A man with a camera approaches another and gets punched in the face. It gets satisfyingly creepy and disjointed from there.
Content Warning: This short contains some violence and poorly drawn nudity.
2015 MARCH MAD MOVIE MADNESS: LIST CANDIDATE TOURNAMENT, ROUND 2
The first round is in the books, and it’s time to move on to the next chapter in the first annual (?) March Mad Movie Madness tournament. The concept is pretty self-evident, but if you have any questions maybe a look at the first round will help. The big surprise result was Southland Tales upsetting #1 seed Under the Skin. Don’t know where all the Southland fans came from, but we’ll see if they can keep it up to the finish line. I had predicted that the final would be Under the Skin vs. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (which was also upset, by The Machinist), which goes to show how well I understand the tastes of our readers. Your selections were, for lack of a better word, weird. Keep it up!
This round ends Monday, Mar. 23 at 11:59 U.S. Eastern Standard Time.
You can see the full bracket here.
[challonge url=”366movies”]
Click on “continue reading” to begin voting.
Continue reading 2015 MARCH MAD MOVIE MADNESS: LIST CANDIDATE TOURNAMENT, ROUND 2
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 3/20/2015
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 on the official site links.
IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):
Jauja (2014): A Danish soldier (Viggo Mortensen) hunts for his eloped daughter in the wilds of Patagonia in this minimalist experimental feature. Reviews have been general good, but this is one of those arthouse features that comes with a “slow” warning. Jauja official site.
SCREENINGS – (Ann Arbor, MI, Wed., Mar. 25, 9:30 PM):
Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922): Read the Certified Weird entry! The diabolically weird silent documentary is performed with a live score supplied by piano/percussion duo Demdike Stare as part of the Ann Arbor film festival. Haxan w/ Live Score by Demdike Stare >> Ann Arbor Film Festival.
SCREENINGS – (Los Angeles, Cinefamily, Fri., Mar. 20-21):
The Color of Pomegranates (1968): : Sergei Parajanov‘s stunning impressionistic biography of Armenian poet Sayat Nova, in a newly restored print. Screens tonight (Friday 20th) at 7:30 PM PST, and again tomorrow at 5 PM. The Color of Pomegranates at Cinefamily.
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972): The Spanish conquistador Aguirre loses his mind and sets off on a suicidal journey down the Amazon searching for the fabled city of El Dorado. Arguably Klaus Kinski‘s greatest performance and Werner Herzog‘s masterpiece, it’s also been a long-standing fixture in our reader-suggested review queue. Buy Aguirre, The Wrath of God [Blu-ray]
FREE MOVIES ON SHOUT FACTORY TV:
Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970): Read the Certified Weird entry! Shout Factory continues exploiting their Werner Herzog catalog with this free online screening of his weirdest classic, about dwarf inmates revolting against their dwarf oppressors at an unnamed institution. Watch Even Dwarfs Started Small free.
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.
FELLINI’S ROMA (1972)
Despite taking the prize at Cannes, Roma (1972) has often fallen under the radar among Federico Fellini‘s oeuvre and it has been dismissed, by some, as the director at the apex of his “self-indulgence”—code for “non-linearity.”
One might see Roma as a private scrapbook containing overstuffed images cut out with dull scissors. Too much glue is used and it oozes out from behind pictures, making the pages stick together and tear. Naturally, it has far more personality than anything done by a professional scrapbooker, despite not being a complete success. Fellini’s Roma is so personally visual that the dialogue is intrusive.
Fellini inserts himself into the film, played as a young man out of time in 1939 by Peter Gonzales, adorned in white. The director prophetically steps in himself to personify his later self in 1972, but acts opposite no one, merely ushering us into his gaudy compositions, purposefully taking us nowhere.
The narrative as tainted whisper follows Fellini through fantasy page after fantasy page of his Roman imagery and we quickly realize this is a metropolis seen through a celestial lens. Expectedly, the director’s interpretation of “celestial” involves high camp, calmly fusing the erotic with the pious as if it is the most pragmatic marriage since ravioli and cheese. In typical Fellini fashion, Magdalena, the erroneously-labeled garish whore, symbolizes Rome herself.
Through a series of evocative vignettes Fellini, overwhelmed with wistful sights (courtesy Director of Photography Giuseppe Rotunno) including a majestic traffic jam encircling the coliseums in an infernal rain storm, visits a brusque vaudeville show and frequents both underground and chic bordellos. Designer Danilo Donati and set director Andrea Fantacci alchemically fashion a voguish parochial pageant with skating padres and nuns adorned like Christmas trees.
Fellini, unlike Luis Buñuel, is able to express anti-clerical sentiments without provoking religious institutions, perhaps because of his ability to transform what on the surface would seem banal into something majestic. Additionally, Fellini, despite the primordial excesses, locates the maternity of Rome. She casts a spell on her sons.
Composer Nino Rota’s score is among his most majestic, romantically ranging from folk music through 1940s big band sounds and, finally, ecstatically echoing the loud, tainted 70s with apocalyptic air raid sirens. In addition to the sounds, we are inundated with visions of groped, fleshy backsides and the smells of food gorging.
Princesses and popes of the past give way to bohemian ideology (a young Elvira—AKA Cassandra Peterson—is one of the beatniks) with Fellini and film crew vapidly chasing down Gore Vidal for an interview. The cameos, in the second half of the film, are jarringly out of place. Aptly, there are no standout performances, except for Fellini himself. The contrast between Rome of past and present is alternately phantasmagoric and obscure.
As we come to the final mercurial pages of Fellini’s Roma sketch-like scrapbook, we find the pulse of his requiem valentine to his sooty mother city seen through the rear-view mirrors of departing, spectral choppers.
READER RECOMMENDATION: KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! (1998)
Reader recommendation by Giles Edwards
DIRECTED BY: Aleksey German
FEATURING: Yuriy Tsuliro, Nina Ruslanova, Mickhail Dementyev
PLOT: General Klensky, the head of a prestigious Moscow mental hospital in 1950s Soviet Russia, tries to evade KGB agents before he’s captured and forced to help the authorities in their last ditch effort to save a dying Josef Stalin.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: With each cluttered frame stuffed with inky blacks and smoky whites, the nightmarish reality of Stalin’s last “Terror” makes for uneasy viewing as a nightmarish hellscape seeps ever more into the cruelty of the tragically mundane. This reality is made both more real and more unpleasant by the inclusion of the dissonant sound track.
COMMENTS: It took nearly a decade for Aleksey German to put together this ordeal of a movie about the last of Stalin’s great purges just before the demise of the Soviet Union’s ruthless dictator. The nightmare of pursuit lasts three days for the heavy-handed but sympathetic General Kensky, who rules like a benevolent counterpart to “Uncle Joe,” presiding over his medical facility in a cognac-fueled display of ordered madness. Surrounded by the grotesque (be it in the chaos of his hospital or the sinister order provided by the black-sedan riding apparatchiks), Kensky uncovers a plot to stage his fall from grace before fleeing to the home of a sympathetic former nurse. Disappearing at the hands of Stalin’s henchmen and being spirited away in the back of a “Soviet Champagne” truck, he meets with the bed-ridden, stroke-afflicted leader before his own disappearance is arranged for good.
The entire atmosphere of the film is made of deeply black blacks and sodium-light bright whites. Steam and disorder fill the interiors, while outside the tainted white of snow and dark sheen of the KGB’s cars make for an incongruous combination of the harshest of whites and darkest of blacks. Innocents are randomly round up (one unfortunate, in the wrong place and the wrong time, is unceremoniously dumped into the trunk of one of the ever-present black cars), and a fearful citizenry makes itself complicit with the state sponsored terror, hoping their compliance will direct the authorities’ suspicion and ire elsewhere.
What makes this movie weird is how it manages to capture society at its most grotesque. There are other movies that have individual images that are more troubling, but this film’s continuous streak of casual violence, cruel misfortune, and unsettling monotony of sadism in a fearful society grinds on for well over two hours of hyper-realism.
The soundtrack consists of oblique conversations continually interspersed with the sound of spitting, sneezing, blowing noses, grunts and all manner of human-noise unpleasantness. While no doubt this is realistic, the constant reminder of people’s bodily sounds makes the soundtrack seem more of a heightened reality: we see (and, more so, hear) humanity in all its discourteous glory.
German was a contemporary of Andrei Tarkovsky (of Andrei Rublev and Stalker fame). But whereas Tarkovsky saw the grittiness of reality and transformed it into a primordial poetry that bordered on spiritual, German takes the opposite route and ground his films so thoroughly in the depths of the hellishly mundane, it is almost as if one is seeing and hearing Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”, but without the “Delight” (or even, for that matter, the “Garden”).
This movie was finished just before the Putin era began: made between the early and late ’90s, along with a number of other introspective post-Soviet Films. One becomes weary in the soul watching the hell this doctor and patriarch goes through in the name of the grisly interpretation of Soviet idealism that was Joseph Stalin’s Russia. The ostensibly uplifting movement of Soviet Realism in film is given a punch to the gut in this vision of nightmare turned into real-life.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: