“Kasio Kristmas” features a man in a Conehead mask frantically dancing to a series of Christmas tracks recorded entirely using Casio instruments. Enjoy.
For songs, loops, and merchandise visit KasioKristmas.com.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 12/23/2011
A 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.
Spielberg and his minions have driven all traces of weirdness from theaters this week, under the guise of “Christmas spirit.” We weirdophiles will have to cower in our hovels this week, regroup, and return to the cinemas in 2012.
IN “DEVELOPMENT“:
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story: Tells the shocking true story of “Weird” Al Yankovic, from his days as an accordion-loving outcast to his multi-platinum “Eat It,” as his career magically survives alcoholism and sex with Madonna. Our favorite line from the trailer? “I’m the weird one!” Reminder to readers: on this site, we occasionally include notices for films that don’t actually exist.
NEW ON DVD:
Columbiana (2011): A young woman (Zoe Saldana) grows up to be an assassin after witnessing her parents’ murder. Thinking it was an ordinary action movie, we passed over this one when it played theaters (even though it came from mildly weird director Luc Besson); we just now noticed the Amazon editorial review says it contains “a dash of oddball surrealism.” We prefer a lot more than a dash, but in a slow week we’ll take what we can get. Buy Colombiana
Love Exposure (2008): Shion Sono’s 4 hour (!) comedy epic involves Roman Catholicism, candid panty photos, and a butt-kicking, man-hating schoolgirl. Thanks to Olive Films, who really earn our respect lately by releasing this and Skidoo in the same calendar year. Buy Love Exposure
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Columbiana (2011): See description in DVD above. Includes an UltraViolet digital download. Buy Colombiana [Blu-ray]
FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:
Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973): Gaseous vapors turn an embryo into an eight-foot sheep monster. Distributor Something Weird calls it “one of the weirdest, wackiest, oddballest monster movies ever made” (and they should know). Watch Godmonster of Indian Flats 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.
CLAUS GUTH: HUMANIZING MESSIAH (2010)
There are endlessly fascinating artistic directors working in the art of opera. Then, there are great artists. Claus Guth is a great artist. In his 2009 staging of Handel’s “Messiah,” Guth calls to mind the Protestant theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who believed that the Church had become inadequate in speaking about God. Bonhoeffer was embarrassed by the Church’s failure to convey the shocking, liberating, revolutionary power of the divine ideal. To attain that, Bonhoeffer once symbolically suggested a one hundred year moratorium on the name (and word) God. Perhaps then, the name and word could be attained.
Guth’s “Messiah” inhabits Bonhoeffer’s realm with a strikingly prophetic voice. We are, unwittingly or not, starved for such a challenging and provocative voice. Guth’s productions have never been less than impressive. Fortunately, many of these have been filmed and are available on DVD: Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (2006), the Mozart/Czernowin Zaide (2006), Richard Strauss’ Ariadne Auf Naxos (2006), Franz Schubert’s Fierrabras (2007), Mozart’s Don Giovanni (2008) and 2011’s Cosi fan tutti (Guth’s most uneven production and an odd fit in his Da Ponte trilogy ). From Guth’s body of work on film, it is clear why he is such an in-demand artist.
Still, I was not prepared for his version of Handel’s perennial favorite, Messiah (2010). Guth’s staging has been called agnostic, and that might be an apt description according to the traditional meaning (as opposed to contemporary interpretation) of the word. Simultaneously, this may also be the most “Christian” filmed religious narrative since Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture (1991). Guth’s Messiah makes an overly familiar yuletide narrative startling again. This production was staged for the 250th anniversary of George Frideric Handel’s death. I believe Handel would have approved.
The history of the composition is well known. Handel was in ill health, destitute, and on the verge on being sent to debtor’s prison when he received a commission from librettist Charles Jennens to write an oratorio on Christ’ Nativity, Passion, Resurrection and Ascension. The libretto was a pastiche, borrowing from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayers. Handel composed it within three weeks and insisted on its being performed in secular Continue reading CLAUS GUTH: HUMANIZING MESSIAH (2010)
101. SKIDOO (1968)
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“It is the gassiest, grooviest, swingingest, trippiest movie you’ve ever seen… Anybody that don’t like that, daddy, don’t like chicken on Sunday.”–Sammy Davis, Jr. recommending Skidoo to the younger generation in the film’s trailer
DIRECTED BY: Otto Preminger
FEATURING: Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Groucho Marx, Alexandra Hay, John Phillip Law, Austin Pendleton, Frankie Avalon, Arnold Stang, Frank Gorshin, Burgess Meredith, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney, Peter Lawford, George Raft, Richard Kiel, Harry Nilsson
PLOT: Tony is a retired mobster living in the suburbs with wife Flo and daughter Darlene, who has an unwelcome (to Tony) interest in dating hippies. A crime kingpin known as “God” pressures the ex-hit man into doing one last job—going undercover in Alcatraz to assassinate a stool pigeon. When Tony accidentally ingests LSD in the pen, his entire worldview is flipped and he decides to ditch the hit and break out of the clink; meanwhile, Flo and Darlene have taken it upon themselves to track down God with the help of a band of flower children.
BACKGROUND:
- Director Otto Preminger had been nominated as Best Director for two Academy Awards (for Laura and The Cardinal). Known for pushing the envelope on taboo topics, Preminger was instrumental in breaking the back of the Hollywood Production Code by releasing The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), which dealt with the then-forbidden topic of heroin addiction, without MPAA approval.
- Skidoo was a giant flop sandwiched between two other Preminger flops, Hurry Sundown (1967) and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970). Despite its notorious reputation, Skidoo was part of a series of failed films and was not solely responsible for Preminger’s fall from grace.
- Two years after Skidoo, screenwriter Doran William Cannon penned the exceedingly weird Brewster McCloud (1970).
- This was Groucho Marx’s final film. He dropped LSD (with writer Paul Krassner) in preparation for the role.
- Preminger also took LSD, supposedly under the guidance of none other than Timothy Leary (who promoted the film in the trailer). Preminger had originally been slated to make an anti-acid movie, but had decided that he should experience the drug before condemning it. After his trip he decided to make Skidoo instead.
- Frank Gorshin, Burgess Meredith, and Cesar Romero, who all have cameo bits in Skidoo, had also appeared together in the same movie just two years before: as the Riddler, the Penguin, and the Joker in Batman: The Movie (1966). Director Otto Preminger had a rare acting role as Mr. Freeze in two episodes of the “Batman” TV show in 1966.
- After flopping in 1968, Skidoo became virtually a lost film—not because it was suppressed or the prints were unavailable, but because no one seemed interested in exhibiting it. A Turner Classic Movies screening in 2008 was the first opportunity most people had to view the movie since its release.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Jackie Gleason’s acid trip is one for the ages, particularly when he sees Groucho Marx’s cigar-puffing head affixed atop a rotating wood screw. His response to the apparition, naturally, is to say “Oh no, I’m not playing your game… go ahead, drop,” at which point the screwball vision slips down the prison sink drain.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Like an onion soaked in high-grade acid, Skidoo contains layers upon layers of weirdness. In 1968 it was not that far out for a movie to take us on a swirly psychedelic journey to check out that purple haze all in our brains. What was freaky was for establishment icons Otto Preminger, Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing and Groucho Marx to serve as our tour guides. Add to that the fact that the film is a notorious flop full of painfully strained attempts at comedy, jaw-dropping left-field musical numbers, scattershot satire, and Harry Nilsson singing the closing credits, and you have a singular pro-drug oddity that mines rare camp.
Screenwriter Larry Karaszewski discussing the trailer for Skidoo (1968)
COMMENTS: Watching Otto Preminger’s Skidoo is like listening to a cover version of the Doors’ Continue reading 101. SKIDOO (1968)
CAPSULE: GAINSBOURG: A HEROIC LIFE (2010)
Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque)
DIRECTED BY: Joann Sfar
FEATURING: Eric Elmosnino, Lucy Gordon, Laetitia Casta, Anna Mouglalis, Doug Jones
PLOT: Recounts the life of French singer Serge Gainsbourg, from his formative days as a young Jewish boy in occupied France through his relationships with Juliette Gréco, Brigitte Bardot, and Jane Birkin—and also his relationship with his spindly, scary puppet alter-ego.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: A brave biopic that’s true to Serge Gainsbourg’s rebel spirit, but in terms of weirdness, it only goes about halfway.
COMMENTS: Growing up as a precocious Jewish boy in Nazi occupied France, young Lucien Ginsburg (later to reinvent himself as Serge Gainsbourg) amuses himself by drawing a flipbook fable. A pianist (like the boy’s father) is constantly rejected because of his “ugly mug.” The despised musician perversely embraces his detractors’ insults and wills his head to swell larger and larger until it finally bursts and the suavely deformed “Professor Flipus” emerges. The Flipus character (also referred to as “my mug”) shows up later in life as Gainsbourg’s artistic daemon, a spirit materialized as a puppet with glowing eyes and grotesque, oversized features (the sharp-nosed homunculus looks like a debonair version of the Brainiac). Flipus’ parents would seem to be Gainsbourg’s Jewish identity—his puppet ancestor is a six-legged, moon-faced anti-Semitic propaganda poster who comes down off a wall to dance with Lucien in the alleyways of Paris—and his insecurity about his own “ugly mug.” Flipus spurs the budding composer to switch from painting to songwriting by “accidentally” burning up Lucien’s canvases, prods him to seduce various glamorous actresses, and grows jealous and vengeful at the appearance of a healthier muse. Surreal moments are scattered randomly throughout the movie (an inexplicable cat butler, four costumed men who trade breakfast for a song, and visual puns referencing Serge’s albums “Melody Nelson” and ” Tête de Chou”), but it’s Flipus who provides most of Gainsbourg‘s underlying weird texture, and lifts the proceedings above the ordinary. As an introduction for those uninitiated in Gainsbourg’s discography and biography, the movie isn’t wholly successful. If you don’t already know who Boris Vian, Django Reinhardt and France Gall are, you may become confused when they suddenly show up or are referenced. Gainsbourg’s scandalous music, which begins as witty, ribald chanson and develops through the 1960s into lounge-rock psychedelia, is sampled in fast-moving snippets that make it hard to see the lines of development. The movie also suffers from the usual drawback of biographical movies: real life produces great characters, but not necessarily great stories (which is why fiction supplanted biography, after all). Life stories tend to turn into a series of vignettes; fortunately for us, Gainsbourg’s vignettes involve him bedding Juliette Gréco, Brigitte Bardot, and Jane Birkin. A trio of actresses—Anna Mouglalis, Laetitia Casta, and Lucy Gordon—simmer as Gainsbourg’s succession of sexy muses. Gordon’s role is most important, but slinky Casta leaves the biggest impression as a spot-on Bardot, first seen walking a dog in thigh-high black leather boots and a leopardskin miniskirt, and later memorably dancing with a sheer bedsheet tantalizingly wrapped around her voluptuous frame. Constantly shrouded in his own personal nicotine cloud (since the MPAA has started handing out “R” ratings for tobacco use, the chain-smoking Gainsbourg should probably earn a XXX rating), Eric Elmosnino holds his own against his eye-candy co-stars, conveying awkwardness and suavity at the same time. Unfortunately, historical accuracy requires him to metamorphose from a charming rake into a drunken lout, so our sympathies for the protagonist sag at the end: not the take-home note you really want in a “heroic” portrait. Still, given the limitations imposed by real life, Gainsbourg is as a successfully hallucinatory hagiography that will please fans, and make newcomers at least curious to sample Serge’s suave discography.
Director Joann Sfar adapted this, his first film, from his own graphic novel. To his dismay, producers insisted that early versions of the trailer contain no shots of Professor Flipus (though variations have been released since that do show the creation, without hinting at his prominence). One source reports that Serge’s daughter, weird favorite Charlotte Gainsbourg, was at one time considered for the role of her father. On a sad note, model/actress Lucy Gordon, who played a convincing Jane Birkin, committed suicide in 2009 before the film’s release.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: