Tom Moody’s fear of performance manifests itself at an open mic show.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 2/21/2014
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 DEVELOPMENT:
Lazy Susan (est. late 2014): There’s no real specific info on the plot of this Seattle-shot low-budget flick other then that it will be in the “supernatural terror” genre. However, when asked if the film will be weird, director Kelly Hughes (of La Cage Aux Zombies and the public access soap opera “Heart Attack Theater”) responded “oui”… and he’s not even French! Starring punk rock frontgrrl Taylor Kimbrough (DEEP Throat) in her acting debut. Lazy Susan info at KellyWayneHughes.com.
NEW ON DVD:
The Ganzfeld Haunting (2014): Some teenage college students engage in ESP experiments and things get weird… and sexy! The Amazon comments are littered with descriptions like “[b]asically young adults doing drugs and licking each other and then once in a while a ghost had a monologue” and “[n]ot so much a movie as a series of edits randomly strung together, periodically interrupted by people snorting cocaine” that appeal to the masochist in us. Buy The Ganzfeld Haunting
Hanging Shadows: Perspectives On Italian Horror Cinema (2007): Documentary on Italian horror cinema with emphasis on the giallo. Subjects and interviewees include Dario (Suspiria) Argento and Michele (Cemetery Man) Soavi. Buy Hanging Shadows: Perspectives on Italian Horror Cinema
Hellbenders (2012): The “Augustine Interfaith Order of Hellbound Saints” are a team of exorcists who remain in a constant state of sin so that demons will possess them and they can then commit suicide and take the critters back to Hell with them. We have some minor doubts about the theological foundation of this plot. Buy Hellbenders
Sick Birds Die Easy (2013): Documentary (mockumentary?) about a crew of hippies, junkies and burnouts who go to Gabon in search of iboga, the hallucinogenic plant rumored to cure addiction. The cover proudly quotes a blogger who calls it a “feverish acid trip through the lunatic fringe.” Buy Sick Birds Die Easy
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Hellbenders (2012): See description in DVD above. Buy Hellbenders [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.
HIGH NOON (1952)
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Olive Film’s 60th anniversary Blu-ray edition of High Noon (1952) presents this critically lauded, still controversial western masterpiece in a Hi-Def transfer that renders all other home video versions obsolete.
The Stanley Kramer production, tightly directed by Fred Zinnemann and written by the blacklisted Carl Foreman, earned the hatred of 1950s McCarthyists, including John Wayne and Howard Hawks, who were so outraged they made Rio Bravo (1959) as a right-wing response. Wayne went further than that, teaming up with Hollywood Gossip mogul Hedda Hopper and the House Un-American Activities Committee to run Foreman out of the country. Foreman moved to England and never returned. Wayne forever boasted of forcing the writer into exile. Kramer, responding to accusations that High Noon was anti-American, tried to get Foreman’s name taken off the credits. Gary Cooper intervened on Foreman’s behalf, making Kramer’s effort unsuccessful, but Kramer had better luck forcing Foreman to sell his part of their company. So much for loyalty under pressure: ironic, given the film’s theme of civic morality.
The biggest offense of the film, for Wayne and his fellow extremist kooks, was the final shot of Will Kane supposedly dropping his marshal’s badge in the dust and stomping on it. Wayne saw symbolism aplenty, but his faulty vision was filtered through a lens of Cold War paranoia and exaggeration. ((Due to John Wayne’s interpretation of this scene, he and fellow right wing extremist Ward Bond bullied Gary Cooper into backing out of a planned independent production company with Forman and producer Robert Lippert.)) Will Kane merely dropped the badge. He never stepped on it. The other offense was the portrayal of the townspeople as a greedy, self-cannibalizing lot, a hypocritical church community who argue their way out of communal (and personal) loyalty. Wayne and Hawks’ Rio Bravo depicted, in sharp contrast, a town full of old-fashioned buddy-buddy camaraderie. If Wayne and Hawks were alive today they might have rethought their depiction, because High Noon could served as an apt snapshot of contemporary division. It’s a good thing that actor/director team didn’t live to see the 21st century, though, because despite the intent behind Rio Bravo, and despite its occasional tendency towards sentimental phoniness, it remains, along with High Noon, one of the standout westerns in the genre’s greatest decade. ((The American Film Institute lists High Noon second in its list of top ten westerns. First is John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) with Wayne. Two other films starring Wayne made the list: Red River at number five and Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) at number nine.))
One cannot approach High Noon without addressing its political themes, both within the film’s text and those raised in its aftermath. Along with writer Formean, co-star Lloyd Bridges and cinematographer Floyd Crosby were also awarded with temporary blacklists until the FBI cleared them of Communist affiliations. The fifty-one year old Gary Cooper was engaged in an affair with his twenty-three year old co-star Grace Kelly (putting an end to Coop’s affair with Patricia Neal.) Kelly’s fling with the long established Republican protected her from McCarthyism’s scrutiny. Cooper was friendly with the HUAC, and testified before them (without ever naming names), but he only did what was expected of him, then returned to his top priority of resuming his romance with a future princess.
Cooper was in Europe by the time the Academy Awards Ceremony rolled around and asked Wayne to accept the award of Best Actor on his behalf, should he happen to win. Of course, he did, and the Duke did a prompt, public about-face in his acceptance speech: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m glad to see they’re giving this to a man who is not only most deserving, but has conducted himself throughout the years in our business in a manner that we can all be proud of. Coop and I have been friends hunting and fishing for more years than I like to remember. He’s one of the nicest fellows I know. And our kinship goes further than that friendship because we both fell off horses in pictures together. Now that I’m through being such a good sport about all this sportsmanship, I’m going back and find my business manager, agent, producer, and three-name writers and find out Continue reading HIGH NOON (1952)
163. 3 WOMEN (1977)
“I’m trying to reach toward a picture that’s totally emotional, not narrative or intellectual, where an audience walks out and they can’t say anything but what they feel.”–Robert Altman (quoted in David Sterritt’s Criterion Collection essay)
DIRECTED BY: Robert Altman
FEATURING: Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Janice Rule, Robert Fortier
PLOT: A young girl named Pinky begins working at a spa in California, where she eventually becomes roommates with her idol, Millie, who is a few years older. Millie believes herself to be popular, inviting people over for dinner parties and out on dates, but in reality nearly everyone avoids her except for Pinky. Then, after a near-fatal accident, Pinky undergoes a radical personality change…
BACKGROUND:
- Robert Altman conceived the picture after a dream he had while his wife was hospitalized: he dreamed the title of the film, the location, that it involved personality theft, and that it would star Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek.
- 3 Women was made without a traditional screenplay. Instead, together with writer Patricia Resnick, Altman devised a 50 page treatment. The movie was then shot in sequence, with Altman writing out the next day’s scenes the night before, and the actors improvising much of the dialogue. Duvall wrote all of her character’s diary entries herself.
- The murals were painted by an otherwise nearly unknown hippie artist working under the name “Bodhi Wind.”
- Duvall’s performance won her a Best Actress nod at the Cannes Film Festival.
- The movie was not available on home video in any form until 2004, due to the distributors’ failure to negotiate rights for Gerald Busby’s avant-garde musical score.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The paintings that decorate the swimming pool walls: strange creatures with scaly legs and baboon faces, engaged in bizarre, violent courting rituals. A male stands with his arms outstretched and his stout penis hanging proudly between his legs while females scatter, looking over their shoulders and baring their fangs at him. Shots of these two murals, which inside the movie’s reality are painted by Janice Rule’s character, occur over and over throughout the film, including over the opening and closing credits. Oddly enough, the shot most associated with 3 Women—the one that illustrates the DVD cover and accompanies most reviews—doesn’t even occur in the film. The photograph of Sissy Spacek entwined in Shelly Duval’s arms as they recline against a fresco depicting one simian lizard creature strangling another was a promotional photo. 3 Women is that kind of movie: the type that’s best represented by something lying outside of its own boundaries.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: 3 Women is based on an uneasy dream suffered by Robert Altman, and incredible performances by Sissy Spacek and (especially) Shelly Duvall turn it into a collaborative dream. Although most of the movie is naturalistic, with nothing happening that could not quite happen in our reality, there is nonetheless a dreadful sense of illusoriness, as if we’re seeing events through a gauze.
Original trailer for 3 Women
COMMENTS: Tucked away on the long stretch of nowhere between Persona (1966) and Lost Highway (1997) lies 3 Women, the 1970s iteration Continue reading 163. 3 WOMEN (1977)
CAPSULE: TEETH (2007)
DIRECTED BY: Mitchell Lichtenstein
FEATURING: Jess Weixler, John Hensley
PLOT: A teenage girl involved in the abstinence movement discovers that she has an unusual mutation—teeth hidden inside her vagina, which clamp down on intruders.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s got an odd little premise, but not enough bite (c’mon, you had to see that one coming.)
COMMENTS: If you’re going to make a film about a girl who discovers she has ravenous teeth inside her vagina—you know, a poonfang flick—you have a serious decision to make about tone. The concept is so ridiculous that it can’t be done realistically: the best you could do would be to make it into a sci-fi version of a “disease of the week” movie. Writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein chooses to play the concept (mostly) as a straight horror movie. Since the other possibility would be to go for a horror/comedy hybrid that would inevitably degenerate into juvenile genitalia jokes, his choice seems like it should be the correct one; but based on the results here, I’m not so sure this material wouldn’t have played better with more icky genital wackiness (a la Bad Biology).
Teeth is technically well-made and benefits greatly from an all-in performance by Heather Graham lookalike Jess Weixler as Dawn, who undertakes a sexually confused journey from idealistic prude to reluctant predator. But the way Teeth handles the inherent absurdity of its situation is problematic. There are no real scares—though prosthetic penises provide some gross-out moments—but there are no big laughs either. It’s impossible to be horrified by the girl’s ridiculous condition, and only slightly easier to be amused. You might involuntarily guffaw when young Dawn decides to visit a gynecologist (“I think their might be something weird going on inside”) rather than a dentist. Some may find the straight-faced parody of the teen abstinence movement in the first act mildly amusing. The movie also hits all the b-movie monster movie cliches, like overdramatic musical cues at the moment of revelation and a cutaway to a forensic scientist providing stilted explication to an investigating detective, although those segments play as much as homage as satire.
The film’s message about the patriarchy’s fear of female sexuality is pure symbolism 101; its implication that all men are potential rapists may strike some as offensive (although this feature may result more from the awkward demands of the plot than from any anti-male ideology). While it would make good copy to quip that movie’s shock and comedy aspirations merge about as well as teeth and vaginas, that’s not really the case. Teeth isn’t a triumph, but nor is it a disaster—which is a real problem for critics when trying to discuss a movie that offers so many opportunities for dentition related puns. You can’t imagine how many reviewers were secretly hoping this movie would be a disaster so that they could be the first to quip “Teeth bites” or “the rotten Teeth should be yanked.”
It’s worth noting once more that Jess Weixler’s portrayal of troubled innocence is a key to making Teeth work, to the extent it does. With a lesser actress in the role, the film might have ended up as pure dreck. The 2007 Sundance Film Festival jury agreed, honoring Weixler with a special jury award for “dramatic acting.”
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Mr. Worf, who described it as “[p]art dark comedy, part horror film. Becoming a young woman is tough, especially for Dawn who is ‘very different.'” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)