An art student animates the post-apocalyptic surrealist paintings of Zdzislaw Beksinski.
Tag Archives: 2012
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: HELTER SKELTER (2012)
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DIRECTED BY: Mika NinagawaFEATURING: Erika Sawajiri, Shinobu Terajima, Kaori Momoi, Kiko Mizuhara, Nao Ômori
PLOT: The struggle to keep up appearances and growing pressure from younger models pushes supermodel Lilico’s physical and mental well-being to the breaking point.
If the higher you go means the faster you fall, then Lilico is about to come crashing down at light speed. She is living her peak life: impossibly beautiful, her face graces countless magazine covers and advertisements. She’s about to branch out into film acting, and every girl in Japan knows her by name. So when she spots a sizeable flaw in her perfect skin, it’s a literal crack in her facade, the augur of an explosive downfall. Helter Skelter is all about that implosion, the slow-motion train wreck of her discovery that perfect beauty has always had an expiration date, and that page on the calendar has finally turned.
It’s hard to work up a lot of pity for someone who is rich, famous, and ridiculously attractive, but Helter Skelter does a solid job in showing how Lilico’s life of luxury is not especially enjoyable. She is monstrous but also desperate, and how her misery expresses itself is the primary source of Helter Skelter’s weirdness. She takes out her rage on her doggedly loyal assistant Hana through sexual abuse and humiliation, and starts to have out-of-control hallucinations at inconvenient moments. The fact that she is being tracked by a pair of detectives who resemble the cast of a Japanese reboot of “The X-Files” is appropriate, because Lilico herself is otherworldly. These moments of panic and cruelty are so outlandish, so extreme, that the biggest surprise is that we are expected to view them realistically. Perhaps tales like The Substance have trained us to expect a supernatural element, but Helter Skelter offers no twist. The film straightforwardly insists that Lilico’s beauty has a scientific (if illegal and amoral) explanation, and that her behavior is all her own. The arrival of her very own Eve Harrington, the naturally stunning Kozue, who achieves success despite expressing apathy toward the fashion business, reinforces that point. Kozue doesn’t expect to be beautiful forever, and while she knows some regurgitation goes with the job, she plans to give it up someday. By contrast, considering everything Lilico has done to secure her position, her fear of decline and the collapse of her enhanced body utterly short-circuit her.Japanese culture is both fascinated and repelled by celebrity, and Helter Skelter enlists exactly the right people to delve into its darker side. Director Ninagawa was a fashion photographer herself, and she films with the barely controlled energy of a wild photo shoot. Sawajiri also knows the world, having been a successful model before turning to acting. (She gained notoriety for a press conference where she was viewed as disrespectful to reporters and her castmates alike, so audiences in Japan would experience art imitating life in Lilico’s ultimate, disastrous encounter with the media.) Their bona fides are beyond reproach, and there’s no question that the team produces a motion picture with a unique sensibility, bringing their personal experience to the story. The thing is, while Helter Skelter is a beautifully crafted film, a certain sameness creeps in as the story seems to be building toward something cataclysmic, but never quite gets there. Lilico’s fate is inevitable—it is painfully obvious that she is going to crash—but given the many omens of doom and the explosive nature of Ninagawa’s camera and Sawajiri’s volcanic performance, the impact ultimately feels blunted. Lilico’s fate can’t quite live up to the drama of what precedes it.
Helter Skelter is based on a popular manga by Kyoko Okazaki, and it feels like it. It jumps storylines and techniques like a page turning, and the bold and vibrant colors and off-kilter angles feel like they could have jumped straight out of the pages of a comic book. The film’s most striking image, when Lilico faces a room full of popping camera flashes, has the veneer of illustration. But like fashion itself, the movie is successful at delivering style and attitude but quickly moves on to the next new thing without imparting a message beyond the surface. It’s a fun, fast ride, but it’s just a ride. Then I get to the bottom and I see you again.WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Scott R. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
Helter Skelter
- This lurid body horror, based on a manga by Kyoko Okazaki and directed by Mika Ninagawa (Sakuran), is a candy-colored nightmare!
New starting from: 23.99 $
Go to AmazonCAPSULE: ELDORADO (2012)
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DIRECTED BY: Richard Driscoll
FEATURING: Richard Driscoll, Darren Morgan, Daryl Hannah, Jeff Fahey, Bill Moseley, Michael Madsen, Patrick Bergin, Brigitte Nielsen, Steve Guttenberg, Rik Mayall, Sylvester McCoy, Peter O’Toole, David Carradine (archival footage)
PLOT: Oliver and Stanley Rosenblum, a Blues Brothers tribute act, accidentally find themselves in Eldorado, where the Sawyer-style family ruling the roost has big plans for the town’s 200th anniversary.
COMMENTS: I can be very forgiving if a movie has competent sound design: balanced dialogue audio, fleshed-out aural background, and adequate-to-good music. Eldorado failed me here, and in many other ways. This makes sense when you know a bit of history behind the movie: writer / director / producer / &c. Richard Driscoll apparently hoped to succeed in a Producers-style gambit, claiming a big movie whilst making it on the cheap. Sound design, surely, suffers from this underinvestment—but what are Eldorado‘s merits?
These include, and are probably limited to, the following:
- Darryl Hannah as “The Stranger”, and her delivery of the titular poem by Edgar Allan Poe
- A surprisingly touching reunion of Vietnam veterans, from Jeff Fahey and Bill Moseley
- An homage to a famous Laurel & Hardy bit
- Michael Madsen’s face, ever over-reacting in that roguish Madsenian manner
- Peter O’Toole proving that even in his don’t-give-a-damn super-annuation, his floor of quality is higher than many actors’ ceilings
The rest is, alas, little more than a tedious curio with occasional blasts of badly mixed sound, music, and FX. There’s plenty that’s gross (though well within the average 366er’s tolerance), plenty that’s derivative (the fine line here being that much of said spoofing is by design), and plenty of questions—the most looming of which is, “Why, oh why?”—and the answer comes back: for tax fraud.
It would be remiss of me to recommend this to anyone—ever—except for the most die-hard of Rik Mayall fans. A curious actor, to say the least, and woefully underused. His performance as Mario the Chef transcends the surrounding doofery; and that’s even bearing in mind it consists mostly of lip-synching to a couple of pop-opera tunes. Had Eldorado been put completely under his creative direction, we may have had one of the grandest monstrosities of the new century.
Instead we don’t.
We have Eldorado.
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Reviewer’s Addendum: Apparently I watched the 90-minute “Director’s Cut”, which I feel is more than sufficient despite being half-an-hour shorter than an earlier release.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by nc, who described it as “an incomprehensible mess, a hypnotically bad fever dream, a film so bad it’s hard to believe it even exists.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: POST TENEBRAS LUX (2012)
Light After Darkness
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DIRECTED BY: Carlos Reygadas
FEATURING: Nathalia Acevedo, Adolfo Jiménez Castro, Willebaldo Torres, Rut Reygadas, Eleazar Reygadas
PLOT: A family moves to a remote area, where the father’s relationships with his wife, his children, and his neighbors steadily fracture.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Reygadas’ deeply personal film casts aside linear narrative in favor of a series of scenes that serve as gloves-off introspection. It features startling situations and memorably surreal images driven by what feels like a rich vein of remorse and self-recrimination.
COMMENTS: The opening scenes of Post Tenebras Lux send a clear warning of trouble ahead. We open on a dreamy sequence of a little girl wandering alone through an open field. Initially, she seems delighted by her surroundings, but as she calls in vain for her parents and large animals encroach upon her, our worries for her safety increase exponentially. From here, we retreat to the relatively safe confines of a home late at night, but someone arrives to wake up a young boy: a tall goat man, glowing red, boasting a low-hung package, and carrying a toolbox. Is it a metaphorical demon, retiring for the evening before getting up to do evil once again, or the genuine article? From the look on the boy’s face, the difference scarcely matters.
That both of these terrorized young people are portrayed by director Reygadas’ own children says something about his commitment to the personal aspect of the story, as well as his possible ignorance of the consequences of being so open on the subject. The director’s method makes it impossible to know for sure which scenes are drawn from personal experience and which are merely invention, but he seems determined to explore his life with depth, so the visit by central couple Juan and Nathalia to a French sex club feels just as true as the moments spent watching the rugby team of an English prep school psyche themselves up for battle.
If Juan is Reygadas’ stand-in, then he is unexpectedly candid about the less savory elements of his character. Indictments against him include a savage beating he issues to a dog who displeases him, lame confessions that he offers in private after attending an AA meeting, and flaunting his wealth around the rural community to which he has brought his family. Post Tenebras Lux is frequently reminiscent of All That Jazz, another movie in which a tempestuous filmmaker creates a central character who magnifies all his worst characteristics. Like Joe Gideon, Juan seems regretful, especially after he is gravely injured when he interrupts a home invasion and flashes forward to a future where his wife and now-teenaged children live happy lives without him. To be fair, there’s a lot of awful going on in the small community, including the man who hires someone to chop down a large tree to spite his wife, as well as the rueful assailant who makes amends by tearing his own head clear off his body.
The most notable visual element may hold the key to Reygadas’ intentions. Throughout the film, the frame is surrounded by a blurry circle that resembles the beveled edges of a mirror. Probably a nod to this Mirror, another filmmaker’s jumbled familial reverie. Like Reygadas himself, we view Juan’s life through a dark, cracked looking glass. The result may be a negative fantasy, or possibly an apology. Whatever it is, and the filmmaker is fervently seeking out the light at the end of the tunnel.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Max. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
- Factory sealed DVD
SATURDAY SHORT: WE CUT CORNERS – THE MALE MIND (2012)
The male mind is full of splitting skulls, winged pink elephants, and unicorn-mounted knights. So is this animated music video for “The Male Mind” by We Cut Corners.