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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: TIERRA [EARTH] (1996)

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DIRECTED BY: Julio Medem

FEATURING: Carmelo Gómez, Emma Suárez, Silke, Karra Elejalde, Nancho Novo

PLOT: A man fresh out of a mental hospital takes a job fumigating a scourge of wood lice in the countryside in Spanish wine country, where he finds himself irresistibly drawn to both a comely young wife who is neglected by her farmer husband and a spirited wild child who is being kept as a mistress by that same husband.

Still from Tierra (1996)

COMMENTS: Ángel is cool as a cucumber. At least, Ángel as portrayed by Carmelo Gómez is cool as a cucumber. Looking like Judd Nelson at the moment when he might have been the sexiest member of the Brat Pack, he’s utterly unflappable, rolling into town in his exterminator truck and telling the residents how he will wipe out the wood lice that have been making their wine taste “earthy.” Is earthy bad? You wouldn’t think so to watch Ángel take a taste. On paper, he ought to be the most unsettled man in Spain: mental stability in question, with a trip to a sanitarium that everyone knows about, his life narrated by an alter ego that constantly reminds him of his mortality, reduced to killing bugs in a dusty nowheresville, and deeply attracted to two beautiful but distinctly opposite women, each of whom is being kept by a possessive and violent man. Ángel ought to be up to his ears in anxiety. But there he sits, laid back like the cool philosophy professor, taking things as they come, man. It’s fascinating.

Tierra is notably odd for being a character study about a character with very little character. Ángel keeps finding himself in extreme circumstances: encountering a lightning strike victim, arousing the ire of a full Roma encampment, accidentally (?) shooting a rival during a town-wide hunt for wild boars. In every case he is preternaturally calm, taking in the circumstances with the passive contentment of a saint—which the film suggests he may be, hinting more than once that he has had a life-changing experience. On the other hand, we’re also told that his stint in the mental ward was due to an “overactive imagination.” Whatever Ángel’s truth may be, Gómez plays it close to the vest.

It would be completely reasonable for Ángel to be torn between the two young women he meets in town. Ángela, the fetching young mom with a name that screams out how in sync the two must be, is played by Suárez with an aching need that she hopes the newcomer can fill. Meanwhile, Silke’s sexpot Mari always seems to be bending over a pool table with painted-on jeans and a come-hither stare, but she is just as desperate for the change in circumstances that Ángel could provide. But what exactly Ángel has to offer to either of them, beyond escape from the status quo, is not entirely clear. Medem manufactures some suspense over whether he will end up with the sweet mom or the hot chick, but neither the tension nor the choice is altogether convincing. 

In a review of another Medem film, a critic observed that “there’s the sense that he’s more interested in his ideas than in his people.” That suspicion permeates Tierra. The barrenness of the Spanish landscape captivates, creating an almost apocalyptic feel, and an outsider with a supernatural connection would absolutely fill a narrative void. But Medem’s affection for Ángel is such that his protagonist does nothing but win, which means that even the ideas aren’t all that compelling. Wherever Ángel and his new companion are headed, there is little reason to worry about them. No wonder he’s so cool all the time. He never has to feel the heat.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Like Medem’s two most recent films, ‘Tierra’ (Spanish for ‘Earth’) is an intricately structured, densely allusive affair. Its central figure is an itinerant exterminator named Angel (Carmelo Gomez) — a nod in the direction of Luis Bunuel’s ‘The Exterminating Angel,’ you might think, but only in the sense that both films draw water from the same surrealist pond… Despite its affectations, however — thanks mainly to a stunning ocher cinematographic palette, rock-solid acting and a story that’s as robustly sensual as it is otherworldly — ‘Tierra’ keeps its two feet (two of everything, in fact) firmly grounded on this Earth.” – Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post (repertory review)

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Tierra

Tierra
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List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: PHASE IV (1974)

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DIRECTED BY: Saul Bass

FEATURING: Nigel Davenport, Michael Murphy, Lynne Frederick

PLOT: Following a mysterious cosmic event, ants in a remote corner of Arizona are acting strangely, and a pair of scientists are out to determine if the insects’ behavior has implications for the future of humanity.

Still from Phase IV (1974)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Given the parts and tools needed to make a monster movie, a master of Hollywood imagery chooses instead to make a kind of video essay envisioning humans and ants becoming one in a sort of neurological singularity. Surprise of surprises, no one really got it, but it lingers in the memory as an example of genre filmmaking providing a platform for genuinely idiosyncratic visions. The film, like its director, is one of a kind.

COMMENTS: Saul Bass is the strangest kind of movie legend. While everyone else was trying to earn fame as an actor or an auteur, or the more adventurous hoped to become a household name as a writer or a composer, Bass carved out a lasting legacy as a master of marketing and design. His graphic skills are still revered as some of the finest and most memorable film posters and title sequences (the latter in partnership with his wife, Elaine) ever devised for the medium. He built a second career for himself as the creator of some uncommonly memorable corporate logos, and his distinctive style even earned him his own Google Doodle. His skill at capturing a movie’s mood soon carried over into the filmic storytelling itself: what could have been a simple end credit sequence to Around the World in Eighty Days became a six-minute animated epic retelling of the tale audiences had just sat through; some accounts (including that of Bass himself) give him credit for crafting Psycho’s iconic shower sequence; and his own dabblings in short filmmaking earned him three Oscar nominations, claiming the short documentary prize for “Why Man Creates.”

All this is to say, when you sit down to watch the sole feature film that Bass ever helmed, you should know not to expect anything traditional or commonplace. Yet audiences and executives alike seem to have been completely unprepared for the kind of movie that Bass intended to make. The subject matter suggests a B-movie with cheap thrills, a la Empire of the Ants or Kingdom of the Spiders. To think that Saul Bass would get control of a film and make something  uninspired is to fail to read the man at all.

For one thing, it’s probably the most delicately paced nature-on-a-rampage movie ever made. Like a metaphysical take on The Andromeda Strain, the film pits methodical scientists against a mysterious phenomenon they are just beginning to understand, and we see their step-by-step process as they test out pesticides and make halting first steps at communication. It feels real, if not suspenseful; the closest thing we have to a ticking clock is the ever-present threat of the government withdrawing a funding. It’s a thriller for tenured university professors.

Bass and screenwriter Mayo Simon are far less interested in the human side of the tale. With the scientists played by the classically arrogant Davenport and the determinedly milquetoast Murphy, and Frederick’s ingenue mainly present to facilitate the ending and to provide the geography for an entertainingly creepy ant’s-eye tour, there’s not much to latch onto. It’s not as though you’re rooting for them to die, but you’re definitely not invested in whether or not the scientists live. Especially when you’ve got the convincingly creepy world of the ants to reckon with. From their 2001-style monolithic creations on the Arizona plains (Arizona being played, oddly enough, by Kenya) to their elaborate funeral ceremonies, the bugs are where it’s at. The close-up photography of Ken Middleham (who cut his teeth capturing similar up-close insect footage for The Hellstrom Chronicle) is absorbing and brings character and nuance to the ant populace, in a way that no present-day CGI take on the material could ever manage.

Adding Phase IV to our list might have been a no-brainer, had the producers not chosen to cut a four-minute chunk out of the movie’s finale. The released cut leaves you with an enticing uncertainty, as the surviving humans are left to contemplate their unknown future. But that’s nothing compared to the original vision (recently rediscovered and offered on a French Blu-Ray release and as an iTunes extra), in which the transcendental implications of the coming conjunction of life on Earth are explored and the true meaning of the film’s title is revealed. With Dalí-esque landscapes, an unsettling soundscape created by Stomu Yamashta, and a cacophonous mix of solarization, overlaid imagery, and off-kilter angles, it almost manages to capture the unseeable vision of a biosphere transformed. In some respects, it’s the greatest Saul Bass opening sequence ever: a prelude to the evolution of the human race.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Think of it as the 2001: A Space Odyssey of treacherous ant movies… it’s a gorgeous and strange film to look at, accentuated by Brian Gascoigne’s sparse and eerie electronic score.” – Jim Knipfel, Den of Geek

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Canonically Weird (The List)

279. THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF TOM THUMB (1993)

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“We have tried to create a kind of ‘nether world’ that would seem timeless. A strange place that would be uncomfortably familiar.”–Dave Borthwick

RecommendedWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Dave Borthwick

FEATURING: Nick Upton, Deborah Collard

PLOT: When wasp-guts accidentally fall into a jar of artificial sperm, the resultant baby is a fetus-like boy about the size of a thumb. While Tom is still a pre-verbal toddler, men in black suits kidnap him from his poor but loving home and take him to their “Laboratorium” for study. Escaping with the help of a tiny dragon-like creature, Tom stumbles upon other miniature people, who live in a state of eternal war against the “giants,” before reuniting with his father.

Still from The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993)

BACKGROUND:

  • The movie’s plot is suggested by the fairy tale “Tom Thumb,” the oldest surviving English folktale, but beyond the presence of a tiny child there are few similarities to the ancient legend.
  • The movie was originally commissioned by the BBC as a ten-minute short to be shown at Christmastime, but they rejected the end product for being too dark. The station changed its mind after the short became an award-winning hit on the festival circuit, and co-funded this one-hour feature version of the story.
  • Tom Thumb was also partly funded by Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, who also wrote the theme song.
  • Besides stop-motion animation, Tom Thumb uses a technique called “pixilation,” which is basically the same idea but with live actors instead of models. Director Borthwick found that professional actors lacked the patience to sit still for the hours sometimes required for shots where humans interacted with puppets, so he used animators and technical personnel in the main roles instead (star Nick Upton is a primarily an animator specializing in pixilation).
  • After debuting on television, Tom Thumb toured the film festival circuit and even booked theatrical dates in the U.S., paired with the excellent and bizarre short “Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There’s so much to choose from—particularly the surrealistic menagerie of disembodied body parts and mix-and-match homunculi from the Laboratorium—that the wilder images cancel each other out. In fact, it’s the faces of our two leads—the innocent, half-formed clay features of Tom and the greasy, beaming mug of his proud working-class dad—that stick in the mind. Indeed, for the poster and DVD cover images, the producers used such of scene of the two principal characters posing together (it’s a promotional still of a domestic scene that does not actually occur in the movie).

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Flying syringe insect; crucified Santa; halo of vermin

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The tone of this fairy tale is hard to explain: equal parts silent slapstick, dystopian futurism, and ian surrealism, delivered through twitchy visuals that makes it play like a particularly restless dream. There is an unexpected sweetness to the concoction that helps it go down more smoothly than you might expect, but it still leaves a residue of nightmare behind.


Original trailer for The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb

COMMENTS:The had been producing surreal, Continue reading 279. THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF TOM THUMB (1993) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

274. NUIT NOIRE [BLACK NIGHT] (2005)

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“Often when we go to the cinema we feel like we’re being taken for fools because things we have instantly understood are laboriously explained. Here it’s a little the other way round.”–Olivier Smolders

Weirdest!

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DIRECTED BY: Olivier Smolders

FEATURING: Fabrice Rodriguez, Yves-Marie Gnahoua, Iris Debusschere

PLOT: A solitary entomologist works at a natural history museum in a world where it is only light for fifteen seconds a day. One day, he comes home to his empty apartment and discovers an African woman sleeping in his bed. She is ill and pregnant and eventually dies, leaving him to deal with the body.

Still from Nuit Noire (2005)

BACKGROUND:

  • Olivier Smolders was born in the Congo, which explains the source of the film’s African imagery.
  • A prolific short film maker, Nuit Noire is Smolders’ only feature film to date.
  • The movie received a very limited theatrical release even in its native Belgium, and did not appear in U.S. theaters (outside of a few film festivals) at all. Little has been written about Nuite Noir in the English language (an only a little more in French).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The African woman’s dead body turning into a pupae, then splitting open as a new life emerges.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: 15 seconds of sun; elephant in the alley; African corpse cocooning

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Set in a world of eternal midnight, with troubled dreams of dead children and troubling realities of sick foreign women who mysteriously show up in your bed, Nuit Noire manipulates time and concepts in ways that only film can. One woman changes into another, and then into another. This story could not take place in the light of day.

Short clip from Nuit Noire

COMMENTS: Closeups of squirming bugs a la Blue Velvet. A reserved protagonist taking care of a sick charge in his isolated apartment a la Eraserhead. Billowing red curtains a la… every Continue reading 274. NUIT NOIRE [BLACK NIGHT] (2005) →