Juan González and Nando Martínez, two swell fellows (“swellows”, if you will) hailing from across the waters, were delighted to première their latest feature on the North American continent for a receptive Fantasia crowd. The Fantastic Golem Affairs is a breezy, fun-time movie, which came as no surprise to this interviewer considering how fun-time the creative team behind it proved to be.
Two affable Irish filmmakers, George Kane & Shane O’Brien, took the time to talk with us about their collaborations, their projects, their backgrounds, their restaurants of choice, and, oh yes—their newly-shown-outside-of-Ireland-for-the-first-time feature film, Apocalypse Clown!
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DIRECTED BY: Yuval Adler
FEATURING: Nicolas Cage, Joel Kinnaman
PLOT: A father-to-be is waylaid at gunpoint while en route to the maternity ward, and instead spends the evening surviving his kidnapper’s increasingly odd and desperate outbursts.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Idiot that I am, my initial thought was, “Nah. This is exactly the kind of movie Nicolas Cage would star in these days,” only to recognize some moments afterwards that, oh yes, that necessarily means it’s a weird ride.
COMMENTS: There’s an honesty to Yuval Adler’s film. It’s in the title, where we’re told up front just what emotion to succumb to. It’s in the song playing under the opening credits, heralding both a plot point and a celebration who this movie is for. (Hint: it’s for you, but not just you…) And it’s in the first, murky appearance of Sympathy for the Devil‘s raison d’être, the old man himself, Nicolas Cage. This is a vehicle for weird cinema’s favorite high caliber nutjob, and it appropriately takes place in a literal vehicle. Sure, sure, there are some segues: an amusing gas station aside, an extended diner freakout, and a Dantean expository oratorio in a labyrinth of big rigs. But this is about Nic Cage, in a vehicle, with his red hair and red lounge-jacket and assorted weapons and intermittent Boston accent.
Knowing the star and the premise, you know whether or not you’re going to watch this already. But I would like to take a moment to highlight two ancillary, but still important, elements. First, allow me to share the good news. This is a deliciously gleaming film. In case you’re not aware, it begins in Las Vegas, and though driver and passenger leave the Strip early on, they bring the colors with them.
Cage’s “passenger” does the heavy lifting (never has red hair looked so doofy, frightening, and appropriate as in this movie), but the film’s palette does its share of overtime to complement the bright, bright shock above the his maniacal face: the cool blues recurring around the bamboozled driver; the dreamy electro-greens during an inspired performance of Alicia Bridges’ “I Love the Night Life“… Frankly, it’s a visual delight, particularly when the flames burst during Cage’s operatic rant.
Second, as you have probably guessed, is the bad news. But bad, well, that’s somewhat too strong. With an experience like Sympathy for the Devil, it’s borderline ungrateful to opine about the ending. We’ve had the pleasure of riding with a nutso Cage for ninety minutes, so damn the whys and wherefors! But an esteemed media colleague suggested that it may have been better—certainly more (which, we know, is a synonym for “better” in this case)—if the inverse had occurred. At the time I agreed, and still, for the most part, do. I got to thinking this past day, and began to wonder if there was any “ideal” way to wrap up this evening trapped in a car with Nicolas Cage. Presuming you can sink your teeth into his particular brand of ham, the only disappointing part is the meal’s completion. Mandy managed to end the dinner with a masterful touch of psycho-cutesy. But Yuval Adler just kinds of stops the car, turns the ignition key, and leaves us to wander off with a mere “oh, okay” after an evening of “oh dear Lord!”
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
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DIRECTED BY: Eddie Alcazar
FEATURING: Stephen Dorff, Karrueche Tran, Moises Arias, Jason Genao
PLOT: The development of a life-prolonging elixir brings humankind to the brink of collapse, until two celestial brothers conspire to subdue the potion’s creator.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: We were all waiting for Guy Maddin to make a David Cronenberg movie. That mash-up so far eludes us, but we do have Eddie Alcazar sliding this cocktail our way—with some further madness thrown into the mix.
COMMENTS: An exciting combination of feelings percolates within me. On the one hand, I feel immediately compelled to attempt a description of what just happened to my eyes and ears; on the other hand, a part of me advises waiting to see just how this mélange of influences and particular vision coagulate. Considering I will probably never know just quite what happened, I am erring on the side of catering to my enthusiasm, even at the near-certain risk of flirting with vague utterances of confusion and satisfaction.
Via the production-distorted lens of auteur Eddie Alcazar, we crash through symmetric dissections of something organic, flipping, sliding, and morphing before the motion stills somewhat, and the glass eye of a camera lens comes into view—a lens focused on Sterling Pierce, a brilliant scientist who has nearly perfected a product (and it is assuredly a product as much as anything else) dubbed “Divinity”, which promises not only to stop aging, but reverse its worst effects. So long as you do not stop consuming it. At some unclear retro-future point in time, we meet a cadre of nubile, leotard-clad women who oscillate between ephemera and physicality, and who we are told hold the key to rejuvenating the dying planet. Two small stars plummet to earth whilst Jaxxon Pierce (son of Sterling, and perfecter of “Divinity”) giddily fucks a groupie.
That description hints at a major caveat of sorts: we have seen this story and these themes before. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” plays a major part, particularly when Jaxxon is jacked-up with concentrated “Divinity.” His slow, extreme morph, and his well-intentioned genetic ambitions, also brings to mind the “ADAM” phenomenon from the “Bioshock” video game. Alcazar crams body horror through a soft-focus black and white, while the dark science plays reassuringly on cathode ray. Plutocratically dystopian advertisements whir us through societal developments, and we’re never more than a few seconds away from a shot of staggeringly buff guys (or in one favorite bit, a buff breakfast, in the form of “Flexi-Os.”) The whole narrative (minus flashes-back, some twenty-four hours of mysteriousness and revelry) rushes though a weird vein straight into our brain’s “What the…?” centers until the climax.
This melange catapults Divinity from mere Apocrypha Candidate into a worthy recipient of our coveted “Weirdest!” badge. While the first seventy-odd minutes are as much of so much as one might hope for, the finale destabilizes like a punch straight to the occipital lobe. A stop-motion show-down, cryptic symbology burning in the night sky, an exterior vaginal POV glimpse, and the emergence of an entity I have never seen before in my life left me with just one reaction (shared by most of the surrounding audience): a “hah!” of sheer disbelief. You know what I’m talking about. In case you don’t, hunt down Divinity. It’ll cure what ails ya.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
Vincent doir mourir
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DIRECTED BY: Stéphan Castang
FEATURING: Karim Leklou, Vimala Pons, François Chattot
PLOT: Vincent flees his humdrum city life when it takes a deadly turn as more and more strangers try to kill him.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: L’absurde et la comédie comme Dupieux, le commentaire social comme Godard, et un peu d’ultra-violence comme Romero? Une combinaison gagnante.
COMMENTS: Vincent’s boss had a dream: a horde of deer in an open field, his mother in a grand, flowing dress—just like she has in real life!—and a newly-grown pair of antlers. What could it mean? Vincent (Karim Leklou) doesn’t care; politely, he shifts the conversation to inquire who that new guy is. Boss tells him it’s Hugo the intern. Vincent jokes to the new lad, “Where’s my coffee?” It falls flat, and later that day Vincent’s face gets smashed by repeated laptop blows from the intern. It’s all very calm, and sets a comedic start ahead of the ratcheting horror to come.
Castang is one of those irritatingly sure-handed newcomers, having floored the audience at Cannes with his feature debut Vincent Must Die before shuffling it across the Atlantic to floor the Fantasia audience. Vincent’s journey from mild-mannered office jockey to prey is more of a shift in his bodily injuries than his behavior. Leklou conveys affable soft-spoken softness and sheer personal terror with masterful body language, apt facial expressions, and (almost) unfailing placidity.
The premise could well have been concocted during a night of one-upsmanship between Godard and Dupieux, with heavy references to Weekend and the quiet office absurdity permeating Keep An Eye Out. For reasons never explained, more and more people—strangers, friends, and even the damaged manic-pixie-dream-girl waitress, Margaux—cannot resist the urge to attempt to murder the protagonist, using whatever is at hand. Not long after his attack by laptop, a passing co-worker stabs Vincent in the wrist multiple times. And his boss, the fellow with the Buñuelian dream of antlers and mother, thinks it best Vincent spend some time away from the office. You know, to help morale. (Everyone’s been a bit tense.)
And the world has gotten tense. As we join Vincent during his internet delvings and late night drives through the French countryside, more and more plot snippets flesh out a growing problem. Castang explores fury and abandon, uncomfortably drawing our attention to a world becoming more and more unhinged. An understated absurdist comedy morphs increasingly into a febrile survival horror, spiked with the requisite French sex and deadpan. I laughed, I gasped, and I began eyeing a malfunctioning automatic door by the movie screen with more apprehension than logic should allow. But logic went out the door, as fear stole its way through the stunned crowd.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Divinity [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41y4nj5K98L._SL500_.jpg)