The thrill and anxiety of new love makes a young woman hallucinate until she coughs butterflies.
Tag Archives: 2022
52*. ONCE WITHIN A TIME (2022)
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DIRECTED BY: Godfrey Reggio, Jon Kane
FEATURING: Sussan Deyhim, Apollo Garcia Orellana, Tara Starling Khozein, John Flax, Brian Bellot, Mike Tyson
PLOT: The Kindergarten of Eden, a pastoral playground populated by children and watched over by a majestic singing tree, is invaded by a devilish serpent in the form of technology. A technomage captures the attention of twins wearing wicker space helmets, and the quiet paradise is soon overrun with unpleasant imagery and mindless distraction. The children are encouraged to fight for their innocence and escape the fallen world with the help of a kindly mentor.
BACKGROUND:
- Reggio is best known for directing the experimental landmark Koyaanisqatsi and its two sequels. Co-director Jon Kane was editor on Naqoyqatsi, the third in the series, as well as Reggio’s previous feature, Visitors (2013). Once Within a Time marks the 83-year-old director’s first foray into (sort of) narrative cinema.
- The fifth feature collaboration between Reggio and composer Philip Glass.
- The film was shot entirely at a soundstage in Brooklyn. Many of the sets are miniatures built by leading Broadway production designers Scott Pask and Frank McCullough, who found themselves sidelined from their usual stagework during the pandemic.
- Although the movie relies heavily on digital technology, there is no 3D CGI animation. Digital rotoscoping was accomplished by human effects artists frame-by-frame.
- The costumes designed by Machine Dazzle were included the artist’s first museum show at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2022.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: One of the first images in the film–Sussan Deyhim’s mother tree singing to the peaceful residents of her youthful utopia–is among its most memorable, but there’s a tableau that repeats throughout the movie to signal the world’s decline. In the center of this park sits a merry-go-round, and as the garden slips deeper into despair, new icons hover over the spinning wheel, most potently a syringe in which children swim about in an endless swirl.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Commedia dell’emoji; The Mentor’s lesson in a boxing ring
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: In finally choosing to create his own images instead of merely assembling them, Reggio does not disappoint. He takes the same green-screen and compositing technology used to create comic book blockbusters and makes the film that Georges Méliès (who gets a visual shout-out) undoubtedly would have produced, if given the tools. The result is a philosophical tone poem that blends a didactic lament for the world with a heartfelt embrace of handmade craft. It’s a mystifying wonder.
Original trailer for Once Within a Time
COMMENTS: At 52 minutes (which includes a lengthy endcrawl), Continue reading 52*. ONCE WITHIN A TIME (2022)
51*. HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (2022)
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“We had the spirit of Jean Nicolet and Werner Herzog with us as we were attempting to make the greatest Wisconsin film of all time. Hopefully.” ― Mike Cheslik
DIRECTED BY: Mike Cheslik
FEATURING: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Olivia Graves, Doug Mancheski, Luis Rico, Wes Tank
PLOT: Following the destruction of his home and factory, applejack purveyor Jean Kayak attempts, and fails, to outwit a variety of woodland creatures in his quest to find food and shelter. Thanks to the tutelage of a master trapper, he learns the fur trade, and his exploits catch the eye of a pretty furrier; however, her merchant father demands that he bring in hundreds of dead beavers to obtain her hand in marriage. Jean sets out to fulfill this request – under the watchful eye of a pair of bucktoothed detectives – whereupon he stumbles upon a massive supervillainous plot.
BACKGROUND:
- High school best friends Cheslik and Tews worked together previously on Apocrypha candidate Lake Michigan Monster. The idea for Hundreds of Beavers was concocted at a bar during the 2018 Milwaukee Film Festival, where Lake Michigan Monster was screening.
- The film was shot near small towns in Wisconsin and Michigan over the course of 12 weeks, spread across two winters in 2019 and 2020.
- Some of the cast have found fame outside of film acting. Graves (the Furrier) has earned renown under the name The Witch of Wonderlust as a folk magician, travel blogger, and pole dancing instructor (the latter talent of which she demonstrates to great effect in a surprising moment in the film), while Tank (the Master Trapper) gained viral fame for his mid-pandemic video series featuring rap performances of Dr. Seuss books.
- Cheslik and producer Kurt Ravenwood put the total budget at $150,000, with a full $10,000 allotted to the purchase of the mascot costumes. All told, the filmmakers purchased 6 beavers, 5 dogs, 2 rabbits, one raccoon, one wolf and one skunk. (The horse costume, such as it is, is bespoke.) The vast number of woodland creatures on screen at any given time were courtesy of the film’s 1,500 visual effects, all composed in Adobe After Effects.
- Recognizing that selling the film to a traditional distributor would likely result in a cursory release before being dumped on video, the producers retained the exhibition rights and commenced a roadshow tour of festivals across North America, complete with live wrestling battles between Tews and a beaver mascot. They report that more than half of the $500,000 in box office receipts came after the film became available through video-on-demand.
- The film’s poster is modeled after the one-sheet for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
- Named to multiple “Best of 2024” lists, including the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. The movie took the prize for Best Narrative Film at the Kansas International Film Festival, while Cheslik was named Best Director at the 2023 Phoenix Film Festival. The film also claimed both of those awards at that year’s Wyoming Film Festival.
- The consensus pick by the writers of this site as the Best Weird Movie of 2024.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: From start to finish, Hundreds of Beavers is almost nothing but indelible images. After the zany animated prologue, there’s the silly running gag of surprise holes in the ice that turn out to be integral to the plot; every single appearance of an animal costume, including gay rabbits, overfed raccoons, and dogs playing poker; mascot guts; ice pond pinball; and so many groups of beavers that take the form of construction crews, a police force, and even a jury. There are no wrong answers. But nothing sums it all up quite like the sight of Jean Kayak on the run from the eponymous horde, his absurd raccoon hat flying off his head while innumerable human-sized Castor canadensis give chase. It’s an intentional borrow from Buster Keaton, solidifying the connection with the glory days of silent comedy and making good on the promise of the provocative title.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: The unhittable spittoon; Elementary, my dear Beaver
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: For a film that looks and feels like it should be a two-reeler from a hundred years ago, Hundreds of Beavers pulls off the astounding trick of using current-day, commercially available technology to assemble vintage styles and hoary-chestnut jokes into something new and entirely unexpected. Between Cheslik’s endlessly inventive microbudget solutions that result in an action film to rival a Fast and Furious entry (at .03% of the bankroll) and Tews’ gloriously full-bodied, rubber-faced performance, the elements are in place to build a tale of ever-escalating silliness and absurdity. Most of the time, you can’t really predict what’s going to happen next, and even in those moments where you might anticipate what is to come, it is accomplished with grin-inducing surprise and wit.
Trailer for Hundreds of Beavers (2022)
COMMENTS: Jean Kayak’s applejack distillery is called “Acme.” That Continue reading 51*. HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (2022)
CAPSULE: NUDE TUESDAY (2022)
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DIRECTED BY: Armagan Ballantyne
FEATURING: Jackie van Beek, Damon Herriman, Jemaine Clement, Ian Zaro
PLOT: A middle-aged European couple goes to a New Age sex resort in an attempt to rekindle their passion.
COMMENTS: Although it’s a romantic comedy, Nude Tuesday is also, more importantly, an experimental film. Unfortunately, in this case, the experiment amounts to nothing more than a gimmick. The idea is that the actors rehearsed the script in English and then, when it came time to turn the cameras on, delivered the lines in vaguely Scandinavian-sounding gibberish. Two sets of writers who were unfamiliar with the original script then watched the film and provided subtitles. (The one created by Julia Davis is the default track in the US region; one presumes the alternate track from Ronny Chieng and Cecilia Paquola is also available on the Blu-ray, although I can’t find confirmation).
Woody Allen once infamously re-dubbed a Japanese spy film to change the story to the search for an egg salad recipe. But it quickly becomes apparent that Nude Tuesday‘s constrained scenario doesn’t lend itself to such a dramatic reinvention, and nor will the writer try for the sort of meta-comedy (e.g. a narrator recapping the plot, fourth-wall break addresses to the audience) that Allen occasionally fell back on to liven things up. Without that, the result is that there is almost literally no line the dubber can write that couldn’t have been written in the usual way. In creating the new dialogue, Davis faces a lot of constraints: who’s in the scene, the length of the spoken lines, contextual requirements (is the character naked? Bleeding? Chasing a goat?) This means that the dialogue is always a slave to the demands of the scene as it’s been set up, and Davis has little actual freedom besides word choice. (She can, for example, make a preening Bjorn say the absurd line “I’m an eagle pimp with a bit of a grudge,” though a regular scriptwriter could have inserted that line anyway). Every reaction is so strictly dictated by the demands of the dialogueless script and the actor’s performances that there’s almost no margin for surprise; I can only think of one gag Davis was able to set up that wasn’t strictly set up by the situation (a joke regarding the bean supermarket aisle). To be fair, there’s also the fact that the finale is constructed somewhat ambiguously, so that there could be multiple outcomes (I wasn’t overly fond of the one chosen here.)
So, while it may have been a stimulating writing exercise for the dubbers, there’s no possible payoff for the audience. What we’re left with is an offbeat-yet-predictable sex comedy. The main attraction is Clemens, playing yet another narcissistic jerk deserving of a hearty comeuppance. The sex retreat’s rituals can be amusing, with orgasmic breathing exercises, strange loungewear and banana hammocks, lots of awkward overplayed sensuality, and of course, nude Tuesday. And the script throws in a mushroom trip for funsies. But none of it is anything you wouldn’t expect to see in a relatively competent indie sex comedy. It’s a bit like being sold a ticket into something that was promised to be a freaskshow, and passing through the curtain to find one lonely dwarf and a bearded lady who just needs a quick pass-over with an epilady.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Nude Tuesday AMAZON EXCLUSIVE [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41+B8mdylHL._SL500_.jpg)
- Amazon Exclusive!
- Contains an Amazon exclusive postcard.
- Behind the Scenes of Nude Tuesday
CAPSULE: PETROL (2022)
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DIRECTED BY: Alena Lodkina
FEATURING: Nathalie Morris, Hannah Lynch
PLOT: Eva is unsure of her film thesis subject until she meets a cryptic young performance artist named Mia.
COMMENTS: Petrol. Petrol. Petrol. (“Petrill?”) After twenty-four hours, I’m still chewing over this title, and how it relates to what I saw. It’s a slippery little movie, so perhaps that fuel’s slickness should come to mind. Alena Lodkina’s sophomore efforts defies easy description. It’s a character study, sure; it’s an exploration of filmmaking (our protagonist is a final-year film student); it’s got some inter-generational stuff going on. And it might just be one of those “coping with loss” kind of explorations.
But it’s hard to say. As Eva shyly navigates life—and the pursuit of a film degree—chance intervenes: first, when Eva accidentally comes across a performance arts troupe whilst traveling a cliffside with a small boom mic, capturing the ambient sounds; second, when she observes one of those performance artists dropping a locket in town. When Eva returns the locket, so begins her relationship with an enigmatic (and altogether Artsy) young woman named Mia, who by all accounts is “living her life” and, as evidenced by the narrative’s sometimes desperate indications, is a rather “deep” person.
Frankly, I didn’t find her all that deep; just young and a touch lachrymose—if perhaps occasionally whimsical. Kind of like this movie’s general energy. Magical realism rears its head at least six times. A finger snap brings a picnic spread into existence, pre-referencing a literary passage which appears later in the film; a couple of pertinent winks of the eye—one appearing from a coffee surface reflection—and strange “reflections” from behind make us question both Eva’s and our own perceptions. Who is Mia? What is art? What is film, in the context of art? Are we interconnected?
And so on. Petrol kept my interest, despite me neither knowing too well what was happening nor caring too deeply about it. Eva’s film professor is a highlight, his brief appearance a master class in diplomatic guidance as he civilly remarks that it’s important to have mastery of film rules and tropes before subverting them; and there’s her fellow student with his down-to-earth ambitions to make a movie about an abattoir cleaner contrasting nicely with Eva’s more ephemeral ambitions. But for the most part, Petrol feels like it’s running on fumes: it gets you to the destination, but not without the worry you’ll end up nowhere at all.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Petrol [DVD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41UVc3BF5qL._SL500_.jpg)
- DVD