Tag Archives: Literary

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: PASSAGES FROM JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGAN’S WAKE (1966)

1 Comment

AKA Finnegan’s Wake

Recommended

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

DIRECTED BY: Mary Ellen Bute

FEATURING: Martin J. Kelley, Jane Reilly, Peter Haskell, Page Johnson

PLOT: In a series of disconnected scenes, memories, and dreams, the passing of Finnegan, AKA Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, AKA HCE (and there may be many other names not yet known) is the occasion of a wake, an event which the deceased keeps attempting to attend despite his survivors’ reluctance for him to participate—or perhaps none of that happens.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The next time you hear someone complain that their favorite book was adapted for the cinema and the filmmakers weren’t “faithful to the original text,” just plop them down and make them watch this ridiculously successful effort to burnish the original medium through adaptation into a new one. Passages never claims to be a literalization of Joyce’s book, instead recognizing that its greatest advantage is the power of its twisted language and putting that front and center.

Still from Passages from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (1966)

COMMENTS: “When is a pun not a pun?” the jolly bartender asks. It’s an unexpectedly galling question, considering that he’s inside a story that consists almost entirely of plays-on-words, that exists solely to celebrate the flexibility and incomprehensibility of language. The nerve of this guy.

James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, the novel he spent 15 of the last 17 years of his life composing, is enshrined in history as, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “arguably one of the most complex works of 20th-century English-language fiction.” It makes pretensions to having a narrative, but if it is about anything, it’s about words, words, words, and their notorious malleability. Joyce gives nearly every sentence at least two meanings, exploiting meter and importing similar words from other languages and playing with time to such a degree that the last words of the book form a complete sentence with the first words of the book. It’s a 628-page fairground ride of a novel, and it regularly tops lists like “The 10 Most Difficult Books to Read” and features in stories like “This book club finally finished ‘Finnegans Wake.’ It only took them 28 years.” It’s a monument to inaccessibility. I haven’t read the whole thing. Have you?

So there is enormous praise to be extended to Mary Ellen Bute’s ambitiously foolhardy decision to actually try and visualize Joyce’s wandering scenarios, because it makes the effort of reading the book seem both achievable and desirable. Her film uses an adaptation created by Mary Manning in 1955 staged by the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but while all the language comes directly from Joyce’s text, she makes two key innovations that neither book nor stage could offer. The first is the use of tools of cinema; framing, closeups, and editing keep the language moving and prevent the focus from wandering away, while visuals can create a level of surrealism commensurate with the text. A film that looks like it will be stuck in the hall of the titular funeral party can transform unexpectedly into a burlesque show, while what has been a stagebound production through the halfway point suddenly steps out into nature.

Bute’s second contribution may be even more important: most of the film is subtitled with Joyce’s text, giving the viewer a unique opportunity to both hear and read the language and appreciate the multiple meanings and sneaky substitutions that Joyce has peppered throughout the book. (Here, “throughout” should be taken to mean “in every damn sentence.”) You know who would agree? Joyce’s countryman Samuel Beckett, who said of the original book, “You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read—or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.” The film version honors this fact, dramatizing Joyce’s maddening doggerel and giving sound and shape to the words so that you cannot miss his fantastical leaps of rhyme and oronym.

It’s nice of Beckett to show up, because in reviewing a pair of films based on the works of this fellow son of the Emerald Isle, I twice made the observation that there was nothing weird about the films that wasn’t already weird in the original plays. One might expect the same to be true of these excerpts from Joyce’s novel, given that scenes have been adapted as faithfully as possible. However, the transition from prose to moving image puts the absurdism into a wholly new context. Film doesn’t just repeat the weirdness of the original; it highlights it. By the end, as HCE marches off into the sun to the strains of composer Elliot Kaplan’s oddly emotion-drenched score, I don’t have any more of an idea of what’s going on than I did at the start, but the urge to explore the puzzle further is invigorating.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie creates literal visuals to go with the flowing imagery of the book that rapidly moves and shifts between scenes as in a dream… probably best taken in smaller doses. .” – Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

(This movie was nominated for review, in a small bit of wordplay, by “Finnegans Cake”. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)   

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SHINBONE ALLEY (1970)

Leave a comment

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

DIRECTED BY: John David Wilson

FEATURING THE VOICES OF: , Eddie Bracken, Alan Reed, John Carradine

PLOT: A poet/newspaper man resurrected as a cockroach tells a  number of stories about his friend, a cat with loose morals and a knack for picking the wrong mates, and the many times he tries to pull her out of trouble.

Still from shinbone Alley (1970)

COMMENTS: Animation, frustrated aficionados will tell you, is not a genre, it’s a medium. Just because the twin monoliths of Walt Disney and Saturday morning television built their empire on a commitment to entertaining grade schoolers with moving drawings, we should not assume that cartoons are only for kids. But parents and studio executives never seem to get the message. There’s plenty of of evidence of this blindness — just count up the number of traumatized children who were exposed to the original Watership Down — and a leading piece of evidence should be the tagline that marketing wizards devised for Shinbone Alley: “It’s sophisticated enough for kids, simple enough for adults!” Because if anything cries out to be seen by all audiences, it’s the story of a sexually promiscuous cat who takes up with a series of abusive partners, as told by the suicidal cockroach who loves her.

The idea of a creating musical based on the “archy and mehitabel” stories of Don Marquis was unusually persistent. The tales were enormously popular in their day (the titular cockroach and cat are among the literary figures immortalized on the bronze screen that fronts the monumental Brooklyn Public Library), but they didn’t get paired up with song-and-dance until a concept album in 1954, penned by Joe Darion (who would gain acclaim as the book writer for Man of La Mancha) and composer George Kleinsinger (whose best known composition is probably Tubby the Tuba) and starring Bracken and Channing in the title roles. The script would get a punch-up from Mel Brooks before making its way to Broadway for a six-week run in 1957, now starring Bracken alongside the dangerously seductive Eartha Kitt as Mehitabel. (So now you know: Andrew Lloyd Webber did not provide the first dancing cats on the Great White Way.) Undaunted by the flop, a shortened version of the show found its way to television in 1960 (featuring Bracken and Tammy Grimes as the titular feline) before arising once more a decade later as an animated feature with the original stars in tow. So with all that effort, there must be something in the adaptation that was demanding to be seen.

I’m still trying to figure out what that is. Shinbone Alley is a collection of scenes in which our heroes go through a sad and troubling cycle: Mehitabel searches for fame, free love, and good times, ignoring Archy’s pleas to clean up her act; her latest beau turns out to be apathetic at best, cruel at worst; Archy has to bail her out of her latest predicament; Mehitabel becomes furious with Archy for trying to kill her buzz; Archy becomes deeply depressed; Mehitabel realizes that Archy is probably the best friend she has; the pair celebrates their friendship, and we go around again. It’s possible that this dysfunction once played for laughs and has just aged poorly, but it’s hard to see who might have enjoyed seeing one of the lead characters getting threatened by a big bully, stolen from by a charlatan actor, and ultimately knocked up by both and then saddled with a litter that she promptly abandons to be nearly drowned in a storm. Is that the part that’s sophisticated enough for kids, or is it the other lead character constantly threatening to kill himself?

Shinbone Alley is actually a well-animated film, and director Wilson has fun shifting from the ugliness of the alley to colorful flights of fancy like pop art representations of Archy’s free-verse musings, or especially the extended scene in which Archy plots revolution in the distinctive style of George Herriman, the “Krazy Kat” creator who illustrated many of Marquis’ stories. But the other elements are a drag. The score is utterly unmemorable; the most notable song is the pals-forever number “Flotsam and Jetsam,” which at least relates to the characters. Other tunes barely connect to anything in the story at all, such as Big Bill’s ode to the alley and his own violent nature (sung by Reed in the same voice he used for Fred Flintstone), or the reminiscence of Tyrone T. Tattersall (“sung” by Carradine) of his early days in the theater. At one point, we even get Shakespeare delivered in the style of beat poetry. It’s as though Darion and Brooks, both of them Tony-winning book writers, can’t think of a single reason for their characters to break into song, so no reason becomes reason enough.

Ultimately, the film seems to take its inspiration from Mehitabel herself. She never seems to learn from her setbacks, bouncing back with the repeated watchcry, “Toujours gai!” So it goes with Shinbone Alley. What worked in Marquis’ newspaper columns never translated to stage or screen, but here we are, giving it another go. The peculiar mix of perky animation and grim subject matter is is certainly weird, but not half as weird as the certainty its creators held that this was a story that must be told.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Shinbone Alley, you see, is a singular strange animated movie, trapped in the film marketplace of the early 1970s with absolutely nowhere to go, certainly no naturally-occurring audience… Weird stuff for a kids’ movie (I am, if nothing else, 100% confident that this was the first American animated feature in which one of the main characters has sex, gets pregnant, and gives birth, all out of wedlock, during the overall course of the narrative), and there’s something irresistibly jarring in that mismatch between the dopey simplicity of the film’s comedy and the thorny, mean streets filthiness of its plot, not to mention the sullen existentialism of archy’s overall arc, and the generally moody songs…”– Tim Brayton, Alternate Ending

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

Shinbone Alley

Shinbone Alley
  •  
Check Price
It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: WISE BLOOD (1979)

2 Comments

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

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: John Huston

FEATURING: Brad Dourif, Amy Wright, Dan Shor, Harry Dean Stanton, Ned Beatty, William Hickey, Mary Nell Santacroce

PLOT:  In a small Southern town, WWII veteran Hazel Motes  proclaims the foundation of his new Church of Christ Without Christ, but runs into obstacles including a deceptive preacher and his wily daughter, a simple young man who is determined to help by providing a Native American mummy, and a huckster who gloms on to Hazel’s pitch in pursuit of a quick buck.

Still from wise blood (1979)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Wise Blood pulls off the trick of translating the quirky voice and complex themes of Flannery O’Connor’s writing to the screen, delivering both the surrealism of her situations and the aspirational delusions of her characters in a way that’s faithful to the source material but fitting for the new medium. There’s a lot that an adaptation like this might leave by the wayside, but this one includes every audacious, blasphemous, ridiculous moment.

COMMENTS: I would never have expected to encounter as much John Huston in my tenure at 366 Weird Movies as I have, but a look at the last decade of his career reveals a man who was fiercely determined to do his own thing, but also savvy enough in the ways of Hollywood to play ball half the time in exchange for freedom the other half. So the man’s going to flirt with weird at about a 1:1 ratio. Stints behind the camera for Annie, Victory, or Phobia seem like down payments for more dedicated efforts like Prizzi’s Honor, Under the Volcano, or The Dead. Wise Blood definitely falls into the latter category, as the director waited patiently for his chance to adapt O’Connor’s first novel, undertaking more commercial ventures until his neophyte producers finally came up with the funding. Once he had it, he worked fast and affordably but without compromise.  

I almost feel like all I need to tell you is that it’s a grand showcase for Brad Dourif. A legendarily weird character actor, Dourif takes to a leading role with gusto. His Hazel Motes is an astoundingly meaty part, a character made up of vast contradictions and competing emotions that all somehow fit together logically. He rails against the unkept promises of organized religion, but becomes irate at the sight of false devotion. He yearns for connection to others, but recoils at anyone who would try to attach themselves to him. (He’s at his happiest with the prostitute whom he pays for her affections.) He tools around in a beat-up Ford Fairlane that even he seems to recognize is beyond repair, but he insistently defends its honor against any criticism. We will quickly learn that Hazel is a parfait of fierce pride and acute embarrassment, and the combustible mix only makes him more ardent in pursuit of a purer truth. Each setback heightens his intensity, each failure leads him to repeat with ever more determination.

Alone, Hazel might seem too weird to endure, but Wise Blood surrounds him with a murderer’s row of supporting players who demonstrate that he’s as much a product of his surroundings as he is his own mass of peculiarities. Stanton is a con man whose tongue drips with moral superiority, while granddaughter Wright hopes to use her skills of deception to trick Dourif into a marriage bed. Beatty has a small but crucial role as a sidewalk swindler who infuriates Dourif by not only being better at street preaching but using that talent to fleece the readily gullible masses. Most eccentric of all is Shor, a simpleton with a fascination for mummies and gorillas for whom no surprise revelation of the truth is ever a disappointment. And all this strangeness is just part of the fabric. Everyone’s weird, but no more so than the next guy.

Which points to Huston’s oddest and most successful trick: Wise Blood is a film truly out of time. Are we seeing O’Connor’s 1952, with the settings, costumes, and attitudes of a society still finding new footing after a world war? Or is this the Macon, Georgia of 1979, neck-deep in national malaise and taking an initial stab at a post-racial new South? Huston chooses not to choose, turning O’Connor’s characters into unwitting time travelers who occupy the physical present day but live in a spiritual yesteryear. It makes for a curious watch, but perfectly fits these people who long for change but refuse to be changed themselves.

It says something about both author and director that the final scene of Wise Blood, in which our protagonist’s unyielding principles lead him to his ultimate fate, is both sad and funny. Not bittersweet, but ruefully humorous. It’s the perfect coda to the tale of a man who refused to be relatable and never stopped wondering why he couldn’t relate. O’Connor and Huston were both one-of-a-kind artists, so it’s a lucky outcome that blending the two results in a movie that’s not much like anything else.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Wise Blood is based on Flannery O’Connor’s extraordinary first novel, which infused the conventions of Southern gothic fiction with fiery Catholicism and surrealistic wit. Huston takes to O’Connor’s hothouse style like a gambler to a royal flush. The inevitable results are the very essence of weird.” – Frank Rich, Time Magazine (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by future contributor , who said it “seems a must for the list in my opinion.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

Wise Blood

Wise Blood
  •  
Check Price
Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: POLA X (1999)

2 Comments

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

DIRECTED BY: Leos Carax

FEATURING: Guillaume Depardieu, Katerina Golubeva, , Delphine Chuillot

PLOT: Pierre’s happy-go-lucky existence is shattered when he meets a young woman claiming to be his lost sister; suddenly disenchanted with his life, he abandons his mother, his fiancée, and his successful literary formula in search of a higher truth.

Still from pola X (1999)

COMMENTS: Herman Melville needed a hit. He’d received a critical drubbing for his last book, a light tome about the whaling industry, so to improve his fortunes, he poured his effort into a potboiler with Gothic overtones. Did it work? Not only did Pierre, or The Ambiguities not reverse his fortunes, but the negative response went beyond the work and spilled over to the author himself, with the New York Day Book headlining its review, “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY”.

Are there parallels with Leos Carax, who waited eight years following the critical and box office failure of The Lovers on the Bridge to bring forth this adaptation of Pierre? One hates to espouse such a simplistic theory of armchair psychoanalysis, but the shoe sure does fit. Just as Melville poured his wounded heart into his tale, Carax goes all in on every bit of melodrama. He faithfully adapts all aspects of the book, including its  transgressive and destructive relationships. For what it’s worth, the critics all called Carax crazy, as well.

Although he’d be the last to admit it, Pierre is already pretty messed up at the start of Pola X. He speaks in romantic platitudes to Lucie, his fiancée whom he’s cheats upon regularly. (Carax nicely frames one such conversation atop a hillside with a dramatic vista, his camera swooping like the beginning of The Sound of Music.) He has an unusually close relationship with his mother Marie, in whose house he still lives, and who has no qualms about bathing in front of her son. Their unity seems to be a reaction to something in his late father’s past; we don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s bad enough that newsstands are selling books about the old man’s precipitous fall. His cousin Thibault has given himself over completely to the pursuit of money. And there’s his budding career as an anonymous novelist, a vocation that permits him to act as the voice of his generation without any pressure to represent it. Clearly, Pierre is a man of the utmost privilege, the kind you fully expect to see brought low by circumstance.

So part of what makes his fall from grace so surprising is that it is almost entirely self-generated, inspired by his discovery of Isabella, a homeless immigrant who professes to be Pierre’s sister by virtue of one of his father’s dalliances. This dovetails with dreams Pierre has been having about a woman who matches Isabella to a tee, and the discovery completely unmoors him and everyone around him. He cuts off all connection to his past life, he takes up with Isabella and a pair of fellow struggling immigrants (and is shocked when hotels turn them away, cab drivers insult them, and Thibault denies any connection to him), and he declares that everything he has ever written has been fraudulent and now he will write the book that truly blows it all wide open.

Carax has a lot of fun pushing his characters to their limits. Pierre undergoes a full transformation, as the twentysomething socialite takes to wielding a cane and wearing a blanket like a Russian greatcoat, as though he had suddenly become a tubercular artist from a 19th century opera. He adopts a fully disgusted assessment of the human race, telling a young girl that all people stink (a viewpoint that recoils upon her in a spectacularly bad way). Pierre and his troupe don’t merely find themselves on the streets; they wind up at the warehouse headquarters of a spectacular industrial music collective (playing the brilliantly realized score by avant-garde rock legend Scott Walker) that turns out to be a terrorist cell. Lucie doesn’t merely waste away in misery at having been ditched by Pierre, but actually shows up at his door, clinging to him and maintaining a blissful ignorance about his connection with Isabella. And Marie doesn’t merely pine for her wayward son, but roams the countryside on his motorcycle until it becomes the agent of her destruction (in a morbidly funny manner).

And then there’s what he does to Isabella, as they make manifest their bond, explicitly. (Golubeva used a body double for the most graphic moments; Depardieu did not.) It’s almost as though Carax wanted to eliminate any doubt as to whether they consummate their incestuous relationship by presenting it in pornographic detail. But he gets to have his cake and eat it too (not a euphemism), because the scene isn’t romantic in any context. The sex is hungry rather than loving, desperate rather than passionate. Whatever Pierre is trying to find in his life, he pays no heed to any obstacles, physical or moral, that stand in his way. Of course, in doing so, he brings the girl down with him. There’s a reason that he later dreams of the two of them consumed by a river of blood.

Pola X ends up being a peculiar sort of ironic contradiction. A protagonist who has it all but finds a lie at the heart of his happiness, and the ensuing search for truth that brings only pain to himself and those around him. Intriguingly, both of Pierre’s creators found a different way out of their dark places. Melville eventually turned away from prose, devoting himself to poetry. Carax, meanwhile, only got weirder.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Not all of Pola X is fully comprehensible… But the images—oh, they capture the mood of this piece and the things that are really important.”–Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

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

Pola X [DVD]

Pola X [DVD]
  •  
Check Price

Capsules

CAPSULE: BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN (2022)

Leave a comment

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

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Pierre Földes

FEATURING: Voices of Amaury de Crayencour, Arnaud Maillard, Mathilde Auneveux, Pierre Földes; Ryan Bommarito, Marcelo Arroyo, Shoshana Wilder (English dub)

PLOT: A salaryman struggles emotionally when his depressed wife leaves him; meanwhile, his co-worker is approached by a giant talking frog who insists that the timid accountant assist him in forestalling an earthquake set to devastate Tokyo.

Still from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2022)

COMMENTS: The blind willow of the title is a fictional tree; flies bear pollen from its blossoms and deposit it into the ear of a woman, causing her to fall into a deep, fairy-tale sleep. The fable is related from inside a flashback in one of the stories that compromise this semi-anthology film. It’s one of many mysterious strands running through Pierre Földes cinematic debut, adapted from six Haruki Murakami (Drive My Car) short stories. The film follows three main protagonists, and one anthropomorphic Frog, through dismal-but-bearable lives in a post-earthquake Tokyo. The movie marches the trio through bouts of catatonic depression, workplace humiliations, odd vacations, encounters with magical restaurateurs, ambiguous erotic and semi-erotic encounters, a search for a missing cat, dreams, and one epic, hallucinatory quest.

The stories are all suffused with gentle melancholy and a sense of humanity’s search for meaning. No answers are given or purposes uncovered, except, perhaps, in the case of accountant Katagiri, who, with the help of the movie’s breakout character, the loquacious and puissant Frog, finally achieves recognition for his years of long and thankless service. The film’s general tone is more attuned to Komura, who endures abandonment by his wife with quiet and insular stoicism, and Kyoko, whose dissatisfaction remains inexpressible, even to herself. The figurants the main characters sit beside on subways, buses, or cafeterias are all silent and spectral, drawn as translucent overlays. There’s something ghostly about the film’s protagonists, who move about as if they’re bound to the world by some unremembered purpose, so it only makes sense that they inhabit a spectral civilization.

The artwork reinforces the calm, poetic, dreamlike mood. Color palettes are muted, with static backgrounds; in the loveliest composition, two characters stand at a bus stop in front of what looks like a springtime watercolor landscape of cherry blossoms and tall grass, a brown mound of mountain arising in the deep background. At times, especially in scenes with Frog, the art can recall anime, although this is not as much of a stylistic touchstone as the Japanese setting might suggest. The movie takes time out for flights of fancy in several dream sequences—Katagiri finds himself flying through the sky in the belly of a worm who resolves into a train as he wakes—but also in waking daydreams, as when Komura sees the whorls of his nephew’s ear morph into a nude woman, or when a spectral salmon swims above two lovers in bed. These digressions harness the fantasy power of animation in a way that seems more natural than it would in a live-action feature, suggesting that the characters’ interior realities have as much emotional weight as their dialogue. Földes has an odd trademark of drawing his character’s lips unusually wide and dark, but this is a minor distraction.

The multitalented Földes, previously known mainly as a composer, not only adapted Murakami’s stories into the screenplay, directed, and wrote the score, but also voiced Frog in both the French and English versions. Perhaps only his love of Murakami’s prose pulled him into filmmaking, but I hope this isn’t the last we see from him. He’s too skilled at this to sit on the sidelines.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a film that’s lovely, mysterious and also, at times, fittingly odd… the film itself is sync with Murakami’s particular blend of the quotidian and the surreal.”–Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter (contemporaneous)