A renter comes to accept that she shares her unit with a miniature black hole.
Tag Archives: Black and White
SATURDAY SHORT: THE REALM BEYOND REASON (2020)
Two teen boys get jobs at a pizza boys delivery service to raise some extra cash, but all is not as it seems in… the Realm Beyond Reason!
Happy Halloween!
CHANNEL 366: UZUMAKI (2024)
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DIRECTED BY: Hiroshi Nagahama, Yûji Moriyama
FEATURING: Uki Satake, Shin’ichirô Miki; Abby Trott, Robbie Daymond (English dub)
PLOT: Residents of a small Japanese town are increasingly haunted by spirals.
COMMENTS: Most horror story monsters are inspired by symbols of death, disease, and predation, not unthreatening geometric shapes like the humble spiral. Leave it to eerie manga star Junjo Ito to choose the spiral as his avatar of evil. Uzumaki (which had previously been adapted as a live-action feature) plumbs every possible devious iteration of the humble coil; it shows up in the story as whirlwinds, whirlpools, DNA, snail’s shells, hair curls, staircases, mosquito swarms, corkscrews, springs, and the twisted, intertwined bodies of snakes (and people). Watch with disquietude as everyday objects in the town gradually get twisted as the story spirals towards its grim conclusion.
The bizarre antagonist is not the only weird element here. The originally-serialized story lurches forward as a series of vignettes, with a threatening new spiral form dominating each mini-arc. In between episodes, normality resets. After the first girl’s head dissolves into a spiral, we would think the two high school protagonists would flee town; instead, the incident is never mentioned again. After the first kid turns into a human-snail hybrid, you would think the town would panic; instead, they accept it as the new normal, building a pen for the newly-minted escargot boy to live in. The commonsense idea of fleeing the town doesn’t even arise until the second episode, when one pair of aspiring refugees are frustrated in their attempt—but our main characters never even attempt to leave until the final episode, when the narrative finally proffers an explanation for their inability to escape. A particularly intense, vampire-adjacent incident dominates the third episode, but again, after a jarring edit, this horror is entirely forgotten. The characters’ incapacity—and their resigned unwillingness—to escape their situation lends the story an especially irrational, nightmarish quality. In fact, Uzuamki‘s entire structure, oscillating between grotesque visions and uneasy pseudo-normality, suggests madness; perhaps our main characters are actually trapped inside their own obsessive delusions, imagining spirals everywhere.
The art style is done entirely in black and white and imitates the intricate linework of Ito’s original drawings, sometimes recreating particularly bizarre panels. When animated, the absurdity of some of Ito’s visions—a dramatically curling tongue, a pair of eyeballs rotating independently—can be as weirdly comic as they are frightening. But the artwork is almost always strange and affecting, no matter the overall emotional effect. Much was made in anime fandom of the fact that the animation quality declines as the series progresses (probably due to budgetary mismanagement). By the final episode, the directors and producers aren’t even credited. I think that this complaint is mostly overstated, at least for the average viewer. I noted the decline in the cartoon’s fluidity and detail with each new episode, but it wasn’t as drastic as I feared; if I hadn’t been forewarned, I’m not sure how much I would have noticed. Perhaps I benefited from having my expectations lowered; perhaps you will, too. Although Uzumaki hobbles a bit on the way to the finish line, it eventually crosses it. It’s not the wall-to-wall masterpiece the first episode promised, but I wouldn’t say it exactly circles the drain, either.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: EL CONDE (2023)
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DIRECTED BY: Pablo Larraín
FEATURING: Jaime Vadell, Gloria Munchmeyer, Alfredo Castro, Paula Luchsinger, Stella Gonet
PLOT: Auguste Pinochet, former dictator of Chile and centuries-old vampire, contemplates whether it is time to finally die, and invites his family to his remote compound to discuss the dispersal of the fortune he looted from the country.
COMMENTS: In a world filled with so much death, it is one of the cruelest ironies that the people you want most to die never seem to oblige. Day after day, they go around fouling the very air they breathe and incurring your helpless wrath, a fact that honestly seems to fuel them and stave off their seemingly inevitable demise even longer. Sure, they may give off signs of ill health or mental decline, but they never actually take the crucial stuff of shuffling off, no matter how many Big Macs and Diet Cokes they clutch in their tiny hands. It’s exasperating.
Pablo Larraín feels your pain. Augusto Pinochet finally exited the Chilean presidential palace in 1990, but he continued to linger in the world for another 16 years, and in the public consciousness still after that, his crimes having had an immeasurable effect on the psyche of the nation. It probably explains why so much of Larraín’s career (when not profiling the notable unhappy women of the 20th century) has been devoted to examining Chile’s troubled soul. Still, El Conde marks the first time that he has confronted the man directly, and that appears to be because he has finally figured out who Pinochet really was: an undying, bloodsucking vampire.
Mapping the traits of a legendary monster onto the life of the man who disappeared thousands of dissidents turns out to be a fairly short walk. Pinochet’s hunger for power is attributed to his beginnings as a loyal soldier in the army of Louis XVI, where his distaste for revolution and anti-monarchal movements were born. From there, he goes from country to country helping to stamp out uprisings, until he finally arrives in Chile to lead the violent overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende. Invoking the vampire legend is a canny choice, because it not only connects Chile to the broad historical arc of oppressive dictatorships, but provides a context to help understand the grotesque body count under Pinochet’s rule. It actually becomes more comprehensible to attribute it to a monster.
The luscious black-and-white cinematography (courtesy of Edward Lachman) lends an authenticity to the story of exclusively awful people. Vadell is suitably cadaverous as Pinochet, and his retinue — his duplicitous wife, his loyal majordomo, his venal children — all embrace their evil eagerly. The one character who never really clicks is Carmen, the undercover nun who Luchsinger infuses with a kind of wide-eyed wonder in almost every moment. This is intriguing when she openly encourages Pinochet and his family in their delusions of victimhood and entitlement, confusing when the narrator is telling us that she is an immensely powerful instrument of vengeance, and truly spectacular when she clumsily but eagerly takes on the capacity to fly. Compared with the vampire Pinochet’s austere, imperious flights over Santiago, Carmen’s tumbles in the sky are genuinely enchanting.
Ah, that narrator. She turns out to be the most important character in the piece, as her plummy upper-crust British tones point the way toward the film’s larger thesis. If you have an ear for voices and think she sounds awfully familiar, you’re probably right. It really is too delicious a secret to be spoiled (if you absolutely must know, let me just say that giving it away even by showing you a picture would be Crass), but it speaks to the larger metaphor that Larraín wants to convey. Pinochet, he tells us, did not arise out of the mists unbidden and commence a reign of terror. He was made, birthed by the same forces that always seek to enforce a rigid division of haves and have-nots and to reap the benefits. Ultimately, El Conde is not really concerned with the specifics of Pinochet or even Chile. It’s about the vampires who have sucked the lifeblood of humanity for centuries and (as the epilogue shows us) will continue to do so. We can take some comfort in the knowledge that death comes for everyone, but the evil that feasts on our ideals, our arts, our conception of what it means to be free… that evil is undying and elusive. The wish is not enough.
El Conde is a Netflix exclusive.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review anonymously. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: GHOSTS BEFORE BREAKFAST (VORMITTAGSSPUK) (1928) / APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ALICIA (1994)
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(for both)
Repression in a society is often noticed first in the arts. When works are banned or proscribed for subject matter deemed offensive to the state, or when artists and their patrons are threatened if they do not alter their messages so as not to displease the powers that be, an attentive eye can pick up the seeds of repression being planted. One might even notice it in attacks on the programming at the national center for the performing arts. Today, our attention turns to a pair of short films that are in the orbit of repression: one that was its victim and one expressly about it.
The title card that precedes “Ghosts Before Breakfast” points the finger clearly at its tormentor: “The Nazis destroyed the sound version of this film as degenerate art.” The accusation seems absurd to modern eyes, so it’s instructive to recall, in the march to World War II, just how much the ascendant Fascists despised modern art, especially surreal and abstract works. No doubt that attitude came from the top, considering failed artist Adolf Hitler was a strict devotee of classical styles. Dictatorships are always humorless scolds, though, and the Third Reich was especially obsessed with a devotion to German propriety and order. Director Hans Richter, who literally wrote the book on Dadaism, was always going to run headlong into trouble.
Nothing that ensues in “Ghosts’” 500-second running time would seem to merit the iron jackboot of censorship: a bow tie refuses to stay knotted, body parts detach and spin around, and men disappear behind poles. (That last is a nifty special effect once accomplished by your humble correspondent.) Most notably, a quartet of bowler hats liberate themselves from the tyranny of resting upon men’s heads, choosing instead to fly about the neighborhood in flock formation until tea is finally served. It’s mostly lo-fi camera trickery in the Méliès tradition, not overtly serious at all. (Occasionally, one can see the strings on the hats and even the shadow of the marionette’s pole, and it detracts from the short’s charm not a whit.) Richter is always a playful surrealist (witness the giddy way he skewers the evangelization of capitalism in Dreams That Money Can Buy), and “Ghosts” captures that spirit in its simplest form. It’s light, it’s fun… no wonder the Nazis hated it.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
Oh, how they would have utterly loathed “Alicia,” Jaume Balagueró’s nightmare musing on the abhorrence of femininity. After our young heroine menstruates during a moment of idle self-pleasure, uniformed thugs haul her away to become a kind of indentured remora to a hideously bloated creature. Alicia’s act of defiance is to have the temerity to reach sexual maturity, at which point she is a commodity for the beasts to consume and discard. Balagueró’s film (a student work that presages his future efforts such as the REC series) exudes a palpable sense of a terrible power that punishes people for who they are.
In less than 8 minutes, there’s no time to be subtle, and Balagueró dials up the unsettling and odd atmosphere well past the initial premise. Alicia herself (played by twins Ana and Elena Lucia) is as white and smooth as a cherub, the very essence of purity before her blood drips onto a book titled “The Drama of Jesus.” Rubber-clad troops force the girl to consume a goopy slime that emits from their masks and drill into her neck in a cascade of oily fluid. When she finally emerges from this dark underworld, she exits through a refrigerator, as if she has only been kept around as food. Meanwhile, the final shot is the ogre framed with the shape of a cross, just in case you’re wondering whom to implicate. The theme of the punishment women endure is explicit, but the concept is dressed up in grotesque imagery that carries the slight story up to another level.
Film is storytelling, and storytelling is speech. Richter may have only intended to tweak the establishment, not rouse the beast; Balagueró was clearly prepared for whatever expressions of offense or disgust might come his way. But both are compatriots in cinema, for storytelling is also bravery, and there’s nothing weird about standing up for their voices.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(“Ghosts Before Breakfast” was nominated for review by Rafael Moreira; “Alicia” was nominated for review by Morgan. Suggest a weird movie or two of your own here.)