Tag Archives: Dreamlike

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: RUSSIAN ARK (2002)

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DIRECTED BY: Aleksandr Sokurov

FEATURING: Sergey Dreyden, Aleksandr Sokurov

PLOT: In one take, a ghostlike figure wanders through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, watching re-enactments of Russian history and debating art and culture with a French aristocrat.

Still from Russian Ark (2002)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: As the longest unbroken take in the history of cinema, Russian Ark is somewhat experimental in form, and with its intermingling of various eras of Russian history inside the Hermitage museum, it is somewhat surreal in content. Viewed simply as tour de force filmmaking, it’s worth seeing for the curious and cultured, and a must-see for film school types. The film’s only drawback is that its high art, highly Russophilic preoccupations make it unavoidably stuffy at times, and risk limiting its appeal to the tea-and-crumpets (er, samovar-and-beluga?) crowd.

COMMENTS: Who is the main character of Russian Ark? Ghost? Amnesiac time traveler? Dreamer? Or just a metaphorical representative of the Russian spirit? The speaker through whose eyes we watch Russian Ark remembers some vague accident, but opens his eyes to see women in furs and feathered headdresses emerging from a carriage; accompanied by men in formal scarlet military uniforms, he judges their fashions to be from the 1800s. He’s swept along with the guests from a snowy courtyard through a wooden door; he eventually deduces he is the Winter Palace section of the Hermitage, the ancient home of the Czars that was turned into the world’s largest art museum. No can see or hear him until he encounters an older man in black, who is equally lost in time and space; this is the Marquis, who will be his companion through the rest of his odyssey through the Hermitage.

That journey involves the pair passing through the various rooms of the museum, some of which are occupied by today’s art patrons, and some by ghosts from prior ages, including Peter the Great, Anastasia, and Catherine the Great (who is looking for a chamberpot). Curiously, there is little focus on the individual works of art; the camera rarely gives the paintings and statuary more than a passing glance, instead maintaining a constant wide-angle view of each sprawling, packed chamber. We watch courtly episodes from history and eavesdrop on some conversations, but the meat of the movie are the conversations between the European Marquis and the modern Russian through whose eyes we see the museum. Some of their dialogue is absurd, but much of it is self-reflective hand-wringing over the state of Russian culture. Russians come off as having a bit of an inferiority complex towards Europe. The Marquis sneers that Russians are great copyists in the fine arts, but produce nothing original; all the great works in the museum come from the French, the Italians, or others. He is disdainful towards the Russian people, yet he is slowly won over by the final scene, a massive Czarist ball where he joins in a mazurka with the ghosts of past maidens. Overcome with nostalgia for the lovely aristocratic past, the Marquis decides to stay behind at the phantasmagorical ballet. His decision validates the Ark’s role in preserving Western culture, but the Russian chooses to go on without him, headed towards an unknown destiny. Although we get a few clues as to the man behind the point-of-view’s identity, it isn’t really important. Russian Ark‘s main character is actually the Hermitage.

Russian Ark was shot in a single 87-minute take with a digital camera that followed the characters through thirty-three rooms of the Winter Palace. The cast included over 2,000 extras, and a full orchestra, all of whom had to be costumed and choreographed. Rehearsals lasted for months before the shot was attempted. Depending on which source you believe, the take was flawlessly executed on either the third or the fourth attempt. (To make things slightly easier, the sound was recorded later). Only one day was allocated to actual filming.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If cinema is sometimes dreamlike, then every edit is an awakening. ‘Russian Ark’ spins a daydream made of centuries.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Jenn, who insightfully suggested that it was “perhaps artsy instead of weird” but added “[i]t is super pretty and certainly unusual and dreamy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET (2012)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Sergio Hernández, Santiago Figueroa, Christian Vadim, Valentina Vargad, Chamila Rodriguez, Pedro Villagra, Sergio Schmied

PLOT: An old man recalls his childhood, when he used to carry on conversations with Long John Silver and Ludwig van Beethoven, as he waits in a boarding house for the man who will kill him to arrive.

Still from Night Across the Street (2012)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: It’s a fine, absurd death movie. We suspect Ruiz has fielded better candidates to make the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of all time, but this one carries an extra poignancy due to the fact that we are watching an artist sail into the sunset under his own power. Night Across the Street is Ruiz’ posthumous jibe at mortality.

COMMENTS: “Time seems to stumble here,” muses a character (amusingly, the line is delivered immediately following a jump cut). “The hours don’t follow one another.” Our main character, Don Celso, is talking to Jean Giono, a somewhat obscure French writer who died in 1970 but whom he meets in a translation seminar, presumably in the present day. Celso is used to chatting with such apparitions; as a child, he used to hold conversations with Beethoven (whom he takes to see a cowboy movie) and the fictional pirate Long John Silver (who predicts that someone close to the boy will die, only to find that every victim he suggests is already dead).

Night Across the Street‘s sense of being lost in a sea of memory where the distant past shares equal billing with the present should be familiar to anyone who has ever observed grandpa recalling his first kiss in the seventh grade as if it happened yesterday, while simultaneously forgetting where he put his keys and how to operate the remote control. The first forty minutes of the movie are full of flashbacks to Celso’s boyhood, leading us to fear that Night will one of those dull, reverential movies full of the bittersweet reminiscences of an old man reflecting back on a life speckled with triumphs and tragedies; but the last two-thirds of the film, dealing with the approach of death and its aftermath, prove far more interesting than the setup. The forcibly retired Celso is waiting for the man who will kill him to arrive, you see, and when the boarding house matron’s nephew, a poet, comes to stay, he thinks his killer has finally arrived. In a convoluted parody of drawing room murder mysteries and noirish twists, the nephew is planning to kill the old man for his money, while romancing his own aunt and a dancer/prostitute who also lives at the home. Meanwhile, Don Celso is trying to talk an assassin, who is a client of the dancer, out of killing the nephew.

It gets stranger from there, as rumors of murder start to fly and the movie’s dream sequences start having their own dream sequences. In the world of this movie, no distinction could be less important than the one between fantasy and reality (unless it is perhaps the one between past and present). Only the difference between life and death truly matters, but even that line proves difficult to draw. Different permutations of the story coexist, overlapped onscreen: it’s a surreally garbled tale of murder, a young boy’s ominous premonitions of the future, an old man’s dying dream, a self-conscious metafiction, and the memoirs of a ghost, all at the same time. It ends as a haunted house tale set in a cursed boarding house, a place where the ghosts are haunted by their own meta-ghosts. The movie sports a delightful sense of intellectual play, especially wordplay (the lectures on translation, poetry recitations, a running gag about a crossword clue, and the main character’s obsession with the word “rhododendron”). Nothing could be more absurd than death. With his extremely odd and dry sense of humor intact until the end, Ruiz laughs at death—not defiantly, but with genuine befuddled amusement.

Raoul Ruiz made over 100 movies in his lifetime, some in his native Chile and many in France where he lived in exile during the Pinochet regime. In 2010 he was diagnosed with cancer and received a successful liver transplant. He shot Night Across the Street in March of April of 2011; in August of that same year he died of a lung infection. He did preparatory work on one final movie, Linhas de Wellington (Lines of Wellington), a historical drama set in the Napoleonic Wars, which was completed by his widow Valeria Sarmiento.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…suffused with the contrast between experience and memory, reality and surreality.”–Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Dwarf Oscar, who called it “a splendid and utterly weird movie, released after the filmmaker’s death, which brings a poignant resonance with the subjects tackled in the film.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

List Candidates, Reader Recommendations

THREE TAKES ON ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW (2013)

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Escape from Tomorrow has been promoted to the List. Comments are closed on this preliminary review; please visit the official entry.

We received an unprecedented three separate reviews of Randy Moore’s controversial surrealist satire Escape from Tomorrow, the independent feature which was shot guerrilla-style at Disney World and which many originally supposed would be unreleasable thanks to Disney’s notoriously aggressive legal department. We have decided to compile these three individual takes into one giant mega-post for your enjoyment and edification. So here’s everything you need to know about Escape from Tomorrow, at least for now…

DIRECTED BY: Randy Moore

FEATURING: Roy Abramsohn, Elena Schuber, Katelynn Rodriguez, Jack Dalton, Danielle Safady, Annet Manhendru, Allison Lees-Taylor, Lee Armstrong, Stass Klassen

PLOT: A day in the life of an American family vacationing at Disneyland… or Walt Disney World… or at least some Disney related theme park. Only the day starts out with Jim (Roy Abramsohn) getting a call from his boss, who tells him that there’s no job for him to return to. Things can only go downhill from there, but everything is filtered through a cheerful veneer. From a spreading cat-flu epidemic, to stalking teen-age girls, brainwashing by Park cyborgs, it just goes to show that “bad things happen everywhere”… even in the Happiest Place On Earth. (synopsis by L. Rob Hubbard)

Troubled family man Jim White and his family try to enjoy their final day in Disney World, but he becomes distracted by a pair of pretty French teenagers, blackouts, and visions of sinister happenings in the idyllic theme park. As the intensity of White’s visions grow, so too do tensions between him and his family, and soon it seems he might lose them and himself altogether to the weird power of Disney World. Would he really miss them, though, or does Disney offer him something better? (synopsis by Ben Sunde)

A middle-aged man (who looks an awful lot like a husky Tom Cruise) gets promptly fired via telephone amidst a family vacation to Disneyworld, and proceeds to break down mentally and physically with his family while he covertly follows two barely-legal Parisian teenagers during his waltz through the happiest place on earth. (synopsis by Ryan Aarset)

1. L. Rob Hubbard

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Aside from the accomplishment of actually shooting on Disney property completely in plain sight, the film’s subversive commentary on Disney’s hold on the collective imagination has a solid bite that has not been previously approached as directly as it is here.

COMMENTS: “Jim, listen to me. Don’t let your imagination run wild. It’s a transitional period.”

This is the first full sentence of Escape from Tomorrow, and it’s a key—if not the key—to understanding exactly what writer/director Randy Moore is up to in this groundbreaking film. Thanks to its impressive and unique origins, Escape from Tomorrow now occupies a spot analogous to that The Blair Witch Project held over a decade ago (leaving aside the latter film’s massive box office) in independent film. And, like Blair Witch, Escape is starting to encounter backlash in reaction to the hype that accompanied its debut at Sundance as “the best film that you may never get a chance to see.” Most of that backlash centers around a perceived lack of bite in the satire, and to criticism of the acting and filmmaking as “amateurish” and “just plain awful.” To each his own, but since most of the initial discussion centered around the film as a cause célèbre when it appeared to be waiting to be crushed by Disney’s corporate paw, now that it has been released with very little reaction from The Mouse House, some are feeling cheated that perhaps the film didn’t go as far as it could taking on Disney… that it’s a missed opportunity.

Still from Escape from Tomorrow (2013)Those who hoped for a harsh slash and burn attack on Disney and its park practices will need to seek satisfaction elsewhere, but those who feel that the satire is too soft and too on the surface are missing the point entirely. Escape from Tomorrow is a comic nightmare of the subconscious: “Lynchian” has been used many times in descriptions of the film. But Moore isn’t a -style surrealist; his take in presenting the paranoia and sexual tension that lurks in the corners of The Happiest Place On Earth is closer to the work of .

“Imagination” is a word that is repeated throughout Escape from Tomorrow, and it is the coin of this realm. After all, the whole function of amusement parks such as Disney World is to provide a playland. What could be better than having your playland already thought out for you—characters, scenarios, every little thing? Disney may not have been at it the longest, but they have certainly been very thorough in “imagineering” characters and places that have Continue reading THREE TAKES ON ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW (2013) →

Capsules

366 UNDERGROUND: WELCOME TO NOWHERE (BULLET HOLE ROAD)

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Watch Welcome to Nowhere (Bullet Hole Road) free at NoBudge until Oct. 18.

DIRECTED BY: William Cusick

FEATURING: Brian Greer, Nick Bixby, Lorraine Mattox, Tina Balthazar, Cara Francis, Peter Blomquist, Stacey Collins, Kevin Gebhard, Stephanie Silver

PLOT: As described in the press kit: “a surrealistic take on the American Road Story, this experimental film follows the overlapping encounters of five strangers as they struggle to exist in the desert of the American West.”

still-of-lorraine-mattox-in-welcome-to-nowhere-(bullet-hole-road)

COMMENTS:  As mentioned above, Welcome to Nowhere is an Experimental Film—there’s not so much a linear story that’s presented here as a collection of tropes associated with the road movie and the American West. There’s the doomed couple (are they adulterers?) meeting miserably in motel rooms and throwing furtive glances at each other; loners and psychos; hookers waiting for johns (or dead in motel rooms), and state troopers with mirrored sunglasses.

As such, one can construct scenarios from the bits and pieces presented, and those looking for an overall plot will be disappointed. The emphasis is on atmosphere, which Nowehere has in abundance. And at under an hour, doesn’t wear itself out. It’s a tone poem, and the result is very refreshing, if the viewer is open to the experience. The film is based on a performance piece by the theater company Temporary Distortion.

As the filmmakers themselves pontificate, “In a series of warped, image-driven episodes, the archetypes of the American Road Story are deconstructed in action, dialogue, intent and ultimately meaning…these representations of the American promise of freedom and travel on the open road disintegrate into paradoxical fantasies of improbable escapism, perverse sexuality and futile violence.” It’s surreal, like a fever dream of a road movie enthusiast.

You can expect to find Welcome to Nowhere popping up in film festivals over the next few months. It will make its online premiere on September 17 at NoBudge.com where it will stream for a month only.

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still-of-peter-blomquist-in-welcome-to-nowhere-(bullet-hole-road)

Capsules

CAPSULE: GALLINO, THE CHICKEN SYSTEM (2012)

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366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Octavi Pujades, , 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.

Still from Gallino, the Chicken System (2012)
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.