PLOT: Professor Kansas Bowling, with a degree in “Teen Age,” draws on myriad examples of girls’ ruined childhoods to explore the dangers of impressionability and sexual predation.
COMMENTS: There’s a human skeleton arranged on a string, a red backdrop, an old slide projector, and a strange figure: a professor, she tells us, with her field of study situated on the grim intersection of the evil and the mundane. Shattered futures, injured esteem and injured bodies, dogged sunniness, doom, defiance, death, and rape: all these elements, across numerous (“There are 100 actresses in this film”) testimonials, flesh out this frightful and compelling, sometimes experimental and sometimes verité, mockumentary dissecting the teenage girlhood experience in all its harrowing possibility.
These girls’ lives unfold in a murky ’70s-to-’90s era, with postcards sent from the road, nary a portable phone to be seen, and the recurring Scott Walker tune, “It’s Raining Today,” lashing ominously as crooned counterpoint to the poppy Nilsson/Monkees title track. After a brief introduction from the professor, Cuddly Toys dives right into its deadpan-dreadful proceedings with a “Miss Pre-Teen” beauty pageant, setting the tone: we’re in for a nasty ride, made just barely tolerable by the clinical absurdism of our guide and the improbable perkiness of (some of) the girls and women onscreen.
But discomfort—to put it mildly—weighs on the viewer, and appropriately so. As a general rule, I am not prone to guilt by association, but by the film’s end I was truly appalled by the evil potential, and the evil realized by, my fellow men. I had no objections to Bowling depicting this, however. There’s far too great a streak of nastiness in the world, which menaces one sex exponentially more than the other. That said, Professor Bowling slips in a trenchant observation in her closing remarks—one which raises the question as to which sex is actually considered more disposable.
Cuddly Toys is a mind-blowing journey into the casual cruelty found in our culture, weaving harrowing nightmares from grubby dreams. The victims are clear, and the perpetrators—though predominately male—seem to be just about everyone; there is more than enough blame to go around.
PLOT: A psychiatrist sets himself up in an apartment overlooking the East River where he beds a series of women, all the while heading steadily toward a complete mental breakdown.
COMMENTS: It’s hard to appreciate just how strange the conceit of Coming Apart must have felt to moviegoers in 1969. Here in the second quarter of the 21st century, when people document their lives frequently and extensively, the sheer strangeness of a man choosing to capture his illicit second life on film just doesn’t come across the same. Viewers at the time were surely perplexed by a film that seemed to be composed entirely a footage taken from a single vantage point. It must have seemed like nothing short of voyeurism, the worst kind of candid camera. Contemporary reviews of the film frequently flail about for the one point of comparison they have at hand: James McBride’s groundbreaking pseudo-documentary David Holzman’s Diary. But while this intentionally self-aware movie has similar vibes, Coming Apart is something very different. Ginsberg crafts a silver screen salute to a man who feels compelled to chronicle his life for a very compelling reason: self-loathing.
Torn’s erstwhile analyst has ditched his career and his pregnant wife, creating a new identity for himself by setting up shop in a Kips Bay love nest. He doesn’t seem at all clear as to why he’s doing this, and for reasons even he can’t begin to unpack, he decides to film everything, making this an early example of the found footage genre. The footage we find is largely his attempts at seduction, successful to varying degrees; but while this is a film with plenty of sex, it’s much more about the manipulations and deceptions that are perpetrated just to get to the act. The wayward Dr. Glaser is an easygoing seducer, but he gets no enjoyment out of it, neither the hunt nor the kill. He’s like a man grazing at the buffet not because he’s hungry but because there’s food. Anyone approaching Coming Apart looking for sexytimes is likely to end up as disappointed as Glaser.
For anyone who knows Torn primarily from the lacerating deadpan he brings to later projects like Defending Your Life, Men in Black, or “The Larry Sanders Show,” his work here is revelatory. He deploys his gravelly baritone infrequently, communicating largely through the subtlest of expressions. It can feel like he’s hardly acting at all, until a crucial scene late in the movie when he goes nearly catatonic and you realize just how emotive he has been all along. Most of the women opposite him, such as Lois Markle’s aspiring fetish-lover or Lynn Swan’s mercenary young mom, are richly detailed, although they can feel melodramatic by comparison. The characters who avoid sex are the most grounded, like Viveca Lindfors’ ex-mistress who tells Torn to his face that his charms won’t work on her anymore. Standing out among the crowd is Sally Kirkland, whose growing mania is grounded by her shockingly total lack of vanity or guardedness. Her role could easily be viewed as “the crazy broad,” but she earns respect and sympathy by giving nothing less than her all. The idea that Torn’s hidden camera captures these people so authentically justifies the gimmick.
While the filming technique suggests gritty realism, the characters and situations we encounter feel forced, as most of Glaser’s sexual partners bring their own lunacy to the show. Were it not for the bad doctor’s slow-motion breakdown, it might be easy to interpret the film’s message as “women be wack.” It is interesting, though, to see documentary formalism deployed in an experimental manner. In the early hangover following the sexual revolution, Ginsberg’s daring feature has the smarts to get out of the way and let the stories of the shellshocked survivors speak for themselves.
Rip Torn (Men in Black) gives one of the great screen performances as a psychiatrist secretly filming his own mental breakdown in Milton Moses Ginsberg’s classic exploration of dark eroticism and self-referential cinematic form
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DIRECTED BY: Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe
FEATURING: Harry Treadaway, Luke Treadaway, Tania Emery, Jane Horrocks
PLOT: Conjoined twins Tom and Barry are conscripted into show business by an unscrupulous promoter who plans to make them into gimmicky pop stars, but they follow their own path, becoming punk rock pioneers.
COMMENTS: The original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker (who were, in fact, born in Siam, present-day Thailand), were a sensation from the moment they arrived on American shores. For a decade, they toured the country shocking audiences with the horrifying wonder of their physical connection. Their private lives were the subject of public fascination: they married a pair of sisters and fathered 19 children between them, fueling speculation about the physical and moral gymnastics required to accomplish such a feat. They kept slaves until the Civil War, returned to touring to rebuild their fortunes after the war, quarreled with P. T. Barnum, and eventually died within hours of each other.
I was starting to think about how much the plot of Brothers of the Head paralleled the tale of the Bunkers, when the film came right out and made the comparison itself. The Howe boys hold up a picture of their predecessors in conjoined fame, noting the similarity of their situations, and when they did, my heart sank a little. Far from pre-empting any protests, it solidified my fear that this story of shocking originality—conjoined twins become rock stars—was only going to walk down well-tread paths.
Brothers of the Head takes the form of pseudo-documentary, unspooling the short but eventful professional lives of the twins through a series of I-was-there talking head interviews and a remarkably deep treasure trove of archival footage. It’s delivered with a high degree of authenticity, which is not surprising considering the nonfiction pedigree of directors Fulton and Pepe, who helmed two different Terry Gilliam making-of documentaries, including Lost in La Mancha. But it also puts the central characters at a level of remove, ensuring that we can never know them except through the interpretations of others. And that choice ends up causing the most damage to the film’s credibility, because it means that any point the filmmakers want to make must be delivered with skull-crushing obviousness. Suggestions of impropriety by the boys’ handlers are conveyed through nervous tics and unsubtle hints. The arrival of a pretty girl to drive a (metaphorical) wedge between the brothers is endlessly dissected by present-day commentators with 20/20 hindsight. And were you wondering if Tom and Barry were working through their troubles via their songs? If the glaring transparency of the lyrics doesn’t tip you off, then the latter-day interviewee observing “Now what do you think that was all about?” with a cockeyed glare should Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BROTHERS OF THE HEAD (2005)→
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DIRECTED BY: Gert de Graaff
FEATURING: Bart Klever, Rick de Leeuw, Devika Strooker
PLOT: A screenwriter is hard at work on a film about the impossibility of reality, and begins to incorporate his every thought and action into the script, which in turn directs the action of the writer, which results in the very film we are watching—unless he decides to delete the document.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA:The Sea That Thinks is a rich, dense text about the intangibility of everything, and it has the guts to put this challenging concept into practice, making for the most self-reflexive motion picture imaginable. An exercise like this should be the height of navel-gazing, and an astonishing amount portion of the soundscape is given over to dry oration about the futility of independent thought, but the mix of captivating imagery and surprising action makes for a fascinating film, regardless of whether you acknowledge that it exists.
COMMENTS: I am writing this review. That’s a thing that is happening, right now, as I type these words on a laptop. I will keep on typing until some point in the future when I have concluded that the words I have assembled to describe this movie and its weirdness are good enough to submit (although, being a writer, I will never think it’s “good enough”). Then I will transfer the words into a content management system, where the esteemed editor of this website will look them over, make appropriate changes to produce a marked improvement in the quality of the piece, and finally choose a day for the review to be shared with the world, forever joining the public discourse…
…except that I can’t be writing this review because I’ve already written it. The present moment is you reading this, right now. Unless, of course, you’re not reading this right now. Maybe you’ve paused, or perhaps you’ve skipped ahead to the comments. It’s possible that no one is reading this at this particular moment. And if they’re not, do these words even exist? Did I even have the thought? Did I watch the movie? Is there a movie? Is there a me? How can you be sure there’s a you?
By now, you should be getting a taste of the mental ouroboros that is the mind of Bart Klever, a writer who is struggling to churn out a screenplay and who is caught in an intellectual loop about the nature of creativity and reality. And while you’re at it, welcome also to the mind of director Gert de Graaff, who has crafted the screenplay for De Zee Die Denkt, which is about writing a movie called De Zee Die Denkt and which includes a character named “Bart Klever” to be played by an actor named Bart Klever. Yes, it’s the infinity mirror gone Hollywood. This is a movie that lays out its challenge from the very beginning and never lets up.
We don’t meet Bart right away. Instead, we begin with the three awakenings of a character named Rick (played by an actor named Rick): first in front of a frustrated camera crew whose latest take is interrupted by a cannon blast of water shooting through the windows; next, the film crew is gone, but when Rick gets up to answer Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE SEA THAT THINKS [DE ZEE DIE DENKT] (2000)→
FEATURING: Chris Alex, Nick Alex, Robert Benfer, Jennifer Alex
PLOT: A documentarian decides to devote an entire film to capturing a typical day in the life of unremarkable Nick, but an acquaintance of Nick’s named Chris shows up and proceeds to derail the project with his own demands, attention-stealing actions, and demonstrations of self-proclaimed genius.
COMMENTS: Jason Steele made his name in 2005 with a Flash animation called “Charlie the Unicorn” that unexpectedly went viral. He followed this breakthrough a sequel, and eventually three more, and further a series parodying the first series, and before you knew it, Steele had inadvertently stumbled into a career. His FilmCow studio has been pumping out material ever since. Somewhere along the way, Steele branched out into live-action, creating a second YouTube channel to showcase his collaborations with brothers Chris and Nick Alex. These are mostly shorts, but our subject today is the time they tried to go for more.
Reportedly, the film was improvised and shot in an entire day. This checks out. The sketches that comprise Nick: The Feature Film display a similar pattern: Fawning documentarian Robert asks Nick to demonstrate some aspect of his plebeian existence, but before Nick can get too far, insane egotist Chris swoops in to tout his superior inventiveness, break some stuff, and leave irritation in his wake. Chris displays all the hallmarks of an improv nightmare, denying the choices of others, hamming it up for the audience to the exclusion of his castmates, and repeating flop jokes under the notion that the funny is in the callback. To be fair, his scene partners are letting him do this, so they clearly believe he’s on to some comic gold.
So let’s talk about our comic star. Chris presents himself as a genius; he undercuts this assessment every time he opens his mouth. He’s particularly adept at ruining existing things by attempting to “plus” them, such as his self-serving takes on Battle Monopoly or Double Badminton. He invites cult figures into Nick’s house, he tries to fix a car with a shovel, and just generally wanders around Titusville with a bracing and unearned self-confidence. It’s a fully committed performance, but it sucks up all the air in the room. This may be Nick: The Feature Film, but it’s really Chris: The Nonstop Antics.
The Monopoly scene shows the limits of this kind of thing as improv: Chris makes up rules at random, like a newfangled version of fizzbin. Nick blithely goes along with whatever Chris says, while Robert’s role is to question the logic like a proper straight man. We don’t learn anything we didn’t already know—Chris is a consummate BS artist, Nick and Robert are different varieties of pushover—and the scene runs for several minutes through its heads-I-win, tails-you-lose scenario, at which point it just ends with Chris declaring victory and everyone else shrugging their shoulders. To be blunt: if only one character gets the chance to do anything, you don’t have a scene.
I have to confess that I’m immediately taken out of the concept of Nick: The Feature Film long before Chris arrives. There is absolutely nothing compelling about Nick. Inoffensive but bland to the point of invisibility, he has nothing to show and nothing to say. This renders the smitten Robert as either insightful beyond typical human understanding or flatly stupid, which explains why the narrative is interspersed with interludes that tell extraordinary tales of Nick’s rich life. They are sketched out on chalkboards, with only a photograph of Nick’s face to connect with anything real. The Nick of these stories bears zero relation to the one we see in live-action. In illustration, Nick is a near-superhero, saving lives. In person, he’s a bland doofus who has barely prepared for an entry-level job interview. The gleefully absurd tales of Nick’s exploits stand in stark relief to the passive, featureless nobody whom we see onscreen, so you can either try to take the film at face value or you can accept it as an absurd platform for the comic stylings of the FilmCow collective. Neither approach works entirely.
For a home movie shot on the fly, Nick looks pretty good, and there are small pleasures to be had, like the neo-evangelist who shows up at Nick’s door and proceeds to quietly follow Robert around way too closely. (She’s played by another member of the Alex clan, Jennifer.) And it’s fairly amusing that the film ends with Robert refusing to accept the finale that’s right in front of him—Chris finally earns his chops by standing up to a blowhard who insults his friend —instead creating his own take in which Chris receives a series of increasingly giant swords falling from the sky and lodging up his rectum. But these amusements take a back seat to a conundrum and a frustration: the empty shirt we’re supposed to be interested in and the irritating loon who demands our attention instead.
![Cuddly Toys [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51xS45EUVTL._SL500_.jpg)
![Coming Apart [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41cbhK2CjSL._SL500_.jpg)
