Tag Archives: 2003

Capsules

CAPSULE: BIG FISH (2003)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , , , , Robert Guillaume, , , Loudon Wainwright III,

PLOT: William Bloom (Crudup) returns to his Alabama hometown when he receives news that his father, Edward (Finney), is dying. William has never gotten along with his dad, a spinner of tale tales, but is it possible that any of his stories are true?

Still from Big Fish (2003)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This is Tim Burton for people who don’t like Tim Burton. It’s classic Oscar bait: a sentimental story of a dysfunctional father-son relationship with the Burtonesque elements—werewolves, witches, conjoined twins—coming in on the margins. As it is, the film is quite enjoyable, but not one of Burton’s best and definitely not one of his strangest—so it’s definitely not weird enough for the List.

COMMENTS: : Big Fish is Tim Burton lite, which doesn’t mean it’s not entertaining. On the surface this is a story of father-son reconciliation, and since Burton had lost both of his parents in the few years before Big Fish, the story must have had extra resonance for him. But this is still a Tim Burton film, with moving trees , a giant and mermaids, among other contrivances, and it definitely dips into any number of fantastical realms. Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney play Edward at 30ish and 65ish, respectively, and Alison Lohman (whatever happened to her?) and Jessica Lange are the younger and older versions of Edward’s wife, Sandra. All four are convincing, as is Crudup in the thankless role of Edward’s perpetually grouchy son, Will. However, future Oscar winner Marion Cotillard makes little impression as William’s wife. Philippe Rousellot’s cinematography is digitally manipulated, which would be a hallmark of almost every Burton film after this, and everything looks so beautiful that it’s not difficult to be sincerely moved by this film’s third act—the first time that Burton attempted to tug the heartstrings since Edward Scissorhands. He certainly hasn’t tried anything similar since. Of course, this is exactly the kind of manipulation that had naysayers complaining that Burton had sold out, and that Big Fish  was too bland and impersonal. Manipulative it may be, but the film feels far more Burton-esque than the lamentable Planet of the Apes or the the dispiriting Alice in Wonderland. Big Fish may be the rare Burton film that can please both his acolytes and detractors equally.

Sharp-eyed viewers will note a very young Miley Cyrus as a little girl in a Brigadoon-like town that Edward visits, and sharp-eared listeners will notice that, except for Cyrus, there isn’t one authentic Southern accent in this Alabama-set tale. Lange still sounds like she’s doing Blanche Dubois. It all adds to the (intentional?) unreality of this charming tall tale.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There are quirks aplenty in Big Fish, but spirited performances from a talented cast, led by a standout Finney as the slippery-fish raconteur, help domesticate the wall-to-wall weirdness.”–Megan Lehmann, The New York Post (contemporaneous)

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

Capsules

CAPSULE: LOVE ME IF YOU DARE (2003)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Yann Samuell

FEATURING:  Guillaume Canet, , Thibault Verhaeghe, Joséphine Lebas-Joly

PLOT: A boy and girl carry on their childhood contest of dares into adulthood, when the game escalates into life-wrecking catastrophes.

Still from Love Me If You Dare (2003)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s not weird enough to make the List, although it is offbeat enough to earn a mild recommendation—especially as non-treacly alt-Valentine’s Day viewing.

COMMENTS: When Love Me If You Dare came out in 2003, most critics pegged it as a flawed and unpleasant attempt to cash in on Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain‘s international success. With distance, Love Me If You Dare doesn’t seem derivative so much as part of an ongoing tradition of whimsical French romantic fantasies. Writer/director Yann Samuell’s twist on the formula is to cut the sweetness, not with the usual melancholy bitter, but with sharper flavors of black comedy that many found too pungent. While is indeed the main stylistic touchstone here—both the French and American distributors were clearly hoping Marion Cotillard would melt international hearts the way had two years earlier—Dare both recalls and anticipates other Gallic romances, while forging its own path. The mix of brightly colored childhood nostalgia and salty adult sensibilities is indebted to , the unsung père of modern French whimsy. Some fantasy sequences play out on cutified versions of Georges Méliès sets—as  when young Julien goes sailing through a sky of cardboard cutout clouds, or the children find themselves as Adam and Eve with a prop apple serving as their lapsiarian music box—while anticipating the crafty handmade worlds of .

The Amélie comparisons were more of a marketing ploy than an accurate aesthetic description, but many reviewers took them to heart. Samuell’s movie got hit from both sides, simultaneously criticized for being too derivative of the hit fantasy, and for failing to warm hearts the way the previous film had. Critics who hated the film because the two main characters were too cruel failed to give credence to the underlying metaphor—that passion often involves an undercurrent of childish competition—but there is psychological merit in the notion. The increasing stakes of the dares—which move from mere humiliations (like wearing your underwear outside your clothes) to acute psychological cruelty to actual physical peril—take the movie into War of the Roses territory. They provide danger and give us a reason to keep watching, rather than the limp “will they or won’t they?” formalities of typical romantic comedies. Yet, for all the sadism inherent in their bantering, there is no doubt Julien and Sophie share a real bond, a hybrid of all-consuming love and hate that is, in a way, admirable for its purity and fidelity. They may not be a likable couple, but they are strangely believable one. Samuell’s script and direction are very impressive for a debut, and the acting by the four principals (young Julien and Sophie are portrayed by cute and expressive couple of kids) is above standard. Marion Cotillard may have been no Audrey Tautou when it came to launching a million crushes, but she ultimately proved the more versatile actress.

One negative note, though: sad to say, you will be sick to death of “La Vie en Rose” before the final credits roll.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The dreamlike amber washes and comic visual asides stress the otherness of the pair’s reality, but seem to offer a limp excuse for their deluded exemption from empathy.”–Gianni Truzzi, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (contemporaneous)

[This movie was nominated for review by “tsross13,” who confessed “I realize this movie might not be weird enough (but the greatness of it, in my humble opinion, cancels that factor out)….” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.]

Canonically Weird (The List), Shorts

204. DESTINO (2003)

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“A magical display of the problem of life in the labyrinth of time.”– describing Destino

“A simple story about a young girl in search of true love .”– describing Destino

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DIRECTED BY: Dominique Monfery

FEATURING: Vocals of Dora Luz

PLOT: Essentially plotless, but the loose narrative involves a nude woman wandering the desert who comes upon a pyramidal statue with a male figure embedded in it. A bird bursts from the statue and it comes to life. The woman and man try to approach each other but walls and other surreal obstacles constantly grow between them, until the woman is transformed into a ballerina with a dandelion head, and then into a bell housed in a tower.

Still from Destino (1946/2003)
BACKGROUND:

  • After making the (flop) Fantasia, was still looking for opportunities to incorporate high culture into his animated projects. In the 1940s visited Hollywood frequently; fascinated by stars and by filmmaking, and constantly promoting himself, the Spanish eccentric struck up friendships with many Tinseltown luminaries, including Disney. The two men hit it off and conceived the idea of a collaboration on a short film (which would be part of an anthology feature film similar to Fantasia). Dalí worked closely with Disney animator John Hench,  who translated many of the Spaniard’s sketches and ideas into ready-to-film animation cels. The project was begun in 1945 and continued for eight months, but only 17 seconds of footage was actually created before it was scrapped.
  • Secondary sources report that the male statue is Chronos (presumably the god of time) while the female character is named “Dahlia” (a feminization of the artist’s name).
  • The official explanation for Disney’s decision to shelve the project was that the wartime vogue for “package pictures” had passed, and Disney’s distributors were requesting full-length features. The documentary Dalí & Disney: A Date with Destino suggests that Walt may have found the film too “bananas,” citing a report that he blew up one afternoon after seeing that Dalí had stopped painting pictures of ballerinas and had begun drawing baseball players instead.
  • Roy E. Disney, Walt Disney’s nephew and a Disney senior executive, was looking for material to provide extras for the DVD release of Fantasia 2000 when he discovered the unused material for Destino in a moldy corporate storeroom. He decided to reconstruct the film from the existing storyboards and leftover concept art, largely so that the Disney Company would gain property rights in the underlying artwork. Fortunately, John Hench was still alive at the time to provide guidance for the reconstruction.
  • This was animator Dominique Monfery’s first work as a director.
  • The short briefly played theaters as an unlikely introduction to the comedy Calendar Girls.
  • Destino was nominated for an Academy Award for best short animated film in 2004, but—incredibly, given its provenance and historical value—it did not win. (‘s excellent Harvie Krumpet got the nod instead).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The most impressive of many gloriously hallucinatory moments is the seventeen second sequence that John Hench animated to try to convince a faltering Walt Disney to go ahead with the project. Two grotesque faces, with bulging eyeballs and tattered skin pulled taut and held in place by crutches, are perched upon two turtles who slowly bear them together. In the negative space formed when their noses touch, a perfect, pearly ballerina appears.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Dandelion-headed dancer; baguette-wearing bicyclists; ballerina-head baseball

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Destino is Salvador Dalí’s only moving canvas. A slight breeze from Walt Disney Studios nudges it ever so slightly off its already tilted axis. This dream of a Disney princess trapped in Dalí’s delirious desert is something we will not see the likes of again in our lifetimes.


Promotional clip about Destino from the Dalí Museum (in Spanish and English)

COMMENTS: Salvador Dalí was a genius. This fact may seem Continue reading 204. DESTINO (2003) →

Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: KILL BILL (VOLS. 1 & 2) (2003-2004)

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Reader recommendation by Caleb Moss

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , , Michael Madsen, 

PLOT: A woman known only as “the Bride” awakens from a coma and sets off to wreak revenge on Bill and the team of assassins that betrayed her.

Still from Kill Bill
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: By the sole merit of being Quentin Tarantino’s most self-indulgent, ambitious and proudly artificial film. Not only is this Tarantino at the height of his formalistic film-making capabilities, this kinetic and entertaining work of ultraviolent pornography may perhaps be the most aesthetically alienating and divisive in his filmography, even to the adamant Tarantino fanbase. It’s therefore worth considering for the List not only as representative of Quentin Tarantino, but as being the seminal representative of the postmodern exploitation genre at its tautest and most entertaining.

COMMENTS: Have you ever been curious what kind of film  would direct if he was perpetually stuck with the brain of a hyper-intelligent, hyperactive 14-year old and had an obsessive penchant for wanton violence, manga, and endlessly deconstructing pop-culture ephemera? This is your movie.

Adhering to the already well-established standard on this website in which the quality of the film discussed can merit inclusion on the List when the degree of weirdness is more or less questionable, I will waste no further time on exalting the blood-drenched beauty of this film, and instead shall provide three reasons why this is Tarantino’s weirdest film:

1. Aesthetic Design: If you’re the film-obsessive type, then every frame of this movie will feel as if you’re being treated to a Nouvelle Vague-themed candy store whose wares are arranged in an array of colorful nods to exploitation and B-movie cinema (see the crimson skies inspired by the Certified Weird film Goke in Volume 1!) The film alternates so frequently between different cinematic modes and filters ranging from anime (a segment animated by  of Funky Forest fame!) to black and white to the striking image of the faces of Uma Thurman’s enemies superimposed over hers in a garish red hue.

2. Unreal and Hyperstylized Violence: Tarantino, a renowned purveyor of aestheticized violence, slices and dices himself a place within the annals of such maestros of perverse, arty carnage among the likes of Sam Peckinpah, , and Sergio Leone. Blood spurts out like ribbons from expertly cut limbs. Our revenge-bent protagonist literally survives a gunshot to her temple simply through the revitalizing force of pure hatred. Uma Thurman dismembers over eighty-eight Yakuza grunts—and then some—effortlessly. A custom-made katana can literally tear down both man and deity alike.

3. Non-Linear Chronology: As in Pulp Fiction, the Kill Bill series structures itself after postmodern narrative, preferring to splice up its epic story as if the entire film was being projected as the murderous fever-dream of an over-caffeinated geek.

Unlike Pulp Fiction, however, the Kill Bill series manages to achieve what its widely-loved predecessor only aims at: rendering pure, unadulterated pulp into a cinematic showcase for gloriously nihilistic Pop-Art. Motifs of blood, sharpened steel, and fantastical dismemberment recur frequently until it all blurs together, a savage yet strangely mesmerizing poetry.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A strange, fun and densely textured work that gets better as it goes along… Few filmmakers have ever had the freedom and resources to make such a piece exactly as they wished, and Tarantino takes it so far that it becomes a highly idiosyncratic and deeply personal excursion into a world of movie-inspired unreality.”–Todd McCarthy, Variety (Vol. 1, contemporaneous)