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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BOXING HELENA (1993)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: (credited as Jennifer Chambers Lynch)

FEATURING: Julian Sands, , Bill Paxton, Kurtwood Smith, , Betsy Clark

PLOT: Unable to cope with his recent breakup with the temperamental Helena, surgeon Nick Cavanaugh finds himself caring for her at his house after a car accident.

Still from Boxing Helena (1993)

COMMENTS: I honestly don’t recall which was the bigger source of discussion when Boxing Helena hit theaters. Was it David Lynch’s daughter helming her first feature? Or was it the prospect of so much sexiness revolving around “Twin Peaks” bad girl Fenn? Some of it was probably the titillatingly taboo premise of a man so infatuated with a woman that he hacks off all her limbs and puts her in a box. (Spoiler: there is exactly one box in this movie, and it does not contain Helena.) But the bulk of the attention circled around the fact that Kim Basinger had to pony up nearly $4 million as recompense for breaking her contract to appear in the title role (and that was after Madonna had rejected it outright). Many of the negative contemporary reviews congratulated Basinger on getting the better end of the deal—and with 30 years distance, watching the film with clearer eyes, we discover that those critics were absolutely right.

We learn at the outset that Nick has been emotionally scarred from his youth, with a slutty mom who rejected him and left him hungry for love. So maybe it’s easy to understand what he sees in Helena: the apathy, the dismissiveness, the belittling condescension… who could turn that down? What’s not at all clear is what she ever saw in him. Within two minutes of arriving at Nick’s party, she’s stripped down to her negligee and cavorting in the fountain. It’s hard to argue that she leaves anything on the table.

One of our most iconic weird actors, Julian Sands, is either terribly miscast or horribly directed. This beautiful, suave man flounces about like an emasculated mockery of masculinity, whining and pining for a lost love that it’s not clear he ever had. But as pathetic as he makes Nick, Lynch goes to great pains to make him more so, with mournful closeups as he jogs and his puppy-dog fawning over her. Later, when Helena mocks his poor bedroom skills, his defensive retort is, “If you were a real woman, you’d lie to me about our sex.” It’s hard to know if Sands is in on the joke or just fully committed to Nick’s painful lack of self-awareness, but his despairing cry of “she’s leaving?” actually left me in hysterical laughter.

Fenn, meanwhile, has almost nothing to do. She begins the film peevish; the loss of her legs makes her angry, the loss of her arms moreso. Her shift to a needier, more empathetic character is motivated not by any change in her but rather as a means of bringing about a change in Nick, an especially odd choice given that a massive plot twist essentially undoes all of the “learning” we’ve witnessed. So this movie about handicapping and torturing a beautiful woman in order to satisfy a broken male ego can’t even commit to its own questionable choices.

Once you establish that the whole thing is an elaborate melodrama with no real point, you can start to embrace it as unintentional comedy, with ridiculous situations, thudding dialogue, and overheated acting. This is best exemplified by the amazingly entertaining Bill Paxton, who shows up as Helena’s occasional boytoy in a Nigel Tufnel hairdo, mesh T-shirt, and leather pants, as cocksure as a 12-year-old trying to buy liquor. The movie may believe in him (when he busts out a Benjamin in payment for information, it cracks on the soundtrack with a snap), but there’s no reason we should. Bragging about his manhood one moment, hiding in the bushes like a Peeping Tom the next, he’s always absurd. The moment late in the third act when he sees what has become of Helena is a masterful double-take, a magnificent piece of comic idiocy.

Boxing Helena could have used a lot more of that, because it is resolutely dumb but lacks the wisdom to recognize it. Young Ms. Lynch seems to think she’s created something bold and erotic and profound. That is an impulse that should be cut off.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I am probably prevented by some unwritten law from divulging the end of Boxing Helena. I can only say that, instead of adding an extra twist to this bizarre tale, it deprives it of what little point it had.”–Quentin Crisp, Christopher Street (contemporaneous)

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

Canonically Weird (The List)

323. CATCH-22 (1970)

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“You’re a very weird person, Yossarian.”–General Dreedle, Catch-22

“When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”–Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”

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DIRECTED BY: Mike Nichols

FEATURING: Alan Arkin, Martin Balsam, Jack Gilford, , , , Bob Newhart, , Paula Prentiss, , Richard Benjamin, , Charles Grodin, , Gina Rovere, Olimpia Carlisi

PLOT: The story is told out of sequence, but begins with Capt. Yossarian, an Air Force bombardier at a Mediterranean air base, being stabbed in the back by what appears to be a fellow soldier. This leads directly into the first of a recurring sequence of flashbacks where Yossarian tends to a young wounded airman in the belly of his bomber. Further flashbacks reveal a protagonist of questionable sanity in the company of equally insane flyboys, including a quartermaster who schemes with the Group commanders to create a black market syndicate that morphs into a fascist regime.

Catch-22 (1970)

BACKGROUND:

  • Joseph Heller published the absurdist comic novel “Catch-22” in 1961, based on his own experiences as a bombardier in World War II.
  • Orson Welles had attempted and failed to acquire the rights to the novel, a fact Mike Nichols was not aware of when he cast him as General Dreedle.
  • Catch-22 was Nichols’ followup to his smash hit The Graduate. He once again worked with screenwriter Buck Henry (who also played Colonel Korn here). The screenplay took two years to produce.
  • Filming (in Rome and Mexico) took more than six months to complete. Cinematographer David Watkins would only shoot the exterior scenes between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, so that the lighting would be exactly the same. This meant the cast and crew were sitting around for long periods of time with nothing to do, which led to resentment on the set.
  • Catch-22 is credited as the first American film to show a person sitting on a toilet, and the first modern Hollywood film to feature full-frontal nudity.
  • Second Unit director John Jordan plummeted to his death when he fell out of the camera plane while daring to film a flight scene without being strapped into a harness.
  • Although the film did not bomb at the box office, it was overshadowed by ‘s similar (but lighter and more realistic) M*A*S*H*.
  • George Clooney is producing a new adaptation of the novel as a six-part miniseries scheduled to air on Hulu.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The gruesome death of Hungry Joe, who’s cut in half by an airplane propeller while standing on a platform in the beautiful blue Tyrrhenian Sea.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Urine I.V.; offscreen portrait switching; friendly fire for hire

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Catch-22 was a novel of paradoxical, circular logic and inverted moral geometries. The certifiably insane Yossarian is saner than his schizoid comrades and commanders—but only because he is the only one who realizes he is crazy. The movie doesn’t soar to the heights of the book, but it creates its own weird all-star universe of moral decay and dystopian reasoning. There aren’t twenty-one other catches. One catch serves as a catchall. Catch-22. It’s the best there is.


Original trailer for Catch-22

COMMENTS: Adapting Catch-22, a novel whose building blocks are Continue reading 323. CATCH-22 (1970) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: BAD TIMING (1980)

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AKA Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , ,

PLOT: A woman is rushed to the emergency room; flashbacks explain the troubled relationship between a psychology professor and a free-spirited younger woman that brought them to this pass.

Still from Bad Timing (1980)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Extremely subtle weirdness + adequate Nic Roeg representation on the List already + shrinking available space (only 85 slots left at the time of this writing) make it a bad time for Bad Timing to come along. Had this review been written earlier in this site’s existence, this movie’s layers of mystery might have convinced us to shortlist it, but now we have weirder candidates waiting in the wings.

COMMENTS: Nicolas Roeg shows excellent, if somewhat deceptive, timing with Bad Timing. He feints that he’s about to give us a bittersweet meditation on a failed love affair, but instead probes ever deeper into a psychology of paranoia and obsession, using a subtly dislocating style to keep us off guard. Opposed dualities appear everywhere: male vs. female, rational vs. emotional, East vs. West, law vs. crime. The setup is classic amour fou, pairing successful academic Dr. Alex Linden with the hard-drinking, free-loving Milena. As the relationship is slowly revealed in flashbacks, we see the power balance between the two shift back and forth, as both parties become mired in an increasingly destructive relationship, in different ways. Alex appears coldly rational—Milena bitingly advises him to try to love her instead of trying to understand her—but his advanced training doesn’t inoculate him from human frailty; he’s as subject to jealousy as the next man, and when he falls from his logical perch, he falls hard, into a churning id.

Paranoia and second-guessing are the rule in Alex’s world. The ever-present Cold War background, which is seldom explicitly mentioned, aroused more paranoid associations at the time than it does now. Alex lectures his Intro to Psych students about how everyone is a spy, starting with children peeking on their parent’s lovemaking; later, it appears that the psychiatrist himself is being analyzed by the detective, whose intuition and experience may lead him closer to Alex’s essence than Freudian methodologies would. Alex’s nemesis is a source of mystery and paranoia, too. Harvey Keitel’s obsession with investigating what on the surface seems to be an open-and-shut suicide attempt is itself obsessive, and seems almost unmotivated (until a last minute revelation). Wearing a greasy mullet, Keitel doesn’t make the slightest pretense of being Austrian; I don’t think this is bad casting, but deliberate dissonance, a clue that his character is pure metaphor.

Art Garfunkel, on the other hand, really is bad casting, and his presence damages what could have been an unqualified classic. Roeg’s good taste in casting as an alien The Man Who Fell to Earth doesn’t carry forward here. Not only is Garfunkel a stiff in the acting department, but we’re asked to view him as a suave sex symbol, someone whose magnetism would ensnare the heart of a young woman who could have her pick of any stud in Vienna. Fortunately, an excellent, brave performance from the underappreciated Theresa Russell blows through Art’s inadequacies in their scenes together.

The finale is truly shocking, but well-earned. Also of note is the excellent soundtrack, featuring hits from , Billie Holiday, The Who, and Keith Jarrett. The difficulty of re-securing the rights to all of this music for home video release put Bad Timing out of circulation for many years. It was released to mixed reviews and big controversies: it was rated “X” in the U.S. (a commercial death sentence), and the U.K. distributor called it “sick” and had its logo pulled off prints. Although the film is better appreciated today (even receiving a Criterion Collection release), the furor over Bad Timing led to a perception of Roeg as box office poison. After starting his career off with five memorable films, the director’s career fell off precipitously in the 80s, with 1990’s adaptation The Witches marking a brief comeback to relevance.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“One of Roeg’s most complex and elusive movies, building a thousand-piece jigsaw from its apparently simple story of a consuming passion between two Americans in Vienna.”–Time Out London

(This movie was nominated for review by sometime contributor Eric Gabbard,  who pleaded “The odd juxtapositions and time shifts. It’s a definite weird candidate. Give it a chance.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)