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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE GREAT MCGONAGALL (1975)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Julia Foster, John Bluthal, Victor Spinetti, Valentine Dyall, Julian Chagrin, Clifton Jones

PLOT: William Topaz McGonagall, renowned by history as one of the worst-ever practitioners of the art of poetry, recounts his eventful life and demonstrates his inability to distinguish fact from both faulty perception and flights of imagination.

Still from The Great McGonagall (1975)

COMMENTS: Scotsman William McGonagall, poet and self-declared “Knight of the White Elephant of Burmah,” has a sterling reputation as a butcher of words without peer. Works such as his bathetic salute to “The Tay Bridge Disaster” have survived over the decades because of their fierce dedication to repetitiveness, disdain for meter, and tendency toward rambling distraction. He is an avatar for the so-bad-it’s-wonderful crowd, on the shelf alongside Florence Foster Jenkins and Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Spike Milligan is also a British hero, although more intentionally, known as a destroyer of comedic conventions. (His spontaneous takedown of an intended tribute from Prince Charles brought down the house in a room full of Britain’s leading comic lights.) His work on “The Goon Show” is deeply influential, with professed fans ranging from the members of to Eddie Izzard to all four . Despite this, Milligan was never a bona fide star on the level of his old pal Peter Sellers, and his ingrained outsider status (born in India to an Irish father) ensured that he could never attain his country’s highest honors. So perhaps it’s not surprising that this serial puncturer of British pomposity would find some affinity with an artist who made the very upper echelons he hoped to enter look foolish .

And that right there is me putting approximately the same amount of effort into researching this review as Spike Milligan did into prepping for the film. It’s not as though anyone would think Milligan was attempting to perpetrate a proper biography on the public; the goal is obviously jokes and nothing but. Nevertheless, The Great McGonagall is a notably slapdash affair, feeling more like someone gave the improv suggestion “William McGonagall” to a troupe at the Edinburgh Fringe, rather than any real attempt to mine the man’s life for material. Most of the acting company takes on multiple roles throughout the film, and Milligan frequently literalizes the staginess of the production like scenes from a music hall revue, complete with an easel advertising the next act. One has to marvel at the laziness of the enterprise, given that this is an actual motion picture featuring two authentic British comedy legends. They could, you know, try a little.

Milligan offers two modes of joke-telling: non sequiturs, and extensive riffs on the trope of the penny-pinching Scotsman. The former gives the film some of its air of oddness; whenever logic dares to show up, it is quickly stomped out. For example, Prince Albert is notably German, but in Milligan’s hands, he becomes a flat-out pastiche of Adolf Hitler, and so naturally a dance scene is accompanied by an orchestra made up entirely of Hitlers. Or consider the curious case of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who first appears after McGonagall haughtily compares himself to the acclaimed poet; Tennyson pops in to say that he really can’t be bothered right now, as he’s in the middle of a vigorous session of lovemaking. He’ll show up later (initially alongside five Tennyson impostors) to extol the virtues of McGonagall’s poetry while simultaneously stripping down and climbing into the dying Scotsman’s bed alongside a Zulu chieftain. It is unequivocally strange. It’s not especially funny.

Milligan and McGrath’s wandering tale goes furthest off the reservation when appealing to the softcore porn producer who pumped some conditional cash into the film’s budget. Why else would a totally nude dancing woman pop up in McGonagall’s cell in debtors prison? Why intercut McGonagall’s imagined courting of Victoria as a benefactor with a naughty threesome? Of course it doesn’t make sense. The disconnect is the joke. By that standard, it’s a great success, but not an especially edifying viewing experience.

The film has a laudable and unwavering dedication to deadpan performances. Sellers plays it completely straight as Queen Victoria, quietly assuring all who don’t recognize her that “I’m very big in England.” As McGonagall’s long-suffering wife Foster hits all the notes for a sweet, silent, and supportive spouse, even while her husband’s deathbed doctor keeps propositioning her. Perhaps the surest sign of the cast’s commitment is the uproarious mocking laughter that greets McGonagall’s poetry recitals. The sheer cruelty of the response produces the last thing one would expect, and the most dangerous to this kind of comedy: pity for Milligan and his otherwise blissfully ignorant hero.

That points to what gets horribly lost in this ersatz biopic of William McGonagall: McGonagall himself. Milligan uses some of the man’s actual poetry, but it’s so scattered and mixed in with all his other pretensions that you never get a sense of why anyone, McGonagall included, thought he could write, other than blinkered delusion. The most interesting joke–the poetry—was handed to the filmmakers on a silver platter, and they divest themselves of it whenever possible, depriving Milligan of a guaranteed platform for extended silliness. Instead, he’s just a master of ceremonies overseeing a parade of weirdos who are weird for weirdness’ sake. It’s a real waste. No McGonagall. No Milligan. Just a mess.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Obviously low budget, it’s like a bizarre vanity project for Milligan, and includes many of the obsessions that would appear on his Q television series, such as Scotsmen in kilts, Adolf Hitler, custard pies in the face and false noses. Is it funny? It’s certainly strange.” – Graeme Clark, The Spinning Image

ADDITIONAL LINK OF INTEREST: 

Socioeconomics journalist Tim Harford examines the life and career of the real William McGonagall on his Cautionary Tales podcast, floating the theory that the poet was in on the bit, and that the terrible poetry was actually an elaborate ruse to keep his career afloat.

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

The Great McGonagall

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    It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BROTHERS OF THE HEAD (2005)

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    DIRECTED BY: Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe

    FEATURING: Harry Treadaway, Luke Treadaway, Tania Emery, Jane Horrocks

    PLOT: Conjoined twins Tom and Barry are conscripted into show business by an unscrupulous promoter who plans to make them into gimmicky pop stars, but they follow their own path, becoming punk rock pioneers.

    Still from Brothers of the Head (2005)

    COMMENTS: The original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker (who were, in fact, born in Siam, present-day Thailand), were a sensation from the moment they arrived on American shores. For a decade, they toured the country shocking audiences with the horrifying wonder of their physical connection. Their private lives were the subject of public fascination: they married a pair of sisters and fathered 19 children between them, fueling speculation about the physical and moral gymnastics required to accomplish such a feat. They kept slaves until the Civil War, returned to touring to rebuild their fortunes after the war, quarreled with P. T. Barnum, and eventually died within hours of each other.

    I was starting to think about how much the plot of Brothers of the Head paralleled the tale of the Bunkers, when the film came right out and made the comparison itself. The Howe boys hold up a picture of their predecessors in conjoined fame, noting the similarity of their situations, and when they did, my heart sank a little. Far from pre-empting any protests, it solidified my fear that this story of shocking originality—conjoined twins become rock stars—was only going to walk down well-tread paths.

    Brothers of the Head takes the form of pseudo-documentary, unspooling the short but eventful professional lives of the twins through a series of I-was-there talking head interviews and a remarkably deep treasure trove of archival footage. It’s delivered with a high degree of authenticity, which is not surprising considering the nonfiction pedigree of directors Fulton and Pepe, who helmed two different Terry Gilliam making-of documentaries, including Lost in La Mancha. But it also puts the central characters at a level of remove, ensuring that we can never know them except through the interpretations of others. And that choice ends up causing the most damage to the film’s credibility, because it means that any point the filmmakers want to make must be delivered with skull-crushing obviousness. Suggestions of impropriety by the boys’ handlers are conveyed through nervous tics and unsubtle hints. The arrival of a pretty girl to drive a (metaphorical) wedge between the brothers is endlessly dissected by present-day commentators with 20/20 hindsight. And were you wondering if Tom and Barry were working through their troubles via their songs? If the glaring transparency of the lyrics doesn’t tip you off, then the latter-day interviewee observing “Now what do you think that was all about?” with a cockeyed glare should Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BROTHERS OF THE HEAD (2005) →

    Capsules

    CAPSULE: THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD (1993)

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    DIRECTED BY: François Girard

    FEATURING: Colm Feore

    PLOT: A patchwork of short vignettes explores the allure of the eccentric piano virtuoso.

    Still from thirty two short films about glenn gould (1993)

    COMMENTS: I discovered my all-time favorite recording, Glenn Gould’s complete “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” and François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould at about the same time. I can’t definitively remember which I encountered first: my guess would be Girard’s film, because it is such an effective advertisement for Gould’s genius that it seems likely to have inspired a purchase. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that I saw there was a film out about this marvelous pianist who accompanied his nimble fingers with ecstatic spontaneous humming,  breathing humanity into Bach’s precise baroque miniatures, and knew I had to learn more about this man. I do know that Gould’s “Clavier” was reissued in on CD in 1993, likely to coincide with this film, and I love to imagine I actually picked up that set from Tower Records and rented a VHS of Thirty Two Films from my local mom and pop video store on the same weekend in 1993 or 1994.

    The movie does what it says on the tin (although some might object to calling the closing credits a “short film.”) The sequences break down into four main categories: documentary-style interviews with friends and co-workers, dramatic reenactments of events in the pianist’s life, adaptations of Gould’s own works, and abstract experimental sketches. The interviews are illuminating, and give the film its hybrid documentary character. The dramatic scenes form the bulk of the movie. They follow in a roughly chronological format, but do not tell a continuing story: each is a standalone vignette. Memorable moments show Gould corralling his hotel chambermaid to listen to his hot-off-the-presses LP and the Gould mesmerized by contrapuntal conversations he hears in a diner. A performance of “String Quartet, Opus 1,” one of his few original compositions, an excerpt from the word collage “The Idea of North,” and a dramatization of a portion of his puckish essay “Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould About Glenn Gould” ground us in the legend’s actual creative output. The experimental shorts constitute the most intriguing category, although there are only five or six of them (considering how you count). They include closeups of Gould’s own CD318 piano in action, hammers striking the soundboard, illustrating the physical geometry of the sonic construction; a scene of Gould playing the piano in x-ray vision; and “Gould Meets McLaren,” a 1969 animated short (originally entitled “Spheres”) that shows globes popping into existence, dancing symmetrically across the screen, and dividing like eggs undergoing musical mitosis as Gould plays a Bach fugue.

    I once defined bopic as “a movie genre that’s not accurate enough to be documentary or interesting enough to be fiction.” One of the most formulaic and cliched film formats, the celebrity biography only really works when it is heavily fictionalized, as in Amadeus or Lisztomania (which, coincidentally, both involve classical musicians). Thirty Two Short Films shatters the mold of this generally insipid movie genre. There are enough talking head reminiscences to capture the spirit of the man, but not so many that it appears lazy. Girard solves the genre’s central problem—the fact that messy human lives rarely fit neatly into three act structures with unified themes—by ignoring narrative almost entirely. This collage portraiture method captures its subject more faithfully than a “realist” approach would. When we think back on people we know, we recall them as a collection of moments and characteristics; we don’t think of them as a contiguous life story. Glenn Gould was the piano prodigy and the hypochondriac and the man who went everywhere wrapped in a coat and gloves and scarf and the man who called up his friends late at night and talked their ears off and the virtuoso who developed a hatred for performing and the monster who put ketchup on his eggs and the genius and the possibly asexual hermit. He is at least thirty two separate stories, and this seemingly chaotic collection of vignettes creates a portrait of a real person far better than a tick-tock chronology or a forced storyline would. Plus, the music is, naturally, great, and what Gould himself likely would have wanted us to focus on; his passion shines through every segment, turning almost anyone into a classical music fan for at least 90 minutes. Glenn Gould is a strong contender for the greatest biopic ever made.

    Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould entered the Criterion Collection in June 2025 on 4K UHD and Blu-ray. Of course it is a new 4K director approved transfer. Of course it comes with a booklet (a nice fold out broadsheet with titles and scenes from the shorts on the other side) with an informative essay (from Michael Koresky.) Of course it has a director’s commentary (Girard is joined by co-writer Don McKellar). Other extras include a thirty minute conversation between Girard and fellow Canadian director Atom Egoyan, archival interviews with star Colm Feore and producer Niv Fichman, and a two part 1959 television portrait called “Glenn Gould: Off the Record” and “Glenn Gould: On the Record.”

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…because of the deadening uniformity of the genre, Girard’s film appears all the more miraculous in retrospect. From its rigorous and deliberately distancing structural gambit to its restless stylistic experimentations, Thirty Two Short Films proves that biopics needn’t color within the lines to effectively portray their subjects.”–Derek Smith, Slant (Blu-ray)

    [(This movie was nominated for review, without further comment, by “Anonymous.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

    Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]

    Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]
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    Capsules

    CAPSULE: BETTER MAN (2024)

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    Better Man is currently available on VOD for purchase or rental.

    Recommended

    DIRECTED BY: Michael Gracey

    FEATURING: Jonno Davies, Steve Pemberton, Alison Steadman, , Raechelle Banno, Robbie Williams

    PLOT: The life and raucous times of pop superstar Robbie Williams, told from his humble beginnings to global stardom with details of his battles with fame, addiction, and the desperate struggle to win his father’s love—and throughout, the singer is portrayed by a motion-captured, computer-generated chimpanzee.

    Still from Better Man (2024)

    COMMENTS: When it comes to pop music success, America is a notoriously tough nut to crack. For every ABBA or BTS who overcomes the odds to score a #1 single in the States, there’s a Cliff Richard or a Kylie Minogue who struggles to sell to Americans what the rest of the world is eager to buy. And then there’s Robbie Williams: a certified international pop phenomenon who jettisoned success as a member of the boy band Take That to establish a solo career that took nearly every corner of the world by storm, with 7 #1 singles and 13 #1 albums in his home country alone. But worldwide fame means nothing in the U.S., where he has only ever managed to crack the Billboard Hot 100 twice (not counting his old band’s solitary chart appearance, a #7 hit). So pitching Williams’ life story to an audience where he is practically an unknown quantity makes for an unquestionably hard sell. When viewed in this light, it actually becomes incredibly sensible to replace the main character with a talking, singing, dancing monkey. Now they’ve got your attention.

    Honestly, it’s so much better to know nothing about our subject, as it frees us from the weight of familiarity and expectation. Teams of animators (and the grueling work of mo-cap stand-in Davies) labored to bring the authentic Williams to life in primate form, but we ignorant bumpkins can embrace his infectious energy and unrestrained showmanship with the unforced glee of a toddler seeing fireworks for the first time. Make no mistake: this is a pretty standard musical biopic, the kind that Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story should have rendered unapproachable, complete with tales of addiction, famous name-drops, and lamentations over the hollowness of fame and fortune, But Better Man proceeds with so much verve, so much melodramatic theatricality, and yes, so much photorealistic cartoon chimp, that it manages to rise above its clichéd trappings and become an inspired exemplar of the genre.

    Director Gracey, late of The Greatest Showman, has a grandiose, -esque eye for over-the-top storytelling, and the monkey gives him creative license to bypass reality in a number of areas. Williams’ highs are grand spectacles, with swooping cameras, pyrotechnic light shows, and frames cluttered with activity, while the lows are phantasmagoric nightmares of drugs and shadows and deep water. Gracey feels empowered to hold nothing back, and he’s not worried about how authentic or truthful it might appear, because hey, there’s a freaking monkey in the center of every scene. Williams’ animal avatar turns out to be a savvy trick, sparing the filmmakers from complaints over hiring a lead actor who doesn’t resemble the genuine article. Even better, it also plays into Williams’ own self-image issues (impostor syndrome plagues him from the very beginning) without ever treating us as so stupid that we won’t get the metaphor. Better Man wisely never sells out its own joke, instead weaving it into the overall circus vibe.

    Williams’ story isn’t especially compelling beyond the usual rags-to-riches-to-ruin-to-redemption pathway common to rock stars who don’t die young. So his boisterous personality, a blend of cheeky snark, crippling self-doubt, and an immeasurable compulsion to perform, is crucial to making the film work. Fortunately, Gracey seems to share those urges, and the film soars in its most bombastic moments. Williams’ meet-cute with fellow pop star Nicole Appleton is an electric dance number that turns the pair into a modern-day Astaire and Rogers. A funeral seamlessly blends into a packed concert venue and back again. Williams’ iconic Knebworth concert becomes a battlefield for his personified demons, transforming into an orgy of violence that would be at home in one of ’s sojourns to Middle Earth. And above all is the utterly thrilling act-one closer in which Take That achieves pop domination to the pulsing tune of “Rock DJ,” shot as a CGI-festooned oner in which the band completely takes over Regent Street with an infectious beat and joyously frenetic choreography. (It’s a remarkable flex, essentially forcing his old band to sing and dance to one of his solo smashes, as if a Paul McCartney bio had staged the rest of the Beatles singing “Band on the Run.”) Better Man seems to know that it can’t rely on a pre-sold audience, so it leans heavily into Williams as the consummate performer, willing to do anything to please the crowd and ultimately earning his colossal success.

    For most viewers, the shock of the monkey is over in the first five minutes of the film, if not in the trailer that preceded it. If you’re all in on that, then there’s nothing especially weird going forward to derail you. But Better Man tells this tale with a vigor and a wild abandon that makes it a surprisingly compelling watch, even if you have no familiarity or even curiosity about the subject. From the outset, Williams makes a simple vow: to be “right fucking entertaining.” It’s a promise he keeps. Welcome to the monkey house.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “Amazingly, the monkey conceit, while certainly strange (and let’s also add, beautifully rendered, with human qualities that give us a full range of emotions while also looking a lot like Robbie Williams), is not the craziest thing in Better Man. That honor would go to the picture’s musical numbers… The movie isn’t just “crazy” – it’s crazy. Trying to describe it, one sounds like a lunatic… Weirdly, the familiarity of the biographical beats ease us into the formal daring. If its structure and script were as unhinged as its style, the film might have been unwatchable.” – Bilge Ebiri, Vulture (contemporaneous)

    (This movie was nominated for review by Anonymous, who called it “a pretty good movie all things considered, but I’m still wondering why.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

    List Candidates

    APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DAAAAAALI! (2023)

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    Daaaaalí! is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.

    Recommended

    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: , , Jonathan Cohen, , Pio Marmaï, Didier Flamand, Éric Naggar

    PLOT: A journalist attempts to interview Salvador Dalí, but the painter’s erratic behavior and demands constantly cut her attempts short.

    Still from Daaaaaali! (2023)
    Anaïs Demoustier in DAAAAAALÍ! Courtesy of Music Box Films.

    WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: If you asked who would be the most intriguing modern director to concoct a Salvador Dalí biopic, Quentin Dupieux’s name would be at the very top of the list. While other directors resort to bemused realism to tackle the Surrealist icon’s notoriously slippery persona, Dupieux is a kindred spirit who fearlessly jumps right in to what makes Dalí tick: the irrational, the nonsensical, the dreamlike. Confident in its refusal to explain its enigmatic subject, Daaaalí! is the only cinematic portrait one could imagine the real Dalí endorsing.

    COMMENTS: More weirdly witty than funny and anything but insightful, Daaaalí! tackles its unknowable subject in the only way possible: as a dream. Aspiring journalist Judith somehow gets the famous artist to agree to sit down for a magazine interview, but when he finally arrives—after imperiously striding down a seemingly endless hotel corridor for long enough for Judith to hit the bathroom and order room service—he immediately shuts down the interview because there’s no camera. Then, when Judith reschedules and secures a camera for a second attempt, Dalí accidentally destroys it. And so on. Dalí serves as a negative force in the film, denying and sabotaging every plan that does not accord with his transient, selfish whims. It soon becomes apparent that, like Judith, we are never going to learn anything about the artist beyond his surface facade of arrogance.

    But insight into the man is not what this movie is, or should be, about. Instead, Daaaaali! is thoroughly Surrealist in spirit, evoking Dalí’s aesthetics (and, equally, those of Dalí’s great frenemy, ). These men’s sensibilities are a perfect fit for Dupieux, who barely has to fine-tune his own eccentric predilections at all to tell this story. After the premise is established, we quickly spin off into a labyrinth of dreams and anachronisms (we see completed paintings, then later in the film we see Dalí in the process of painting them). Nothing encapsulates the playful narrative spirit better than the long digression (over a bowl of muddy stew with live worms) in which a priest tells the painter about a dream he had where he was shot by a cowboy while riding a donkey. That incident doesn’t end the dream, however; it keeps recurring throughout the film. We are quickly lost inside an arbitrary narrative structure that almost gets as confusing as Dupieux’s bewildering Reality. But we’re anchored in Dalí’s frustratingly quirky, self-involved personality, and in Judith’s repeated failure to capture anything of substance about her quarry.

    There are basically four actors who play Dalí, plus one actor who plays old Dalí (a sub-Dalí standing to one side of the main story), plus at least one bonus Dalí who only appears for a few seconds. There could be more Dalís running about, but 4-5 Dalís seems like the most accurate number, without counting fractional Dalís. This use of multiple actors in a central role is, naturally, a reference to Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, just as the continuous failure to consummate the interview recalls the failed dinner party of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. The gentle anticlericalism shown by the repeatedly-shot priest character is also a decidedly Buñuelian touch. Dupieux adapts these Surrealist motifs so naturally that, as much as anything, Daaaaali! serves as a reminder that the Rubber auteur, while often trafficking in modern pop culture references like slashers and superheroes, is himself firmly anchored in the Buñuel/Dalí tradition. Dupieux even creates a living Dalíesque tableau to bookend the film: a piano with a tree sprouting from its cabin and a fountain spouting from its keyboard, draining into a piano-shaped pool. Although critics sometimes view Dupieux as a lightweight due to his prolific output and disinterest in tackling political or otherwise “weighty” themes, in actuality he stands nearly alone in carrying on this strain of classical European Surrealism. We may not learn much about Dalí in Daaaaali!, but hopefully people will learn more about Quentin Dupieux’s underappreciated talents.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “… great fun and appropriately strange, with Dupieux delivering a dream-layered understanding of artistry and impatience with palpable glee… ‘Daaaaaali!’ doesn’t build to a stunning conclusion. It moves slowly to weirder and weirder encounters, doing so with an assortment of performers portraying Dali, with everyone offering their fingerprint on the subject, making for flavorful acting choices.”–Brian Orndorf, Blu-ray.com (contemporaneous)