26 minutes of morphing cats and women chanting “meow”; you’re welcome.
Tag Archives: 2022
CAPSULE: THE DREAMS OF RENE SENDAM (2022)
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DIRECTED BY: Joshua Zev Nathan
FEATURING: Jake Smith, Sophia Savage, Darwin Luján, Becca Huerter
PLOT: A socially awkward poetry student pursues relationships with classmates which mix up in his mind with his dreams.
COMMENTS: Microbudget features require a different set of expectations from the viewer. Watching and appreciating them is a learned skill, not something that comes naturally to modern filmgoers accustomed to plots which are advanced by CGI as much as dialogue. Movies like The Dreams of Rene Sendam, therefore, aim at a niche audience. You need to be able to handle a minimalist presentation and develop an appreciation for what filmmakers can accomplish with little means. These films offer their audiences not spectacle and diversion, but authenticity and passion. Even when they don’t entirely succeed, I often develop a soft spot for them simply because they have more personality than big budget, focus-grouped features developed with corporate blandness. Such is the case with The Dreams of Rene Sendam.
Rene Sendam is a character study/romance infused with the spirit of poetry—in the wispy, hazy, undergraduate free verse mode. The main character is a poetry student, trying to pick up other poetry students in poetry class while we hear lectures and verses from a poetry professor. Unfortunately Rene, while quietly handsome and a sensitive soul, is so shy and awkward that he gives off creepy stalker vibes. His only friend is religious zealot Jim (Darwin Luján, who gives the film’s best performance, taking a word association game to apocalyptic lengths). As Rene wanders through the film writing poetry, he searches for what he really wants—love—as occasional surprising bouts of nudity and sex interrupt the proceedings.
Despite featuring in the title, Rene’s dreams aren’t much integrated into the film’s artistic framework. The fact that he sometimes (rarely) has vivid dreams that we are privy to is just a character trait, like bushy eyebrows or a love of houseplants. Although the logline brags that Rene’s “dream world threatens to rupture reality and put his friend’s life in danger,” the unruptured reality is that the simple love story that the script wants to tell could easily be rewritten to omit the brief flights of fantasy without changing anything. Unlike a low-budget feature like Strawberry Mansion, the microbudgeted Rene Sendam has no money to create dream sequences, so we get simple hallucinations like dinner served on a beach. This movie’s dreams are so like its realities that there’s little ambiguity to the proceedings.
Like its protagonist, Rene Sendam always has good intentions, even if it doesn’t always deliver on them. To its credit, its dramatic scenarios have enough variation to keep you reasonably engaged. Ultimately, however, the film lacks the budget to realize its purposelessness.
Trivia/disclosure: a 366 Weird Movies writer worked as crew on this movie and appears as an extra. I was not aware of this fact until after it had been selected for review. It is available for purchase, or try it for free on Tubi.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MOON GARDEN (2022)
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DIRECTED BY: Ryan Stevens Harris
FEATURING: Haven Lee Harris, Augie Duke, Brionne Davis
PLOT: Trapped in a coma, 5-year-old Emma must find her way to her parents while avoiding the insatiable maw of a hollow fiend.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Colors have rarely looked so beautifully “off” as they do in the Moon Garden, and that’s just the start. Making respectful nods to the likes of Svankmajer, Gilliam, and other luminaries, it would be remiss to bury this as a capsule. It is a dark, vibrant movie for children—and a perfect gateway into weird cinema.
COMMENTS: Moon Garden …
No… no. Please give me a moment, as I need to collect myself. This film may just as well have been made with me in mind. It is dark, but accented with beautifully saturated colors; the frame is almost constantly littered with broken oddities; the pacing is brisk but never rushed; and it features one of my favorite storytelling archetypes: the fearless little girl. With the help of several ideal influences, Ryan Harris has crafted a contained little marvel of a movie, showcasing considerable creativity and an impressive performance from a wide-eyed newcomer, his own daughter Haven.
Family strife hits quickly, as young Emma is woken before dawn one morning by her mother, Sara, so the two can “chase the sunrise.” Bundled into the car, their would-be escape is thwarted by the girl’s father, Alex. Emma plays on the stairway while her parents argue, ultimately escalating to a blow-out fight. Emma interrupts them with her own fury, and storms out of the room, right down the stairs, crashing to the bottom, and falling into a coma. This is where the real story begins.
Moon Garden was filmed with vintage camera lenses, on expired 35mm film stock. Through these damaged goods, Ryan Harris encases the narrative in a fuzzy/glossy bell jar through which we observe the subconscious action. Flashbacks to happier times interrupt Emma’s journey through her mind; but as the memories grow more recent, domestic strife grows more prominent. She is also interrupted by glimpses of the world outside her mind. Mostly, though, she is interrupted by an entity I’ve dubbed “the Mouth Man.” This voidful creature inflates from a nothingness after Emma’s tear travels down a creaking network of pipes to a sub-subconscious netherworld, her mind’s dark and creepy basement.
Anyone familiar with Gilliam’s Tideland or Svankmajer’s Alice will immediately appreciate the parallels with Harris’ film. Emma’s dream quest is hindered by the Mouth Man, but aided by a kindly musician, who gifts her the portable transistor radio she uses to pursue her parents’ voices. And her fight against darkness is mirrored by clues about her mother’s battle with depression, and her father’s battle facing the melancholy—and apparent irrationality—of someone whom he dearly loves. Moon Garden is a serious film filled with equal parts wonder and fear. It also ends at the perfect moment, on an eye-opening shot. In some ways, admittedly, the story mimics the most pedestrian of Hallmark Channel tearjerkers. That Ryan Harris (alongside his daughter Haven) render this experience a beautifully scary journey, is commendable. But it is the curious clatter of mystical symbols and set-pieces that make Moon Garden an alluringly strange delight.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: LINOLEUM (2022)
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Linoleum is currently available for VOD rental.
DIRECTED BY: Colin West
FEATURING: Jim Gaffigan, Katelyn Nacon, Gabriel Rush, Rhea Seehorn, Roger Hendricks Simon
PLOT: When a rocket crashes in his backyard, failed children’s TV-show host Cameron decides to rebuild it; meanwhile, a lot of strange, inexplicable things are happening in his suburban town.
COMMENTS: Linoleum has a lot going on in it, and for a while you may get the sense that it has bitten off more than it will be able to chew. The core story follows Cameron, who once wanted to be an astronaut but has settled for a career as an astronomer-cum-children’s show host, and whose long-running Bill Nye-esque science program has just been shifted to the midnight time slot. It also spends a lot of time following his daughter Nora, who’s a fashionably lesbian outcast until the new boy in town makes her question her sexual identity. There’s also Cameron’s wife Erin, who’s debating her own career choices and her choice of mate, and Cameron’s father, who’s in memory care with dementia. And there’s the new arrival in town, Cameron’s doppelgänger, who crashes onto the scene in a red convertible in miraculous fashion. A lot of weird, reality-defying events happen in this suburban town in an unspecified VHS-era time period, much of it precipitated by the rocket capsule that crashes in Cameron’s back yard. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out Linoleum‘s numerous, deliberate Donnie Darko nods, from the FAA-baffling aeronautic MacGuffin to the mysterious old woman hanging around on the periphery to a climax occurring at a Halloween party. So, yeah, there’s a lot going on; to the script’s credit, it’s all eventually explained by the (guessable, but not obvious) ending twist.
Colin West’s third feature film sports capable direction, helped along by a solid cast of indie movie vets. But most of the film’s publicity and buzz rightly centers around stand-up Gaffigan’s unexpected thesping. Although he doesn’t quite sink his wholesome reputation—Cameron is likable, if a bit of a wimp—he does stretch in his secondary role as Kent Armstrong, who brings a different and darker energy. Kent is cocky, and he treats his son with a military dad’s disciplinary philosophy. He’s both a better (younger, more competent) and a worse (less empathetic) version of Cameron. Gaffigan differentiates the two parts nicely, making a strong case he should be considered for more dramatic roles.
There’s a lot to praise in Linoleum, and yet, for me, it doesn’t entirely launch—and I’m not really sure why. The plot mechanics work; the twist satisfyingly ties things together (presuming you prefer things tied up in tidy packages). But the scattered critical reception it received, ranging from raves to confusion, suggest it failed to land universally. Cameron looks at the tangled mess of wires and unknown components he’s gathered from the capsule wreckage and wonders how he’s going to assemble them into a functional rocket. An early trial of the boosters starts with nothing, followed by a gradual growing power-up, followed by disappointment. So even though the assemblage works, it doesn’t work exactly as intended. This is not quite the proper metaphor for my experience of watching Linoleum, but it comes close. On the plus side, Linoleum has a gentle, Gaffiganesque charm and a resolution that tugs on susceptible heartstrings. So although it falls short of a general recommendation, if you are looking for the unusual combination of a puzzle movie with a tearjerking element, I’ll understand if you value this film highly.
No idea why it’s called Linoleum.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
366 UNDERGROUND: TRIPLE TROUBLE (2022)
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DIRECTED BY: Homer Flynn, The Residents
FEATURING: Dustin York
PLOT: After a crisis of faith, a priest (and son of a deceased member of the Residents) becomes a plumber and goes insane as he is consumed by his theory about a fungus-led conspiracy.
COMMENTS: “Junior” is an ex-ponytailed skateboarding priest who’s lost his faith and become a plumber. His mom just died. His only friend is a malfunctioning A.I. drone. He finds semen-like fungus clogging up every drain he services. He sometimes sees the ghost of his dead father, a former lead singer of the Residents. From his cell phone, the news blares about a Night of the Living Dead style plague striking white people in prisons and meat-packing plants. So his life is pretty full. His main hobby is theorizing about the omnipresent fungus and its possible lunar origins, but Junior obsesses over many things: a kidnapping from his past, a local radio tower, the nice Wiccan girl he has a crush on, the unusual number of white vans in his neighborhood, and the Residents’ unfinished movie “Vileness Fats.” And every now and then he finds himself drawn into short dream sequences featuring dancing eyeball-headed men.
Yes, the Residents’ Triple Trouble lays a strong claim to weirdness, as one would expect from a movie proffered by a band fronted by giant eyeballs. A lot of the experimental video work, featuring spinning backdrops and the mini video-art dream sequences, is cool. Scraggly Dustin York does fine enough, acting most of the time alongside disembodied voices (partly a function of the pandemic-era shooting schedule). But, unfortunately, the project as a whole never comes together, or goes sideways in a truly interesting manner. It’s inspired by a combination of lockdown paranoia and Residents nostalgia, but nothing coheres thematically; its 90 minutes don’t seem to be about anything much in particular. The plot eventually unwinds as a portrait of a delusional schizophrenic, an approach which feels lazy and almost anti-cathartic. (In another disappointment, there’s little actual Residents music on the soundtrack; no full-fledged songs, just snippets of the kind of incidental accompaniment you’d find in any similar indie project.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, Triple Trouble is aimed at an audience who are already fans of the band—it’s obviously full of in-jokes and references your reviewer missed (along with a few he caught). Whether the resulting concoction intrigues the novice enough to hunt down more from the Residents in a vain quest to understand what it all means will vary from person to person.
To a large extent, the backstory behind the making of Triple Trouble is more interesting than the finished project (as well as helping to explain its air of, um, unevenness.) Director and Residents co-founder/current spokesman Homer Flynn embeds a lot of the band’s lore into this project, starting with both references to and actual footage from “Vileness Fats.” “Fats” was an elaborate unfinished avant-garde video project about one-armed dwarfs, conjoined twins, and dirty laundry, shot on sets aping The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which the band worked on for four years in the mid-1970s, shooting fourteen hours of footage before abandoning it to the dustbin. Triple Trouble also rests on the bones of Double Trouble, a planned Residents feature which Don Hardy began shooting in 2016, which shut down in 2019 after the death of Gerri Lawler (who plays Junior’s mother). The color flashback footage in Triple Trouble featuring Junior as a priest comes from that half-completed film. Perhaps sensing that working for years on unfinished projects was getting them nowhere, the Residents shot the remaining material that makes up Triple Trouble in ten days. So if Triple Trouble seems a little cobbled-together, Residents fans can at least rejoice that the stars finally aligned for long enough to bring a movie to completion.
The 2023 Blu-ray offers some interesting supplements. There are four deleted scenes (one of which should have been included in the film, as it outlines Junior’s conspiracy theory in relatively lucid detail) and a blooper. It also includes trailers for Triple Trouble, the original teaser for Double Trouble, and a promo for the Residents’ performance of “God in 3 Persons Live.” The disc sports a reel of unused stop-motion animated footage from “Vileness Fats” (I don’t know whether this has appeared elsewhere). The most significant extra is the 17-minute long “Vileness Fats Concentrate,” a short which gives you a good sense of the pretentious, unhinged wackiness that the unfinished project might have been. “Concentrate” had been released before, but presumably this 2022 “remaster” is higher quality. Residents completists will obviously be all over this like fungus on a drainpipe.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: