Tag Archives: God

Canonically Weird (The List)

312. MOTHER! (2017)

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“And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.”–Revelation 11:18

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Jennifer Lawrence, , , Ed Harris, Brian Gleeson, , Kristen Wiig

PLOT: A writer and his wife live alone, rebuilding a house where the man used to live before it burned down. One day, a stranger shows up at their door and the husband invites him to stay, against the woman’s wishes. More uninvited guests arrive, first the family of the original man, and then hordes of the writer’s adoring fans, sowing complete chaos in the home just as the woman gives birth.

Still from mother! (2017)

BACKGROUND:

  • Darren Aronofsky says he wrote the first draft in “a fever dream” in just five days.
  • Per Aronofsky, 66 of the film’s 115 minutes are closeups of Jennifer Lawrence.
  • 20th Century Fox passed on distributing the film due to a controversial scene.
  • The movie received a rare “F” rating on CinemaScore (which measures audience reactions). Fewer than 20 movies have ever received such a low score.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: We won’t mention the scene that makes the most impact for fear of spoiling your reaction. (You’ll know it when you see it). That leaves us looking for a second place image to fill this space; we’ll go with the vagina-shaped wound that develops out of a bloodstain on the house’s hardwood floor.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Urine-Seltzer; toilet heart; crowd-surfing baby

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Writer/director Aronofsky lets this movie go all to hell—mother! is his most irrational and difficult film, and also his most provocative, with one scene in particular that sent ’em packing to the exits. It’s a Hollywood offering with an outsider’s brashness, transgressing society’s norms—mostly by blaspheming against coherent realist narrative, the biggest taboo of all. Outraged moviegoers who came to see megastar Jennifer Lawrence’s horror film got a puzzling, punishing allegory instead. mother! was an all-too-rare “event movie” in the weird genre.


Original trailer for mother!

COMMENTS: The first act, with uninvited house guests arriving in Continue reading 312. MOTHER! (2017) →

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CAPSULE: THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT (2015)

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Le Tout Nouveau Testament

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Pili Groyne, Benoît Poelvoorde, Yolande Moreau,

PLOT: God, who’s something of a jerk, lives in an inaccessible high-rise apartment in Brussels; rebelling from his authoritarian control, his 10-year old daughter hacks his computer and leaks humanity’s death dates, then goes to Earth to write a new Gospel.

Still from The Brand New Testament (2015)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: In the earlier days of this site, a movie like The Brand New Testament would easily have been shortlisted as a candidate. But with available slots on the List of the Weirdest Movies Ever Made shrinking, the field grows more competitive by the week. In a way, with two entries already on the List, Jaco Van Dormael is a victim of his own success—and this high-concept comedy is not as weird as Toto the Hero or Mr. Nobody, although the Catherine Deneuve bestiality subplot nearly puts him over the top one more time.

COMMENTS: Since nothing can come from Nothing, God seems to be an ontological necessity. Yet, our fatally flawed world of starving children, male nipples, and Kanye singles argues against the existence of a perfect, benevolent Supreme Being. There is one way to reconcile this seeming paradox, however. What if God exists, but He’s not a pure and loving spirit: in fact, he’s not only imperfect, but a mildly sadistic bastard? Such a God would perfectly accord the necessity for a First Cause with our experience of life on this planet as frequently annoying, sometimes torturous, and genuinely tragic—besides explaining the whole “made in His image” thing.

Jaco van Dormael takes this whimsical philosophical proposition as the basis for his fantasy The Brand New Testament, a congenially blasphemous lark that winkingly rewrites Christian theology to tweak human nature. This God—played with wicked gusto by a perpetually peeved Benoît Poelvoorde in a ratty bathrobe—is a petty tyrant who delights not only in crashing planes but in setting up universal laws of annoyance, such as the cosmic rule that toast must always fall to the floor jam side down. So intolerable is his reign of terror that his eldest son, J.C., ran away from home to slum around Earth, embarrassing his father with his hippie antics. (“The kid said a lot of stuff on the spur of the moment,” God explains to a scandalized priest). J.C.’s sister, Ea, is now set to follow big bro’s example, climbing down to Earth via a magical dryer duct to escape her Father’s wrath after she hacks his computer and leaks the death dates of all of humanity, freeing them to live their remaining days to the fullest. The girl then sets about recruiting six new apostles, each of whom comes with their own mini-story, dramatized in segments like “The Gospel According to the Sex Maniac.”

The Brand New Testament is sprawling and ambitious, but despite a plot that wanders wide, it centers itself with a consistently off-center wit. The more you know your Bible, the more you’ll laugh (“not at my right hand!” objects an angry God when Ea sits down to dinner). The scenario is so absurd, and the underlying message so humanistic, that only the most humorless Bible-thumper could take offense at Poelvoorde’s clearly farcical deity. Van Dormael slips surreal gags into the interstices of the already fantastic film: an ice-skating hand, a chanson-singing ghost fish, and Deneuve’s simian liaison. The ending is a feminist apocalypse where the patriarchal God is sent into exile and the universe rebooted with flowery skies, male pregnancies, and the return of the Cyclopes.

Belgian Van Dormael’s movies are similar to the solo work of , without a giant blockbuster hit like Amelie but with an oeuvre that, overall, has been both smarter and more consistent than that of the more famous Frenchman. With a small body of only five feature films full of philosophical ambition, wit, visual imagination, and thorough weirdness, he gets my vote for the world’s most underappreciated master filmmaker.

Despite having a role that’s no bigger than any of the other six apostles, Catherine Deneuve gets third billing. You can understand why. Her iconic presence dignifies the film, and her support for the project helped Van Dormael recover from the economic disaster of Mr. Nobody.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a surreal comedy whose endless visual imagination matches its conceptual wit.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

Canonically Weird (The List)

259. THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

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AKA Twinkle Twinkle Killer Kane

“Kane said quietly, ‘Why won’t you go to the moon?’

‘Why do camels have humps and cobras none? Good Christ, man, don’t ask the heart for reasons! Reasons are dangerous!'”

–William Peter Blatty, The Ninth Configuration (novel)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Scott Wilson, Ed Flanders

PLOT: Col. Kane, a U.S. Marines psychiatrist, is assigned to an experimental program in a castle housing delusional military officers who are suspected malingerers. There, he bonds with Cutshaw, a militantly atheist and misanthropic astronaut, with whom he engages in passionate dialogues about the existence of God. One night, Cutshaw breaks out of the compound and heads for a bar frequented by a rough motorcycle gang; Kane follows.

Still from The Ninth Configuration (1980)

BACKGROUND:

  • William Peter Blatty (“The Exorcist”) adapted the screenplay from his own 1978 novel, which was itself a reworking of a 1966 novel (“Twinkle, Twinkle, ‘Killer’ Kane”) with which he had been dissatisfied. This was his directorial debut (in a career that reached three films with 2016’s Legion).
  • Blatty originally wrote a “Kane” screenplay that he hoped would be filmed by in the early Seventies, but they could not find a studio willing to produce it. Blatty and Friedkin collaborated on The Exorcist (1973) instead.
  • Although the script made the rounds in Hollywood for years, no studio would back The Ninth Configuration. Blatty eventually funded the film half with his own money and half with a donation from Pepsico, who were willing to provide funds for complicated international tax reasons so long as the film was shot entirely in Hungary.
  • Blatty has fiddled with the editing through the years, deleting and restoring scenes, so that cuts run anywhere from 99 minutes to 140 minutes.
  • According to Blatty, The Ninth Configuration‘s Cutshaw is the same character as the astronaut who attended the dinner party in The Exorcist.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: What else could it possibly be besides the crucifixion on the moon?

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Lunar Calvary; lunatic with a jet-pack; dog Hamlet

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Obsession is fertile soil for a weird movie. The Ninth Configuration is a movie in a madhouse that sets out to do nothing less than to prove the existence of God; it doesn’t, naturally, but the ambition involved makes for some strange choices, invoking a passion that carries the story over some rough patches.


Clip from The Ninth Configuration

COMMENTS: The Ninth Configuration posits that a world without Continue reading 259. THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980) →

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LIST CANDIDATE: THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

The Ninth Configuration has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies of All Time. Please post any comments on the official Certified Weird entry. This post is closed to comments.

AKA Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Scott Wilson

PLOT: A U.S. Marines psychiatrist is assigned to an experimental program in a castle housing soldiers who are suffering delusions; he bonds with a militantly atheist and misanthropic astronaut, but harbors a deep secret of his own.

The Ninth Configuration

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Obsession is fertile soil for a weird movie. The Ninth Configuration is a movie set in a madhouse that sets out to do nothing less than to prove the existence of God; it doesn’t, naturally, but the ambition involved makes for some strange choices, and invokes a passion that carries the story over some rough patches.

COMMENTS: The Ninth Configuration posits that a world without God is a madhouse. An unexplained epidemic of apparent insanity strikes Vietnam War vets and other military types, including a NASA astronaut who’s now afraid to go to the Moon. The suspected malingerers are sent, naturally, to a castle in the Pacific Northwest, where they await the arrival of one Colonel Kane, a military psychiatrist with some odd ideas of his own. By the end of the film, Kane’s unorthodox therapeutic methods involve the inmates putting on a Shakespeare play cast entirely with dogs, roleplaying that they are prisoners of war and the hospital staff Nazi concentration camp officers, and inexplicably flying through the castle corridors in a jet pack. In other words, it’s sort of a wacky combination of M*A*S*H* and the early reels of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with a touch of Spellbound (a movie which is explicitly referenced—whether as a hint or a red herring, you’ll have to watch to find out).

That outline makes Configuration sound like an anti-authoritarian satire—which it is, at times. The main point of departure is that the comedy is tinged with a very melancholy performance from a world-weary Stacy Keach, and the characters argue a lot about the existence of God. The movie itself is, in fact, more schizophrenic than its Corporal Kliner-esque caricature patients, bouncing around from mood to mood and finding time to shoehorn in a hallucination where the astronaut encounters a crucifixion on the Moon and a barroom brawl that pits a single Marine against a motorcycle gang. The origin of the plague of mental illness is never explained, although we can presume it’s a metaphor for the situation of men who have lost faith in something larger than themselves.

It’s no spoiler to point out that the argument that Blatty advances for God’s existence here is that a seed of universal love can be the only explanation for a man taking the irrational action of sacrificing his life for his fellow men. It seems to me that there is a fatal logical paradox with this argument from altruism, however. If someone wants to commit a selfless act—say, to quiet their own doubts, or assuage their own guilt—then by definition, the act will not be selfless. In his defense, I don’t think Blatty is naive enough to suggest that he has discovered the magic bullet proof of God’s existence with The Ninth Configuration; he merely finds that the existence of altruistic love suggests and supports the idea of a created universe. Whether you agree or not, you have to admit it’s the kind of subject that doesn’t get addressed often in movies, even weird ones. As the work of a passionate first time director shooting for the moon, The Ninth Configuration is recommended, but more for what it attempts than for what it achieves.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I’ve got a weakness for a certain kind of wacky personal filmmaking—movies… that aren’t ‘well made’ by any standard but clearly mean so much to their creators that all aesthetic rules crumble in the face of their bizarre, unaccountable intensity. William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration may be a classic of this peculiar genre…”–Dave Kehr, The Chicago Reader

(This movie was nominated for review by Kat, who said that there was an “atmosphere of overwrought emotion and barely concealed hysteria about the whole thing that left me feeling a bit creeped out.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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TV CAPSULE: SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN (1998)

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DIRECTED BY: Ryūtarō Nakamura

FEATURING: , Bridget Hoffman (English dub)

PLOT: Timid junior high school student Lain receives an email from her schoolmate Chisa, who has recently committed suicide. Chisa states that she is not dead but that she has only abandoned her physical body, ending her email with the words “God is here.” After this event Lain develops an interest in, even an obsession with, “the Wired,” a worldwide communications network similar to the Internet. She discovers that there may be another Lain, identical to her in appearance but with a very different personality, inside the Wired, and that the boundary between the virtual and the real world may not be as sharp as it is thought to be.

Still from Serial Experiments Lain (1998)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Set in a world where a global communications network is almost like a spirit realm, “Serial Experiments Lain” is undeniably weird and surreal, and it is also quite interesting and entertaining to watch. However, it is a (short) TV series, not a movie, and as such an exception would have to be made in order for it to make the List of the Weirdest Movies ever made. The competition is very strong, with true classics such as Stalker and Nosferatu already on the List, and in this company “Serial Experiments Lain” is just not quite outstanding enough to warrant such an exception.

COMMENTS: Mind-bending and confusing plots are not uncommon in anime. A few of the more well-known examples are “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” “Paranoia Agent,” “Rahxephon,” Paprika, and the anime series considered in this review: “Serial Experiments Lain.” What all of these have in common is that they have mysterious plots that leave you wondering “What did it all mean?,” and in fact you can find many Internet debates about the meaning of “Lain.” But does “Lain” really have a true “meaning of it all”? I believe, based on some of his other writings, and his interest in the work of the well-known writer of weird horror , that series’ writer Chiaki Konaka is a weirdophile. It is likely that he chose to make some scenes weird-for-weirdness’-own-sake without having any particular interpretation in mind. In other words, “Lain” is among other things a work of surrealism. It does not necessarily always make complete sense and it does not need to. That said, it contains interesting philosophical and psychological themes that are well worth discussing.

“Lain” is not really attempting to be serious science fiction in the sense of trying to be, to any extent, scientifically accurate. It does, however, very loosely base elements of its story on real scientific theories, although only on theories that have been rejected by mainstream science. We could say that “Lain” takes place in an alternate world where fringe theories of some of the scientists contributing to the early development of Internet technology have turned out to be true. One of the episodes is largely dedicated to presenting excerpts from the scientific history behind the Internet while also presenting discredited theories of the same scientists, seamlessly mixing the fake and real ideas. This episode appears fairly late in the series and can perhaps to some extent be seen as a deus ex machina, but it does have the positive effect that the technology used in the series and some of the characters’ special abilities gain the appearance of having a scientific explanation within the fictional world. However, these explanations do not survive Continue reading TV CAPSULE: SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN (1998) →