Tag Archives: Meta-narrative

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: TASHER DESH (2013)

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AKA The Land of Cards

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DIRECTED BY: Quashiq “Q” Mukherjee

FEATURING:, , Soumyak Kante De Biswas, , Tinu Verghese

PLOT: An exiled prince escapes from confinement, only to arrive in a strange land where all the residents dress as military regiments of playing cards; meanwhile, a writer struggles to imagine an screen adaptation of this story.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Tasher Desh is a fascinating example of a weird movie that manages to get weirder entirely through attitude. The land of the playing-card people and their lockstep behavior is plenty strange, but the movie treats their situation with a baroque intensity, a gravity that overwhelms everything that has preceded it. One kind of strange is replaced with another, and an emotional ache that completely changes the viewing experience.

Still from Tasher Desh (2013)

COMMENTS: When last we met up with Q, he was sharing the adventures of a Kolkata street rat turned hardcore rapper. His adventurous tale carved out a niche distinct from his colleagues in the Indian film industry, eschewing colorful dances and crowd-pleasing romance in favor of drugs, hardcore sex, and verses spat out with boundless anger. So when we begin Tasher Desh by meeting a screenwriter who has been tasked with adapting Rabindrath Tagore’s 80-year-old play about a fantastical land where the population paints their faces white and assumes the roles of a platoon of playing cards, the writer’s confusion would seem to be a conduit for that of Q himself. Is this really his kind of film? Can he make the pivot from raw vérité to classic adaptation? The answer is, of course. The man’s a professional. But rest assured, it will not look anything like you’d suspect. Q is gonna Q. 

Tasher Desh spends its first hour establishing a mood of expectation. We hang out with the Prince and his retinue in their large but sparse prison, a cage that would be gilded if it were not made of rock and decorated with only the barest of furnishings, for a remarkably long time. The Prince chats with his mother, ignores his bevy of female attendants, sits around with his aide-de-camp, and plays marathon games of table tennis. Whatever he has done to merit this punishment (and the film is wisely silent on the subject), it’s a dreary fate. That he will want to escape seems a foregone conclusion.

Juxtaposed with the Prince’s misery is that of the screenwriter, who seems to learn the story and script the film in real time. Both men search for something to make sense of everything: for the Prince, an encounter with an exotic fortune teller seals the deal, while the screenwriter similarly meets a mysterious woman who shows him the way.

Here, halfway through the film, it’s fair to wonder who is the dog and who is the tail. The Prince and his pal wash up on an unfamiliar shore, and we immediately encounter the squadron of card people, a live-action version of the Red Queen’s brigade. They are stripped of all identity: hair hidden under a cap, clad in red and black uniforms, eyes concealed behind thick goggles, with their faces painted white and suits painted upon their lips. Only the numbers on their epaulets distinguish them. Their speech is captioned onscreen in bold all-caps blocks that threaten to fill half the screen. They are strange, single-minded, and fiercely xenophobic as they prepare to execute the newly arrived Prince. It’ll take some fancy speechifying to get out of this mess. Luckily for the Prince, he’s got that arrow in his quiver. 

There’s something delightfully demented about the seriousness with which Q treats this absurd premise. It’s not clear why the Prince’s words are so motivating, but maybe he’s the first voice of opposition the card people have ever encountered. Regardless, the speech ushers in an awakening that shatters the worldview of everyone on the island. The Prince and his story are essentially done with at this point, and we’re left with the cards—especially the female cards—and the existential earthquake they face. For some, it is a sexual awakening, for others, a crisis of identity. It’s a huge pivot, and Q treats this shift with the solemnity and intensity that follows a long-drawn out war. 

With multiple inspirations from literature, stage, and screen, Tasher Desh could be called derivative. Yet the sources are so many and so disparate that trying to tease them out ends up feeling foolish. The Tempest meets Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland meets Adaptation meets Lysistrata meets Pleasantville… trying to find a true antecedent is absurd. You’re better off with a different analogue altogether: it’s a Cobb salad, a track off Paul’s Boutique, a Rauschenberg montage. It synthesizes a diverse array of elements into something barely resembling its source material, something wholly new and strange. 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…not just a movie, but a surreal fever dream that completely rewired my brain…  while it might look like a straightforward ‘weird’ movie, ‘The Land of Cards’ is smarter than that. It’s a full-blown political allegory that isn’t afraid to question conformity, social structures, and the power of art.” – Brittany Vincent, Tom’s Guide

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

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE WHEEL OF HEAVEN (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Joe Badon

FEATURING: Kali Russell, Jeff Pearson, Vincent Stalba

PLOT: Purity navigates a Choose Your Own Adventure-style novel as Joe Badon flips channels through his own narrative.

Still from The Wheel of Heaven (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The Wheel of Heaven unspools before the viewer as a direct conduit into the filmmaker’s mind (including his rapid-fire attention span). With Death, derricks, sex, and banana splits in the proceedings, Badon’s movie is as strange as it is hurried.

COMMENTS: Decades ago, in college, I received a professor’s feedback on a short-film screenplay I had submitted: “I don’t quite follow what’s going on, but it seems to be the screenplay you want to write.” This, perhaps, was the apex of my cinematic career. His (good natured) reaction came to mind recently concerning Joe Badon’s latest film, The Wheel of Heaven. First, because he includes an early scene wherein he explains his writing process; second, because, like my film teacher those many years ago, I did not quite follow what was going on, but strongly feel that this is the movie Badon wanted to make. It’s been argued (by me, at least) that art is best done for an audience of one; and it’s fortunate that Badon’s audience of one has such a scattered field of interests.

The Wheel of Heaven has a little something for everyone who is likely to find their way to this review (and indeed, this website). Do you enjoy silly humor, executed intelligently? Are you curious about the many elements of creative process behind filmmaking? Were you seeking a dessert-fueled monologue on the destruction inherent in creation? And, have you or any chill deuces in your ‘board crew been vexed by the man?

With the latter scenario, I recommend you telephone “Rad” Abrams, Skateboard Attorney. His information—as well as everything else I’ve been on about in the paragraph above—can be found in The Wheel of Heaven: a film as personal as it is unpretentious. The staccato pacing keeps an eyebrow raised and a smirk ever-forming as we travel between science fiction, philosophical thriller, news flashes, and ubiquitous ad parodies on Badon’s own BBDCCVTV station.

This acronym, like much of the film, is never explained. But the focus here is the process. That process? Creating—however you are able so to do. Badon has assembled a movie from cracked cathode-memories molded into a series of querical doorways. With only 100 minutes, he can only open and explore so many of them; but it isn’t life without choices. Perhaps, at the end of it all, we may be lucky enough to explore those prior paths unchosen. Until then, the only way to go is forward, even if it leads you back for a do-over.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Completing a cycle of meta-chaos and matryoshka doll storytelling, filmmaker and master of the cosmic weird Joe Badon has crafted his most awesome and best movie to date.”–Bill Arcenaux, Moviegoing with Bill

The Wheel of Heaven [DVD]

The Wheel of Heaven [DVD]
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SNOW WHITE AND RUSSIAN RED (2009)

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Wojna polsko-ruska (Polish-Russian War)

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DIRECTED BY: Xawery Żuławski

FEATURING: Borys Szyc, Roma Gąsiorowska, Maria Strzelecka, Sonia Bohosiewicz, Anna Prus, Dorota Masłowska

PLOT: Against the backdrop of ongoing tensions between Poland and Russia, Silny, a drug-using student, pines for his unfaithful girlfriend Magda; he sublimates his pain through hedonism, but begins to question his role in the universe and the very nature of his own reality. 

COMMENTS: Finding a suitable title to sell a movie to another country’s audience is not the least challenge foreign films face. If a direct translation doesn’t work, then you have to come up with something that makes sense to a different culture without betraying the original spirit. By this standard, Snow White and Russian Red is a pretty good effort, evoking the colors of the Polish flag while referencing two of the protagonist’s greatest foes: the cocaine that provides an escape and the oppressors who continue to loom over Polish life even decades after the fall of communism. Nice work, title translators.

The undercurrent of politics is a constant in Snow White and Russian Red, and Silny, looking like the lead singer of Right Said Fred and alternating between uncontrolled violence and tearful self-pity, is ill-equipped to understand any of it. He is supposedly pursuing a business degree, he is surrounded by decadent baubles of the West like beauty pageants and fast-food joints, and he dreams of living in a McMansion in a suburb where everything looks the same. But he’s continually drawn back to Magda, the hot blonde in the Soviet-red dress whose infidelities infuriate him and only make him want her more. They are beyond co-dependent; they are perpetually locked in each other’s orbits, pushed and pulled by gravity.

Someone more well-versed in the particulars of Polish politics and society could do a better job of deciphering the allusions that populate the film, particularly the women who simultaneously entice and frustrate Silny’s attempts to find escape through sex: Angela, the nihilistic goth who embraces suicide but also is protective of her virginity; Arleta, who seems to want Silny’s affections but consistently irritates him with insulting gossip; Natasha, the tough girl who teases Silny but is so focused on getting her next hit that she snorts powdered soup broth; and Ala, the cute nerd who loves her parents but gets physically aroused talking about this amazing 16-year-old writer she’s discovered named Dorota. Silny feels superior to all of them on an intellectual level, but consistently fails to score sexually. If director Żuławski (son of Andrzej) has any metaphor to convey, it’s that Poland is like Silny, neither fish nor fowl, small on the world stage but unsatisfied at home. 

But while there’s the sociopolitical allegory going on, there’s also a weirder level of surrealism that suggests what we’re seeing is somewhere beyond the realm of reality. Within the opening minutes, an irate Silny deploys cartoon physics to fling his erstwhile girlfriend across the room. When Angela gets sick during a two-person dance party, she spews sick like a fire hose, and then upchucks rocks. Silny engages in a ridiculous fight with nearly everybody in a public park, dispatching them with greater ease than Neo in The Matrix. But it’s only with Silny’s arrest for fighting that we jump headfirst into the rabbit hole, when he is led to the desk of a clerk named Dorota Masłowska. Those in the know will recognize that name as belonging to the author of the original novel upon which this film is based. (Also, the same teen author who got Ala hot and bothered.) Turns out that’s not just a cheeky tip-of-the-cap; we’re looking at the genuine article. We’ve actually seen Masłowska before, moping around in a striped hoodie and narrating some of Silny’s story in the first person, but now that they’re face-to face, she can demonstrate her omnipotence by forcing him to do her bidding and literally deconstructing the set. It’s a pivot that evidently comes straight from the book, a piece of meta-narrative that Żuławski replicates with the author’s participation. It’s also a twist that only muddies the waters. The godlike powers of the author don’t equate neatly to the forces keeping Silny down, or to Poland, for that matter. It’s just a whole other element that Żuławski and Masłowska want to play with, and it doesn’t serve the story or stand on its own. It’s a hat being worn on top of another hat.

After despairing about ever knowing what in his life is real, Silny rams his head into a wall and finds himself in Hell, which turns out to be a talk show where he fabricates his encounters with the devil for the audience’s amusement. Masłowska is in that crowd, too, and if anything sums up the arc of Snow White and Russian Red, it’s this: a character reckoning with things he can hardly understand, and the author who created him sitting in judgment. It’s a dance that seemingly has no end.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The visually splashy sophomore effort of Polish helmer Xawery Zulawski is just as helter-skelter as the spiky local literary sensation that inspired it, but is finally too thematically anemic to provide any real dazzle… no amount of wacky occurrences can substitute for any deeper insight or suggest possible solutions. This makes the film totally static on a thematic level, despite its pumping soundtrack, roving camera, often psychedelic lighting and snazzy (though thankfully not hysterical) editing. Effects work and wire-fu fight scenes add to the generally off-the-wall tone.” – Boyd van Hoeij, Variety (contemporaneous)

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

Wojna Polsko-Ruska

Wojna Polsko-Ruska
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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: KING LEAR (1987)

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William Shakespeare, Jr. V: “Just what are you aiming at, Professor?”
Professor Pluggy: [farts]
Goblin maid: “When the professor farts, the moon things are trembling.”

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , Jean-Luc Godard, ,

PLOT: After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster destroys all world culture, William Shakespeare Jr. V, descendant of the famous playwright, seeks to rediscover and re[Lear]n his ancestor’s works; simultaneously, Professor Pluggy investigates the phenomenon of cinema.

COMMENTS: Godard and the cinema – what more can possibly be said? To begin at the end: his 1967 film Weekend concludes with Godard [in]famously declaring the end of cinema. The enfant terrible of the French New Wave returned twenty years later with a post-apocalyptic adaptation of a Shakespeare tragedy in which he equates the non-existence of cinema with Cordelia’s poignant “nothing.” Godard details how this all came about within the film through metanarrative threads woven among scenes adapted from the titular play plus digressions into his many cinematic obsessions.

Godard’s Lear takes place “after Chernobyl.” Despite this premise, the film isn’t convincing as science fiction. It never explains how exactly Chernobyl managed to wipe out the arts beyond a one-sentence statement. Godard isn’t interested in hard science; he has other things on his mind, “no things” to be c[Lear] (or not).

Despite being structured around absence and loss, there’s a lot to unpack in this dense palimpsest of sound, text, and image. Among many literary references besides Shakespeare’s King Lear, details of famous paintings from art history frequently interrupt the action. Intermittent title cards define the film’s “Approach” through a variety of terms (“King Lear: A Clearing”, “King Lear: A cLearing”, “King Lear: Fear and Loathing”, “No Thing”). The chaotic sound mix consists of Beethoven sonatas distorted, slowed down, and overlaid with intrusive Buñuelian noise (seagulls, slurping soup, ocean waves, pigs snorting). Two competing voiceovers, reciting lines from Shakespeare, even drown out the dialogue of the (in-movie) actors.

In Godard’s hands, adaptation turns into an exercise in free association. The seagulls represent Chekov; the waves, Virginia Woolf. “L’Image“, by surrealist poet Paul Reverdy, quoted at length, describes “the image” as “a pure creation of the soul. It cannot be born of a comparison but of a reconciliation of two realities that are more or less far apart. The more the connection between these two realities [birds squawking loudly] are distanced and true, the stronger the image will be, the more it will have emotive power.”

Reverdy’s two realities reflect the conflict between Lear and Cordelia, the dual missions of William and Pluggy to rescue the world’s culture from oblivion, and Godard’s real life struggles with his producers to get the film made. Only two scenes from the actual play make it into the final cut. The entire film explores the opening scene with Lear and Cordelia’s argument. The tragic finale ends up distilled into a single frame.

Fresh off the string of John Hughes films which made her famous, Ringwald portrays Cordelia with patience and melancholy. As “Don Learo,” Meredith recounts the lives of famous gangsters and his own accomplishments with crotchety zeal and professional pride. He tells his daughter with conviction that loss of character is worse than losing money. She remains silent after this anecdote and when he angrily demands a response from her, she utters the famous “Nothing” which exemplifies the loss at the heart of the tragedy.

The rest of the film consists of William scribbling in a notebook while trying to regain his ancestor’s brilliance, and Godard himself as the enigmatic Professor Pluggy, a recluse who spent twenty years in his “editing room” trying to rediscover “the image.” So what exactly is Godard aiming at, amid all this audiovisual clutter? Pluggy serves as a narrator of sorts, yet he consistently mumbles his lines through one side of his mouth like he’s suffered a stroke (I turned on the disc’s closed captioning to make sure I understood what he said, but sometimes the captions simply read “[speaking indistinctly]”).

This muddled “approach” perplexed the few contemporary critics who saw it (many being weirded out by Pluggy’s wig of A/V cables). After the film’s premier at Cannes, the production company didn’t know what to do with it. Lear saw an extremely limited release in Los Angeles and New York then it sank without a trace before being released in France for the first time in 2002.

Nearly forty years later, it can be seen on physical media. In an era witness to the actual death of film stock and the transition to digital video technologies, Godard’s concerns about the future of cinema, and the power and virtue of film makers, remain eerily prescient. An unsatisfactory experience as a Shakespeare adaptation, Godard’s Lear intrigues as the very type of cinematic artifact of the late twentieth century his characters endeavor to excavate within the movie, an ongoing quest to find the image pure and true.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Daylight surrealism at its finest. Goddard is using this meta-textual dreamscape to lull you into an emotional place to explore one of the greatest moments in literary and artistic history. . .”–Andrew J. Eisenman, Elements of Madness [Blu-ray]

(This movie was nominated for review by Deadly Serious Andy, who remarked “I’d love to see the reaction of a roomful of people expecting a ‘normal’ take on the story.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

King Lear (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

King Lear (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]
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Apocryphally Weird

57*. HALLUCINATIONS OF A DERANGED MIND (1978)

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Delírios de um Anormal

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“…there’s this spiritist center in Bahia that summons an Exu, or Zé do Caixão spirit. I’ve been to these places, incognito of course, wearing sunglasses, hiding my nails, the whole deal. And then someone channels Zé do Caixão, claiming it’s me. There’s this narrative that Zé do Caixão was already a spirit and I just summoned him. I pay them homage in this film. I leave it up to the viewers to decide for themselves. Is he real?”– on the commentary track to Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind

DIRECTED BY: José Mojica Marins

FEATURING: José Mojica Marins, Jorge Peres, Magna Miller

PLOT: Psychiatrist Hamilton has terrible nightmares where he believes Coffin Joe is coming to take his wife away to use her to breed his offspring. His concerned colleagues call in José Mojica Marins, the creator of the Coffin Joe character, to convince him that the character is fictional and all in his imagination. The cure works; or does it?

hallucinations of a deranged mind (1978) still

BACKGROUND:

  • Zé do Caixão (Anglicized as “Coffin Joe”) was a character created and portrayed by low-budget Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins. Beginning in the late 60s, Coffin Joe appeared in a trilogy of canonical feature films, also appearing in Marins’ work in dream sequences, host segments, personal appearances, his own line of comic books, and so on. The character is sadistic, but ultimately more amoral than evil; he disdains religion and the supernatural, and quests eternally to find the perfect “superior” woman to breed with so he can sire superhuman progeny. Joe was known for his black top hat and cloak, his monobrow, and, most notably, for his uncut fingernails, which Marins grew to over 9 inches in length. Though nearly unknown outside of Brazil during the height of his popularity, within that country Coffin Joe was a homegrown bogeyman of superstar status, roughly equivalent to Freddy Kruger.
  • Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind was created from repurposed and unused footage from This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, The Strange World of Coffin Joe, The Awakening of the Beast, and others, mixed with newly shot scenes (there is approximately 35 minutes of new footage in the 86-minute movie). Some of the reused scenes had previously been nixed by censors.
  • The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe (1974) used a similar premise of director Marins facing off against his own character.
  • Marins says that the inspiration for this film came from a real life request from a psychiatrist. The doctor’s wife was obsessed with Marins’ Coffin Joe character, and seemed to believe he existed independently. Marins visited the couple and watched one of his films with them on a midnight TV broadcast; during the screening, he reminisced how he suffered from diarrhea and painful corns during the shooting of certain scenes. The spell was broken and the woman no longer believed in Coffin Joe.
  • Editor Nilcemar Leyart estimates that the final film contains more than 4,700 cuts.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are so many garage-surrealist possibilities here it boggles the mind—the woman-headed spider, the magic-markered buttocks, the human staircase—but ultimately the dominating figure is, appropriately, Coffin Joe himself: the dark, dagger-fingered nightmare undertaker who orchestrates this parade of Boschian delights.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Faces on asses; multi-headed torture blob

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A circus of the damned crawling out of a cinematic scrapheap, Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind is the distilled essence of Coffin Joe at his most irrational and insistent.


Clip from Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind

COMMENTS: A man circles a bikini babe while beating a bongo; after each circuit he stops and a new set of female legs pop into the Continue reading 57*. HALLUCINATIONS OF A DERANGED MIND (1978) →