We’ve collected all five nominees for 2015′s Weirdest Short of the Year together in one place, for ease of voting. Just click “continued” for a mini film-festival of weirdness. Be sure to vote for your favorite! (You can cast a vote once every 24 hours). Polls close February 28 at 1:00 PM EST. A special thanks goes out to Cameron Jorgensen, 366 Weird Movies under-appreciated shorts Czar, who discovered these unusual films through his own research. This year’s lineup includes killer flowers, self-abusing infants, postmortem interviews, camouflaged painters and sea monsters. Click below to view all the nominees and vote.
SATURDAY SHORT: INTRODUCING BOBBY (2013)
An ex-con reflects on his past, and looks to the future as a potential contestant on the reality series Survivor. This could be a fairly straightforward documentary, but the uncomfortable depictions of poverty along with some unusual film techniques make it fit to be highlighted here.
Content Warning: This short contains strong language.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 1/15/2016
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.
SCREENINGS – (New York City, Lincoln Center, Friday, 1/15 at 9:00 PM):
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976): Read Andreas Stoehr’s review! Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade theater hosts this last-minute free (!) screening of Nicolas Roeg‘s science fiction fantasia to celebrate the legacy of the late, great David Bowie. NYC weirdos with no weekend plans may want to try to make it. The Man Who Fell to Earth at Lincoln Center.
SCREENINGS – (New York City, Videology Bar and Cinema, Saturday, 1/16 at Midnight):
Trash Humpers (2009): Read the Certified Weird review! Clearly, the best way to watch Harmony Korine‘s aggressively transgressive low-budget lark about viscous old people humping trash is at a bar. Trash Humpers at Videology Bar and Cinema.
NEW ON DVD:
Flutter (2011): A dog track gambler is suckered into increasingly surreal bets with a mysterious new female bookie. Never heard of this one before, but two out of three Amazon reviewers currently refer to it as “weird” (while the third simply calls it “creepy”). Buy Flutter
“Out 1” (1971/1974): Jacques (Celine and Julie Go Boating) Rivette’s rarely seen opus: a byzantine, confusing twelve-hour film (divided into 8 episodes) about rival experimental theater groups and an overarching conspiracy. This box set also includes Out 1: Spectre, the four-hour theatrical edit of the film and a feature length documentary, spread across six Blu-rays and seven DVDs, along with a thick booklet of essays and criticism. Buy “Out 1 (Limited Edition Box Set)”
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1990): Tom Stoppard directs the film adaptation of his own play focusing on two minor characters from “Hamlet,” depicted as bumbling rakes wandering through a artificial world that resembles Samuel Beckett more than Shakespeare. This Image Entertainment “25th Anniversary” release is not remastered but has an extended interview with Stoppard as a bonus. Buy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
The Bed Sitting Room (1969): Read our review! Richard Lester‘s vision of an absurd apocalypse makes it to Blu-ray for the first time (in the U.S.A.), but unfortunately without much in the way of extra features. Buy The Bed Sitting Room (1969) [Blu-ray]
Bolero (1984)/Ghosts Can’t Do It (1989): In the 1980s, director John Derek took his “10” wife Bo and slapped her into a couple of absurdly bad softcore “erotic” features. Bolero featured Bo as a virgin (!) who has to travel the world to find someone to sleep with her (!!), while the even dumber (!!!) Ghosts found Bo street-testing male bodies for her dear departed husband (Anthony Quinn!!!!) to possess. Buy Bolero/Ghosts Can’t Do It [Blu-ray]
How I Won the War (1967): An incompetent British officer gets most of his squad killed while trying to set up a cricket pitch behind enemy lines in this anti-war satire co-starring John Lennon. Part of a Kino Lorber Richard Lester dump that also includes The Bed Sitting Room (above) and the more conventional sex comedy The Knack (and How to Get It). Buy How I Won the War (1967) [Blu-ray]
“Out 1” (1971/1974): See description in DVD above. Buy “Out 1 (Limited Edition Box Set)”
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1990): See description in DVD above. Buy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead [Blu-ray]
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.
DAVID BOWIE: AN ACTOR RETROSPECTIVE
With news of David Bowie‘s passing, our review for Zelig (1983) will be pushed back to next week.
This excerpt from author Keith Banner’s blog 2 +2=5 gracefully expresses what the loss of David Bowie means: “Bowie was a weirdo that somehow found a way to make weirdness majestic, worth putting up with. Of course it’s January when David Bowie dies. Cold silvery light, frosted-hard glass, that sense of loss locking into place: roads, tree-branches, ditches, power-lines. He was silvery like that somehow, frosty; you didn’t know him, you just experienced his atmosphere. That’s exactly how I remember him. Just enough cold to make you shiver, just enough strangeness to make you feel scared, just enough glamor to make you understand, just enough video to freak you out. Once somebody like him goes, you get what he means, and it’s startling. You’ve depended on his strangeness to get you through. I have. Truly. Depended on David Bowie’s oddness and fearlessness and creepiness, his shapeshiftingness, his ability to disappear and reappear. It gave me hope. Gives me hope still. He pursued a swarm of off-kilter notions that turned into a kingdom.”
Bowie’s music is going to be covered for quite some time, but for this site, we will cover his second career as a celluloid actor. Apart from The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), The Hunger (1983), and Labyrinth (1986), his films have not received the same kind of publicity and exposure as his music. Indeed, Bowie rarely spoke of his film acting, and repeatedly turned down roles that others competed for (he once rejected the role of a James Bond villain, saying with shrewd sarcasm, “I don’t want to get paid watching my double fall off a cliff for five months”). Although Bowie possibly considered his body of film work to be a dabbling in the medium, his screen persona was (to borrow that overused, suave cliche) chameleon-like. In sharp contrast to the cement tradition of everyone from Bing Crosby to Madonna, Bowie did not rest on his musical laurels or rely on his celebrity status to forge a zombie-like cinema rendition of his pre-existing persona. Indeed, Bowie is probably the pop music icon who has been most successful in establishing himself as a legitimate actor. His stage personality, as a reflection of his life, was restlessly birthed from a highly refined sense of the absurd and a razor-sharp perception of artistic trends. When he immersed himself in the medium of film, he did so with concentration and humble thoughtfulness.
Bowie’s first authentic performance of note was in Nicolas Roeg‘s cult classic The Man Who Fell To Earth. The film is vintage Roeg. Roeg was a more uneven director that his cultists are prone to admit, and The Man Who Fell To Earth presents an uneven landscape. Bowie’s persona as fashionably weird is in full throttle. It’s an inspired bit of Continue reading DAVID BOWIE: AN ACTOR RETROSPECTIVE
225. ADAPTATION. (2002)
CHARLIE KAUFMAN: I’ve written myself into my screenplay.
DONALD KAUFMAN: That’s kind of weird, huh?
—Adaptation.
DIRECTED BY: Spike Jonze
FEATURING: Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Brian Cox
PLOT: Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, fresh off the hit Being John Malkovich, is contractually and mentally trapped as he is forced to plow his way through an impossible project: “writing a movie about flowers.” Things go from bleak to bizarre as he finds himself competing with his endearingly oblivious twin brother, Donald, who also aspires to be a screenwriter. Charlie slips further and further past the deadline, until things come to a head in the film’s swampy denouement where he comes face-to-face with both the writer of and titular character from “The Orchid Thief
BACKGROUND:
- The screenplay for Adaptation. was on Charlie Kaufman’s to-do list since the late ’90s. Tasked with adapting Susan Orlean’s novel-length essay “The Orchid Thief” and suffering the same problems as his doppelganger, he kept his progress secret from everyone other than Spike Jonze until 2000, when the movie was green-lit for production.
- Screenwriting guru Robert McKee and his seminars are real. He personally suggested Brian Cox play him in the movie.
- Adaptation. handily recouped the producers’ investment, with a return of $32.8 million worldwide on a $19 million outlay.
- Nominated for four Oscars: best actor for Cage, supporting actor for Cooper, supporting actress for Streep, and adapted screenplay for Charlie and Donald Kaufman. Cooper was the only winner.
- Though “Donald” Kaufman’s serial killer script The 3 was never shot, the idea may have inspired two subsequent movies, 2003’s Identity and 2006’s Thr3e.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Returning from a misfired date, Charlie finds his twin brother already back home from a writer’s seminar, brimming over with newly adopted wisdom. As Charlie stands in front of his hallway mirror, Donald’s face is captured in the reflection as he expounds upon his own screenplay’s “image system” involving broken mirrors. Charlie’s expression goes from dour to disbelieving at this inanity, and the viewer sees the movie mock both itself and screenplay tricks. A further twist is added by the fact that the blurry reflection in the mirror is the face of the actual Charlie Kaufman talking to Nicolas Cage.
THREE WEIRD THINGS: Film-within-a-film-within-a-screenplay-within-a-screenplay ; Ouroboros; orchid-snorting
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: For all its unconventionality, Adaptation is amazingly self-deprecating. Spoilers unravel in opening scenes and are tossed aside, coastal city elites are presented as real people with the petty little problems real people have, and Nicolas Cage gains a bit of weight and loses a bit of hair to provide the compelling double performance as the Kaufman brothers. Events seem scattershot, only to have their purposes later clarified as the tightly structured flow keeps the viewer jumping from moment to moment, always questioning which parts of this convoluted tale are actually true.
COMMENTS: Between its thorough description of the protagonist Continue reading 225. ADAPTATION. (2002)