Tag Archives: Musical

Canonically Weird (The List)

134. LISZTOMANIA (1975)

8 Comments

“A veritable insanity, one unheard of in the annals of furore!”-Heinrich Heine on “Lisztomania” (1844)

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Paul Nicholas, Veronica Quilligan, Sara Kestelman, ,

PLOT: Composer/pianist Franz Liszt hosts concerts before screaming throngs of 19th century women, and enjoys as many groupies and mistresses as he can fit in on the side. Young composer Richard Wagner gives Liszt a piece to perform, thinking it will make his career, but is outraged when the star transforms the composition into his hit “Chopsticks” on stage. Wagner takes it upon himself to wreck Liszt’s life and career, eventually seducing the older musician’s illegitimate daughter into joining his fascist cult while simultaneously building an Aryan monster with which he hopes to conquer the world.

Still from Lisztomania (1975)

BACKGROUND:

  • There really was a phenomenon known as Lisztomania (the term was coined by the poet Heinrich Heine). Hungarian Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was a virtuoso concert pianist as well as a composer, and as a young man his concerts would induce fits of hysteria in (especially female) concertgoers; fans would fight over the performer’s discarded gloves or broken piano strings. This condition of ecstatic fandom, now familiar to anyone who has ever attended an arena rock concert, was unheard of at the time, and authorities were seriously concerned about it, considering it a psychological disorder.
  • Portions of the movie were adapted from the book “Nélida” by Countess Marie d’Agoult (played in the film by Fiona Lewis). The novel was a thinly-disguised description of her love affair with Liszt (with whom she had three illegitimate children).
  • Lisztomania was made by Russell back-to-back and released in the same year as the hit rock opera Tommy, which also starred Daltrey.
  • Lisztomania was the first movie recorded in Dolby sound.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The musical number at the Russian palace where Liszt pulls out his giant inflatable, um, instrument, and the scantily clad female dancers treat it as an, um, maypole.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: At times, it’s the biography of Franz Liszt if it were directed by Benny Hill working from a script by . With Nazi golems, Richard Wagner as a vampire, a climax aboard a heavenly spaceship, and a giant phallic musical number, this phantasmagorical biopic is Ken Russell at his ebullient silliest.

Clip from Lisztomania

COMMENTS: In his melodramatically excessive movies like The Devils or Altered States, it’s sometimes hard to tell when Ken Russell is being Continue reading 134. LISZTOMANIA (1975) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE DEVIL’S CARNIVAL (2012)

Leave a comment

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Terrance Zdunich, , Briana Evigan, Jessica Lowndes, Dayton Callie

PLOT: A suicide, a jewel thief, and a thug’s girlfriend die and find themselves at an afterlife circus run by the Devil; he reads the stories of their sins retold as fables, which they re-enact to musical accompaniment supplied by carnies.

Still from The Devil's Carnival (2012)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Devil’s Carnival is a lot like director Darren Lynn Bousman’s previous horror musical effort, Repo: The Genetic Opera, only on a smaller scale. If that one didn’t make it onto the List, then logically this one shouldn’t, either.

COMMENTS: Hell is eternal musical theater! I knew it! The Devil’s Carnival looks like refugees from a circus took over unused sets from Moulin Rouge. Hell’s color scheme is candy apple red and hot dog mustard yellow, and all the demons have mime-white faces with black and red designs equally inspired by medieval harlequins and KISS. The plot to this musical is delightfully warped, in more ways than one. It involves suicide, thievery, and women in masochistic relationships, but it also benefits from a wild narrative that veers between reality, fantasy, and song and dance numbers at a whim. Fittingly, none of the denizens of the carnival seem the slightest bit surprised by any of it; the three hellbound souls receiving their poetic punishments wonder why they’re suddenly at a state fair designed by David Lynch for all of five seconds before they start accepting the dream at face value. I always like it when a movie script takes on too much and mixes its metaphors. Carnival starts off as Dante by way of Cirque du Soleil, then, one-third of the way in, after each of the three stories is already in progress, the Devil starts reading a book of Aesop’s fables which illustrate the sins (adding to the confusion, the last section, “The Devil’s Due,” doesn’t even refer to Aesop—the quote’s from from Shakespeare and the plot’s from nowhere in particular). Along with the three fables, we also get a backstage peek at the Devil’s lieutenant casting the night’s morality plays and a subplot about the Lucifer-God rivalry, all shoehorned in around a dozen songs in a movie that’s only an hour long. The script’s a mess, but I don’t mean that as a criticism: the overabundance of ideas and references in The Devil’s Carnival gives the entire enterprise a loose and crazy feeling that’s appropriate and appealing. The costume and set design is superlative, and the demonic hoofers—the Hobo Clown, the Painted Doll, and plastic-haired greaser Scorpion—are all a morbid hoot. Where The Devil’s Carnival loses me is with the songs. They are impressively staged and consistently performed in a Weimar-era German cabaret style. The Hobo Clown, ragged hat extended for alms, croons a demented doggerel silhouetted by footlights while a topless woman is whipped in the background (like all of Carnival, this is a surprisingly PG-13 rendition of some very dark material). But the melodies, while appropriately carnivalesque, aren’t memorable, and the libretto can’t match the ambition of the mise-en-scene. There’s too much repetition, and more than once the lyrics fall back on the cheap trick of incorporating children’s nursery rhymes to cop a little irony. Songs like “Kiss the Girls,” with a man menaced by a gang of sexy clowns in Bozo’s of Hollywood lingerie, look great, but make little sense. The lip-syncing is also frequently off, providing another distraction. Ivan L. Moody, a veteran of several minor metal bands with a surprisingly melodious baritone, gives the best performance; but the best conceived number is “Prick,” a love badly sung by a painted waif to a bullfrog that makes clever use of the double meaning in the title. Still, there is nothing here that you’d want to put on your I-Pod (Repo cultists, many of whom bought this soundtrack on the release date without having heard a note, may naturally disagree). Divorced from their presentations, the songs are all competent but forgettable, and, like its predecessor Genetic Opera, it’s that lack of memorable tunes that keeps The Devil’s Carnival from making the leap to the next artistic level. If Bousman could just borrow the talents of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, or even , for just a week sometime, he might make something really magical. The film is part of a planned series, and ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. Carnival may not have blown me away, but the best compliment I can give it as that it has me looking forward to the next installment—and, it makes me consider looking backward to reassess Repo.

While Bousman continues to make horror movies like Mother’s Day within the Hollywood system, The Devil’s Carnival cements his credibility as a cult filmmaker and suggests he’s dedicated to the more interesting, less-marketable horror-musical concept. The mid-range production values, cable TV-friendly naughtiness, cliffhanger ending and hour-long length of Carnival make it look like a pilot for an HBO series, although there’s no evidence it was ever intended for the small screen. The marketing of the film, which was self-financed by Bousman and partner Terrance Zdunich (who wrote the script and plays the Devil), is innovative: a VOD/Netflix streaming release, supplemented by a collector’s edition DVD/Blu-ray (limited to 6660 copies) and a “carnival road tour.” Hopefully this nontraditional distribution strategy will work and allow the pair to retain their artistic independence by selling directly to the fans.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Dismiss Repo and Carnival as weird musicals for weird people if you like, but there’s always room for a filmmaker who treats his ticket-buyers well and delivers something sort of … unsafe.”–Scott Weinberg, FearNet (contemporaneous)

Canonically Weird (The List)

128. YELLOW SUBMARINE (1968)

5 Comments

“The Lennon/McCartney songs used in the film seem to have been conceived and brought forth in the pure simple spirit of mystical innocence, like the works of Chagall. And, like Chagall’s works, the film tries to include everything in the world to make up its own cosmos. The animation style ranges from storybook simplicity to pop art and psychedelic shimmer.”–Punch magazine

Must See

DIRECTED BY: George Dunning

FEATURING: Voices of Paul Angelis, John Clive, Geoffrey Hughes, Peter Batten, Dick Emery

PLOT: The music-hating Blue Meanies freeze the residents of the idyllic undersea kingdom of Pepperland. Only Admiral Fred escapes in his Yellow Submarine; he travels to Liverpool to enlist the assistance of the Beatles to deal with the threat. After a sailing through several surreal seas, the lads eventually reach Pepperland and use the power of music to defeat the menace.

Still from Yellow Submarine (1968)

BACKGROUND:

  • Yellow Submarine was animator/director George Dunning’s only feature length work. His job here consisted mainly of supervising the 200+ contributing artists who worked on the film.
  • In 1968 the Beatles were disenchanted with movies after the mediocre reception to their self-produced television special Magical Mystery Tour (1967). They were still under contract to United Artists to produce another film and, despite the fact that they weren’t happy with the Americanized Beatles animated TV show, they saw lending their images and four new songs to a cartoon movie as a good way to fulfill their bargain. They liked the finished product well enough to agree to appear in a live-action epilogue.
  • The script was co-written by Erich Segal, a professor of classics at Yale who had never even heard of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” when he was hired for the project. Segal later wrote the deplorable novel Love Story, which was turned into an even more deplorable movie.
  • Liverpool poet Roger McGough also worked on the script, supplying many of the jokes and puns, but did not receive a screenwriting credit.
  • Peter Batten, who voiced George, was discovered by the producers in a pub and cast because he sounded like Harrison. He was later found to have deserted the British army during WWII and was arrested before filming was completed; his remaining lines were recorded by Paul Angelis (who also voiced Ringo).
  • The “Hey Bulldog” segment was cut for American theatrical release.
  • A 3-D motion capture remake was planned by Disney but scrapped in 2011, to the delight of thinking people everywhere.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Picking out a favorite frame from Yellow Submarine is like picking a favorite note from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The psychedelic submersible of the title should probably be featured, but what bizarre pop-art backdrop should it be floating past—the gray and grimy industrial wastes of Liverpool, the optical netherworld of the Sea of Holes, or the lysergic bestiary of the Sea of Monsters? We selected the moment the sub transforms itself into a Zippo lighter to re-enact an old slapstick routine with a giant purple boxing beast, but we wouldn’t put up an argument with just about any random image anyone wanted to champion.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Blurring the line between a children’s story and a hashish-fueled daydream, Yellow Submarine is a riot of color and visual imagination sure to delight kindergartners and stoners alike. You don’t even have to picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies—over a hundred animators worked for almost a year to paint those vistas for you better than your feeble imagination could ever manage.

Original trailer for Yellow Submarine

COMMENTS: We often think of the Sixties in terms of revolutions: the sexual revolution, the civil Continue reading 128. YELLOW SUBMARINE (1968) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

123. THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT (2001)

9 Comments

QUESTIONER: What are the most common comparisons to other films that you hear?

CORY MCABEE: There’ve been a few. Because it’s in black and white people sometimes say Eraserhead, but other than the fact that it’s in black and white I don’t really see much… [laughter]. I get a lot of “cross-betweens,” like “a cross between Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Grapes of Wrath.” [laughter]. That’s a very large area to cross between…

–Cory McAbee at an American Astronaut Q&A session

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Cory McAbee, Rocco Sisto, Gregory Russell Cook, Annie Golden, Tom Aldredge

PLOT: Astronaut Samuel Curtis arrives on the asteroid Ceres, where he meets his old friend the Blueberry Pirate, enters a dance contest, and trades a cat for a Real Live Girl (who consists of cloned cells in a box). His commission requires him to go to Jupiter where he will swap the Real Live Girl for the Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast, whom he will then take to the all-female planet Venus to exchange for the remains of an expired stud. Along his journey he is pursued by maniacal “birthday boy” (and film narrator) Professor Hess, a man who can only kill if he has no reason to do so.

Still from The American Astronaut (2001)

BACKGROUND:

  • Writer/director Cory McAbee is the songwriter and lead singer of the band The Billy Nayer Show; the then-current lineup of the band (minus McAbee) appears in the movie in the Ceres dance contest sequence.
  • McAbee was working on a script entitled Werewolf Hunters of the Midwest when he got the idea for American Astronaut and decided it was the more interesting project. He completed the script for Werewolf Hunters in 2002, but negotiations with financiers fell through. Pre-production resumed in 2011, but the actor cast as the lead died, and the project is again on hold.
  • The American Astronaut got its limited theatrical release September 21, 2001, only a little more than a week after the 9/11 tragedy.
  • After our first viewing we declined to place The American Astronaut on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies immediately (read our shortsighted initial review), but the public decided this omission was one of our biggest oversights, as the movie won our third readers choice poll.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast dressed as the messenger god Mercury in an art-deco helmet and thick black eyeliner, raising the roughnecks of Jupiter’s morale by performing a song and dance number in a spotlight on a stage in a cavernous warehouse.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The fact that it’s an absurdist musical comedy space western, for one thing. The American Astronaut is an incredibly personal affair—Cory McAbee wrote, directed, starred, composed the songs, helped paint the backdrops, and probably sold the popcorn on opening night. McAbee brings a particular and peculiar set of personal preoccupations to the project: space operas, psychobilly, Monty Python, German Expressionism, cowboy movies, Lewis Carroll, film noir, , the wide-eyed innocence of childhood, Ed Wood, and Dadaism, among others. It’s a galaxy of influences with competing gravities, and whether they appear as a meaningful constellation or just a meaningless mass of lights may depend on where the viewer is standing. The movie probably makes the most sense when seen from Mars.


Original trailer for The American Astronaut

COMMENTS: Since it’s such a spaced-out movie, it’s appropriate that The American Continue reading 123. THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT (2001) →

List Candidates

RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (1978)

3 Comments

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Peter Frampton, Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb, Robin Gibb, George Burns

PLOT: Four loveable lads from Heartland, America form a band, overcome the corrupting influences of the music industry, and save their town from the evil forces that want to steal four prized musical instruments which can guarantee peace and love the whole world over.

Still from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is an almost perfect example of a bad idea gone wrong. Attempting to shape a collection of 29 Beatles songs into a narrative seems an iffy prospect, but the resulting story is somehow even more ludicrous than you could expect. Add in dubious casting (the singers can’t act, the actors can’t sing, no one can dance except Billy Preston), garish art direction, many open shirts, tight pants, and the enormous hair of Barry Gibb, and of course some truly awful musical performances. Then, take away all dialogue and replace it with bug-eyed silent film-style reactions and the bored narration of George Burns, and you’ve got yourself a veritable carnival of oddity.

COMMENTS: There is a peculiar subset of motion pictures with musical scores consisting entirely of Beatles songs, including Julie Taymor’s artsy Across the Universe, the peculiar war documentary-rock soundtrack mashup All This and World War Two, and the maudlin Sean Penn drama I Am Sam. As that list indicates, none converted the success of the Beatles into its own artistic or financial triumph. But in terms of jaw-droppingness, all of them take a backseat to the misfire that is Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The film is essentially a calculated effort on the part of music mogul Robert Stigwood to sell a boatload of records. He reasoned that combining the perennial popularity of the Beatles with the then-ascendant careers of the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton was like printing the deed to a gold mine. His thinking appears to have ended there. He placed the project in the hands of neophyte screenwriter Henry Edwards, who concocted the tale of a magical bandleader named Sgt. Pepper. Pepper’s magical musical instruments single-handedly ended two World Wars.  His spirit enters a magical weathervane upon his death and his legacy is handed down to his grandson, Billy Shears, and the three Henderson brothers, with town mayor Mr. Kite and Billy’s girlfriend Strawberry Fields on hand to watch their success. And that’s where things start to really get weird.

Why do a defrocked real estate agent and his boxer henchman (Carel Struycken!) want to turn Continue reading RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (1978) →