Canonically Weird (The List)

103. BLOOD TEA AND RED STRING (2006)

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“The doll character had been working its way into my drawings since 1990.  A lot of these things evolved from drawings.  The drawing is coming from the subconscious, really, so you don’t really know why, or say ‘why am I drawing it’?”–Christiane Cegavske on the DVD commentary to Blood Tea and Red String

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DIRECTED BY: Christiane Cegavske

FEATURING: With one minor exception, all characters are silent animated puppets

PLOT:  A group of aristocratic white mice commission rodentlike creatures with beaks (called the “Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak”) to create a doll for them, but once the puppet is fashioned the Creatures refuse to give it up; instead, they revere it and sew an egg they find floating in a creek inside its torso.  The mice steal the doll and take it to their lair, so the Creatures set out on a journey to recover it.  Along the way they meet a frog sorcerer and a spider with a human face, and everything changes when the egg inside the doll hatches.

Still from Blood Tea and Red String (2006)

BACKGROUND:

  • The film took 13 years to make, with Cegavske animating perhaps 10 seconds a day.  Many of the models and effects used show up in the director’s 1992 short Blood and Sunflowers.
  • Cegavske intends for Blood Tea and Red String to be part of a trilogy, and in 2011 she announced the second part of the project, titled Seed in the Sand.  She estimates this installment will take five years to complete.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Blood Tea is bizarre throughout, and many will be attracted to the psychedelic splashiness of the sequence where the Oak Dwellers eat hallucinogenic berries and see morphing pink and green leaf patterns overlaid on the courtyard garden.  For my money, though, things are at the weirdest when we climb inside the dark mouse hole and watch the well-dressed vermin pour bloody tea onto the lips of the lifeless doll while their skull-headed pet raven looks on.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A dialogue-free stop-motion animated fable done in the style of Jan Svankmajer, but with a darkly feminine spin, Blood Tea and Red String gently folds surrealism into its fairy tale structure to create a weirdly compelling world. It’s an inverted Alice, told from the perspective of mutant rodents, depraved white mice, and mystical frogs.


Original trailer for Blood Tea and Red String

COMMENTS:  Artist Christiane Cegavske had been living with the haunting creatures of Blood Continue reading 103. BLOOD TEA AND RED STRING (2006) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: FILM SOCIALISME (2010)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Jean-Luc Godard

FEATURING: Marine Battaggia, Catherine Tanvier, Christian Sinniger, Gulliver Hecq, Eye Haidara, Élisabeth Vitali

PLOT: Snippets of scenes involving passengers on a cruise ship are followed by a long segment exploring a rural French family who run a gas station; it’s topped off with impressionistic travelogues to Egypt, Palestine, and other locales.

Still from Film Socialisme (2010)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s weird—by way of being random and impenetrable—but it’s also boring.  Really boring.  Had Jean-Luc Godard’s name not been attached, this movie would remain happily unseen by all but a handful of unlucky film festival attendees.

COMMENTS: Jean-Luc Godard has been telling French magazines that “cinema is dead” (though he would say “le cinéma est mort” and translate it as “film    dead.”)  Film Socialisme is the work of an auteur who truly believes that sentiment: it’s a dispassionate, bloodless dissection of moving images.  It offers us actors but no characters, situations but no drama, incidents but no story, ideas but no argument, and challenges but no rewards.  Deliberately obtuse, Film Socialisme sets out to frustrate: the first thing English speakers will notice is that Godard chooses not to fully translate the French dialogue, opting instead to tell the story through what he calls “Navajo English.”  Large portions of the French dialogue are left untranslated, and when the viewer does see subtitles he reads only snatches like “watch    notell    time” and “itshim    wariswar.”  Sometimes the language will switch from French to English or German or Russian, sometimes in the middle of a conversation; one presumes that this provides brief  opportunities for Francophones to enjoy “Navajo French.”  Structurally, Film Socialisme is divided into three chapters.  The first, titled “Des choses comme ça,” takes place aboard a cruise liner and explores fragments of stories from various travelers that don’t appear to add up to anything: a woman is trying to learn to speak cat by watching kitties on her laptop, a couple have a conversation about the Allied landing in North Africa while ignoring an apparently drunk woman Continue reading CAPSULE: FILM SOCIALISME (2010) →

Top 10 Lists

366WEIRDMOVIES TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIE LIST(S): THE SECOND PASS

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We’ve now certified over 100 of an eventual 366 movies here, and it’s time to step back, take stock, and make a provisional list of the “Best of the Weird”—and a list of the “Weirdest of the Weird.”  We first took a stab at this list about two years ago, and my how things have changed since then (at least, at the bottom).  We’ve added new movies, and reshuffled our ratings for some of the others, and—well, you can read for yourself.

Recognizing that “weirdest” and “best” aren’t always the same thing, we’ve actually created two top ten lists here: one for the best movies that fall into the weird genre (these are the ones to start your timid friends off with), and one for the absolute weirdest movies we’ve seen (these are the ones to put on at a party when you want to clear the room).  Because we’re giving you two top ten lists for the price of one, you’re actually getting 20 recommended weird movies.  Well, actually 19, since one movie appears on both lists, but who’s counting?  Oh, wait, we are, that’s the entire point…

Feel free to agree with my choices, disagree, or hurl hurtful epithets at me in the comments.  But do remember that this list only covers movies we’ve already reviewed.  Your favorite movie we omitted may be coming down the line, and may make this list the next time we formulate it (in another two years or so).

With that said, let’s get to it!

# 10 Best Weird Movie: Kwaidan (1964). “Although on the surface it’s just a collection of bare-bones ghost stories, in telling these tales director Kobayashi wisely jettisons reality in favor of a stylized, expressionistic, visually poetic aesthetic that gently detaches the viewer from everyday life and floats him into an ancient spirit world that seems simultaneously to have never and always existed.”

#10 Weirdest Movie: House [Hausu] (1977). “Rife with images of flying heads, murderous painos, laughing watermelons, an invisible wind machine, and a truly demonic kitty, the film’s surrealist atmosphere and ever-shifting styles are as hilarious as they are inscrutable.  There is no way to get a handle on Hausu—the viewer is completely at the mercy of Obayashi’s bizarre whims.”

#9 Best Weird Movie: The Wicker Man (1973): “Hardy and Shaffer create an atmosphere like no other; it’s an encounter of civilized man with strange, primeval beliefs…. The viewer himself undergoes a dread confrontation with Old Gods who are at the same time familiar and terrifyingly strange.”

Continue reading 366WEIRDMOVIES TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIE LIST(S): THE SECOND PASS →

Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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Now that we’ve certified over 100 movies weird, we’ll be kicking off next week by taking a second pass at our semi-official “top 10 weird movies” list.  I know this will be a rehash for you long-time 366 veterans, but it’s a useful service for new visitors who want a best-of-the-best primer to start off with; and, you would not believe how much Googlers love top 10 lists!  Don’t worry, though, we’ll still be adding new reviews to the database, including our take on Jean-Luc Goddard’s divisive latest movie essay, Film Socialisme (2010), and, from the reader-suggested review queue, we’ll break down the bizarre stop-motion fairy tale Blood Tea and Red String (2006).

We’re getting more and more search engine traffic—over 1000 unique queries most days.  This is making it harder, not easier, to find a Weirdest Search Terms of the Week, as we’re forced to scan the server logs with a quicker eye to keep the project from eating up our little bit of free time.  Nonetheless, we’ll continue to point out the strange noises we do find amidst the massive signal.  First, we’re proud (though a bit confused) that we continue to hold a top 5 ranking for the term “saxyshat.”  Also, we are now going to be on the lookout for “an alien movie that made some womens boobs grow” (personally, if I can find it, I think it would be worth a shot to show this one to my girlfriend).  We’re less enthused about the “movie where pregnant goat moves to woman,” and “monsther minds perverted wit tens ladys porno movies” is just outside our area of expertise. Our weirdest search term of the week, however, goes to ‘illuminati face “skinning” children.’  We knew the Illuminati worked in mysterious ways, but for God’s sake, can’t they leave the children out of it?

Here’s the massive, ever-growing reader-suggested review queue: Blood Tea and Red Strings (next week!); Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; The Bride of Frank; La Grande Bouffe; Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Even Dwarves Started Small;  “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117″; Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →

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