Orangina has produced a series of humorous commercials featuring anthropomorphic birds, mammals, reptiles, and so on. In these commercials the drink is used for just about everything from a floor cleaning solution to aftershave. The focus, which is very apparent in this commercial, seems to be on mocking the role of sex in advertising.
CONTENT WARNING: This short contains brief, animated nudity and suggestive cross-species sexuality.
DIRECTED BY: Carlos Atanes
FEATURING: Xavier Tort, Anne Céline Auche, Manuel Solás, Marta Timón, Anna Diogene
PLOT: A mute male slave’s involvement with romance and rebel pornographers lands him in trouble in a sex-free future ruled by a totalitarian matriarchy.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: After producing a series of wildly experimental shorts in the 1990s (three of the most twisted of which were anthologized for the collection Codex Atanicus), Spanish filmmaker Carlos Atanes scaled back the surrealism for his feature debut, FAQ. While plenty of weirdness remains (it’s hard to argue that a movie that casually drops dialogue like “unwrap the cat, we’re taking it with us” and includes a plotline regarding “architectural castration” doesn’t push the boundaries of normality), it’s stretched more thinly than in the shorts: it’s like drinking skim milk after having become accustomed to whole.
COMMENTS: “Failure is inevitable,” concedes a rebel, “but it is our duty to keep trying.” He’s come to recruit Nono, a mute sound collector who’s never far away from his phallic microphone, to record some bird songs for the resistance’s archive of vanishing natural sounds; their ultimate dream is to someday record a breathing human female. The quote, however, could just as easily apply to the scrappy spirit of independent cinema FAQ embodies. As a philosophical dystopian science fiction, it’s not entirely successful: it frequently lags dramatically, especially in a languorous episode in the woods; with minimal sets and cheap-looking green screen effects, it struggles at times to hide its budgetary limitations; and it stumbles into a reality-bending non-resolution of an ending. But the sincerity and professionalism of the production shines through, and the movie shows enough crazy imagination and intelligence to make you forgive its flaws, both budgetary and dramatic. Some of the weirdest bits in this pretty weird feature involve the Internet porn of the future; adult actresses remain fully clothed at all times, and since human contact is verboten in the Brave New World, a woman touching a man’s bare chest is the height of salaciousness. For reasons unknown, this forbidden erotica is created in an Continue reading CAPSULE: FAQ: FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (2004)
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“Q: How would you define the film’s genre?
A: Psychedelic Melodrama.”–Gaspar Noé, Enter the Void Cannes pressbook
DIRECTED BY: Gaspar Noé
FEATURING: Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta
PLOT: Oscar is a drug-dealer living in Tokyo with his stripper sister. One day he is shot and killed during a deal inside a bar called “The Void.” He spends the rest of the movie as a silent ghost, floating around Tokyo and observing his sister and friends, while simultaneously hallucinating and remembering the details of his life.
BACKGROUND:
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The opening DMT trip, with its multicolored mandalas, floating planetoids, and neon tentacles seems hard to top, but it merely sets the mood. It’s the pornographic “Love Hotel” scene, with its parade of rutting couples with mystically glowing genitalia, that really impresses itself on the mind’s eye.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: As the most impressive and eye-splintering acid trip movie of the decade (by a wide margin), Enter the Void gets an automatic pass onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of All Time. The fact that the protagonist is dead throughout most of the movie doesn’t hurt its chances one bit. But the clincher, the sure sign that the movie is weird, is the walkouts. Less than halfway through the screening I saw, the sexagenarian couple who had stumbled into the film by accident (probably thanks to ad copy suggesting the movie was a sentimental ghost story about brotherly love that transcends death) walked out of the theater, leaving me alone with two same-sex couples with facial piercings and hair that glowed in the dark.
COMMENTS: Enter the Void is an exploitation piece masquerading as an art installation, Continue reading 81. ENTER THE VOID (2009)
DIRECTED BY: Marina de Van
FEATURING: Sophie Marceau, Monica Bellucci, Andrea Di Stefano
PLOT: As she struggles to write an autobiographical novel, a writer with childhood amnesia
![Still from Don't Look Back [Ne te retourne pas] (2009)](https://i0.wp.com/366weirdmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/dont_look_back.jpg?resize=450%2C192 "Don't Look Back")
finds that everything she sees—her apartment, her husband’s face, and even her own image in the mirror—is changing into something unfamiliar.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The sophomore effort by rising bizarre star Marina de Van arrives as a slight disappointment. The opening segments are disquieting without being bang-up weird, and by the end the mystery is resolved too completely, leaving nothing to linger in the mind.
COMMENTS: Don’t Look Back mines the psychological terrain of jamais vu: the strange feeling you get when you enter a room you’ve been in hundreds of times and everything suddenly looks different, or when you look at the face of the person you’ve slept next to for a decade and see a stranger. Sophie Marceau begins as Jeanne, the woman who finds that her kitchen furniture has been rearranged, the Paris city streets are no longer familiar, and her husband and children are making strange hand gestures when she’s not looking. Initially she just seems paranoid, but the incidents keep building until finally her entire family has been replaced by different actors whom she doesn’t recognize, and we’re convinced there’s something seriously amiss inside Jeanne’s mind. The breaking point comes when she looks into the mirror and sees an unfamiliar face staring back at her—on her left side, she still looks like Sophie Marceau, but the right side of the image is the face of Monica Bellucci. Based on a clue she finds in a photo, Jeanne (now being played by Bellucci rather than Marceau) travels to an Italian village where she finds herself in a situation that’s almost the reverse of Paris: she recognizes the faces she sees as those of her husband, mother, etc., but no one she encounters seems to have a clue as to who she is. It’s an intriguing premise, and the film is sincere, well-executed, and clever—and it’s also one of those movies where, by the end, you’re puzzled why it’s turned out merely solid rather than exceptional. Part of the problem is the pace. The movie starts slow, and keeps piling up weird incidents long after we’ve gotten the point that something’s cracked inside Jeanne and are anxious to get moving towards some answers. The use of horror movie music cues to inform us that something uncanny is taking place is overdone and gauche, almost to the point of parody. Containing two episodes of traumatically interrupted intercourse and more than a hint of incest, the movie flirts with ideas of sexual repression and perversion that, in the end, turn out to have nothing to do with Jeanne’s psychology. And although the movie gets into a nice weird groove in the run up to the finale, where Jeanne now seems to be turning from Bellucci into a third actress at a wild village party, the script explains itself too completely by the end. Although the solution to the mystery is intellectually satisfying, it doesn’t provide the emotional chills and thrills it should. Looking back on the “clues” scattered through the earlier parts of the film, you realize that many of them didn’t add up; they were just arbitrary strange occurrences that let you know something was off but didn’t assist you to guess what it was, and so you feel cheated. That said, the ending is unexpected and should keep you interested enough to keep watching. The half Marceau/half Bellucci effect is truly novel and uncanny. And the performances by the two French beauties are superlative: Marceau sets up the character, but it’s remarkable how Bellucci picks her up mannerisms so that you never question that this is the same character inhabiting two different bodies (to a lesser extent, the same compliment can be applied to Andrea Di Stefano and Thierry Neuvic, the two men who play Jeanne’s husband). The end result is not a disaster, but given everything the movie apparently has going in its favor, it’s underwhelming.
De Van’s previous film was In My Skin [Dans Ma Peau] (2002), a shocking and mysterious portrait of a woman’s obsessive self-mutilation.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
DIRECTED BY: Pascal Laugier
FEATURING: Morjana Alaoui, Mylène Jampanoï, Catherine Bégin, Robert Toupin, Patricia Tulasne
PLOT: A girl ventures into unknown territory when she helps her lover, a former torture victim, seek revenge on her one-time captors, in this bloody tale of madness and sadism.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: You may have heard incomplete descriptions of Martyrs in the media or by word of mouth. Hushed references and whispered gossip might make it sound like a snuff movie, a sado-masochistic tableau, or a scandalous exploration of taboos. It is none of these things. While Martyrs is a heavy, very violent film with a grim story, it is not a snuff movie or a sensational expose of torture. It is an offbeat, horrifying thriller, and nothing more.
COMMENTS: When Anna (Alaoui) and her lover Lucie (Jampanoï) embark on a mission of revenge against Lucie’s childhood torturers, the situation quickly spirals out of control. The couple locates Lucie’s alleged abductors, but did they find the right people? Lucie is stalked and victimized by the spectre of the mutilated sister she had to leave behind, and Anna is not so sure where the truth lies. In the process of exacting retribution the landscape changes dramatically and Anna is swept into an incomprehensible morass of hell on earth.
I’m so underwhelmed! I was expecting a real stick of dynamite, but instead, I got one of those Fourth of July smoldering snake novelties. Movie site rumors and an ongoing debate over whether or not Martyrs amounts to little more than “torture porn” made me expect a wild ride. I had hoped to see the ultimate horror movie, or at least something mindlessly vulgar and sensational, but no dice.
What I got was an extremely well-shot, conventionally produced, offbeat story. Unfortunately, it consists of two loosely linked plot sequences which, once combined, don’t amount to a sum greater than their parts. Nor do they deliver any sort of soul stirring revelation. Ho hum.
I found Martyrs to be intriguing, but, well, kinda boring. Maybe even a little tedious in places. Continue reading CAPSULE: MARTYRS (2008)