Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

Leave a comment

It’s been a busy week here at 366 Weird Movies as we relocated our world headquarters from one undisclosed location to another one down the road. Even though our offices are now stacked high with mountains of unopened boxes containing Guy Maddin DVDs, unsold Jack Nance Eraserhead wigs, and surplus cow organs coated in fine layers of Cheetos dust (sounds odd, until you realize that our lab technicians need them for validating copyright issues), we’ve still managed to put together a fine slate of exemplary weird content for you to peruse in the coming week. First, we noted that the studio we have our biggest love/hate crush on— —has just dumped (a most appropriate verb in this case) a load of their back catalog onto YouTube for free viewing. We’ll provide a short guide to navigating this wealth of cinematic offal for your viewing pleasure. Next up, guest columnist Jesse Miksic (of the impressive pan-media blog Benefit of the Doubt) brings us a critical essay on the 1985 cult fantasy Return to Oz. We didn’t forget that July 4 marks the 236th anniversary (has it really been that long?) of the United States declaring independence from ol’ King George III. What better way to celebrate Independence Day than with a review of Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), the revolutionary declaration from the mother of domestic independent cinema and of the American avant-garde, the great Maya Deren?

Due to what our web host terms “unscheduled maintenance,” last Pipeline we neglected to bring you our installment of Weirdest Search Terms of the Week, but promised you a double shot this week. True to our word, here’s two weeks worth of the strangest search terms that clogged up our server logs the past fortnight.

  • a girl opens a box and becomes wierd movies
  • weirdness i am weird
  • anti drugs dream world camping wake wings jail or bs movie
  • movie where kids where salves of senor (note to the guy who’s been repeatedly searching for this term for the past two months: we nominated you, you can stop now)
  • weird man eating fanny aliens movie
  • robot boy reals nakeds sexys bigs boobs

Our dual winners for the past two weeks are “hollywood romantic movies bigboobs movies two much bad boys boobs” (you had us at Hollywood romantic big boobs movies) and “satans’satanic whacky chess game ride” (weird due to redundancy: what kind of wacky chess game ride would Satan have other than a satanic one?) Thanks to all the horny schizophrenic non-English speaking Googlers who participated in the contest, and see you next week!

One more thing: here’s how that ridiculously-long-and-ever-growing reader suggested review queue stands: “Meshes of the Afternoon” (next week!); “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117″; The Hour-glass Sanatorium [Saanatorium pod klepsidra] (out of print in Region 1, but we’ll keep looking); Liquid Sky (re-review);  Fantastic Planet; “Twin Peaks” (TV series); Society; May; Little Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORZION FOR THE WEEK OF 6/29/2012

Leave a comment

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):

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012): A six-year old girl named Hushpuppy contracts a fever, which ushers in the apocalypse and a plague of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. Benh Zeitlin’s debut feature is the arthouse festival hit of the season, and will start its theatrical run in New York and Los Angeles this week, appearing in major cities throughout the country throughout July. Beasts of the Southern Wild official site.

NEW ON DVD:

Numero Deux (1975): Sexually explicit postmodern portrait of a dissolving marriage from . The action plays out on two video monitors, which are juxtaposed and superimposed in different ways throughout this cinematic experiment. Buy Numero Deux.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011): A group of policemen and a suspect patrol the Anatolian countryside one long night searching for a victim’s corpse.  It looks like an arthouse police procedural but critics hints at something deeper: NPR’s Ella Taylor describes it as “an existential fairy tale set in a nocturnal netherworld…” This year’s Palme D’or winner (the last two Cannes champions have been Certified Weird—will the trend continue?) Buy Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.

Sound of Noise (2010): A music hating cop tries to silence a band of avant-garde percussionists who are planning to stage a performance art symphony in the public spaces of Stockholm in this quirky Swedish satire. It’s won a few awards on the festival circuit and is often described as “absurd.” Buy Sound of Noise.

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

Tommy (1975): Read our capsule review. Who better to direct a psychedelic rock opera about the deaf, dumb and blind kid who sure plays a mean pinball then the always tasteful and restrained Ken Russell? Watch Tommy 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.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

GLASS LIPS (2007)

Leave a comment

Lech Majewski’s Glass Lips (2007) debuted as an instillation piece at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s original title was Blood of a Poet, paying homage to Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film. Surreal, kaleidoscopic, and predominantly silent, Glass Lips feels like a series of interrelated shorts literally forming a “motion picture.”

Sebastien (Patrick Czajka) is the poet in question in this painterly film, which begins with his birth atop a towering rock. The sound of the infant wailing, his umbilical cord dangling, is the only one we hear from his lips. This image later connects to a waterlogged dream of his mother (Joanna Litwin) giving birth to a bloodied rock.

Maternal inertia is the dominant pigment used in painting Sebastien as the scourged poet. One striking image calls to mind early photographs of artist Andres Serrano (when Serrano actually counted). The sensual, nude mother, clothed only in pathos, glides by row after row of slaughtered hogs. The Serrano image, so striking and, for some reason, long unavailable, showed the image of Christ (a young, blonde woman, dressed in a short, black nightclub dress) before the swine (the hog’s bloodied torso hanging from a hook in the ceiling). Paradoxically, iconoclastic and liturgical metaphors repetitively intertwine in Majewski’s parochial bedlam.

The suffering mother is forced to witness her only son’s humiliation by a severe, unyielding father (Grzegorz Przybyl). The mother seeks to both nurture and be nurtured. She is not milked and can no longer can provide milk. Therefore, she baptizes her naked body, as Sebastien witnesses. For the father, mother is not fully human. She is merely a hole for his convenience. She is, at first, replaced by a blow-up doll.

Eventually, the death of his wife resonates and the father peels away layer after layer, to discover his own folly. But, neither is Sebastien guiltless. His romanticized nihilism might be something akin to dysfunctional stained glass windows that simultaneously mythologize, canonize and eroticize his projected experiences.

Alpo as the Eucharist; erotic playtime between Ma and Pa as Sebastien, bound and adorned in first communion dress, stands in for the host in this poetic reenactment of transubstantiation.

Still from Glass Lips (2007)The homoerotic frescoes of St. Sebastien are re-imaged with a Marian sheen. Mother repeatedly replaces son in martyrdom. Rows of the maternal tree, reduced to an orifice by exploring patriarchal hands.

There is also resurrection. Nothing is permanent, possible because the martyr also co-created his passion, painted his pathos, and unraveled the rope which ties him to the cliches and traditions of the doomed poet.

Majewski himself composed the impressive score, creating  a lush language to supplant impotent words. Glass Lips not only inspires the viewer to labor in his or her voyeurism, but the film also demands some sweat from those who write about it.

Canonically Weird (The List)

118. THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE [LES TRIPLETTES DE BELLEVILLE] (2003)

8 Comments

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

AKA Belleville Rendez-vous (UK theatrical release)

Must See

“Don’t want to end my days in Acapulco
Stiff as a board, dancing the tango.
I’d love to be twisted, utterly twisted,
Twisted like a triplet from Belleville.

Swinging Belleville rendez-vous,
Marathon dancing doop dee doo.
Voodoo can can, balais taboo,
Au Belleville swinging rendez-vous…”
–English lyrics from “The Triplets of Belleville”

DIRECTED BY: Sylvain Chomet

FEATURING: There are voice actors, but the film is nearly silent

PLOT: An indefatigable old woman tries to rescue her cyclist grandson from the clutches of the mafia, with the help of her train-hating dog and a long-forgotten, frog-eating trio of Depression-era superstar singing sisters.

Still from The Triplets of Belleville

BACKGROUND:

  • Nominated for two Academy Awards, including Best Animated Feature (the first PG-13-rated movie ever nominated in the category, it lost to Finding Nemo) and Best Song (which fell victim to that year’s Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King juggernaut).
  • Writer-director Chomet began his career as a comic strip artist. His first animated film, The Old Lady and the Pigeons, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short. The stars of that film make a cameo appearance here.
  • Composer Benoit Charest’s score actually utilizes some of the fanciful instruments that appear onscreen, such as newspaper, refrigerator shelves, and a canister vacuum cleaner.
  • Although mostly animated traditionally, Chomet used 3-D computer animation for machines, such as cars and bicycles, which he argued would be too boring to animate properly by hand.
  • Gypsy-jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt (an obvious inspiration for the music who has an animated cameo in the film’s first scene) recorded a song titled “Belleville” in 1942. The Triplets themselves suggest the three Andrews Sisters, whose popularity peaked in the 1940s.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: For a film built on memorable imagery, picking one is difficult choice. A tiny pedal boat chasing an enormous ship across a storm-tossed ocean? The explosive geyser that creates its own rain of frogs, or the gourmet meal that results? The city of Belleville, all enormous buildings and a fat Statue of Liberty hoisting a burger? A strong argument for each of them, but I’ll go with the monochromatic dreams of Bruno the dog, who imagines a dreamworld railroad in which he is towed by his master around the rim of a gargantuan food dish.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The film delicately blends a thoroughly unpredictable storyline, an artistic style at once beautiful and grotesque, and a fierce sentimental streak. Any one of these elements alone could have been off-putting, but Chomet pulls off the delicate balancing act, managing to capture the heartwarming ugliness of a cartoon by Charles Addams or Ronald Searle. As a result, truly bizarre moments arouse a sense of wonder rather than repulsion.


Original trailer from The Triplets of Belleville

COMMENTS: That plot description up there? Provides absolutely no insight into the twists and Continue reading 118. THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE [LES TRIPLETTES DE BELLEVILLE] (2003) →

Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!