Tag Archives: 2014

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: INHERENT VICE (2014)

11 Comments

Inherent Vice has been promoted to the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made. Read the Certified Weird entry here.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Joanna Newsom, , Katherine Waterston, , Martin Short

PLOT: In 1970 Los Angeles, private investigator and marijuana enthusiast “Doc” Sportello investigates several converging cases while dodging a hippie-hating police detective out to get him.

Still from Inherent Vice (2014)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Paul Thomas Anderson’s work has flitted around the edges of the bizarre, beginning with the baffling ending to Magnolia, through the reader-recommended oddity Punch-Drunk Love and the existential meanderings of The Master. With this stoned adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s studiously esoteric novel, Anderson may finally have passed over to the weird side for good.

COMMENTS: I don’t think it’s a mistake that’s it’s easy to misread the title Inherent Vice as Incoherent Voice. This smoky noir in which everything connects, but nothing does, is like a comic version of William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” (the novel, not the movie); but instead of an expatriate junkie’s 1950s nightmare, it’s an American pothead’s 1960s reality of a world of alarming signifiers (Vietnam, the Manson family, Nixon rallies) that float past, occasionally colliding and combining like the hot wax spheres in a lava lamp. The plot is doled out in fits and starts, as if Doc is suffering from blackouts. He probably as; at one point he writes “not hallucinating” in his detective’s notebook as an act of self-reassurance. Characters like Reese Witherspoon’s hot-to-trot assistant D.A. or ‘s maritime lawyer plop in to drop bits of exposition without much explanation of who they are, where they came from or why they care. Like a slightly more coherent Branded to Kill, deconstructing  American detectives instead of Japanese yakuza, Inherent Vice assembles its pseudo-story out of warped genre tropes: hard-bitten detectives who inhale bong hits instead of slamming shots of bourbon; femme fatales who manipulate saps into giving them a good spanking.

Better to think of Inherent Vice not as a plotted movie, but as a movie composed of free-associated plot elements. There’s a decadent real-estate magnate with a private sex cult, Aryan biker gangs, hippie-hating flattoped cops, a disappearing surf-sax player, an insane asylum that doubles as a private prison, and a vertically integrated Taiwanese heroin consortium. For added oddness, there’s conspicuous product placement for nonexistent brands, ridiculous fang-shaped skyscrapers that pop up in formerly empty lots, and a manic Martin Short as a drug-snorting, cradle-robbing dentist. There is even resolution, of a sort: Doc discovers all of the missing persons before the end credits roll. But you may be mystified as to how he did it.

Inherent Vice is the new masterpiece of hippie noir. It rides that fine line between rationality and irrationality, heading towards a hazy neverland where universal paranoia holds sway. Not only does it ride that line, it eventually snorts it up.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an aggressively weird movie, which you should take not as a warning but as a compliment and an invitation to see it, to let its stoner vibes wash all over you.”–Bill Goodykoontz, The Arizona Republic (contemporaneous)

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: BATTLE AT BEAVER CREEK (2014)

3 Comments

DIRECTED BY: Bryan Taylor

FEATURING: Matt Brown, Sheldon Graham, Corky McMechan

PLOT: In the near future, a volunteer travels to the Yukon border to fight with a militia against unknown invaders.

Still from Battle at Beaver Creek (2014)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s really just a very elaborate home movie, and not a particularly weird one at that.

COMMENTS: Every single person who appeared in Battle at Beaver Creek—every soldier extra glimpsed from a distance for a half-second, every motionless corpse—gets a video credit at the end of the movie, with a closeup  and their name in big letters. It’s both amusing and endearing, and reveals the kind of production this was—a bunch of guys out in a field together, making a movie! And, to their credit, they did make a movie—a coherent one, with a beginning, middle and end, a few nice ideas, and creative effects given the budget. Unfortunately, while that achievement is impressive, that doesn’t mean that you, as a member of the general viewing public, are going to be interested in seeing the result.

This is one of those movies where nothing much really happens, and you still can’t figure out exactly what’s going on. Introductory text explains that we’re 100 years in a pseudo-post-apocalyptic future, and the American government has developed mind control technology known as WEFI. We then see Chinese office workers turn into suicidal zombies for reasons that are never explained. TV tells us that an unknown force, possibly Chechens (?!) are gathering on the Yukon-Alaskan border to invade Canada, and a local militia is forming to oppose them. Our protagonist, who seems to be some sort of retired intelligence officer or something (his backstory is never explained) goes to join them at Beaver Creek, where he encounters mind control warfare.

The movie has a vision of the future that’s fairly plausible, and a few interesting moments (when an omniscient being appears in the sky, delivering lines like “I am your Lord God. You are an American projection”). But the downsides are formidable.  Essentially, as is so often the case for movies funded by credit card, the project’s ambition outstrips its resources. There are no professional actors in the cast; they can’t even find anyone to convincingly play an emotionless zombie. The use of stock footage can be distractingly bad (apparently, one hundred years from now, the U.N. Secretary General will be a dead ringer for former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad). Although the futuristic setting which mixes high cybertechnology with a fossil fuel shortage is rich, the script is still confusing, and it’s difficult to tell what exactly is at stake and at times even who’s who. The dozens of available extras are not enough to create a believable battle scene.

Most of all, there is simply not enough material here to create a feature film. The solution is to pad the film with endless walking scenes. Our hero begins walking to Beaver Creek at the 18-minute mark and does not reach the first plot point until the 27-minute mark. The fact that the Yukon scenery is beautiful and the cameraman experiments with different digital grains and arty dissolves does not change the fact that nothing is happening except a guy walking. And, after he finally does meet another character and they exchange a few minutes of additional exposition, it’s time to start marching again. The eighty-minute runtime seems interminable. Well-intentioned but, unfortunately, flat-out boring, Battle at Beaver Creek cannot be recommended to anyone but other low-budget filmmakers looking to copy the few good ideas here, and avoid the many pitfalls.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…one of those weird, cultish independent films that you may not think you’ll like, but eventually will.”–Amy R. Handler, Film Threat (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: BUTTWHISTLE (2014)

Leave a comment

DIRECTED BY: Tenney Fairchild

FEATURING: Trevor Morgan, Elizabeth Rice, Analeigh Tipton, Adhir Kalyan

PLOT: A pathologically nice guy rescues a cute but sadistic girl from a suicide attempt, and she takes over his life and poisons his relationships.

Still from Buttwhistle (2014)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Buttwhistle is legitimately weird, from its random opening Scanners tribute to the detached coda, an obscene discussion of the law of non-contradiction. That is not to say that it’s an entirely successful enterprise, however; and although it’s not nearly as bad as you may have heard, it’s not a serious contender for one of the best weird movies of all time, either.

COMMENTS: Despite its “stupid” title, Buttwhistle is put together with care, and maybe even love, but it’s easy to see why this strange mix of slacker drama and deadpan absurdity infuriated most viewers. The first ten minutes are guaranteed to confuse, with too many supporting characters–girlfriends, bikers, cheeky British chums—introduced without much context, and some real non-sequiturs thrown in to boot. Stick with it and the plot will mostly sort itself out, however, though I wouldn’t expect every line of inquiry to be followed through to completion if I were you.

When, out of nowhere, easygoing Ogden catches Beth falling from the sky—presumably in a suicide attempt—the basic outline of this frog-and-the-scorpion fable becomes clear. Ogden is a terminal nice guy; it’s impossible to insult him because he turns every jab into a joke on himself (“You have an answer for everything!” “I’m not going to answer that.”) He’s the kind of guy who regularly checks in on his elderly neighbor, the friend you turn to when you’re out of doors and needed a floor to sleep on, no questions asked. Beth follows him home and stays with him with no discussion about the arrangement. She is Ogden’s mirror image, completely nasty and selfish. She amuses herself by spiting in Ogden’s food when he’s not looking. She takes a keen interest in both seducing her savior, and in surreptitiously turning everyone in his life against him.

Tonally, Buttwhistle is a strange egg. A lot of it has the feel of a hipsterish indie drama, but with inconsistent applications of absurdist humor. The influences are good: (Ogden talks about changing his name into the sound of an air horn, middle name “for which it stands”) and (when someone illogically calls Ogden’s phone and asks to speak to half of a pair of detectives currently interviewing him about missing dogs, the other partner grills the lad about the unsolicited call), but without the silliness of the one or the darkness of the other. A vision of an ex-girlfriend and a talking bar of soap give Ogden advice, he fights girls while dressed in drag, helps fix a biker’s plastic cybernetic hand, and so on. The performances are pleasant, and a number of small clever jokes land, but overall Buttwhistle fails to find sure footing. The message is that Ogden is too nice, too altruistic for his own good—but he’s so likable we don’t want him to change, which makes for an oddly non-cathartic tragedy. Buttwhistle‘s fractured aesthetic lacks sharp edges, but remains hard to grasp.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…surreal and senseless, with hopelessly inept execution.”–Geoff Berkshire, Variety (contemporaneous)