Tag Archives: Black and White

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: LAKE MICHIGAN MONSTER (2019)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Beulah Peters, Erick West, Daniel Long

PLOT: Having lost his father to the claws of the terrible “Lake Michigan Monster,” Captain Seafield assembles a crew of specialists to exact his revenge.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: This movie is very dumb, in a good way, and very derivative, in a good way. Tews creates a scratchy, black and white world à la Guy Maddin in a clever, mindless romp where every rule of narrative is bent as the story crescendos to a dizzying municipal-political climax.

COMMENTS: In the spirit of the movie, this is a DIY review. Feel free to cut and paste the sections below however suits your mood.

Disclaimer: In no way have I been remunerated for the views expressed herein. Fact is, they’d have to more than double the film’s budget to buy my good graces.

Good: There is a jokesy doppelgänger of Guy Maddin at work in Lake Michigan Monster. Ryland Tews captures the Canadian auteur’s aesthetic—grainy black and white, mythic proportions, and the idolization of a city (though not Winnipeg for this go-around)—and puts it to work for an episodic comedy that would seem ramshackle if it weren’t so charming and also somehow pinned to what just about passes as a story arc for the good Captain Seafielding.

Plot: Assembling a mercenary crew comprising a weapons expert, a N.A.V.Y. drop-out, and a “sonar individual”, Captain Seafielding (Ryland Tews) hopes to hunt and destroy the titular monster that he blames for the murder of his father. With half-baked schemes (à la “Nauty Lady” and other pun-driven titles), he fails again and again until he is abandoned by his hirelings and is forced to summon a ghost army (found, incidentally, in an Episcopal cathedral). After losing all his henchman, worldly and otherwise, he must complete his quest mano-a-beasto.

Weird: Lake Michigan Monster is merely 78 minutes long, but a whole world and mythology is haphazardly crammed into each and every nook. Seafielding begins each outing with a magical, animated map of the action, on which designations for each crew member zip around according to his mad whim. The fourth wall is battered to dust as Seafielding, in character, begins to dismantle the narrative shell that keeps the audience separate from his machinations; we become very much the accomplice in his silly work as the movie goes on. To boot, there are the kind of quips and asides that we’d expect more from popular television.

Opening or Closing: So what is it like to watch this movie? Unless you have some very creative film buddies, it’d be hard to get closer to the core of the crafting experience. Mind you, this isn’t just some dumb evolution of a movie into a movie about movies. This is just some dumb s̶e̶a̶ lake-faring yarn that feels like it’s being told to you live over a glass of bourbon, or whatever that type of whiskey it is you find in Scotland. But there is a gloriousness to its apparent idiocy. No real actors, no fabricated sets, but one heckuva a closing sea shanty await you in this wild and whimsical outing.

You can also listen to our interview with some of the gang responsible for Lake Michigan Monster.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Tews and company have crafted something unique here, an absurdist fever-dream that looks (and sounds) like little else.” -Matt Wild, Milwaukee Record (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: LETTERS TO PAUL MORRISSEY (2018)

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DIRECTED BY: Armand Rovira

FEATURING: Xavi Sáez, , María Fajula, Saida Benzal, Almar G. Sato

PLOT: Five cinematic letters to Paul Morrissey are sent by various fans of the experimental director.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This is an anthology film, and so the format isn’t really what we’re after. In addition, the films lean much more toward “art-house” than “weird”.

COMMENTS: Udo Strauss: This opening letter, appearing in a photographic slide-style frame like all the epistles, is angry and languid. The writer in question is a German who, dismayed at the triumph of a hollow capitalism in his home country, attempts to claw his way toward unquestioning faith in God and Jesus. He attempts to find peace in a Spanish monastery. His doubt in the Church is made manifest by an attractive woman in sunglasses who intellectually parries with him in split-screen philosophizing. His desperation grows until we see him stapling pages from his Bible to his naked body. An obvious stand-in for , whom Morrissey directed in Andy Warhol’s Dracula and Frankenstein, actor Xavi Sáez encapsulates the plight of a man whose new gods disappoint and whose old God has gone silent. Appropriately, this was the most meditative and trying of the bunch, as we watch Udo grind himself down mentally in an attempt to attain a faith that cannot be forced.

Joe Dallessandro: Channeling in a junkie monologue over the shots of some nameless city’s denizens scoring heroin and coping with life, this is the briefest of the five films. Dallessandro’s gravelly tone made me feel like I was watching a reel from the author’s own memories.

Olena Wood: A former Chelsea girl waxes nostalgic about working with and frets over her diminishing fame (“I feel dizzy as I grow old”). To boost her spirits, she responds to a television ad for “Man Connections” (just call 800-453-2800 to rent yourself the perfect man). Her perfect man is a “Steve”, whom she meets at a swinger-karaoke bar after he sings Françoise Hardy’s “Voilà.” After forty-eight hours, he melts—it was only a rental—and the girl gets a phone-call about a special screening of Chelsea Girls she should attend. Dual montages show a “then” and “now” woman dolling herself up. It’s an odd riff on the universal fear of aging (and being forgotten) with undertones of determined hope clawing against the unstoppable time.

Saida Benzal: We find out that she’s a vampire in the closing credits, and that goes great lengths to explain Saida Benzal’s rumination on eternal damnation-through-longing. A cycle of events: a dark hallway, a man drawing in breath—a woman drawing in breath, a man rising toward a doorway—a woman crawling to peer through the crack below. These few minutes capture the furtive desperation endured by lovers who can never meet.

Hiroko Tanaka: The final letter begins with blood and sonic pain but ends with a making of peace, handily wrapping up the entire exercise. Almar Sato plays the a young woman afflicted with “Hoissuru”, a sound in the range of 20 Hz and 20 kHz that is audible in Françoise Hardy’s “Voilà” (again), a song Hiroko Tanaka used to love. She meets a young Spanish woman who works as a sales clerk at a comic book shop, whose voice immediately relieves the pain. Together they enjoy talking to a looming aquarium shark (who could also double as Morrissey’s stand-in as a confessor).

I write this review to try to work out the basics of what has occupied my mind quite a bit since I watched it thirty hours ago. I know little about Paul Morrissey, but plan to use this film as a starting point in my investigation of the iconic filmmaker; and perhaps now you may want to do this, too.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a true pleasure to witness, slightly echoing Guy Maddin’s experiments with found footage and certainly his weird sense of humour.It may seem strange to describe a film like this as ‘fun’, and yet that’s precisely what it is, with philosophical questions smoothly interwoven with loving throwbacks to Warhol and Morrissey’s biggest hit, Chelsea Girls, and discussions about the importance of eyeliner.” -Marta Bałaga, Cineuropa (festival screening)

Saturday Short, Shorts

SATURDAY SHORT: ANT HEAD (2018)

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Thought Gang was a musical collaboration between director David Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti formed after the second season of “Twin Peaks.” Just four days after we posted the music video for “A Real Indication” (1992), Lynch released this even weirder music video featuring the tracks “Frank 2000” and “Woodcutters From Fiery Ships,” from the same lost record.

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DECASIA (2002)

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Also see Alfred Eaker’s take on Decasia

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Uncredited documentary subjects

PLOT: Scored to a disturbing minimalist composition, a parade of early 20th century images on decayed and damaged film stock march across the screen, forming hypnotic abstract landscapes.

Still from Decasia (2002)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: We avoided the hypnotic experimental documentary subgenre on our first pass through the List of the Weirdest Movies ever made, because this peculiar corner of art films normally wed an unusual (weird) form to commonplace (not-weird) subject matter. When it comes to honoring movies as Apocrypha, however, it’s harder to argue that formally groundbreaking movies like Koyaanisqatsi—and this one—can be excluded from being considered among the strangest things the mind of man has come up with.

COMMENTS: A boxer punches an amoeba. A man in a fez prays at a mummy’s tomb, in negative image. A lone airplane flies through the sky, almost perfectly centered in a wavering iris puncturing the darkness. Nuns and schoolchildren strobe in and out of existence. The screen is filled with nothing more than a billowing cloud. Abstract patterns whir by, almost looking as if they were drawn by hand—a butterfly here, a flower petal there—and fade away to reveal a shy geisha.

Experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison scoured over what must have been thousands of hours of partially decayed stock footage to select the most wondrous and poetic images time accidentally created. A complete taxonomy of film damage is on display here. Images sometimes decay from the center outward, sometimes from the edges inward. Frequently, the film is warped so that abstract cracked lines obscure the underlying picture, but often the effects are more surprising. Individual stills might look like gibberish, but because each frame of film holds a slightly different piece of information about the whole, when the series is run through a projector, ghostly figures emerge. The visuals often resemble ‘s splatter-paint-on-the-celluloid experiments, except that the effects here have been created entirely by the natural degradation of cellulose.

Decasia‘s reliance on a minimalist classical music score obviously recalls ‘s time-lapse documentaries. But whereas Philip Glass’ work on the “Qatsi trilogy” of films was smooth and dreamy, Michael Gordon’s composition is dissonant and confrontational. Low strings create a ceaseless rhythm, while violins fall through microtonal scales in a long, slow decay. Horns enter the mix like distant alarms. Gordon specified that certain instruments in the Basel Sinfonetta be deliberately out of tune. In keeping with the theme of recycling, he used discarded car brake drums he found in a junkyard as an instrument, along with detuned pianos. His intent, he said, was to “make the orchestra sound like it was covered in cobwebs, with instruments that had been sitting for a hundred years, creaky and warped and deteriorated…” The uncomfortable but still beautiful sounds divert our thoughts to the darker implications of the pictures dancing and disintegrating before our eyes. The music and the images exist in such a perfect, unconscious  symbiosis that it’s meaningless to wonder which came first.

Decasia is an authentically Surrealist documentary. The startling images have all been generated via a random process, with the interpretation up to the individual viewer. Everyone in these film clips is long dead, and soon the damaged images themselves will fade away to nothing. And yet, the experience is marvelous, not depressing.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The unexpected thing is that its dying, in this shower of black-and-white psychedelia, is quite beautiful.”–Anita Gates, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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