Tag Archives: 1988

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BIG TIME (1988)

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DIRECTED BY: Chris Blum

FEATURING: Tom Waits

PLOT: Tom Waits guides the viewer through a surreal concert experience.

Still from Big Time (1988)

COMMENTS: Geometric backdrops, sweat, a hook-light, and pocketsful of confetti litter the screen as a strange presence raspily sings through songs from a time out of time. Tom is a dust bowl mourner, a piano-side crooner, a cabaret djinni, and a gravel-hammer blues man. He swaps guises at the drop of a hat, instantaneously—because Tom waits for no man. A dreamy New Years Eve alternately thwacks in your ears through a pipe rig percussion solo, or floats gently like the bubbles popping up from an on-stage bathtub. All sunglasses, cigarettes, and watches, Waits in ’88 is an amalgam of decades, fashions, and sentiments, and must be seen to be believed.

Directed by Chris Blum (a man so niche he doesn’t have a Wikipedia page), Big Time kicks off with an alarm clock summoning Tom Waits to sleep. While Waits serenely tosses about on an onstage and rooftop bed, Waits greets us to the show, greasy-haired and hustling time-pieces, running up his arm and set to the trendy times of Paris, Tokyo, Ann Arbor, and Sudan. On stage with his band, Waits shucks to his own quirky performance of his undefinable songs. He charms the audience with stories and quips. “I feel like I can look right into those black little hearts of yours,” he suggests. Later he kicks off a tune with, “The question I get asked the most is, ‘Is it possible to get pregnant without intercourse?’ To answer that, we have to go allll the way back to the Civil War…” Waits operates his own spotlight, and even mans the ticket booth outside—occasionally receiving telephone calls from an unknown agent.

In case anyone here is unfamiliar with the phenomenon, Big Time is the ideal primer for Tom Waits. This “concert film” not only covers a broad range of his musical stylings, but also offers a window into the mind of a man who, by all rights, probably can’t exist. Imagine if the piano bar at the Black Lodge was infiltrated by a radiant imp, or a flare of genteel id rained down over Brecht’s favorite boozer. While many good films inspire you to sit and think, this one makes you want to leap up and create something—anything—so I urge you to watch Big Time, and then smash yourself into that creative project that’s been teasing the corners of your mind.

Right now.

Big Time has long been out-of-print on home video, but is currently available on scattered subscription services, including Paramount+ and Amazon Prime. For whatever reason, it’s still not available for purchase or rental anywhere else.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…elements of vaudeville, burlesque and soulful balladry are orchestrated by what is evidently, for all the downbeat, offbeat imagery, a fantastically energetic imagination.”–Time Out

(This movie was nominated for review by Jake H. McConnell, who argued “from performing on stage and telling odd stories to standing on a roof with an umbrella on fire this is a odd film.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE WIZARD OF SPEED AND TIME (1988)

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DIRECTED BY: Mike Jittlov

FEATURING: Mike Jittlov, Richard Kaye, Paige Moore

PLOT: Aspiring filmmaker Mike Jittlov makes a wondrous, delightful short film that catches the eye of Hollywood producers; they enlist him to make a feature containing the same formula of special effects magic and raucous whimsy, but sinister forces conspire to prevent Jittlov from realizing his dream.

Still from Wizard of Speed and Time

COMMENTS: Moviemaking is a cutthroat business, you know. Maybe you got a hint of that from a film like The Player. Or possibly  Barton Fink. Could have been The Big Picture. Or perhaps State and Main. Come to think of it, it might’ve been Living in Oblivion. Or Bowfinger or Hollywood Shuffle or My Life’s In Turnaround or In the Soup or …And God Spoke or any number of films where Hollywood takes a look in the mirror to catch a glimpse of the laborious and fraught process of trying to get a movie made. When filmmakers are instructed to write what they know, there are plenty who do exactly that.

Well, you can add Jittlov’s sole feature to that list, with the twist that what he knows is how to make lively low-budget special effects. In 1979, he created a short film exploiting his editing and stop-motion photography skills. As these things often do, the short became Jittlov’s calling card, a golden ticket into the world of Hollywood filmmaking. That turns out to be the starting point for this feature-length exploration of his journey into the heart of the moviemaking beast. And when it comes to “writing what you know,” Jittlow keeps his focus squarely on what he’s good at: special effects. The result is… almost exactly what you’d expect.

On the one hand, anyone who manages to assemble a feature film, particularly without the aid of a well-heeled studio, has undertaken a major achievement. On the other hand, Jittlov’s production is laden with the self-awareness of this achievement, and practically demands to be recognized for its own bravery and pluckiness. To call it self-indulgent is a ground-shaking level of understatement. Self-indulgence is the point; the message seems to be, “Everybody deserves a piece of this genius.”

For a zany comedy, The Wizard of Speed and Time is notably angry. One subplot of the film is Jittlov’s ongoing battle against moviemaking’s gatekeepers. Studio indifference, greedy vendors, apathetic accountants, zealous cops, guild oppressiveness (boy howdy, does this movie hate unions), gawking tourists, and general grownup shallowness are just a few of the forces lined up against the filmmaker’s pure and simple goal to make jolly little movies. Atlas Shrugged wishes its heroes and villains were drawn as starkly as this.

So this movie stands as Jittlov’s demonstration of what the Magic Store could be like if there wasn’t so much red tape and cynicism in the business. That being the case, let’s hear it for the bad guys, because The Wizard of Space and Time is exhausting. Determined to pile on the charm, it never lets up. Every jokey moment is slammed up against another jokey moment, with irony-laden captions, a music score taken directly from a theme park, undercranked footage, goofy sound effects, and so much post-production audio looping to guide you along the way. It’s so breathlessly insistent, it makes Airplane! look like a film.

The Wizard of Speed and Time is undeniably weird (or, as the movie itself jokes, “WHOLLY ODD”), but it’s so invested in its zany iconoclasm that it’s impossible to enjoy on any terms if you’re not Mike Jittlov. The climax of the film features a complete re-creation of the original short. This is a smart move; it reminds the audience that there is something genuinely charming here. What Jittlov does with little money and a whole lot of imagination is quite remarkable. And probably best appreciated in a small dose.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Created by cult animator and weirdo Mike Jittlov, this 1988 hella-low-budget film follows a talented but jobless special effects wizard as he navigates Hollywood… Jittlov’s enthusiastic DIY production earned a generation of cult fans, who allege he slipped over 1000 subliminal messages into the film. Spooky.”–Chase Burns, The Stranger

(This movie was nominated for review by Marko. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: DAMNATION (1988)

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DIRECTED BY: Béla Tarr

FEATURING: Székely B. Miklós, Vali Kerekes, Gyula Pauer

PLOT: Karrer pines for a married nightclub singer and passes along a smuggling opportunity to her husband.

COMMENTS: The subdued tragedy, utter pointlessness, and active ennui that oozes from this beautifully shot film is probably Damnation‘s goal. From its opening shot of coal bins slowly traveling along a suspended wire track to its closing shot of a mound of earth littered with barbed-wire-looking roots, there’s a great heap of scant going on, with the vivaciousness provided only by the (comparatively) seductive and jaunty film score. It is arguable there is beauty to be found within Damnation; it is inarguable that the viewer is provided countless minutes to keep an eye out for it.

Karrer (Székely B. Miklós) is introduced by his favorite past-time: silently observing full bins of coal traveling off in one direction and empty bins traveling in the opposite. He stares out his window; then we stare at him as he stares into a mirror, shaving. He has an awkward encounter with a woman through a chained gap in a door; she claims to have had enough of him, he claims he should be let inside. A jolly bartender (Gyula Pauer, the only ray of light in the overcast cast) chats amiably with Karrer about the slow destruction of body and soul before getting sidetracked from his chuckling existentialism in order to address the actual topic at hand: a parcel needs picking up, and the retriever’s fee is “20%”. (“20% of what?”, some may ask—it matters as much as Hitchcock’s suitcase full of incandescent distraction.) The woman from behind the door is a nightclub singer. Her husband has had enough of Karrer. So what’s the sporting thing to do? Offer the singer’s husband the job and the reward.

The camerawork somehow sludges into fascinating. Under the direction of Gábor Medvigy, the lens practically skulks its way through the film, slinking languidly left to right across sets as (in)action takes place in the fore-, mid-, or back-ground. It idles over unlikely figures, such as the bar’s accordionist noodling through an ambiguous melody; or the waiter snoozing on a chair; or a film extra sitting in absolute stillness amidst rhythmically pacing dancers. This circle of revelers—if one could be so generous as to call them that—is a metaphor, encapsulating Tarr’s obsessive message of cyclical tedium and its inevitable, meaningless disintegration.

Despite my intentions, I appear to be suggesting that something profound occurs in Damnation. Perhaps there is, but the question as to whether this is a story worth telling remains. Toward the end, something of an expectable twist limps from the narrative, and on the heels of that subdued reveal comes what may be the film’s most famous sequence: Karrer’s psychological descent into caninity. But Tarr should take note, as his bartender puts it to protagonist, that “[y]our problem is you see things from your perspective.” A biting societal commentary loses its edge if left to dull for two monotonous hours.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“. Tarr’s fascination with their ennui is profound, and while his statement about them isn’t lacking in visual power and philosophical heft, it’s also questionable whether it’s the strongest statement an artist of his caliber can make.” -Jeremiah Kipp, Slant Magazine

Capsules

CAPSULE: DREAM DEMON (1988)

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DIRECTED BY: Harley Cokeliss (as Harley Cokliss)

FEATURING: Jemma Redgrave, Kathleen Wilhoite, Mark Greenstreet, Timothy Spall, Jimmy Nail

PLOT: Diana is about to get married to a Falklands War hero, but starts suffering nightmares as the date of her nuptials approaches.

Still from Dream Demon (1988)

COMMENTS: Leading lady Jemma Redgrave is the niece of cinema’s heavy-hitting grand dame, Vanessa Redgrave. Nicolas Cage is the nephew of cinema’s heavy-hitting director Francis Ford Coppola. I bring up this semi-coincidence to allow me to raise the following point: a movie as overblown as Dream Demon would have done much better with an actor as overblown as Nicolas Cage. As it stands, Jemma Redgrave provides a capable performance as bride-to-be Diana, but her energy level is far too wan—perhaps I might say too “English”—for the blood-splattered, creepy-staircase-laden, hard-to-follow nightmare on screen. Redgrave hovers at a “proper” Four, when Dream Demon demands nothing short of a Cage-ian Eleven.

Had Harley Cokeliss (who co-wrote as well as directed) pursued the story he should have, that kind of quiet nuance might have been appropriate. He falls into the trap that ensnares horror writers and directors all too often, however: wanting to graft ill-thought-out scares onto dramas that could have been more interesting in their own right. Dream Demon, in its real world portions, touches on a lot of issues worth exploring: the bilious nature of the British press corps in the 1980s, the strange flag-waving jingoism of the Falklands War, the culture clash of Los Angeles and London society, the manifestations of childhood guilt, and the fears of human sexuality as expressed by the subconscious.

Instead, there are dreams within dreams (within dreams, and so on). These dreams, as the title suggests, are invariably nightmares—and Dream Demon opens with a real doozie. During a full-on, hyper-Anglican wedding—replete with far-flung family and officer chummies of the groom—Diana gets cold feet at the last possible moment and refuses to say “I do” at the vicar’s prompt. Furious with embarrassment, the groom (Mark Greenstreet, doing the best impression of David Bowie‘s ’80s hair-cut I’ve ever seen) slaps her; she slaps him back, and his head explodes. The blood-spattered bride walks back down the aisle and outside into the crowd of paparazzi. Alas, anyone who’s anyone knows that this opening is not to be–and we see the bride-to-be awakening in the arms of her fiancé who showers her with the standard “Everything’s all right!” platitudes.

So Dream Demon skirts around full-bore madness while also ignoring the many issues it raises with its colorful cast of characters. (I wish to take a moment for a special shout-out to Timothy Spall; not for his performance within Diana’s dreams, but as the tremendous skeezeball photojournalist who at one point inquires, “[Your fiancé] murdered a lot of Argentinians. Does that turn you on?”) But overall, Dream Demon is an untidy mess of missed opportunities. If the craziness had been laid on as thick as the spoooooky sound cues, it might have been something.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sort of a serious attempt to deliver a new twist on the Nightmare on Elm Street formula with a dose of Hellraiser-style surrealism in its second half, this is a film that requires a bit of work to fully embrace but delivers plenty of atmosphere and some quirky little chills that nicely evoke the subtle but unsettling nature of very bad dreams.” -Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo-Digital [Blu-ray]

Capsules

CAPSULE: EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY (1988)

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DIRECTED BY: Julien Temple

FEATURING: , Jeff Goldblum, Damon Wayons, Jim Carrey, Charles Rocket

PLOT: Valerie discovers her fiancé is cheating on her, but finds her “Mister Right” when a trio of furry aliens crash land in her pool.

Still fromEarth Girls Are Easy ()

COMMENTS: Seeing as I’m on probation for recommending Apocrypha status for movie musicals, it was a dangerous decision to dive into Julien Temple’s cult classic, Earth Girls Are Easy. While I had my typical “so, this is weird…” reaction that I do with every musical I see, at least this time the environment wasn’t as off-kilter as a magnified downtown London; it was merely off kilter in a “Dear-God-1980s-Hollywood” kind of way. Temple’s film–which is really the brainchild of Julie Brown, the go-to Valley Girl  at that time–runs longer than it should with plenty of awkward moments of stupidity. That said, once it finds its footing it hovers within a stone’s throw of recommendable.

Earth Girls Are Easy does not begin with said Earth girls, but with the aliens who discover them. Mac (Jeff Goldblum), Wiploc (Jim Carrey), and Zeebo (Damon Wayons) are a crew of brightly colored, fur-covered aliens on a mission of… well, it’s not clarified, and it doesn’t matter. While Mac is in stasis, Wiploc and Zeebo are puttering around the ship looking for a transmission signal, preferably one transmitting an image of hot women. When one of them prompts the navigation system to go haywire, they crash on a nearby planet, right into Valerie’s pool. Because she’s recovering from a spat with her now-ex-fiancé (lovely ’80s-slimy Charles Rocket), and because this is a musical, the plot becomes an engine for getting her together with one of the extraterrestrials. Dance numbers, big hair, and lite satire ensue.

A number of factors scream, “This movie merits no further thought.” It’s an ’80s movie about the ’80s, so its humor is obvious; it’s a musical, so its plot is of tertiary concern; and it’s directed by a guy with a music video career, so though the film’s look is lively, it breaks no new ground. However, the presence of Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis lifts Earth Girls up from dreck to the lofty designation of “fun.” Goldblum, in particular, gives Mac a nuance, and at times a pathos, that the subject material doesn’t remotely deserve. During a night on the town, after the aliens have absorbed countless television soundbites, Mac inquires of Valerie, “Are we limp and hard to handle?”, giving this query from an advertisement a sensitivity that well explains why he’s one of his generation’s greatest actors.

Geena Davis, who co-starred opposite Goldblum in Cronenberg’s haunting version of The Fly, rekindles that tragic romance in a bubblegum setting. Golblum and Davis are cute together, and have a real connection; though this is really the only thing to recommend about Earth Girls, it gives it enough gravity to be worthwhile.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Great, wacky-sexy title. Attractive, amiable cast, with Davis, Goldblum and pop singer-satirist Julie Brown. Promising concept, with three space creatures—very humanoid, very male, very horny—crash-landing in the swimming pool of a gorgeous woman who has just thrown her philandering boyfriend out of the house. So why is this movie about as much fun as a bowl of cold Spaghetti-O’s?” –People (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Paula. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)