Tag Archives: 2022

Capsules

CAPSULE: FANG (2022)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Richard Burgin

FEATURING: Dylan LaRay, , Jess Paul

PLOT: Billy lives with his Parkinson’s-stricken mother; his dispiriting routine is interrupted by a rat bite which seems to catalyze an unnatural change in him.

Still from Fang (2022)

COMMENTS: Billy’s world is cramped. He sweeps a broom for nine bucks an hour on a crowded warehouse floor for Mr. Wolfson. After a short walk home, he can only look forward to his small apartment where he looks after his fading mother, Gina. On top of this dreariness, he is trapped inside his own mind, and is forced nearly every waking hour to pretend to know how to interact with all these callous normies he finds himself amongst. Daily, he faces patrician disregard from Wolfson and maternal fury from Gina. But he has a refuge.

More than ten million years in the future, the planet Graix is thriving, with wide-open spaces and a civilization descended from rats which were sent from Earth in the deep past, when a nigh-unlivable planet forced humanity into a “Noah’s Ark”-style gambit.  Billy has much more to say about this world, as it is his—the good part, at least. His mother’s caretaker, a young woman named Myra, thinks so, too. After his spiel, she looks at his drawings of this world and sincerely opines, “This is really cool.”

Richard Burgin takes great care and consideration in and for Billy’s character, and Dylan LaRay is to be commended for his spectrum-informed performance. But Burgin cannot be too kind to Billy. The protagonist’s small world looks smaller on camera, with furtive lens movements coupling with angled close-ups. The lighting is overcast. And every other character is performed, it seems to me, as slightly “too much,” as a way of capturing the daily bombardment Billy endures. (Even ignoring the confined Hell of his life with his mom.)

The supernatural element may or may not be real. We can be certain of two things: Billy is primed for a mental breakdown, and he is bitten by a small white rat. He witnesses down fur growing from an awful wound on his arm, and his hyper-perception (the foley in Fangs is not a comfortable experience) takes a tone more sinister than even his underlying circumstances should allow. While there is a facsimile of comic relief—in the form of a pair of warehouse co-workers, one of whom invariably talks about breasts, as well as a delightful scene with a zealous hardware store clerk—there is not much of it. And knowing the genre, the character’s perturbation (undiagnosed autism), the mother’s affliction (Parkinson’s disease, stage five), and observing Billy’s life in the first ten minutes, we know this will not end well.

That in mind, please take the “Recommended” notice with this warning: Fang is very painful at times; but its most painful moments are its most impressive. Billy’s encounters with his mother—sometimes with Myra bearing witness—tilt dismayingly between disturbing and sweet, cruel and caring. At times, all four, as when she condemns her boy in the most vulgar and harshest terms, and then on the heels of this excoriation mistakes him for his father and moves to seduce him. Fang is at its best when it is true to what it is at heart: a hushed, harrowing tale of mental disintegration. While some of its more overtly “Horror film” elements misfire, the genuine sadness of the son’s and mother’s experiences was enough to make me shudder.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A dash of body horror combined with a pinch of surrealism and a peck of psychological horror... Fang is a perfect midnight movie.”— Bryan Staebell, Scare Value (festival screening)

Fang

Fang
  •  
Check Price
Capsules

CAPSULE: THE PEOPLE’S JOKER (2022)

2 Comments

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Vera Drew

FEATURING: Vera Drew, Nathan Faustyn, Lynne Downey, Kane Distler, David Liebe Hart, Griffin Kramer

PLOT: While on the pathway to becoming an Anti-Comedienne extraordinaire, the People’s Joker confronts her troubled past and her chaotic present to attain self acceptance—and dethrone the domineering normies plaguing Gotham City.

COMMENTS: It possibly says something about me that, when Vera Drew mentions early in the film about her revelatory experience “seeing the world’s favorite orphan,” I immediately thought, “Annie?” But that doesn’t say what you might think. Because I have my particularities. So does Vera. So does everyone. This film is a personal anecdote, framed within a (veerrry) loose construct of plot. The specifics of the fictional battle are moot anyway, as whatever narrative through-line is there merely acts a metaphor. Do not misunderstand me, however: this is an effervescent experience, with swirling bubbles of pathos and confession perpetually subsumed with self-aware humor.

Vera Drew has made a stylish movie, and an all-too-uncommon one. Heavy use of CGI, saturation, and stop-motion—sections hark back to flash animation of yore—combine with trashy-classy costuming for the villains (comedians and misfits all), maintaining an unreal comic book tone from start to finish. We enter Harlequin the Joker’s (Vera Drew) world through a montage of fake, early-’90s-baked advertisements and talk show clips. Vera’s narration is with us throughout, as she provides her take on the tragic life she led until she became Vera Drew, or Joker the Harlequin, or, ultimately, just “the Harlequin”: an ambition vaguely sensed when first she saw a somewhat notorious superhero film.

The motley crew of disaffected snarks who assemble in “The Red Hood Playhouse” have their Anti-comedy acts (comedy proper, in this film’s world, has been outlawed), and Vera’s act evolves from rambling obtusities to huffing Smylex on stage and guffawing mercilessly as other performers recount their own tragic back stories. But this manages somehow not to be cruel, but instead self-deprecatory. She bonds through these confessions, as the film itself connects with the viewer as a confession of misery, and hope. Her awareness broadens—particularly when she begins her romantic involvement with Mr J, a trans-man—and as she copes, both diegetic and non-diegetically, we come to understand how she is able to look back with such a probing and smiling eye.

Among the many admissions in The People’s Joker, there’s a tiny, joking aside that struck me personally, but I shall keep that to myself. The larger point is that everyone has their own history, with their own desires forming and formed by it. Gotham is, of course, the real world, writ onscreen as a ian trash parade. Vera learns, slowly and painfully—but certainly—that we must deal with reality, starting with who we are ourselves.  Presuming someone is not harming others, you should accept how they wish to be; this can go a long way to preventing them from hurting themselves.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“a weird little movie that everyone’s talking about…very experimental and odd…”–Christy Lemine and Alonso Duralde, Breakfast All Day (contemporaneous, video review)

Capsules, Shorts

CAPSULE: GODARD CINEMA (2022)/TRAILER OF A FILM THAT WILL NEVER EXIST: PHONY WARS (2023)

2 Comments

 Godard, seul le cinéma/Film annonce du film qui n’existéra jamais: ‘Drôles de guerres’

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Cyril Leuthy

FEATURING: (archival footage)

PLOT: A documentary overview of the career of nouvelle vague icon Jean-Luc Godard, programmed together with a sketch for the director’s final, unfinished film.

Title card from "phony wars trailer of a film that will never exist" (2023)

COMMENTS: There have been a number of director retrospective documentaries lately: Dario Argento Panico (2023), Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer (2022), Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist (2020). These affairs are typically hagiographies wherein talking heads (usually other directors) sit around complimenting their comrades. Godard Cinema, originally made for French television, digs a bit deeper into its subject, and isn’t afraid to expose a few of Godard’s warts (his habit of literally stealing to finance his early films, his troubled relationship with first wife , his “inexplicable” decision to go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao). If there is an ongoing theme to Leuthy’s portrait, it’s Godard’s ultimate unknowability: early on, he observes that there are no known boyhood pictures of young Jean-Luc. Although, by the end, we understand why this free spirit did not quite fit in with his bourgeois family, the absence of much childhood biography reinforces the idea of Godard as a sui generis being who arises spontaneously in response to his time in cinema history.

If there’s one complaint here, it’s that, as an examination of a man’s life, the the pacing feels wonky. You may find yourself wondering how the doc is going to fit in the majority of Godard’s five-decade career when it’s already at the midpoint, and they’re not even through 1967. They aren’t; the doc rushes through the final 45 years of Godard’s life, spending only about 15 minutes on the entirety of his output after 1985’s controversial comeback, Hail Mary. Godard Cinema follows the commonly-accepted dogma (which this writer also endorses) that Godard’s vital movies were all completed in his first eight years of filmmaking, and that his work falls off an ideological cliff after 1968. The front-loading makes sense if you consider the documentary as an essay on film history, but as a complete biography of Godard the man, it falls short. But perhaps that’s why it’s called Godard Cinema and not Godard.

The main selling point to Kino’s Godard Cinema release may not be the documentary itself, but the supplement: “Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars,” the auteur’s incomplete sketch for a final feature. The piece is a skeletal outline for a work that would be, by all appearances, a very loose adaptation of the novel “Faux Passeports” by Communist artist Charles Plisnier. What we get, mainly, are a series of photographic collages, with Godard’s enigmatic handwritten notes scrawled on some of them (e.g., one reads “it’s your business and not mine to reign over the absence of…” The next phrase is blotted out by magic marker). Much of it is silent; other segments are scored to dissonant classical music. There is almost a minute of actual film, studies of a young actress wandering around smoking, overdubbed with Godard giving some background on Plisnier; later on, we hear what seems to be a dialogue rehearsal, read in both French and Russian. It’s impossible to guess what the final film might have looked like—did Godard intend to flesh it out, using these stills as an outline, or was it always intended to be a longer version of the experimental abstraction we see onscreen? It’s hard to imagine anyone but the most dedicated Godard scholar watching this “trailer” more than once, but it is an interesting artifact, a peek into a master’s creative process, and therefore worth a gander.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[Godard Cinema] provides an immersive exploration of his influence on both the celluloid world and broader cultural landscapes… TRAILER OF A FILM THAT WILL NEVER EXIST: PHONY WARS, the final work from Godard, emerges as a daring and inventive visual tapestry.”–Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews

Godard Cinema / Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars [Blu-ray]

Godard Cinema / Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars [Blu-ray]
  • An in-depth look at the career of revered French director Jean-Luc Godard
  • Includes Godard's final work, Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars
Check Price