Tag Archives: Black Comedy

Canonically Weird (The List)

340. A ZED & TWO NOUGHTS (1985)

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“The film contains three absurd propositions that aren’t impossible but are highly improbable: 1) Siamese twins who don’t want to be reunited; 2) a woman fascinated by zebras who dreams of being raped by them; and 3) a crippled woman who gives birth to twins whose fathers are also twins. These are deliberately bizarre notions that we’ll be trying to render believable using all the artifices of cinema.”–Peter Greenaway on A Zed and Two Noughts

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Brian Deacon, Eric Deacon, , Frances Barber, , Agnès Brulet

PLOT: The wives of two zoologist brothers are killed when a car driven by their friend Alba Bewick strikes a swan outside the zoo where they work. The grieving brothers question Alba, now missing a leg and bed-ridden, trying to find answers to the tragedy, while simultaneously documenting the decomposition of various animal corpses with time-lapse photography. Eventually both brothers fall for Alba, forming a strange menage a trois.

Still from A Zed and Two Noughts (1985)

BACKGROUND:

  • This was Peter Greenaway’s second theatrical feature, after The Draughtsman’s Contract (1980’s The Falls was made for television). It was partially filmed at the Rotterdam Zoo.
  • Zed was the first (of an eventual eight) of Greenaway’s collaborations with cinematographer Sacha Vierny. Vierny’s other projects included Last Year at Marienbad, Belle de Jour, and The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, making him arguably 366’s favorite cinematographer.
  • In keeping with the alphabetic sub-theme, Greenaway and Vierny worked out twenty-six different ways to light a set.
  • Painter Johannes Vermeer inspired the film’s look. The character named Van Hoyten is a reference to van Meegeren, the famous Vermeer forger.
  • On its original American release A Zed and Two Noughts was sometimes screened alongside “Street of Crocodiles.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Peter Greenaway films each scene like a painting: static, with characters arranged in precise visual relationships, moving very little. That technique creates a multitude of memorable tableaux: two children dragging a dog past the enormous blue ZOO sign at the Rotterdam Zoo, Alba with her head sticking through the car windshield while a swan’s hindquarters decorate the hood, the twins flanking the legless woman in bed. For something with a bit of motion to it, you could pick one of the slightly nauseating time-lapse experiments, such as the decaying  zebra corpse (which heaves as it is swollen with scurrying maggots, then deflates as they consume its guts). We decided on the image of the legless man standing erect on crutches, a character who suddenly shows up in the film for no other reason than to provide a masculine symmetry to maternal amputee Alba.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Accident on Swann’s way; sex for corpses; snail suicide sabotage

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Greenaway’s highly structured, artificial movies often come off as strange simply because of the complicated intellectual conceits behind them; but this tale of amputees, carcasses, and cages played out in the stylized zoo of his mind might be his weirdest, right down to its decaying bones.


Brief clip (opening) from A Zed and Two Noughts

COMMENTS: A Zed and Two Noughts begins with death and climaxes Continue reading 340. A ZED & TWO NOUGHTS (1985) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

330. AFTER HOURS (1985)

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“Different rules apply when it gets this late. You know what I mean? It’s like, after hours.”–After Hours

Must See

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , John Heard, Linda Fiorentino, Terri Garr, , Verna Bloom, , Tommy Chong

PLOT: Paul meets an attractive woman in a Manhattan coffee shop after he gets off work. Under the pretext of his buying a paperweight from her roommate, she gives him her number. He calls her, is invited over to her SoHo loft, loses his money on the cab ride over, and is plagued by a bizarre series of missteps and coincidences that result in a dead body and his pursuit by a lynch mob as he tries in vain to make his way back home.

Still from After Hours (1985)

BACKGROUND:

  • Originally titles Lies, the script for After Hours was Joseph Minion’s thesis project for Columbia Film School. His professor was . He got an “A.”
  • Minion lifted about a third of the film (much of Marcy’s character) from a radio monologue by Joe Frank, who won a plagiarism lawsuit against the producers.
  • Minion would go on to write the script for another Certified Weird pick: Vampire’s Kiss (1988).
  • Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson, then-struggling actors who took up producing, optioned Minion’s screenplay. They pitched the project to Martin Scorsese, but when they did not hear back from him they began negotiations with , who had yet to make a feature film at the time. Months later, when Scorsese’s first attempt to make The Last Temptation of Christ fell apart, he expressed interest in the project. When Burton heard this news he gracefully withdrew, saying he did not want to stand in the way of Scorsese.
  • The ending of After Hours had not been decided on when shooting began. (One proposed, and unused, surrealistic ending had Paul climbing into Verna Bloom’s womb and being reborn uptown). The first cut used a downbeat attempt at a conclusion that bombed with test audiences. Scorsese then went back and re-shot the ending we see today. (Director suggested the resolution Scorsese finally used).
  • Scorsese won the “Best Director” award at the Cannes Film Festival for After Hours.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Kiki’s papier-mâché sculpture of a man staring up at the sky, mouth agape and gnarled fingers held before his face, like a flash-fried Pompeii victim preserved in ash. Paul thinks it looks like a three-dimensional version of “The Shriek.” The statue turns up unexpectedly later in the night, and an eerily and ironically similar piece plays a key role in the climax.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Burn victim?; “Surrender Dorothy”; mummified escape

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: No other black comedy has ever captured such a perfect mix of unease, absurdity, melancholy, and danger with the light, unforced touch that Scorsese does here. Man’s fate in an uncaring universe ruled by the iron fist of coincidence has never seemed so horrifyingly hilarious.


Original trailer for After Hours

COMMENTS: Years ago, I wrote an article for this site about Continue reading 330. AFTER HOURS (1985) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: DARK ARC (2004)

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DIRECTED BY: Dan Zukovic

FEATURING: Sara Strange, Dan Zukovic, Kurt Max Runte

PLOT: Three people are drawn together by their obsession with artistic imagery and the persistence of memory into a web of deceit, manipulation, and violence.

Still from Dark Arc (2004)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: With meticulous visuals, florid dialogue, and a mannered indifference to others, Dark Arc is certainly not a typical movie. Most of the strangeness, however, lies in its attitude, which may be strikingly aggressive toward its audience, but isn’t particularly “weird” for the purposes of our list.

COMMENTS: I have a vivid memory of my first visceral reaction to a piece of art. Several pieces, actually. It was at the MoMA in New York, and I wandered into a room filled with paintings by Piet Mondrian, an artist who I had previously mocked as being easily reproduced with three primary colors and a roll of gaffer tape. But walking into a gallery filled with five or six of these abstract window-like creations, I was immediately struck by their power. Given their resemblance to stained glass, it wouldn’t be inappropriate to call it a sacred experience.

Watching Dark Arc, I suspect that writer-director-star-songwriter Dan Zukovic—or at least his pretentious blowhard art critic character—would mock my reaction and attempt to trap me in a room full of red, yellow, and blue squares. His movie, ostensibly about the power of art but more accurately a look at unchecked obsession, exudes great hostility for… well, everyone, really, but especially anyone who is committed to a vision or a goal. Our heroes are poorly or not-at-all employed, indifferent to or contemptuous of the rest of humanity, and barely tolerant of themselves. So art is less of an escape and more of a millstone around their necks.

Dark Arc is frequently referred to as a comedy, and I suppose it might be, in the Chekhovian sense of featuring pathetic people who are trapped by their own absurdities. Viscount Laris, the ex-critic whom Zukovic plays like a vampiric John C. McGinley, even references Chekhov’s gun when he references a narwhal tusk that will “go off in the final act.” (It doesn’t, entirely.) But Zukovic treats these people with deadly seriousness. Laris and Lamia, the “no-sex escort” whom he enlists in a strange campaign to screw with the head of a graphic designer who he once encountered in his youth, spar with dialogue like screwball comedians with advanced degrees, but they are absolutely committed to the nastiness of their scheming. The movie emerges as a quasi-spin on Dangerous Liaisons, particularly in the film’s finale, which reads as a sort of punishment for having ever interacted with a piece of art.

It’s tempting to assign more prescient thoughtfulness to the picture than was probably intended. Dark Arc posits that art has the ability to burn itself into our brains, and its stars go to extraordinary lengths to recapture the initial power of an image. Like fans obsessed with their favorite blockbuster franchise or smartphone owners who can’t tears their gaze away from the screen, these characters are in thrall to the visuals, and their efforts to re-create them are so all-consuming as to evoke a drug addict’s chase for the thrill of that first high. Their actions are equally anti-social, not just isolating but actively against society.

And give credit to Zukovic for having an eye for a picture. In a film so dependent upon the conviction that someone could throw away their own life for an image, he’s come up with some powerful ones to make the case. The most potent is the keystone image of Strange alone in a colorless field, arrestingly unmissable in a shocking pink raincoat, a snapshot that could have been plucked right out of Pleasantville. It’s hardly surprising that the tableau opens and closes the film, in addition to its many recurrences.

But one image does not a great or even a weird film make, and Dark Arc can’t wring much out of a conflict that is ultimately so evitable. In fact, the film walks such a straight line to its conclusion as to make a lie out of its title: these are dark people, walking deliberately and unwaveringly toward a dark end, but there is no arc. Nobody changes, nobody advances, nobody has a single thought that would dispute Zukovic’s thesis that everyone is awful. One might argue that there’s more of an arc in a bunch of black lines and colored squares.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I almost get the feeling that Mr. Zukovic watched a lot of David Lynch films, and decided to try to replicate the haunting noirish tones that are present in each of Lynch’s movies but came up a little short.”–Mike D, The Film Philosopher

(This movie was nominated for review by David Veleker, who called it “an extremely bizarre, psycho-surreal noir-ish Art Film… Great twisted stuff.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Canonically Weird (The List)

323. CATCH-22 (1970)

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“You’re a very weird person, Yossarian.”–General Dreedle, Catch-22

“When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”–Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Mike Nichols

FEATURING: Alan Arkin, Martin Balsam, Jack Gilford, , , , Bob Newhart, , Paula Prentiss, , Richard Benjamin, , Charles Grodin, , Gina Rovere, Olimpia Carlisi

PLOT: The story is told out of sequence, but begins with Capt. Yossarian, an Air Force bombardier at a Mediterranean air base, being stabbed in the back by what appears to be a fellow soldier. This leads directly into the first of a recurring sequence of flashbacks where Yossarian tends to a young wounded airman in the belly of his bomber. Further flashbacks reveal a protagonist of questionable sanity in the company of equally insane flyboys, including a quartermaster who schemes with the Group commanders to create a black market syndicate that morphs into a fascist regime.

Catch-22 (1970)

BACKGROUND:

  • Joseph Heller published the absurdist comic novel “Catch-22” in 1961, based on his own experiences as a bombardier in World War II.
  • Orson Welles had attempted and failed to acquire the rights to the novel, a fact Mike Nichols was not aware of when he cast him as General Dreedle.
  • Catch-22 was Nichols’ followup to his smash hit The Graduate. He once again worked with screenwriter Buck Henry (who also played Colonel Korn here). The screenplay took two years to produce.
  • Filming (in Rome and Mexico) took more than six months to complete. Cinematographer David Watkins would only shoot the exterior scenes between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, so that the lighting would be exactly the same. This meant the cast and crew were sitting around for long periods of time with nothing to do, which led to resentment on the set.
  • Catch-22 is credited as the first American film to show a person sitting on a toilet, and the first modern Hollywood film to feature full-frontal nudity.
  • Second Unit director John Jordan plummeted to his death when he fell out of the camera plane while daring to film a flight scene without being strapped into a harness.
  • Although the film did not bomb at the box office, it was overshadowed by ‘s similar (but lighter and more realistic) M*A*S*H*.
  • George Clooney is producing a new adaptation of the novel as a six-part miniseries scheduled to air on Hulu.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The gruesome death of Hungry Joe, who’s cut in half by an airplane propeller while standing on a platform in the beautiful blue Tyrrhenian Sea.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Urine I.V.; offscreen portrait switching; friendly fire for hire

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Catch-22 was a novel of paradoxical, circular logic and inverted moral geometries. The certifiably insane Yossarian is saner than his schizoid comrades and commanders—but only because he is the only one who realizes he is crazy. The movie doesn’t soar to the heights of the book, but it creates its own weird all-star universe of moral decay and dystopian reasoning. There aren’t twenty-one other catches. One catch serves as a catchall. Catch-22. It’s the best there is.


Original trailer for Catch-22

COMMENTS: Adapting Catch-22, a novel whose building blocks are Continue reading 323. CATCH-22 (1970) →