Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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First off, merry Christmas to all our readers, and we hope that you have all been very weird this past year so that Santa will stuff your stocking full of the collected works of Stan Brackhage.

We won’t be taking Christmas off; you can expect to see our normal “Weird Horizon” column on Christmas Day, along with another unsettling holiday-themed short. The rest of the week, you can expect to see reviews of Dans Ma Peau [In My Skin] and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, and an introduction to the weird words of John M. Bennet, among other features.

In looking for the weirdest search term used to locate the site this week, we’ll stick with the holiday theme and nominate “singing santa and reindeer- I am a weirdo.”

The ever-growing reader-suggested review queue looks like this: Greaser’s Palace (substituted for Institute Benjamenta), Waking Life, Survive Style 5+, The Dark Backward, The Short Films of David Lynch, Santa Sangre, Dead Man, Inland Empire, Monday (assuming I can find an English language version), The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Barton Fink, What? (Diary of Forbidden Dreams), Meatball Machine, Xtro, Basket Case, Suicide Club, O Lucky Man!, Trash Humpers (when/if released), Gozu, Tales of Ordinary Madness, The Wayward Cloud, Kwaidan, Six-String Samurai, Andy Warhol’s Trash, Altered States, Memento, Nightmare Before Christmas/Vincent/Frankenweenie, The Science of Sleep, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Gothic, The Attic Expeditions, After Last Season, Getting Any?, Performance, Being John Malkovich, The Apple, Southland Tales, Arizona Dream, Spider (2002), Songs From The Second Floor, Singapore Sling, Alice [Neco z Alenky], Dark Country, Necromania (1971, Ed Wood), Hour of the Wolf,  MirrorMask, Possession, Suspiria, and Mary and Max.  Honestly, that list should take us all the way through 2010!

Saturday Short, Shorts

SATURDAY SHORT: X-MESS DETRITUS (2008)

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Voltaire gives his audience a different perspective on Christmas in his short, “X-Mas Detritus.”  Like many of the shorts posted here, “Detritus” contains some frightening images. So, even though this short contains some great insight into the impact of this holiday season on our world, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is very squeamish.

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 12/18/09

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A look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…

Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.

IN THEATERS (WIDE RELEASE):

Nine: Here’s a curiosity for sure: a musical based around the putative romantic adventures of Federico Fellini while filming the classic weird movie 8 1/2.  Too bad the critics mostly hate it.  Also, we have to point out that fractional numbers are weirder than integers (though not as weird as irrational numbers).  Nine official site.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

A Town Called Panic: A stop-motion animated children’s film from Belgium; according to the press release, it “follows the wacky, hilarious and often surreal adventures of three plastic toys named Cowboy, Indian and Horse who share a rambling house in a rural town which never fails to attract the weirdest events.”  We’re going to keep an eager eye out for the DVD release!  A Town Called Panic official site.


Ricky: Reviewers are being tightlipped about the plot of this one, but it concerns a French couple who have a remarkable, miraculous baby.  There are strong hints that many are upset by the fact that the movie begins in the realm of pure realism, and slips into magical realism for the second half, something that always makes weird-hating audiences feel cheated.  From François Ozon, the director who brought us the enigmatic Swimming Pool (2003), among other intriguing movies I haven’t seen.  Ricky official site.

IN PRODUCTION:

Alice in Wonderland (2010): Tim Burton‘s eagerly awaited adaptation of Alice in Wonderland is now in post-production, scheduled for a March 5th, 2010 release.  Burton and company released a new trailer two days ago. In a chintzy move, embedding the video is disabled so that Disney can sell exclusive embedding rights to other sites (Rotten Tomatoes will allow you to embed the video from their site—but the code hijacks the user’s browser and redirects him to Rotten Tomatoes when it finishes playing!) Access the trailer from the following link, then come back and tell us what you think:

Alice in Wonderland official Trailer 2.

We’re cautiously optimistic… but a little more cautious than optimistic after seeing this second trailer.

NEW ON DVD:

The Headless Woman [La mujer sin cabeza] (2008): Argentinian film about a woman who experiences a mysterious form of amnesia after striking something—a dog, or a child?—with her car.  Described as head-scratching, slow and oblique.  Buy The Headless Woman from Amazon.

Year of the Fish (2007): Here’s a movie idea you don’t see everyday: a rotoscoped animated adult retelling of “Cinderella,” with the lead role taken by a Chinese immigrant woman forced to work in a “happy-ending” massage parlor and befriended by a magical goldfish.  Critically acclaimed. Buy Year of the Fish from Amazon.

What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.

Canonically Weird (The List)

43. INK (2009)

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“It was just an extra splash of weird.  We decided it wasn’t weird enough to begin with, so what can we really do to make this weird?”–Kiowa Winans on Ink‘s DVD commentary [explaining why the Incubi staves end in human hands]

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: (as Chris Kelly), Quinn Hunchar, Jessica Duffy, Jeremy Make, Jennifer Batter

PLOT:  Ink introduces us to a world where a race of guardian angels called “Storytellers” guard over humanity and bring pleasant dreams while we sleep, while the evil “Incubi” sneak by our bedsides and send nightmares. One night, a mysterious cowled and chained figure comes into the room of a sleeping girl, defeats the assembled Storytellers, and snatches the child away to a limbo halfway between the waking and dreaming worlds. Meanwhile, in the earthly realm, the girl’s body lapses into a coma, while her estranged, workaholic father refuses to leave a billion dollar contract he’s working on to visit his daughter in the hospital.

ink

BACKGROUND:

  • Jamin Winans not only wrote, edited and directed the film, but also composed the soundtrack. Jamin’s wife Kiowa handled both sound design and art direction as well as serving as producer.
  • The movie was made for only $250,000.
  • Ink won the Best International Feature award at the Cancun Film Festival.
  • Despite faring well on the festival circuit, Ink was not picked up by a distributor; the producers self-distributed the movie to a few cinemas and oversaw the DVD and Blu-ray releases themselves.
  • After its DVD release, Ink was downloaded 400,000 times, becoming one of the ten most pirated features of the week of its release alongside major Hollywood films like Zombieland. On the official website, the filmmakers request voluntary donations from those who watched the movie for free.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The Incubi, demons for the digital age. Unmasked, these shadowy figures with glowing spectacles have become the film’s iconic poster image, but they are even more frightening when they hide their true visages behind happy-face projections flickering on perpetually on-the-fritz LCD monitors affixed to their heads.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Ink taps into the beautifully frightening, often disquieting aesthetic of fairy tales, mixing high-tech nightmare visions with ancient storytelling traditions to create a new mythology that’s simultaneously progressive and connected to the past. It blunts its weirdness by resolving its symbolism completely by the end, although the literal plot resolution remains a paradox. Even though all becomes clear by the end, the early reels can be a wild ride.

Original trailer for Ink

COMMENTS:  “Ink has been compared to cult classics Brazil, Donnie Darko, The Matrix, Continue reading 43. INK (2009) →

List Candidates

BORDERLINE WEIRD: THE BOX (2009)

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The Box divided critics—even our in-house critics.  Eric Young defends the movie, but read to the end for Gregory J. Smalley‘s opposing opinion.

DIRECTED BY: Richard Kelly

FEATURING:  Cameron Diaz, , James Marsden

PLOT: A man comes unsolicited one morning to the doorstep of a financially troubled family with a proposition: if they press a button he gives them within 24 hours, they will receive $1 million, and someone in the world, whom they don’t know, will die.

Still from The Box (2009)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Kelly’s surreal odyssey through Virginia in the mid 70s is hauntingly strange. One would not think it to be remarkably anything from the marketing, the extremely negative reviews put out by, um, pretty much everyone, and a tame, seemingly safe cast. But this is Richard Kelly, so nothing is really as it seems. The Box needs to be considered for the List because Kelly tells a morality story involving aliens, God, and Jean-Paul Sartre in ways that are as flippant and off-handedly odd as , as unflinching as Lynch, and as psychologically insightful as Cronenberg.  And while Kelly is not as good a filmmaker as those three, he has grown undeniably in his talents since Donnie Darko, and this time his story is just as weird.

COMMENTS:  The Box is a little more complex than you’re led to believe by the trailers. I was honestly underwhelmed when I first heard about the idea, but after hearing more about it, it started growing on me. I wanted to know what the deal was with this button, and what I got was beyond my wildest imaginings. It’s unusually dense for a Richard Kelly movie, filled with haunting music, esoteric imagery, and references to existential philosophy. In a way, The Box is Kelly’s most obscure work yet, even more obscure than his previous film, the dumb, loud Southland Tales. Although Kelly’s touted it as his commercial movie, I have the feeling that he might never have actually seen a commercial movie, because what he came up with is quite weird, and more than a little off-putting for the average moviegoer.

Kelly’s imagination makes the film something special.  He takes a simple, bare-bones concept from a Richard Matheson short story and adds a third, and perhaps even a fourth, Continue reading BORDERLINE WEIRD: THE BOX (2009) →

Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!