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IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SONATINE (1993)

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DIRECTED BY: Takeshi Kitano

FEATURING: Takeshi Kitano, Aya Kokumai, Tetsu Watanabe, Masanobu Katsumura

PLOT: The yakuza dispatches an enforcer to Okinawa to resolve a dispute between rival gangs, but the ensuing conflict threatens the future of his clan and his very life.Still from Sonatine (1993)COMMENTS: If you made a checklist of essential gangster-film elements, Sonatine would check a lot of boxes. Lone assassin, shootout in a bar, car bombing, cute moll faithfully standing by, thoughts of retirement balanced with the inescapability of the criminal lifestyle… they’re all here, and yet not one of them hits in the way you expect. Sonatine is unquestionably a crime film, particularly the Japanese-yakuza-chronicle variety, but it operates at a wildly different pace than its brethren.

At the time he made Sonatine, Takeshi Kitano was as close as Japan had to a “king of all media,” having found success in film, television, and even stand-up comedy. This project, however, found him ruminative and depressed. So it’s probably no wonder that his mob middleman, Murakawa, is similarly disenchanted with his life. Audiences were well-trained to expect an antihero with deep emotions, but very little would have prepared them for the taciturn, blank-faced hitman presented here.

When Murakawa complains that he lost three men on his last assignment, his protest—“I don’t like it”—feels like it would be a threat for retaliation coming from anyone else. But as Takeshi delivers it, it’s a resigned grump. Faced with other threats or inflection points, his response at every turn is quiet contemplation. Rivals have bombed his headquarters? Quiet contemplation. One of his underlings shot in the head right in front of him? Quiet contemplation. He witnesses an ugly attempted rape? He slaps the perpetrator, then quickly shoots the surprised assailant in the belly before quietly contemplating the victim. Murakawa is tired and devoid of hope, a character well-past finding bursts of violence to be alarming or invigorating. Takeshi does more to point up the essential hollowness and indignity of organized crime than 20 film scoldings could accomplish.

The desperate blankness of Murakawa brings brief moments of diversion and happiness into stark relief. As he and his underlings are stowed away at an Okinawan safehouse, he finds moments of pleasure that are surprising in their simplicity. A game with folded-paper sumo wrestlers is transformed into a live-action version, and Takeshi’s smile is captivating. He also has fun shooting fireworks and prankishly digging sandpits on the beach. But he knows all too well that death is close at hand; no pleasant distractions or pretty admirers can solve the fundamental malaise.

The climactic showdown is the ultimate proof of Takeshi’s concept: cornered on all sides, Murakawa plans and implements a bloody revenge on his foes. True to form, we see almost none of it, save for distant flashes of light and smoke and brief intercuts of bloody reprisals (set to the Tangerine Dream-esque score of legendary composer Joe Hisaishi). There’s no joy in it, no escape, no “one last showdown” to give him a brighter future, even if the plot conspired to provide him with one. Filmgoers expecting a gritty crime drama must have found this slow, grim-faced character study a strange proposition. But say this for Takeshi: his checklist might have been different than his audiences, but all his boxes are checked.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sonatine doesn’t encourage a straight reading, where logic dictates meaning and importance. When our normal responses are broken down, we relate more directly to the film… at a time when action movies typically hand us a canned experience, [Kitano’s] pictures carry a charge of originality.”–Patrick Z. McGavin, The Chicago Reader (contemporaneous)

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

Sonatine

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    Capsules

    CAPSULE: THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD (1993)

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    DIRECTED BY: François Girard

    FEATURING: Colm Feore

    PLOT: A patchwork of short vignettes explores the allure of the eccentric piano virtuoso.

    Still from thirty two short films about glenn gould (1993)

    COMMENTS: I discovered my all-time favorite recording, Glenn Gould’s complete “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” and François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould at about the same time. I can’t definitively remember which I encountered first: my guess would be Girard’s film, because it is such an effective advertisement for Gould’s genius that it seems likely to have inspired a purchase. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that I saw there was a film out about this marvelous pianist who accompanied his nimble fingers with ecstatic spontaneous humming,  breathing humanity into Bach’s precise baroque miniatures, and knew I had to learn more about this man. I do know that Gould’s “Clavier” was reissued in on CD in 1993, likely to coincide with this film, and I love to imagine I actually picked up that set from Tower Records and rented a VHS of Thirty Two Films from my local mom and pop video store on the same weekend in 1993 or 1994.

    The movie does what it says on the tin (although some might object to calling the closing credits a “short film.”) The sequences break down into four main categories: documentary-style interviews with friends and co-workers, dramatic reenactments of events in the pianist’s life, adaptations of Gould’s own works, and abstract experimental sketches. The interviews are illuminating, and give the film its hybrid documentary character. The dramatic scenes form the bulk of the movie. They follow in a roughly chronological format, but do not tell a continuing story: each is a standalone vignette. Memorable moments show Gould corralling his hotel chambermaid to listen to his hot-off-the-presses LP and the Gould mesmerized by contrapuntal conversations he hears in a diner. A performance of “String Quartet, Opus 1,” one of his few original compositions, an excerpt from the word collage “The Idea of North,” and a dramatization of a portion of his puckish essay “Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould About Glenn Gould” ground us in the legend’s actual creative output. The experimental shorts constitute the most intriguing category, although there are only five or six of them (considering how you count). They include closeups of Gould’s own CD318 piano in action, hammers striking the soundboard, illustrating the physical geometry of the sonic construction; a scene of Gould playing the piano in x-ray vision; and “Gould Meets McLaren,” a 1969 animated short (originally entitled “Spheres”) that shows globes popping into existence, dancing symmetrically across the screen, and dividing like eggs undergoing musical mitosis as Gould plays a Bach fugue.

    I once defined bopic as “a movie genre that’s not accurate enough to be documentary or interesting enough to be fiction.” One of the most formulaic and cliched film formats, the celebrity biography only really works when it is heavily fictionalized, as in Amadeus or Lisztomania (which, coincidentally, both involve classical musicians). Thirty Two Short Films shatters the mold of this generally insipid movie genre. There are enough talking head reminiscences to capture the spirit of the man, but not so many that it appears lazy. Girard solves the genre’s central problem—the fact that messy human lives rarely fit neatly into three act structures with unified themes—by ignoring narrative almost entirely. This collage portraiture method captures its subject more faithfully than a “realist” approach would. When we think back on people we know, we recall them as a collection of moments and characteristics; we don’t think of them as a contiguous life story. Glenn Gould was the piano prodigy and the hypochondriac and the man who went everywhere wrapped in a coat and gloves and scarf and the man who called up his friends late at night and talked their ears off and the virtuoso who developed a hatred for performing and the monster who put ketchup on his eggs and the genius and the possibly asexual hermit. He is at least thirty two separate stories, and this seemingly chaotic collection of vignettes creates a portrait of a real person far better than a tick-tock chronology or a forced storyline would. Plus, the music is, naturally, great, and what Gould himself likely would have wanted us to focus on; his passion shines through every segment, turning almost anyone into a classical music fan for at least 90 minutes. Glenn Gould is a strong contender for the greatest biopic ever made.

    Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould entered the Criterion Collection in June 2025 on 4K UHD and Blu-ray. Of course it is a new 4K director approved transfer. Of course it comes with a booklet (a nice fold out broadsheet with titles and scenes from the shorts on the other side) with an informative essay (from Michael Koresky.) Of course it has a director’s commentary (Girard is joined by co-writer Don McKellar). Other extras include a thirty minute conversation between Girard and fellow Canadian director Atom Egoyan, archival interviews with star Colm Feore and producer Niv Fichman, and a two part 1959 television portrait called “Glenn Gould: Off the Record” and “Glenn Gould: On the Record.”

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…because of the deadening uniformity of the genre, Girard’s film appears all the more miraculous in retrospect. From its rigorous and deliberately distancing structural gambit to its restless stylistic experimentations, Thirty Two Short Films proves that biopics needn’t color within the lines to effectively portray their subjects.”–Derek Smith, Slant (Blu-ray)

    [(This movie was nominated for review, without further comment, by “Anonymous.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

    Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]

    Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]
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    Capsules

    CAPSULE: PALMS (1993)

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    Ладони, AKA Ladoni

    DIRECTED BY: Artour Aristakisyan

    PLOT: A man tries to connect with his unborn son by seeing glimpses of him in the faces of people he meets in the slums of late-Soviet Moldova.

    Still from Palms (1993)

    COMMENTS: Palms is a pseudo-documentary black-and-white film shot single-handedly by Artour Aristakisyan over five years in Chisinau, Moldova. It is a haunting journey through faith, identity, and what it means to exist. When it was first screened in Moscow in the early 1990s, it blindsided everyone. Few people saw it, but those who did will never forget it. Even compared to other eccentric Russian films of Soviet parallel cinema or necrorealism, Palms is something else entirely. But unlike the ironic works of Yevgeny Yufit or Andrei I., Palms overflows with intense passion and austere ideology.

    The film is composed of ten short stories about real people—beggars, psychiatric patients, oddballs, cripples, and others—who behave like “Bodies without Organs” (a concept from philosopher Gilles Deleuze). So, who are these people? There’s an unwashed woman who has supposedly lain on the ground for 40 years, waiting for Jesus. A boy who swore not to move until the Kingdom of Heaven arrives. An old woman who clings to the severed head of an SS officer—her lover—a clear nod to both Salome and Judith. A grandfather who collects trash from the dead, with “the border of Israel running across his face.” A man named Srulik, who kisses a dove—an allusion to the Holy Spirit.

    Each kooky character, with their own tragic story, is woven into a cryptic narrative voiced by the filmmaker, who speaks as “the Father” addressing his “Unborn Son,” a child about to be aborted (an allusion to “the Logos” —Jesus before the Incarnation). The Father (voiced by Aristakisyan himself) is the only speaking character in the film. The central theme of his calm, solemn narration is a deep distrust of the material world, which is portrayed as inherently evil. Earth, in this worldview, is the creation of the Demiurge—a false god behind all societal systems. Although Aristakisyan claims he followed these drifters, outcasts, and madmen for five years and wrote down what they said, it’s clear that many of them are figments of his imagination.

    Though the film seems disconnected from any specific cinematic tradition, Palms shares thematic affinities with early Christian thought, including Pauline theology and the Bogomil heresy. “Father Aristakisyan” proclaims:

    “This is the System. It doesn’t have borders anymore. The System will find you wherever you go. So, kid, before it’s too late, focus on your salvation. You have your own light. Use it, and you’ll escape the System. For now, don’t get distracted by all this nonsense. No, don’t think about traveling abroad. After death, you’ll have plenty of time to travel. Your next baptism will be by fire. And then it’ll be too late to pick a side.”

    To the Paulicians, everything on Earth was the work of Sataniel—the Demiurge, the god of the Old Testament. Jesus Christ, in contrast, was the Good God, made of “subtle” matter. They viewed Christ as a kind of phantom, not truly human—an idea known as docetism, associated with Serapion of Antioch. Aristakisyan’s concept of the System aligns with this Paulician worldview: not merely a political structure, but something much larger. It’s not socialism or capitalism, or even human society as such. The System is the entire material realm—factories, asylums, homes, and everything else.

    Ironically, Aristakisyan (or his on-screen persona) even ridicules the vastness of outer space:

    “I’m worried about you, kid. The sky used to be a protective ceiling—obviously made of foil. It kept me safe from the cosmos and all the crap in it. When I lived under the sky, maybe some of my thoughts didn’t come true. Now, every thought becomes real. It’s like cancer spreading everywhere, but a special kind of cancer. It keeps the body alive so the corpse can keep generating energy.”

    In a nod to earlier critiques of modernity, the film hits the audience with an almost didactic intensity. Aristakisyan’s vision of the System is a heady mix of conspiracy theory and mystical philosophy, creating a spellbinding and unsettling atmosphere throughout. Thirty years later, the leading ideologist of Russian fascism, Alexander Dugin, would echo some of these themes: “The Outer Space exploration is godless and shameful. It’s a globalist fantasy preparing for the Antichrist. The Outer Space is an illusion. We need to stay faithful to Christ and the Russian land.”

    The film recalls the small, priestless sects that emerged in 18th-century Russia, some of which still survive in remote regions like the Evenk taiga or the Trans-Volga steppes. One such group, the Golbeshniki, believed society itself was the kingdom of Lucifer. They buried themselves in mysterious earthen dens, burned their children in dark rites, and danced naked in the moonlight.

    Despite its Paulician creed and somber tale, the film breathes of something far greater. The pallid and dappled hues that stain the frame, the wretched hovels of Chișinău, and the tranquil voice of the author together weave a spell most strange. A beauty not of this earth steals o’er the senses, ensnaring the soul in such wise that to look away becomes a sorrowful task indeed.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “[Palms’] approach certainly risks exploiting, aestheticising or exoticising human suffering. Instead, the film decontextualises its subjects without suggesting that the suffering it depicts is either unreal or picturesque. Rendering the historical as the trans-historical here functions to set extant reality into question.”–Hannah Proctor, ‘So-called waste’: Forms of Excess in Post-1960 Art, Film, and Literature’ (lecture)

    Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: JOHNNY AQUARIUS (1993)

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    Jancio Wodnik; AKA Johnnie the Aquarius, Johnny Waterman

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    DIRECTED BY: Jan Jakub Kolski

    FEATURING: Franciszek Pieczka, Grazyna Blecka-Kolska, Boguslaw Linda, Katarzyna Aleksandrowicz

    Still from Johnny aquarius

    PLOT: An old farmer leaves his young wife and sets forth on a journey through the countryside to fulfill a higher purpose; along the way, he discovers that he possesses healing abilities, and he abandons his family in favor of the cult springs that springs up around him.

    COMMENTS: You have to be a little forgiving of fables. They’re not to be taken literally, of course. If a character in a fable behaves badly, well, that’s the whole point; they will get their comeuppance, and we’ll all learn an important lesson. And if the story dabbles in fantasy, with magic or hints of the supernatural, that only magnifies the examination of humanity at the heart of the tale.

    So it was with all my might that I tried to keep from getting unreasonably mad at the hero of Jańcio Wodnik, who turns his back on his family in search of deeper meaning and is soon corrupted by arrogance and obsequious adulation. After all, when we first meet poor Jańcio, he’s experiencing a spiritual crisis. His young wife has not managed to get pregnant, despite the fact that she has hung upside down 11 separate times in order to get his seed to the right spot. He’s beginning to lose his trust in gravity in other ways, too, having watched water flowing up a ladder to fill a bird’s nest. The only thing left to do is go out on a pilgrimage, bearing on his back nothing but a washing tub to keep his feet clean, which is a bit of an obsession for him. His devoted wife Weronka kindly lets him go, singing a song of sadness but understanding as he departs. If she’s not angry with him, what right have I to be?

    It is curious how quickly Jańcio breaks bad. When he first meets Stygma, a roving motorcyclist who picks up extra cash here and there by piercing his hands with nails and showing up in local towns as the crucified Christ, he seems unimpressed with the blasphemy. But he also suspects that there’s something special in his foot washing, and when he offers to help the sick and the lame, the shocking thing isn’t that his ablutions work, or that Stygma will look for ways to capitalize on these gifts, or even that a small community of worshipers will descend upon him with gifts of money, sex, and adulation. No, what takes your breath away is how easily Jańcio succumbs to pride and hubris. He returns to his old home like a Roman emperor, telling his now-pregnant wife how utterly unimportant she is, and bestowing upon her the dubious gift of a car (which is carried on a litter by a phalanx of strongmen). It’s a striking sight, witnessing the simple man rendered cruel and haughty by his power. Surely his fall will be a sight to behold. 

    The turn comes quickly, as his son is born with a tail and impervious to his ministrations. Indeed, all of his cures are quickly undone, and he is so dumbstruck by his folly that he sits motionless outside his house, unperturbed by the snow or the leaves or even the birds that nest upon his head. Years pass before a vision awakens him out of his stupor and returns him to face his wife and child. And the moral of this tale? Well, that’s perhaps the most unexpected twist of all, because it turns out that the cause of all this folly lies in a vignette that appears at the start of the film and is referenced once again before roaring to life in the final scenes: a sickly horse has been sent away from its farm to die alone, and in a truly strange bit of backfilling, Jańcio angrily confronts the horse’s owner (whom we have never seen before) to tell him that this bit of cruelty is single-handedly responsible for all of the misfortune that has followed. Jańcio Wodnik sets itself up to be a fable about gullibility or the dangers of taking on false holiness, and then out of nowhere hits you with Chekhov’s Horse.

    Jańcio Wodnik is a light parable, charming but ultimately with no weight to it. A fable doesn’t have to be heavy-handed, but it feels like it should leave you wiser than you were before it began. Weronka does teach us to be steadfast and true, and Jańcio warns us against getting too big for your britches. But the lesson of “don’t turn out your sick horse or an old man will abandon his family and believe himself to be anointed by God” doesn’t exactly give Aesop a run for his money.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…a slight but unusual charmer sustained by fine perfs and an inventive script… Recurrent joy of the pic is how all the crazy goings-on are treated as absolutely normal by the peasants.” – Derek Elley, Variety

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

    Johnny Aquarius

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    Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, Shorts

    THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE FOOL AND THE FLYING SHIP (1991) / MOUSE SOUP (1993)

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    The tradition of celebrities narrating children’s literature is as old as recorded media itself; the first thing Thomas Edison ever recorded on the phonograph was his own recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Ever since then, plopping their children down in front of a famous person reading a book has been tried-and-true escape for parents. It’s a win for everyone: the kids get literature, the parents get distraction, and the celebrities receive a low-pressure gig with major PR upside. Not for nothing has SAG-AFTRA provided a helpful archive of famous storytellers, and if you needed another reason to hope for a speedy resolution to the ongoing strike (#sagaftrastrong #wgastrong), then it’s to save the world from recitations of kidlit by narrators with a lesser pedigree like, say, this guy.

    Today, we present two such star-powered endeavors, each of which reflect the character of their narrators, but which tap into weirdness through their design as much as through the stories themselves. 

    This is particularly true of “The Fool and the Flying Ship,” which features Robin Williams doing his best impression of an immigrant Jewish Eastern European grandfather unspooling an old folktale about a young schlub who sets out to win the hand of a princess by fulfilling a number of impossible conditions set forth by the King. The only thing the ridiculous young man has going for him is his innate friendliness, but that proves a decisive advantage, as he assembles a retinue of similarly odd companions who are unusually well-suited to meeting the King’s challenges. The film is a product of Rabbit Ears Entertainment, a storytelling outfit responsible for numerous memorable celebrity narrations (foremost among them Jack Nicholson’s peerless rendering of some of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just-So Stories”), but “Flying Ship” stands out as a notably odd entry. Williams’ raucous recounting of the tale frequently feels improvised, with snarky asides and deadpan diversions (perhaps best-exemplified by the casual dismissal of the Fool’s two older brothers), and the rollicking score by The Klezmer Conservatory Band mirrors his energy. The story itself is happily unweighted, with any perceived morals secondary to the silliness of the Fool’s adventures.

    Still from The Fool and the Flying Ship

    There’s a case to be made, though, that Williams is simply following the lead of the wild illustrations that visualize the tale. Not a true animation, the movie consists of still images of Henrik Drescher’s artwork, similar to the snapshots of book pages found on “Reading Rainbow.” Drescher’s drawings are often ugly, sometimes even deranged, but filled with such joyful anarchic spirit that director Craig Rogers doesn’t need to do much more than add a little Ken Burns-effect here and there. The illustrations, set to Williams’ energetic performance, do the lion’s Continue reading THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE FOOL AND THE FLYING SHIP (1991) / MOUSE SOUP (1993) →