Tag Archives: 2006

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE FOX FAMILY (2006)

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Gumiho Gajok

DIRECTED BY: Hyung-gon Lee

FEATURING: Si-Yeon Park, Hyeon Ju, Jung-woo Ha, Jun Gyu Park, Ju-yeon Ko, Cheol-min Park

PLOT: A family of foxes pose as circus performers; if they can eat a human liver on the lunar eclipse, they will become human for good.

Still from The Fox Family (2006)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s not especially weird. This is one of those fantasy films whose strangeness to Westerners stems mainly from different cultural expectations.

COMMENTS: “Where can we find a lot of humans?” asks the clueless Fox patriarch at a lonely gas station as the clan makes its way from the mountains to the city. The family of four is actually centuries old, but they’ve been living as kumiho—mischievous shapeshifting fox spirits—in the mountains. According to this movie’s spin on the ancient mythology, if they devour a person’s liver on the night of the lunar eclipse, they can become human forever. Unfortunately for this particular family, they are (mostly) sweet-natured yokels who are completely at sea when it comes to human society. They can’t even seduce lonely humans, supposedly the specialty of kumiho. The brother’s spastic dance floor moves get him ejected from the club, and the sister can’t fathom why her striptease doesn’t work on a particular subway patron. Still, it would be hard for them not to eventually bumble into a victim or two—except for the fact that they unwisely trust a con man who develops a scheme to protect his fellow humans (and save his own liver) while exploiting the clan.

There is a temptation to classify The Fox Family as a black comedy because of scenes like the one where a homicide detective absentmindedly scratches his head with a severed arm he finds at a grisly crime scene; yet, overall the tone is sweet, and even family-friendly. Even the con-artist is a pussycat at heart. The only features that give The Fox Family a whiff of weirdness are the musical numbers. They are mostly love songs from Si-Yeon Park—a South Korean model who is one of the world’s most beautiful women—although each member of the clan gets a moment in the spotlight. The only bizarre show-stopper is the trip to recruit victims—er, circus performers—at a camp for the homeless. Somehow, they dance their way into a complete different musical number, a Sharks vs. Jets vs. riot police style dance-off, complete with 1984-vintage breakdancing. This one scene may make the film worth a view for fans of Asian dementia.

If you want to understand why this film isn’t really weird, just use your imagination to change the fox spirits to something more Western (say, werewolves) and recast it with Hollywood stars: Danny DeVito as the father, Anna Kendrick as the older sister, as the brother, and for the cutie pie younger daughter—are there any Fanning sisters left? Suddenly, what we have isn’t a weird movie, but a light comedy with blockbuster potential. Although you would have to ditch those musical numbers.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… nothing quite prepares viewers for the unhinged craziness of Lee Hyung-gon’s The Fox Family… Everything here is manic and mercurial.”–Anton Bitel, Eye for Film (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Kat,” who described it as “Shape shifting fox spirits, a street riot that becomes a dance off and the oddest use of a Wonder Woman costume I’ve ever seen [and I’ve seen some odd ones!]. You can’t go wrong really.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Canonically Weird (The List)

235. A SCANNER DARKLY (2006)

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“I think it was probably the strangest script I ever read.”–Robert Downey Jr.

“I was very confused by the script at first, it’s a bizarre kind of story…”–Woody Harrelson

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , , Rory Cochrane

PLOT: In the near future, an estimated twenty percent of the American population is addicted to a drug called “Substance D.” “Fred,” an undercover agent, is posing as Bob Arctor, hanging out with a small-time group of users, hoping to locate a high level supplier. Fred, who is becoming more and more addicted to substance D and is being watched closely by police psychologists concerned about possible brain damage, grows increasingly paranoid, especially when one of Arctor’s roommates goes to the police and accuses the plant of being a terrorist.

Still from A Scanner Darkly (2006)

BACKGROUND:

  • Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was a fascinatingly weird figure, a counterculture science fiction author and the man responsible for the stories that were adapted into movies like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and others. He was also a heavy user of amphetamines (and, some say, LSD) in his youth; in his later years he became paranoid, and may in fact have been living with some form of mental illness. In 1974, after taking sodium pentothal for an impacted wisdom tooth, Dick began seeing visions involving pink beams of light, the sense of having lived a previous life as a persecuted Christian in the Roman era, and communication from a super-rational intelligence he dubbed “VALIS.” To Dick’s credit, he never surrendered to these delusions altogether; he remained rational enough to write coherent (if paranoid) novels.
  • Dick’s novel “A Scanner Darkly” was written in 1977 and set in 1992. It was based on the author’s own experiences as a drug addict, and was dedicated to casualties of drug abuse (the author’s roll call of those “punished entirely too much for what they did” is included before the movie’s end credits).
  • wrote an unproduced adaptation of “A Scanner Darkly,” and  was also reportedly interested in the property.
  • The animation technique used here is rotoscoping, where actual footage is filmed and then “painted” over by animators (in this case, with the aid of computer software, although in the earliest days of the technique a team of artists would hand-paint each individual frame of film).
  • Filmed in a brisk 23 days, but post-production (i.e. the rotoscope animation) took 18 painstaking months to complete.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The “scramble suit,” the undercover cloaking device of the future which is “made up of a million and a half fractional representations of men, women and children.” These “fractional representations” flicker across the surface of the suit, masking the the wearer’s identity by changing him into a “vague blur” of constantly shifting identities. The effect is eerie and disorienting, but unforgettable.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Aphids everywhere; scrambled identities; alien presiding at a suicide

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A Scanner Darkly is a paranoid, dystopian meditation on self-destruction—both personal and social—told as a sci-fi parable about an addictive, mind-rotting hallucinogen. For extra weirdness, the entire movie is rotoscoped to create a squirmy, synthetic reality.


Original trailer for A Scanner Darkly

COMMENTS: Hollywood has long been attracted to the works of Continue reading 235. A SCANNER DARKLY (2006) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE FALL (2006)

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DIRECTED BY: (as “Tarsem”)

FEATURING: Catinca Untaru, Lee Pace, Justine Waddell

PLOT: In a Los Angeles hospital, a young girl with a broken arm befriends Roy, a stunt-man paralyzed by a recent accident. Through her eyes, a beautiful vision of his epic yarn unfolds; and, as a quintet of wronged men hunt for the hated Governor Odious in his story, the crippled Roy slips further into suicidal depression.

the_fall

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Fans of the movie will likely kneecap me for this, but by placing the free-spirited story within the framing of the realistic (and touching) “actual” narrative, Tarsem has made a movie that, though beautiful and full of the fantastic, is not wholly weird.

COMMENTS: Set all around the globe, but primarily in a turn-of-the-century hospital, the Fall is both a grand, epic adventure and the intense emotional drama of a sick, suicidal man bonding with an impressionable young girl. Roy Walker (Lee Pace) is an ironically named stunt-man who has worked in countless “flickers”. In his latest, his jump from a train bridge on to a moving horse goes awry. Perhaps he intended to kill himself—the movie is noncommittal—but the result is he becomes paralyzed from the waist down. Now crippled, he is also sick at heart, pining for a starlet who cast him aside. Through a chance encounter involving a secret note and a crate of oranges, he meets the young Alexandria (Catinka Untaru, an amazing find on the director’s part), a 5-year-old Romanian fruit-picker, who is in the hospital because of a fall of her own. She has taken to wandering the corridors of the hospital, carrying a “box of things [she] likes” in her hand.

Moods ranging from wonderment to tragedy and back to joy bubble up and dissipate over the course of the film. As Roy’s situation goes from bad to worse, the heroes of the story he tells, originally poised for a quick triumph, get waylaid and thwarted. Alexandria sees the five heroes of the tale largely as described by Roy, but also through her own subjective lens. For instance, Roy mentions one of the heroes being a brave Indian warrior. Alexandria has no knowledge of the Native Americans he is referring to, so she sees in her mind’s eye a glorious Sikh. The main hero of the group, the Masked Bandit, changes too; first he is her father, then a Frenchman, and then finally Roy himself. The epic’s various characters are all based on the hospital’s denizens and visitors (à la the Wizard of Oz). Alexandria even makes herself appear in the story; when Roy is giving up on life, both in the hospital and in the story, a small masked bandit saves the five heroes. And all the while, dozens of fantastical (and, apparently, real-world) locales are explored as the adventurers pursue their sworn enemy. The movie’s unbelievable locales—a blue city, an endless maze of stairs, a glorious wedding temple, among many others—merit research. Apparently little to no CGI was used (somehow).

While the story-within-the-story is a good one, the truly compelling drama unfolds as we see Roy and Alexandria together. He tries to trick her into bringing him enough morphine to end his life, but she misinterprets his handwriting. As he spirals downward, her entreaties for him to keep telling the story—to keep living—become the film’s driving force. Naturally, I cared about the vengeance of the Bandit and his crew, but even more, I wanted to see the stuntman and the little girl. Their story was so charming and moving that every bit of the mundane hospital world still had magic. All told, this movie is both boisterous and heart wrenching — and has an ending for which we can only be grateful.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“These rambling scenes then inform the way the fable unfolds, which at best is impressionistic and dreamlike, but for the most part is just haphazard… The end result is like listening to a little kid tell a story: sometimes intriguingly bizarre and surprisingly clever, but mostly just futile and frustrating.”–Josh Bell, Las Vegas Weekly (midnight screening)

Capsules

CAPSULE: FUDGE 44 (2006)

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DIRECTED BY: Graham Jones

FEATURING: A series of interviewees, each of whom speak for less than a minute

PLOT: Dozens of residents of a Japanese suburb are interviewed about a series of sightings of little men, in a story that gets progressively wilder with every new detail that is revealed.

Still from Fudge 44

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s an odd experiment in how to make a film with almost no money down, but there’s not really enough texture or action here to merit a general recommendation.

COMMENTS:  Fudge 44 might have made a good short story; it’s almost entirely composed of narration by talking heads, with very little cinematic illustration to catch our interest beyond the faces of the interviewees. There is occasional music, but far more noticeable is the audio tape loop which runs for about 10 seconds, ending in a pair of clicks, which accompanies the entire film. This hard-to-explain audio affectation could give the film either a hypnotic or an annoying aspect, depending on your outlook. (I sort of liked it). The plot-heavy nature of the project makes it difficult to discuss without spoiling it, but it’s safe to say that it begins with reports of sightings of tiny little men in a Japanese suburb, and a backstory is gradually revealed that is as consistent as it is bizarre, bringing in a bank robbery, a puppet show, and a gang of “multicultural assassins.”

The story of Fudge 44  is far too absurd to fool you into believing it’s true; rather, it tries to fool you into believing that other people might believe it’s true. And why not, in a world where people believe in Bigfoot and alien abductions? Despite its minimalist format, Fudge 44 has a lot on its mind. It’s a parody of cryptozoological documentaries, and the opening quote suggests that it’s a criticism of the way Western media views Japan through a series of stereotypes. At its core, it’s a whopper, with the trappings of a hoax; and, by the end, it becomes a sort of melancholy elegy for the passage of our childhood ability to believe in such tall tales. “She knew the difference between imagination and reality, but maybe this didn’t fit into either category,” muses one interview subject when describing a child’s reaction to an encounter with the little creatures. It also could be a slogan for Fudge 44, an oddity that doesn’t really fit into any category.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The story becomes more and more convoluted as it unfolds by including a bizarre tale of a pair of boys who came up with a secret recipe for fudge and later disappeared under mysterious circumstances.”–Matt Exile, “Japanese Hollywood File”