Tag Archives: 2013

366 UNDERGROUND FROM THE READER QUEUE: NICK: THE FEATURE FILM (2013)

Nick: The Feature Film is currently available to watch for free on YouTube.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Chris Alex, Nick Alex, Robert Benfer, Jennifer Alex

PLOT: A documentarian decides to devote an entire film to capturing a typical day in the life of unremarkable Nick, but an acquaintance of Nick’s named Chris shows up and proceeds to derail the project with his own demands, attention-stealing actions, and demonstrations of self-proclaimed genius.

Still from nick: the feature films (2013)

COMMENTS: Jason Steele made his name in 2005 with a Flash animation called “Charlie the Unicorn” that unexpectedly went viral. He followed this breakthrough a sequel, and eventually three more, and further a series parodying the first series, and before you knew it, Steele had inadvertently stumbled into a career. His FilmCow studio has been pumping out material ever since. Somewhere along the way, Steele branched out into live-action, creating a second YouTube channel to showcase his collaborations with brothers Chris and Nick Alex. These are mostly shorts, but our subject today is the time they tried to go for more. 

Reportedly, the film was improvised and shot in an entire day. This checks out. The sketches that comprise Nick: The Feature Film display a similar pattern: Fawning documentarian Robert asks Nick to demonstrate some aspect of his plebeian existence, but before Nick can get too far, insane egotist Chris swoops in to tout his superior inventiveness, break some stuff, and leave irritation in his wake. Chris displays all the hallmarks of an improv nightmare, denying the choices of others, hamming it up for the audience to the exclusion of his castmates, and repeating flop jokes under the notion that the funny is in the callback. To be fair, his scene partners are letting him do this, so they clearly believe he’s on to some comic gold. 

So let’s talk about our comic star. Chris presents himself as a genius; he undercuts this assessment every time he opens his mouth. He’s particularly adept at ruining existing things by attempting to “plus” them, such as his self-serving takes on Battle Monopoly or Double Badminton. He invites cult figures into Nick’s house, he tries to fix a car with a shovel, and just generally wanders around Titusville with a bracing and unearned self-confidence. It’s a fully committed performance, but it sucks up all the air in the room. This may be Nick: The Feature Film, but it’s really Chris: The Nonstop Antics

The Monopoly scene shows the limits of this kind of thing as improv:  Chris makes up rules at random, like a newfangled version of fizzbin. Nick blithely goes along with whatever Chris says, while Robert’s role is to question the logic like a proper straight man. We don’t learn anything we didn’t already know—Chris is a consummate BS artist, Nick and Robert are different varieties of pushover—and the scene runs for several minutes through its heads-I-win, tails-you-lose scenario, at which point it just ends with Chris declaring victory and everyone else shrugging their shoulders. To be blunt: if only one character gets the chance to do anything, you don’t have a scene. 

I have to confess that I’m immediately taken out of the concept of Nick: The Feature Film long before Chris arrives. There is absolutely nothing compelling about Nick. Inoffensive but bland to the point of invisibility, he has nothing to show and nothing to say. This renders the smitten Robert as either insightful beyond typical human understanding or flatly stupid, which explains why the narrative is interspersed with interludes that tell extraordinary tales of Nick’s rich life. They are sketched out on chalkboards, with only a photograph of Nick’s face to connect with anything real. The Nick of these stories bears zero relation to the one we see in live-action. In illustration, Nick is a near-superhero, saving lives. In person, he’s a bland doofus who has barely prepared for an entry-level job interview. The gleefully absurd tales of Nick’s exploits stand in stark relief to the passive, featureless nobody whom we see onscreen, so you can either try to take the film at face value or you can accept it as an absurd platform for the comic stylings of the FilmCow collective. Neither approach works entirely.

For a home movie shot on the fly, Nick looks pretty good, and there are small pleasures to be had, like the neo-evangelist who shows up at Nick’s door and proceeds to quietly follow Robert around way too closely. (She’s played by another member of the Alex clan, Jennifer.) And it’s fairly amusing that the film ends with Robert refusing to accept the finale that’s right in front of him—Chris finally earns his chops by standing up to a blowhard who insults his friend —instead creating his own take in which Chris receives a series of increasingly giant swords falling from the sky and lodging up his rectum. But these amusements take a back seat to a conundrum and a frustration: the empty shirt we’re supposed to be interested in and the irritating loon who demands our attention instead. 

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

Nick: The Feature Film (mildly NSFW: language, crude humor)

366 UNDERGROUND FROM THE READER SUGGESTION QUEUE: BHONER: THE MOVIE (2013)

Bhoner: The Movie is available to watch for free on Vimeo.

DIRECTED BY: and/or (Frank Anderson & Colin Shields)

FEATURING: Amolia Shells, Mellīza Verǎnda, Angel Gabriel, Taylor D’Andrew

PLOT: Sheltered ingenue Kisses, who lives in fear of the killer who murdered her father, is sent to a public summer school where she runs afoul of various cliques, and possibly the serial killer as well.

Still from Bhoner: The Movie (2013)

COMMENTS: In a Facebook post, the directors of Bhoner offered a simple invitation with a clear expression of their overall goal: “Help us offend a wider audience.” It honestly couldn’t be simpler. With a movie the filmmakers themselves describe as “vulgar, ugly, and stupid,” you can settle in for a straightforward effort to push the boundaries of good taste. 

The feeling from the outset is a satire of afterschool specials or parent-scare films along the lines of Go Ask Alice. The very first scene of the film shows purported innocent Kisses immediately turning to witchcraft in order to cope with the loss of her father and the restrictive atmosphere created by her holy roller mom (director Anderson in a camp drag routine). That should tell you right off the bat that none of this is to be taken seriously. No one in the cast looks remotely like a high schooler. Summer school seems to be held in one section of the cafeteria, with no teachers; students have lockers and the run of the entire building. A rich-kids-go-shopping montage takes place entirely at a thrift shop. It’s all deliberately silly. 

Along those lines, it’s only in this film’s opposite-day-logic that a child falling in with the wrong element would be sent to public school. But that development allows an introduction to a student body in the form of a parade of overinflated stereotypes, including dimwit cheerleaders, too-cool bros, and the occasional student who walks around in fetish gear. The acting runs at one of two speeds: you have a choice of either hugely low-key (such as the pair of jocks who declare they might be gay with all the enthusiasm of a light beer review) or raucously over the top (best exemplified by Verǎnda’s gratuitously evil head cheerleader Dimple). The one consistent trait is casual nastiness, snarkiness, and spouting the title word as every conceivable part of speech, a la Gretchen Wieners trying to make “fetch” happen.

The film’s greatest achievement is Shells pulling off dual roles as guileless Kisses and goth troublemaker Poppy, aided by judicious use of mascara and, ironically, haphazard edits that ensure they’re never quite in the same shot. I’m still kicking myself for how long it took me to recognize the stunt. Shells is no Tatiana Maslany, but she manages to give each of character their own spirit.

The vibe is further enhanced behind the camera, where Anderson and Shields’ directorial technique can be summed up in two words: Dutch angles. They are passionately in love with the tilted camera, and you can find one in very nearly every scene in the movie. That said, they’ve clearly never met a Dutch angle sharp enough for their tastes, so the image is constantly slanted to such an extreme that you half expect cast and props to go sliding off the edge of the screen. Their method is abetted by Gil Turetsky’s score, which consists of three or four cues which initially drop into a wryly cynical groove before becoming infuriating through endless repetition. This happens a lot in Bhoner: The Movie: an idea is treasured for being wild or unorthodox, and then the film piledrives that idea into the ground.

In a description provided for a screening at The New School, co-director Shields outlines very large ambitions for the Bhoner: The Movie. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, he talks in terms of Biblical allegories and mocks the idea of the conservatively minded cautionary tale. The filmmakers want to meet over-the-top storytelling with even-more-over-the-top storytelling, but without even an ounce of subtlety to sell it, it loses any context or grounding at all. Think , but without any of the love he feels for his ridiculous characters. Instead, the film feels like a project put together by a sketch group where everybody is competing to be the most outlandish person in the movie. It’s exhausting, and not terribly funny. Bhoner: The Movie is limp.

(This movie was nominated for review by Frank—most likely co-director Frank Anderson. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS (2013)

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DIRECTED BY: Ben Rivers, Ben Russell

FEATURING: Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Nicholas McMaster, Weasel Walter

PLOT: A commune member goes off on his own for a more solitarty existence but eventually heads to the city, where he plays in a black metal rock band.

Still from A Spell to Ward off the Darkness (2013)

COMMENTS: Michael Winterbottom’s 2004 romantic drama 9 Songs is ostensibly about the life of a relationship, in which we see the central couple enjoy each other’s company, argue, and have sex; in between, they go to concerts and see bands like Franz Ferdinand, the Von Bondies, and the Dandy Warhols. The back-and-forth nature of the production begs the question of whether the songs are there to justify the explicit sex scenes, or if the sex is an excuse to showcase all these up-and-coming bands. 

I thought of this as I followed the tripartite journey of the central figure in A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. This man who goes from a commune to a lone encampment in the woods to a concert in a small nightclub never speaks, never offers any insight into his heart or mind. Even in performance, he and his fellow bandmates sing exclusively in wordless intonations. So what are we seeing? Is this concert the culmination of a journey? The logical endpoint for his travels from nature to urbanity? Or did the band come first, and the movie was reverse-engineered to get us here?

As winner of the award for Best Documentary Feature at the Torino Film Festival—aside from reminding us just how many film festivals there are out there—Spell brings up the question of just what a documentary is. Nothing in A Spell to Ward off the Darkness is fictional, strictly speaking, because nothing in it is functionally narrative. Arguably the most vérité section of the film is in the first third, when we hang out with a bunch of hippies at their wooded retreat as they build a small dome, frolic about in the sauna, laze by a river, and engage in idle chit-chat. It seems pleasantly rustic (they still have wi-fi and sound systems), and the residents are a little crunchy-granola, but not annoyingly so. Still, there’s a distinct lack of specifics. We don’t even know anyone’s name, let alone what led them to walk away from society or permitted them to find each other. It documents by capturing on film, but completely elides the facts or context that would give the images meaning.

But the remainder of the film doesn’t even possess the veneer of the found moment. When one of the campers (Lowe, whom we’ve only seen occasionally up to this point) decides to go off and live on his own, it feels enormously calculated, as we jump directly to the middle of his escape in a canoe. Nothing has precipitated the move, and not much will come of it as he hikes his way to a remote cabin where he can read, fish, and get dressed for the last portion of the film. Having put on makeup and set fire to the cabin, Lowe heads into town to join a concert in a tavern. Surely this was no surprise to the filmmakers. Certainly these are known events, staged and shot with forethought and intention. So the questions arise again: What are we seeing? Does the dog wag the tail, or vice-versa?

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness is a beautifully shot motion picture, and the slow and contemplative pacing is enticing, encouraging you to watch to see where it’s going to go. But it isn’t going anywhere, because it isn’t really storytelling. It feels more like a collection of the most professionally shot home movies ever assembled. Having seen the pretty pictures, the viewer leaves with no more than when they began, without even hot sex or a cool song to take as a souvenir. So I guess it’s weird. I’m not sure if it’s a movie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This muddled curio doesn’t coalesce into anything, even by its own dreamy, associational terms.”–Tara Brady, The Irish Times (contemporaneous)

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

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: HOW STRANGE TO BE NAMED FEDERICO (2013)

Che strano chiamarsi Federico; AKA How Strange to Be Named Federico: Scola Narrates Fellini

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DIRECTED BY: Ettore Scola

FEATURING: Vittorio Viviani, Antonella Attili, Tomasso Lazotti, Giacomo Lazotti, Maurizio De Santis, Giulio Forges Davanzati 

PLOT: Film director Ettore Scola remembers his friend and contemporary, the legendary Federico Fellini, recreating moments from the great filmmaker’s life on the soundstages of the fabled Cinecittà Studios.

Still from How Strange to Be Named Federico (2013)

COMMENTS: If we’re being honest, How Strange to Be Named Federico is not a movie at all. It’s a eulogy, an Italian take on an Irish wake, replete with fond remembrances and amusing tales of a sadly absent friend. For most of us, it’s the kind of thing that might be shared at a bar or a VFW hall. But then, most of us aren’t successful filmmakers, and our friend isn’t a titan of the art form. So it’s only to be expected that Ettore Scola’s eulogy for Federico Fellini would have to take the form of a film.

Scola makes no effort to try and sum up Fellini’s career or the tremendous mark he left upon cinema. How Strange is a deeply personal account, and we see Fellini’s life exclusively through Scola’s eyes. Early scenes depicting Young Fellini’s big break drawing cartoons for the satirical magazine Marc’Aurelio are presented as a prelude to Scola’s own arrival at the periodical and his subsequent tutelage under Fellini and the staff of hard-bitten comedy writers. Later scenes depict the men holding court at an outdoor café, recounting Fellini’s successes. This isn’t an opportunity to analyze or deconstruct Fellini. Scola just wants you to know what it was like to hang out with the man.

If we learn anything about Fellini, it’s how much of his films seem to come from his observation of others. Scola suggests that Fellini’s intense insomnia, which he addresses by taking lengthy drives through his beloved Rome, provided inspiration in the form of passengers he picked up and encouraged to expound upon their views and experiences. We see two such raconteurs: a prostitute who deliberately overlooks the lies told to her by a thieving suitor because she derives happiness from the falsehoods, and a sidewalk chalk artist whose need to express himself is paramount. They don’t map directly to characters from Fellini’s films, but you kind find their spirit throughout his career.

This isn’t going to make much sense to the uninitiated, and the narrow focus of Scola’s memory play may be more likely to close off audiences, rather than invite them in. The wordless opening scene is like a parade of Easter eggs for Fellini aficionados, as a series of performers appear to audition for the director on a beach at dusk (one of many such scenes set on Cinecittà’s iconic Stage 5), evoking the memory of such classics as La Strada or . And there are occasional side trips into archival footage of Fellini at work: making a rare turn as an actor, traveling to Hollywood to pick up an Oscar, or finding ways to showcase his avatar, Marcello Mastroianni. (We see the actor’s mother confront Scola with the charge that Fellini makes her son look handsome while Scola’s films turn him into a monster.) But these are all part of the kaleidoscope of Scola’s reminiscence. He’s remembering his friend through the method of storytelling they both knew best.

The final scene is probably the most unusual – or Felliniesque – as the not-dead-after-all filmmaker bolts from his own funeral, eluding the honor guard and escaping to an abandoned fairground where he finds pleasure in the rides, and we are treated to a whirlwind montage of striking visions from throughout his catalog. It’s akin to a celebrity-themed version of Cinema Paradiso. But the moment is affecting, because this is truly Scola’s farewell to the man he loved and admired, using Fellini’s own cinematic language to render him forever free. It’s the wish we all hold for the ones we hold dear, but only a filmmaker can make it come true. 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

How Strange to be Named Federico, Scola Narrates Fellini hits just the right notes of whimsy, nostalgia and mocking tomfoolery to bring this memory of Fellini and his times vividly to life… Scola leaps around casting bits and pieces of expressionist portraiture before us. This makes the film much more interesting to watch, even for audiences who know little about the director.” – Deborah Young, Hollywood Reporter (contemporaneous)

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

How Strange to Be Named Federico ( Che strano chiamarsi Federico ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Italy ]
  • How Strange to Be Named Federico ( Che strano chiamarsi Federico )
  • How Strange to Be Named Federico
  • Che strano chiamarsi Federico
  • Non US Format, PAL, Region 2