Tag Archives: Juno Temple

Capsules

CAPSULE: HORNS (2013)

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DIRECTED BY: Alexandre Aja

FEATURING: , , Max Minghella, Joe Anderson,

PLOT: An accused killer (Daniel Radcliffe) awakes one day to find horns growing from his head and people suddenly anxious to confess their secrets to him.

Still from Horns (2013)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Despite some good ideas, Horns‘ uneveness ultimately undoes it, and it’s not weird enough to overcome its lack of clear purpose.

COMMENTS: Horns begins promisingly, but loses its way as it meanders to its devilish finish. Up until the last act, I was still with the movie, though just barely. But the film begins with its strong points and slowly squanders them, ending up in a diabolical failure. The crazed premise intrigues. Daniel Radcliffe plays Iggy, a lover accused of murdering his beloved during a drunken blackout. All signs point to him as the culprit, and his town has already condemned him on circumstantial evidence (“Go to Hell!” reads a prophetic sign wielded by an angry protestor).

After a desperate act of desecration, Iggy wakes up to find two ram’s horns growing out of his temples. Here, almost at the very beginning, is where the movie hits its height, detouring from a burgeoning mystery drama into dark comedy. People (well, most people) can see Iggy’s horns, but they’re not startled by them. Instead, the protrusions cast a spell that makes them confess, and sometimes act out, their darkest secrets, beginning with a doughnut-scarfing slut and progressing through a doctor who proves less than helpful in amputating Iggy’s unwanted growths because he can’t resist sneaking some of his patient’s anesthesia for himself.

Here is where Horns starts encountering problems. The film is working. But the people-aren’t-reacting-to-these-enormous-horns-poking-out-of-my-forehead jokes begin to wear thin, and the plot is stalling. So comedy is put aside and we transition into a supernatural procedural, as Iggy puts the horns’ power to use to search for the real killer. The solution to the mystery is obvious (although there is a slight twist), but method of sleuthing is novel enough to keep us interested (although we might wonder what happened to the comedy we were watching a few minutes ago). Unfortunately, the reveal arrives too early, and the film changes tone once again. Iggy grows crueler and more Satanic, leading to an action finale that shows off the movie’s poor CGI (although a scene with Radcliffe vomiting lava is admittedly pretty cool).

Horns brings us a flood of religious symbolism: broken crosses, serpents, Eve’s diner (with an apple logo), Radcliffe transformed into a cartoonish Lucifer as his lust for revenge grows. There is clumsy voiceover and clichéd-feeling erotic flashbacks to Juno Temple dancing to Bowie’s “Heroes.”  There’s an out-of-focus muti-drug trip scene that ends with a forest growing in living room and an extremely nasty and out-of-place murder/rape flashback. All-in-all, there are too many narrative and stylistic gambles, without enough payoffs. The result is an initially promising film that ends up as a mild disappointment. Horns may be successful in changing Radcliffe’s image, however: whether the change is from cute magical lad to tormented antihero, or from bankable star to fading child actor in need of a better agent, may be a matter of opinion.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…for a genre that rarely deviates from the cyclical and the tried and true (torture porn this time around, ‘70s throwback terror another), Horns is a welcome bit of weirdness.”–Bill Gibron, Pop Matters (contemporaneous)

Canonically Weird (The List)

168. MR. NOBODY (2009)

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“Oh, my God, and when you got up in the morning, there was the sun in the same position you saw it the day before—beginning to rise from the graveyard back of the street, as though its nightly custodians were the fleshless dead—seen through the town’s invariable smoke haze, it was a ruddy biscuit, round and red, when it just might as well have been square or shaped like a worm—anything might have been anything else and had just as much meaning to it…”–Tennessee Williams, The Malediction

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Toby Regbo, Sarah Polley, Natasha Little, , , Diane Kruger, Linh Dan Pham

PLOT: In 2092, after all disease has been conquered through cellular regeneration technology, 119-year old Nemo Nobody is the last mortal man left in the world. He recounts his life story to a psychiatrist and a reporter, but his memories are wildly inconsistent and incompatible, and at times fantastic and impossible. In his confused recollections he is married to three different women, with multiple outcomes depending on choices that he makes in the course of his life; but which is his real story?

Still from Mr. Nobody (2009)

BACKGROUND:

  • The genesis of this story came from Jaco Van Dormael’s 1982 short film “È pericoloso sporgersi,” about a boy who must make an “impossible” choice between living with his mother or with his father.
  • According to Van Dormael the script took seven years to write, working about five and a half hours a day, every day.
  • Van Dormael published the Mr. Nobodoy screenplay (in French) in 2006, one year before production began and three years before the film was completed.
  • Despite being made in 2009, the movie was not released in the U.S. until 2013, and then only in an attempt to capitalize on the Oscar buzz surrounding Jared Leto’s performance in Dallas Buyers Club.
  • Leto temporarily retired from acting after Mr. Nobody, spending the next four years focusing on his band Thirty Seconds to Mars.
  • Mr. Nobody’s first name, Nemo, means “nobody” in Latin.
  • The movie is full of visual tricks and illusions, some of which are so subtle that they’re easy to miss. For example, watch for a scene where Nemo enters a bathroom then focuses on his own image in a mirror. When he turns around and the camera follows him back out of the room, we now see the perspective as if we had passed through the mirror; the reflection seamlessly swaps places with the real world.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Mr. Nobody‘s essential image is of branching, criss-crossing railroad tracks; if you want something with a little more surreal zip, however, check out the scenes of a fleet of helicopters delivering slices of ocean, slowly lowering them into place on the horizon.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Essentially an experimental narrative film disguised as a big-budget science fiction extravaganza, Mr. Nobody, an epic fantasia in which the protagonist lives a dozen different lives and a dozen different realities, was doomed to be a cult film from its inception. Even with a healthy dose of romantic sentimentality and whimsy a la , it is far too rare and peculiar a dish for mainstream tastes. The opening is confusing, the moral ambiguous, and reality won’t sit still; it’s got unicorns, godlike children, helicopters delivering the ocean, a future world where everyone has their own genetic pig and psychiatrists are known by their facial tattoos, and a malformed sub-reality where everyone wears argyle sweaters. It’s unique, unforgettable, and utterly marvelous.


Original trailer for Mr Nobody

COMMENTS: One of the enigmatic Nemo Nobody’s many possible past identities is a TV science lecturer who explains such esoteric concepts as Continue reading 168. MR. NOBODY (2009) →

Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: JACK AND DIANE (2012)

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Reader Recommendation by Jason Steadmon

DIRECTED BY: Bradley Rust Gray

FEATURING: , , , , Lou Taylor Pucci

PLOT: Somewhat immature Diane (Temple) meets and starts a relationship with the streetwise Jack (Keough) while also going through some strange blackouts and changes.

Still from Jack and Diane (2012)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: If you take the point of view that an analogy doesn’t make for weirdness, Jack & Diane may not immediately make the List. This movie, however, takes that analogy and leaves one to make one’s own mind up. Maybe Diane is turning into a creature in her blackouts – maybe not. It’s from this ambiguity that the movie derives its strangeness.

COMMENTS: Diane is a girl who has been getting nosebleeds lately, and those eventually lead to some scary blackouts, with her seeing a creature in the mirror in place of her own reflection. The idea that Diane may be going through some bodily change (cancer, maturation, exploration of her own sexuality, etc.) is a pure distillation of metaphor–except that it starts to have physical consequences for her lover Jack. Jack eventually gets jealous of Diane hanging around with her friends–Diane has a more fluid sexual nature as opposed to Jack’s straight-up lesbian orientation–even if she was willing to roll with the sometimes literal punches of the relationship. If this isn’t metaphorical, both Diane and Jack (and New York City) are in trouble, because one of them is turning into a very violent monster.

Diane’s other self is represented through some good old-fashioned prosthetic work by veteran effects artist Gabe Bartalos (the Leprechaun movies, most of ’s films). The impending coming of the Creature Diane is also represented in animation by the Brothers Quay in their characteristic and inimitable style. Bradley Rust Gray does good service to the iffy nature of the story and never beats you over the head with the creature. He is obviously bolstered by his experience with both independent and experimental film. As Diane, Juno Temple doesn’t necessarily break any new ground in the childlike yet sexually charged role–but does well with a part that seems written with her in mind. More astounding is Keough (Lisa Marie Presley’s daughter) as Jack, completely eschewing her normal glamorous looks to play the tomboyish role, and bringing depth to the character that one might not expect from someone who makes a regular living as a fashion model.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Tonally, the film swings between whispery romance and ominous horror as it explores the dark side of love and lust, including an amusingly gory meditation on the notion that the person you think is your beloved might just rip your heart out.”–Sara Stewart, New York Post (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: KILLER JOE (2011)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Matthew McConaughey, , Thomas Hayden Church, Gina Gershon

PLOT: A poor Texas family encounters serious trouble after a shady murder deal to acquire a life insurance policy on the mother goes totally wrong.

Still from Killer Joe (2011)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Although the film is exceptionally well made and immensely entertaining, it’s a rather straight exploitation film that uses crassness, violence and exaggerated black comedy to comment on the disintegration of American society.  It’s a fantastic film, but not even close to being one of the weirdest of all time. There is only one single scene that could ascend into the sacred cloud of weirdness, and it’s not the one most people are thinking of. Near the beginning of the film, Chris (Emily Hirsch) sees a ghost of his sister Dottie (Juno Temple) in a rather revealing garment, and she stretches her hand out in a peculiar and deliberate way before disappearing. The resultant silent motions and their rapidity gave the scene a creepy feel that was chillingly bizarre. Other than that, this solidly-made shocker doesn’t veer into any territories that are strange enough to stand apart from other movies of its type.

COMMENTS: The distinct flicking sound of a Zippo lighter breaking the black sets the stage for Killer Joe, a film about family, lust, betrayal, and fried chicken. A cavalcade of rednecks, trailers guarded by muscular pooches, booze-hounds, druggies, incest, a nowhere-town pouring with rain and a step mom who refuses to groom her womanly regions follow. By the time the end credits rolled around (with a God-awful country tune in the background), I came to the conclusion that Friedkin and his brilliant cast truly delivered the goods.

Ansel Smith (Thomas Hayden Church) supplies sardonic humor as an utterly careless deadbeat. He is totally subservient to Matthew McConaughey’s Detective Joe Cooper, dutifully responding with “yes sir” after being repeatedly humiliated. He accepts a plan to murder his ex-wife as a chance to get some extra cash, and he appears to be unconcerned for the danger his son Chris is in. The comedy of the film mostly centers on Ansel’s goofy and dim-witted assessments of the terrible trouble his family is in, while the darker aspects come from McConaughey’s complete depravity and manipulation of the Smith family. Throw in an unfaithful wife and a son who cuts too many corners (Chris is shown gambling at the tracks even when he owes money to mobsters), and you see that the rest of the family isn’t much different. Dottie is nuts as the virgin sister, standing naked and pigeon toed before a sexually repressed Detective Joe in one of the movie’s more uncomfortable scenes. The scene reflects the widespread and under-reported sexual abuse that happens in America’s domestic landscape, as well as its effect on society at large. Indeed, the “date” scene is one of the few moments in the film that reveals Joe Cooper to be vulnerable, depicting his discomfort and residual frustration while listening to Dottie’s memories of childhood trauma. He quickly and aggressively changes the subject, asking her to put on a black dress, escaping his own feelings by controlling the actions of others. It becomes apparent that these characters share similar psychological issues, but the social leverage created by age and power posit a complete devastation of morals committed by Joe towards the Smith family. Although everyone in the family is up for plenty of misdeeds and rotten amorality, it is McConaughey’s deliberately physical performance that lingers to sinister effect here. Notice the way he walks around a room, slowly calculating not only his words but the environment itself, checking to make sure everything is exactly as it should be, eyes intense and exerting absolute control at all times.

The tightness and coherence of Killer Joe‘s structure cannot be understated. It weaves its way through its sickening plot with grace, while including a plenitude of seemingly mundane details that enhance characterization while efficiently raising the suspense level as the story runs its course towards the nasty climax. An example of this kind of cyclical plot device can be seen when Detective Joe manipulatively turns off the television each time he enters the Smith family’s house. Near the end of the film, we are expecting him to yet again turn off the television as he walks towards it, but instead he picks it up and smashes it on the ground, signaling the beginning of his most overtly heinous act in the film and establishing his right to complete dominance over the family. Another sublimely subtle connection occurs when Digger playfully mentions his reluctance to stay away from fried chicken right before he orders his biker-goons to beat Chris to a bloody pulp. It foreshadows the upcoming shock-scene quite nicely. It’s clear that Digger, Joe, and Rex (Chris’s mom’s boyfriend, flaunting a loud yellow Corvette) represent the American business/ruling class in the film, and the Smith family can be seen as the desperate underclass willing to forsake morality, dignity, and intelligence to survive their hopeless economic state. As in Friedkin’s Bug, the main characters are desperate to the point of delusion, only this time their vile acts of familial betrayal for the sake of capital stretch them into larger representations of disintegration, stagnation, and ignorance. We feel some sympathy for Chris, who is shown as being slightly justified in his attempts to shield his sister from Joe, a fact highlighted to amplify the downright anarchic ending. McConaughey completely elevates himself as an actor in the ending of this film, gleefully abandoning his accumulated social precisions to expressions of ecstatic sexual bliss as he brutalizes the family. Church makes us smirk while we are watching horrific violence by acting oblivious to it, even while participating in it. One final and devastating note is dropped before the credits that implies these cycles of violence and stupidity will continue. It may be some time before I get hungry for fried chicken again.

Killer Joe was adapted from his own play by Pulitzer prizewinning playwright Tracy Letts.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…lurches from realism to corn-pone absurdism and exploitation-cinema surrealism. Such lurching isn’t necessarily bad and could have proved entertaining. Yet… it feels as if Mr. Friedkin is consistently controlled by the story’s excesses rather than in control of them.”–Manohla Dargis, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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

Capsules

CAPSULE: MAGIC MAGIC (2013)

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DIRECTED BY: Sebastián Silva

FEATURING: , , Agustín Silva, Catalina Sandino Moreno,

PLOT: An emotionally fragile American girl is trapped with four strangers in a vacation home in Chile when her friend ditches her to deal with personal issues.

Still from Magic Magic (2013)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The movie is good at creating a subtly unnerving atmosphere, but it doesn’t quite push far enough into eldritch realms earn a single Magic in its title, much less two.

COMMENTS: Magic Magic‘s scenario is a little like Repulsion-lite. Juno Temple plays the repressed girl with the disintegrating mind, with the major difference being that it is other people, not solitude, that makes her crack up. It’s also not clear that Temple’s Alicia fears men in general, although she certainly shudders at the touch of Michael Cera’s Brink (which is actually pretty rational behavior, given Brink’s awkwardly sleazy passes at her). Abandoned among strangers in a foreign country, Alicia comes off as merely shy, at first; but, she seems to be having difficulty sleeping, as well as relating to her fellows. She loves animals, but they don’t reciprocate, unless it’s to hump her leg. As the vacation goes on her paranoid behavior gets worse. She begins recalling conversations others don’t remember. The camera sometimes inhabits her subjectivity; when out of focus, her companions’ faces seem to be staring at her, studying her, but a more objective view shows them to be minding their own business. Most of the movie consists of a string of scenes that are very good at creating a subtle, unsettling atmosphere of social and sexual anxiety. The individual pieces are carefully detailed and observed, but the movie as a whole lacks the narrative hooks to draw you into the story, either emotionally, or as a psychological mystery play. The roots of Alicia’s problems, even her basic backstory, are barely hinted at, leaving this unsatisfying as a character study. The movie’s climax invokes Chilean voodoo, a left-field gambit that’s fairly intense and spooky on its own; but, like a potentially interesting and emotionally resonant subplot involving Browning’s character, it doesn’t seem to belong to the main narrative in a meaningful way. The overall result is a slightly unsatisfying movie with parts that are better than the whole. On the plus side, the performances by Temple and Cera are very good. Cera’s character is the socially inept inversion of Temple; overcompensating for his inadequacies with obnoxiousness, he talks a big game, but he may be even more repressed than Alicia.

Michael Cera made two movies back-to-back with director Silva while on a visit to Chile. In Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus, the somewhat better of the two films, he plays a neurotic American drug tourist foiled by a free-spirited hippie girl.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“To be sure, the movie isn’t much more than its atmosphere of clammy discomfort and a gonzo performance from Juno Temple, but those open to the experience will enjoy its gleeful strangeness.”–Tim Grierson, Screen Daily (contemporaneous)