Not sure exactly what we’ll be reviewing next week, but for once, the problem is having too many options on what to publish, rather than too few. I think we’ll continue our “2009 in review” series with Growing Out, an indie horror about a musician who finds a head growing out of a cellar floor. We may also sneak in a review of Cold Souls, the Paul Giamatti expose about the black market soul trade. You can also expect to see a review of the offbeat 1979 vampire film Thirst. What else? Well, some possibilities include Johnny Got His Gun (1971), Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988), Housekeeping (1987), and Feed (2005)—you’ll just have to check out this space to find out for sure.
As for the weirdest search term used to locate the site this week, we may as well pick “sex movie in which fairies come near water,” which sounds like pretty weird request but could actually refer to an actual movie we’ve reviewed here. On the other hand, our favorite search term used to locate the site was “why are weird movies always the best”?
Here’s how the reader-suggested review queue looks: 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 (if it’s 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, Johnny Got His Gun, The Science of Sleep, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
This week’s short is, as Thomas Grootoonk explains it, “A stop-motion animation about a boy who longs for a more vivid and brighter world.” Everything in this short, including music and animation, was done solely by Groontoonk.
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):
The Box: A couple are given a mysterious box that contains a temptation; push a button on it and you will get a million dollars, but an innocent person somewhere will die. I passed on mentioning this one last week because the theatrical previews made it look like a lame and hokey extended Twilight Zone episode. I disregarded a few reports trickling in that said it was “weird,” assuming they came from the same type of people who find any fantasy weird. Then, I discovered that it was directed by Richard Kelly, which makes it noteworthy for this site. We probably should give it a shot despite the underwhelming reviews and uninspiring trailer. The Box official site (much like the Donnie Darko website, there’s no clear navigation and you’re forced to click around randomly to find stuff).
Fantastic Mr. Fox: This animated fable about talking animals is clearly not weird, but it does represent a collaboration between two borderline weird figures: ultra-quirky director Wes (I Heart Huckabees) Anderson and mordant children’s book author Roald (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) Dahl. Featuring the voices of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, and Bill Murray. Fantastic Mr. Fox official site.
IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):
Uncertainty: An experiment in conflicting storylines from two different directors, Uncertainty deals with a young couple whose day follows one of two paths, depending on the flip of a coin: one route leads to a family drama, the other to a murder thriller. Uncertainty official site.
NEW ON DVD:
Ink (2009): Critics compared this visionary thriller about a father entering the nightmares of his daughter to the work of Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Jeunet; its own press release compares it to Brazil, Dark City and Donnie Darko, among others. We’re cautiously optimistic; that’s some awfully lofty company. Expect a review in the coming weeks. Buy from Amazon.
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut (2009): Read our Watchmen capsule. Hopefully, this four disc (!) Blu-ray release will be the ultimate edition of Watchmen, but would you truly be shocked if Warner came out with a 6-disc Watchmen: The Even Ultimater Cut in three months? At any rate, this new version integrates the fanboy demanded story-within-a-story “Tales of the Black Freighter” into the Director’s Cut. There’s also a disc of featurettes, a digital copy of the theatrical release, and a disc of “Complete Motion Comics” (whatever that means). Buy from Amazon.
PLOT: Repressed corporate employees the world over are literally bursting apart from frustration. Innocuous worker George Winsterhammerman must deal with his huge corporate employer’s misguided and demeaning attempts to remedy the malady. But could the source of the problem be the perpetual brain-numbing proselytizing of the very corporations themselves?
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Visioneers is an unconventional metaphor about the illogic of artificial business and social constructs.
COMMENTS: Set in the not so distant future, Visioneers is a satirical black comedy about the absurdity of corporate culture, futile optimism, and the ridiculous nature of self-help schemes. George Washington Winsterhammerman works for the fictitious Jeffers Corporation, a giant corporate bureaucracy. His mid-level workaday job is mundane and unfulfilling. The PA system bombards him hourly with optimistic corporate pep talk encouraging productivity.
Everything is business as usual until George and his personal office staff are made aware that around the world, people are spontaneously exploding—literally. The root of the problem stems from lives of quiet desperation and repression. It seems that everywhere, people are being forced to pay lip service to falsely optimistic corporate culture and to suppress human emotion and rational thought.
The constant denial of emotions, the enforced phony business visages, and the frustration of coping with senseless bureaucracies takes its toll. The pent-up stress and officially-enforced anal-retentiveness is causing employees everywhere to literally burst apart into a spray of atomized blood and body parts as surely as if a fuse had been lit to a rectally embedded stick of dynamite. The Jeffers Corporation frantically imposes an endless series of misguided remedies, accompanying them with futile reassurances and encouragement not to explode.
Meanwhile, George has his own worries to deal with. He and his wife are unhappy, he struggles with impotence, his ex-convict, whackjob brother founds a freedom-of-expression movement in George’s backyard, and George worries that he too will explode under all of the confusion and pressure. His employer and physician instruct him to relieve stress via a cascade of absurd quack remedies and bizarre devices, such as a “happiness hat” that comes equipped with a mobile of the solar system. Try as he might, George cannot make any of these remedies reduce his anxiety. Finally, George has to confront the question of whether or not a lifestyle of mindless productivity, absurd Orwellian bureaucracy, and smiley-faced denial actually provides a positive, substantially meaningful conduit to reality and the human condition.
In the way it addresses the effect of irrational propaganda on the human psyche, Visioneers is reminiscent of Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros,” with human explosions stemming from modern workplace dogma replacing rhino metamorphosis from political indoctrination.
Visioneers furnishes an effective metaphor for the artificial constructs of the modern world. The film is very funny until it misses its chance to top its premise near the end, when it changes into a personal triumph of self-actualization for the protagonist. With great irony, Visioneers becomes the very thing that it condemns and satirizes; a sort of inspirational icon, akin to the posters on your bosses’ walls with the motivational messages printed at the bottom.
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“I CAN SEE YOU is a film about the thing that frightens me the most… my own mind… we as sentient human beings are completely at the mercy of an organ that we may never fully understand; an organ that, at the slightest malfunction, can throw our perception of reality into such chaos and confusion that we will never see or experience the world the same way again.”–Graham Reznick, from the Director’s Statement for I Can See You
PLOT: Ben is a nearsighted, neurotic and painfully shy photographer/artist working for an advertising start-up firm looking to land a huge contract for the ClarActix corporation. The three twenty-something admen organize a camping trip to snap nature photos that can be used in the campaign. At a campfire hootenanny, Ben meets a beautiful hippie girl he once had a crush on, and his awkward attempts to romance the free-spirited girl lead him to an internal breakdown that manifests itself in a series of unnerving surrealistic montages.
BACKGROUND:
Director Graham Reznick accumulated over a dozen credits on low-budget films in the sound department before helming I Can See You, his first feature film.
I Can See You is the fifth in the “Scarefilx” series executive produced by Larry Fessenden (who also appears in the movie as the ClarActix spokesman). According to its press release, the Scareflix series is “designed to exploit hungry new talent and inspire resourceful filmmakers to produce quality work through seat-of-the-pants ingenuity.”
Actors Ben Dickson, Christopher Ford and Duncan Styles, who play the members of the three man advertising firm in the film, are part of Waverly Films, a YouTube based comedy troupe that makes ad parodies, among other sketches.
Composer Jeff Grace was an assistant to Howard Shore on The Lord of the Rings films.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Relying as it does on the montage style for its unsettling effect, I Can See You is filled with memorable imagery. The briefly seen double-image of Ben is sublimely creepy, so much so that a variation of it was used for the original movie poster (unhappily abandoned in favor of a forgettable still of Ben shaving for the DVD release). It’s Ben’s unfinished, faceless portrait of his father, however, which recurs several times in different contexts, that is the film’s most important visual symbol. If you stare at the painting long enough you can make out tiny indications of eyes and a mouth, which makes the picture even more uncanny than pure blank flesh would be.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: I Can See You is one of the trippiest, druggiest movies to come down the pike since the psychedelic Sixties; the last sequence plays like a twenty-minute, long-take hallucination shot on location inside Ben’s splintered mind.
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