Pete discusses the 1990 comic book flop, trying (but failing) to keep the Dick jokes to an absolute minimum.
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IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: COOL WORLD (1992)
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DIRECTED BY: Ralph Bakshi
FEATURING: Kim Basinger, Gabriel Byrne, Brad Pitt, voices of Charlie Adler, Maurice LaMarche, Candi Milo
PLOT: Cartoonist Jack Deebs finds himself magically transported to the universe he thinks he has created, the Cool World, where sexpot doodle Holli Would is scheming to transform herself into a humanoid.
COMMENTS: The notion that Ralph Bakshi was ever going to make a four-quadrant, people-pleasing mainstream Hollywood smash seems utterly ludicrous. But damned if people weren’t thinking he would back in 1992. By all accounts, animation’s enfant terrible rode the Who Framed Roger Rabbit wave, selling on the spot his pitch for a horror film in which the half-toon offspring of an absent-father cartoonist seeks revenge. Then, a phalanx of studio executives, producers, and screenwriters set about methodically dismantling that initial pitch, to the point where Bakshi was handed an entirely new script just prior to the start of shooting. Perhaps he can be forgiven for losing some of his enthusiasm for the project.
The result is two different kinds of hybrids: a mix of live-action and animation, and an unholy mashup of a Ralph Bakshi film and the kind of movie that everyone else in Hollywood was looking for. (Supposedly, halfway through filming, Basinger told the director that she wanted to make a movie that could be shown to sick kids in hospitals, betraying a total lack of familiarity with his c.v.) In either case, the mix never really takes. The visual combination is surprisingly terrible, resembling Pete’s Dragon rather than the more recent achievements of Roger Rabbit. The interaction is sloppy, the eyelines are all over the place, and the physical sets are rendered two-dimensionally but without any sense of cartoonishness. As for the tone, it’s as schizophrenic as you might imagine. This may be one of the worst-edited films I’ve ever seen, with scenes covering different plotlines and delivering dramatically contrary emotions intercut and slammed together almost randomly, as though assembled by a hyperactive chihuahua. At any moment that you think you’re watching one storyline, you’ll need to brace yourself for an awkward and illogical transition, with the likelihood that you’ll soon be zipped back to the previous thread without warning. The best thing that can be said for this approach is that it neatly conceals the fact that Cool World is equally as incomprehensible as a linear story.
Part of the challenge is to figure out exactly whose movie it is. Are we watching the tale of an artist who is suddenly confronted by his work? (Practically no time at all is spent on Byrne’s backstory as the ostensible creator of this cartoon universe or on reactions to his predicament, so no.) Or perhaps it’s the artist confronting the unaddressed trauma from the incident that landed him in jail. (The revelation that Byrne was accused of murdering his wife for cheating on him is casually thrown away, left unproven either way, and never addressed again. Probably not that, then.) Okay, forget the artist. Could it really about the poor World War II veteran suffering from both PTSD and the tragic loss of his mother and now finds himself in a world beyond all understanding? (All that is jettisoned approximately two minutes after Pitt is transported to the Cool World, so no again.) Then surely it’s about the Machivellian efforts Holli Would expends in pursuit of her quest to become human. (Honestly, we don’t really know why Holli does anything she does, except that it involves a lot of rotoscoped dancing, so… maybe?) The story is so confused that late in the third act, someone entirely new tries to sneak in, a neighbor about whom we know exactly nothing but who is positioned as a possible love interest and as a foil for Holli, but is then almost comically ignored in the conclusion. Cool World is in the remarkable position of having only irrelevant characters.
The cast flounders amidst this mess. Basinger never seems to know which emotion she’s supposed to play (not entirely her fault), so her sex-kitten allure fails to jibe with her madness for power, a dynamic most evident in the inexplicable scene in which Holli sings a duet with Frank Sinatra, Jr. in which she barely seems to acknowledge the man’s existence. Pitt seems thoroughly embarrassed in every scene he’s in. At least he has an extended introduction to try and make something of himself; Byrne has no character at all, and the film knows it, since he’s barely onscreen for 30 seconds before yanking him into the animated universe, and then isn’t even remotely like himself once he is transformed into his cartoon avatar. Even the voice actors struggle, such as Adler’s choice to play Pitt’s dimwit partner with a voice that suggests Ed Wynn by way of Dom DeLuise.
I honestly can’t say enough bad things about Cool World, but for the purposes of this forum, I must offer this final condemnation: it’s not anywhere near as weird as it wants to be. At its best, Bakshi has littered his animated landscape with an unending supply of throwaway gags and random images, sometimes even overlaying them atop the main action, as if the spirit of Max Fleischer was perpetually trying to break out of the film. These adjunct characters capture Bakshi at his wildest, but those treats are fleeting. The core story is little more than warmed-over rabbit, garnished with sex jokes that don’t even have the guts to be proper smut. Holli Would? You’d best not.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Claudia V. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
![Cool World - Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51Yqe-CORiL._SL500_.jpg)
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE SPIRIT (2008)
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DIRECTED BY: Frank Miller
FEATURING: Gabriel Macht, Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Sarah Paulson, Paz Vega, Jaime King, Dan Lauria, Stana Katic
PLOT: When the villainous Octopus terrorizes Central City in pursuit of an ancient elixir that will give him godlike powers, The Spirit–heroic guardian of the city–is there to foil his plans.
COMMENTS: In the opening scenes of The Spirit, the central character delivers a monologue about his mission as he vaults through the city, a black silhouette swinging and somersaulting off the tops of the buildings, with only a pair of titanium white-soled Chuck Taylors and a rippling vermilion necktie to distinguish him. Here is that monologue in full:
This is but the first of at least half-a-dozen similar monologues scattered throughout the film, because writer/director Frank Miller wants to emulate the narration boxes found in the comic books that are his primary medium. This is not an unworthy goal, but the fact is that those words play better on the page than they do said aloud during a moment of action. And while it’s certainly possible that there’s an actor out there who could pull off reciting dialogue like this, it poses a tremendous challenge, considering that the prose might be best described as “too purple for Prince.”
Suffice to say, future “Suit” Gabriel Macht is not the person to overcome the limitations of such dialogue. His every effort is labored, trying and failing to weave in elements as disparate as Superman’s moral purity, Batman’s righteous vengeance, Philip Marlowe’s world-weariness, and even a little bit of Han Solo’s roguish charm. But in fairness, with so many styles to play, Macht has the hardest job. The well-pedigreed performers surrounding him only have one style to ape, although they must contend with the same stilted dialogue. Consider Samuel L. Jackson, who is given leave to go full maniacal-laughter bad guy but isn’t given anything to be particularly evil about. (There’s some lip service paid to something about blood found on the Golden Fleece conferring godhood, but far more time is lavished on his role in The Spirit’s origin story, which honestly makes very little sense.) Miller’s screenplay provides little context for the rivalry between Spirit and Octopus, so we’re mainly riding on our goodwill toward Jackson doing his thing, lending some comedy to what would otherwise be gratuitously baroque.
This problem is particularly acute for the ensemble of actresses whom Miller prizes for their beauty, and gives just enough characterization to get them off his back. Paulson is the stalwart and sexless love interest, Mendes is voluptuous and obsessed with jewels (the genuinely charming Seychelle Gabriel fares better as Mendes’ teenaged past), Vega is all tease and violence, and Katic provides gum-smacking 40s patois. And then there’s Johansson, whose presence here is baffling. She hints at a mercenary soul in a world of true believers, but mainly seems to be here exclusively so Miller can clothe her and Jackson in Nazi uniforms for no reason whatsoever. Characters don’t just lack an arc; they barely even bend.
Miller seems to have drawn the wrong conclusions from his earlier outing, Sin City, where co-director Robert Rodriguez adhered religiously to the stark contrasts and sparse coloring of Miller’s original book. Miller holds no such reverence for his forebears, trading the vibrant and varied colors of Will Eisner for his own tinted monochrome and applying the same grittification that made his name in the Batman re-think “The Dark Knight Returns.” It feels like a bad match. The result is sometimes visually intriguing, but never compelling as a story.
The Spirit is finally a vanity project, Miller using his new-found access to moviemaking as a platform for his style. But while he bends film to his needs, he hasn’t let the demands of the medium bend him at all. So determined to make a movie look like one of his comic books, he’s made one where the story is convoluted, the characters are two-dimensional, the comedy is leaden, and the dialogue is obtuse. I hate to break it to him, but I have no time for this. My city screams.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Motyka. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
- Factory sealed DVD
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER (1959)
DIRECTED BY: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
FEATURING: Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Katharine Hepburn
PLOT: A brain surgeon examines the case of Catherine, a young woman who has been in a terrible state ever since the death of her poet cousin, inquiring into a mysterious incident in Europe.
COMMENTS: By the time Suddenly, Last Summer hit Broadway as part of a double-bill of one-act plays, Tennessee Williams was well-established as the pre-eminent voice – alongside Arthur Miller – of the American theater. With two Pulitzers, a pair of Oscar nominations, and at least three certifiable classics in his oeuvre, he was nearing the end of that imperial phase where almost anything he wrote could be staged and then adapted to the screen. The mere presence of his name on the bill was a commercial guarantee… even if his subject was a manipulative gay man whose indiscretions cause a group of feral youths to assault and eat him.
This is where “weird” comes into the discussion. You could easily place this alongside Williams’ most familiar works – the smothering maternal figure of The Glass Menagerie, the mental instability of A Streetcar Named Desire, the web of familial lies of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – without a moment’s hesitation. The acting is juicily overwrought, the battle between the tight lips of Southern propriety and the sweaty brows of unexpressed emotions is pitched high. It’s just another Southern Gothic drama, until you get to Elizabeth Taylor’s climactic monologue and she finally tells everyone just what happened to her cousin Sebastian. That irrevocably alters everything that has come before.
In some respects, Suddenly, Last Summer could only have happened at the precise moment it did. Homosexuality was still an unmentionable curse (the filmmakers only got it through the Production Code by emphasizing that Sebastian pays for his sins with his life), and neither it nor any other transgressions – the Venable women procuring young boys to feed Sebastian’s sexual appetites, the cannibalism – are called out explicitly. But Williams and screenwriter Gore Vidal clearly felt empowered to pull the curtain back on these immoralities. The whole saying-without-saying approach would be nigh unthinkable a decade later. This was the precise moment where such subjects could be talked about, but only if they were talked around.
Talking is all there is left, and Suddenly, Last Summer indulges in it. Vidal does little to open up Williams’ play for the screen, with most of its running time spent in either Catherine’s hospital room or Violet’s decadent New Orleans mansion and elaborate garden. Whenever the movie feels stagebound, the actors chomp on the scenery; Taylor knows she’s got a scrumptious part, with monologues that are by turns defiant and distraught. Hepburn, meanwhile, delights in deploying a mannered cruelty, from her wonderfully theatrical entrance descending in an elevator right up until the moment Taylor shatters her illusions of her beloved son. (Clift, in their presence, is unavoidably vacant. He is reduced to establishing exposition). Yet it’s in the moments when the story leaves the soundstages and pulls away from acting showcases that it starts to go to some truly strange places. Catherine’s forays into the depths of the mental asylum need no words as she comes face-to-face with souls far more damaged than hers. Her account of her trip to the island of Cabeza de Lobo (Wolf’s Head) is presented as a mute play, with phantasmagoric images of the swarthy locals, the blazing sun, and her own revealing swimsuit. Throughout, Sebastian is never given a face, reinforcing his complete unknowability. The twist of his horrific end only gains power from what we almost see.
Variety’s original review dubbed Suddenly, Last Summer “the most bizarre motion picture ever made by a major American company.” Time has dulled the impact of the film’s content, but there’s still something off-kilter about the way it delivers its surprises. It’s almost like a horror film pretending to be a Tennessee Williams play, rather than Williams dabbling in the grotesque. Like its title, it reflects a moment that ends everything we thought we knew, and leaves us reflecting upon it long after.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by blibo. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
- The disk has English audio.
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE KEEP (1983)
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DIRECTED BY: Michael Mann
FEATURING: Scott Glenn, Ian McKellen, Alberta Watson, Jürgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne
PLOT: A Nazi regiment unwisely establishes a base inside the keep of a Romanian castle where an otherworldly beast has been imprisoned for the safety of humanity.
COMMENTS: Wanting to cleanse my palette after my last encounter with Nazis, I figured it would be fun to watch them get slaughtered by a supernatural force even more evil than themselves. What I forgot to reckon with was Michael Mann, a man who walks eagerly into grey spaces. To be clear, dead Nazis haven’t lost their appeal. It’s just that no one comes out of The Keep smelling like a rose.
Mann has always been interested in the bad things that decent people do in defense of some greater good, usually accompanied by moody visuals and moodier music. In that sense, The Keep fits right into his CV. We’ve got pure bad guys in the form of a Nazi platoon that sets up camp in a Carpathian castle, but the forces aligned against them are a disparate bunch: Molasar, an ancient demon trapped behind silver crosses and a talisman; the amazingly named Glaeken Trismegestus, a kind of knight-errant tasked with ensuring Molasar never emerges from this dark prison; and Dr. Cuza, a Jewish academic sprung from a concentration camp to help the Nazis translate ancient languages, who decides that freeing Molasar will save his people. So our bad guys are plenty bad, but the enemy of our enemy might not be our friend.
The stage is set for a real philosophical showdown, but Paramount was looking for a horror-thriller, and when the production went way over budget, the studio declined to provide additional funds. To complicate things further, the visual effects supervisor died two weeks into post-production, leaving behind no instruction and no means of accomplishing the effects-heavy finale Mann intended. Finally, Mann turned in a cut nearly three and a half hours long, promptly getting himself thrown off the project. The studio hacked off about ninety minutes and, following a terrible preview, applied classic Hollywood logic and shaved off another thirty. The final product is, predictably, disjointed and open-ended, with characters appearing and disappearing randomly, a significantly truncated romance, and the entire thing wrapping up in a flurry of anticlimax. (Amusingly, an entire battalion of Nazis is wiped out while we’re watching their commander in another room.) It’s hard to argue that a horror film the length of The Godfather Part II is a good idea, but the shortened version is sorely lacking in some of the most critical areas, such as suspense, or clear linear progression.
The elements that work best in The Keep are the ones that go gleefully beyond the pale. Electronica pioneers Tangerine Dream provide a wonderfully anachronistic score that works despite itself. The production design by John Box and the art direction of Alan Tomkins and Herbert Westbrook are suitably evocative and foreboding. And best of all, the acting is top-notch baroque insanity. Byrne is relentlessly nasty in classic Nazi fashion, positioned opposite the war-weary pragmatism that Prochnow brings over undiluted from Das Boot (1981). McKellen uses the full power of his stage-acting experience, bellowing in a bizarre American accent (reportedly at Mann’s instigation) that eventually becomes a John Huston impression. Watson makes no impression at all. And then, in the role of the enigmatic stranger who is engaged in a millennia-old battle against evil, there’s affable everyman Scott Glenn. He’s horribly miscast, but somehow he gets far entirely on the basis of the asynchrony. The story may not make sense, but at least everyone goes for it.
The best thing that The Keep has going for it is its spectacle, and that suffers from being visibly undercut, far from the poetic grandeur its auteur intended. It’s hard to say if the film Mann had in mind–a blend of arty philosophy and purple grandiosity –would have worked. But it’s clear from what remains that it would have lacked for neither.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by purplefig. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
