A man happens upon a talking tree, and seizes the opportunity to gain insight on existence.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 5/24/2019
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):
Diamantino (2018): A Portuguese soccer star adopts an African lesbian immigrant, while his twin sisters are conducting secret genetic experiments. This bonkers-sounding comedy has garnered good reviews, and a limited stateside release, after a successful festival run. Diamantino official site.
NEW ON HOME VIDEO:
Dead Hooker in a Trunk (2009): Four friends find the titular Macguffin in the titular locale, which eventually leads to surreal confrontations with the Cowboy Pimp and the Almighty himself. A feminist work by identical twin sisters (the Soskas) whose title perhaps oversells the level of subtlety here. Makes its Blu-ray debut this week. Buy Dead Hooker in a Trunk
The Image Book (2018): Jean-Luc Godard takes images from films of the past, digitally alters them, and philosophizes in voiceover. More late Godard for cinema masochists (we’ll probably end up joining them). On DVD or Blu-ray from Kino-Lorber. Buy The Image Book
The Perfection (2019): Psychological thriller about a musical prodigy. The trailer makes it look like Black Swan meets Get Out. A Netflix exclusive movie exclusively streaming on Netflix.
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, 5/28 – The Color of Pomegranates [Sayat Nova] (1969). At the Brattle.
- Cleveland, OH, 5/26 – The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953). At the Cleveland Institute of Art.
- Columbus, OH, 5/26-5/29 – Evil Dead II (1987). At Gateway Film Center.
- Los Angeles, CA, 5/24 (midnight) – The Love Witch (2016). At the New Beverly Cinema.
- Los Angeles, CA, 5/24 (midnight) – Vertigo (1958). At the Nuart Theatre.
- Los Angeles, CA, 5/25 – 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). At the Aero Theatre.
- New York City, NY, 5/24 & 5/27 – Daisies [Sedmikrásky] (1966). At the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
- New York City, NY, 5/24-5/26 (midnights) – Fight Club (1999). At IFC Center.
- New York City, NY, 5/25 – The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). At the Museum of Modern Art.
- New York City, NY, 5/25 & 5/27 – Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970). At the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
- New York City, NY, 5/30 – Eyes Without a Face [Les Yeux sans Visage] (1965). At the Metrograph.
- Oakland, CA, 5/27 – Nosferatu (1922), with live score by the Invincible Czars. At the New Parkway Theater.
- Omaha, NB, 5/27 – Zardoz (1974). A portion of all proceeds will be donated to Angels Among Us (fighting childhood cancer) . At the Alamo Drafthouse.
- Pittsburgh, PA, 5/24, 5/26-5/30 – Daisies [Sedmikrásky] (1966). At the Row House Cinema.
- San Diego, CA, 5/24 (midnight) & 5/25 – Mandy (2018). At Ken Cinema.
- San Francisco, CA, 5/24-5/25 – Eraserhead (1977). At the Roxie.
- Santa Ana, CA, 5/24-5/25 – Belladonna of Sadness (1973). At the Frida Cinema.
- Santa Ana, CA, 5/35-5/26 – Brazil (1985). At the Frida Cinema.
- Toronto, Ont., Canada, 5/25 – The Tin Drum (1979). At the Royal.
- Washington, D.C., 5/27 – The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984). At Smoke & Barrel.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE: Next week Shane Wilson digs into the long-neglected reader-suggested review queue for a look at Jean-Luc Godard‘s Alphaville, a strange 1965 noir-sci fi-philosophy mashup, while G. Smalley is back from vacation with a report on the fake-Japanese-TV-show mockumentary Top Knot Detective. That rapscallion Smalley’s vacation has delayed the upcoming print release of the 2018 Yearbook—proofing revealed a new problem with the margins that cropped up just before his departure—so hopefully next week we’ll get that little issue sorted out and get those collectible items up for sale before too long. We swear, next year the Yearbook will arrive much earlier… well, at least we plan on it. Onward and weirdward!
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.
CAPSULE: RHINOCEROS (1974)
DIRECTED BY: Tom O’Horgan
FEATURING: Gene Wilder, Karen Black, Zero Mostel
PLOT: Stanley is an alcoholic accountant. Everyone else turns into a rhinoceros.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: O’Horgan’s adaptation of an absurdist play features too much stagey kookiness to work well as a film—which is a pity, because it has a weird premise that, when the tone is right, shows the potential it had as an unsettling commentary on the nature of man.
COMMENTS: Before ascending to the lofty heights of film criticism, I led a something of an artistically minimal life between college and my first reader-submitted review. So it is with a long-stretched arm that I reach back to my school days of Theater Drama, particularly when I was an assistant director my senior year of high school. Through early college I occasionally partook in what Tom O’Horgan described as “a ritualized version of a piece of art”, both offstage and on it. I bring you this somewhat long-winded reminiscence so that you may believe when I say: “theater” and “film” are two entirely different beasts.
As an adaptation of an absurdist bit of theater, the fine points of Hippopotamus‘ plot are inconsequential. Indeed, my summary above could probably be trimmed by a word or two. That said, I regret to inform you even the incredible talent of Gene Wilder on screen fails to compensate for the scattershot approach O’Horgan takes off of it. Half of it is too stagey—with an unfortunate tilt toward “zany”—which compromises Rhinoceros in two ways. First, the handful of scenes of rhino-related destruction and transformation come across as, “Look at how off-the-wall and Damn-the-conventions we are!” Second, Rhinoceros is only a comedy in the same way that Waiting for Godot is: the small snippets of absurd humor are only there to (thinly) paper over the underlying message about the dispiriting pointlessness of life.
On occasion, though, O’Horgan manages to hit the right tone. A scene with Stanley, Gene Wilder’s character, slinking—late—into the office after a discussion about Race, Religion, Capitalism, and Other Topics Found In Plays, crescendos into some buffoonery. It is immediately followed by a haunting interlude where Stanley leaves a subway car, elbowing past faceless masses, passed by faceless pedestrians and workers as he walks the streets. They aren’t actually faceless, they just have hats, buckets, anything covering them. Like the guilty revelers after a crazy party, they shun others’ gazes as they realize the epidemic’s magnitude: who will be next? This is echoed in an altogether strange hallway walk through fear, hitting an apex with a dream sequence/musical number that finds Stanley in a zoo cage as his work-crush cavorts with his friend.
Rhinoceros is almost saved by the presence of Gene Wilder. He seems to be the only one who got the memo that this project was being recorded on film as a movie. As the scene demands, he has a subtlety of expression, a softness of tenor, or a naturalistic reaction to the absurdness around him. If O’Horgan had grasped this need for understatement, the movie would have been a Certifiable genius piece of work. As it stands, the viewer can only hope for snippets of unnerving pathos littered sparsely through a big dish of hammy excess.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
366 UNDERGROUND: SHE FOUND NOW (2018)
DIRECTED BY: Zachary O. Burch
FEATURING: Francesca Caterina Ghi, Nidalas Madden, Peyton Rowe, Tyair Blackman
PLOT: With a storm approaching, a group of housemates try to resolve their personal relationships, while a mysterious entity lurks in the shadows.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: She Found Now is a curious little film, featuring interesting screen images and loaded with portentous symbolism and mannered acting. But the dream state dramatized is not new enough to be surprising, and the weirder elements feel less motivated by the plot than positioned to obscure it.
COMMENTS: The pretty girl looks up from her pasta, searches for the right moment, and then makes her play to break the ice with her paramour: “So, I heard around that there’s supposed to be a hurricane coming by. Would you feel comfortable at my place?” Such is the nature of things in the universe of She Found Now—disaster lurks around the corner, but people show only the most casual awareness of it.
This scene, which kicks things off, is not like any other in the film, and yet it’s strangely representative of the movie as a whole. Most of the action, such as it is, takes place within a single apartment, but the characters are mentally elsewhere most of the time, either in a dream locale (like the restaurant, rendered in amusingly obvious green screen), a landscape of their own fears, or in the mind of someone outside. Our characters are trapped, but longing for an elsewhere they can only imagine.
The filmmakers clearly appreciate surreal humor. A scene in front of a static-filled television almost has a Marx Brothers vibe to it, as more people keep arriving to gape at the screen. Similarly amusing is a game of Trivial Pursuit where the trivia is people’s lives: “How do you feel?” “Are you satisfied with yourself?” Director Burch and co-screenwriter K. L. Scott also have a knack for striking imagery: a monochromatic encounter with a mystery doppelganger is effectively creepy, while a shadow puppet that lingers and transforms is genuinely unsettling.
Given their limitations, the makers of She Found Now do a lot with a little. They clearly learned the trick of leaning into their challenges. For example, one can easily surmise that actors were not available to re-record dialogue. Instead, they cast new voices that are blatantly out-of-step with the visuals. It adds another layer of dissonance to a storyline that is built on mystery.
My biggest problem, though, concerns that mystery. All the surrealism, all the deliberate oddness and opaqueness… it doesn’t add up to very much. In the final act of the film, when all of our main characters are being stalked by a malevolent force, the antagonist is rendered as a guy with bear paws whose face is blocked out by a big dot. Should we know who this is? Is the absence of a face a metaphorical comment on our fears? Or is it just a lo-fi solution to an inability to properly represent the horror being invoked?
I was plagued by questions like this throughout She Found Now. Even the title flummoxed me. Is that a comment on the lead’s predicament, or her conclusion? Which now is “Now”? And should I draw any inference from the fact that the title is not only drawn from a song by cult shoegazer band My Bloody Valentine, but that the album in question marked that band’s emergence from a 14-year hiatus? She Found Now feels like a word problem that is impossible to solve because there just aren’t enough clues to piece the answer together, and yet the film is nothing without its mysteries.
There’s the hint of something powerful in She Found Now. I suspect the filmmakers were hoping to invoke something Lynchian, a visual metaphor for potent psychological roadblocks. But the reference point I kept coming back to was “No Exit,” the legendary play by Jean-Paul Sartre in which three people trapped in a room for an eternity come to learn that “hell is other people.” These flatmates do not hate each other, but they are trapped in each others’ self-destructive orbits. But so much is invested in deliberately obscuring those real emotions in surreal decoration that the movie never gets to be what it really is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CClBOgiZepM
SATURDAY SHORT: GARFIELD GAMEBOY’D (2019)
Similar to the Lasagna Cat series, “Garfield Gameboy” parodies the comic cat into something less family-friendly. This short is made up of cutscenes from a nonexistent Gameboy horror game in which Jon is trying to hide from, and destroy, a shapeshifting Garfield.