Tag Archives: Mystery

Canonically Weird (The List)

201. BLUE VELVET (1986)

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“It’s a strange world.”–Sandy Williams, Blue Velvet

Must See

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern,

PLOT: While home from college to visit his ailing father, who has suffered a stroke, Jeffrey Beaumont finds a severed human ear in a field. Though warned by his neighbor, Detective Williams, that the case is a police issue and he should not ask any questions, the curious Jeffrey decides to seek answers on his own, enlisting Williams’ daughter Sandy, a high school senior, in his investigation. The trail leads to a melancholy torch singer named Dorothy Vallens, and when Jeffrey hides in her closet after nearly being caught snooping in her apartment, he witnesses a horror he never imagined, which forever shatters his innocence.

Still from Blue Velvet (1986)
BACKGROUND:

  • Blue Velvet was David Lynch’s comeback film after the disastrous flop of 1984’s Dune.
  • Warner Brother’s commissioned a treatment of Lynch’s basic idea for the film, but in 1986 no major studio would touch the finished Blue Velvet script because of its themes of sexual violence. The film was produced and distributed by Dino De Laurentiis (who formed a distribution company just for this release). De Laurentiis was known for taking chances on risky or salacious movies, whether exploitation or art films. He gave Lynch final cut in exchange for a reduced salary (possibly hoping that Lynch would refuse his insulting offer and chose a more commercial project).
  • Blue Velvet is considered Lynch’s comeback film, but even more so Dennis Hopper’s. Hopper, who became a star when he wrote, directed and acted in the 1969 counterculture hit Easy Rider, developed a serious polydrug addiction problem throughout the 1970s. By the 1980s he had earned a reputation as unreliable and difficult to work with, and landed only minor roles after his memorable turn as a maniacal photographer in Apocalypse Now (1979). He entered rehab in 1983 and was sober for a year and a half before making Blue Velvet. Looking for a role to revive his career, Hopper told Lynch, “You have to give me the role of Frank Booth, because I am Frank Booth!”
  • Booth’s character was originally written by Lynch to breathe helium from his gas tank, but Hopper convinced the director that amyl nitrate would be a more appropriate inhalant for Frank. The actual drug the villain breathes is never specified in the film.
  • This was the first collaboration between Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti. Badalamenti was hired to be Isabella Rossellini’s voice coach for her singing numbers, but Lynch liked his arrangements so much he hired him to produce the film’s soundtrack. Badalamenti would work on the score of all of Lynch’s future films until INLAND EMPIRE, and is perhaps best known for the “Twin Peaks” theme.
  • , who played a part in all of Lynch’s feature films until his death in 1996, has a small part here as one of Frank’s hoodlums.
  • Lynch was nominated for a Best Director Oscar, losing to for Platoon. Dennis Hopper’s performance was widely praised, but was too profane for Academy consideration; he was nominated for Supporting Actor for Hoosiers, where he played an assistant high school basketball coach struggling with alcoholism, instead.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: “Suave” Dean Stockwell performing a karaoke version of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” an illuminated microphone lighting his lightly-rouged face.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Dream of the robins; candy-colored clown; dead man standing

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Nearly everyone describes Blue Velvet as “weird,” but most of the time, when pressed, it’s hard to pin down exactly why. Yes, there is sexual perversity, a campy and impossibly white-bread Lumberton, and one of the strangest lip-sync numbers ever, but if we were to actually sit down and graph Blue Velvet on an axis of Lynchian weirdness, we would find it closer to The Straight Story pole than it is to the incoherent extremes of INLAND EMPIRE. But despite the fact that Blue Velvet is among Lynch’s less-weird works, it’s one of his greatest. The clear and powerful presentation of key Lynch themes—the contrast between innocence and experience, and sexuality’s fateful role in marking that line—make it a crucial entry in this weirdest of director’s oeuvre. Blue Velvet‘s influence is so monumental that it would be a crime to leave it off the List of the Best Weird Movies ever made.


Original trailer for Blue Velvet

 COMMENTS: David Lynch’s Blue Velvet exists in a heightened reality—and a heightened depravity—but essentially it is a Continue reading 201. BLUE VELVET (1986) →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

CALVARY (2014) AND I CONFESS (1953)

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John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary was one of 2014’s best films, with  a central performance that is authentic in the rarest of ways. is a welcome throwback to a specialized breed of cinematic actors: big, erudite men (Robert Shaw was such an actor). Gleeson began his acting career  at a young age, appearing in the plays of Samuel Beckett and William Shakespeare. He was an English teacher for over a decade before embarking on a film career. Naturally, he has specialized in playing Irish patriarchs, mentors and historical figures, which makes his casting as Father James, a potential martyr, shrewd.

Traditionally, the role of a Catholic priest has been thought of as an actor’s plum. It is easy to see why, especially in the contemporary world. The Roman Catholic priest, with his vows of  poverty, chastity, and obedience, has willfully chosen a subculture that is shockingly in direct opposition to the precepts of modernism’s worldview. The priest believes, whether he inevitably lives up to it or not, that he has an existential calling. He does not take the honor unto himself. Rather, he regards that his is a vocation called by something inward. His rejection of materialism is, hypothetically, inclusive. Capital, desire, and ego, theoretically are tenets of a status quo path that he has chosen to reject. The priesthood is the quintessential revolt against all that which is temporal.

Still from I Confess (1953)‘s I Confess (1953) features a performance by Montgomery Clift, as Father Michael Logan, which takes the psychology of the priestly vocation to an icy extreme. Clift’s performance, born of primordial method acting, parallels the film’s inert aesthetic.

Robert Burks’ shimmering cinematography exudes a Genesis-like potency. This, combined with Clift’s acting achievement, rendered I Confess a cult favorite among New Wave filmmakers and French critics.

American critics and audiences found it a more curious affair. It is akin to Gabriel Fauré’s music. Its appeal is primarily provincial; so subtle that invoking its aesthetic content proves to be a task.  Critics deemed this theological drama from the Jesuit-schooled Hitchcock too inaccessible, an inside affair amidst the director’s populist oeuvre. With introverted themes of Eden-esque transgressions, annihilation of carnality, and dogmatic devotion, I Confess was too bound in the interior of an orthodox landscape. Had Hitchcock’s film taken a more commercial approach, Western reception would have been considerably broader. Local critics predominantly panned Continue reading CALVARY (2014) AND I CONFESS (1953) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: INHERENT VICE (2014)

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Inherent Vice has been promoted to the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made. Read the Certified Weird entry here.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Joanna Newsom, , Katherine Waterston, , Martin Short

PLOT: In 1970 Los Angeles, private investigator and marijuana enthusiast “Doc” Sportello investigates several converging cases while dodging a hippie-hating police detective out to get him.

Still from Inherent Vice (2014)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Paul Thomas Anderson’s work has flitted around the edges of the bizarre, beginning with the baffling ending to Magnolia, through the reader-recommended oddity Punch-Drunk Love and the existential meanderings of The Master. With this stoned adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s studiously esoteric novel, Anderson may finally have passed over to the weird side for good.

COMMENTS: I don’t think it’s a mistake that’s it’s easy to misread the title Inherent Vice as Incoherent Voice. This smoky noir in which everything connects, but nothing does, is like a comic version of William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” (the novel, not the movie); but instead of an expatriate junkie’s 1950s nightmare, it’s an American pothead’s 1960s reality of a world of alarming signifiers (Vietnam, the Manson family, Nixon rallies) that float past, occasionally colliding and combining like the hot wax spheres in a lava lamp. The plot is doled out in fits and starts, as if Doc is suffering from blackouts. He probably as; at one point he writes “not hallucinating” in his detective’s notebook as an act of self-reassurance. Characters like Reese Witherspoon’s hot-to-trot assistant D.A. or ‘s maritime lawyer plop in to drop bits of exposition without much explanation of who they are, where they came from or why they care. Like a slightly more coherent Branded to Kill, deconstructing  American detectives instead of Japanese yakuza, Inherent Vice assembles its pseudo-story out of warped genre tropes: hard-bitten detectives who inhale bong hits instead of slamming shots of bourbon; femme fatales who manipulate saps into giving them a good spanking.

Better to think of Inherent Vice not as a plotted movie, but as a movie composed of free-associated plot elements. There’s a decadent real-estate magnate with a private sex cult, Aryan biker gangs, hippie-hating flattoped cops, a disappearing surf-sax player, an insane asylum that doubles as a private prison, and a vertically integrated Taiwanese heroin consortium. For added oddness, there’s conspicuous product placement for nonexistent brands, ridiculous fang-shaped skyscrapers that pop up in formerly empty lots, and a manic Martin Short as a drug-snorting, cradle-robbing dentist. There is even resolution, of a sort: Doc discovers all of the missing persons before the end credits roll. But you may be mystified as to how he did it.

Inherent Vice is the new masterpiece of hippie noir. It rides that fine line between rationality and irrationality, heading towards a hazy neverland where universal paranoia holds sway. Not only does it ride that line, it eventually snorts it up.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an aggressively weird movie, which you should take not as a warning but as a compliment and an invitation to see it, to let its stoner vibes wash all over you.”–Bill Goodykoontz, The Arizona Republic (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: HORNS (2013)

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DIRECTED BY: Alexandre Aja

FEATURING: , , Max Minghella, Joe Anderson,

PLOT: An accused killer (Daniel Radcliffe) awakes one day to find horns growing from his head and people suddenly anxious to confess their secrets to him.

Still from Horns (2013)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Despite some good ideas, Horns‘ uneveness ultimately undoes it, and it’s not weird enough to overcome its lack of clear purpose.

COMMENTS: Horns begins promisingly, but loses its way as it meanders to its devilish finish. Up until the last act, I was still with the movie, though just barely. But the film begins with its strong points and slowly squanders them, ending up in a diabolical failure. The crazed premise intrigues. Daniel Radcliffe plays Iggy, a lover accused of murdering his beloved during a drunken blackout. All signs point to him as the culprit, and his town has already condemned him on circumstantial evidence (“Go to Hell!” reads a prophetic sign wielded by an angry protestor).

After a desperate act of desecration, Iggy wakes up to find two ram’s horns growing out of his temples. Here, almost at the very beginning, is where the movie hits its height, detouring from a burgeoning mystery drama into dark comedy. People (well, most people) can see Iggy’s horns, but they’re not startled by them. Instead, the protrusions cast a spell that makes them confess, and sometimes act out, their darkest secrets, beginning with a doughnut-scarfing slut and progressing through a doctor who proves less than helpful in amputating Iggy’s unwanted growths because he can’t resist sneaking some of his patient’s anesthesia for himself.

Here is where Horns starts encountering problems. The film is working. But the people-aren’t-reacting-to-these-enormous-horns-poking-out-of-my-forehead jokes begin to wear thin, and the plot is stalling. So comedy is put aside and we transition into a supernatural procedural, as Iggy puts the horns’ power to use to search for the real killer. The solution to the mystery is obvious (although there is a slight twist), but method of sleuthing is novel enough to keep us interested (although we might wonder what happened to the comedy we were watching a few minutes ago). Unfortunately, the reveal arrives too early, and the film changes tone once again. Iggy grows crueler and more Satanic, leading to an action finale that shows off the movie’s poor CGI (although a scene with Radcliffe vomiting lava is admittedly pretty cool).

Horns brings us a flood of religious symbolism: broken crosses, serpents, Eve’s diner (with an apple logo), Radcliffe transformed into a cartoonish Lucifer as his lust for revenge grows. There is clumsy voiceover and clichéd-feeling erotic flashbacks to Juno Temple dancing to Bowie’s “Heroes.”  There’s an out-of-focus muti-drug trip scene that ends with a forest growing in living room and an extremely nasty and out-of-place murder/rape flashback. All-in-all, there are too many narrative and stylistic gambles, without enough payoffs. The result is an initially promising film that ends up as a mild disappointment. Horns may be successful in changing Radcliffe’s image, however: whether the change is from cute magical lad to tormented antihero, or from bankable star to fading child actor in need of a better agent, may be a matter of opinion.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…for a genre that rarely deviates from the cyclical and the tried and true (torture porn this time around, ‘70s throwback terror another), Horns is a welcome bit of weirdness.”–Bill Gibron, Pop Matters (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Peter Weir

FEATURING: Margaret Nelson, Rachel Roberts, Anne Lambert, Martin Vaughan, John Jarrett, Helen Morse, Christine Schuler, Karen Robson

PLOT: The unexplained 1900 Valentine’s Day disappearance of four schoolgirls and a teacher haunts the residents and neighbors of an all-girl college in Australia.

Still from Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: It’s an subtle, indirect feature with a unique tone; the question is whether the diffuse symbolism and impudent refusal to explain its central event gets it from “curious” all the way to “weird.”

COMMENTS: “What we are or what we seem is but a dream, a dream in a dream,” says young Miranda, paraphrasing Poe in voiceover as we gaze at the lonely mountain of Hanging Rock rising out of the bush. We then see her wake. Is she having a premonition? (Later that morning, before she disappears, Miranda warns a school chum with a serious lesbian crush on her that she “won’t be here for very much longer.”) Don’t look for an answer to that question. Explanations do not come in Picnic at Hanging Rock; the movie is about its own lack of explanations. We naturally desire answers to life’s mysteries, but in Picnic‘s Victorian Australia, what is even more important is to maintain propriety. After four of her charges and one of her teachers disappear, the headmistress is most distressed when one of the girls returns with no memory of what happened to her. It’s worse than if none of them ever came back, because this sensational and mysterious restoration puts the story back on the front page of the papers and fans the public’s curiosity. Picnic throws out clues, or observations that have the general shape of clues, every now and then: scandalously, one of the girls who disappeared lost her corset! (The doctor confirms, to everyone’s relief, that the girl who returned was found “intact”).

What is the point of erecting a girls’ finishing school in the middle of the Outback, if not to provide a civilized outpost against the forces of sinful Nature? If Nature abducts a few of civilization’s foot-soldiers for Her own unknown purposes, then perhaps it is best not to know their fate; we should forget it, lest it turns out that something horrible has happened to compromise the girls’ honor. Still, people remain curious and prone to gossip, especially in the lower classes.  “There’s some questions got answers and some hasn’t,” advises an elderly gardener. “No,” objects his younger companion, “there’ll be a solution turn up directly, more’n likely.” But no solution comes. There is not even a central character in the story, only the central fact of the disappearance, around which subplots orbit. The movie is quiet, almost oppressively so, until finally the girls’ suppressed anxiety explodes: “tell us, tell us!” they cry. The teachers quickly quash the hysterical outburst. Emotions must be contained, propriety maintained, corsets tightened. If that means that nothing much appears to happen in the movie, then we still have freedom to dream. Picnic‘s gauzy meditation on sexual repression and loss can have a hypnotic effect on those susceptible to its mysterious moods, while others find it an inconclusive bore. Both sides have an argument, but in general, the good here outweighs the bland.

With its sunlight cinematography, period setting, and artistic ambition, Picnic at Hanging Rock is a natural acquisition for the Criterion Collection. Criterion’s edition collects numerous interviews with the principal cast and crew, but the extra of most interest to us is Weir’s 50-minute mini-feature Homesdale. This black comedy involves an insidiously authoritarian Australian resort where infamous murders are recreated over dinner, personalized subliminal messages are broadcast at night, and the talent show turns into a human sacrifice if you bomb. Tonally, Homesdale is a cross between and ; it’s well-acted and quite a bit weirder than Picnic, though not nearly as memorable. Seeing Homesale convinced Joan Lindsay, author of the original “Hanging Rock” novel, that Weir was the right man to handle the adaptation of her beloved work.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a film of haunting mystery and buried sexual hysteria.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago-Sun Times (retrospective)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Simon,” who politely suggested it “might be worth a look.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)