A beautiful woman and a plate of raw ground beef; this will not end well.
CONTENT WARNING: Although nothing here fits into traditional categories of obscenity, many viewers will find the imagery contained here grotesque, disturbing, or degrading.
Tag Archives: Carlos Atanes
CAPSULE: GALLINO, THE CHICKEN SYSTEM (2012)
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DIRECTED BY: Carlos Atanes
FEATURING: Octavi Pujades, Manuel Solas, Sasha Slugina
PLOT: A man travels to Antarctica planning to rendezvous with a woman there later; he seeks refuge from the cold in a chicken shack, where he enters into philosophical discussions about pornography with the proprietor.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Carlos Atanes slaves away in relative obscurity, continuing to make defiantly weird movies his way, despite a lack of funding and mainstream notice. His work as a whole arguably deserves representation on this List. While I wouldn’t say that we will automatically restrict “Atanic” entries to a single candidate, as of now, the apocalyptic fetish musical Maximum Shame is the Atanes film to beat. Poultry fetishists, however, may disagree.
COMMENTS: The tagline proclaims this a “pornophilosophical film,” and so it is, although it’s probably heavier on the porno than the philosophy. Still, as far as academic name dropping goes, you’ll hear shout-outs to thinkers like Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard, along with discussions of Bertrand Russell’s “barber’s paradox.” There is also the debate, between the mournful lover and the Antarctic poulterer, about the philosophy of pornography: the latter considers obscenity to be a species of topography, and an illustration of Gallino‘s putative thesis that human beings are essentially “donuts.”
But, this movie is not all abstract speculation. You can’t satirize pornography without making pornography, and there is plenty of filth here, although of an exceedingly strange sort: to wit, if you have a fetish for seeing women deep-throat chicken drumsticks, this is the movie you’ve been waiting for your whole life. “Fisting” is also a major subplot, and in another episode the planet of Jupiter gets violated in its red spot. The movie’s climax (forgive the wording) takes place in a sort of greasy trans-dimensional chicken-tube glory hole; the afterglow involves first contact with three “Sidereal pornstars.”
There’s also some weird stuff in there, including a Spanish actor playing a Spanish fried chicken magnate pretending to be from Texas, speaking Spanish with a Spaniard’s idea of a Texas accent. Things get so strange that the two main characters in the Antarctic chicken shack debate whether they’re trapped in a dream; they conclude that they cannot be, because things seem incoherent to them, whereas in a dream impossible things seem natural.
As for conventional carnality, the movie has only two short topless sequences. Most of the flesh on display is of the extra-crispy variety. The substitution of a poultry-based erotic system allows Gallino to get away with imagery that would otherwise make this a XXX feature, evoking the queasy arousing-yet-repellant feeling we experience when we see someone acting out a sexual fetish we don’t share. Today, we live in a world that’s awash in smut, but actual pornographic iconography rarely makes it into mainstream films. Even the explicit moments in arthouse films like Antichrist refer to real human sex acts rather than the fantasy rituals of porn. Gallino looks at pornography obliquely, the way an alien might view it; it appears both ridiculous and strangely poetic, a landscape full of symbols and secrets. Atanes is well aware of how the average person (or average critic) will view Gallino‘s assault on the viewer’s narrative and sexual sensibilities. He takes a shot at preempting criticism via an in-movie film critic who says, about the work of fictional art-porn director Gropius Cantor: “it’s a vulgar and disgusting concatenation of pseudo-pornographic shots lacking any appeal.” (While he says this, we watch an unrelated scene of a woman shoving her lubricated fist down another woman’s throat). Of Cantor’s legacy, the critic concludes, “his films became worse with time, more cryptic, more obtuse, more unappealing and utterly unwatchable.” Atanes’ films are becoming more cryptic and obtuse, but the more unappealing and unwatchable they become to “normal” people, the more fascinating they become to us.
Movies like Gallino, the Chicken System find themselves in an impossible marketing position. They really need rental outlets to allow people to take a low-cost chance on them, so the movie can eventually spread its reputation by word-of-mouth. Yet, they are too specialized and weird for outlets like Netflix to stock. Gallino is being sold in the U.S. in a DVD-R version. It includes numerous behind-the-scenes clips, all in Spanish.
DISCLAIMER: A copy of this movie was provided by the distributor for review.
CARLOS ATANES: THE INTERVIEW & TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIE LIST
Carlos Atanes is a Spanish filmmaker who proudly describes his life’s work as “weird” (and was using the term before this site came into existence). He’s the creator of the bizarre feature films FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions (2004), Proxima (2007), and Maximum Shame (2010), all of which are reviewed here, as well as dozens of short subjects. His official website describes his ideal fan as one who likes “fantasy, weirdness and oddity” and is “part of that public who has a good time with risky and different things and with the cinema that recreates alternative and personal universes.” Since that description fits 366 Weird Movies readers perfectly, we figured we would play matchmaker between Carlos Atanes and our fans—and get a top 10 Weird Films list to add to our collection in the process.
This interview was conducted by Gregory J. Smalley with Mr. Atanes via email in October and November of 2011. His “Top 10 Weird Movie List” appears at the bottom of the interview.
366: You’ve announced a new project, Gallino, which you describe as a”pornophilosophical film.” What can you tell our readers about the movie?
Atanes: It is a step forward in my rise to weirdness. Gallino is related to my last movie Maximum Shame in many of its subjects. There are different actors and characters, other aesthetics and other conflicts, but in fact it is like a next part, a complement to Maximum Shame. Both are like a “double feature.” Gallino goes deep into parallel realities, meta-narrative and blurred borders between the pornographic and and the non-pornographic. Why do we consider one thing pornographic and not another, exactly? Why some things are visible/presentable and other things are not? So, Gallino is an strange trip along the cracks, halfway between dream and wakelfulness, porn and no porn, skin Continue reading CARLOS ATANES: THE INTERVIEW & TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIE LIST
LIST CANDIDATE: MAXIMUM SHAME (2010)
DIRECTED BY: Carlos Atanes
FEATURING: Marina Gatell, Ana Mayo, Paco Moreno, Ardiana Ferrer, Ignasi Vidal
PLOT: On the night before the world is to be swallowed up by a black hole, a man discovers a world underneath his bed ruled by a chess-obsessed dominatrix queen.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Carlos Atanes is a defiantly, and proudly, surrealistic director, and his brief filmography (three features and dozens of bizarre shorts) already constitutes a body of weird work that could be worthy of recognition on this List. With its wardrobe of black leather and chrome dental restraints along with a powerful musical score that ranges from 40s show tunes to 80s synth pop, Maximum Shame is perhaps Atanes’ most ambitious and polished—not to mention weirdest—feature work.
COMMENTS: You have to love the tagline for Maximum Shame, which describes the movie as “an apocalyptic fetish horror musical chess sci-fi weird feature movie.” The surprising thing is that the film, which plays like a combination of “Alice in Wonderland” and the Orpheus legend staged by refugees from a leather bar in a deserted warehouse, largely lives up to that description. The words “apocalyptic,” fetish,” and “chess” define the three motifs that keep the film (somewhat) grounded. The story, such as it is, takes place as a black hole is encroaching on earth (or so we are told), and characters mention the total destruction of the world sometimes as an imminent cataclysm, and sometimes as a disaster that’s already come to pass. The film’s s&m/b&d fetishism is obvious from the costuming, most notably the deviant dental equipment used to keep slaves’ mouths perpetually splayed. (Although the Queen plays games of dominance and submission, there is no overt sexuality in the film—which, together with its alienating weirdness, makes it of only marginal interest to the bondage crowd). All of the characters have, or are given, the names of chess pieces, and talk of gambits and sacrificing rooks makes up a large part of the plot. “Horror” and “sci-fi” turn out to be the least accurate of the descriptors. The film does speak of black holes and invokes a theory of infinite parallel universes in a throwaway bid to explain the inexplicable Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: MAXIMUM SHAME (2010)
LIST CANDIDATE: PROXIMA (2007)
DIRECTED BY: Carlos Atanes
FEATURING: Oriol Aubets, Anthony Blake, Manuel Solás, Abel Folk
PLOT: Just as his life seems to be falling apart, aimless sci-fi nerd Tony (Aubets) becomes accidentally entangled with a doomsday cult, a time-traveling conspiracy, and new method of interstellar transportation. Or does he?
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Atanes is explicitly trafficking in weird material here, and PROXIMA certainly has its fair share of strange imagery and plot twists, but its elaborate scenario often feels culled from classics like Videodrome and The Matrix. Originality aside, though, its abundance of imagination and ambiguity might be enough to scrape onto the List.
COMMENTS: Attached to anything else, the tagline “The Last Science Fiction Movie” might sound hubristic. But it’s absolutely appropriate to PROXIMA, an apocalyptic love letter to sci-fi and its fans. Atanes puts his obsession with the genre front and center, and the film is dotted with casual references to Blade Runner, Star Wars, and Jean-Luc Picard. Perhaps the most telling such reference is “Felix Cadecq,” the name of the Kilgore Trout-like author (Solàs) whose revelations set Tony’s adventure in motion—and a Spanish homonym for “Philip K. Dick,” whose pet themes form the backbone of PROXIMA‘s mind-bending world.
But Atanes, as liberally as he may borrow from the sci-fi canon, never settles for pure pastiche. The opening scenes, for example, are refreshingly slice-of-life, patiently building up to the main plot with subtle hints of weirdness. We see Tony preparing to close his failing video store, playing Halo as his girlfriend dumps him, and visiting a convention with his best friend Lucas (get it?), balancing sympathy with brual honesty in its depiction of his slacker lifestyle. But everything changes after Tony and Lucas attend a panel featuring the eccentric old Cadecq, who vows never to write again. Instead, he hawks his new CD “Journey to Proxima,” which he claims will guide its listeners into contact with extraterrestrial life.
From this point on, the film is a series of left turns, with detours into amnesia, astral projection, alien technology, and false imprisonment. By the time Tony’s drifting through space in what looks like a magical refrigerator, it’s unclear exactly how each twist is related, beyond a loose sense that something epic is going on. At times, the movie comes across like the breathless sci-fi equivalent of North by Northwest. Alas, Tony’s sojourns into space also reveal PROXIMA‘s greatest weakness: its budget is tragically outstripped by its imagination, and its special effects are universally cheap and shoddy.
That said, it’s impressive how far Atanes goes with so little money, and PROXIMA ends with a string of stunning, otherworldly visions mixing its meager effects with real-world landscapes. Furthermore, at no point is PROXIMA entirely beholden to its effects budget: unlike many Philip K. Dick adaptations, it stays away from action-oriented set-pieces, sticking to a more introspective, cerebral realm. It’s less about the adventure itself, and more about the egotism of imagining oneself at the center of a vast, interplanetary saga. As Cadecq says early in the film, “We are the protagonists now!” But as Tony must learn, bridging the gulf between sci-fi and real life isn’t all it”s cracked up to be.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: