Another cinema year has come and gone, and as always, if you dig deeper than the blockbuster reboots of Mad Max and Star Wars or the conservative Oscar-bait dramas trotted out at the end of the year for Academy geriatrics to vote on, you will find some very strange creatures squirming around in the movie industry’s basement. Any year in which early cinema’s postmodern champion Guy Maddin releases a movie is bound to be a rich one; add Roy Andersson’s long-awaited third chapter in his “being human” trilogy, a trippy big-budget Thomas Pynchon adaptation, and some unclassifiable debuts by weirdo film upstarts, and you have a truly strange year in cinema. Transvestite samurai, Swedish kings, and instructions on how to take a bath await you in this tensome of the year’s most unusual films.
As for the choice of movies, I pick them using a secret proprietary formula that accounts for cinematic craftsmanship, the level of surrealism/weirdness, and the perceived prestige in the weird movie community based on buzz and reader feedback, then I rank them in whatever arbitrary order I momentarily feel like without regard to any of that. As always, the films are listed in random order, the weirdest of orders (a convention other lists are starting to catch on to).
On to the movies!
10. Anomalisa – Even though we narrowly declined to make it a List Candidate (a decision I wonder if we will later regret), we couldn’t possibly leave out a Charlie Kaufman-scripted stop-motion existential comedy about a motivational speaker who hears everyone in the world talking in the same monotone voice off our year end list. confirms that “yes, it does get weird” while adding “but for the most part it just gets sad, and nihilistic, exploring mid-life crisis in ways both poetic and infuriating.” Although the fumbling sex scene was one of the most realistic bedroom scenarios ever scripted, I confess I find puppet cunnilingus disturbing.
1. The Forbidden Room – Stories unfold inside of other stories in Guy Maddin’s telescoping narrative experiment. The concept for this omnibus project came from Maddin trying to imagine the content of lost films from their titles alone. Of course, Guy Maddin’s imagination evokes such unlikely scenarios as men trapped in a submarine furiously eating pancakes, a bone surgeon assaulted by seductresses in skintight skeleton leotards, and a man who bids against his own double for a bust of the two-faced Roman god Janus. It all begins and ends with Louis Negin in a bathrobe, explaining how to take a bath (for hygiene novices). Once The Forbidden Room is released on home video we’re certain you’ll agree it’s easily the weirdest movie of Continue reading 10 WEIRDEST MOVIES OF 2015
