Tag Archives: Jeremy Davies

Capsules

CAPSULE: SECRETARY (2002)

1 Comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

The second installment in the “Pete’s Perverted Pix” series.

Recommended

 

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , ,

Plot: A tightly wound, obsessive, repressed lawyer meets a meek, neurotic typist who suffers from low self esteem and a compulsion to cut herself.

Still from Secretary (2002)

 

COMMENTS: Let it never be said that 366 Weird Movies turns its back on plain old love stories. We treasure lopsided romances such as Harold and Maude, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It goes to show, you can still have a weird movie even if it’s just a boy-meets-girl story. This time around we have more of a “boy beats girl” scenario, and that becomes our weird angle. The only reason  not to recommend this movie for the Apocrypha is because everything weird about it is done even weirder in other movies. Secretary (2002) stands alone as a truly frank examination of the phenomenon of kink relationships, the one which even the self-identifying “leather community” points to as the  movie that gets BDSM relationships closest to right. That, in itself, is an incredible rarity—but it should be less rare.

It’s not like we get into the floggers and spreader bars right away. It’s a slow-burn progress, starting with Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) being released from a mental institution. She attempts to re-adjust to normal life, hampered by a dysfunctional family including an overpowering mother and by her own neuroses that manifest in a compulsion to secretly cut and stab herself. Lee is mousy and anxious, seeming like she’d shatter at a harsh word, and usually far too intimidated to express herself. She applies for a job in the title profession, at the law office of one E. Edward Grey (James Spader, eight years before the Fifty Shades of Grey books came out). Grey is a demanding and controlling boss, so much so that he apparently needs a custom-made sign to advertise for help. Lee gets the job, since Grey assures her that it’s dull work and Lee responds that she sincerely likes dull work.

Soon their dynamic spins off-center from standard employer-employee. Grey is a stickler for detail who takes special delight in catching every typo in Lee’s work, amassing a collection of red markers for highlighting flaws and lining them up on his desk in OCD fashion. One day while rummaging around the office he discovers Lee’s secret box of self-harm toys and confronts her about it. When he paternally orders her never to engage in such behavior again, the two start to show some magnetism. She is more drawn to him with every new demand he makes and every scolding he gives her, while he is spellbound by her unquestioning obedience to his every whim. It’s obvious that neither of these people ever expected to encounter anyone quite like the other. Finally the tension breaks when Grey gambles on smacking Lee on the rear while she hunches over a desk proofreading, and Lee—instead of running off to file a sexual harassment lawsuit—is totally cool with it. Once the lid is off this boiling pot of kinky sexual tension, the two enter an awkward dance, escalating games of domination and submission, and alternately retreating in fright from their mutually acknowledged dark sides.

Some of their play is point-blank role-playing, such as when he dictates that she take her dinner in tiny portions, while more involved games have her prancing about the office in restrictive bondage gear with a spreader bar holding her arms out like a cross, still handling her secretarial work. Even sillier scenes flash by in montage, most notably Lee on a desk on her hands and knees saddled like a pony. Eventually Grey suffers a classic case of “top drop,” the point where every out-of-the-closet sadist asks themselves for the first time “what kinda sick monster enjoys this?” Even though he tries to break things off, Lee is single-minded. She is deaf to the pleas of her vanilla boyfriend on the sidelines, a sweetheart of a guy who nevertheless just can’t handle Lee with the firm hand she seeks. Will our star-crossed lovers ever be able to relax and enjoy their attraction without judging it?

The amazing thing about Secretary is the poise and balance it maintains while deconstructing a taboo relationship between two little-understood personalities. This could easily have been gross-out schlock, seedy porn, or silly camp, but the characters themselves are treated with dignity, and the relationship is presented as a positive thing for them. The humor is gentle and cherishes the human, flaws and all. As two ostracized, repressed weirdos both attracted and repelled by this energy between them, Gyllenhaal and Spader are downright cute and fun to watch. Finally, we viewers have to accept that, while this relationship wouldn’t work for most of us, it works for these two, and more power to them. As Woody Allen observed in Annie Hall, “we need the eggs.” Secretary may not be the weirdest depiction of the leather lover in the wild, but it is likely to be the most respectful and heart-warming one for many decades yet.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 ““Secretary” approaches the tricky subject of sadomasochism with a stealthy tread, avoiding the dangers of making it either too offensive, or too funny. Because S/M involves postures that are absorbing for the participants but absurd to the onlooker, we tend to giggle at the wrong times. Here is a film where we giggle at the right times.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

Secretary

Secretary

  • Lee Holloway is a smart, quirky woman in her twenties who returns to her hometown in Florida after a brief stay in a mental hospital. In search of relief from herself and her oppressive childhood environment, she starts to date a nerdy friend from high school and takes a job as a secretary in a local law firm, soon developing an obsessive crush on her older boss, Mr Grey. Through their increasing

List Price : 9.99 $

Offer: 6.37 $

Go to Amazon
Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: TEKNOLUST (2002)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Lynn Hershman Leeson

FEATURING: Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Davies, , Karen Black

PLOT: Dr. Rosetta Stone creates three “self-replicating automatons” in her image, who generally stay hidden away in her apartment except when one goes out to harvest the Y-chromosomes they require to survive; her creations’ growing dissatisfaction with their confinement threaten this arrangement.

Still from Teknolust (2002)

COMMENTS: Years before Zoom culture, Teknolust latched onto the power of screens to bring communication to those trapped in their rooms. Rosetta’s isolated, phosphor color-coded creations – unsurprisingly named Ruby, Marinne, and Olive – speak to her through large flatscreens mounted in each of their matching bedrooms, and she peers back down at them and their silly antics through her own screen. The catch is that, rather than a phone or a tablet, Rosetta’s viewscreen is the disguised window panel of a  microwave oven. It’s not exactly Star Trek, but then Teknolust is only interested in enough science fiction to get things going. After that, it’s devil-may-care.

Consider that title, for example, which suggests a neon-accented erotic thriller on early-90s Cinemax. Teknolust is a much lighter, frothier confection. Once we get past the opening minutes, in which one of the automatons uses her sexual wiles in a steamy modern-decor bathroom to extract valuable “nourishment” from an unsuspecting male, the movie settles down into something closer to a romantic comedy. In fact, it’s remarkably evocative of 1987’s Making Mr. Right, which also features an asocial scientist who constructs an empathic android in his own image.

Even if we focus on the “lust” part, the strongest emotions held by Rosetta’s three creations (it is never clear if they are actual robots, clones, or computer-generated beings) are not their sex drives, but their compulsion to see the world beyond their window. It’s surprising that femme fatale Ruby jettisons all of her powers of seduction (which she gleaned from watching three public domain films) for Davies’ hapless copyboy, but given her lack of a life otherwise, it’s only logical that she latches on to his dweeby innocence. (His mother’s surprise that this angular, statuesque vision would take up with her scruffy, underachieving son is worth a chuckle.)

The roles of Rosetta and her creations point to Teknolust‘s gravest sin: wasting the bottomless reservoir of weirdness that is Tilda Swinton. Casting her to play four separate roles – three of which are constantly interacting – seems like a masterstroke, but the four women are given precious little opportunity to assert themselves beyond surface-level characteristics. Rosetta is your classic flustered nerdgirl, right down to the terrible perm and oversized glasses. Marinne is a petulant schoolgirl, Olive is eager to please, and Ruby is mainly the one who gets to go outside. Swinton can’t figure out anything else to do with them, which suggests these underdeveloped parts might have worked better with someone a little closer to the comedy genre they seem to be stereotyping, like Sandra Bullock or Reese Witherspoon.

A number of oddball characters populate Teknolust, who all turn out to be little more than their affectations. The script develops bit parts, like the doctor who speaks exclusively in an ASMR whisper, just as much as prominent figures like Karen Black’s cellar-voiced private detective Dirty Dick. There are interesting depths to be plumbed in such characters, but we never delve deeper than their surface oddness. They probably wouldn’t hold Leeson’s interest anyway, as she repeatedly demonstrates by crosscutting between storylines with almost no regard for timing or narrative flow. She’s always got a new thing she wants to show off – little hints in the story about an entire family being wiped out by a virus, or the implications of a disease that manifests a barcode on the victim’s forehead – and she’s in an awful hurry to get you there.

Like a sugar cube, Teknolust is pleasantly sweet in the moment and gone in a flash. There are some intriguing ideas at work here, but don’t get too attached to them. It’s got just enough in it to hold the attention of someone staring at the video screen on their microwave, waiting for the tea to steep.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This sweetly surreal futuristic comedy definitely marches to the beat of its own bizarre rhythm!” – Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall

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

Teknolust

Teknolust
  •  
Check Price

List Candidates

APOCRAPHYA CANDIDATE: THE MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL (2000)

4 Comments

DIRECTED BY: Wim Wenders

FEATURING: , , , Jimmy Smits,

PLOT: Following the death of a trust-fund kid at a downtown Los Angeles transient hotel, an unorthodox FBI agent arrives to interrogate the residents, enlisting the help of a mentally challenged man-child who holds a candle for a disaffected prostitute.

Still fromThe Million Dollar Hotel (2000)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The dream collaboration of a notoriously iconoclastic film director and a rock star whose imagination always skirts with pretension, The Million Dollar Hotel thumbs its nose at convention even as it dives into classic genres and tropes. The result is a film that rarely makes sense and borders on incompetence, but revels in its absurdities and comes out happier for all its quirks.

COMMENTS: Wenders’ 1991 film Until the End of the World was, among other things, a piece of near-future science fiction in which he tried to envision a world almost like ours, but with just a touch of futurism. This approach extended to the soundtrack, for which the director solicited a murderer’s row of music legends—Talking Heads, R.E.M., Lou Reed, Patti Smith, among many—to envision their own sound at the turn of the millennium and contribute a song in that style. Included in that company was U2, a band for whom Wenders had recently directed a video, and which he enlisted to compose the title song. Clearly, Wenders and lead singer Bono hit it off. Which might explain why, when the real year 2000 finally arrived, Wenders would draw upon a story directly from Bono’s mind for the subject of his next film.

What they concocted together is almost a simulacrum of a detective movie. There is ostensibly a plot about the mysterious death of a powerful billionaire’s son (an uncredited ) who has tossed aside his wealth to slum it in an L.A. flophouse. There is a detective who comes into a tight-knit community to expose its secrets, and there are the members of that community who attempt to unite against the outside world while still profiting individually. But all this amounts to something leagues beyond a MacGuffin, becoming a hook so irrelevant that it’s hard to imagine there was any real goal other than to give each actor a chance to shape themselves into the weirdest character they could imagine. Their motivations and the excitement with which they pursue them are universally disproportionate and baroque. It’s as if Bono’s entire story treatment read, “Think ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but everyone in it is cr-A-zeeee!”

To call the performances mannered is to indulge in breathtaking understatement. Wenders seems to have told the actors to “go bigger,” and each answers the call. Davies leads the way with a performance that skirts dangerously close to Tropic Thunder’s warning about filmed portrayals of the mentally challenged. Smits is given free Continue reading APOCRAPHYA CANDIDATE: THE MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL (2000) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT (2018)

3 Comments

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , Sioban Fallon Hogan, Sofie Gråbøl, , Jeremy Davies

PLOT: Jack (Dillon), an architect–and prolific serial killer–recounts several examples of his “work” and philosophy as Verge (Ganz) leads him on a journey to Hell.

COMMENTS: Due to controversial films like The Idiots, Dancer in the Dark, and Antichrist, among others, Lars von Trier was already considered ‘problematic’ even before his infamous press faux pas at Cannes at the time of Melancholia‘s release. So it’s an interesting conundrum that, in light of his behavior over the years, his work is intellectually engaging and appears (my impression) to have a strong moral center at its core. Jack is much the same. At its Cannes premiere, it gained notoriety when over a hundred audience members walked out during the screening, as well as for for the ten minute standing ovation it received from the remaining audience when it ended.

Originally conceived by von Trier with co-writer Jenle Hallund as an eight-part television series, Jack is a treatise on serial killers and the culture of fascination regarding them. Jack sees murder as an art and himself as amongst the greatest of artists, as he argues to Verge (i.e. Virgil, the poet of “The Aeneid” and guide from “The Divine Comedy”) on their journey. He justifies himself and his acts by pointing  up examples in Nature (the Tyger and the Lamb; the “noble rot”) and Art (poetry of Blake, and the films of one Lars VonTrier).

Despite adopting the non de plume “Mr. Sophistication,” Jack, as portrayed Matt Dillon, is not the Hannibal Lecter type of cultured romantic one ends up liking despite his horrible acts. The film makes clear that Jack is a liar (not a good liar either), and not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, but gets away with his horrible acts because he uses his entitlement and privilege to full advantage. People overlook his behavior until it’s far too late. He acts so obnoxiously that some who might bring him to justice get annoyed and brush him off.  He’s abetted by the naiveté  and obliviousness of his victims, and everyone else; as he yells out of an intended victim’s apartment window, “Nobody wants to help!”

Despite this “success,” Jack’s flaws eventually catch up with him. For all of his lofty pretensions as an “artist” and creator, Jack is unable to complete any sort of life-positive project. His attempts at building a house for himself end in a Sisyphean cycle of frustration; the only structure he succeeds at is a grisly sculpture made from the corpses of his victims, which serves as his literal entrance into Hell. Despite Jack’s spirited arguments and defenses on their journey, Verge isn’t buying any of Jack’s b.s. As he remarks, he’s “heard it all and there’s very little that would surprise him” at this point. Jack’s ultimate fate, likewise, is no surprise at all, though he still thinks there’s a chance he can beat the House. He learns the hard way that the House always wins.

The House that Jack Built is a bleak look at an empty soul in an empty world. It’s also very funny, among the darkest of dark comedies.

Scream Factory released Jack in a 2-disc Blu-ray set in early 2020. It includes the standard theatrical cut, and the unrated cut that played in selected theaters for one night only. Extras includes von Trier’s introduction to the unrated cut and an interview with the director conducted by University of Copenhagen Associate Professor Peter Schepelern.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“As the film progresses into its last stretches, it proves itself to be bizarrely satisfying, recontextualizing itself into something much grander in sadness and scope.”–Matt Cipolla, Film Monthly (Blu-ray)