As a Mysterious Deadly Disease rages, an aspiring influencer hopes a smoothie deal will make her universally beloved—but will her nemesis, Lamp, ruin everything?
CONTENT WARNING: Contains brief profanity.
POD 366, EP. 56: THE 14TH ANNUAL WEIRDCADEMY AWARDS NOMINATION EPISODE
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Weirdcademy Awards nominations begin at the 23:45 mark.
Quick links/Discussed in this episode:
“Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection Volume 4” (His Girl Friday/Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner/Kramer vs. Kramer/Starman/Sleepless in Seattle/Punch-Drunk Love). Discussion begins. Read the Reader Recommendation for Punch-Drunk Love. This grab-bag of 4K UHDs (plus Blu-rays) features one restored film from each decades from the 1950s to the 2000s. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s offbeat romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Lunch is the only movie of passing interest to us. Buy “Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection Volume 4”.
Godard Cinema (2022)/Trailer for a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars (2023): Discussion begins. Godard Cinema is, simply, a made-for-French-TV retrospective of Jean-Luc Godard‘s career. “Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars” is the more interesting item here; Godard’s final work, a sketch for a portrait of the surrealist poet Charles Plisnier that he was unable to complete before death. Kino Lorber Buy Godard Cinema/Trailer for a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars.
This Is Me … Now: A Love Story (2024): Discussion begins. Jennifer Lopez spent her own money for this “surrealistic magical odyssey”; a visual album exploring her relationship with hubby Ben Affleck. Debuts on Prime Video on February 16 (today!) Jennifer Lopez interview with Hollywood Reporter.
Repo Man 2: The Wages of Beer (202?): Discussion begins. Alex Cox will make a sequel to Canonically Weird cult classic Repo Man four decades later, with a new actor (Kiowa Gordon) playing Otto traveling through space and time immediately following the events of the first film. Honestly, this sounds like an early April Fools joke. Read more about Repo Man 2 at Variety.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
Keith John Adams (Ozma) will be next week’s guest on Pod 366. And in more YouTube-based content, Pete Trbovich brings you another “Weird View Crew” video review, this time of the goofy 1975 occult horror The Devil’s Rain.
In written reviews, Shane Wilson recommends one that Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue with Peter Weir‘s attempt to out-mysterious Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave (1977); while Giles Edwards also dips into the reader suggestions for a look at Exte: Hair Extensions, an early absurdist horror from noted weirdo Sion Sono.
And of course, stay tuned for your 2023 Weirdcademy Awards ballot, appearing in these pages on Sunday.
Onward and weirdward!
CAPSULE: OZMA (2023)
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DIRECTED BY: Keith John Adams
FEATURING: Ferdy Roberts, Victoria Moseley, Jun Noh, Gemma Saunders, Alice Margaroli, voice of Éva Magyar
PLOT: An insomniac widower spends the night toting around an on-the-run telepathic jellyfish creature.
COMMENTS: Jeff attributes his only slightly startled reaction to finding telepathic jellyfish Ozma abandoned in his garden to having been “well rehearsed” to accept strangeness through a lifetime of dreaming. If this film had been merely about that telepathic blob with the blinking lights and nothing else, he would have needed less rehearsal. But Ozma is entirely built on dream logic. There’s the pair of squabbling pursuers disguised as cops who use vegetables as truncheons. A woman who illustrates the story of the journey of Cleopatra’s Needle from Alexandria to London through very crude cutout animation. Rifles whose bullets have effects far from what we expect. And that’s not to mention the tiny touches, like Jeff’s unusually large bed.
And there’s one more weird thing. When Jeff begins his opening narration, he’s lying in bed, complaining of insomnia. A walking bass line accompanies his fretting, soon joined by the complaints of a muted trombone. It’s an effective accompaniment, but more noteworthy is the fact that we can see the bassist and trombonist, apparently vamping right there in Jeff’s bedroom as he tosses and turns. Throughout the movie, musicians show up in the frame with the characters, never acknowledged. The use of musicians onscreen—playing nondiegetic accompaniment, yet visible, like materialized ghosts—is unique. It’s a simple idea, but I can’t recall any movie that uses this technique in exactly this way, and none that’s so dedicated to the concept. And it’s a great idea, because the sounds here are outstanding—ranging from multiple jazz combos to a tabla, a dulcimer, and even more exotic instruments like the Ethiopian krar (harp) and the Japanese shakuhachi (bamboo flute).
It’s all pleasantly eccentric, which is much of the appeal. Ozma does, however, also explore a serious topic: the widower’s pathological, insomnia-inducing grief, which has mellowed from traumatic sadness into a permanent personality feature. Jeff’s entire story, frequently told in voiceover, is addressed to his absent wife. His journey to take the telepathic jellyfish to its appointed rendezvous reflects his adoption of a healthier relationship to his memories. Ozma is modest in means—in its household props and London public street locations, in Ferdy Roberts’s calm portrayal of Jeff, in its reliance on monochrome —but ambitious in its ideas. Ozma is musical, original and inventive: it’s not just the same old tired story about an insomniac toting a telepathic jellyfish around London.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Ozma [DVD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41V5sz5TRfL._SL500_.jpg)
- DVD
CAPSULE: LADYWORLD (2018)
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DIRECTED BY: Amanda Kramer
FEATURING: Ariela Barer, Annalise Barro, Ryan Simpkins
PLOT: Seven young women, unable to leave a house after an earthquake, descend into paranoia.
COMMENTS: A low rumble; growing chaos; a cacophony of destruction: all taking place during a black screen. A destructive earthquake traps eight young women in a house. Rubble gathers up to the window tops, blocking all known exits. We see none of this, but the impression is clear, the sensation of imprisonment rendered wholly through sound design. This background—creaks, crashes, and whirring blades of helicopter—traps us with these confined, forgotten women; a human-sound film score of yelps and bursts augments the dread. Ladyworld is an uncomfortable place, and misery for its inhabitants.
This riff on Lord of the Flies flips the script, gender-wise, exploring the trope from a wholly feminine perspective. Much is the same: feral tribalism bursts through a civil veneer, even in such a small group; spatial confinement melds with a growing hopelessness to trigger listlessness and psychosis, depending on the moment and victim; and sightings of a man lurking in the dark basement add an edge of terror to the ambient menace. By the film’s end, nearly everyone has lost it.
Amanda Kramer plays a risky game with her story. Its strengths and weaknesses are the same cards. There is much repetition—dialogue, montage, and shots—which at times grows tedious; but, that’s the point. Kramer emphasizes the differences between feuding factions—Olivia’s civil-minded, and smaller, cadre on the one side, and Piper’s gangster-clique on the other—more and more over time. Every corner of living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, closet, and, of course, the forbidden basement, becomes trashed, nicely reflecting the state of the party. We see these rooms and developments again and again. And again. You may want to scream, “Enough, already!” But just think of how the characters feel.
Ladyworld is up front in putting its characters and setting right in the title, and it delivers a discomfited vision. It is a film to be endured alongside the story’s victims. While it would have done well—maybe—to be trimmer by a quarter of an hour, it might had less impact. After the opening black screen shot and its destructive sound establishes the ambient tension, it only ratchets up. The audience bears witness to the strain until the unlikely, but apt, finale, when the ladies’ world bursts asunder.
Yellow Veil re-released Ladyworld on DVD and Blu-ray in January 2024, with alternate and deleted scenes, a director’s commentary, two Kramer short films, her otherwise unreleased debut feature Paris Window, and even more extras.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Ladyworld [DVD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41152iki3FL._SL500_.jpg)
CAPSULE: TRAINSPOTTING (1996)
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DIRECTED BY: Danny Boyle
FEATURING: Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Kelly Macdonald
PLOT: Renton, a heroin addict struggling to get his life under control, is just one of a collection of misfit 20-somethings puttering around Edinburgh, Scotland, in this stark and blackly-comedic examination of the underworld.
COMMENTS: A commonly requested movie in our reader request queue, Trainspotting holds the ranks of cult classic, box office smash (relative to its budget), and critical hit. Not only is the movie itself enshrined by fans, but the soundtrack—one of the biggest reasons why this is a cult film to begin with—was a worldwide multi-platinum seller. To make sure that I don’t go off on anymore tangents about the soundtrack (because I adore it, natch), here’s my coverage over at my music blog gig so I can focus here on the movie; later, I’ll climb on my soapbox about drug legalization/awareness/safety. When it comes to this movie’s themes, I find myself almost distressingly overqualified to discuss it.
I trust that after almost three decades almost everybody interested has seen (or at least heard about) the film, so I’ll just fill in some light non-spoily details. Trainspotting has a Pulp-Fiction-like structure, with several intersecting lives on various trajectories, some headed up and some headed down, verily, to the gutter or the grave. At the center of this busy rat’s nest of urban squalor is antihero Renton (McGregor), heroin addict trying to get his life on track. His mates are Sick Boy (Miller), a blond pimp, co-junkie, and charming sociopath; Spud (Bremner), a luckless underdog with the personality (and IQ) of a Labrador puppy; Begbie (Carlyle), a brawling psychopath with a hair-trigger temper that even scares his closest friends; and Tommy (McKidd), a squeaky-clean and very self-righteous jock. Renton is trying his best to straighten out and fly right. But first he has to overcome his addiction, and then the gravitational pull of urban poverty. Renton stands at the threshold of a bleak and joyless existence, wondering if his own future is worth salvaging.
When it comes to weird-movie credentials, everyone seems to remember the toilet where Renton dives after his precious suppositories—a shot of it is in every trailer. Some recall the dead baby crawling on the ceiling, turning his head Exorcist-style before falling down on Renton, just one of many hallucinations the addict experiences during extreme withdrawal. But let’s not forget the overdose scene, where Renton nods off so hard that he physically sinks into the carpet about six feet deep… and we’re stuck in that POV all the way to the hospital, when a shot brings him bolting out of his drug coma (and return to wide-screen). His dealer, Mother Superior (“jumped the gun”), stuffs Renton’s limp body into a cab, and the cab driver in turn dumps him on the street in front of the emergency room like a Continue reading CAPSULE: TRAINSPOTTING (1996)