Next week you can expect to see reviews of the “sick” film Feed (2005) and two opinions on the metaphysical Paul Giamatti comedy Cold Souls (2009). Other films that may get tackled include Chan-wook Park‘s Thirst (2009), the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man (2009), or Richard Kelly‘s The Box (2009). 2009 is rushing to a close, and we have yet to discover a truly bizarre film released theatrically this year.
We go back to he fetish well for the weirdest search term used to locate the site this week: “riding pony sex napoleon riding cult.”
And the reader-suggested review queue is once again growing faster than we can knock titles off it. Here’s how it stands now: 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, and Southland Tales.
Autumnir is an artistic short filmed in a park in Germany using minimal subjects. It’s also seasonally appropriate. Alec Crichton, the creator of this short, has a remarkable talent for taking ordinary entities, and making them look atypical.
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 (LIMITED RELEASE):
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: I don’t know how weird it will be, but if you know your movies you’ll immediately see that the concept is totally crazy: the great Werner Herzog remakes Abel Ferrara’s singular, bleak Bad Lieutenant, but as a self-aware action parody, with Nicolas Cage going wild (maybe channeling Klaus Hinski?) as the titular drug-crazed cop. Even if it wasn’t getting excellent reviews, it would be worth seeing just for the talent mashup involved. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans official site.
Mr. Sadman: The interesting premise is that one of Saddam Hussein’s body doubles loses his job and moves to Los Angeles immediately before Iraq invades Kuwait in 1990. The press release describes the impersonator’s journey as a “surreal quest to rediscover the love, adoration and fame he once knew;” we suspect that’s a “small s” surreal, but it sounds offbeat at the very least. Playing Los Angeles this week before heading off to DVD land. Mr. Sadman official site.
SCREENINGS (NEW YORK CITY):
I Can See You (2008): Read our review of this “psychedelic campfire tale.” Here’s your chance to see one of the weirdest movies of 2008 on a big screen in high definition, along with the 3-D short The Viewer. Playing at NYU’s Cantor Film Center at 36 East 8th Street tonight only!
The Sun [Solzne] (2005): It contains at least one crazy dream sequence, but this minimalist biopic about Emperor Horohito’s defeat from Russian director Alexander Sokurov is only a borderline weird pick; it’s still a noteworthy off-the-beaten-path choice for New Yorkers. Playing at the Film Forum.
NEW ON DVD:
Franklyn (2008): This weird-sounding film tells two converging stories, one set in modern London and the other in a fantastical Meanwhile City, which is ruled by religious fanatics. The films fans compare the visual look to a low-budget City of Lost Children. Another one we’ll need to take a look at down the road. Buy from Amazon.
The Limits of Control (2009): From Jim Jamursch, who brought us the anti-western Dead Man, comes this anti-thriller about a mysterious nameless, assassin in Spain meeting with enigmatic strangers in pursuit of an unknown mission. Buy from Amazon.
Thirst [Bakwji] (2009): Korean ultra-stylist Chan-wook Park + vampirism; sounds like a match made in heaven (or hell) to us. Buy from Amazon.
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Fight Club (1999): David Fincher’s anarchic, very nearly surreal satire features brilliant performances by both Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. It’s a weird movie favorite that’s long overdue on Blu-ray. Buy 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.
Robert Dornhelm’s film Beauty As I See It is a compelling, ambitious documentary on the life and career of the late conductor Herbert Von Karajan, who, more than any other musician of the twentieth century, made an obsessive, downright bizarre fetish of surface beauty in musical interpretation.
A billion words have probably been written about Karajan, from the adulation of Richard Osborne, who surprisingly wrote the fairly well balanced biography, “Karajan, a Life in Music,” to Norman Lebrecht, author of the intentionally provocative “The Maestro Myth” who sometimes likens Karajan to Lucifer himself. 2009 is the centenary of Karajan’s birth and, predictably, the Berlin celebration has garnered intense praise and intense criticism.
Karajan (who died in 1989) left far more audio recordings and filmed performances than any other conductor in history. His last series of films, for Sony, were produced, edited, and directed by himself, sparing no expense. Karajan is often lit from below, like a descending deity. This was the conductor’s final valentine to himself.
Karajan’s Nazi Party membership; his marriage to his second, Jewish wife (which predictably hurt his career in the Third Reich); his influential promotion of the compact disc format; his alleged homosexuality; and his divisive, bitter struggle with his beloved, yet misogynistic Berlin Philharmonic over his attempt to appoint a female clarinetist are either glossed over or are not covered at all in the film.
Still, despite these glaring omissions, Beauty As I see It probably comes closer to capturing the conductor’s paradoxical, obsessive nature than any other of the numerous films. Karajan was an autocrat who, upon being told he had been appointed director for the BPO, said, ” I shall be a dictator”. Karajan was mercenary in his business dealings and died a near billionaire. Stories about his superstar celebrity abound. A taxi driver picks up Karajan after a concert and asks, “where to?” Karajan replies, “it doesn’t Continue reading KARAJAN, OR, BEAUTY AS I SEE IT (2008)→
“How can you tell what is a dream and what’s real when you can’t even tell when you’re awake and when you’re asleep?”–line from Joe’s internal monologue in Johnny Got His Gun
PLOT: Joe is an ordinary young man with a sweetheart back home who goes to Europe to fight World War I and is blown apart by an enemy shell. The accident leaves him limbless, deaf, and blind; the doctors assume he is brain dead, but keep him alive in hopes of learning how to cure similar brain injuries in the future. Left alone in a hospital bed with only his own thoughts for company for years on end, Joe drifts in and out of memories and dreams, while during his lucid moments he struggles to find a way to communicate with the outside world.
BACKGROUND:
Dalton Trumbo wrote the novel “Johnny Got His Gun” in 1938; it won that year’s National Book Award for “Most Original Novel.”
Trumbo became a sought after screenwriter in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. He joined the American Communist Party, and in 1947 he was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee (the “McCarthy hearings”). Along with 9 others (the “Hollywood 10”), Trumbo was held in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify on the grounds that he believed the First Amendment protected his right to political association. Trumbo served several months in prison and was later blacklisted by Hollywood. While the blacklist was in effect he wrote the script for The Brave One; the screenplay won an Academy Award, but no one showed up to the Oscars to claim it. The person credited for the screenplay was actually a producer’s nephew.
Luis Buñuel, whom Trumbo had met while in a self-imposed exile in Mexico, was originally set to direct the adaptation of the novel. The two men went so far as to collaborate on a screenplay. When the deal fell through, Trumbo decided to direct the film himself. The image of Christ driving the locomotive was one typically Buñuelian touch that made it into the final product.
Johnny Got His Gun tied for the Jury Prize (second place) at Cannes.
The movie inspired the popular Metallica song “One,” and footage from the film features heavily in music video (included on the DVD).
There is also a 2008 version of Johnny Got His Gun available on DVD, which is actually a film version of the stage play.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Jesus Christ howling out the window of a locomotive engine as he drives doomed doughboys to the front.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The bizarre flashbacks and fantasies Joe endures for years on end as he lies in a nightmarish paralysis. His dreamlike reveries—including conversations with Jesus and imagining himself as a freakshow exhibit in a carnival traveling though a barren desert—are never gratuitously weird, but always relate tightly to his psychology and to the antiwar theme.
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