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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

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DIRECTED BY: Abel Ferrara

FEATURING: Harvey Keitel, Frankie Thorn, Zoe Lund, Paul Hipp

PLOT: A dirty cop indulges his many addictions as he pursues the culprits behind a horrible sexual assault on a nun.Still from Bad Lieutenant (1992)

COMMENTS: Central characters who are bad—flouting conventions, horrifying the prim and proper, indulging the id—are the stuff of Hollywood cliché. Between all the bad moms and bad teachers and bad Santas, these comical antiheroes can feel played out. But Abel Ferrara would never be lumped in with conventional showbiz trends, and his Bad Protagonist can in no way be misconstrued as a good-natured rebel thumbing his the nose at society. If anything, it’s the “Lieutenant” that’s superfluous in this title: our hero is a bad detective, a bad dad, a bad colleague, a bad gambler, a bad Catholic, a bad john. He drinks (sometimes upon waking up), he smokes crack, he shoots heroin, and he steals cocaine and sells it to drug dealers, keeping a little for himself to snort off any handy surface (including pictures of his daughter’s first communion). He robs criminals. He cajoles his colleagues into giving them their money and turns around and makes terrible bets with it. He cavorts with prostitutes, extorts teenagers for humiliating sexual favors… hell, when he shows up to a double homicide, he takes a lingering look at the victims’ breasts. And this is long before we witness him hurling vulgar invective at Jesus Christ. Ya get it, folks? The guy is just spectacularly bad.

Lost in the wonder of Nicolas Cage’s out-there turn in the quasi-sequel Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (and a third film supposedly in the works set in Tokyo and to be directed by Takashi Miike) is the fact that the original was a deliberate shocker in its own time. Ferrara pulls no punches, dramatizing every despicable moment in exacting detail as part of what my colleague Gregory J. Smalley called “an overwrought, magnificent Christian parable that sought to demonstrate God’s infinite capacity for forgiveness by presenting a character that audiences couldn’t forgive.” Bad Lieutenant is a Book of Job for its audience, dragging viewers through the muck and the mire and daring them to re-evaluate their notions of sacred and profane.

One should always be hesitant in using the word “brave” to describe an acting performance; it is just acting, after all. But Keitel’s work here is undeniably go-for-broke, and sometimes it borders on comedy to see just how horrible he’s willing to appear. He never stops talking, only yielding when a woman injects him with smack. He’s hostile to nearly everyone he encounters (including one of his kids portrayed by his real-life daughter). Contemporary critics made much of a full-frontal nude scene, a traditional line-in-the-sand for mainstream cinema, but Keitel is arguably even more naked in his fully clothed, emotionally raw confrontation with Christ, letting all his feigned confidence and gruff bravado drop in a desperate cri de coeur. The film’s Act 3 twist, in which he makes a series of questionable choices in an attempt to find redemption, only makes sense because Keitel has laid the groundwork for a character for whom no decision is unthinkable.

Bad Lieutenant is outrageous in the extraordinary awfulness of its title character, but not especially weird. Keitel’s troubles are entirely of his own making, and his desperate attempts to keep his head above water while insisting on tying more and more weights to his ankles have become more common in recent years, most notably in the frantic machinations of the Safdie brothers. Bad Lieutenant would make an excellent companion piece to the Apocryphally enshrined God Told Me To; both films force their central detectives to confront the nature of the Almighty and their unstable faith in the face of events in the living world, although their journeys are nearly polar opposites.

There’s an entertaining piece of subtext in the way Keitel’s fortunes mirror the championship baseball series that soundtracks the film. We learn from the outset that a comeback by the hapless New York Mets from a 3-0 deficit in a playoff showdown with the rival Los Angeles Dodgers would require nothing short of a miracle. (It’s a feat that would actually be pulled off for the first and only time 12 years later, by the 2004 Boston Red Sox.) Naturally, Keitel has stopped believing in miracles and so forsakes his hometown team, continuing to put his money and his life behind the ascendant Dodgers and slugger Darryl Strawberry, a prodigious talent who himself was infamously brought down by drugs. Of course, Keitel is in so deep to his bad bets that when things go south, he swivels on a dime from attaboy-cheering to racial epithets, punctuated by a gunshot to the car radio. Yes, he’s a bad, bad man, but it’s not his badness that brings him down. It’s his failure to heed the advice of another Met: “Ya gotta believe.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an illuminating, excoriating descent into the cesspool of sin, self-loathing and defilement. This is not an easy film to watch… This bizarre ecclesiastical dimension is what makes “Bad Lieutenant” more than a shallow wallow in the muck. Ferrara does make his moral points, and though one feels dirtied in the process, there is an accompanying feeling of purification as well.” – Hal Hinson, Washington Post (contemporaneous)

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

Bad Lieutenant (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

Bad Lieutenant (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

  • A degenerate cop who snorts coke, bets on playoffs and drinks himself into stupors starts to pull himself out of the abyss when he investi- gates the rape of a nun who refuses to press charges.

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List Candidates

APOCRYHA CANDIDATE: SHE LOVED BLOSSOMS MORE (2024)

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Agapouse ta louloudia perissotero

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She Loved Blossoms More is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Yannis Veslemes

FEATURING: Panos Papadopoulos, Aris Balis, Julio Katsis,

PLOT: Three brothers try to cope with their mother’s untimely death.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Hallucinating your dead mom as a talking vaginal flower, complete with glowing clitoris, might be a totally natural Oedipal response for a son still processing grief and loss. But when Hedgehog then makes a psychedelic drug from said flower so he can hold a séance with a transdimensional severed head to perfect his time travel experiments, things get pretty weird.

COMMENTS: You can tell life just hasn’t been the same for Dummy, Japan, and Hedgehog since their mother passed away. They try to maintain some semblance of normalcy, coming together for meals and decorating their house for the holidays as Christmas rolls around. But they inevitably drift apart into their own mournful rhythms. Dummy, a failed scientist, spends all his time making and taking pharmaceuticals, then sleeping in the family car with his hands tied to the steering wheel. Japan, the computer nerd, prefers to play chess online before getting drunk on cognac and passing out in the bathtub. Only Hedgehog feels seriously devoted to their family and their ongoing project: he even sleeps in their mother’s Art Deco armoire, the very piece of furniture the brothers are converting into a time machine so they can bring her back from the dead.

After a series of experiments, with variable success (one results in a chicken with its head in another dimension), Mom’s garden has become a pet cemetery (where she also lies buried). Her sons need more money for additional equipment, but Hedgehog avoids taking calls from Logo, their mysterious Parisian funder. Logo (Pinon, in an excellent cameo) has set a daunting deadline, and seems to have questionable motives of his own for pursuing time travel.

When Dummy brings his dealer/girlfriend Samantha to join the party, an increasingly desperate Hedgehog begins hearing his mother’s voice, begging him to bring her back. During a heavy trip she urges him to “try it” with the girl. Needless to say, Hedgehog doesn’t interpret “it” the way most people would; but do his subsequent actions disrupt the time-space continuum. Or is everyone still high on grave flowers?

Like , Yannis Veslemes clearly has a deep love of late seventies to early eighties cinema. A sensuous trippy vibe pervades Blossoms from beginning to end, but this is lo-fi sci-fi: a blend of neon light filters enhanced by distorted sound and visuals with the bluish static of cathode-ray televisions and glowing green text on early computer monitors. The strategic use of animatronics ups the weirdness factor as the plot veers into an uncanny valley. Veslemes may be the only contemporary director to have not only seen, but taken inspiration from the obscure films of (a close examination of the computer screen in the opening sequence reveals the user’s handle: “zoozero79”.)

Veslemes composed scores for films before turning to directing and, also like Cosmatos, he displays a interest a soundtrack that adds to the film’s unique ambiance. She Loved Blossoms More features mainly neoclassical compositions, with some electronics, but avoids clichéd over-reliance on imitating the stereotypical sounds of ’80s movies. The music always complements the visuals without trying to overpower the imagery’s otherworldliness.

The story provides no plausible explanation for how hooking electrodes up to a closet could create a time machine. Blossoms requires a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief, or perhaps outright cynicism. The characters’ plight generates sympathy; the retro technology on display leaves the viewer wondering whether we’re actually witnessing groundbreaking DIY research, or a family caught up in a collective delusion. As the identity of Logo and the backstory of Mom’s tragic death are gradually revealed, it only adds another layer to an already ambiguous reality.

As Hedgehog, Papadopoulos  gives an understated performance that sometimes recalls Jake Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko, displaying a similarly creepy dead-eyed intensity. It’s an interesting point of comparison, given that both films explore ’80s nostalgia, weird physics, and altered states of consciousness, though in entirely different ways.

As with most time travel narratives, the story loops around on itself, but the ending is not quite the same as the beginning. You can’t travel through the back of the wardrobe and come out unchanged.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…gets super psychedelic and downright weird… for those viewers who are on its very particular wavelength, She Loved Blossoms More could be a soothing journey to a dark place within themselves, exploring the peripheral spaces just beyond memory, and that is worth the trip. – Josh Hurtado, Screen Anarchy (festival screening)

Capsules

CAPSULE: SNORKELING (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Emil Nava

FEATURING: Daniel Zolghadri, Kristine Froseth, Tim Johnson Jr.

PLOT: Teenagers Michael and Jameson start a relationship while delving deeper and deeper into the trippy landscapes concocted in their minds by a trendy psychedelic inhalant.

Still from Snorkeling (2025)

COMMENTS: Disaffected teens have been fertile ground for cinematic drama for decades. Going back to Rebel Without a Cause, and probably well before, young people have sought out entertainment that gets them, and the movies have responded with tales of kids whom the squares refuse to get. Snorkeling is a proud inheritor of that tradition, and seems especially in tune with a moment where teenagers are too beaten down to rebel; they just want to escape.

Snorkeling finds America’s youth in an especially despondent mood, and it’s hard to blame them. We only catch glimpses of adults, but the world they’ve created for their kids is a selfish one; they’re dedicated to satisfying themselves, leaving nothing behind for the next generation. We hear from several teenagers in quasi-documentary segments where they explain their rootlessness and highlight the relief that snorkeling brings. Our guides through this defeated landscape are Michael, a half-Iranian pothead who affably goes through his days just trying to put it all behind him, and Jameson, an effervescent young woman with a home life she is so over. (One suspects that her father named her after a bottle of his favorite spirit.) She introduces Michael to a new kind of high, and they embark upon a curious push-pull relationship where he always tries to get closer, and she’s always anxious to get away.

Looking inside their drugged-out world doesn’t tell us much about its appeal. Scenes take on a pink hue, featureless bodies writhe in the sky, and everyone seems to be caught up in a blissed-out, laid-back hippie vibe. Every now and then, the disconnect is so intense that characters literally become animated, swirling around in a hand-drawn fantasia for a few seconds of true escape from the real world. (These are the moments that take the most advantage of Nava’s background as a go-to music video director for stars like Ed Sheeran, Calvin Harris, and Eminem.) We have to take it on faith that this is as satisfying as the characters tell us it is. But while these peeks inside the hallucinations are mildly interesting, the truly shocking images are what these cosmic travelers look like back in our world. They’re half-comatose bodies, staring blankly into the sky with oxygen masks strapped to their faces, as if some titan had picked up a hospital and shaken all the patients out onto the ground. We’re trading one empty room for another.

The big paradox at the heart of Snorkeling is that Michael and Jameson—and presumably all their contemporaries—desperately seek connection, but their solution is to engage in the most isolating activity imaginable. That’s the driving force behind the awkward finale, which feels like adults showed up at the very end and shoehorned in a climax from an ABC Afterschool Special. It’s a relief to see them recognizing the trap they’ve escaped, but it feels stagey in a way that the earlier surreal naturalism did not. Snorkeling has some interesting ideas about the reasons the kids are not alright these days and is very sympathetic about why they’re downright anxious to get away from it all. But the only way out it can think of is to harsh everyone’s mellow. That’s disappointing, but for a little while, it’s a nice mild buzz.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…perfectly captures the disaffected mood of a generation through its stunning, hallucinatory visuals and immersive soundscape, creating a potent atmosphere of beautiful despair. However, this stylistic triumph comes at the cost of story and soul. The characters are hollow vessels, and the film’s sanitized portrayal of addiction feels like a profound failure of nerve.” – Naser Nahandian, Gazettely (contemporaneous)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SNOW WHITE AND RUSSIAN RED (2009)

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Wojna polsko-ruska (Polish-Russian War)

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DIRECTED BY: Xawery Żuławski

FEATURING: Borys Szyc, Roma Gąsiorowska, Maria Strzelecka, Sonia Bohosiewicz, Anna Prus, Dorota Masłowska

PLOT: Against the backdrop of ongoing tensions between Poland and Russia, Silny, a drug-using student, pines for his unfaithful girlfriend Magda; he sublimates his pain through hedonism, but begins to question his role in the universe and the very nature of his own reality. 

COMMENTS: Finding a suitable title to sell a movie to another country’s audience is not the least challenge foreign films face. If a direct translation doesn’t work, then you have to come up with something that makes sense to a different culture without betraying the original spirit. By this standard, Snow White and Russian Red is a pretty good effort, evoking the colors of the Polish flag while referencing two of the protagonist’s greatest foes: the cocaine that provides an escape and the oppressors who continue to loom over Polish life even decades after the fall of communism. Nice work, title translators.

The undercurrent of politics is a constant in Snow White and Russian Red, and Silny, looking like the lead singer of Right Said Fred and alternating between uncontrolled violence and tearful self-pity, is ill-equipped to understand any of it. He is supposedly pursuing a business degree, he is surrounded by decadent baubles of the West like beauty pageants and fast-food joints, and he dreams of living in a McMansion in a suburb where everything looks the same. But he’s continually drawn back to Magda, the hot blonde in the Soviet-red dress whose infidelities infuriate him and only make him want her more. They are beyond co-dependent; they are perpetually locked in each other’s orbits, pushed and pulled by gravity.

Someone more well-versed in the particulars of Polish politics and society could do a better job of deciphering the allusions that populate the film, particularly the women who simultaneously entice and frustrate Silny’s attempts to find escape through sex: Angela, the nihilistic goth who embraces suicide but also is protective of her virginity; Arleta, who seems to want Silny’s affections but consistently irritates him with insulting gossip; Natasha, the tough girl who teases Silny but is so focused on getting her next hit that she snorts powdered soup broth; and Ala, the cute nerd who loves her parents but gets physically aroused talking about this amazing 16-year-old writer she’s discovered named Dorota. Silny feels superior to all of them on an intellectual level, but consistently fails to score sexually. If director Żuławski (son of Andrzej) has any metaphor to convey, it’s that Poland is like Silny, neither fish nor fowl, small on the world stage but unsatisfied at home. 

But while there’s the sociopolitical allegory going on, there’s also a weirder level of surrealism that suggests what we’re seeing is somewhere beyond the realm of reality. Within the opening minutes, an irate Silny deploys cartoon physics to fling his erstwhile girlfriend across the room. When Angela gets sick during a two-person dance party, she spews sick like a fire hose, and then upchucks rocks. Silny engages in a ridiculous fight with nearly everybody in a public park, dispatching them with greater ease than Neo in The Matrix. But it’s only with Silny’s arrest for fighting that we jump headfirst into the rabbit hole, when he is led to the desk of a clerk named Dorota Masłowska. Those in the know will recognize that name as belonging to the author of the original novel upon which this film is based. (Also, the same teen author who got Ala hot and bothered.) Turns out that’s not just a cheeky tip-of-the-cap; we’re looking at the genuine article. We’ve actually seen Masłowska before, moping around in a striped hoodie and narrating some of Silny’s story in the first person, but now that they’re face-to face, she can demonstrate her omnipotence by forcing him to do her bidding and literally deconstructing the set. It’s a pivot that evidently comes straight from the book, a piece of meta-narrative that Żuławski replicates with the author’s participation. It’s also a twist that only muddies the waters. The godlike powers of the author don’t equate neatly to the forces keeping Silny down, or to Poland, for that matter. It’s just a whole other element that Żuławski and Masłowska want to play with, and it doesn’t serve the story or stand on its own. It’s a hat being worn on top of another hat.

After despairing about ever knowing what in his life is real, Silny rams his head into a wall and finds himself in Hell, which turns out to be a talk show where he fabricates his encounters with the devil for the audience’s amusement. Masłowska is in that crowd, too, and if anything sums up the arc of Snow White and Russian Red, it’s this: a character reckoning with things he can hardly understand, and the author who created him sitting in judgment. It’s a dance that seemingly has no end.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The visually splashy sophomore effort of Polish helmer Xawery Zulawski is just as helter-skelter as the spiky local literary sensation that inspired it, but is finally too thematically anemic to provide any real dazzle… no amount of wacky occurrences can substitute for any deeper insight or suggest possible solutions. This makes the film totally static on a thematic level, despite its pumping soundtrack, roving camera, often psychedelic lighting and snazzy (though thankfully not hysterical) editing. Effects work and wire-fu fight scenes add to the generally off-the-wall tone.” – Boyd van Hoeij, Variety (contemporaneous)

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

Wojna Polsko-Ruska

Wojna Polsko-Ruska
  • - English subtitles
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Capsules

CAPSULE: QUEER (2024)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Drew Starkey, ,

PLOT: The arrival of an enigmatic young man in 1950s Mexico City disrupts William Lee’s dissolute routine with the promise of companionship.

COMMENTS: Queer begins with a character sketch in the opening credits. Static shots of a small apartment reveal a cheap mattress, and a series of things—the first being a scuttling centipede. There are rumpled blankets, pairs of glasses, cigarettes (both stubbed-out and fresh), books, a passport and visa, a camera, a ViewMaster, and an array of pistols. Seven of them, to be precise, all nicely arranged. By the end of the opening credits, you know the character pretty well, even if you’re unfamiliar both with the author William Lee facsimulates, and the book the movie is based upon.

William Lee is an obviously intelligent but woefully uncharismatic fellow approaching or already in middle age. He has difficulty keeping still, and the camera mimics his erratic physicality by cutting from micro-shot to micro-shot as the protagonist bumps through his alcohol-fueled days and nights. It’s hot, and we can feel it alongside the array of gringos who’ve set up a little gay community in a borough of Mexico City that seems comprised exclusively of cheap bars, cheaper apartments, and by-the-hour hotels. We are there, with Lee, and can feel him either about to crack from his own tension or melt away into a puddle of boozy-Beatnik soup.

Queer, the film, has two halves: the first is a (very) awkward romance of sorts, wherein Daniel Craig’s Lee clumsily attempts to woo a young cypher named Eugene. We never learn too much about the guy, which is apt, in that one of the few things we do learn concerns his involvement with army intelligence during World War Two—and the staggering amount of lies he was tasked with sifting through. The second half involves a desperate Lee seeking an ancient drug in the Ecuadorian jungle to overcome his communication deficits, having—despite his self-perceived lack of persuasive powers—convinced Eugene to be his semi-paid companion. Surrealistic touches season the goings-on: disorienting flares of television static; a giant Lee looking in on a tiny Lee through a mock-up of an apartment building within his apartment room; and even a jaunt to see Cocteau’s Orpheus.

Guadagnino confronts the challenge of translating an incomplete Burroughs novel for the screen, and acquits himself well. I’m inclined to be forgiving toward the movie, as adapting any of Burroughs’ word-bursts (be they novels, anecdotes, memoirs, or otherwise) into semi-coherent narratives requires making difficult choices. Craig is a delight as the author, Starkey maintains a tight balance of charm and impenetrability, and Guadagnino keeps the look and feel on course even as the subject matter becomes increasingly slippery. With unrequited love (but plenty of sex), gallons of sweat (despite chills from junk withdrawal), and a time-bending soundtrack, Queer is an pleasing experience, even as it often crossed my mind that a man this addled shouldn’t be carrying around any firearms—much less seven of them.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Kuritzkes and Guadagnino diverge from their source material in making Lee’s quest for psychedelic fulfillment successful. Queer has a vein of David Lynchian surrealism (RIP) that starts with the inky, oil-painting cinematography of the nocturnal Mexico City scenes and grows more pronounced in the third act, when Lesley Manville does a darkly hilarious turn as a botanist living deep in the jungle. Without spoiling: Things get weird.”–Margot Harrison, Seven Days (VT)

Queer [Blu-ray]

Queer [Blu-ray]
  • Daniel Craig
  • Drew Starkey
  • Jason Schwartzman
  • Lesley Manville
  • Luca Guadagnino
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