Tag Archives: Obscure/Out of Print

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: RELICS: EINSTEIN’S BRAIN (1994)

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DIRECTED BY: Kevin Hull

FEATURING: Kenji Sugimoto

PLOT: A documentary account of a Japanese math professor who comes to America in search of his hero, Albert Einstein— specifically, the scientist’s brain, which was extracted during an autopsy and removed to points unknown.

Still from "Relics: Einstein's Brain" (1994)

COMMENTS: Among the most cherished books of my childhood were the three volumes that made up “The People’s Almanac,” a peculiar reference book that purported to comprise only the most interesting and widely unknown stories and facts from the span of recorded history. Where else would biographies of fictional characters who have become immortal through extended popularity sit comfortably alongside histories of some of the world’s leading news publications? A particularly memorable story was the one told in “People’s Almanac #3” by journalist Steven Levy about his successful search for Albert Einstein’s mind-meat, harvested (and possibly pilfered) by a pathologist named Thomas Harvey. Levy chronicled the strange afterlife of the physicist’s brain, culminating in his memorable description: “I had been granted a rare peek into an organic crystal ball. Swirling in formaldehyde was the power of the smashed atom, the mystery of the universe’s black holes, the utter miracle of human achievement.” So the result of screening a documentary about another person’s hunt for this very same organ 15 years after Levy’s article was a uniquely odd sensation for me specifically. For a film that proposes to solve a deep and thought-provoking mystery, I kept watching with a nagging question in my mind: “Didn’t we already figure this out?”

Maybe Levy’s report was lost to history, or only the barest of information made it through time’s game of telephone to tickle the fancy of a Japanese math professor. In any event, Einstein’s Brain kicks off the search with a retroactive information deficit, armed with only the knowledge that the mind behind relativity was plucked from its braincase during an autopsy in Princeton in 1955. From there, we pick up the trail with Professor Kenji Sugimoto in hot pursuit as he crisscrosses the country in search of the wayward noggin-nugget, encountering a university professor in New York, a neuroscientist in California, a police officer in Missouri, a pile of redacted FBI records in Washington, DC, a biologist in New Jersey, William S. Burroughs (who plays him a clip from “The Day After” and provides directions to Harvey’s home), and even Einstein’s granddaughter, working our way ever closer to Albert Einstein’s cranial cortex.

Einstein’s Brain has its origins in television, airing on the long-running BBC documentary program “Arena” as part of a series called “Relics” that purported to be about treasured artifacts but was really more interested in the people who sought them. That makes Prof. Sugimoto an intriguing subject, because the only thing we know Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: RELICS: EINSTEIN’S BRAIN (1994) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THROW AWAY YOUR BOOKS, RALLY IN THE STREETS (1971)

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Sho O Suteyo, Machi E Deyou

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DIRECTED BY: Shuji Terayama

FEATURING: Hideaki Sasaki, Masaharu Saito, Yukiko Kobayashi, Fudeko Tanaka

PLOT: An angry, aimless young man drifts along in search of purpose, despairing at society’s shallowness and cruelty.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Terayama’s filmed essay defies traditional elements such as narrative or a consistent point of view. It is, instead, a howl of righteous anger using a cinematic techniques to depict a society in chaos and an individual’s profound isolation.

Still from Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971)

COMMENTS: A legend that has arisen over the years about philosopher Henry David Thoreau focuses on a single night in 1846 when he was arrested and jailed for failing to pay taxes, a stance he took to protest government policy on slavery and the Mexican-American War. In the story, his friend, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, discovered that he had been imprisoned and rushed to visit him. As dramatized by playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, a despairing Emerson asks, “Henry, what are you doing in jail?” Thoreau, fueled by his righteous commitment to civil disobedience, replies indignantly, “Waldo! What are you doing out of jail?”

Thoreau would find common cause with Eimei, our guide through this kaleidoscopic tour of 1970-era Japan. Eimei opens the film angry… at us. He’s been standing by as we’ve sat through a couple minutes of a solid black screen, and he has had it. He castigates us for mindlessly tolerating the nothingness like an audience of sheep. Don’t be offended, though. We will soon see that he has much to be angry about. He has little money, no respect for his family, his community is obsessed with sex and lacks any other ambition, and his culture is becoming uncomfortably Americanized and subsumed by rapacious capitalism. By the end of the film, he dabbles in a small-scale dream of his own, only to be attacked and robbed. He ends screaming his hatred for Japan—but no one truly escapes his wrath.

We see the subject of his ire first-hand. Eimei wanders through a series of scenes with an air of disconnection, not because he doesn’t care but because he can find no way in. The local school does nothing but practice soccer, where Eimei lamely offers to tidy up the locker room. Showcasing society’s whacked-out priorities, the coach happily takes him down to the local prostitute for a chill-out deflowering, which does nothing for him at all. His grandmother, knowing she’s about to be kicked out of the house, lies to strangers about her dead family in a bid for sympathy. Eimei’s father, who fought in the war, is a shiftless layabout whose only profession is molesting young women. Most tragic is Eimei’s flighty (and possibly mentally compromised) sister, who initially has an unhealthy attachment to her pet rabbit until her grandmother arranges to have the animal killed, which somehow leads to her terrible assault at the hands of the entire soccer team. It’s an extraordinary set of circumstances, but the film in no way sensationalizes or finds dark humor in the accumulation of miseries. Imagine living in a world where each day brings not just bad news, but a completely different kind of bad news (if you can even picture such a scenario), and you get a sense of the struggle Eimei has just to get up each day.

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets is reportedly adapted by Terayama from his own play, which is an extraordinary notion, because the movie feels in no way tied to the stage. Terayama has a vivid and far-ranging approach to visual storytelling. He mixes film stocks, employs surprising framing and shot angles, toys with film tinting and superimposition, and stages scenes with the eye of a Surrealist. He also has a solid appreciation of the power of sound, often staging scenes with repetitive sound effects or scoring transitions with proto-punk anthems to soundtrack Eimei’s oppressive surroundings. Interspersed among the scenes of Eimei’s world are staged interviews, fantasy sequences, and dream-like images of early pioneers of flight. This is one of Terayama’s first films, emerging the same year as his controversial Emperor Tomato Ketchup, and it mixes a newcomer’s urge to play in his new sandbox with an experienced storyteller’s confidence in abstract and nonlinear storytelling.

There are no rallies in Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets. There are barely even books (although urgent quotes are graffitied across the landscape). That title isn’t a synopsis but a call to action, a demand from Terayama. Look at your world. Why do you tolerate this? Aren’t you going to do anything about it? Given what he shows us, it’s not hard to understand his contempt. If we’re not rallying in the streets, just what are we doing?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a surreal psychedelic experience like no other… Many of the bizarre, dreamlike sequences that act as short interludes or scenes of escapism for the adolescent at the heart of the film elicit the traits of a Jodorowsky film.”–Tom Bielby, Film Bantha

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

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ALLEGRO (2005)

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DIRECTED BY: Christoffer Boe

FEATURING: , Helena Christensen, Henning Moritzen

PLOT: An acclaimed pianist returns to Copenhagen in response to the appearance of an impassable no-man’s land that was created when the musician broke up with his girlfriend a decade prior.

Still from Allegro (2005)

COMMENTS: Allegro is a musical term, an instruction to performers to maintain a fast and bright tempo in the range of 120-156 beats per minute. The first movement of Vivaldi’s “Spring” is allegro, as is “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” by Mozart. (Also at allegro tempo: this.) It establishes a bright, bouncy feel, and while allegro tunes don’t have to be happy, there’s something wickedly perverse about lending the term to the title of this slow, methodical look at a musical artist who has removed all flair and personality from his performances, and indeed from himself. Surely “Adagio” was sitting right there.

Writer/director Boe hints at the outset that we’re about to be treated to a modern fairy tale. Through recurring sketchbook-style animation, we learn about the early life of our hero, an aspiring concert pianist we will only know by his last name, Zetterstrøm, who grows up to become a technically perfect but emotionally flat musician. This seems like it might change when he has a charming meet-cute with a lovely woman named Andrea. They progress to a relationship, despite his clear reservations, and his wariness seems justified when they break up a while later because of his commitment to his career. Leaving Andrea behind, he becomes a performer whose interpretations hit all their marks perfectly but are devoid of emotional engagement. He is so completely devoted to the purity of his work and so determined to extricate any trace of personality that he does Glenn Gould one better by refusing to be seen as he performs. As one music expert tells us, “He is an excellent pianist, technically… but where is his passion?”

Turns out his passion is in Denmark. I mean, that’s literally where he has deposited all of the distracting impulses that he has purged from his system because they harsh his chill. What Zetterstrøm has done, unbeknownst to him, is compartmentalize all his memories and feelings of the intense relationship into a section of Copenhagen that becomes a closed-off, inaccessible disaster area called “The Zone.” (Locals bounce things off the invisible force field that surrounds The Zone for their amusement.) In short, Allegro is a clever piece of magical realism, making manifest the consequences of locking one’s emotions away.

The idea is compelling when described, but less so in execution. The premise is fantastical, but Boe is so committed to the reality of the situation that he devotes much time to the uninteresting business of getting Zetterstrøm to Copenhagen, getting him into The Zone, and finally getting him to understand the implications of his careless soul-ectomy. Yes, Zetterstrøm has intentionally extracted his heartbroken soul, but as played by Thomsen, he’s a pretty emotionally vacant fellow already. It ends up feeling like the function is following the form, and that rather than exploring this broken psyche by viewing it through the prism of an “Outer Limits”-style no-man’s land, Allegro seems to have come up with the strange storytelling twist and retrofitted a story to occupy it.

It is frustrating how much of Allegro is told and not shown. Zetterstrøm is spoon-fed every clue to unlock his stolen past by Moritzen’s ill-defined narrator/journalist/ringmaster, like the minder overseeing an escape room. Zetterstrøm’s performing ability is delivered to us second-hand. His relationship with Andrea is conveyed quickly through a crafty piece of editing that takes the couple’s relationship from its earliest moments to its sad end, but the technique denies us the opportunity to see the relationship for ourselves. Most tellingly, the film’s final revelation resolving the ramifications of his experience in The Zone, tying together the pianist’s emotional turmoil and his professional acumen, is delivered in voiceover.

Allegro goes hard on its unusual premise, and there are some intriguing camera and set design choices that reflect the scattered and troubled nature of Zetterstrøm’s memories. It’s also to the film’s credit that we invest in his relationship with Andrea (the film debut for former supermodel Christensen) despite how little we see of it. Ultimately, however, an appropriately weird idea does not alone make a weird film, and Allegro never quite makes good on what it promises. Contrary to its title, Allegro doesn’t go fast, and it doesn’t get where it wants to go.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…despite its surreal aspects, [Boe] keeps it real, as if Terry Gilliam had adopted cinema verite.”–Amber Wilkinson, Eye For Film (contemporaneous)

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

366 Underground, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

366 UNDERGROUND FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: DAYMAKER (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: Joe LiTrenta

FEATURING: Joe LiTrenta, Michael Nathanson, Cristina Marie Proctor, Myla Pitt, Sakura Sugihara, Carrie Terraccino, Sara Weibel

PLOT: On a clear day in New Jersey, twentysomethings meet up, chat, drink and take drugs, dream, and reconvene in new combinations.

Still from Daymaker (2007)

COMMENTS: Not too long ago, we talked about the options available to the no-budget filmmaker. They can go for taboo. They can go for shock value. They can try for goofball comedy. They can aim at surrealistic nonsense. They can go for flat-out absurdism. Whatever the approach, the goal is to demonstrate what an aspiring filmmaker can do even without all the bells and whistles and the fancy equipment and the support of a whole industry. And if there’s an important message about the human condition to convey in the process, then that’s just gravy.

Which brings us to Daymaker, a DIY debut from writer/director Joe LiTrenta that is about drugs. It’s not about the drug trade, or drug abuse, or drug profiteering. It’s not a hard-hitting exposé or a harrowing descent into addiction or even a psychedelic celebration. It’s just about drugs. We know this because it’s the only thing anyone in the film talks about. Any other topics—work, relationships, a movie someone saw—are filtered through the ongoing use of drugs, like a benzo-laced Bechdel Test that the film cannot pass. No one wants to leave it to chance that you might miss this reading of the text, so characters come out and say it at every opportunity. “I’m addicted to cocaine.” “Janice has a drinking problem.” “We did a bunch of molly.” “That’s right, no more acid for me.” “I’m supposed to have been sober for a month now and I can’t even stop my hands from shaking.” This feature is most amusing/bananas when a woman tells her daughter, “Mommy has an illness,” and the girl replies, “Because you like beer?” Daymaker is not a coy film.

Having laid its cards on the table, it has precious little to say about the subject. There’s a slot machine-approach to scenes, with characters from previous scenes coming together to start a new one. This hints at a La Ronde-esque format in which each new pairing reflects on the interactions we’ve seen before, or where a single character or object leads us on a picaresque journey, but there’s nothing so orderly. The unpleasantly rude boyfriend we meet at the very beginning of the film hasn’t gone any further emotionally or geographically when he returns halfway through to proposition a girl for her pink motorcycle helmet, nor has his now-ex-girlfriend when she turns up as the subject of a hastily staffed photo shoot with cigarettes and highway flares. People just come together willy-nilly, and there’s a good chance that when they do, they’ll be drinking or snorting or talking about having drank or snorted.

After a while, you start to get the sensation that it’s not the characters that have done drugs, but that the movie itself is high. It has that drifting lope to it, that sense of being in a conversation with someone who can’t hold the plot and who seems to be way too into whatever distraction comes up next. The comparison that kept coming to mind, unfavorably, was A Scanner Darkly, a film legendarily successful at putting the viewer inside the minds of its aimless, drug-addled protagonists while revealing their world for the hollow dead end that it is. Daymaker has some of those same moves, with significantly less plot to interfere. Drugs are certainly not glorified—people are either being told they need to get off that stuff or are admitting themselves that they need to get off that stuff—but there are no consequences. The most devastating impact of their addictions is that they are dreadfully boring. At more than two hours, Daymaker really needs to have something to say to justify itself, and it decidedly does not.

Daymaker is bad, but often in intriguing, surprising ways. The actors—you might assume they were all amateurs doing the director a solid until you see the surprising number of them with more than one credit to their name—deliver their dialogue with the desperate hopefulness of amateurs who have been asked to improvise, but the words they speak are so carefully assembled that they leave no room for an ad-lib. (At least one performer stumbles on her lines and they just leave it in.) Repeatedly, characters tell each other that they’ve just said something funny, and their word is all we have. Locations bounce between the basement of a rec center, a cellar decorated with cinder blocks and unpainted drywall, a series of sparsely decorated bedrooms and living rooms. These spaces are meant to suggest how low these people have fallen, but in fact scream “a friend loaned us their house for a day.” Twice, the film breaks into a dance number. You want it all to mean something, to add up to a message that has been lurking amidst the randomness, but it never does—and it doesn’t seem to want to.

There is at least one moment that I can take to the bank. It’s a dream sequence where a girl walks through a field of perfect green, leaving behind her the faintest trace as she cuts through the tall grass, while a boy stares after her clutching a childish mash note. The image is genuinely captivating. The guy who shot it must have some talent; somebody ought to throw a few bucks at him and see what he can do.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No other critics have published reviews of this movie.

(This movie was nominated for review by Desmond, who said it was “damn weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)   

Capsules

CAPSULE: PINK LADY’S MOTION PICTURE (1978)

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Pinku redi no katsudo dai shashin

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DIRECTED BY: Tsugunobu Kotani

FEATURING: Keiko Masuda, Mie, Isamu Ago

PLOT: A director, a producer, and a folklorist seek the perfect idea for a movie to promote the pop band “The Pink Lady.”

Still from Pink Lady's Motion Picture (1978)

COMMENTS: How to promote a pop band cinematically? Through a musical, of course, but what kind? This movie takes this question as its starting point, exploring it through three distinct tales that traverse genres and styles.

The subject here is the iconic, albeit obscure, pop musical duo “The Pink Lady,” mad up of two girls singing as one. According to Wikipedia, they were a short-lived, briefly popular act from the late-70s and early-80s, featuring Mie and Keiko Masuda (formerly known as Kei). The movie makes clear from early on—especially through its exaggerated acting—that it will retain a lighthearted comic tone, while at the same time being self-conscious and self-referential.

This aspect of self-parody becomes apparent as we watch a film director, a folklorist, and a producer come together to brainstorm ideas for an upcoming movie about the duo. Each one of them has his own idea of what this movie should be, and chaos ensues. For viewers, this results in a fun romp, a mix of genres, each depicting a different take on the musical they want to create. We have an old-fashioned romantic melodrama, a cheesy sci-fi monster movie, and a western. Mie and Kei are always the protagonists, with playful musical numbers accompanying the story beats.

Pink Lady’s Motion Picture isn’t afraid to embrace absurdism. It doesn’t always makes perfect sense, and it doesn’t need to. But it’s not subversive or transgressive in any serious way; it’s harmless, mindless entertainment for mass consumption by a local, albeit westernized, Japanese audience. The flick is also of sociological interest, depicting, through the juxtaposition of disparate cinematic genres, a society divided between tradition and foreign influence.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[the production] consciously emulated the breezy stream-of-consciousness aesthetic of A HARD DAYS’ NIGHT (1964), and can also be viewed as a forerunner to SPICE WORLD… The film overall is colorful and energetic, but bears the marks of a hasty and ill thought-out production… fans of Mei and Kei will likely be satisfied.  Everyone else, however, is advised to turn their attention elsewhere.”–Adam Groves, The Bedlam Files