An L.A. man unknowingly eats a chicken nugget laced with acid.
SLAMDANCE 2024: SLIDE (2024)
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DIRECTED BY: Bill Plympton
FEATURING: Voices of Maureen McElheron, Jim Lujan, Tom Racine, Ana Sophia Colón, Daniel Kaufman
PLOT: Emerging from a desert whirlpool, a mysterious slide guitarist defends the locals—and the local monster—from the corrupt machinations of the mayor of Sourdough Creek.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Plympton’s absorbingly grotesque animation style, paired perfectly with his oddball storytelling, make his films a shoo-in ’round these parts.
COMMENTS: A bearded hick, launched from his horse-driven observation perch above an incomplete dam, hurdles through the air as dozens of flying logs arc in his direction. He screams, and the camera appears to crash through his mouth, past his teeth, down his esophagus, through his guts, and out again through the… other end. This dramatic journey is animated in Bill Plympton’s signature, jaunty style, and is just one of the countless examples of him playing with lines in motion.
The man in question is Jeb Carver, the mayor of hickturesque Sourdough Creek, the rustic locale where Tinselwood Studios is hoping to film their latest blockbuster. Never one to abstain from milking a chance for all its worth, Carver takes this opportunity to convert his logging town into “Monte Carlo del Norte,” pushing his citizens to deadly lengths to whip up a dam, casino, and resort over the course of a week. The immigrant fishing village gets leveled, the “service girls” work extra shifts, and the band is banned from playing slow music. Enter a mysterious stranger, and his slide guitar.
The silly plot is pushed forward with silly machinations, silly dialogue, and a sinister (but still fairly silly) monster which is disturbed by the deforestation. This silliness serves mostly to allow Plympton to play around with his weird cartooning. Characters chase other characters up interminable stairs; dozens of unnaturally proportioned firearms pop up and fire from trees, fish, and hats; teardrops slide and slosh in extreme closeups; bosoms bounce up and down (and, for the kinky types, side to side) courtesy of the in-film technological marvel, The Sugar Shaker; and Yellow Submarine-esque fantasies play out like nauseous reimaginings of psychedelic whimsy.
Slide is not groundbreaking, it’s not “big” in any sense of the term, and as a pastiche, isn’t “new” per se. But, it is unfailingly interesting to watch (a necessity for a cartoon—something that other animation studios would do well to remember) and oh-so-reassuringly bizarre. Bill Plympton is a talented artist, particularly for having chosen the (difficult) route of animation in his unique style of comical grotesquerie writ (er, drawn) large. Kick back, keep your eyes peeled, and allow Plympton’s latest eccentricity to Slide deep down your pie-hole.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
POD 366, EPISODE 53: SLAMDANCING TO ZEB HARADON’S ETERNAL RECURRENCE
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Audio only link (Soundcloud download)
Quick links/Discussed in this episode:
The Eternal Recurrence (2023): Interview begins. In guest Zeb Haradon‘s latest movie (available sometime in 2024), Jim recounts his dreams, which include aliens, monsters, bad parents, and a visit from Friedrich Nietzsche, all realized by A.I.
“Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968-1978”: Discussion begins. The Criterion Collection boxes up Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles with eight other rarely seen movies (many shorts). A few might be interesting experiments to those who can endure Akerman’s punishing minimalism. Buy “Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968-1978.”
Curse of the Dog God (1977): Discussion begins. A uranium miner accidentally releases the Dog God, who curses everyone. From Mondo Macabro, it’s another reputedly bizarre Japanese exploitation horror in the vein of A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse. Buy Curse of the Dog God.
Hundreds of Beavers (2022): Discussion begins. Read El Rob Hubbard’s review and listen to Giles Edwards’ interview. The absurdist silent comedy featuring has a 100% positive on Rotten Tomatoes (as well as a “must see” from us). and is on a “Great Lakes Roadshow” tour of the Midwest. Trailer and screening dates available on the Hundreds of Beavers official website.
Impossible Object [AKA Story of a Love Story] (1973): Discussion begins. A married writer has an affair, but it may be all in his imagination. This reputedly surreal John Frankenheimer effort barely got a release outside of France and has been largely forgotten; the Indicator label rescues it from complete obscurity. Buy Impossible Object.
Slamdance 2024: Discussion begins.
Triplets of Belleville (2003): Discussion begins. Read the Canonically Weird entry! There doesn’t appear to be anything special about this re-release of Sylvain Chomet’s dialogue-free, jazz age animated musical. Buy Triplets of Belleville.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
No guest is scheduled for next week’s Pod 366 (although it’s possible someone could pop up at the last minute), but either way Greg and Giles will have a lot to talk about as there are a ton of odd movies released next week. Pete Trbovich will be bringing you another Weird View Crew video review as he check outs Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. Coincidentally, perhaps, Cannibal Women is (Cannibal Women are?) in our reader-suggested review queue, and Shane Wilson will kick off our written reviews with another one that Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue with the strange Russian tank movie White Tiger. Rounding things out, Giles Edwards handles some Slamdance 2024 leftovers, and Gregory J. Smalley checks out the new New Age vision-quest movie Reflect (2023). Onward and weirdward!
CAPSULE: GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT (1972)
DIRECTED BY: Brian De Palma
FEATURING: Tom Smothers, John Astin, Katharine Ross, Orson Welles
PLOT: At his wit’s end in the fast-paced business world, a dissatisfied middle manager chucks his job to become a traveling tap-dancing magician.
COMMENTS: The passing of Tom Smothers brought many recollections of the genuinely transgressive variety show he and his brother Dick assembled to ride the waves of the counterculture and tweak the humorless establishment. It’s part of the legend that the stuffed shirts at CBS seized upon the first opportunity to cancel the show and presumably serve the whim of newly inaugurated paranoiac president Richard Nixon. Smothers would go down in history as a First Amendment martyr, and although the brothers would eventually resume their successful career as comedians and folk-performance parodists (your reviewer still cherishes catching their act as an adolescent and meeting Tom after the show), they never again saw the lofty heights they reached when they were tweaking censors and highlighting America’s distaste for the Vietnam War.
That fall from fame was not for lack of trying. About a year after “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” got yanked off the schedule, Tom decided to take a stab at movie stardom. Get To Know Your Rabbit looks like an ideal vehicle: a satire on the numbing effect of American corporate culture. The leading role seems tailor-made to take advantage of Smothers’ carefully developed stage persona as overwhelmed and bewildered by the world, as well as his offstage passion for justice. The producers also saw an opportunity to provide a Hollywood debut for Brian De Palma, who had made a name for himself with a pair of subversive comedies, Greetings and Hi, Mom! (Our Alfred Eaker would describe De Palma’s work here as “blatantly avant-garde”.) Add in a small part for Katharine Ross (hot off the success of The Graduate) and a key role for one of De Palma’s heroes, Orson Welles (who, as we’ve already seen, was apparently willing to do any film that would let him perform some magic), and this thing can’t possibly miss.
It missed, and badly. The shoot was evidently a misery; Smothers, a controlling figure on his TV show, disapproved of many of De Palma’s choices and eventually refused to turn up for re-takes. Welles also disappointed the young filmmaker, refusing to learn his lines. Eventually, Warner Bros. fired De Palma and recut the film using discarded footage and new scenes, including a much milder ending than the one the ousted director preferred. Finally, they sat on the film for two years, throwing it into theaters for a quickie release to be rid of the thing. (An alternate strategy for the studio was still decades away at the time.) Smothers would head back to the stage, while De Palma would mostly abandon both comedy and the major studios in favor of Hitchcockian thrillers and suspenseful horror shows. (De Palma avoided Warner Bros. in particular, returning only after two decades to direct The Bonfire of the Vanities, which did Continue reading CAPSULE: GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT (1972)
SLAMDANCE 2024: LOVE AND WORK (2024)
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DIRECTED BY: Peter Ohs
FEATURING: Stephanie Hunt, Will Madden, Frank Mosley
PLOT: Diane and Fox love to work, a banned practice which may land them in “Time Out,” but this does not thwart their pursuit of productivity.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Quirky black and white dystopian rom-com: sure, we can dig it. But Love and Work‘s particular breed of social commentary is unlike any other I’ve encountered.
COMMENTS: Diane and Fox extol the virtues of The Weekend, without fully grasping just what it is; but in their gut they know The Weekend is good, and that it is good only because of what comes before. Their former boss, still recovering from a stint in Time Out and a close run-in with the Reminders after trying to recreate the workplace, seeks answers from them as they stand on a street corner holding inspirational placards.
It’s better than a hobby. It’s better than a job. It’s The Weekend.
“What’s ‘The Weekend’?”
The answer to all your troubles.
Peter Ohs’ Love and Work is among the breeziest of bleak future visions put to screen. In this world, jobs are outlawed—a mandate enforced, free of charge, by busy-bodies whose only qualification is having memorized every governmental ordinance.
An underground network has grown among those who wish to work, employing coded language to dodge the Reminders who would put them in Time Out (a much-dreaded punishment, though not quite so bad as “The Relaxation Room”). In the foreground are Diane and Fox, two rebels who crave supervision, productivity, and shifts as long as possible.
Will Madden’s gangly Bob Fox attempts to woo Stephanie Hunt’s tight-lipped Diane. Love and Work efficiently pushes romantic comedy tropes to their extreme to bring this pair of ambitious workers together, instilling a level of awareness generally lacking in the hobby-filled, run-down town in which they’re stuck in. A previous boss winces as he shows them the ukulele he’s been doomed to play, and a former co-worker stealthily knits a sweater whilst lurking in a back alley after a crack-down on a job site.
It’s all rather silly, and delightfully so. But it serves a purpose. Loath though I am to phrase it this way, Love and Work is a manifesto, and Ohs and his team have an agenda. The scenario could have been a hyper-capitalist dream: “See? People want to work! They long for it!”; alternately, it could have been some wispy musing on the evils of forced productivity. To my surprise and palpable relief, it turned out to be neither. Love and Work is a fun, oddball little comedy, passing along to the viewer a message of hope: hope for a sensible world, where everyone can truly enjoy The Weekend.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: