Tag Archives: Black and White

List Candidates, Shorts

BORDERLINE WEIRD: THE SHORT FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH (2002)

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DIRECTED BY: David Lynch

FEATURING: Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance, Catherine Coulson

PLOT: A series of six short films spanning director David Lynch’s career from the

Still from The Short Films of David Lynch

1960s through the 1990s.  We track Lynch from his early years as a highly experimental student to a macabre master of the darkly surreal with these films that show a man who needed to grow and challenge himself as a creative force.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: As collections of short films go, this is one of the most mercurial and hard-to-peg I’ve ever seen.  There’s really no denying the odd nature of Lynch’s efforts.  The first film alone, a minute-long animated loop of six hideous plaster sculptures throwing up,  stands as a timeless testament to Lynch’s nightmarish creative vision.  And the gut-wrenching scope of his silent feature, entitled “The Grandmother”, is a window into the mind of a radically different artist than the one Lynch has become.  But, honestly, the quality and sheer atmosphere present in most of Lynch’s features feels absent here, and there’s not enough memorable material to consider this a momentous release.

COMMENTS:  Much like a renowned painter or an extremely colorful luchador, a filmmaker’s work becomes more lionized as his fame grows, even his mistakes.  David Lynch is a very famous filmmaker, so it’s only appropriate that this assortment of short subjects should come out to cement his status as an iconic artist and a true visionary in the world of the nightmarish and the utterly bizarre.  But those die-hard fans of the man who seek a diamond in the rough here, a Pollack behind the frame of this small cache of movies, will likely find themselves disappointed, or at the very least conflicted.

If short films represent the transformation of a filmmaker as as he/she goes from one project to another, this gathering of shorts spanning Lynch’s career is a shadowy, rocky road.  Half of these films don’t desire to be much more than insubstantial experiments, hokey dumping grounds for ideas that are really just there to try something out.  They merely exist in a tangible form for the consumer because of the marketable name of Lynch, not because they actually have some sort of deliciously demented merit and are worth seeing for any length of time.  And while the three that are good are indeed very good, it’s easy to put this one on the borderline with the vibes I get from the other three.

Let’s break it down by feature, shall we?

“Six Figures getting Sick (Six Times)” – A minute long film loop featuring a set of six Continue reading BORDERLINE WEIRD: THE SHORT FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH (2002) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: DEAD MAN (1995)

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NOTE: Dead Man has been promoted to the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made. Commenting is closed on this review, which is left here for archival purposes. Please visit Dead Man‘s Certified Weird entry to comment on this film.

DIRECTED BY: Jim Jarmusch

FEATURING: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Robert Mitchum, Crispin Glover, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, Mili Avatal, Gabriel Byrne

PLOT:  Mild-mannered accountant Bill Blake heads west, becomes a wanted man after he

Still from Dead Man (1995)

shoots a man in self defense, and, wounded, flees to the wilderness where he’s befriended by an Indian named Nobody who believes he is the poet William Blake.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Dead Man is a lyrical and hypnotic film, and one that comes about as achingly close to making the List on the first pass as is possible.  The quality of the movie is no obstacle to its making the List, but the weirdness, while there, is subtle and must be teased out by the viewer.  There is a mystical and dreamlike tinge to Blake’s journey into death, but the strangeness is almost entirely tonal; Jarmusch’s artiness aside, it’s possible to view the movie as a rather straightforward, if quirky, indie Western.

COMMENTS:  Dead Man begins on a locomotive as a naif accountant is traveling from Cleveland to a the western town of Machine to begin a new life.  We see him on the train playing solitaire or reading a booklet on beekeeping.  He looks up to survey at his fellow passengers, who meet his glance with indifference.  The train’s whistle blows as the scene fades to black, accompanied by twanging chords from Neil Young’s guitar (sounding like abstract, electrified snippets stolen from a Morricone score).  The scene repeats and fades back in again and again, each time with the traveler glancing around the compartment to find his companions slowly changing: their dress becomes more rustic, their hair longer and more unkempt; female passengers become less frequent, firearms more common; the indifference in their eyes turns into quiet hostility.

Dead Man tells the story of an innocent who becomes a refugee after being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It’s a standard story, but the way Jarmusch tells can be strange indeed.  This opening scene sets the rhythm for the movie: it proceeds in a series of slow pulses punctuated by fadeouts and anguished bursts from Young’s guitar, and it slowly shifts locale from the civilized to the wild.  The continual fading out and Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: DEAD MAN (1995) →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema, Capsules

CAPSULE: AUTOMATONS (2006)

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DIRECTED BY: James Felix McKenny

FEATURING: Christine Spencer, Angus Scrimm

PLOT: The lone survivor of a devastated nation lives in an underground bunker; her only companions are the voice recordings of a long-dead scientist and the robots she sends out to do battle with the enemy on the planet’s poisoned surface.

Still from Automatons (2006)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Much of the underground hype regarding this 2006 indie from James Felix McKenny and Glass Eye Pix likens Automatons to a cross between Eraserhead and Ed Wood, with Guy Maddin‘s name bandied about for good measure. There is nothing remotely arthouse or surreal about Atomatons, however, and the only identifying aesthetic McKenney might share with Maddin is an obsessive love of a genre. Maddin’s love of baroque silent film expressiveness hardly compares to McKenney’s hard-on for 1950’s sci-fi kitsch. That’s the problem with hype; it usually tends to be a disservice, and is so here.

COMMENTS: Automatons is not weird or surreal. That is not to say it does not have merit or is a film without interest. Is it a thought-provoking, intelligent film, worth comparing to some of the better, more compact Outer Limits episodes? No. The post-apocalyptic scenario of a lone survivor is a really, really old one that has been around since Robot Monster (1953) and is repeated in Omega Man, Mad Max and countless movies.

The robots themselves look like they just stepped out of an old “Superman” TV episode, but without the awkwardly quirky personality of those 50s tintypes. Angus Scrimm (Phantasm) is the professor who instructs heroine Christine Spencer through a series of pre-recorded videos. The biggest problem here lies in Spencer’s flat acting, which fails to project the necessary charisma needed in this type of project.

Where Automatons takes an admirable independent risk is in its lethargic pacing, which, despite the plot and acting, creates a hypnotic milieu. Long, static takes, along with the much repeated Scrimm transmissions, are, at first, odd, then oddly compelling. This is the one surprising, indeed endearing quality about Automatons.  It refuses to cater to commercial pacing. Some mistake that for an arthouse quality or made predictable, banal comparisons, such as that to Eraserhead. Automatons does not possess that organic, wistful Lynch quality. It is grounded in the love of its genre. The later battle scenes and the gruesome deaths have a certain grainy style derived from its 8 mm source, but this is an often utilized stylistic ploy in genre indies, and is not what gives Automatons its original flavor.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Automatons is what happens when Eraserhead and Tetsuo the Iron Man bong themselves into oblivion and collaborate on a minimalist avant-garde sci-fi cheapie shot in a toolshed… Robot radness acheived!”–Nathan Lee, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: PROMETHEUS TRIUMPHANT: A FUGUE IN THE KEY OF FLESH (2009)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Mike McKown, Jim Towns

FEATURING: Josh Ebel, Kelly I. Lynn

PLOT: A mad doctor reanimates the body of his loved one who has died in a plague.

Still from Prometheus Triumphant: A Fugue in the Key of Flesh (2009)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Silent films have an inherently dreamlike feel to them that gives them a leg up in the weird department. Prometheus Triumphant fails to capture and exploit this feeling, leaving us with a dull and lifeless film devoid of sound, color or interest.

COMMENTS: It’s tempting to give amateur films bonus points for good intentions, but with Prometheus Triumphant it seems like the filmmakers didn’t do due diligence to create something professional looking, thinking that a cool concept alone could carry the film. The first problem, as is usually the case, is the plot, a groaningly obvious and unoriginal mix of Frankenstein and The Phantom of the Opera that’s as thin as stage blood. Action is almost nonexistent: after embarking on his grave-robbing spree, it takes “The Creator” almost ten minutes to dig up and cart away his first corpse, and most of that time is spent watching him walk with a wheelbarrow across a bleak and uninteresting field with a few prop crucifixes in the foreground.

With no surprises or suspense in the story, Prometheus needs a strong visual look to compensate, one it’s incapable of generating on its budget. A few kind critics have implied that the film evokes the look of German Expressionism, but I’m led to wonder if they’ve ever actually seen a work of classic German expressionism. It’s true that both Prometheus and its inspirations are in black and white and use Gothic imagery, but it’s impossible to imagine anyone confusing a perfectly framed and detailed still from Nosferatu or Caligari with the mundane angles and dull sets of this one. Composer Lucein Desar clearly has some talent, but not enough ideas to stretch out over 80 minutes, and the score becomes repetitive and irritating.

Not all of Prometheus‘ flaws can be forgiven due to budgetary limitations; some of them come from an endemic lack of attention to detail. A shot containing a modern steel handrail and concrete steps in 1899 might be forgiven, but a navel ring on the corpse of a dead peasant girl can’t be. Even more revealing are the mistakes that show up in the intertitles. Many people confuse “throws” for “throes,” but in this day of automatic spellcheckers, how can anyone let a goof like “existance” slip into a project that’s intended to be professional? And if you’re going to misspell a term you’re only vaguely familiar with, such as “Bürgermeister,” at least be consistent: don’t use “Bergmeister” sometimes and “Burgmeister” other times.

It may seem picky, but these mistakes help explain why the flick is so listless in the end. Everyone seems so excited by the cool overarching concept of recreating a classic silent movie that they forgot to work on the little things that make a work breathe. It’s almost as if the camerawork, imagery, acting, script, action, sets, locations, costumes, and makeup all have no higher aspiration than to be usable, and the directors were satisfied if they turned out adequate. The end result isn’t a meaningful tribute to Murnau, Wiene and Lang; if it weren’t so sincerely intended, it would be an insult. Prometheus Triumphant reinforces every negative stereotype mainstream viewers have about silent films being boring and inferior. It’s what all bad, amateur horror movies would look like today if cinema had never developed sound, color, or slashers.

The DVD contains a short film by the same directorial team, “The Sleep of Reason,” that shows a bit more promise than Prometheus actually delivered. Despite the fact that the feature didn’t work on an entertainment or artistic level, I wouldn’t write Towns and McKown off as hacks. Sometimes things just don’t come together the way the creators imagined. At least they had some fun and hopefully learned some valuable lessons; but sadly, better-made independent features are sitting on shelves, while this failed experiment gets a relatively decent distribution deal.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…for all its poetic visual bravura, seems distant when it should be dynamic, yet still worth the effort.”–Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

CUBAN STORY (1959) AND CUBAN REBEL GIRLS (1959)

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In the late 1950s movie star Errol Flynn owned a movie theater in Havana. Not the beautifully chiseled Flynn from The Adventures of Robin Hood, but a fat 50 year old has-been, yellowed with cirrhosis, eaten up with syphilis and dodging numerous creditors, including the IRS, with his latest teen age girlfriend: fourteen year old Beverly Aadland. Flynn, probably feeling his self-fulfilled hour (which predictably came shortly after) wanted to sow his macho oats one last time in the thick of the Cuban revolution (clearly, he wasn’t up to it).

Flynn, with Producer Victor Pahlen, made this pseudo-documentary about Flynn’s meeting Castro, although this meeting is only seen in photographs.

The film proclaims Flynn a sympathizer with Castro’s Batista Regime (paradoxically, he was also posthumously charged with being a fascist sympathizer during WWII). Most likely, this was a feeble effort, on the part of Pahlen and Flynn, to cash in on being in the right place at the right time.

Cuban Story [AKA The Truth About Fidel Castro Revolution] was only screened once, in Moscow, and disappeared until Pahlen’s daughter released it the early 2000s. This utterly bizarre film begins with Flynn drunkenly narrating (more like a strained slur), from a cheap office, something about “freedom fighters.” Flynn, with long cigarette hanging from his mouth, picks up a globe to show viewers “‘where Cuba is” and then throws the globe off camera. It can be heard bouncing off the wall. The remaining film narration (credited to Flynn, although it clearly is not) is frequently incoherent, pro-Castro, and pro-terrorist.

According to Pahlen’s film, Flynn made his way through the heart of the revolution to meet Castro, but the only footage of the extremely soused, dissipated Flynn is of his escorting women into one of George Raft’s casinos, to gamble with them and Beverly. The rest of the film is a collage of seemingly unrelated, and often shocking, but historically valuable footage. Silent images of slain “comrades” and the savage killing of young men in the streets as Batista police casually observe are unsettling.

Cuban Story is redeeming in its historical value and its unintentional strangeness, both in Continue reading CUBAN STORY (1959) AND CUBAN REBEL GIRLS (1959) →