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Capsules

CAPSULE: GENTLEMEN BRONCOS (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Jared Hess

FEATURING: Michael Angarano, , Sam Rockwell, Halley Feiffer, Jennifer Coolidge, Hector Jimenez

PLOT:  A pretentious pulp fantasy icon who’s run out of ideas steals a home-schooled teen writer’s sci-fi epic, “Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years,” and positions it to be his next bestseller; meanwhile, the original author has sold the property to a team of his nerdy peers who are making it into a YouTube-quality adaptation.

Still from Gentlemen Broncos (2009)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Weirder than expected and funnier than its reputation suggests, Gentlemen Broncos falls just short of a general recommendation, and just short of being weird enough to be considered for the List.  You may want to take a flyer on this uneven but sporadically hilarious spoof of sci-fi nerdom, though; the beyond-offbeat tone is sure to alienate many, but if you can connect with it you may come away with a peculiar affection for this messy film, the kind of devotion an owner gives a particularly ugly dog.

COMMENTS: Gentlemen Broncos is a movie with three different tonal layers, which sometimes conflict, but ensure that the movie remains stylistically unpredictable and never gets boring.  The base tone —which might be styled “nerd grotesque”—takes some getting used to; in fact, you’re going to have to work to meet the movie halfway on it. Jared Hess creates a world as seen through the eyes of a frightened adolescent: everyone young Benjamin encounters is uncomfortably strange, every social interaction awkward and fraught with the danger of humiliation. It’s as if every character in the film is some variation of Napoleon Dynamite. His role models include a nightgown-designing mom who supplements her income by selling homemade popcorn balls and a Church-appointed Big Brother with an incontinent albino python and a perpetually stoned expression framed by permed blond ringlets.  His peers are fellow maladjusted home-schooled youths: when he first meets the scheming Tabatha, she fleeces him for half his meal allowance, then cozies up to him by sitting next to him on the bus and letting him give her a squishy hand massage.  Even stranger is Lonnie, the creepiest kid on the block, a no-budget movie mogul whose flamboyant air of artistic superiority could have been hilarious if not for the freakish dental prosthetic he wears that stretches his mouth into a permanent Mr. Sardonicus death mask.  This base layer, a suburban universe inhabited by nothing but oddball losers makes for an uncomfortable, subtly nightmarish viewing experience, in the mold of a gentler and geekier John Waters.

Dr. Ronald Chevalier introduces another dimension to the film. The self-important sci-fi idol and general tool, obsessed with American Indian spirituality and breastfeeding, is shrewdly and purposefully characterized by Jemaine Clement.  He speaks with a carefully affected accent that suggests Ivy League superiority without having any actual geographic significance, and answers his omnipresent blackberry headset with a self-important “Chevalier” that makes you want to smack him.  The scene where he pompously lectures aspiring teen writers on the importance of providing characters with “magical” names is a pinpoint piece of character-assassination comedy.  If the entire movie had been made out of scenes like that, Gentlemen Broncos would be acknowledged as a satirical masterpiece.

These two layers—the uncomfortably quirky and the sharply sardonic—exist uneasily together, but the wild cards, and the segments of most interest to fans of the weird, are in the third layer, the dramatizations of the “Yeast Lords” adventure. The saga involves the mysterious properties of yeast (which look like cow patties and allow a Yeast Lord to fly), stolen gonads, clones, cyclopses with ray guns, and flying reindeer mounted with rocket launchers. We see three iterations of the tale scattered throughout the film: Benjamin’s original concept (with a manly Sam Rockwell as the hero) and Chevalier’s plagiarized version (he changes the protagonist into a “tranny” in an Edgar Winter wig, also portrayed by Rockwell, in a weak attempt to hide the story’s origins), as well as the amateur film adaptation by Lonnie, who doctors the script and casts himself as the female lead. Outrageously cheap CGI is used to achieve the flying and pink puke spewing effects, adding another layer of parody to the already tongue-in-cheek proceedings.  There’s brilliantly absurd dialogue throughout: “we’re investigating ways to strengthen the military—your gonad is being used for research,” “take me to your yeast factory!,” and Chevalier’s memorable couplet (from an alien lullaby) “within my breast meat there is a famine/No more sweets in the mammary cannon.” Without the “Yeast Lords” scenes, Gentlemen Broncos would be a highly peculiar mix of over-quirkiness and pulp fiction satire; scattering these histrionic playlets throughout turns the movie into something meriting the designation “weird.”

On the strength of Hess’ Napoleon Dynamite and the less-successful but still profitable Nacho Libre, Broncos received a generous $10 million budget and was scheduled for a limited release by Fox Searchlight.  The film was savaged by critics and shunned by audiences; its opening weekend was a disaster, netting just over $100,000 theatrically.  The movie was far too weird for mainstream filmgoers, but it stands to improve its performance on home video and could even develop a small cult following. Extreme weird movie trivia: Robin Ballard (star of the Certified Weird Elevator Movie) has a bit role in Broncos as a “female assistant.” Further trivia: the movie is set in a fictional Utah town called “Saltair.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a finely deranged, sillyhearted satire… the aesthetic is followed through to the end by the filmmaker, who’s fixated on whatever weirdness he can devour.”–Brian Orndorf, DVD Talk (Blu-ray)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1951)

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DIRECTOR: Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske

FEATURING: Voices of Kathryn Beaumont, Ed Wynn, Sterling Holloway, Verna Felton, J. Pat O’Malley, Bill Thompson

PLOT: A young girl named Alice follows a talking white hare down his rabbit hole and into a world of talking animals, smoking insects, walking playing cards, and other nonsense creatures.

Still from Alice in Wonderland (1951)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Because of the source material.  Disney animator Eric Goldberg explains Alice‘s appeal: “I think the book ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is popular because it’s completely absurd… The book, in its kind of weirdness, persists because people like weird.”  The question becomes, does Disneyfication destroy the story’s weirdness?

COMMENTS: Though it doesn’t reach the level of the classic-era Disney animated masterpieces Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) or Pinocchio (1940), Alice in Wonderland is certainly in the next tier—notwithstanding the fact that it didn’t fare well on its initial release. The animation, obviously, is glowing and superlative, and the anything-can-happen-here surrealism of the story gave the Disney artists the license to let their imaginations run wild without being fettered even by cartoon realism. As might be expected, the result is worlds away from the staid, quaintly absurd black and white line drawings of Sir John Tenniel (the standard vision of Alice and Wonderland up until that time). The rabbit hole, with its grandfather clocks and rocking chairs floating at different rates, doesn’t follow the rules of gravity; the flexibility of the playing card royal guards allows the animators to arrange them into pickets or to spontaneously form roller coasters to take Alice for a ride. Scarcity of spectacle is not an issue in Wonderland.

As an adaptation, this Alice is surprisingly smooth.  Episodes from the book have been shuffled around and mixed with characters and events from “Through the Looking Glass,” an example that future Alices would follow (since no one wants to leave out Tweedledee and Tweedledum). Even digressions like the “The Walrus and the Carpenter” interlude, which plays like a self-standing Looney Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1951) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

70. PERFORMANCE (1970)

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PHERBER: What do you think Turner feels like?
CHAS: I don’t know. He’s weird, and you’re weird. You’re kinky.
PHERBER: He’s a man, a male and female man!

–dialogue from Performance

DIRECTED BY: , Nicolas Roeg

FEATURING: James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Michèle Breton

PLOT: Chas, a sadistic associate gangster who terrorizes local businesses for London crime kingpin Harry Flowers, is forced to go into hiding when he kills one of his boss’ allies. He rents a basement from Turner, a former rock icon caught in creative doldrums, now living as a hermit in a luxurious town house with two beautiful live-in girlfriends and a never-ending supply of dope. Turner initially wants to get rid of Chas but gradually grows fascinated by him, sensing that the thug’s energy might help him break out of his artistic slump, and he begins to make over Chas in his own image.

BACKGROUND:

  • Donald Cammell, a former painter turned screenwriter, wrote the script and directed the actors. Nicolas Roeg, already a sought after cinematographer for his work on films such as The Masque of the Red Death and Fahrenheit 451, supervised the film’s visuals. It was the first directing credit for either.
  • Donald Cammell took his own life in 1996 with a bullet to the head.
  • Warner Brothers agreed to distribute the movie solely because rock star Mick Jagger was attached to the project.
  • The role of Chas was written with Marlon Brando in mind. Depending on whom you ask, Brando either declined the role, or the producers decided he could not play a convincing lower-class Brit. James Fox, a rising young actor known for his posh upper-class persona, studied actual London gangsters to get down the Cockney accent and criminal mannerisms.
  • Fox, in his acting prime at the time of Performance, suffered a nervous breakdown after filming (reportedly brought about by the combination of his father’s death and smoking the powerful hallucinogen DMT with Jagger) and did not act again for 8 years after completing the movie.
  • Tuesday Weld and Marianne Faithfull were the original choices to play Pherber, but Pallenberg, a model and Rolling Stones groupie (then Keith Richards’ girlfriend), was brought in after Weld was injured and Faithfull became pregnant.
  • Nicolas Roeg recalls seeing members of the film development lab destroying “intimate” scenes of the film “with a fire axe,” apparently believing they had mistakenly been sent illegal hardcore pornography to develop.
  • Jack Nitzsche composed much of the score on the ninth Moog synthesizer ever built (the Moog probably belonged to Jagger: the Rolling Stones had been one of the first rock groups to include a synthesizer on their 1967 album “Their Satanic Majesties Request”).
  • The movie was completed in 1968, but shelved for two years after a disastrous test screening at which audiences yelled at the screen and walked out of the theater. A studio executive’s wife reportedly vomited from viewing the graphic violence, and audiences were offered their money back. The movie’s eventual release was delayed for two years while the film was re-edited; much of the violence was trimmed, and Mick Jagger’s first appearance was moved forward in the film to appease Warner Brother executives. Roeg has already left for Australia to make Walkabout and was not involved in the final cut.
  • In order to compress the beginning of the film, partly so that Jagger would appear onscreen earlier, editor Frank Mazzola created the fast crosscutting montage that begins the film. “I knew I’d have to slide things back and forth or extend something to make it hit on a note or a frame,” the editor recalls. “I could do three or four or five of those cuts and bang!, it was perfect, like a beat… You could do anything to that film and it would work, because of the way it was happening. It was poetry, it was organic…”
  • Among the cuts later demanded by the British censors was a scene of Fox being flogged, intercut with a scene of him making love to a woman digging her fingernails into his back.
  • Performance was savaged by critics on its initial release, but its reputation has improved over the years. In 2009 Mick Jagger’s Turner ranked number one in Film Comment’s poll of top film performances by a musician.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Turner is dancing around with a large fluorescent tube before a stoned Chas when he suddenly howl and thrusts the glowing cylinder at the mobster’s ear; a tracking shot through his auditory canal reveals Chas’ mob boss imprinted on the tympanic membrane. The camera plunges past this barrier and suddenly Jagger replaces the crimelord in the scene; he launches into a taunting song aimed at Chas and assembled gang lieutenants.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Even before Anita Pallenberg feeds James Fox hallucinogenic amanita mushrooms on the sly near the climax, the crazed editing of the first half, which cuts back and forth across time and space without warning while setting up the tale of Chas’ fall from gangster grace, is so trippy that it’s almost completely disoriented us. Performance is almost exactly what you would expect to see if you matched a couple of smart, artsy, experimental directors to an eccentric half-amateur cast of drug addicts in 1968 and the set’s caterers fed the crew a diet of nothing but hash brownies and magic mushrooms for the entire shoot.


Original trailer for Performance [mildly NSFW]

COMMENTS: When you notice a bullet shattering a portrait of Jorge Luis Borges on the way Continue reading 70. PERFORMANCE (1970) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

69. FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998)

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This entry was originally published Nov. 3, 2010, but lost in a server accident. The version here was recreated from scratch and re-published on Oct. 24, 2012. Eric Young contributed to this article.

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“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”–Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl”

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: ,

PLOT: Journalist Raoul Duke heads to Las Vegas with his attorney (“Dr. Gonzo”) and a suitcase full of exotic drugs to cover a motorcycle race. Somewhere around Barstow, the drugs start to take hold. The mission changes into a quest to find the secret of the American Dream, an excuse for an orgy of hallucinogenic hedonism and dangerously antisocial behavior as the pair tromp through the unreal neon wonderland of Sin City.

BACKGROUND:

  • ‘s novel “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream” was published in 1971 and became an instant counterculture classic. Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone each hoped to adapt the novel to film, but plans fell through.
  • The character of Dr. Gonzo, played by Benicio Del Toro in the film, was based on Hunter S. Thompson’s real-life friend Oscar Zeta Acosta, an attorney/activist. Acosta mysteriously disappeared three years after the publication of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” in 1974 while traveling through Mexico and has not been seen since.
  • The original script for the film was written by Alex Cox and his colleague Tod Davies, but differences between Cox and the producer Laila Nabulsi, as well as open disdain of his treatment by an unhappy Hunter S. Thompson, led to the script being dropped. This left only a few precious days for Terry Gilliam and screenwriter Tony Grisoni to write a new script to begin production with. Gilliam and Grisoni allegedly finished their script in only eight days, with two additional days for rewrites.
  • Featured heavily in the opening of the book, the Rolling Stones track “Sympathy for the Devil” was going to be the opening theme that set the tone for the rest of the film, but Allen Klein, former manager of The Rolling Stones and owner of a sizable chunk of their early library, demanded an exorbitant $300,000 for the song. As this would have devoured half of the soundtrack budget, so Terry Gilliam opted for the more fiscally reasonable “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” as the closing track.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: We’ll go with the scene where Duke, who is peaking on acid while checking into the Mint hotel and has already seen the carpet climbing up a cowboy’s leg and hotel clerk Katherine Helmond‘s face stretching like Silly Putty, suddenly sees the denizens of the hotel bar transformed into a tribe of literal lounge lizards.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Master fantasist Terry Gilliam brings Hunter S. Thompson’s semi-autobiographical satirical novel about a degenerate journalist and his equally debased attorney companion whose idea of a good time is to sniff ether and scarf mescaline before striding into the whirling carnival of the Bazooka Circus casino to howling life. Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo’s increasingly deranged pilgrimage to the Mecca of American venality turns into a grim and perverse endurance test for both them and the viewer, as the pair see how far they can push the limits of decency without losing their lives, freedom or sanity.


Original trailer for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

COMMENTS: When Terry Gilliam was promoting Fear and Loathing Continue reading 69. FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: ARIZONA DREAM (1993)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Johnny Depp, Lili Taylor, Faye Dunaway, , Jerry Lewis

PLOT: Axel is a fish-tagger who reluctantly moves to Arizona to help his uncle run a car

Still from Arizona Dream (1993)

dealership; there, he becomes romantically entangled with an emotionally unstable older woman and her suicidal stepdaughter.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  The fish swimming through the desert past a Saguaro cactus and darting in and out of a Cadillac window certainly helps.  With intrusions of magical realism and pretentious pseudo-philosophizing by a cast of fish-counting dreamers, madwomen who dream of flying, suicidal turtle-loving accordion players and the comic tics of Jerry Lewis, Arizona Dream plays out like a European attempt to make a Coen brothers comedy.  It’s quirkiness magnified to a metaphysical level.  Considered scene-by-scene, the movie’s almost always interesting and funny, but it doesn’t stick together to create a satisfying vision, and its weirdness isn’t thorough enough to justify the lack of coherence.  It just misses making the List on the first ballot.  Mr. Kusturica need not sweat, however; even if Arizona Dream is ultimately denied admission to the Halls of Weirdness, he has plenty of other contenders on his resumé (Time of the Gypsies, Black Cat White Cat, and Underground) and he’s unlikely to be left out in the cold.

COMMENTS:I don’t want to completely false impression that Arizona Dream is a bad movie, but, given its considerable assets—a peak cast sinking their fangs into crazy characters, a visionary director, and some humdinger scenes—it’s fair to start out a review by defining what holds it back from being a great movie.  Arizona Dream is a movie that’s obviously eager to say something profound about the human condition, but has trouble spitting it out.  Instead, we get a parade of aphorisms that progress from “People think that fish are stupid, but I was always sure that they weren’t because they know when to be quiet and its people that are stupid, and fish that know everything and don’t need to think” to “even though I no longer felt like a fish, and realized I knew nothing, I was happy to be alive.”  There’s lots of talk about Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: ARIZONA DREAM (1993) →