Tag Archives: Experimental

Saturday Short, Shorts

SATURDAY SHORT: BULB (2008)

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David Collins may not have a lot of material posted on video-sharing websites like YouTube and Vimeo, but the few shorts and trailers he does have out have certainly attracted our attention. Collins has the creativity to be a part of something big. For now, however, it appears that Dave will have to continue maxing out his credit cards for each humble release.

Bulb – Short Film from David Collins on Vimeo.

For more on David’s past, present, and upcoming work visit his personal site www.ssplayground.com

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CAPSULE: ODDSAC (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Danny Perez

FEATURING: The music of Animal Collective and a bunch of unknown actors.

PLOT:  Zilch.  ODDSAC is completely without narrative, or much coherence.  The only line of

Still from Oddsac (2010)

dialogue is, “Yeah, he hates chocolate.  He hates everything but green beans,” spoken by a young girl with a southern drawl.  Oh, and there is a vampire.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  While it is certainly one of the weirdest pieces of film-making I’ve encountered in awhile, it is not a movie.  It is an extended performance art video piece for a new, unreleased Animal Collective album.  Although it has some very cool visuals and the weirdness never lets up during the 52 minute running time, I say the art form of music videos should be separate from a list of the best 366 weird movies of all time.

COMMENTS:  If you are familiar with the oddball musical stylings of Animal Collective, you would expect a visual album from these guys to be an “out-there” extravaganza.  Well… it is.  The film is a barrage of acid-fueled, kaleidoscopic visuals that may melt your retinas if you stare too long.  Like the band’s music, ODDSAC does not follow conventional structure in its visual montages.  At times, it is reminiscent of the experimental art films painstakingly crafted by Stan Brakhage in the early 1960’s. Whereas Brakhage was a pioneer in the experimental film field, Danny Perez is just really good at quick-cut editing and manipulating his visuals into a trippy panorama.  At an open-discussion forum after the screening of the film in Los Angeles, Perez and the Collective gang mentioned the influence of John Carpenter’s Halloween.  Say what?!? There are elements of horror interspersed with the craziness, but I don’t see any connection to a straight-forward slasher film.

The film is divided into 13 chapters.  Each segment features a different song, so essentially it is 13 music videos.  The first segment sets a tone of darkness and dread with the creepy song “Mr. Fingers,” which writhes its way around images of a towel-headed man with a red-painted face.  Ropes of fire rhythmically swing around him, brightly lighting the pitch black sky.  Elsewhere, a young woman claws into a wall, only to be immersed in a stream of oil that Continue reading CAPSULE: ODDSAC (2010) →

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CAPSULE: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD: REANIMATED (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Mike Schneider

FEATURING: Karl Hardman, Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea

PLOT: An animated recreation of the classic zombie film, Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated features a number of talented animators filtering Romero’s original vision through their own artistic viewpoints, expressing the universal messages therein in their own mediums.Still from Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated (2010)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  While aesthetically intriguing and at times very eerie, there never was much that jumped out as being incredibly weird about Romero’s zombie movie.  Although it was the first of its kind in what is now a celebrated genre, Night of the Living Dead was always more of a message film than a meditation on the dead rising from their graves.  This animated version does indeed add some visual quirks, but there is no real strangeness here.

COMMENTS:  For fans of the zombie film, it doesn’t get much more better than the simple-yet-satisfying claustrophobia of the grandpappy of them all, Night of the Living Dead.  More than a horror flick, this grainy 1968 indie is a meaningful, smart work of art that pushes the boundaries of what the genre is capable of and what it can stand for.  So above any horror I can think of, this one definitely deserves an animated homage that explores it from a stylistic point of view.  And Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated doesn’t disappoint in that department.

Using a cadre of young, experimental artists, this exercise explores the original movie nearly shot-for-shot with different styles of animation.  The styles are incredibly varied: parts are simply still images, sometimes it’s a comic book-style series of cels, while at other times it takes on an anime quality. One artist takes the real footage from the film and animates over it to generate an eerie reality that blurs the line between realism and otherworldliness. The different mediums at work boggle the mind; whether it’s claymation, pencil sketches, Flash cartoons, or sock puppets, this project has something to evoke just about anyone’s personal aesthetic. It’s amazing what the creators do here to make you think of the movie in a whole new way.  The different animators break from the stark reality of the original to steep the entire world in a haunting, eerie mood that was not there before.  My favorite style, personally, is when they use the real life baby dolls to simulate some of the action scenes!  It doesn’t fit well with the other styles to create that perfect sense of dread and the unknown, but it’s just too funny to leave out!

Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated is definitely a success in my book.  The unsettling black-and-white animation combined with the oddly displaced archive voices of the original actors creates a mesmerizing experimental film that goes beyond the norm and pulls off something that few people have.  The various styles of animation work fluidly together to pay homage as well as to press the boundaries of the original zombie survival template.  My only complaint would be that the ending is the most clinical part of the film, when I thought it should be a bit more erratic in style.  In those desperate moments before daybreak, Reanimated doesn’t hit any crescendo notes that the original did not already sound, making the last few scenes almost redundant if you’ve already seen NOTLD.  That caveat, compounded with this film’s lack of utter weirdness, knocks Reanimated out of contention for a spot on the List, although it must be considered one of the more impressive movies released in2010.

If you’re a fan of the original, or just a lover of experimental animation, Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated has something for you.  It’s a very strong feature that builds upon Romero’s work with a love and a care that is both heartfelt and reverent.  Despite its lack of general weirdness, it is still one of the better films in a year devoid of cinematic life, and a must-have for any fans of the zombie sub-genre.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an ideal midnight movie for film geeks who don’t mind the animators occasionally taking some liberties or tweaking the material.”–Rob Gonslaves, efilmcritic.com (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: THE ADVENTURES OF SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL IN 3-D (2005)

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DIRECTED BY: Robert Rodriguez

FEATURING: George Lopez, Cayden Boyd, Taylor Lautner, Taylor Dooley

PLOT:  Dreamy young Max invents the imaginary superheroes Sharkboy and Lavagirl from Planet Drool to brighten his dull existence; when his dream journal is stolen by a schoolyard bully, Planet Drool is taken over by tyrants and his imaginary friends whisk him away to his disintegrating dream world to set things right.

Still from The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D (2005)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The childishly imaginative The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D shows all the evidence of having been taken out of the hands of the original scenarist, 7 year old Racer Max Rodriguez, and script-doctored to fit into a kiddie film format that would be more comfortable for adults. The tale heads off in weird directions, obliterating the line between fantasy and reality as it meanders down a stream-of-consciousness style from superheroes to roller coasters to electrical plug villains to omniscient floating head robots. It’s a near-perfect exhibition of the hyperactive schizophrenia of a typical seven-year old. So far, so good; but then, someone—my money is on director Robert Rodriguez—imposed a standard three-act structure on the story, smoothed out the non-sequiturs, and tossed in a moral about realizing your dreams to placate stern, rational adults. Had they stuck to Racer’s original vision, Sharkboy and Lavagirl, as the first script actually written by a seven year old, might have turned out as one of the weirdest movies ever made.

COMMENTS: Sharks are not weird. Pomegranates are weird. I base this conclusion on the fact that the Armenian director Sergei Parajanov once chose to make a weird movie about pomegranates, but no one has ever made a weird movie about sharks. Sharks are b-movie heavies, excuses for bad special effects and senseless gratuitous violence. They serve the same cinematic purpose as other non-weird bad guy archetypes like giant spiders, psychotic killers in hockey-masks, and Paris Hilton.

Mega-sharks, on the other hand, may be weird, but I thought of them too late.

Robert Rodriguez, who alternates making weirdish adult cult movies like Grindhouse and Sin City with wacky children’s movies like the Spy Kids series, loves sharks, a love affair that began when Steven Spielberg’s Jaws premiered on his 7th birthday. For recreation, he goes scuba diving in shark-infested waters in a steel cage. He’s passed down his obsession with sharks to his son Racer, who, between the ages of six and seven, made up the character of Sharkboy in stories he told to amuse himself. In an attempt to recapture the spirit of youth and create a movie that would appeal to directly to kids with as little adult intervention as possible, the elder Rodriguez took Racer’s ideas, dialogue and plot sketches (as verbatim as he could while still making a reasonably coherent movie), cast professional talent in the key roles, and directed his son’s daydreams in front state of the art green-screen special effects as The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl.
Sharkathalon!
I say this to explain why a weird movie website is covering a semi-weird, shark-lite, non-horror movie for the b-movie roundtable SHARKATHALON!, “week-long tribute to everything that has to do with sharks and horror films” scheduled to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the release of Jaws. Fans of the toothy marine predators looking for tales of blood in the water, prepare for something completely different.

With those flimsy justifications out of the way, let’s jump into Racer’s kiddie shark pool, where the chum floating in the water isn’t chunks off a great white’s latest victim, but shreds of childhood dreams.

First off, forget 3-D. Part of the reason this film was originally panned is because the 3-D effects, which came along at the very tail end of the red-blue glasses era and just before the contemporary polarized glasses became standard, just didn’t measure up. The DVD comes with red-blue glasses and offers viewers the chance to torture themselves with them should they so wish, but most will be happy to stick to the standard flat-viewing experience.

The adventures begin with Sharkboy’s origin story: son of a marine biologist, separated from his father and lost in a CGI sea after a storm, adopted by talking sharks; naturally, his exposure to the sharky lifestyle results in him growing gills, fangs and fins  Lavagirl, the affirmative-action superheroine added to tap into the lucrative girl market, doesn’t get an origin story; she Continue reading CAPSULE: THE ADVENTURES OF SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL IN 3-D (2005) →