Kiwi director Tim Van Dammen discusses his new movie Mega Time Squad with Giles Edwards at the 2018 Fantasia Festival. Read more in the first 2018 Fantasia Festival recap.
LIST CANDIDATE: LUZ (2018)
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DIRECTED BY: Tilman Singer
FEATURING: Luana Velis, Jan Bluthardt, Julia Riedler
PLOT: A police psychotherapist gets drunk at a bar with an animated young woman who has recently been thrown out of a cab; back at the station, the young cabbie has turned herself in and the therapist gets summoned to recreate the incident.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Uncanny valley sound design keeps the viewer on the edge of his seat from the start as a barroom encounter, a police procedural, and a car-ride collide together in fits, bursts, and very extreme psychotherapy. This tightly packed little nightmare bursts at the seams with dark visions, psychological overlaps, and camera work that stays on the deeply menacing side of surreal.
COMMENTS: Good luck can play a big part in finding a truly amazing film. My path toward 366 began almost two decades ago when, by chance, I rented The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, & Her Lover from a little VHS rental place near my home. Naturally, being at a film festival like Fantasia, one is engineering the good luck, but I am still thankful (and surprised) that I went, by chance, to the press screening for the new German “psychothriller” (for lack of a better catch phrase) Luz. From the get-go I was glued to my seat; an odd compunction to have when the opening shot is of a bored police officer manning a desk.
The humdrum opening: Dr. Rossini (Jan Bluthardt) is quietly enjoying a drink at a near-empty bar. His pager beeps from time to time, as he is on-call; but he only needs to leave if “there’s an emergency.” One eventually arises, but only after another bar patron, an animatronically-twitchy young woman named Nora (Julia Riedler) gets him drunk. Sloshed, both from the drinks and her bizarre tale about a young woman named Luz (Luana Velis), he needs to get sober—and fast. Jump to the barroom bathroom where Nora seems to shake the drunkenness out of him, imbues him with a golden glow from her throat, and then collapses. Thus mended, off he goes.
Menacing from the start, Luz maintains an incredibly unsettling atmosphere as the police psychologist hypnotizes a very unstable— and very possibly possessed—cab-driver to recreate a fateful car ride. Going to incredible extremes, his analytic work morphs more and more into a violent interrogation-cum-exorcism. Recollection and reality violently collide as Dr. Rossini turns the screws further and further. Memories are impossibly conjured in the police station: Rossini adopts the persona of Nora, bloodying his face and putting on her stolen clothes, and all the while, a poor police translator is locked in a sound booth. Through an impeccably askew soundscape and the goth-prog-synth score, even the relatively quiet moments pulse unnaturally.
As every faithful reader is aware, this site is cruising along toward “completion” at a very steady clip. With that in mind, I know what a Hail Mary shot this is. And even though the Festival has just begun, I still suspect that this will be hard to top. Using effectively only two sets, Luz crams an amazing amount of nightmarishly surreal drama into just seventy minutes—and Jan Bluthardt’s performance as Dr. Rossini would make both Klaus Kinski and Erwin Leder proud. Presently, I find myself at a loss for words, so I’ll leave this review saying that, due to the review embargo, I’ve had to sit on this for a week before posting it. By the time you read this, I may well have seen it a second time.
SATURDAY SHORT: CONTACT (2018)
Jason is left to assess what is happening when his partner, David, disappears.
Content Warning: This short contains strong language.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 7/20/2018
Our weekly look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs and Blu-rays (and hot off the server VODs), and on more distant horizons…
Trailers of new release movies are generally available at the official site links.
IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):
Holy Hell (2018): A priest goes off the deep end and starts slaughtering sinners. With cinemas turned over to superheroes for the summer, we had nothing to spotlight, but we did find this brief trailer for a Troma-esque splatter comedy that is playing… somewhere? Holy Hell Facebook site.
IN DEVELOPMENT (SHOOTING SOON):
The Dead Don’t Die (2019?): Genre-hopper Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man) tackles the zombie film (apparently, it’s a zomcom). Bill Murray, Selena Gomez, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Steve Buscemi, and Chloë Sevigny are attached (that is an impressive cast). Seen at Variety.
CERTIFIED WEIRD (AND OTHER) REPERTORY SCREENINGS:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). We won’t list all the screenings of this audience-participation classic separately. You can use this page to find a screening near you.
- Boston, MA, 7/26 – Yellow Submarine (1968). At the Coolidge Corner Theater.
- Chicago, IL, 7/21 – Yellow Submarine (1968). At Music Box Theater.
- Dallas, TX, 7/20-7/21, 7/26 – Yellow Submarine (1968). At the Texas Theater.
- Los Angeles, CA, 7/20 (midnight) – Yellow Submarine (1968). At the Nuart Theater.
- Nashville, TN, 7/21-7/26 – Yellow Submarine (1968). At the Belcourt Theater.
- New York City, NY, 7/20-7/21 (midnights) – Blue Velvet (1986). At IFC Center.
- New York City, NY, 7/20-7/26 – Yellow Submarine (1968). At IFC Center.
- Toronto, ON, Canada, 7/21-7/22 – Lost Highway (1997). At the Royal Cinema.
- Tuscon, AZ, 7/20-7/21 – Fantastic Planet [La Planète Sauvage] (1973). At the Loft.
- Tuscon, AZ, 7/22-7/26 – Yellow Submarine (1968). At the Loft.
- Vancouver, BC, Canada, 7/22 – Stalker (1979). At the Rio.
- Vancouver, BC, Canada, 7/22 – Run Lola Run (1998). At the Rio.
- Yonkers, NY, 7/21-7/22 – Yellow Submarine (1968). At the Alamo Drafthouse.
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.
341. UNDERGROUND (1995)
“If you saw what I see for the future in Yugoslavia, it would scare you.”–Marshall Tito, 1971
“I think that this current conflict is the result of tectonic moves that last for a whole century. If there is anything good in this hell and horror, it is that the tectonic disturbance will result in absolute absurdity. And then a new quality will emerge from it.”–Emir Kusturica, circa 1995
DIRECTED BY: Emir Kusturica
FEATURING: Predrag Manojlovic, Lazar Ristovski, Mirjana Jokovic, Ernst Stötzner, Slavko Stimac, Srdjan Todorovic
PLOT:Two Yugoslavian gangsters join the Communist Party to resist the invading Nazis. One tricks the other into hiding out in a large cellar, where he and a small tribe of partisans manufacture munitions he believes are going to the resistance but which are actually being sold on the black market for years after the war has ended. Decades later, the ruse falls apart, and the former friends meet on the battlefields of Kosovo.
BACKGROUND:
- Kusturica adapted Underground from a play by Dušan Kovačević, although he only took the premise of people tricked into residing in a cellar under the pretense of a fake war from that source.
- The movie was filmed in 1992 and 1993, while the Bosnian War was raging—and ethnic cleansing was going on.
- Emir Kusturica’s original cut ran for 320 minutes, about the same length as the six part serialized television version released later.
- Underground won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but was not nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar.
- Despite its international success, Underground was controversial nearer to home. Kusturica was accused of taking money from the Serbian Broadcasting Corporation, which would have been a violation of sanctions against the Serbian government. (The director countered that he had only accepted non-financial assistance, and won a lawsuit for libel against a playwright who accused him of taking money from the Serbs.) The film was also criticized for being too conciliatory by not blaming Serbia and Slobodan Milošević’s regime directly for the Bosnian conflict. (Kusturica himself is ethnically Bosnian).
INDELIBLE IMAGE: A burning wheelchair circling an inverted crucifix under its own power.
THREE WEIRD THINGS: Flying bride; chimp in a tank; underwater brass band
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Up until the third act, Underground plays as an absurd, Balkanized satire—a far wilder ride than the average moviegoer is accustomed to, but not a film that went all the way to “weird.” That final half-hour, however, pulls out all of reality’s stops, sending the film off into a nightmarishly surreal conclusion, then soldiering on to a more conciliatory mystical ending. It’s the perfect, weird way to cap off a world cinema masterpiece.
Original trailer for Underground
COMMENTS: Emir Kusturica considers himself Yugoslavian. “In my Continue reading 341. UNDERGROUND (1995)