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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: TOYS (1992)

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DIRECTED BY: Barry Levinson

FEATURING: Robin Williams, Joan Cusack, Michael Gambon, Robin Wright, LL Cool J, Donald O’Connor

PLOT: Whimsical toymaker Kenneth Zevo leaves his company to his army general brother Leland, bypassing his head-in-the-clouds son Leslie; when Leland shifts the factory’s production to military weapons controlled by children, Leslie goes into battle with his mad uncle to save the company and the world from violence and mayhem.

Still from toys (1992)

COMMENTS: A while back, on the occasion of my review of the big ball of whimsy that is Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, my colleagues here at 366 HQ took to the comment section to observe that I missed the opportunity to pair it up with a review of a similarly fanciful tale of the life-changing power of toys. I don’t regret passing up that moment, because now I can don my Santa hat and give Toys the chance to stand on its own merits. And now that I’ve done that, I have to say that it makes me think more favorably upon Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.

Toys was a notorious bomb at the time of its release, an outcome that surely had something to do with the wild disconnect between the movie audiences were promised and the one they got. Toys was pitched courtesy of a very buzzy teaser that featured star Williams alone in a field riffing without restraint with nary a single frame of the actual movie to distract. If you saw this (or if you had popped into the multiplex auditorium next door to hear Williams similarly unleashed in Aladdin), you were primed for a raucous comedy featuring Robin-off-the-chain. The opening minutes of saccharine Christmas imagery, pastoral nostalgia, and a decidedly un-funky carol from Wendy and Lisa must have been a real cold shower.

It turns out that Toys is a dour film, beginning with a funeral, ending with a war, and delivering a volume’s worth of personality quirks and emotional damage in between. The mere existence of toys is supposed to be a balm of mirth, but even these people who rely upon them seem to derive little joy from them. This is a movie whose idea of showing the jolly, happy world of toymaking is to score it with the warm, sentimental tones of Tori Amos. (When the same song returns to demonstrate the drudgery of toiling under a new regime, the only change is to give it a techno remix.) You want fun? The dying toy magnate has a goofy beanie hat hooked up to a heart monitor. The quirky daughter lives inside an enormous swan that closes like a coffin. The straight-laced nephew converts to the side of light and life only because he discovers that he and his father have been sleeping with the same nurse. I think that delight is supposed to leaven the sadness, but the sadness actually crushes delight under its oppressive weight. No one is having a good time; even the people play-testing fake vomit are obsessive and pedantic, and it’s hard to imagine that the finished product would be much more entertaining, since Zevo’s toys are all throwbacks to the lead wind-up models of Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: TOYS (1992) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ENDGAME (2000) / OPERATION: ENDGAME (2010)

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The second highest-grossing motion picture of all time—the product of a little indie shingle that hit the jackpot, called Avengers: Endgame—is also by fiat the highest-grossing motion picture of all time with the word “endgame” in the title. That’s not as easy a title to grab as you might think; IMDb lists several dozen features, shorts, and TV episodes that have relied upon the handy term for the final moves of a chess match, most of which preceded Marvel’s grand finale. So it’s probably the law of averages that put two different Endgames on our reader-suggested review queue within spitting distance of each other. Aside from their titles, these two films share exactly two common elements: they both use hurtful language with reckless abandon, and they are both shot on film. Beyond that, you couldn’t ask for two similarly titled stories to be further apart in style, tone, and subject matter. What makes them both worthy to bear the standard of games that end? Let’s dig in.

ENDGAME (2000)

DIRECTED BY: Conor McPherson

FEATURING: , , Charles Simon, Jean Anderson

PLOT: In a barren house at the end of the world, a blind and decrepit old man lives with his parents (who occupy a pair of rubbish bins) and his hobbled servant, who is contemplating a departure.

COMMENTS: Let’s give a warm welcome back to Samuel Beckett, previously seen round these parts waiting for a friend. Another entry from Irish television’s epic “Beckett on Film” cycle capturing all the great writer’s stage works on celluloid for posterity, Endgame is here to deliver the author’s vision of a bleak and doomed future for the human race, precisely according to the author’s wishes. The set is an almost-empty room, devoid of any decoration or furnishing that isn’t occupied by an actor for the duration. Beckett was notoriously allergic to anything ornamental (as with Godot, he originally wrote Endgame in French to curb any tendencies toward florid vocabulary), so what we see and hear is not just what matters but all that matters.

What we can see is definitely a surreal nightmare. All four characters are stricken with various invalidities. Hamm, the apparent lord of the manor, doesn’t enter so much as he is unveiled, and when he speaks it is to declare himself the center of the universe. “Can there be misery loftier than mine?” He is immobile, and thus relies upon the assistance of a crippled man who is himself unable to sit down. The apocalypse has obliterated everything outside of this room. (“Nothing on the horizon?” Hamm asks. “What in God’s name could there be on the horizon?” Clov replies.) And then there are the upstage trash cans that Continue reading THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ENDGAME (2000) / OPERATION: ENDGAME (2010) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: SLEEPY HOLLOW (1999)

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DIRECTED BY: Tim Burton

FEATURING: Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Miranda Richardson, , Christopher Walken

PLOT: Constable Ichabod Crane is sent from New York City to investigate a string of murders in Sleepy Hollow only to find that there are grisly supernatural machinations afoot.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: If Tim Burton maintained the off-kilter, whimsical bloodiness of the film’s first half throughout, it might have stood a chance. Unfortunately, the tone and narrative collapse together as the movie progresses.

COMMENTS: We’ve spilled a fair amount of ink writing about our mounting disappointment in Tim Burton—a director who had such promise starting out, with a string of odd-to-weird hits including Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Apocrypha Candidate Beetlejuice. The end of the last millennium also heralded the end of Burton’s dalliance with weirdness, and Sleepy Hollow acts, appropriately, as the gravestone to his career in weird cinema.

After its haunting introduction, the story proper begins down by the docks, in a young New York City, as Constable Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp, in perhaps his last role before the living ghost of took full possession of him) pulls a bloated corpse from the waters. Irked by his cleverness, but bowing to his investigative acumen, the authorities send him packing to the gloomy town of Sleepy Hollow, as a string of murders there has left a terrified populace along with a growing stack of headless victims. He immediately is smitten by the fey Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci), the daughter of the town’s chief farmer, magistrate, and all around patriarch Baltus Van Tassel (Michael Gambon). Crane soon begins his twitchy investigation, uncovering a conspiracy involving some very dark arts.

With Sleepy Hollow, Tim Burton reaches the peak of his storybook, Expressionistic powers. Smoke and clouds are used to the most sinister of effects. Dark dreams filled with white magic and black torture batter the hero’s consciousness. The movie’s wicked ambience—gloomy landscapes, stunted buildings, and colorful townsfolk—seems impossible to maintain. And so it turns out to be. The strangeness of seeing Michael Gambon, Jeffrey Jones, Richard Griffiths, and Michael Gough as the gaggle of terrified and powerful officials is undercut, unfortunately, by two serious casting errors. I am a big fan both of Christina Ricci and Miranda Richardson, but in Sleepy Hollow the former is too childlike, and the latter too modern.

Obviously, Christopher Walken helps—he always does. His dialogue-free performance as “the Hessian” would have been a major selling point had the marketers not (commendably) opted to keep his presence hush-hush. But as I said, the whole venture starts crumbling as we learn more about the conspiracy (all these machinations for what is, effectively, a mere cash grab) and as Ichabod Crane develops his increasing fancy for Katrina (who is simultaneously fascinating and charmless). While it’s not a high water mark for Burton, Sleepy Hollow is his last good movie. (This position is perhaps affected by my own nostalgia, having seen it in theaters in my younger days.) Had he gone full tilt, it could have been a great movie.

Speaking of tilting, there is that fiery showdown at a windmill, an apt metaphor for the film. Tim loses his nerve, and crashes and burns.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Heads roll, bodies pile up, and the horseman — played in flashback by a mega-weird Christopher Walken — rises from the dead. Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote Seven, turns Irving’s Sleepy Hollow into one fucked-up farm town, filled with adultery, theft, murder and witchcraft. It’s a Burton kind of place.” -Peter Travers, Rolling Stone (contemporaneous)

Canonically Weird (The List)

194. THE COOK THE THIEF HIS WIFE & HER LOVER (1989)

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“Painters hate having to explain what their work is about. They always say, it’s whatever you want it to be — because I think that’s their intention, to connect with each person’s subconscious, and not to try and dictate. For all of his intellectualism, I think Peter Greenaway directs from his real inner gut, and he seems to have a very direct channel in that. The only other director I can think of who’s close is David Lynch.”–Helen Mirren

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Richard Bohringer, Alan Howard

PLOT: A brutish but successful criminal with expensive tastes has bought a French restaurant, where he holds court nightly drinking the finest wines and abusing staff and customers equally. A bookseller who dines there catches the eye of Albert’s mistreated Wife, and the two embark on an illicit affair. The Thief’s discovery of their affair sets off a chain of violent reprisals which ultimately draw in the establishment’s Cook.

Still from The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989)
BACKGROUND:

  • The MPAA denied The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover an R-rating (under 17 not admitted without parent) because of its extreme content (including scat, violence, nudity, cannibalism, and some disgusting stuff, too). Rather than have the film released with an X rating (a designation associated with hardcore pornography in the public mind), Miramax released the film unrated in the U.S. This is frequently cited as one of the films that led to the creation of the adults-only NC-17 rating (under 17 not admitted, a rating which fared little better than X). Cook accepted a NC-17 rating for its DVD release.
  • The controversy did not hurt, and probably significantly boosted, Cook at the U.S. box office, where it grossed over $7 million, becoming the closest thing to a hit Greenaway has ever had.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: We are going to skip over the shocking (and spoilerish) final image, and instead focus on the color transitions during the magnificent tracking shots: as Georgina walks from the sparkling white ladies’ room into the royal red of the restaurant’s main dining room, her dress changes color to match the decor.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Although not as thoroughly weird as most of the rest of his oeuvre, Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is the director’s most beloved (?) movie, and in many ways his poplar masterpiece. While the surrealism here is as subtle as the scatology is explicit, there can be no doubt that Cook is an outrageous, brutish and lovely work of sumptuous unreality from an eccentric avant-gardist that demands a place of honor among the weirdest films ever made.


Original trailer for The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover

COMMENTS: He begins the movie by smearing dog feces on a quivering naked man who owes him money, then urinating on him. This is Continue reading 194. THE COOK THE THIEF HIS WIFE & HER LOVER (1989) →