Eager to satisfy his need for consumption, a supermarket shopper goes on a shopping spree. The way in which he decides to use his groceries, though, is taboo.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 7/20/2012
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.
There’s nothing new for weirdos in theaters this week; The Dark Knight has driven away all competitors. Even the weirdest features are afraid to challenge its mighty debut. (Heck, even the DVD releases have largely gone quiet for the week).
FILM FESTIVALS: FANTASIA (Jul. 19 – Aug .9, Montreal, CAN):
In its brief 15 year existence, Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival has become one of the premier destinations for foreign (especially Asian) and independent fantasy, science fiction, horror and action films. Thankfully, the festival programmers’ tastes skew towards the weirder side of genre cinema. We highly some of the debuts and new-to-us films below, but we also noticed a lot of interesting titles that were familiar to us from Sundance, Tribeca and other fests: the Possession-esque romantic horror Beast (Zuwalski’s original will also screen at FIFF); Carré blanc, a the surreal dystopian French fantasy that’s nearing the end of its festival run; another bow for Traci Lords and John Waters, headlining the misfit cast of the shock-horror Excision; the anthology The Fourth Dimension, anchored by a Val Kilmer/Harmony Korine collaboration; and Grabbers, about Irish pub-dwellers who get drunk to dissuade invading aliens from snacking on them; the Unabomber-inspired magical realist drama Monsters Club; Quentin Dupieux‘s absurdist missing dog comedy Wrong; and the crowd-pleasing Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead. Unique features playing Fantasia are mentioned below; there are a couple we’re extremely excited about…
- Ace Attorney – Takashi Miike‘s second film to play 2012 Fantasia (his musical comedy For Love’s Sake screened on opening night), this futuristic courtroom comedy is based on a video game and involves improbable hairstyles and ghost co-counsel. Screening Aug. 2 (sold out).
- As Luck Would Have It – Alex de la Iglesia absurd satire about an ad-man who gets a spike through the head, and uses his public relations savvy to make the best of it. This one’s not new to the festival circuit, but we overlooked it before. July 25.
- Dead Sushi – Noboru Iguchi (The Machine Girl, RoboGeisha, Zombie Ass) is making 3-4 horror comedies per year since 2008; this one involves killer sushi (not “really good” sushi, but sushi that must be kickboxed into submission before it can be sampled). July 22.
- The Devil’s Carnival – Repo! The Genetic Opera fans will want to check out this followup rock musical, which is a sort of variation on Dante’s Inferno with Hell as a circus. There will be live performances of the score, celebrity guests and carnival sideshow attractions at this gala event, but Fantasia forgot to mention whether the movie will actually screen. July 22.
- A Fantastic Fear of Everything – Simon Pegg stars as a children’s author turned crime writer undergoing a hallucinatory nervous breakdown in this paranoid black comedy. July 31.
- Honey Pupu – Experimental Taiwanese techno-pastiche about the ephemerality of modern life. July 21.
- The Human Race – Random American citizens are whisked away to a netherworld to participate in a brutal death race; two of them are deaf, and the main character has only one leg. July 29.
- Isn’t Anyone Alive? – Follows about 20 characters through two hours as they suddenly die without explanation. July 31 & Aug. 3.
- Lowlife – Two lowlife musicians engage in an orgy of drugs that ends with them descending to a state of permanent hallucination. It’s weird. Check out this trailer (narrated by a dog) if you don’t believe us. Jul. 21.
- Mondomanila – Filipino sleaze about a gang of poor drunk outcasts and freaks who extract revenge on a racist pedophile rapist. July 20 & Aug. 1.
- “Outer Limits of Animation” – Twenty short films, two of which are especially noteworthy to us: Don Hertzfeldt‘s “It’s Such a Beautiful Day,” the third installment of the stick-figure psychodrama that began with Everything Will Be OK, and Bill Plympton‘s “Guard Dog Global Jam,”which sees dozens of animators remaking a section of his 2004 Oscar-nominated short “Guard Dog” in their own styles. July 22.
- Resolution – A buddy ties his crack addict pal up in a cabin in the woods for an involuntary detox, and things get weird. July 25.
- Schoolgirl Apocalypse – A plague makes men kill women in this zombie-apocalypse tale with a bow-firing Japanese schoolgirl heroine and animated scenes. July 30.
- The Warped Forest – Here it is: the spiritual sequel to Funky Forest, this time a solo flight by Shunichiro Miki, the director of the infamous “Wanna Go for a Drink?” segment.
That’s one hell of a lineup! Fantasia official website.
SCREENINGS (Hollywood, CA, Egyptian Theater):
Foxfur (2012)/Spacedisco One (2007): The world premier (possibly to be the only theatrical screening) of microbudget icon Damon Packard’s Foxfur, which looks to be a surprisingly straight-faced, gee-whiz sci-fi drama that takes Billy Meier’s insane UFO theories at face value, with CGI flying saucers that would make Ed Wood cream. The companion feature, Spacedisco One, is an unauthorized psychedelic/absurdist sequel to both 1984 and Logan’s Run. Both movies run under an hour. Also featuring a documentary short and a Q&A with Packard and the Foxfur cast. Foxfur/Spacedisco One at the Egyptian Theater.
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
The Butterfly Effect (2004): Trippy, Donnie Darko inspired cult movie about a time-tripping college student who suffers blackouts. We’ll be honest: we skipped this on release solely because it starred teen heartthrob and Dude, Where’s My Car? alumnus Aston Kuchner; now that Kuchnermania is long past, maybe it’s time to give this one a fair look with unbiased eyes? The Blu-ray contains both the director’s and theatrical cuts, in case that matters. Buy Butterfly Effect [Blu-ray]
FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:
Highlander 2: The Quickening (1991): The first movie about battling Immortals was a cult hit because of its originality; the sequel is a notoriously confusing and illogical mess that’s a cult movie for the wrong reasons. This movie is so bad, it actually has less than a 4 1/2 out of 5 star rating at Amazon.com. This upload has Dutch subtitles. Watch Highlander 2: The Quickening 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.
SATURDAY MORNING WITH SID AND MARTY KROFFT
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Some may count the 1980s as the last great decade of pop culture. I disagree. The first half of the 80s was undoubtedly influential, but it was a continuation of the individuality of the previous decade. Around the halfway mark, the 80s gave way to the lack of personality blandness that saturated the 1990s (and beyond, to today). Rather, the 1970s was the last decade of pop heaven, and Saturday Morning With Sid and Marty Kroft serves well as the Calgon to take us away to that Neverland time capsule.
This Rhino DVD collection of pilot episodes will probably be best enjoyed with a bowl of Quisp cereal and some full blown Vitamin D milk. None of that wimpy 2 % or skim crap (you might also enjoy a bowl of Quake, if you can find it). Now, slip into a plaid robe, a pair of fuzzy house slippers, kick all those boring hyper-realists out of the house. Then, turn on the TV and hit play. DO NOT fall into the temptation of using the remote control (yes, it’s a DVD, but let’s try to get as close to the genuine experience as we can). Throw the pillows on the shag rug carpet and let the cartoons begin.
The pilots assembled here make for a grand psychedelic starter kit, but some are surprisingly subdued; the series would reach higher planes of inspired lunacy later. No matter. Sid and Marty Krofft stuck to their idiosyncratic formula, which was characterized by prepubescent heroes and heroines, puppet comedy relief, knee-tapping kitsch songs and (badly) canned laughs from the laugh track. It is extremely doubtful that the Krofft Brothers were insightful or perceptive enough to realize just how surreal their macrocosm was. Yes, for me, Sid and Marty Krofft are big bold, dopey examples of naive surrealism. It is no accident that the 1970s animated programs of Sid and Marty Krofft proved to be among the all-important aesthetic diving boards for many later and contemporary surrealists artists, such as Paul Ruebens, Todd M. Coe, and many more.
The Krofft Brothers’ first three series shared much in common, and only a single season was filmed for each (although reruns kept them in syndication for an additional year or more). H.R. Pufnstuff is the first and most famous. The pilot premiered in 1969 and began as a series heavily influenced by The Wizard of Oz (1939) with a dash of “The Magic Flute.” The Oz theme of a child being transported to an otherworldly dimension would serve as the primary ingredient in the Krofft recipe.
Jimmy (Jack Wild) and his magic flute, Freddy, are shipwrecked on Living Island. Little do they Continue reading SATURDAY MORNING WITH SID AND MARTY KROFFT
120. FANTASTIC PLANET [LA PLANETE SAUVAGE] (1973)
“Cinema is showing more and more. It’s a paranoid, dictatorial cinema. And it’s saying less and less. We need a schizophrenic cinema.”–René Laloux
DIRECTED BY: René Laloux
FEATURING: Voices of Eric Baugin, Jennifer Drake, Jean Valmont
PLOT: On a fantastic planet full of strange creatures, a race of mystical giant blue aliens (named “Traags”) treat humans (called “Oms”) as either pets, or as pests to be exterminated. An orphan Om dubbed Ter is adopted by a young Traag, but eventually escapes captivity, taking along an encyclopedic headband that holds all the aliens’ knowledge of their world. He meets up with a band of wild Oms scratching out a living in the surreal landscape and, using the alien technology, fashions a plan for humanity to escape its captivity.
BACKGROUND:
- Fantastic Planet was a French/Czechoslovakian co-production, and is often assumed to be an allegory for the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. The similarity between the enslavement of the Czechs and the Oms is coincidental, however. Fantastic Planet was based on a science fiction novel written by Stefan Wul in 1957. Laloux only used Czech animators because there was no real animation industry in France at the time and the Czechs worked cheaply; he began production in 1968, before the Soviet invasion. The newly installed Czech puppet regime canceled the production, but eventually relented, and work resumed in 1971.
- The Czech animation team reportedly tried to depose Laloux and install one of their own animators as director. The coup failed, and friendly relations were restored.
- “Oms,” the term the aliens use to refer to humans, is a corruption of the French word “hommes” (“men”). The original French novel was titled Oms en série (“Oms in series”), which is also an electrical pun (“Ohms in series”).
- Writer/painter Roland Topor was the production designer for the film and the man responsible for much of the movie’s surreal look. Topor drew up the designs and the original cutouts used in the production, but left the project before animation began. Topor was a bit of a weird movie polymath; besides working on Fantastic Planet, he wrote the novel on which Roman Polanski‘s The Tenant (1976) was based, and appeared as Renfield in Werner Herzog‘s Nosferatu the Vampire (1979). Topor was also one of the three co-founders of the French theatrical “Panic movement,” together with Fernando Arrabal and Alejandro Jodorowsky.
- Fantastic Planet won the Special Jury Prize (the second most prestigious award) at Cannes in 1973.
- The movie was distributed in the United States by Roger Corman‘s New World Pictures, known mainly for their drive-in exploitation movies.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The twisted topography of Fantastic Planet features flying sawtooth-beaked anteaters, bat-winged flora straight out of Hieronymus Bosch’s worst nightmares, and glittering crystals which spontaneously grow and shatter with a whistle. Selecting a single souvenir snapshot from among these startling vistas would be an impossible task. Fortunately, Fantastic Planet‘s artists animate not only landscapes, but mindscapes as well, illustrating the giant blue Traag’s spiritual expeditions by showing their heads floating away in giant soap-bubbles and other trippy tropes. From among these, we’ll choose the moment when four Traags’ close their eyes and blank out while their bodies do impressions of lava lamps, morphing and flowing like heated wax, as the film’s indelible image (though we’d be unable to quarrel with anyone who chose to canonize almost any other moment of the film).
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Terry Gilliam-meets-Salvador Dalí-in-space animation combined with the acidic prog-rock soundtrack encourages (or even precipitates) altered states of viewing, but Fantastic Planet is more than just an astral trip. It’s a solid sci-fi parable set in a fully realized, incredibly detailed, and truly alien world that provokes more and more astonishment with each succeeding scene.
American trailer for Fantastic Planet
COMMENTS: Made between 1968 and 1973, at the height of the Acid Era, Fantastic Planet Continue reading 120. FANTASTIC PLANET [LA PLANETE SAUVAGE] (1973)
LIST CANDIDATE: BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (2012)
DIRECTED BY: Benh Zeitlin
FEATURING: Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry, Gina Montana, Lowell Landis, Levy Easterly
PLOT: A young girl named Hushpuppy lives in an isolated bayou community known as “The
Bathtub”, cut off from the rest of the world by levees. A massive storm destroys much of her home and she, her ailing father, and their friends must find a way to survive in a flooded, dying land.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Benh Zeitlin offers a unique fantasy that is grounded in the reality of global climate change and environmental disasters like Hurricane Katrina. There is little exposition, and our understanding of this world comes through a six-year-old girl, resulting in a dreamlike and perplexing story that might just be weird enough for the List.
COMMENTS: Filmed in an intimate style and focusing solely on the perspective of the defiant but loveable Hushpuppy, Beasts of the Southern Wild presents an alternate way of living, one that is in harmony with nature even in the challenging landscape of a flooded bayou. Hushpuppy and her father care for numerous animals, residing in two separate trailers made up of composite parts and mementos of her long-lost mother. Their town frequently holds large celebrations, honoring a lifestyle free from the constraints and responsibilities of civilization on the other side of the levee. Hushpuppy is taught that everything in the universe is connected to everything else, and she believes the great storm that destroys her home has unsettled the world’s harmony. It is her mission to restore balance, working together with the Bathtub’s remaining denizens as they escape on ramshackle boats, hoping the land they’ve loved for so long won’t betray them.
With the lines between reality and fantasy artfully blended and fascinating waterlogged landscapes, the film is as much a visual treat as it is an environmental parable. Everything is familiar and yet somehow unreal, with slight dystopian elements that open the film up to myriad possibilities. Zeitlin’s camera sticks closely to Hushpuppy, with intermittent cutaways to the rampaging beasts of the title: great, ancient aurochs awakened after centuries encased in ice, who may or may not be figments of her imagination. Many of the film’s ideas and themes are epic in scope, but smartly distilled into something more accessible through the eyes of a small child.
Wallis is exceptional in the lead role. We see and feel her experiences so completely, though her precocious nature makes us wonder just how much she understands. She perfectly embodies this resilient, fierce character who loves her standoffish father but longs for the kind of tender affection she imagines her mother would give. Her relationship with her father is complex; he is volatile and at times abusive, tormented by a heart disease he can’t fight and an unwillingness to show weakness. He wants to imbue Hushpuppy with independence and self-sufficiency, pushing her to age rapidly while remaining emotionally distant to shield himself. Hushpuppy recognizes what is happening but cannot accept it, believing part of her mission for the universe is saving her father from the wild beasts coming to claim him.
Beasts of the Southern Wild is beautiful, ambitious, and strange, with a strong emotional center that resonates long after the credits roll. It is advertised as a kind of apocalyptic adventure story but in truth it is more focused on relationships and themes of community and responsibility. The cinematography is intimate and dreamlike, with a clear vision that rarely relies on special effects to impress viewers. The script is steeped in social commentary but never resorts to preachiness, as Zeitlin wisely maintains focus on the wonderful little fireball that is Quvenzhané Wallis. It is a thought-provoking and heartfelt tale of survival with unique touches of ambiguity and fantasy that keep it compelling.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: