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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FOUR ROOMS (1995)

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DIRECTED BY: Alison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino

FEATURING: Tim Roth, , Valeria Golino, Madonna, Ione Skye, Lili Taylor, , , David Proval, Antonio Banderas, Tamlyn Tomita, Lana McKissack, Danny Verduzco, Kathy Griffin, Marisa Tomei, Paul Calderón, Quentin Tarantino, Bruce Willis

PLOT: On a particularly crazy New Year’s Eve at a rundown Hollywood hotel, a harried bellman’s first night on the job is highlighted by the wild goings-on in the various guestrooms, including a coven of witches, a dysfunctional married couple, a pair of disorderly children, and a film director’s sadistic game of chance. 

COMMENTS: Every now and then, someone gets the bright idea to assemble an anthology film, bringing together a unique roster of top-flight directing talent. They’re almost never a success, financially or critically, but they keep coming back, and every age gets their turn. In the mid-90s, it was time for the young guns of the new Hollywood to join forces for a project set in a crazy hotel, and Four Rooms is the result.

All four filmmakers were coming off big successes, and while few people would ever look for common ground between, say, Gas Food Lodging and Desperado, it’s not completely impossible that the common setting and diverse storytelling styles could combine to make for an interesting melange. Unfortunately, all four seem to have settled on “unbridled chaos” as a guiding principle for their segments. It’s comedy by way of breathlessness, which is typically more exhausting than amusing. In addition, they’re counting on Tim Roth to be a unifying element, providing his own brand of untethered mania. Alas, they don’t seem to have checked in with each other on how they were using Roth, which means we really get four (and arguably five or six) different versions of Ted the Bellboy, a character developed via exquisite corpse.

The first story, Anders’ “The Missing Ingredient,” is a joke with no punchline. A collection of witches, ranging from glamour queen Madonna to crunchy granola Taylor, have gathered in the Hotel’s honeymoon suite to resurrect one of their sisterhood, lost to a curse years ago. By turning the whirlpool tub into a cauldron and adding such items as blood and sweat, they can restore her, but the only thing missing is naive babe-in-the-woods Skye’s assigned contribution: semen. The solution? Seduce the bellboy. And this is exactly what happens. Roth goes full-on Hugh Grant here, stammering and sputtering his way through Skye’s come-ons. He poses exactly no obstacle to the Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FOUR ROOMS (1995) →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FUZZY HEAD (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Wendy McColm

FEATURING: Wendy McColm, , Jonathan Tolliver

PLOT: Pursued by the police, Marla is dogged by memories as she attempts to get a grip on what happened after a fateful evening at her mother’s home.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Presented as a thriller, McColm’s intensely personal film explores guilt and inter-generational trauma in a style reminiscent of Lynch, Tarantino, Fincher, and even . Thus equipped with its own storytelling tool-kit, Fuzzy Head shifts gears faster than you can say “unreliable narrator.”

COMMENTS: From what Marla can piece together, her mother is dead. The fact that she has not slept in almost a week doesn’t help her understanding of the situation. It also doesn’t help that she’s faced years of emotional abuse from mom, interrupted by moments of emotional clarity and ineffable love. Marla’s own tragedy consists of her being forced to cope with oblique hints from her mother, “a woman who was never heard in her pain.” McColm translates the disorientation of “fuzzy head”—a semi-clinical condition whose symptoms include problems with focus, memory, and logic, often stemming from a sense of hopelessness, worthlessness, and guilt—onto the screen with intensity at times, softness at others, absurdity, despair, sympathy, and humor. All the while, they thread a narrative whose focus is woven from muddled tatters into a crystalline whole.

Blank asks Marla, “What happened to your mother?” Marla is screaming, flailing; Blank is her best—and only—friend. Marla wants to kill her mother. Perhaps Marla did. Police have questions, but not as the string of faceless therapists Marla endures as she attempts to discover what happened that one night, and what has happened her entire life. Her brain snaps back to a memory of triumph: firing a six-shooter into the air when she successfully rides her bicycle without training wheels. Her mother stands by proudly. Her brain snaps back to a memory of debasement: being forced to walk across the shards of a kitchen glass she dropped. Her mother stands by in disgust. Marla’s memories crash upon her as she navigates her life, waking up in a cheap motel serviced by a strangely insistent housekeeper. Memories mingle with present-day experience, and she doesn’t always know what’s real, particularly when interacting with Blank.

For those out there baying for symbolism, Fuzzy Head comes up aces. On her journey toward redemption, Marla’s dreams give her access the worst parts of her self and her experience. A sign to hang on her door for the maid. A key dangling from Blank’s rear-view mirror. The six shooter she buys back from a sympathetic local (“I think I killed my mother with that gun”, she admits; “Yeah, we all feel that way sometimes,” the seller replies). Lynchian touches include a theremin solo in an empty nightclub. Tarantino time-loops and snap-cuts keep up the pace. Fincheristic perception-humor takes the edge off when events become too stinging. And the cast of recurring, unreal-maybe-real personae bring to mind the continuous efforts of the guardian angels secreted in Jacob’s Ladder.

Fuzzy Head is a stylish and stylized film. Pondering the influences, Wendy McColm might be accused by some as being derivative. Not by me. As with just about any and all filmmakers, the methods they use are lifted (and altered) from those who came before. Indeed, the last “new” movie I remember seeing came out in 1991. The directors I’ve mentioned have developed a language of cinema for those of us who are frightened, disoriented, confused, and amused, and Wendy McColm’s second feature film shows an already mature storyteller finessing to convey “fuzzy head”: desperate sadness, acute loneliness, and traces of confused amusement. In so doing, McColm tells a decidedly personal story in such a way that spectators like ourselves can look on with satisfaction.

No word on Fuzzy Head‘s post-festival distribution plans at the moment; we’ll let you know when we know more.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a hauntingly beautiful and surreal exploration of childhood trauma… a strangely affecting and expressive feature with a heavy emotional core.” -Brian Fanelli, Horror Buzz (contemporaneous)