Tag Archives: 2002

Capsules

CAPSULE: SECRETARY (2002)

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The second installment in the “Pete’s Perverted Pix” series.

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , ,

Plot: A tightly wound, obsessive, repressed lawyer meets a meek, neurotic typist who suffers from low self esteem and a compulsion to cut herself.

Still from Secretary (2002)

 

COMMENTS: Let it never be said that 366 Weird Movies turns its back on plain old love stories. We treasure lopsided romances such as Harold and Maude, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It goes to show, you can still have a weird movie even if it’s just a boy-meets-girl story. This time around we have more of a “boy beats girl” scenario, and that becomes our weird angle. The only reason  not to recommend this movie for the Apocrypha is because everything weird about it is done even weirder in other movies. Secretary (2002) stands alone as a truly frank examination of the phenomenon of kink relationships, the one which even the self-identifying “leather community” points to as the  movie that gets BDSM relationships closest to right. That, in itself, is an incredible rarity—but it should be less rare.

It’s not like we get into the floggers and spreader bars right away. It’s a slow-burn progress, starting with Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) being released from a mental institution. She attempts to re-adjust to normal life, hampered by a dysfunctional family including an overpowering mother and by her own neuroses that manifest in a compulsion to secretly cut and stab herself. Lee is mousy and anxious, seeming like she’d shatter at a harsh word, and usually far too intimidated to express herself. She applies for a job in the title profession, at the law office of one E. Edward Grey (James Spader, eight years before the Fifty Shades of Grey books came out). Grey is a demanding and controlling boss, so much so that he apparently needs a custom-made sign to advertise for help. Lee gets the job, since Grey assures her that it’s dull work and Lee responds that she sincerely likes dull work.

Soon their dynamic spins off-center from standard employer-employee. Grey is a stickler for detail who takes special delight in catching every typo in Lee’s work, amassing a collection of red markers for highlighting flaws and lining them up on his desk in OCD fashion. One day while rummaging around the office he discovers Lee’s secret box of self-harm toys and confronts her about it. When he paternally orders her never to engage in such behavior again, the two start to show some magnetism. She is more drawn to him with every new demand he makes and every scolding he gives her, while he is spellbound by her unquestioning obedience to his every whim. It’s obvious that neither of these people ever expected to encounter anyone quite like the other. Finally the tension breaks when Grey gambles on smacking Lee on the rear while she hunches over a desk proofreading, and Lee—instead of running off to file a sexual harassment lawsuit—is totally cool with it. Once the lid is off this boiling pot of kinky sexual tension, the two enter an awkward dance, escalating games of domination and submission, and alternately retreating in fright from their mutually acknowledged dark sides.

Some of their play is point-blank role-playing, such as when he dictates that she take her dinner in tiny portions, while more involved games have her prancing about the office in restrictive bondage gear with a spreader bar holding her arms out like a cross, still handling her secretarial work. Even sillier scenes flash by in montage, most notably Lee on a desk on her hands and knees saddled like a pony. Eventually Grey suffers a classic case of “top drop,” the point where every out-of-the-closet sadist asks themselves for the first time “what kinda sick monster enjoys this?” Even though he tries to break things off, Lee is single-minded. She is deaf to the pleas of her vanilla boyfriend on the sidelines, a sweetheart of a guy who nevertheless just can’t handle Lee with the firm hand she seeks. Will our star-crossed lovers ever be able to relax and enjoy their attraction without judging it?

The amazing thing about Secretary is the poise and balance it maintains while deconstructing a taboo relationship between two little-understood personalities. This could easily have been gross-out schlock, seedy porn, or silly camp, but the characters themselves are treated with dignity, and the relationship is presented as a positive thing for them. The humor is gentle and cherishes the human, flaws and all. As two ostracized, repressed weirdos both attracted and repelled by this energy between them, Gyllenhaal and Spader are downright cute and fun to watch. Finally, we viewers have to accept that, while this relationship wouldn’t work for most of us, it works for these two, and more power to them. As Woody Allen observed in Annie Hall, “we need the eggs.” Secretary may not be the weirdest depiction of the leather lover in the wild, but it is likely to be the most respectful and heart-warming one for many decades yet.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 ““Secretary” approaches the tricky subject of sadomasochism with a stealthy tread, avoiding the dangers of making it either too offensive, or too funny. Because S/M involves postures that are absorbing for the participants but absurd to the onlooker, we tend to giggle at the wrong times. Here is a film where we giggle at the right times.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

Secretary

Secretary

  • Lee Holloway is a smart, quirky woman in her twenties who returns to her hometown in Florida after a brief stay in a mental hospital. In search of relief from herself and her oppressive childhood environment, she starts to date a nerdy friend from high school and takes a job as a secretary in a local law firm, soon developing an obsessive crush on her older boss, Mr Grey. Through their increasing

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: NITWIT (2002)

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Weirdest!

Nitwit is currently available to watch for free on YouTube.

DIRECTED BY: Xan Price

FEATURING: Agnes Ausborn, Daniel Brantley, Wilder Selzer, Philly Abe

PLOT: A couple licks pictures of horses; the woman grows an unusually large blue proboscis. A wig screams and moans, while a baby cries out for a mommy; a man digs up a furry monster named Tongue and agrees to be its mommy and buy it a red dress. Microscopic creatures scheme to implant a baby in the woman so that the ensuing explosive birth will produce an anus; rollicking games of “Hot Damn” and “Damn Slow” are played.

Still from Nitwit (2002)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Nitwit checks all the boxes. There are monsters and manipulative babies. The characters are cartoonish and never make any choice you expect. The acting is wildly over-the-top. The filming is amateurish but confident. And the authorial voice is all there on the screen, neither judgmental nor protective. Nitwit is bracingly odd and unashamed. It plays by no rules, and doesn’t even pretend to make sense.

COMMENTS:  Having spent a couple years working my way through the 366 Weird Movies Reader Queue, I’ve been impressed with the perceptiveness of our contributors; even when I didn’t find a movie to be all that weird, I’ve always understood where the suggestion came from, the glimmer of surprise and wonderment that undergirded the suggestion. But when it comes to Nitwit, my immediate reaction was an unwavering, “Oh, yeah, this is the stuff.” The opening vignette, in which a boy and a girl (they are adults chronologically, but emotionally they are definitely children) become so enraptured by a visual encyclopedia of horses that they attempt to taste the pictures, followed by chomping on a piece of steel wool, is but a mere amuse bouche for the full menu of eye-widening surprise this film inspires. There’s something refreshing about a movie that is unmistakably, indisputably weird, and Nitwit is cool, invigorating plunge.

Nitwit plays like a sketch film. There are only a handful of characters, who shift from high to low status as needed, and their stories interweave without ever really connecting. Sometimes these sketches take the form of little dramas, like the way the fresh-faced Minoltuh and her bewigged mama Womma trade off taking care of each other, the sickly one becoming childish and helpless while the healthier of the pair criticizes the patient for being difficult. (When it’s Minoltuh’s turn to be the patient, she grows an enormous azure nose that resembles nothing less than a coiled duct pipe. They do finally manage to cut the appendage off, but when Womma demands to know why the enormous blue schnozz is still in the house, Minoltuh lamely replies, “I was just keeping it, you know… for the memories.”) Other times, the characters engage in random silliness, such as the game Minoltuh and Hootus play in which they climb over each other while lasciviously-but-asexually chanting “hot damn!” to each other. In one of my favorite absurd moments, Hootus meets up with a dog, whom the man says he would love to see dig a hole. Smash cut to both of them, the man and the dog, gleefully pawing at the dirt like the mindless animals they are. 

There are a couple threads that flirt with plot, including Hootus’ encounter with a Davy Crockett cap with dangling tentacles. He brings the strange spider-like creature to his bomb-shelter hovel and nails it to the wall, at which point the beast makes a simple request: it will be the man’s mommy if the man will be its mommy. In the most reasonable statement anyone in this film makes, the man admits that he doesn’t know very much about being a mommy, but the furry thing is undeterred. “Just mash your lips together and spit.” The bargain is made, with the caveat that he can’t call the monster “mommy,” but must instead use its given name, “Tongue.” This is one of the most fully articulated relationships in the entire movie, and it serves as a stark counterpoint to the glowing parasites who are conspiring to put a baby in Minoltuh’s belly in order to force an explosion that will create the anus she currently lacks. Their intent seesaws between charity and cruelty, and it’s only on that emotional spectrum that a character desperately gasping “I’m farting” could be a poignant moment.

Nitwit is an amateurish production, shot on harsh video with novice actors gamely doing every crazy thing Price asks of them in locations like abandoned alleys, empty fields, and somebody’s apartment. But there’s nothing that a gaudier, more professional approach would bring to the material that’s not already here. The film is collected insanity, stuck together like pinned butterflies on display, and the raw presentation only intensifies the surprise of the thing. Nitwit isn’t smart, but it’s content to be exactly what it is, and that’s not dumb.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A doggedly eccentric whatsit of a movie, Xan Price’s debut feature after 10 years of underground shorts stamps its own distinctive weirdness on ideas influenced by ‘Eraserhead’ and early John Waters.” – Dennis Harvey, Variety (festival screening)

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

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DAY OF THE WACKO (2002)

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 Dzien swira

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Marek Koterski

FEATURING: Marek Kondrat

PLOT: An easily irritated Polish teacher with OCD spends a long day in increasingly surreal, comic situations.

Still from Day of the Wacko (2002)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: This cult Polish comedy is a long shot for consideration among the weirdest of all time, but it does offer numerous imaginary sequences, a uniquely cynical perspective, and a scene where the main character complains, “where are all these weird people coming from?”

COMMENTS: Day of the Wacko’s Adas Miauczynski is a comic creation who transcends cultural boundaries. Perpetually annoyed, he strides through Warsaw like a Polish Basil Fawlty, arguing with noisy neighbors, defecating on their lawns, and sending a crippled lapdog flying over a hedge with a swift kick. He’s no role model, but his take-no-guff attitude is perversely appealing; his misbehavior allows the audience to live out a fantasy of taking out their frustrations on annoying urbanites. But while Adas’ antics are vicariously satisfying, the film never loses sight of how utterly miserable the man really is. The first twenty minutes or so show him engaged in his obsessive morning rituals, which involve him washing up and making coffee, always using multiples of seven. He’s the kind of sad sack who, when he finally meets a dream lover in a fantasy sequence, immediately begins worrying about how he’ll be able to get rid of her. And his final monologue as night falls over his apartment block is utterly despairing, tonally inconsistent with the foregoing comedy, and yet somehow not at all out-of-character.

The movie is essentially plotless, showing Adas mucking his way through various social disappointments over the course of a long day. After completing his persnickety ablutions and raging at his noisy neighbors, he gets peeved and walks out of the poetry class he’s teaching; visits his mother, ex-wife, and son, all of whom disappoint him to various degrees; putters about attempting to complete errands; tries to take an afternoon nap just as a wandering minstrel decides to stroll by with an accordion; and decides to take a trip to the beach, where he falls asleep and dreams about death. These adventures are peppered throughout with little fantasy sequences and skits: snippets of the serene-but-constantly-interrupted poem Adas tries vainly to compose, a TV ad for dildos. The satirical material aimed at millennial Polish audiences may go over your head: for example, a scene where various factions tug at a medieval flag, which rips apart and bleeds. The film occasionally looks like it was shot on video, and the fantasy sequences lack visual fireworks, but the imagery isn’t really the thing here: it’s all about Kondrat’s peeved performance, which keeps you watching to see what outrage he will suffer, or commit, next.

Marek Kondrat plays the role of Adas Miauczynski in two other Koterski films, Dom wariatów (1985) and Wszyscy jestesmy Chrystusam (2006). Cezary Pazura played the same character (although named “Adam” instead of “Adas”) in Nothing Funny (1995) and Ajlawju (1999), and at least one other actor has portrayed Miauczynski at a different stage in life. Like Mick Travis in ‘s movies, there is little narrative or stylistic continuity between the various Miauczynskis; Wszyscy jestesmy Chrystusam, for example, seems to be an earnest drama about alcoholism, and in another, the character is described as a film director rather than a teacher. Other than Nothing Funny and Wacko, none of the Miauczynski movies appear to have been translated into English. Wacko is the most universally praised.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A nonstop screwball screed against the multitude of perceived indignities in contempo Poland… sheer chutzpah alone should propel this unique item to brave fests and perhaps a bit of business.”–Eddie Cockrell, Variety (contemporaneous)

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

Dzien Swira (Day of the Wacko)

Dzien Swira (Day of the Wacko)
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: TEKNOLUST (2002)

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DIRECTED BY: Lynn Hershman Leeson

FEATURING: Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Davies, , Karen Black

PLOT: Dr. Rosetta Stone creates three “self-replicating automatons” in her image, who generally stay hidden away in her apartment except when one goes out to harvest the Y-chromosomes they require to survive; her creations’ growing dissatisfaction with their confinement threaten this arrangement.

Still from Teknolust (2002)

COMMENTS: Years before Zoom culture, Teknolust latched onto the power of screens to bring communication to those trapped in their rooms. Rosetta’s isolated, phosphor color-coded creations – unsurprisingly named Ruby, Marinne, and Olive – speak to her through large flatscreens mounted in each of their matching bedrooms, and she peers back down at them and their silly antics through her own screen. The catch is that, rather than a phone or a tablet, Rosetta’s viewscreen is the disguised window panel of a  microwave oven. It’s not exactly Star Trek, but then Teknolust is only interested in enough science fiction to get things going. After that, it’s devil-may-care.

Consider that title, for example, which suggests a neon-accented erotic thriller on early-90s Cinemax. Teknolust is a much lighter, frothier confection. Once we get past the opening minutes, in which one of the automatons uses her sexual wiles in a steamy modern-decor bathroom to extract valuable “nourishment” from an unsuspecting male, the movie settles down into something closer to a romantic comedy. In fact, it’s remarkably evocative of 1987’s Making Mr. Right, which also features an asocial scientist who constructs an empathic android in his own image.

Even if we focus on the “lust” part, the strongest emotions held by Rosetta’s three creations (it is never clear if they are actual robots, clones, or computer-generated beings) are not their sex drives, but their compulsion to see the world beyond their window. It’s surprising that femme fatale Ruby jettisons all of her powers of seduction (which she gleaned from watching three public domain films) for Davies’ hapless copyboy, but given her lack of a life otherwise, it’s only logical that she latches on to his dweeby innocence. (His mother’s surprise that this angular, statuesque vision would take up with her scruffy, underachieving son is worth a chuckle.)

The roles of Rosetta and her creations point to Teknolust‘s gravest sin: wasting the bottomless reservoir of weirdness that is Tilda Swinton. Casting her to play four separate roles – three of which are constantly interacting – seems like a masterstroke, but the four women are given precious little opportunity to assert themselves beyond surface-level characteristics. Rosetta is your classic flustered nerdgirl, right down to the terrible perm and oversized glasses. Marinne is a petulant schoolgirl, Olive is eager to please, and Ruby is mainly the one who gets to go outside. Swinton can’t figure out anything else to do with them, which suggests these underdeveloped parts might have worked better with someone a little closer to the comedy genre they seem to be stereotyping, like Sandra Bullock or Reese Witherspoon.

A number of oddball characters populate Teknolust, who all turn out to be little more than their affectations. The script develops bit parts, like the doctor who speaks exclusively in an ASMR whisper, just as much as prominent figures like Karen Black’s cellar-voiced private detective Dirty Dick. There are interesting depths to be plumbed in such characters, but we never delve deeper than their surface oddness. They probably wouldn’t hold Leeson’s interest anyway, as she repeatedly demonstrates by crosscutting between storylines with almost no regard for timing or narrative flow. She’s always got a new thing she wants to show off – little hints in the story about an entire family being wiped out by a virus, or the implications of a disease that manifests a barcode on the victim’s forehead – and she’s in an awful hurry to get you there.

Like a sugar cube, Teknolust is pleasantly sweet in the moment and gone in a flash. There are some intriguing ideas at work here, but don’t get too attached to them. It’s got just enough in it to hold the attention of someone staring at the video screen on their microwave, waiting for the tea to steep.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This sweetly surreal futuristic comedy definitely marches to the beat of its own bizarre rhythm!” – Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall

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

Teknolust

Teknolust
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