Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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We’ll be taking a short break from catching up on 2014 releases next week before our big year-end push. Instead, we’ll start by bringing you one of those ever-popular celebrity “Top 10 Weird Movies” lists, this time by Ink/The Frame auteur . On Tuesday we’ll have a little early Christmas present for you as we bring you the Alloy Orchestra’s compilation of some of the weirdest shorts of the silent era (including a couple of certifiable classics), complete with a link to watch for free courtesy of our monthly arrangement with the Movie and Music Network. And from the reader-suggested review queue, Ryan Aarset will give his opinion on Cube (seeing as how we’ve already passed on the two sequels for the List, how will the original fare?)

“Video footage of pretty girls named violet pounding on doors” may be one of the most specific sexual fetishes we’ve ever encountered, but that’s the kind of thing we see every week in our roundup of the Weirdest Search Terms of the Week. Speaking of strange fetishes, sometimes a slip of a single letter can turn an already odd search term into something weirder, as is the case with “guy in orange suit ducks a tranny.” We thought “future midget submarines” might be a winner this week, but a quick check of Google suggests that future midget submarines may really affect us in the future. So this week we’ll pick “drama set in africa where actors are playing chimps who defecate coconuts” as the weirdest search term we saw, despite the fact that we know inevitably some reader will comment “yeah, that’s Simian Love Gods of Zimbabwe he’s thinking of,” or something like that.

Here’s how the ridiculously-long and ever-growing reader-suggested review queue stands: Cube (next week!); The Real McCoy; Themroc; Candy (1968); The Fox Family; Angelus; Britannia Hospital; Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 12/5/2014

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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 on the official site links.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Billy Bates: Experimental feature about an artist who has a psychotic freakout and becomes “the Warhol of his generation.” Playing NYC’s Quad Cinemas this week, and tonight’s (12/5) 7:50 screening is free to the public, with a Q&A to follow.  Billy Bates official site.

The Foxy Merkins: An asthmatic woman who aspires to be a lesbian hooker takes hints from a rich, beautiful heterosexual hustler with a gift for seducing women. From the team behind Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same. The Foxy Merkins official site.

SCREENINGS – (Cinefamily, Los Angeles, Dec. 5-8):

“Truth and Soul, Inc.: The Films of Robert Downey Sr. (a prince)”: How big film geeks are the folks at Cinefamily? They want to do a fundraiser, and they think, “what will get the people out thereto  really shell out dough? I know, a four-day retrospective of the no-budget underground movies of !” Director , comedian Louis CK, and Downey’s own superstar progeny, Mr. Iron Man himself, enable the programmers’ delusions, thank goodness. On Dec. 5 Downey pere and fils discuss Chafed Elbows and Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight; December 6th pairs the Certified Weird Greaser’s Palace with an ultra-rare screening of 1970’s Pound (where dogs in a pound are played by human actors); on the 7th, Louis CK and Alan Arkin host a showing of Putney Swope; and the final night brings Downey Sr. and Arkin together for a twin bill of the music documentary Rittenhouse Square and No More Excuses, together with “surprises” (ooh!) A retrospective fit for a prince! “Truth and Soul, Inc.: The Films of Robert Downey Sr. (a prince)” at Cinefamily.

NEW ON DVD:

The Congress (2013): Read our review. Our favorite angry Amazon review reads, “If I could give this less than 1 star I would. This movie goes from physical form 15% of the movie to 30’s style HIPPIE cartoons for the most of the movie…” Buy The Congress.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

The Congress (2013): See description in DVD above. +Buy The Congress [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.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND (1966) BLU-RAY CRITERION

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‘s two 1966 Westerns, The Shooting and Ride In The Whirlwind, have finally received due recognition in a Criterion edition. For years, Hellman’s “existentialist” Westerns (as they are often termed) have languished in execrable transfers on Z-grade DVD labels. Even these have usually been out of print, and only available at mortgage payment-level prices.

Both were produced by  (uncredited), , and Hellman, with Hellman directing both simultaneously. The Shooting was written by Carole Eastman, Ride In The Whirlwind by Nicholson. The writing proves to make the difference; Nicholson lacks Eastman’s sense of pacing and aptitude for coherent nonsense. Still, each film is sharply focused and securely grounded among films for the bourgeoisie to walk out on (a quick glance at the deluge of prosaic comments from banal IMDB users serves as a verification of Hellman’s provocative reputation).

Ride In The Whirlwind opens as a traditional Western, with a stagecoach robbery. Tradition soon gets thrown out with yesterday’s bathwater. The robbery goes askew, as do concepts of righteousness, virtue, honor, and frontier justice. The ensuing shootout between rival gangs lays waste to our inherent ideologies of heroes and villains.

Still from Ride in the Whirlwind (1966)Nicholson is shockingly subdued and vulnerable. Even better is , an overly familiar character actor villain, in his best celluloid role. Despite very good performances, Ride In The Whirlwind lacks  and Millie Perkins, who gave The Shooting its essential grounding.

Hellman is a Western grim reaper, as vital and original as Sam Peckinpah as a harbinger of the genre’s death. Comparatively, Clint Eastwood and his celebrated deconstructionist Unforgiven (1992) are obvious and unsatisfactory.

The films premiered together at Cannes and were enthusiastically advocated by  and other notable French critics. Alas, it was to little avail. Hellman’s twin opuses received scant attention in the States and only belatedly earned cult reputations.

The Shooting was previously reviewed here. Ride In The Whirlwind has received considerably less attention, but Criterion astutely treats the two films as inseparable. True to form, Criterion provides a definitive edition. Both films finally receive spotless, lush transfers. Among the plethora of extras are interviews with Corman, Perkins, Harry Dean Stanton, and Will Hutchins, an outstanding homage to Oates (written by critic Kim Morgan), critic Michael Atkinson’s equally excellent essay, and several commentaries by Hellman accompanied by film historians Bill Krohn and Black Lucas.

Canonically Weird (The List)

185. SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD (2010)

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“‘The books walk a line where you wonder if it’s fantasy, or if it’s really happening, At some point it stops mattering,’ O’Malley said, adding that he believes Wright captured the “whimsical weirdness” of the series.”—“Scott Pilgrim” franchise creator Bryan Lee O’Malley, quoted in L.A. Times article

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Edgar Wright

FEATURING: Michael Cera, , , Jason Schwartzman

PLOT: Scott Pilgrim is a slacker and bassist in the garage band “Sex Bob-omb”; his heart was broken a year ago by a former bandmate who cheated on him and went on to musical stardom. Scott, who’s in his early twenties, has taken to Platonically dating a wide-eyed high school girl named “Knives”. He (literally) dreams of a quirky, assured girl his own age by the name of Ramona Flowers, but while wooing her he learns that he will have to defeat her seven evil exes in battle in order to win her.

Still from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
BACKGROUND:

  • Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was selected to go on the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies in the 5th Readers Choice Poll. Actually, it ended the poll tied and was involved in a run-off vote which also ended in a tie, at which time it was declared the winner by editorial fiat.
  • The film is based on a series of six graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley. The script was optioned after the first volume was published, and filming began before the series finished its run. Since the script was completed first, O’Malley provided the screenwriters with his notes on how the story was to end. O’Malley actually asked for permission to use lines from the screenplay in later “Scott Pilgrim” books. The final “Scott Pilgrim” volume was released in 2010, the same year as the movie.
  • Scott Pilgrim cost $60 million to make and earned only $30 million in its theatrical run. It has proved to be a home-video hit, however.
  • The film’s original ending, which had Scott reuniting with Knives, was rewritten due to negative audience response.
  • Naturally, the film inspired a video game adaptation.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Split screens. Besides the “Batman”-style “ka-pow!” lettering floating past during fight scenes, the visual motif you may notice most about Scott Pilgrim is the abundant use of split screens. This is not simply a stylistic affectation; the device refers to the movie’s graphic novel inspiration, mimicking the freedom of the printed page to place each image inside the frame that best suits it, however bent. That’s why we selected the fanned out rouges gallery of the League of Evil Exes as our indelible image (some of the promotional material features the same iconic image, with the actors occupying different spots on the evil spectrum for variety’s sake).

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A villain sets up a duel to the death by email, then brings his own Bollywood backup singers—who happen to be levitating “demon hipster chicks”—to the fight.  When he’s defeated, he dissolves into a shower of coins. If you don’t think that’s at least a little weird, you probably need to put down the video game controller for a few hours a day.


Original trailer for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

COMMENTS: When Scott Pilgrim flopped at the box office, it became Continue reading 185. SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD (2010) →

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