Tag Archives: Musical

Capsules

CAPSULE: ELDORADO (2012)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Richard Driscoll

FEATURING: Richard Driscoll, Darren Morgan, , Jeff Fahey, , , , Brigitte Nielsen, , Rik Mayall, Sylvester McCoy, , David Carradine (archival footage)

PLOT: Oliver and Stanley Rosenblum, a Blues Brothers tribute act, accidentally find themselves in Eldorado, where the Sawyer-style family ruling the roost has big plans for the town’s 200th anniversary.

Still from Eldorado (2012)

COMMENTS: I can be very forgiving if a movie has competent sound design: balanced dialogue audio, fleshed-out aural background, and adequate-to-good music. Eldorado failed me here, and in many other ways. This makes sense when you know a bit of history behind the movie: writer / director / producer / &c. Richard Driscoll apparently hoped to succeed in a Producers-style gambit, claiming a big movie whilst making it on the cheap. Sound design, surely, suffers from this underinvestment—but what are Eldorado‘s merits?

These include, and are probably limited to, the following:

  • Darryl Hannah as “The Stranger”, and her delivery of the titular poem by
  • A surprisingly touching reunion of Vietnam veterans, from Jeff Fahey and Bill Moseley
  • An homage to a famous Laurel & Hardy bit
  • Michael Madsen’s face, ever over-reacting in that roguish Madsenian manner
  • Peter O’Toole proving that even in his don’t-give-a-damn super-annuation, his floor of quality is higher than many actors’ ceilings

The rest is, alas, little more than a tedious curio with occasional blasts of badly mixed sound, music, and FX. There’s plenty that’s gross (though well within the average 366er’s tolerance), plenty that’s derivative (the fine line here being that much of said spoofing is by design), and plenty of questions—the most looming of which is, “Why, oh why?”—and the answer comes back: for tax fraud.

It would be remiss of me to recommend this to anyone—ever—except for the most die-hard of Rik Mayall fans. A curious actor, to say the least, and woefully underused. His performance as Mario the Chef transcends the surrounding doofery; and that’s even bearing in mind it consists mostly of lip-synching to a couple of pop-opera tunes. Had Eldorado been put completely under his creative direction, we may have had one of the grandest monstrosities of the new century.

Instead we don’t.

We have Eldorado.

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Reviewer’s Addendum: Apparently I watched the 90-minute “Director’s Cut”, which I feel is more than sufficient despite being half-an-hour shorter than an earlier release.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“To say that Eldorado’s cast is eclectic is more than somewhat of an understatement. Quite how Mr Driscoll coerced such a parade of (one-time) A-listers to appear in his ‘Mamma Mia for horror fans’ (the filmmaker’s description – not mine) is beyond me. Surely they didn’t all need the money?  But you certainly get more than you bargain for with this ‘B’ movie: Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen and David Carradine (in his last albeit brief role) reuniting from ‘Kill Bill’. Jeff Fahey, Patrick Bergin and Brigitte Nielsen – who deserves a special mention for miming Ottis Redding’s ‘Respect’ in a hair salon whilst kitted out in stockings and suspenders. Throw a cameo by Caroline Munro into the melting pot and you sure have one big steaming pot of erm, surrealism.”–Paul Worts, Fleapits and Picture Palaces

(This movie was nominated for review by nc, who described it as “an incomprehensible mess, a hypnotically bad fever dream, a film so bad it’s hard to believe it even exists.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Apocryphally Weird

64*: CITIZEN DOG (2004)

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Mah nakorn

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Mahasamut Boonyaruk, Saengthong Gate-Uthong, Sawatwong Palakawong Na Autthaya, Raenkum Saninn, Nattha Wattanapaiboon

PLOT: Pod leaves his remote homestead for the bright lights of Bangkok, ignoring his grandmother’s warning that he will grow a tail in the big city. There, he loses a finger working in a sardine factory, then falls head over heels for cleaning lady Jin, who is intensely focused on a book that she found after it fell out of a crashing passenger jet. Her curiosity leads her to monomaniacal environmental activism, leaving no attention for Pod, who tries to remain close to her through a series of odd jobs that bring him into contact with some of the city’s more unusual residents, including a man who licks everything, an undead motorcyclist, and a child-like woman in a passive-aggressive relationship with her teddy bear.

Still from CItizen Dog (2004)

BACKGROUND:

  • Based on a novel by the director’s wife, Koynuch, which Sasanatieng illustrated. The novel was, in turn, based on Sasanatieng’s unpublished screenplay.
  • The title is a pun on the city’s name, “Bangkok, Great City.” By changing one letter in the Thai translation—Krung Thep Maha Nakorn to Krung Thep Mah Nakorn–-the name becomes “Bangkok, City of Dogs.”
  • Narrated by director , whose films include Last Life in the Universe.
  • Boonyaruk is a musician (some of his music appears in the movie) making his film debut here. Gate-Uthong is also a film novice, having worked previously as a fashion model.
  • The foreigner handing out protest leaflets who Jin dubs “Peter” is played by Chuck Stephens, an expatriate film critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Thai cinema expert, who also worked on the movie’s subtitles. 

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Sasanatieng’s candy-colored Bangkok is rife with visual pleasures, but none as dramatic as the literal mountain comprised of plastic bottles that Jin recovers and carefully cleans, a peak which Pod and Jin separately ascend in a desperate search for meaning and jointly summit in celebration of love. Just as Bangkok itself is portrayed as an urban nightmare made beautiful by the people who live and love there, this mountain of trash is transformed into a wonder by the community.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: A chain-smoking woman-child’s love-hate relationship with her teddy bear; Grandma’s gecko rap

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The one thing that’s guaranteed to come up in any discussion of Citizen Dog is a reference to that milestone of quirky romance, Amélie. The comparison is not without merit: the two films share a bemused enjoyment of life’s pleasures. Sanasatieng looks to do the French hit one better, though, marshaling all his resources to highlight the strangeness of his characters, be they main, supporting, or background. No one in Citizen Dog zigs when they could zag, and strangeness and silliness are very much the norm. The opening scene in which everyone sings along with the soundtrack would be a musical number in most contexts, but here it feels diegetic, the voice of a community singing as one.

Original Thai trailer for Citizen Dog

COMMENTS: Life in the big city is hard. Say you get a nice job slicing Continue reading 64*: CITIZEN DOG (2004) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: WAVE TWISTERS (2001)

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AKA DJ Qbert’s Wave Twisters

DIRECTED BY: , Eric Henry

FEATURING: DJ Qbert, Yoga Frog, D-Styles, Flare, Buckethead

PLOT: When the dastardly Lord Ook deprives Arrow Town of the Four Lost Arts of Hip Hop — rhyming, scratching, breaking, and graffiti — it’s up to an intergalactic crew of dentists to liberate the town through the power of sick beats.

Still from "Wave Twisters" (2001)

COMMENTS: Faced with a video album based on the musical stylings of a national and world champion DJ known as the Jimi Hendrix of the turntable, the last thing I would have expected was a coherent narrative. Yet that is what we get in Wave Twisters, a hip-hop sci-fi musical in which rapid-fire scratching and carefully chosen radio drama samples combine to tell a story that would have been at home in the days of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. From the outset, the movie’s strongest claim to weirdness is that it’s so unexpectedly linear and focused. 

Don’t mistake that for any pretensions of depth. The story would not be out of place alongside the cheap sci-fi serials shot in Bronson Canyon in the 40s and 50s; strange aliens attack, and a group of square-jawed heroes save the day, complete with cliff-hanging chapters that slowly advance the conflict. It remains first and foremost a platform for the real star, DJ Qbert’s scratching wizardry. Qbert’s album came first, and it was up to directors Garon and Henry and co-writer/art director Doug Cunningham to transform the soundscape into a visual tale, while leaving Qbert’s original work intact. Considering the challenge, the result is impressive, with a charming comic book feel that takes advantage of limited animation. The images lend a broader sense of humor to Qbert’s sardonic wit; the DJ may have enjoyed finding a snippet of a classic serial villain declaring, “I am the Red Worm!,” but it’s the filmmakers who add lascivious gloss by putting that dialogue in the mouth of a symbiotic parasite residing in the navel of a baby in a luchador mask.

Perversely, it’s the beats that inadvertently drag down the story. With all the tunes working at roughly the same BPM, there’s not much variety in the energy, and you can feel the story slowing down to keep pace with the score. For example, a side trip wherein graffiti expert Honey is captured by the enemy is intriguing, especially as she is transformed into an ostrich. It looks cool, but it’s a dead end for the plot, and overlong as an eye-catching visual. Similarly, set pieces like an assassin stalking the crew down a hallway are tense for the first few seconds, but in short order the repetition becomes tiring. The visuals are in sync with the soundscape, but they never quite harmonize.

If nothing else, Wave Twisters is worth the watch to see Qbert and his colleagues in action. Amusingly, they are deployed in live action as agents of the bad guys, using their rapid-fire scratches and sonic tweaks as weapons against enemies of the state, but it’s remarkable watching them do their thing at breakneck speed. If it takes a wacky tale from the Golden Age of Science Fiction to show off the awesome instrumental power of the turntable, then by all means, get those dentists to space on the double.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘Plot’ clarity ain’t a high priority here, as ‘Wave Twisters’ blitz-riffs on everything from hip-hop and sci-fi mythology to vidgames, toys, Japanese anime, manga tomes, Godzilla pix, Hanna Barbera-style toons, even retro dental-hygiene ads. The in-jokes and absurdist gags fly by so fast that many viewers will be eager to re-experience pic on DVD and other manipulation-friendly formats.”–Dennis Harvey, Variety (contemporaneous)

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

DJ Qbert's Wave Twisters

DJ Qbert's Wave Twisters
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