Tag Archives: Meta-narrative

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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) →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE LICKERISH QUARTET (1970)

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DIRECTED BY: Radley Metzger

FEATURING: Frank Wolff, Erika Remberg, Silvana Venturelli, Paolo Turco

PLOT: A bourgeois family invites a carnival performer back to their castle, convinced they recognize her from a stag film.

Still from The Lickerish Quartet (1970)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The Lickerish Quartet questions the very nature of reality through a series of breezy sex romps. If that’s not enough in itself, there’s a library floor paved with bawdy vocabulary, a magic act that disappears the lead actress from the film within the film, and the fact that every line of dialogue sounds like a riddle.

COMMENTS: In The Lickerish Quartet, softcore pron peddler Radley Metzger steals the Teorema scenario with a healthy dose of inspiration from playwright-philosopher Luigi Pirandello. Throughout his directing career Metzger remained aware of his roots as an editor. He preferred to adapt well-known literary works for his films so he wouldn’t have to worry about plot. The Lickerish Quartet loosely adapts Pirandello’s play “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” first performed in 1921. At the premier, audiences revolted in protest of the fourth-wall breaking metanarrative structure. Here, Metzger constantly reminds us we’re watching a movie through all the tricks of the editor’s trade. The film changes between color and black and white, between past and present, with playful disregard for continuity, and the film within the film and the core story switch places in diagetic reality, along with both sets of cast members.

After growing bored with watching a stag loop together, a middle-aged man (Wolff), his wife (Remberg), and her young adult son (Turco) decide to visit the carnival. They see a girl (Venturelli) in a white catsuit riding the Wall of Death on a motorcycle, and when she takes a bow and removes her helmet she’s revealed to be the spitting image of an actress in the blue movie the family just watched. The father decides to invite her back to their castle to show her the film. The son wishes he wouldn’t, but the mother thinks it will be fun.

The carnival girl accepts the invitation. From the moment she sets foot inside the castle, flashbacks suggest she somehow remembers it. A brief shot shows a man being killed before he falls through a doorway and down a flight of stairs, prompting the carnival girl to ask, “Who has the gun? To do the shooting?”

What they expected to be a fun flirty lark has already taken an ominous turn for the family. “There isn’t going to be any shooting,” the father says; “but of course there is,” the girl replies. Before they show her the stag film, the son performs a magic act and the carnival girl disappears. When the reel begins to play, her doppelgänger’s face is no longer visible on screen. On a third viewing, the blonde girl in the film is an entirely different actress. The mother and father are confused and disappointed, but they convince the girl to spend the night.

In ‘s Teorema a mysterious stranger visits a bourgeois family and seduces each of them in turn. The results of the seductions vary, but in the end the total effect is devastating. Quartet runs this plot backward. Metzger rewinds the bickering family back to their beginnings, to World War II, the source of their conflicts and tensions.

A look into the source text reveals Metzger hews pretty closely to Pirandello’s scenario. The “Six Characters in Search of an Author” are identified only by their roles within a step-family, the result of a woman’s affair sanctioned by her husband. The plot centers around the complexities of their relationships and the impact of transgressive sexuality. In the metanarrative, their stories were left uncompleted by their original creator, so they seek an author in order to achieve resolution.

In updating it to the present day and paring down the family to four members, Metzger makes the material more accessible to contemporary audiences and a society still coming to terms with the legacy of WWII. The carnival girl becomes “The Author” who literally fleshes out the characters’ memories, personalities, and desires.

Pirandello believed reality is an illusion and everyone should be aware of it; he also believed this awareness would lead only to unhappiness. Metzger is far less pessimistic. The carnival girl makes the family members whole people through their sexual encounters with her. Far from tearing them apart, this shared experience brings the family closer together and makes them capable of seeing each other’s different perspectives.

In creating an avant-garde skin flick with philosophical underpinnings, Metzger confused and frustrated critics, who struggled with how to classify Quartet when they didn’t outright dismiss it. Featuring Metzger’s usual attention to the details of production design, Quartet straddles the ditch between low- and high-brow with ease. Ultramodern décor artfully situated within an actual medieval castle mirrors the characters’ inner journeys from the present to their pasts. Despite frequent syncopated cuts to enigmatic scenes (a close-up of a reclining woman’s crossed ankles and magenta high-heeled shoes; the dying man falling down the stairs), a mood of dreamy sensuality prevails.

With its dual focus on subjectivity and sexual mores, it’s no surprise Pirandello’s play spoke to Metzger as a film maker. Metzger learned editing during his military service while working on propaganda films for the United States government. He knew better than most people how movies shape reality, and vice versa.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[Metzger and co-writer Michael de Forrest] must have dreamed up the story line late at night, for it’s a weirdo of the first order, a confusing blend of fantasy, reality, and illusion…”–Thomas Blakely, The Pittsburgh Press (contemporaneous)

The Lickerish Quartet [Blu-ray]

The Lickerish Quartet [Blu-ray]
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