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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: STATIC (1985)

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DIRECTED BY: Mark Romanek

FEATURING: Keith Gordon, Amanda Plummer, Bob Gunton, Lily Knight

PLOT: A quiet young man in a small Western town believes he has invented a machine with life-changing potential, if only he could find someone else who could see it operate successfully.

Still from Static (1985)

COMMENTS: Throughout the summer of 2001, buzz was building over a mysterious new invention codenamed “Ginger.” Mastermind Dean Kamen had impeccable credentials as an innovator, and his creation was being touted by some of the biggest names in business, but Kamen held details of the project in such secrecy that supposition and rumor ruled the day. A hoverboard, some speculated, or some other anti-gravity device. Or some suggested it was some new hydrogen-fueled form of transportation. The mystery and the hype fueled each other in an escalating cycle, so perhaps disappointment was inevitable when the true nature of Ginger was revealed: the Segway.

Ernie Blick (Gordon) is also an inventor with a secret, but despite lacking any of Kamen’s advantages, everyone feels his widely discussed invention is certainly real and likely to be a big success. In a way, he has none of the narcissistic personality issues we often associate with creators: he’s unassuming and unfailingly nice, good-natured despite the recent loss of both parents, deferential to others, outwardly humble, and unflappable even when being laid off from his job at the town crucifix factory. (It’s hard to imagine a more perfect locale for a film featured on this website than a crucifix assembly line.) He’d be just another one of those quiet guys in a loudly quirky town were it not for the amazing thing he claims to have invented.

Commencing spoilers: what Ernie has invented is a TV that relays images of heaven. Ernie knows this has the potential to change the world; he imagines Q&As with excited reporters that bandy about talk of Nobel Prizes. Ah, but here’s the rub: no one else can see the live reports from the great beyond. They get the same thing we do: the titular snow and hiss. Reaction is poor, Ernie is understandably crushed, and we’re left to wonder why anyone thought such an invention might be in his skillset.

Up to this point, Static has been a rather charming accumulation of surprises and quirks. Ernie’s possible girlfriend Julia (Plummer, in an uncharacteristically straightlaced role) is a disillusioned rock keyboardist—just because. Ernie’s cousin Frank (Gunton, charming in his gracelessness) is a doomsday prepper and a hostile street evangelist—just because. (He’s also terrible at small talk. Upon meeting Julia, he wishes her well by saying, “I hope your death is painless.”) Everyone’s a little offbeat like this, and it’s okay because that’s just the kind of town it is. But once the heavenly cable box is revealed and no one can see what Ernie sees, we’re confronted with the question of what it all means, and that’s when things go careening wildly off the rails.

Static is right on the edge of asking some interesting questions about the nature of faith versus proof, about the role of artists and creators in society, about tolerance for ideas outside the mainstream. But instead, the movie lurches into a scenario wherein Ernie takes a busload of senior citizens hostage in order to generate publicity for his invention. Admittedly, Ernie is just as affable a kidnapper as he is a diner customer, and the standoff has the humor and light satire we might expect from a British sitcom. But it ends just as terribly as you could expect, with bullets fired, everyone dead, and not a single lesson learned. It’s a bold choice, sure, but a cheap and cynical one.

Director Romanek has reportedly disowned the film as juvenalia, which seems unfair. The movie looks good and is well acted. It just has absolutely no idea what it wants to say, and therefore ends up saying nothing. Static serves as an interesting collection of “wouldn’t it be cool” notions, but ask yourself what happens during the time between when Plummer comes rolling into town and when she heads back out. It may look like there’s a lot going on, but cut through the snow and the noise and all you really get is a fancy scooter.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s always tempting to find a strange cult film all the more alluring if it’s hard to get to see it in the first place… Static serves up a near-surreal helping of small-town America just before Lynch himself had got to Blue Velvet, let alone Twin Peaks.” – Andy Murray, We Are Cult

(This movie was nominated for review by Wormhead. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: FREEWAY (1996)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Reese Witherspoon, Kiefer Sutherland, Wolfgang Bodison, Dan Hedaya, Bokeem Woodbine, Amanda Plummer, Brooke Shields,

PLOT: Teenager Vanessa flees foster care to go live with her grandmother and is picked up hitchhiking by Bob Wolverton.

Still from Freeway (1996)

COMMENTS: The tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” is known in the version set down by Charles Perrault, and later as one of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, but elements of the story date back to ancient Greece. (On the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index of folktales, it’s type 333.) It’s a sturdy trope, revisited many times over the years; we even found one version Canonically Weird. So to come upon Freeway, a modern-day take incarnation of Red and the Wolf’s perennial conflict, is not too surprising. What is different is the gusto with which the film embraces some of the darkest elements of our modern world.

Writer/director Matthew Bright brings two major twists to his take, both revolving around our perception of the heroine. Witherspoon embodies the guileless innocent of the fairy tale as a magnificent piece of white trash. Foul-mouthed and incapable of shame, Vanessa has stepped straight out of “Jerry Springer” and brought a bouillabaisse of lower-class tropes with her: her mother turns tricks, her stepfather is a layabout drug addict and molester, her boyfriend is a drug dealer, her cellmate is an emotionally immature lesbian, she takes down an aggressive Mexican girl to become the alpha of the detention facility, and she’s so illiterate as to barely be able to read the word “cat.” It is to Witherspoon’s credit that she never softens the rough-edges of her antisocial character, yet still earns our support. Vanessa is plucky, resourceful, and hews to a strict code of honesty and personal morality. Even in the face of danger, she refuses to be anything but herself. You don’t always like her, but you have to admire her perseverance.

This ties into the other twist that Freeway brings to the table: our heroine takes her fate into her own hands. No woodsman comes to her rescue; her boyfriend – named “Chopper,” natch – is unable to help her, and the police are unwilling, taking her at face value as a degenerate miscreant. (In fairness, her use of racial epithets doesn’t exactly endear her to the African American detective.) The only person willing to look out for Vanessa is Vanessa, and she doesn’t hesitate to take charge, escaping her social worker, crippling her attacker, and even staging a prison break. (She’s very funny showing up at a diner covered in blood and daintily asking for the washroom.) She is repeatedly punished for her initiative, because given the choice between a young woman who is hardened by her origins and an outwardly clean-cut school counselor who moonlights as a sexual deviant and serial killer, society is obviously going to side with the man. In this version of the fairy tale, the princess is all on her own.

Witherspoon is matched well with Sutherland, who makes a meal of his role by heightening all the different personas of the Wolf: false ally, malformed victim, gleeful sadist. Even though you’re never going to mistake Kiefer for a bleeding heart, he has a lot of fun playing up Bob’s false purity, so that when he does start to reveal his true colors, the over-the-top villainy makes sense as the other side of the coin. By the time he’s been maimed and emasculated by Vanessa, he’s become pure raging id.

As a character study, Freeway is pretty entertaining. As a story, it’s surprisingly conservative, holding tight to the source material. Some of the references feel fun and cheeky, but others are shockingly literal, from the basket that Vanessa totes on her journey to the disguise Bob dons to trick her in the film’s climax. That puts a lot of pressure on style to justify the film’s very existence. Roger Ebert, in his positive review, asserts his law that a movie is not about what it is about, but how it is about it. Ergo, Freeway is not about a girl who uses her wiles to elude a savvy killer, but rather about our insatiable hunger for lurid stories that confirm our suspicions that the world is a cesspool but there’s nothing wrong with us. For Ebert, that’s why Freeway works. The voice is perfectly attuned to the sensational subject matter.

Ironically, I would argue that all that is a major reason why Freeway is kind of a mess. It’s so focused on the satire, on replicating a child’s fable with a vulgar end-of-the-millennium veneer, that it never actually gets to be its own thing. Witherspoon is a delight to watch, but after a while, she appears to be a list of societal ills, not a character. It’s all about the stunt, and that’s distracting. Freeway’s engagement with the less privileged elements of society seems less about anger with the world’s institutions and more a prurient interest in the crude, the nasty, the tasty, tasty dirt. It’s clever, to be sure, but you end up wishing there was something more to it. All the better to watch, my dear.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a dark comic excursion into deranged pathology… plays like a cross between the deadpan docudrama of ‘Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer’ and the berserk revenge fantasy of ‘Switchblade Sisters.'”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “CinemaObscura.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)         

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE FISHER KING (1991)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Mercedes Ruehl,

PLOT: A guilt-ridden ex-shock jock discovers he has a tragic connection to a homeless man who believes himself to be a knight questing for the Holy Grail.

Still from The Fisher King (1991)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s not weird enough, although it has a couple of transcendent moments of magical Arthurian fantasy. As weird titan Terry Gilliam’s most popular and commercial (non-Python) film, it is an important touchstone in weird movie history, however.

COMMENTS: Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King starts out strong, as a karmic drama about creep disc jockey Jack hoist on his own petard of media cynicism. When Robin Williams appears as the junkyard knight Parry, attacking a pair of punks with a garbage can lid and the power of song, it briefly becomes a wacky comedy; then develops into a redemption fable as the relationship between Jack and Parry deepens. Magical realism appears in Parry’s Arthurian hallucinations of fiery knights riding through the streets of New York. These multiple tones actually mesh surprisingly well, until the tale goes errant into the Realms of Rom-com, from whence no sane plot emerges unscathed. It concludes with a happy ending that feels very un-Gilliam; the story requires a happy ending, but this one is too pat, too Hollywood. Maybe it’s all over the map, or maybe The Fisher King just has something for everyone; high drama and mythological touchstones for the art house crowd, comedy and sentimentality for the masses.

Plot and style aside, The Fisher King is an actor’s showcase, anchored not by headliner Robin Williams, but by the excellent Jeff Bridges as a self-centered Jack (a character who inevitably evokes Howard Stern). Bridges is slick and unlovable, admired by the public only for his outrageous cruelty. But because he suffers, and because his guilt is enormous and comes from a core that has not yet been drowned in the oily cynicism that engulfs the rest of the character, we root for him to reform. Williams, of course, is the Fool. Under Gilliam’s direction, he’s restrained so that his berserk improvisatory tendencies never overshadow the story and turn it into a Robin Williams vehicle. The comic still gets plenty of moments, both manic (a nude moonlight dance in Central Park) and mawkish (his romantic stoop speech to Lydia, in which he essentially confesses to being a stalker). Mercedes Ruehl is wonderful as Jack’s long-suffering girlfriend, a typical New York Jewish/Italian mutt in trampy miniskirts. This character, who has attached herself to a down-and-out ex-celebrity, could easily have come across as needy and pathetic, but instead she is strong, sexy and noble. She justifiably won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Of the four major characters, only Plummer disappoints, slightly, and that can be blamed on the screenplay rather than her thesping. Her super-quirky, clumsy love interest role is simply unnecessary, a distraction from the film’s important relationships between Bridges and Williams and Bridges and Ruehl.

Standout moments include the Red Knight rampaging through Central Park, a massive waltz in Grand Central Station, and in a cameo as a “moral traffic light.” Curiously, one of the stylistic inspirations for the film is the Hollywood musical. Williams breaks into show tunes throughout, a fellow homeless man dresses up like Gypsy Rose Lee and does an Ethel Merman song-and-dance number, and the words “the end” even appear in the sky above Manhattan lit up like a Broadway marquee. Though not a musical, that spirit of light fantasy bubbles through the movie, leavening some of the themes of mass murder, alcoholic despondency, and homelessness. Even though The Fisher King has a strong sense of purpose, stylistically it’s more than a bit shaggy around the edges. Perhaps that’s appropriate in a film featuring a madman, and perhaps that makes it more lovable in the end.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 “…a wild, vital stew of a movie… veers with great assurance from wild comedy to feverish fantasy, robust romanticism and tough realism–with only an occasional stumble.”–David Ansen, Newsweek (contemporaneous)