A stiff and silent clown provides ambiguous evidence of visitations by the Underpant People from the sky.
Tag Archives: 2013
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ONLY GOD FORGIVES (2013)
DIRECTED BY: Nicolas Winding Refn
FEATURING: Ryan Gosling, Kristin Scott Thomas, Vithaya Pansringarm, Yayaying Rhatha Phongam
PLOT: An expatriate American drug smuggler in Bangkok becomes enmeshed in an escalating cycle of violence following the murder of his brother, with increasing pressure from his revenge-minded mother and a persistent sword-wielding cop.
COMMENTS: The power of success is immense. For the filmmaker who receives acclaim for their work, the decision about what to do next marks a decision point of unusual gravity. Is this a time to pursue a longed-for passion project? A call to double down on the styles and tropes that first merited attention? A surrender to the siren call of mass entertainment? The choice speaks to a director’s very soul.
So it says a lot about Nicolas Winding Refn that, hot off the success of Drive, he went all in on a moody, bloody, glacially paced meditation on vengeance and justice. Refn renews his commitment to evocative visuals, bathing a dark and seedy Bangkok with stark contrasts of red and blue and framing his actors with an eye to capturing their place in the universe. But he does all this in service of a story that marinates in grimness, where everyone starts out bad and only gets worse, if they change at all. Refn’s response to success seems to be to hit back at the very things that brought it.
Refn displays a remarkable commitment to not doing anything that feels like the next logical choice. For a film predicated upon the twin impulses of sex and violence, he refuses to do anything that could be misconstrued as pandering to the baser desires of the audience. When he shows sex, it’s isolated and unsatisfying to everyone involved. When he shows violence, it is brutal. He frequently withholds the direct impact of this violence, but when he does let it show, he is unrelenting. In the most vivid example, a character actually tells people in the room to close their eyes and watch nothing while a scene of torture methodically unfolds. It could be a command to the audience.
This perverse contrariness extends to the performances of his actors. Gosling walks about in a perpetual state of resigned exhaustion, barely speaking (IMDb reports that he has 17 lines of dialogue in the entire film; this seems accurate) and appearing beleaguered and helpless even when he has clear agency. His counterpart, Pansringarm, is equally taciturn, but at least blessed with the certainty that he is in the right and backed with the force of the sword that always mysteriously seems to be at hand. At least he has karaoke to give him some release; the film frequently cuts away to what looks like a cheaply decorated wedding hall to give the policeman a chance to serenade a roomful of his underlings with a plaintive musical number. Maybe that’s why, when the two men finally square up for a brawl, Gosling fails to lay so much as a finger on his opponent. If only he’d sung.
Kristin Scott Thomas, on the other hand, seems to be joining us from another movie entirely. Arriving with bottle-blonde hair, leopard prints, and a hardcore devotion to vulgarity and crudeness, her nightmare mom feels like a breath of fresh air simply because of the change in energy. She is consistently emasculating with Gosling, utterly brutal toward his pretend girlfriend (she’s not entirely wrong, but, you know, social niceties), and openly dismissive of everyone else. Perhaps everything you need to know about her is contained in her much-quoted response to the news that her late son had raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl (and this after having been denied his previous requests to have sex with a 14-year-old girl and then the club owner’s own daughter): “Well, I’m sure he had his reasons.” An argument could be made that every bad thing that happens in Only God Forgives is directly attributable to her, which may just be more evidence of Refn’s agenda.
Viewers were notoriously split when Only God Forgives came out. Audiences at Cannes responded with a mix of applause and booing. The critics’ score at Rotten Tomatoes is around 40%, just below middling but with enough raves to merit further review. Rex Reed hysterically labeled it “unquestioningly in the top five” of the worst movies ever made, which given his intense dislike for anything with even a hint of quirk should makes us think more charitably about this particular film (although we must take his assessment seriously, as he himself earned consideration for the list with the lone film in which he himself starred). Honestly, it’s easy to understand everyone’s confusion. The film is uncommonly well-made but extremely hollow and off-putting in its content. And there’s every evidence that this is exactly what Refn intends; love it or hate it, that’s exactly what he wants from you. It’s a strange ambition, but no one can say he didn’t earn it. After all, it’s not your forgiveness he wants.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by “a”. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
30*. THE CONGRESS (2013)
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DIRECTED BY: Ari Folman
FEATURING: Robin Wright, Harvey Keitel, Danny Huston, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Sami Gayle, Paul Giamatti, voice of Jon Hamm
PLOT: Film actress Robin Wright agrees to sell the rights to her image to a studio which will use the captured data to showcase an eternally young avatar in their productions. After 20 years, the producers invite her to extend the contract, and she travels to the meeting of a futuristic congress where all the participants ingest a chemical that allows them to invent their own reality and become anyone. When the congress proposes sharing this drug with the masses, Wright rebels, but her resistance is put down, and another 20 years on, she surveys the world that has resulted.
BACKGROUND:
- The Congress is loosely based on Stanislaw Lem’s 1971 dystopian novel “The Futurological Congress“; Folman describes the novel as “more as a source of inspiration, rather than the basis of the screenplay.“
- Folman’s previous film, Waltz With Bashir, is a member of the 366 Weird Movies Canon.
- Folman originally conceived the central role for Cate Blanchett and the part of Dylan for Keanu Reeves.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The trip through the animated landscape of Abrahama City is rife with psychedelic visions and eye-catching creations. The scenes within the animated universe are densely populated with caricatures of the famous and celebrated, representing alternative identities whom a disaffected humanity have chosen to take on in place of their own. Naming them all would be impossible, but I’d like to offer a particular shout-out to the person who decided to become Magritte’s apple-faced businessman. But the image that stays with you is a lonely and scared Robin Wright standing alone in the middle of a large and inhuman motion-capture dome, presenting a prism of emotions as the computers capture her every nuance. It’s an ironic manifesto for the value of human acting, as Wright the actress manifests the uncontrolled feelings of Wright the character.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Entrance to Abrahama City, Robin grows wings
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Animation has always reveled in its power to bend reality, making it an ideal medium for fantastical visions and deep dives into the imagination. The high-wire act that The Congress has to walk is literalizing animation’s attempt to slip the surly bonds of the real world. It’s not enough for this fantasy landscape to be trippy; it has to be a logical extension of the very real world being abandoned. It’s only appropriate that a movie star, the very avatar of a flesh-and-blood figure creating something artificial for our amusement, would be our guide. The film deftly juxtaposes the two worlds, each commenting upon the other and dramatizing the wonders and perils of our ongoing quest for escapism.
Original trailer for The Congress
COMMENTS: The most recent episode of the excellent podcast Continue reading 30*. THE CONGRESS (2013)
25*. SAINT BERNARD (2013)
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“I proudly slam my flag in the sand that Saint Bernard is not for ‘them’— whoever ‘them’ is, but you and I know who ‘them’ are— and I don’t want ‘them’ seeing the film.” —Gabriel Bartalos
DIRECTED BY: Gabriel Bartalos
FEATURING: Jason Dugre
PLOT: An orchestra conductor travels through an increasingly bizarre milieux while carrying a dog’s severed head in a bag.
BACKGROUND:
- Gabriel Bartalos only directed two features, the bizarro slasher film Skinned Deep (2004) and this one. He was, however, much in demand as a practical special effects and makeup expert, working on many popular horror movies (including several Frank Henenlotter projects). He also provided effects and makeup Matthew Barney‘s “Cremaster” films (2, 3, and 4).
- The film is dedicated to Benoît LeStang, a French make-up/special effects artist involved in, among many other projects, Brotherhood of the Wolf.
- Saint Bernard was shot on 35mm film over the course of 10 days in a screen ratio of 1.78:1; standard dimensions in France—a country somehow on the hook for producing this.
- The movie is only known to have screened once—at the San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film Festival—before being released to Blu-ray in 2019.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Seeing as this story is chock-full of unsettling and grotesque sequences, the whimsical emergence of young conductor Bernard from a sweet-dreams variant of the Něco z Alenky mansion stands out for its sunny magical surrealism. The smiling lad in a crisp white suit and bow-tie ably batons through a classical performance amplified from an iPod for a receptive audience of his peers.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Doggie bag; Uncle Ed the Music Monster
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Saint Bernard is intensely cryptic, but always engaging—even as the symbolism (or, perhaps mere randomness) is slapped on without mercy. Our cursèd conductor endures the unfathomable: liberation by chainsaw-wielding Frenchman; a run-in with a deformed wino police chief; a would-be escape through a fecal puddle emitted by Static Boy. Is it all meaningless? Perhaps; but this is Goremeister Arthäus . It may waste your time, but it does so with gooey gusto.
Original trailer for Saint Bernard
COMMENTS: “Hey, um, I need help,” admits the film’s protagonist at Continue reading 25*. SAINT BERNARD (2013)
SATURDAY SHORT: NEXT TO HEAVEN – WINNERS (2013)
The narrator divulges the secret of success, as illustrated by four Great White Explorers and their broken-down jeep.