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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY (1968)

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DIRECTED BY: Elio Petri

FEATURING: Franco Nero, Vanessa Redgrave, Georges Géret, Rita Calderoni, Gabriella Boccardo

PLOT: After relocating to a run-down mansion in an attempt to recharge his imagination, a famous painter begins to suspects that the ghost of the previous owner, a beautiful young woman with nymphomaniac tendencies, may be endangering his sanity.

Still from A Quiet Place in the Country (1968)

COMMENTS: A filmmaker has to know what he’s doing when he opens a film called A Quiet Place in the Country with a cacophonous opening credit sequence, flashing snippets of famed pieces of art (which will be visually referenced throughout the film) to the sounds of percussive crashes from Ennio Morricone and the improvisational ensemble Nuova Consonanza. Sure enough, the only thing noisier than those titles is the mind of our protagonist, whom we first meet tied to a chair, nearly naked and surrounded by unnecessary electric appliances bought by his hot girlfriend. This ought to be a moment of supreme satisfaction, an introduction to someone at the top who is about to be brought low for our entertainment and edification. But Leonardo, the handsome and successful painter with money and public adulation and said hot girlfriend, is already in free fall. The point of the movie is to show how much further he’s going to go.

Nero plays a man in the grip of maddening dissatisfaction. He’s stricken with a drought of creativity; the works he produces are dissonant blotches of color, and he seeks inspiration in images of war, famine, and smut. His libido is barely under control: he molests women on the street (or imagines he does) and he greedily collects skin mags at the local newsstand despite knowing that Redgrave (arguably looking as beautiful and certainly as overtly sexual as she had ever been on film) is waiting at home for him. He’s desperately seeking something, and it isn’t until he comes across a decrepit mansion on the outskirts of the city that he gets anywhere close to figuring out what it is.

Did I mention that A Quiet Place in the Country is a giallo? The house contains a supernatural murder mystery, with the previous tenant allegedly gunned down during the war, but the townsfolk may be keeping some secrets about her, especially the old groundskeeper. Leonardo’s obsession with the woman leads him to have bloody, violent thoughts that he doesn’t do a great job of keeping in check. The threats only grow, while Leonardo’s grip on his sanity slips. He attacks a photographer, he terrifies his live-in housekeeper (although he seems to accept her absurd assertion that the young man sharing her bed is her little brother come to keep her company), and he grows ever more paranoid about his girlfriend Flavia. He dreams of her killing him, and sees visions of her everywhere he goes, often pushing him around immobilized in a wheelchair. By the time insanity erupts into violence, it seems inevitable.

Perhaps that’s what leaves me cold about A Quiet Place in the Country. Director Petri (whose work I have reviewed previously) has unquestionably put together an efficient piece of shock cinema with a highbrow veneer. But because Leonardo seems pretty unstable from the outset, there’s not really any suspense or surprise in his story. He’s like a jack-in-the-box: you know he’ll pop, and it’s only a question of when. And because we are rooted in his point of view, the twist ending loses a lot of its punch. Rather than recontextualizing all that has come before, it just reinforces the fact that we’ve been watching everything through the lens of a crazy person. That makes A Quiet Place in the Country an interesting piece of art, even unique. But it doesn’t linger. Once it’s through, we’re on to the next piece in the gallery.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…one of the weirder, more vaguely satirical contemporaries of Argento’s definitive Italian post-BLOW-UP giallo; it’s the brother, not the son, the cool uncle the Argento generation never sees anymore except on rare holidays when they can get away to visit him at the ‘funny’ farm… It defies expectations for a giallo while riffing on them in a deadpan absurdist abstraction that puts it more aligned with Spasmo and nothing else.” – Erich Kuersten, Acidemic Journal of Film and Media

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

A Quiet Place in the Country [Blu-ray]

A Quiet Place in the Country [Blu-ray]
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Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

KING OF PLUTO (2004)

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Sheila Franklin’s 2004 documentary, The King of Pluto (2004) focuses on the art of Michigan politico Mike Wrathell. From the outset, it is immediately apparent that Wrathell is a genuine oddball.  I say the film is about Wrathell’s art because it is not really about his life at all.  He and Franklin do not delve into the why of his art, what drives him, or where he came from and that’s just fine because this approach renders the film as quirky, vague, and enigmatic as Wrathell’s art.

Poster for The King of PlutoWrathell considers himself a Warhol-inspired dadaist who is obsessed with the planet Pluto.  He recollects that when he met president George W. Bush, he asked Bush to support a mission to Pluto.  Bush replied  “I’m going to send you to Pluto!”  Wrathell (in 2004) predicts the mission to Pluto will be a reality by 2006.

Wrathell’s art can be seen on film can be purchased there as well.  Wrathell’s silk-screen art, not surprisingly, often deals with Pluto, but he also covers celebrities, such as Maurren O’ Sullivan, John Travolta’s “Pluto Night Fever,” Ted Koppell as an Orwellian Micky Mouse, and Gilligan (as a Plutonian).  Wrathell also covers events and topics such as 911, images of Saturn, Venus, Neptunians, Blue Dracula, and why he prefers Martha Stewart to Barbara Walters.

Wrathell is a Republican and has run for various offices, unsuccessfully.  He tells us about buying a CIA baseball cap while he was in New York City near ground zero.  He buys it so potential terrorists will think he is CIA.  Or, they will think he is not CIA since an agent would not wear a cap reading “CIA”; or, a CIA man might buy a cap reading CIA to make us think he is not with the CIA, when in actuality he is.  Who knows?  But, on reflection Wrathell admits the cap was worth five bucks.

Still from King of Pluto (2004)He takes us to Burger King where he describes the perfect Whopper as having two tomatoes, or three, if you order extra tomato, which is what he orders.  Wrathell sits down with his Whopper and explains that it should have three tomatoes.  When he unwraps his sandwich, he discovers it to be a Chicken Whopper.  He returns the sandwich and hums, masking his displeasure, as they make him a new Whopper.  They do it right this time and the world is good again.

Back to the art.  Wrathell shows us watercolors on postcards and on lined notebook paper.  He has started a movement, he says.  It is the Ultra-Renaissance art movement, of which he is the sole member.

In the end, I am not sure who Mike Wrathell really is, but then I don’t know much about Pluto either, other than that the idea of it seems pretty cool, and that is good enough.  In the end, I would say Wrathell flies the freak flag high.  He is the kind of artist to sit down and have a couple of beers with, let him talk as you drink, and the more you drink, the better and better his talk sounds.  That is a recommendation.

Capsules

CAPSULE: SPIRAL (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: Adam Green and Joel Moore

FEATURING: Joel Moore, Amber Tamblyn, and Zachary Levi

PLOT: A gregarious young professional befriends a complex loner at work and unleashes

madness when she tries to unravel his convoluted personal secrets.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While Spiral tells an offbeat story, it contains no outstanding weirdness, aside from the very odd personality of the lead character and the bizarre nature of his relationships.  In fact, it is the straightforward way in which the story is told that is responsible for its hypnotic feel and impact.

COMMENTS:  Overcast Portland, Oregon locations grace this gloomy and grim, offbeat psychological suspense story about a deeply troubled artist.  Spiral spins the whorled, offbeat portrait of a lead character with an odd personality and  bizarre personal relationships.

Mason (Moore) is a painter working as an insurance telemarketer.  He excels at his job, maintains a nice bachelor pad, and despite his gross social awkwardness and timid appearance he has tremendous luck with the ladies.  In fact, he has had a succession of girlfriends who all pose for his oil and canvas portraits.

Despite all that he has going for him, Mason is tortured and confused.  A shy loner at work, he feels trapped in his overly bright, sterile, corporate cubicle.  The nervous Mason is coiled so tightly that he’s about to spring out of his skin.  To make matters worse, he is prone to asthma flare-ups triggered by extreme night terrors and panic attacks.

Mason harbors more than a few skeletons in his inner footlocker and they are especially grim.  Like malevolent phantasms, dreadful images of his past girlfriends twirl our of his dreams and splash across his conscience like spatter from a centrifuge.  Striking terror, these hit and run specters jar Mason out of deep slumbers, and slap him out of daydreams.  The experiences leave him in a cold, sweaty daze, scrambling for his asthma inhaler with a racing heart.

Mason’s only safety net is his cocky, but empathetic boss, Berkeley (Levi)—who is also his only friend and advocate.  Willing to act as Mason’s ad-hoc therapist, Berkeley is the closest thing Mason has to some much needed Xanax.  Suppressing Mason’s panic with a combination of good-natured ridicule and reassurance, he talks his frightened employee down like Rasputin hypnotically calming Czar Nicholas II’s hemophiliac son.  The effect is temporary, however, as Mason seems to be plagued not only by the serpentine hallucinations, but by a wide range of deeply seated personal issues, all indicating a winding, ganglionic tangle of dark, hidden secrets.

Berkely begins to find his role as counselor diminished when a bubbly new employee named Amber (Tamblyn) jumps on board and takes a shine to Mason.  Inexplicably attracted to the shy salesman, she is like a schoolgirl rescuing a baby bunny.  Intrigued by the dark enigma of Mason’s persona, Amber radiantly circles Mason, determined to unravel his helical psyche by patiently prying away at the repressed layers of his complicated personality.

Mason gradually warms to her efforts and finally admits her to his inner world.   Once inside, Amber wreaks havoc like a Trojan horse when she realizes too late that she has opened a Pandora’s box. But how genuine is Amber?  Is she really who she appears to be?  What does Berkeley know about Mason’s past girlfriends that he isn’t telling Mason?  And why the haunting visions?  As tensions reach the meniscus, unanswered questions brew a churning swirl of fantasy, reality and bedlam as Mason, Amber and Berkeley cross paths in a twisting maelstrom of truth and lies.

Crisp audio processing of the soundtrack compliments the high definition DVD release of this Santa Barbara Film Festival entry. Spiral is the directorial collaboration of Joel David Moore and Adam Green, who worked as actor and director respectively on the 2006 slasher film, Hatchet.   Spiral was co-written by Moore with Jeremy Danial Boreing.  Amber Tamblyn may be known to some viewers from her roles in The Grudge II (2006) and The Ring (2001).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Like an urban cousin of Jon Keder’s ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ as filtered through Edgar Allen Poe, the disturbed and delusional aspiring artist at the center of ‘Spiral’ promises much terror and delivers far less… Given the sheer weirdness of his character’s neuroses, Moore the actor tries to tamp down the urge for an over-the-top perf…”–Robert Koehler, Variety (contemporaneous)

Spiral trailer