Tag Archives: Documentary

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CAPSULE: ENDLESS COOKIE (2025)

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Endless Cookie is available to purchase on-demand.

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DIRECTED BY: Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver

FEATURING: Voices of Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver

PLOT: A Canadian cartoonist interviews his half-Cree brother and his numerous nephews and nieces to make an animated documentary about their shared family history.

Still from Endless Cookie (2025)

COMMENTS: Animator Seth Scriver sets himself a difficult task. He thinks his half-brother, Pete (born to Seth’s father and an indigenous woman of the Cree tribe) is the greatest storyteller he’s ever known, and wants to document those tales. But Pete lives on the Shamattawa reservation in northern Manitoba, a location so remote that there are no roads and visitors must fly in. Pete’s large family has no experience with filmmaking, and the sound quality is so bad Steh frequently has to scrap recordings and start over. He’s excited to get a grant from Telefilm Canada, but his financial backers grow increasingly skeptical with the work-in-progress (“Is this what you’re doing with the money we gave you?” “Tell me, Seth, why is this pizza scene going on so long?”). A project that was supposed to take 7 months to complete stretches out to 9 years. But he crosses the finish line, and he and Pete finally deliver a heartfelt but oddball saga that sometimes approaches outsider art.

Seth’s lack of direction for the project becomes both a thesis and a running joke. His vague but lofty aspiration is to create a documentary that’s “funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple, and true.” Easygoing Pete is fine with the plan: “oh, okay.” The original idea is for Pete to tell seven stories, but his first attempt, a tale about the time he got his hand caught in a Conibear trap, is interrupted by the sound of a flushing toilet in the background. (Pete won’t finish this story until the end of the film.) Seth’s briefly-glimpsed flow chart for the movie is composed of irregular scribbled blobs representing scenes and looks like a bulbous, winding intestine instead of a straight arrow. The seven story structure is scrapped in favor of a laid-back method of just recording daily life and squeezing in stories as the come, an approach that better fits the documentarians’ personalities. While sitting around the table at Pete’s house—interrupted by Pete’s daughter Cookie offering to make sound effects for the film—Pete talks to his father on the phone, and Seth’s mother tells a story about a dream Pete told her, which leads the father to reminisce about a fishing trip where he encountered a strange glowing globe in the sky. And so it goes. As they slowly progress through each episode, with digressions aplenty and flashbacks nestled inside of flashbacks, a portrait emerges of Pete’s family and the way First Nations people live today: clinging to some traditions while jettisoning most for modern conveniences. This unforced, as-it-happens methodology allows the movie to touch on social topics like indigenous incarnation rates, lack of access to clean water and hunting lands, and historical injustices without seeming pedantic. Somehow, the movie ends after the apocalypse—although it eventually circles back to the present, because the past is an endless cookie.

The meandering style fits Scriver’s ADD animation style, which can best be described as “cute grotesque.” The brothers are drawn as clowns assembled from Mr. Potato Head parts, with plastic hats perched atop their rotund heads and big floppy noses; they wouldn’t look out of place in Yellow Submarine. Other characters become anthropomorphic trophies, slices of toast, right-angle rulers, or baby onions—not to mention the eponymous Cookie, who’s an actual talking chocolate chip cookie. Scriver puts enormous detail into every deceptively crude Flash animation frame, and indulges in surreal flights of fancy at every opportunity: coffee cups add commentary, real characters intrude on the stories (and vice versa), and a suicidal family member drives an eyeball motorcycle into a desert eternity. Endless Cookie is never visually dull, to say the least, and although some people can’t connect with the meandering storytelling, it resolves into a conversational format: one idea sparks another as stories wind their way through the tapestry of life, indifferent to temporal and physical laws. In the end, Scriver checks off his list of “funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple, and true”; he just forgot to add “and kind of weird.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… the film… boasts so much mirth and good will that the strangeness becomes grounded in universal feelings of warmth and togetherness. The surreal becomes identifiable and relatable… It’s a weird kind of hang out movie where the door is always open, either to engage directly or to just let all the strangeness wash over the viewer.”–Andrew Parker, The Gate (festival screening)

(This movie was nominated for review by Sean Ramsdell. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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CAPSULE: THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD (1993)

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DIRECTED BY: François Girard

FEATURING: Colm Feore

PLOT: A patchwork of short vignettes explores the allure of the eccentric piano virtuoso.

Still from thirty two short films about glenn gould (1993)

COMMENTS: I discovered my all-time favorite recording, Glenn Gould’s complete “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” and François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould at about the same time. I can’t definitively remember which I encountered first: my guess would be Girard’s film, because it is such an effective advertisement for Gould’s genius that it seems likely to have inspired a purchase. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that I saw there was a film out about this marvelous pianist who accompanied his nimble fingers with ecstatic spontaneous humming,  breathing humanity into Bach’s precise baroque miniatures, and knew I had to learn more about this man. I do know that Gould’s “Clavier” was reissued in on CD in 1993, likely to coincide with this film, and I love to imagine I actually picked up that set from Tower Records and rented a VHS of Thirty Two Films from my local mom and pop video store on the same weekend in 1993 or 1994.

The movie does what it says on the tin (although some might object to calling the closing credits a “short film.”) The sequences break down into four main categories: documentary-style interviews with friends and co-workers, dramatic reenactments of events in the pianist’s life, adaptations of Gould’s own works, and abstract experimental sketches. The interviews are illuminating, and give the film its hybrid documentary character. The dramatic scenes form the bulk of the movie. They follow in a roughly chronological format, but do not tell a continuing story: each is a standalone vignette. Memorable moments show Gould corralling his hotel chambermaid to listen to his hot-off-the-presses LP and the Gould mesmerized by contrapuntal conversations he hears in a diner. A performance of “String Quartet, Opus 1,” one of his few original compositions, an excerpt from the word collage “The Idea of North,” and a dramatization of a portion of his puckish essay “Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould About Glenn Gould” ground us in the legend’s actual creative output. The experimental shorts constitute the most intriguing category, although there are only five or six of them (considering how you count). They include closeups of Gould’s own CD318 piano in action, hammers striking the soundboard, illustrating the physical geometry of the sonic construction; a scene of Gould playing the piano in x-ray vision; and “Gould Meets McLaren,” a 1969 animated short (originally entitled “Spheres”) that shows globes popping into existence, dancing symmetrically across the screen, and dividing like eggs undergoing musical mitosis as Gould plays a Bach fugue.

I once defined bopic as “a movie genre that’s not accurate enough to be documentary or interesting enough to be fiction.” One of the most formulaic and cliched film formats, the celebrity biography only really works when it is heavily fictionalized, as in Amadeus or Lisztomania (which, coincidentally, both involve classical musicians). Thirty Two Short Films shatters the mold of this generally insipid movie genre. There are enough talking head reminiscences to capture the spirit of the man, but not so many that it appears lazy. Girard solves the genre’s central problem—the fact that messy human lives rarely fit neatly into three act structures with unified themes—by ignoring narrative almost entirely. This collage portraiture method captures its subject more faithfully than a “realist” approach would. When we think back on people we know, we recall them as a collection of moments and characteristics; we don’t think of them as a contiguous life story. Glenn Gould was the piano prodigy and the hypochondriac and the man who went everywhere wrapped in a coat and gloves and scarf and the man who called up his friends late at night and talked their ears off and the virtuoso who developed a hatred for performing and the monster who put ketchup on his eggs and the genius and the possibly asexual hermit. He is at least thirty two separate stories, and this seemingly chaotic collection of vignettes creates a portrait of a real person far better than a tick-tock chronology or a forced storyline would. Plus, the music is, naturally, great, and what Gould himself likely would have wanted us to focus on; his passion shines through every segment, turning almost anyone into a classical music fan for at least 90 minutes. Glenn Gould is a strong contender for the greatest biopic ever made.

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould entered the Criterion Collection in June 2025 on 4K UHD and Blu-ray. Of course it is a new 4K director approved transfer. Of course it comes with a booklet (a nice fold out broadsheet with titles and scenes from the shorts on the other side) with an informative essay (from Michael Koresky.) Of course it has a director’s commentary (Girard is joined by co-writer Don McKellar). Other extras include a thirty minute conversation between Girard and fellow Canadian director Atom Egoyan, archival interviews with star Colm Feore and producer Niv Fichman, and a two part 1959 television portrait called “Glenn Gould: Off the Record” and “Glenn Gould: On the Record.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…because of the deadening uniformity of the genre, Girard’s film appears all the more miraculous in retrospect. From its rigorous and deliberately distancing structural gambit to its restless stylistic experimentations, Thirty Two Short Films proves that biopics needn’t color within the lines to effectively portray their subjects.”–Derek Smith, Slant (Blu-ray)

[(This movie was nominated for review, without further comment, by “Anonymous.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]
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CAPSULE: PALMS (1993)

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Ладони, AKA Ladoni

DIRECTED BY: Artour Aristakisyan

PLOT: A man tries to connect with his unborn son by seeing glimpses of him in the faces of people he meets in the slums of late-Soviet Moldova.

Still from Palms (1993)

COMMENTS: Palms is a pseudo-documentary black-and-white film shot single-handedly by Artour Aristakisyan over five years in Chisinau, Moldova. It is a haunting journey through faith, identity, and what it means to exist. When it was first screened in Moscow in the early 1990s, it blindsided everyone. Few people saw it, but those who did will never forget it. Even compared to other eccentric Russian films of Soviet parallel cinema or necrorealism, Palms is something else entirely. But unlike the ironic works of Yevgeny Yufit or Andrei I., Palms overflows with intense passion and austere ideology.

The film is composed of ten short stories about real people—beggars, psychiatric patients, oddballs, cripples, and others—who behave like “Bodies without Organs” (a concept from philosopher Gilles Deleuze). So, who are these people? There’s an unwashed woman who has supposedly lain on the ground for 40 years, waiting for Jesus. A boy who swore not to move until the Kingdom of Heaven arrives. An old woman who clings to the severed head of an SS officer—her lover—a clear nod to both Salome and Judith. A grandfather who collects trash from the dead, with “the border of Israel running across his face.” A man named Srulik, who kisses a dove—an allusion to the Holy Spirit.

Each kooky character, with their own tragic story, is woven into a cryptic narrative voiced by the filmmaker, who speaks as “the Father” addressing his “Unborn Son,” a child about to be aborted (an allusion to “the Logos” —Jesus before the Incarnation). The Father (voiced by Aristakisyan himself) is the only speaking character in the film. The central theme of his calm, solemn narration is a deep distrust of the material world, which is portrayed as inherently evil. Earth, in this worldview, is the creation of the Demiurge—a false god behind all societal systems. Although Aristakisyan claims he followed these drifters, outcasts, and madmen for five years and wrote down what they said, it’s clear that many of them are figments of his imagination.

Though the film seems disconnected from any specific cinematic tradition, Palms shares thematic affinities with early Christian thought, including Pauline theology and the Bogomil heresy. “Father Aristakisyan” proclaims:

“This is the System. It doesn’t have borders anymore. The System will find you wherever you go. So, kid, before it’s too late, focus on your salvation. You have your own light. Use it, and you’ll escape the System. For now, don’t get distracted by all this nonsense. No, don’t think about traveling abroad. After death, you’ll have plenty of time to travel. Your next baptism will be by fire. And then it’ll be too late to pick a side.”

To the Paulicians, everything on Earth was the work of Sataniel—the Demiurge, the god of the Old Testament. Jesus Christ, in contrast, was the Good God, made of “subtle” matter. They viewed Christ as a kind of phantom, not truly human—an idea known as docetism, associated with Serapion of Antioch. Aristakisyan’s concept of the System aligns with this Paulician worldview: not merely a political structure, but something much larger. It’s not socialism or capitalism, or even human society as such. The System is the entire material realm—factories, asylums, homes, and everything else.

Ironically, Aristakisyan (or his on-screen persona) even ridicules the vastness of outer space:

“I’m worried about you, kid. The sky used to be a protective ceiling—obviously made of foil. It kept me safe from the cosmos and all the crap in it. When I lived under the sky, maybe some of my thoughts didn’t come true. Now, every thought becomes real. It’s like cancer spreading everywhere, but a special kind of cancer. It keeps the body alive so the corpse can keep generating energy.”

In a nod to earlier critiques of modernity, the film hits the audience with an almost didactic intensity. Aristakisyan’s vision of the System is a heady mix of conspiracy theory and mystical philosophy, creating a spellbinding and unsettling atmosphere throughout. Thirty years later, the leading ideologist of Russian fascism, Alexander Dugin, would echo some of these themes: “The Outer Space exploration is godless and shameful. It’s a globalist fantasy preparing for the Antichrist. The Outer Space is an illusion. We need to stay faithful to Christ and the Russian land.”

The film recalls the small, priestless sects that emerged in 18th-century Russia, some of which still survive in remote regions like the Evenk taiga or the Trans-Volga steppes. One such group, the Golbeshniki, believed society itself was the kingdom of Lucifer. They buried themselves in mysterious earthen dens, burned their children in dark rites, and danced naked in the moonlight.

Despite its Paulician creed and somber tale, the film breathes of something far greater. The pallid and dappled hues that stain the frame, the wretched hovels of Chișinău, and the tranquil voice of the author together weave a spell most strange. A beauty not of this earth steals o’er the senses, ensnaring the soul in such wise that to look away becomes a sorrowful task indeed.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[Palms’] approach certainly risks exploiting, aestheticising or exoticising human suffering. Instead, the film decontextualises its subjects without suggesting that the suffering it depicts is either unreal or picturesque. Rendering the historical as the trans-historical here functions to set extant reality into question.”–Hannah Proctor, ‘So-called waste’: Forms of Excess in Post-1960 Art, Film, and Literature’ (lecture)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

CAPSULE: INVENTION (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Courtney Stephens

FEATURING: , Sahm McGlynn, James N. Kienitz Wilkins

PLOT: Actress Callie Hernandez comes to terms with her eccentric father’s death, while portraying the character Carrie Fernandez who inherits her father’s patent for an “electromagnetic healing device.”

COMMENTS: Brought to our attention by a reader who noticed some uncanny similarities to Certified Weird curiosity  After Last Season, Invention tells a story of death and medical experimentation. Both films are low-budget explorations of weird science, but the comparison ends there—in Invention‘s favor, as the more coherent and watchable film (although After Last Season earns the award for weirdness).

In real life, actor-writer Hernandez is the daughter of Dr. John Hernandez, an alternative medical guru who hosted a program on local television. Six months after his death, Hernandez began collaborating with director Stephens on a script inspired by her mourning experiences. Actual footage from her father’s VHS archives made its way into the film. The story becomes a dual narrative about Hernandez and her fictional counterpart, “Carrie Fernandez,” the daughter of elusive “Dr. J.” When she unexpectedly inherits a patent discovers upon his death, she discovers her father secretly invented a “vibronic” machine.

Dr. J’s story is reminiscent of Wilhelm Reich, another traditionally educated medical professional whose career took a strange turn when he began developing outré theories (whom readers may recall from the Certified Weird film WR: Mysteries of the Organism). Dr. J’s device isn’t sexual, but Carrie finds out the FDA recalled it for its dubious medical value.

People of a certain age will remember seeing television personalities like Dr. J on public access, programs that were a bewildering mix of actual facts, bizarre theories, and advertising for various New Age products and therapies. I distinctly remember flipping past these types of shows on PBS back in the 1980s and ’90s (to a kid, they were incredibly boring). I can only imagine what it must have been like growing up with someone like Dr J for a father. Invention gives the viewer a pretty good idea, though the film mostly focuses on the absurdities of dealing with the loss of a parent in a death-phobic country like the United States.

Invention excels at black humor, maintaining a consistent tone of deadpan awkwardness as Callie/Carrie endures stilted conversations with funeral parlor staff and estate executors, while navigating the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of corporate bereavement policies. As Callie encounters the various people connected to her father’s mysterious machine, she tries to learn more about it, but conflicting stories emerge. Some of Dr J’s friends and patients remain convinced of his misunderstood genius; others politely refrain from calling him a crackpot to his grieving daughter.

Brief scenes of intensely colored video and animation emphasize Carrie’s descent into this psychedelically-tinged world of alternative medicine, as does a tea party in an “Alice in Wonderland”-themed corn maze. The intertwined narratives of Callie and Carrie, united by archival television footage, blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, as Dr. Hernandez essentially plays himself in both. But aside from the animated sequences, the film’s style remains realist. It hovers at the edge of the rabbit hole without ever tumbling in.

Many viewers will probably leave this film wanting to know more about the mysterious machine, but it remains cryptic. A series of cathode-ray tubes connected by a ring of coiled wire and staged in a red-walled room, it looks suitably science-fictional, and its main champions are a little too “woo” to be believed. Callie references Nikola Tesla’s theories when trying to defend to father’s vision, but she doesn’t seem entirely convinced. Even after she begins using the machine, she never reveals whatever effect it may or may not be having on her.

Hernandez looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember what else I had seen her in—probably because she was buried under layers of mascara in Under the Silver Lake (as Millicent Sevence, another daughter in mourning for her eccentric father). She also co-starred in Benson and Moorhead’s The Endless. Which is  to say, Hernandez has some fledgling weird credentials. Courtney Stephens has been assistant director on a number of pictures. I’ll be curious to see how both their careers develop. Invention has weird potential; perhaps someday we’ll see something full blown weird from its creators.

Invention is currently playing in limited cities across North America, with a wider release planned for Summer 2025.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This strange, personal movie is a mind meld between the experimental filmmaker Courtney Stephens (‘Terra Femme’) and the actress Callie Hernandez (‘Alien: Covenant’)… ‘Invention’ is committed to finding its own wavelength.”–Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan, who suggested “If After Last Season left an impact on anyone, it would probably have to be Courtney Stephens and her film Invention from 2024. The trailer is a pretty strong homage: minimalist keyboard music, cardboard in the background, CGI dreams, questions that go nowhere, and shot on film.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)