In this series, Greg Barth uses ingenious sets and effects to make statements on three separate subjects.
Essays On Reality, Chapter 2 from Greg Barth on Vimeo.
Explanations of each message, and how each episode was made are available in the making-of video here.
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):
John Dies at the End (2012): Two college dropouts must save the world from an alien invasion brought on by a hallucinogenic drug in Don Coscarelli‘s trippy adaptation of the cult graphic novel of the same name. One of our most anticipated titles of the new year, it’s getting a limited release through major US cities and college towns through early spring, but you can also catch it on demand
Resolution (2012): A buddy ties his meth addict pal up in a cabin in the woods for an involuntary detox, and things get weird in this low-budget meta-horror that’s earned some comparisons to The Cabin in the Woods. Screening in Los Angeles only, although it’s also available on demand on some US cable systems. Resolution official site.
IN DEVELOPMENT:
Spring Breakers (2012): Harmony Korine‘s new movie—which looks like a return to the exploitation roots of his first screenplay, the juvenile delinquency shocker Kids—has released its first official trailer. This project, which features ex-Disney starlets Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens and is being pumped by MTV, looks like it could be Korine’s first ever non-weird directorial effort, but we’re sure he’ll slip something strange in there. It’s hitting theaters this spring, naturally. Spring Breakers official site.
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NEW ON DVD:
Dead Sushi (2012): Noboru Iguchi (The Machine Girl, RoboGeisha) makes 3-4 absurd, gory horror comedies per year. This one involves killer sushi (not “really good” sushi, but sushi that must be kickboxed into submission before it can be sampled). Buy Dead Sushi
The Paperboy (2012): A reporter investigates a death row case; somehow, this causes Nicole Kidman and John Cusack to have psychic sex (?) We’re cautiously adding this one to our watchlist after Stephen Garrett of the New York Observer called it an “off the rails… nut-bar melodrama” in an article encouragingly titled Cannes Gets Weird. Buy The Paperboy 
Pina (2011): Read our capsule review. Criterion picks up Wim Wenders‘ documentary tribute to avant-garde choreographer Pina Bausch, which has lots of weird arty dancing. Buy Pina (Criterion Collection)
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Ivan’s Childhood (1962): Three Soviet officers care for a young boy who is used as a spy during WWII. Andrei Tarkovsky‘s first movie is not as weird as his later science fiction work, but it does have famous dream sequences. Criterion upgrades their DVD edition to Blu-ray. Buy Ivan’s Childhood (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]
The Paperboy (2012): See description in DVD above. This package includes a DVD as well, along with the now-ubiquitous “digital copy.” Buy The Paperboy [Blu-ray]
Pina (2011): See description in DVD above. Includes a Blu-ray 3D alongside the normal disc for those few who can play such discs. Buy Pina (3D Blu-ray + Blu-ray Combo Pack) (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]
FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:
#Whoreship Movie (2012): You may have seen a bizarre viral music video called “TH3R3S R3ALLY NO 1 LYKE ME,” featuring a girl in pasties writhing, eating pizza and sitting in a bloody bathtub while performing an arrhythmic, amelodic sex rap. This is sort of an improvised, feature-length expansion of that concept, featuring half-nude “star” Labana Babylon explaining her free love philosophy accompanied by a host of el-cheapo psychedelic effects. It’s worth seeing just for the opening “LYKE ME” video, although the whole thing gets tiresome at almost an hour long. This is what happens when you give a neohippie stripper with a goddess complex access to an editing suite and all the Moroccan hashish she can inhale; it’s really weird (and NSFW). Watch #Whoreship Movie free on YouTube.
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.
The Kid (1921) was Charlie Chaplin‘s first and most autobiographical feature film. Produced for First National, it fulfilled his ambition to move beyond shorts. Critics immediately hailed it as a masterpiece, but its reputation has since suffered due to its many flaws. Of course, no work of art is flawless and the film’s status remains intact. It is, in many ways, a synthesis of Chaplin’s previous work and the work which followed. Chaplin began filming shortly after losing his infant son with first child bride, Mildred Harris. The Kid is, in part, a fantasy about what might have been, which Chaplin wedded to his own bitter childhood memories. The film was also a blueprint for Chaplin’s work process. He took his time filming, much to the chagrin of the studio, who applied considerable pressure on him to speed up the process.
It opens with Edna Purviance as a (single) woman “whose sin was motherhood.” Chaplin, who was himself illegitimate, edits the image of the suffering woman with a shot of Christ carrying the cross. This is visual storytelling, of course, so Chaplin’s not done with the manipulation yet. Our Scarlet Letter-styled heroine sees a couple coming out of a church. The bride, looking shell shocked, is all of about 16 years old. She drops a withered flower, symbolizing her loss of virginity. Her groom emerges, a white-bearded man who is at least 70. The minister and congregation bless the wedding. Edna, empathizing with the bride from afar, is accentuated with a halo round her head as she holds her bastard son. Within a few seconds, Chaplin takes his big swipe at hypocritical American piety, puritanism, and organized religion.
Edna sees an open limousine, darts in through its door (a device he reworked in 1931’s City Lights) and dumps her shame in the back seat, with a letter: “please love and care for this orphan child.”
Now Chaplin has fun. Two robbers steal the car, find the squalling brat in the back seat, duck into an alley and dump him in a nearby trashcan. Cue the Tramp. He finds the bundle of joy and does everything imaginable to dispatch of it, including contemplating throwing the infant into a street grating. This vignette is, often, hilariously cold-blooded. Finally, the Tramp accepts his fate and unofficially adopts the Kid, christening him “John.” The Tramp ingeniously turns a tea pot into a milk bottle and, with a pair of scissors, transforms an ordinary chair into a potty training seat. Meanwhile, the grief-stricken Edna has seen the error of her ways and will, henceforth, lead a life of charity.
Five years later, the infant is Jackie Coogan: the first and probably greatest child star actor in cinema history. The Kid is dressed in oversized clothes, a reflection of the Tramp. Daddy Tramp is teaching junior Tramp the fine art of swindling, which puts them under the radar of resident cop Tom Wilson. High octane slapstick follows.
Loss of mother, poverty, fear of the orphanage, and surreal amorous escapades are all movements in Chaplin’s opus. The Tramps do get plenty of pancakes to eat with the money they swipe from gullible patrons. Little doubt this is fantasy from Chaplin’s own destitute, half-starved London childhood.
John’s fight with a bully neighborhood kid leads to a further fight between the bully’s brother (Charles Reisner, in shoulder pads) and the Tramp. Edna, now a worldwide star (!) arrives to preach the gospel of turning the other cheek. Good news for Charlie that the bully listens, and the second that said bully gets soft, Charlie takes full advantage with a brick in his hand.
When the Kid gets sick, a visiting doctor discovers Edna’s old letter and contacts the authorities. Orphan Control soon arrives and kinetic slapstick is masterfully blended with pathos. Coogan’s acting is simply stunning. Only an ice cube would remain unaffected.
The Tramp flees to a flophouse and, again, the cruelty of poverty blended with inventive slapstick is nearly seamless. What follows has long been a source of controversy: the Heaven dream sequence. Having lost his child, the Tramp dreams of heaven. The Tramp gets his wings and, it turns out, heaven’s not that different from the earthly realm. Temptation arrives in the form of 12-year old Lita Grey, whom Chaplin would marry and bitterly divorce in real life (Grey was the source of inspiration for Vladimir Nabakov’s “Lolita”). Jealousy leads to a brawl and celestial murder. To some, it is an ill-fitting surreal sequence. Yet, it is an aesthetically potent bridge to the finale, which is, thankfully, a happy one.
The Kid is, indeed, awash in mawkish sentiment. However, fused with the fierceness of street survival, apathetic institution, and surrealistic hope, The Kid is a landmark in film as visual storytelling.
DIRECTED BY: Pier Paolo Pasolini
FEATURING: Terence Stamp, Laura Betti, Massimo Girotti, Silvana Mangano, Andrés José Cruz Soublette, Anne Wiazemsky
PLOT: A mysterious guest sleeps with every member of a wealthy household, and when he leaves they come to strange, mostly tragic ends.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Mainly on the strength and reputation of its director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, a seminal figure in the Italian avant-garde scene of the 1960s and 1970s, who nonetheless has only a small handful of films that might qualify for the list of the 366 best weird movies. Teorema, while not his best known movie, may be the the poet-cum-director’s most mysterious parable, and therefore demands consideration.
COMMENTS: Today, it’s hard to imagine the controversy that accompanied the relatively tame Teorema in 1966. The film was given an award by a left-leaning Catholic film board at the Venice Film Festival, then condemned by the Vatican for indecency. Despite containing no nudity or explicit sexual depictions, Teorema was brought up on obscenity charges in Italy. Some of Pasolini’s Communist brethren even criticized the film for its irreverent approach to Marxism and for its apparent religiosity. I imagine what really unnerved people at the time was the bisexuality of dreamy, blue-eyed Brit Terence Stamp, the movie’s mysterious visitor. A homosexual character would have been somewhat shocking in 1968, but a man who fornicates equally with men and women—and whose charms are irresistible to straight men—is far more threatening to sexual mores; it’s even more outrageous when it’s hinted that the pansexual visitor may be God. Teorema is schematic in structure: after a few introductory passages, including a long sequence done silent film-style, the plot settles down to a series of sexual encounters between the magnetic Stamp and the members of the household (mother, father, daughter, son, maid) where he stays as a guest, followed by an examination of their individual breakdowns after he leaves them bereft. Synopses invariably misreport that Stamp “seduces” the household, which is almost the opposite of Pasolini’s scheme here: each of the family members is attracted to the visitor on their own and seeks to seduce him. He initially rejects their advances, but quickly succumbs—he provides sex as an act of charity, or grace. When Stamp leaves, with as little explanation as was given for his arrival, the family falls apart. The pastimes they cling to to try to fill his absence—sex, respectability, money, art, even sanity—are revealed as empty and unsatisfactory. The housekeeper Elena, who retreats to her country village where she eats nettles and performs morose miracles, appears to escape the tragic fate of the others—although her end hardly seems more comforting than the father’s, who winds up naked and raving mad in the desert. What it all means is up for interpretation: despite delivering each plot point on time with mathematical regularity, Pasolini leaves out some essential step from his proof that would lead us to an irrefutable conclusion. I suspect the movie is mostly about the death of God and Pasolini’s notion that, with the decline of Christendom, the bourgeois class would implode from a lack of meaning in their lives. (If Pasolini is to be believed—and surely his tongue was tucked partially in his cheek when he gave this reductionist quote—the film’s message is that “a member of the bourgeoisie, whatever he does, is always wrong).” The snail’s pace and minimum of dialogue make the movie a bit of a chore to watch, and for all his concern with sensuality, Pasolini is no more than average as a visual stylist. True to its name, Teorema (Italian for “theorem”) is a dry theoretical film that’s more interesting to discuss afterwards than it is fun to watch.
Astute 366 readers may note that Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q is basically an inverted (and perverted) version of Teorema.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by “lo-fi jr.,” who called it “the most psychotically Catholic flick I’ve ever seen.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
AKA The Last Days of Man on Earth
DIRECTED BY: Robert Fuest
FEATURING: Jon Finch, Jenny Runacre, Sterling Hayden
PLOT: Scientific genius, billionaire playboy, rock star, and international man of mystery Jerry Cornelius (no relation whatsoever to Buckaroo Banzai, though it’s probably not coincidental that he has the same initials as Jesus Christ) searches for a computer programme written by his recently deceased father which will somehow create the new Messiah: a self-replicating hermaphrodite destined to breed the superior race which will replace mankind. A lot of confusing, post-psychedelic, very 1973 stuff happens, but of course in the end he finds it. And then he turns into a gorilla.
WHY IT WONT MAKE THE LIST: It’s dull!
COMMENTS: This movie is very difficult to see. It doesn’t seem to be available on DVD anywhere for less than $100, and since I have no intention of paying that much (or indeed anything) to watch this clunker again, I’ll have to review it from memory. However, since I did catch it on the big screen at my local arthouse cinema a couple of years ago, I’ve probably seen it much more recently than most of the people reading this.
Here’s the thing. Most difficult-to-see films are difficult to see for legal reasons; usually they’re banned, or at least highly controversial. The Final Programme is difficult to see because so few people care about it that it’s not worth releasing on DVD. But its very unavailability has given it a totally undeserved cult status, which is why the few copies on the market sell for insane prices to people who think they want them. Ladies and gents, a word in your ear. Don’t get too excited about this movie, because when you finally do get to see it, you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about. And if you paid $100 for the privilege, you will not be a happy bunny!
The first problem with this movie is its leading man. Jon Finch is famous for starring in Alfred Hitchcock’s last (and most definitely not his best) film, Frenzy, and for appearing in a couple of Hammer horrors. He also would have been the guy whose chest exploded in Alien, if he hadn’t had to drop out due to health problems. So, a perfectly decent actor, but not exactly A-list (and by the way, he died on 28 December 2012, so RIP Jon). Jerry Cornelius is supposed to be an amoral anti-hero who combines the more interesting elements of Oscar Wilde and James Bond (and Buckaroo Banzai, who hadn’t even been invented yet), and for that, you need a lot more screen presence than Jon Finch could muster. Rumor has it that Mick Jagger turned down the role on the grounds that it was “too weird.” Given his performance in Performance, I can only assume that what he really meant was: ”This script sucks, and I can’t be bothered to argue.”
Michael Moorcock also thought the script sucked, and since he wrote the 1969 novel on which the film was based, he presumably knew what he was talking about. His outrageously decadent protagonist’s screen incarnation comes across as being a bit naughty and cheeky: there’s absolutely no sense that this man is either genuinely dissipated or the slightest bit dangerous. Which is especially unfortunate, given that it was only two years since A Clockwork Orange had shown us exactly what an amoral yet strangely charismatic anti-hero is supposed to be like (curiously, Patrick Magee is in both films).
Many elements of the film now considered “weird” were actually standard for any fairly expensive fantasy or sci-fi film made at that time. Yes, Continue reading CAPSULE: THE FINAL PROGRAMME (1973)