Tag Archives: Jemaine Clement

CAPSULE: NUDE TUESDAY (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Armagan Ballantyne

FEATURING: Jackie van Beek, Damon Herriman, , Ian Zaro

PLOT: A middle-aged European couple goes to a New Age sex resort in an attempt to rekindle their passion.

Still from Nude Tuesday (2022)

COMMENTS: Although it’s a romantic comedy, Nude Tuesday is also, more importantly, an experimental film. Unfortunately, in this case, the experiment amounts to nothing more than a gimmick. The idea is that the actors rehearsed the script in English and then, when it came time to turn the cameras on, delivered the lines in vaguely Scandinavian-sounding gibberish. Two sets of writers who were unfamiliar with the original script then watched the film and provided subtitles. (The one created by Julia Davis is the default track in the US region; one presumes the alternate track from Ronny Chieng and Cecilia Paquola is also available on the Blu-ray, although I can’t find confirmation).

Woody Allen once infamously re-dubbed a Japanese spy film to change the story to the search for an egg salad recipe. But it quickly becomes apparent that Nude Tuesday‘s constrained scenario doesn’t lend itself to such a dramatic reinvention, and nor will the writer try for the sort of meta-comedy (e.g. a narrator recapping the plot, fourth-wall break addresses to the audience) that Allen occasionally fell back on to liven things up. Without that, the result is that there is almost literally no line the dubber can write that couldn’t have been written in the usual way. In creating the new dialogue, Davis faces a lot of constraints: who’s in the scene, the length of the spoken lines, contextual requirements (is the character naked? Bleeding? Chasing a goat?) This means that the dialogue is always a slave to the demands of the scene as it’s been set up, and Davis has little actual freedom besides word choice. (She can, for example, make a preening Bjorn say the absurd line “I’m an eagle pimp with a bit of a grudge,”  though a regular scriptwriter could have inserted that line anyway). Every reaction is so strictly dictated by the demands of the dialogueless script and the actor’s performances that there’s almost no margin for surprise; I can only think of one gag Davis was able to set up that wasn’t strictly set up by the situation (a joke regarding the bean supermarket aisle). To be fair, there’s also the fact that the finale is constructed somewhat ambiguously, so that there could be multiple outcomes (I wasn’t overly fond of the one chosen here.)

So, while it may have been a stimulating writing exercise for the dubbers, there’s no possible payoff for the audience. What we’re left with is an offbeat-yet-predictable sex comedy. The main attraction is Clemens, playing yet another narcissistic jerk deserving of a hearty comeuppance. The sex retreat’s rituals can be amusing, with orgasmic breathing exercises, strange loungewear and banana hammocks, lots of awkward overplayed sensuality, and of course, nude Tuesday. And the script throws in a mushroom trip for funsies. But none of it is anything you wouldn’t expect to see in a relatively competent indie sex comedy. It’s a bit like being sold a ticket into something that was promised to be a freaskshow, and passing through the curtain to find one lonely dwarf and a bearded lady who just needs a quick pass-over with an epilady.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… one of the best feel-weird, feel-good movies I’ve seen in quite a long time.”–Davy, Cinema Sentries (festival screening)

Nude Tuesday AMAZON EXCLUSIVE [Blu-ray]
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CAPSULE: AN EVENING WITH BEVERLY LUFF LINN (2018)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Craig Robinson, ,

PLOT: Lulu is unhappy with her cappuccino-store managing husband, so she runs off with a man who stole money from him to go see an old flame’s “one night only” performance at a nearby hotel.

Still from An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn (2018)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Though advertised in-film as a “magical” evening with Beverly Luff Linn, the onscreen evening is not so much “magical” as “eccentric.” Luff Linn is a hulking teddy bear, leaking stuffing, and with one eye holding on by a thread. It stays surprisingly true to romantic comedy conventions while employing light, sub-Brechtian alienation techniques.

COMMENTS: For a few viewers, An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn will be their first exposure to the weird world of Jim Hosking. Most, especially readers of this site, will be drawn to it to see what the director of 2016’s transgressive The Greasy Strangler would come up with given a bigger budget and professional actors. The answer is that he compromised by scaling back the most aggressively bizarre elements of his shock debut, while still indulging in enough skewed reality to keep the comedy firmly on the surreal side of the ledger. So, for example, in Luff Linn you will see cigarette snuffed out in an absurdly oversized meatball, but no baths in vats of half-congealed grease; a couple of characters repeating the word “immediately” across scenes, but no painfully extended “bullshit artist” segments; Craig Robinson in a 40s-style one-piece bathing suit, but no full-frontal prosthetic nudity. Whereas Strangler felt a little dangerous, like  meets , Beverly is more like a  awkward/quirky concoction, slightly out of step with reality, but without the offal and outrageousness. The results are not entirely satisfactory, but they are also not nearly as much of a sell-out as they might have been.

The plot, although a bit shaggy, is not so bad, with Lulu’s urge to reconnect with a younger and more vital romance bumping up against a couple of subplots in her husband’s suburban gangsta theft of a cashbox and Luff Lin’s mysterious melancholy (which results in his only being able to communicate in Frankenstein grunts for the much of the movie). Aubrey Plaza’s sarcastic resentment, Jermaine Clement’s clueless earnestness, and Emile Hirsch’s petty criminality are perfect matches to the material, but Craig Robinson doesn’t come over as the kind of charismatic mentor Lulu would fall for (which is perhaps part of the joke), and Matt Berry makes little impression as Luff Lin’s platonic partner/manager. Hoskins sprinkles in supporting performances from a couple of his regular stock company: Sky Elobar as a cappuccino-store henchman and Sam “potato” Dissanayake as an angry yet polite convenience store owner. He also finds a few more odd-faced weirdos to add freaky texture in a moon-faced toady and a hulking, pasty hotel clerk with a Ren-faire hairstyle. Though set in the present day, the anachronistic circa 1970s wardrobe choices—Colin’s turtleneck sweater and amber-tinted tinted eyeglasses—garb a world out of whack. It’s the kind of movie where three amateur robbers go on a robbery wearing women’s wigs as disguises, but never bother to cover their familiar faces. Low synths lay a doomy horror movie soundtrack over what is basically a light comedy, adding yet another level of alienation.

And yet, for all its absurdist insouciance, Luff Linn surprisingly has heart—something conspicuously lacking in Greasy Strangler. The boy gets the girl—the right boy gets the girl. The sentimentality may be a put-on, or it may be a concession, but it feels like an honest choice.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s not perfect, and it certainly isn’t for everyone, but oddballs who love weirdo cinema will probably get a kick out of An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn.”–Diedre Crimmins, High-Def Digest (festival screening)

CAPSULE: GENTLEMEN BRONCOS (2009)

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)