Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 1/22/2016

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Our weekly 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 at the official site links.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Bleak Street (2015): Two aging prostitutes accidentally kill two midget luchadores while trying to steal their earrings in this Mexican oddity based on a true story (!) The New York Times‘ A.O. Scott is both encouraging and discouraging, calling it “willfully weird but, at the same time, not quite weird enough.” Distributor page for La calle de la amargura (Spanish only).

Mojave (2015): A depressed artist wanders into the desert where he meets a strange, violent drifter (Oscar Isaac) who claims to be the Devil. Reviews have been poor, which may explain why it’s being dumped in the January film graveyard. Mojave official site.

Monster Hunt (2015): Chinese import about a cute half-breed bringing peace between the human and monster races. Raman Hui is known as “the Spielberg of Beijing.” No official site; Monster Hunt unofficial (?) Facebook page.

SCREENINGS – (Los Angeles, Cinefamily, Jan 22-28):

Pierrot le Fou (1965) :Pierrot and Marianne flee Paris, pursued by Algerian hit men, in this anarchic early experiment at a road movie from .  This restored print has been touring select destinations in the U.S. since November (although we just found out about it today). Pierrot le Fou at Cinefamily.

SCREENINGS – (New York City, Videology Bar and Cinema, Saturday, Jan. 23 at Midnight):

Lisztomania (1975): Read the Certified Weird review! With Nazi golems, Richard Wagner as a vampire, a climax aboard a heavenly spaceship, and a giant phallic musical number, this phantasmagorical mock biopic of Franz Liszt is Ken Russell at his ebullient silliest. Lisztomania at Videology Bar and Cinema.

FILM FESTIVALS – Sundance (Park City, UT, Jan 21-31):

The 2016 movie season officially kicks off with Sundance, where a hundred hopeful independent movies, including a few off-the-wall ones, come to vie for a handful of distribution contracts. Recently Sundance added the “Midnight” screening section to add some weirdness to the otherwise lame, tame lineup of dramas about privileged white people and their problems (alternating with imported dramas about underprivileged brown people and their problems). Some of their big name weird movies are far from premieres: ‘ fest-circuit fave The Lobster and ‘s sleepy Cemetery of Splendor have been making the rounds for a year now. There’s also a special screening of the soon-in-theaters Anomalisa with a Q&A with co-directors and . Among the new stuff, here is some of the more adventurous offerings we’ll be tracking:

  • 31 – We’re highlighting s killer clown horror solely on the basis of the character names: “Father Murder,” “Sex-Head,” “Venus Virgo,” and so on. In the “Midnight” category, screening Jan 23, 24, 27, 30.
  • Antibirth – Danny “Oddsac” Perez’s paranoid stoner horror stars and Natasha Lyonne. Plays Jan 25, 26, 28 & 30.
  • The Greasy Strangler -Director Jim Hosking financed this debut feature about the title character and a disco walking tour after his “G is for Grandad” segment from The ABCs of Death 2 wowed the guys with the purse strings. Jan 22, 23, 26 & 29.
  • The Lure – Mermaid sisters join a band and a love triangle in this horror/drama/musical from Poland. Jan. 22, 24, 26, 28, 30.

Sundance Film Festival home page.

FILM FESTIVALS – Slamdance (Park City, UT, Jan 21-28):

Slamdance is Sundance’s punkier, sometimes weirder little brother, a low-budget alternative to the mid-budget institution.

  • Director’s Cut – This crowdfunded comedy bills itself as “the ultimate ‘meta movie'”; written by and starring magician Penn Gillette, directed by .

Slamdance official site.

NEW ON DVD:

Luther the Geek (1990): Cult slasher movie about a killer geek with razor-sharp dentures who spends the entire movie clucking like a chicken. Sick and different, at least. Buy Luther the Geek [DVD/Blu-ray combo].

Nightmare Weekend (1986): A scientist turns co-ed nymphomaniacs into mutant killers; there’s also a telepathic hand puppet. Vinegar Syndrome proudly describes it as “among the weirdest and most jaw droppingly absurd horror films of the 1980s.” Buy Nightmare Weekend [DVD/Blu-ray combo].

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Luther the Geek (1990): See description in DVD above. Combo pack only, neither the DVD nor Blu-ray is being offered by itself. Buy Luther the Geek [DVD/Blu-ray combo].

Nightmare Weekend (1986): See description in DVD above. Like Luther the Geek, this one comes in a combo pack only. Buy Nightmare Weekend [DVD/Blu-ray combo].

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.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

WOODY ALLEN’S ZELIG (1983)

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Zelig (1983) finds in full experimental mode. This mockumentary was released a full year before Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap (1984), which is often cited as an innovation. With a more cultured, refined approach and subject matter, it is relatively easy to ascertain why the quaint Zelig lacked the broader appeal of the loud Spinal Tap. Although the earlier film received overwhelmingly positive reviews, numerous critics pointed out that it is an extended single joke. Of course, the same might be said of Spinal Tap, but its celebration of heavy metal culture does give it a more extensive quota of memorable lines and puns—and nothing against that.

Yet, even in his most experimental film, Woody Allen continues to speak solely in his own voice. Indeed, he may be the most personal American filmmaker to date. Zelig charmingly plots out the life of “human chameleon” Leonard Zelig. In doing so, it follows the gimmick of 1982’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid: teleporting its protagonist into yesteryear’s newsreel footage, beginning with the 1920s. As in Midnight In Paris (2011), we are introduced to icons of the jazz age, including F. Scott Fitzgerald. In both films, Allen’s approach to the pre-WWII era is paradoxically fawning, clear-eyed, and critical. He is consistent in expressing his loves and obsessions, although he does so with more subtlety, and better, in the earlier film. Smartly, he minimizes the pathos and so is more aligned with the spirit of in Zelig (Paris was sentimental like ). Like those silent clowns, Allen’s art is a guardian for his preoccupations.

Susan Sontag informs us: “Zelig was the phenomenon of the 20s,” and that “according to Saul Bellow, Zelig was amusing, but at the same time, touched a nerve in people perhaps in a way in which they did not want to be touched.” It is not surprising that Allen casts a critical Freudian eye on social conventions of America’s past. As a character, Leonard Zelig literally mirrors Western neuroses. As a compositional image—and this film is about image—Zelig is the guy with the vacant stare in the photograph’s bent corner. A non-personality, Zelig becomes the film’s co-personality. The eternally underrated Mia Farrow gives comic zip to both Zelig and “The Changing Man” film housing him. The film’s most animated scenes are on the therapy couch, where she becomes Zelig’s reflection, peeking through the corner of her glasses with a “you want to go to bed with me? But, I’m not pretty” look as she adjusts herself at the edge of the seat.

Allen compares Zelig to a character out of Kafka (along with Freud, another obsession). Indeed, Zelig’s transformations are more sepia insect than Technicolor chameleon, and the community’s response to him is one of initial curiosity, followed by reaching for the insecticide.

Still from Zelig (1983)Zelig leaps from hobnobbing with William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, and Charlie Chaplin to becoming an anonymous speck in the Nazi machine. After he is cured, Zelig becomes the provocative intellectual hated by American working class heroes. Naturally, he is rehabilitated after his fall from grace, rendering his idiosyncratic, celluloid promenade as an archival blueprint for precision in poignancy.

Allen is hardly a model of American filmmaking. He is New York, not Hollywood, and never attended film school; but his body of work stands as a unique immersion into the study of film. In his studies, he avoids the pratfalls of being too sentimental (Chaplin) or too glacial (). Once Allen made it clear that he would not be contained by our “funny man” category, he composed his own parties, showing up in a plethora of hats and suits: warm, beautifully bleak, elitist, anti-elitist, nostalgic, and modern. Like Zelig himself, Allen revels in his own contradictions with individualistic conscientiousness. In other words, Allen is always authentically Allen. Zelig is a testament to that.

Canonically Weird (The List)

226. CONSPIRATORS OF PLEASURE (1996)

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Spiklenci Slasti

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“Conspirators is actually a film about liberation, and about gaining a freedom.”–Jan Svankmajer explaining why he considered Conspirators his most Surrealistic film up to that point

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Jan Svankmajer

FEATURING: Petr Meissel, Gabriela Wilhelmová, Barbora Hrzánová, Anna Wetlinská, , Pavel Nový

PLOT: A man enters a newsstand and furtively buys a pornographic magazine as the owner nods conspiratorially at him. At home, he leafs through the pages but is interrupted by the postwoman, who has him sign for a letter that simply reads “on Sunday.” Over the next several days the man constructs an elaborate chicken costume; meanwhile, the postwoman, his next door neighbor, the newsstand owner, and another couple are all involved in their own strange, surreptitious projects.

Still from Conspirators of Pleasure (1996)

BACKGROUND:

  • Conspirators of Pleasure began life as a screenplay for a short written in 1970 but never filmed. That short would have told the parallel stories of the “chicken man” and his neighbor across the hall. Svankmajer resumed work on the project in 1996, thought of four more characters to include, and expanded the film to feature length.
  • In 1975 Svankmajer wrote a (satirical?) essay entitled “The Future Belongs to Masturbation Machines.”
  • Originally known for his stop-motion animated shorts, Conspirators was Svankmajer’s third feature film, and it continued a trend of having less and less animation in each successive film (there are only a few accent scenes here, which amount to about one minute of animation).
  • The end credits list Sacher-Masoch, the , Freud, , and Bohuslav Brouk (a Czech psychoanalyst who wrote up a series of case studies about masturbatory practices) as having provided “professional expertise.”
  • The , animators who paid tribute to the Czech director with the 1984 film “The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer,” are listed in the credits as “musical collaborators” (although the soundtrack is prerecorded classical music).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The man in a chicken suit doing a ritualistic (and sometimes literally animated) dance in front of a doll-like effigy tied to a chair.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Stop-motion submissive; dough-snorting; carp shrimping

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: We follow six people engaged in complicated, intensely personal fetishistic rituals; adding to the odd, voyeuristic atmosphere, there is no dialogue, other than what’s overheard in the background on television. Each of the conspirators crosses the others’ paths, but continue to work on their own private obsessions, until all of them appear to receive their ultimate gratification. Then, Jan Svankmajer launches us into a new stratosphere of strangeness at the finale, when the chickens come home to roost (so to speak).


Short clip from Conspirators of Pleasure

COMMENTS: Case study: a man, Eastern European, balding but fit Continue reading 226. CONSPIRATORS OF PLEASURE (1996) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: FANDO Y LIS (1968)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Alejandro Jodorowsky

FEATURING: Sergio Kleiner, Diana Mariscal

PLOT: Fando carts and carries his paralyzed lover Lis across a ravaged landscape searching for the legendary city Tar.

Still from Fando y Lis (1968)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: If you’ve ever seen a Jodorowsky movie before, you know what to expect. Fando y Lis is a parade of fantastical, shocking imagery, including snakes that penetrate a baby doll and a man who begs for blood (he extracts a donation with a syringe and drinks it from a brandy snifter). That said, Fando & Lis is one of the least of Jodorwosky’s works, an early curiosity that is thoroughly weird, but not strongly conceived enough to make the List on the first ballot. (Plus, Jodo’s so well-represented here already we don’t feel at all bad about the possibility of leaving one movie off).

COMMENTS: Fando y Lis begins with a woman eating flowers while a siren wails. Later we will learn she is the paraplegic Lis, whose lover Fando will cart her across a bizarre post-apocalyptic landscape searching for the mystical city of Tar. Along the way they encounter a man playing a burning piano, mud zombies, a transvestite parade, and a gang of female bowlers led by a dominatrix, among other absurdities. There will also be flashbacks to both Fando and Lis’ childhoods, and unrelated fantasy sequences of the actors goofing around (posing in a graveyard, and painting their characters’ names on each other). And there’s quite a few more transgressions, both beautiful and clumsy, to be found in this rambling, overstuffed avant-garde experiment. Although Jodorowsky comes from an older bohemian tradition, at times Fando y Lis plays like something made by Mexican hippies, improvising scenes with random props in between hashish tokes.

The “spiritual journey” structure makes for an episodic film, but the ideas aren’t as stunningly realized or obsessively detailed as The Holy Mountain. Here, Jodorowsky has found, but not perfected, his unique voice: it’s as if he’s working with individual sentences, rather than complete paragraphs. It would have helped the movie feel more coherent and unified if the relationship between Fando and Lis was better done, but their dynamic is unpleasant. They unconvincingly profess eternal love for each other, but Fando is much better at conveying his irritation and annoyance at having to carry Lis everywhere, while her character is reduced to desperate, pathetic whining for most of the film.

In 1962 Jodorowsky, Fernando Arrabal and , feeling that Andre Breton and the old guard Surrealists had lost their edge and were no longer extreme enough in their embrace of absurdity, founded the Panic movement, which was mostly an experimental theater group. Fando & Lis was originally a play from this school, written by Arrabal and staged by Jodorowsky. This movie adaptation is not intended to be faithful; Jodorowsky instead described it as based on his memories of the play. When Fando y Lis premiered at the Acapulco Film Festival in 1968 it caused a riot (presumably due to its abundant nudity and mildly sacrilegious content) and was subsequently banned in Mexico. The film basically disappeared for years. Discovering Jodorowsky in the early 90s, when his films were only available in bootleg VHS versions, I was unaware that he had made a movie before El Topo; Fando wasn’t even a filmography entry. It wasn’t until 2003 that a DVD of this early work suddenly popped up.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… pothead vaudeville all the way… A tumultuous cause celebre at festivals, it paved the way for the director’s rise from small-time poseur to big-time poseur with El Topo a few years later.”–Fernando F. Croce, Cinepassion

(This movie was nominated for review by “Zelenc” who called it a “must see film.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Miscellanea

YOUR VOTE DETERMINES THE WINNERS OF THE 6TH ANNUAL WEIRDCADEMY AWARDS

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First, a little bad news: citing a scheduling conflict, Chris Rock has decided not to host the 6th annual Academy Awards. ( says he is free that night, but we felt awkward about him hosting since we didn’t nominate Chi-Raq). For this reason, and many others, we will not be having a telecast this year. Instead, results of the race will be announced the way they always are: right here on 366 Weird Movies, a few hours before the Academy Awards ceremony begins in Los Angeles (or wherever they host that thing).

Although the editors of 366 Weird Movies select the nominees from the pool of available movies, the Awards themselves are a naked popularity contest and do not necessarily reflect either the artistic merit or intrinsic weirdness of the films involved. The Weirdcademy Awards are tongue in cheek and for fun only. Ballot-stuffing is a frequent occurrence. Please, no wagering.

The Weirdcademy Awards are given to the Weirdest Movie, Actor, Actress and Scene of the previous year, as voted by the members of the Weirdcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Weirdness.

Who makes up the Weirdcademy, you ask? Membership is open to all readers of 366 Weird Movies. The rules for joining the Weirdcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Weirdness are as follows. To officially join the Weirdcademy, locate an official online ballot (such as the one below) and hover your mouse pointer over the radial button representing the choice of movie you would like to see win any award in any category. Then, simply depress the left button of your mouse to make your selection. Selections made using the right mouse button will be disregarded, and you will be forced to reapply. If your application for membership is approved, a dot will appear next to your choice. You are not done with the application procedure yet, so continue reading. To be certified as a voting member of the Weirdcademy, at some point subsequent to making your selection, you must navigate your mouse button to the box marked “vote.” Now, again depress your left mouse button to confirm your membership as a voting member of the Weirdcademy.

(Vote as many times as you like, but only once per day, please. We’ll keep voting open until February 28 at 1:00 PM EST, so we can announce our results before the Academy Awards and steal their thunder).

There is no requirement that you’ve have to actually see all the movies in any category before voting.

Be sure to also vote for Weirdest Short Film of the Year. To watch all five nominees and to cast your vote, please click here.

Without further delay, here are the nominees for the 2015 Weirdcademy awards:

Continue reading YOUR VOTE DETERMINES THE WINNERS OF THE 6TH ANNUAL WEIRDCADEMY AWARDS →

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