Tag Archives: Philosophical

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE SEA THAT THINKS [DE ZEE DIE DENKT] (2000)

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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.

Still from The Sea That Thinks (2000)

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) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, Shorts

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ONE SOLDIER (1999)

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DIRECTED BY: Steven Wright

FEATURING: Steven Wright, Sandi Carroll

PLOT: A Civil War soldier looks back upon his life and contemplates the nature of human existence in the days leading up to his execution for murder.

Still from One Soldier (1999)

COMMENTS: For years, Steven Wright built his comedy empire on peerless one-liners that required 5 seconds to fully sink in and another 30 to stop laughing. Long before successors like Mitch Hedberg and Demetri Martin picked up the torch, Wright was unspooling hour-long sets built out of dozens upon dozens of jokes that lay like unexploded mines waiting to go off. It’s frankly all I can do to resist the temptation to just spend the whole review quoting him. (I’ll allow myself this one famous joke for the unacquainted: “I spilled spot remover on my dog… and now he’s gone.”) This earned him many opportunities to apply his hangdog stare and drier-than-the-Sahara monotone to a variety of projects as a supporting actor and voice artist, but there have been fewer opportunities to try to translate his voice as a writer to the screen. In 1988, he wrote, produced, and starred in “The Appointments of Dennis Jennings,” the tale of a hapless psychiatric patient that earned Wright that year’s Academy Award for live-action short. That success under his belt, he then waited 11 years to make another short, this time assuming the director’s mantle as well.

The initial joke is that, even though his milieu is now the American Civil War, Steven Wright in a Union uniform is still Steven Wright. The elements are in place for a “Drunk History”-style collision of history and comedy, as mournful violins accompany Wright’s walks through an empty New England landscape. But when he launches into his narration in his classic disaffected drone, the subject matter is immediately more philosophical, touching on the inscrutability of life and the inevitability of death. Soon enough, his wife Becky joins in with her own reflection, and each hints that his fate may already be sealed. Essentially, “One Soldier” is like if “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” were a comedy sketch.

Of course, Steven Wright can’t not be funny, or at least not indulge his quirkier side. Particularly as regards his fate, which he anticipates by plucking petals off a flower. Even his deepest musings are tinged with silliness, like his recollections of his job in the war, playing the concertina to soothe the nerves of the top brass. A heartwarming reunion with his wife is tempered somewhat by his insistence on wearing a harmonica, even during intimate moments. And there’s a comedian’s love of the absurd, best typified by this line of dialogue which is no less bizarre when heard in context: “When she said the number 25 in German, it drove me wild.”

Wright’s soldier is a philosopher who hasn’t done the work and doesn’t have the language to describe the uncertainties he feels. That makes “One Soldier” a most unusual vanity project: it can’t carry the burden of the weighty issues it confronts, so it leans into that weakness. But there’s still something haunting that comes through, perhaps best exemplified by the film’s final thoughts: “First you don’t exist, then you exist, then you don’t exist. So this whole thing is just an interruption from not existing.” Steven Wright finds the comedy in the tragic notion that a person’s last thought on this earth is that he’s been thinking too much about the meaning of life.

“One Soldier” is available as a bonus feature on “When the Leaves Blow Away,” a recording of a one-hour Wright stand-up set from 2007.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It is a fine blend of deep theological ponderings, modern Zen koans, and comic schtick. Like Wright’s live stand-up, the film’s slow pace and ponderous subject matter have a rather hypnotic effect, drawing one into the skewed reality of Wright’s brilliant mind.” – J. C. Shakespeare, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by RobinHoodsun, who mused “it was very very weird and it left me with a starnge feeling lol.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE ELECTRIC MAN (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: B. Luciano Barsuglia

FEATURING: , James Di Giacomo, Rachel Riley

PLOT: A meter reader is zapped by 12,000 volts by a faulty transformer and finds himself experiencing different realities.

COMMENTS: “This movie was inspired by the things that really happen that cannot be explained, that nobody else will believe.” This disclaimer, which appears during the closing credits, possibly should have introduced The Electric Man—and in another reality, perhaps it did. Possibilities, be they decisions ill-made, opportunities missed, or words said or left unsaid, are squarely on B. Luciano Barsuglia’s mind, and in his latest film he allows himself to muse at length about them. The impossible is merely an unconceived likelihood flowing from different decisions in a different plane; at the same time, with the free mingling of fate and free will, the end destination—for Barsuglia, you, me, everyone—is never in doubt.

These heady concepts are presented within a Room-style universe of stilted dialogue and non-traditional editing choices. That said, perhaps I feel this way only because I’ve never been to California. Whether it be the Wiseau-isms of San Francisco or the incongruous irritation of every performer in Barsuglia’s LA-set time-slip drama, maybe those are real, and those of us nestled away in a Mid-Atlantic-Accented center of calm are the odd ones. Regardless, there is a lot to overlook while Tracy (the titular “Electric Man”), Quinn (his on-again-off-again hippie-styled bowling buddy), Rose (Tracy’s love; possibly a vampire, and presumably a ballerina), and all the rest try to make sense of the strange shifts in the protagonist’s perception. After his fatal (then resuscitative) encounter with a transformer (one whose dilapidation screamed “run!” to a layman like myself), his mundane existence becomes a series of slightly less mundane vignettes as he is forced to converse, and philosophize, on the fly.

Though I am loathe to say it, the word “crummy” is the best way to describe the production. The actors all deliver their lines badly (presumably even Tom Sizemore, as I could not even tell which of the pissed-off, gesture-happy characters he performed as). The discourse was cut awkwardly, not just with strange little pauses, but some bad sound editing cutting off the ends of words. And the screenwriting, too, makes me wonder at the language of origin. Who (in LA or otherwise) queries, “Is that what I’m to understand?”; and why the strangely specific estimate, by Tracy’s dead(?) father after being electrocuted by his son, “Shit! That felt like… 110 volts!”

Despite these constant kicks from my belief-suspension groove, The Electric Man did do one thing making it worthy of a highly-caveated recommendation: it made me think. Alternate realities, and their dizzying effects on a psyche, are nothing new, but Basuglia’s contemplations were both considered and, from time to time, rather droll. Tracy chatting in a Lutheran church with a broken-down Jesus, or his late night hospital meeting with Satan (“Please, call me Luke.”; “Is this Hell?”; “It’s Long Beach”), or his reality sliding into a grisly finish—there are interesting things here; fun things, too. And as so often is the case when I encounter a film like this, I am hopeful that the filmmaker goes on to great things—if not in this reality, then at least an adjacent one.

The Electric Man is currently streaming free on Tubi. Should that deal end, it can also be purchased or rented on-demand.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Writer/director B. Luciano Barsuglia (Social Distance, Impact Event) ramps up the strangeness as Trace finds himself dealing not only with his girlfriend Rose (Rachel Riley, Moon Creek Cemetery, Edgar Allan Poe’s Lighthouse Keeper) a stripper who might also be a vampire but becoming unstuck in time and space… The Electric Man is a spiritual/philosophical journey wrapped up in the guise of a science fiction/fantasy film.” -Jim Morazzini, Voices from the Balcony (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SOMETHING IN THE DIRT (2022)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead

FEATURING: Aaron Moorhead, Justin Benson

PLOT: A bartender and a divorcee witness supernatural phenomena and fall into an increasingly disturbing—and increasingly compromised—investigation into patterns, aliens, multiple dimensions, and secret societies as they try to come to terms with their own reality.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Returning to their Endless musings, this filmmaking duo once again fuse unsettling metaphysics with comedy-tinged chamber drama, creating a fantasy which straddles the cosmically significant and the piercingly mundane.

COMMENTS: Levi has the aura of a past-his-prime surfer bro, crashing through life as he tries to stay ahead of an unfortunate criminal past. He awakens in a spartan apartment, crummy even by dirt-cheap Los Angeles standards, and encounters another tenant in the side alley. Bumming a cigarette, Levi learns in brief that this is John, who recently separated from his husband—and so is new to the whole “smoking” thing. They hit it off, more or less, despite John being a bit stilted and over-eager and Levi being disconcertingly cryptic; is Levi actually a bartender? And what’s this “charity” work he mentions? After John drops off some old furniture in a neighborly gesture, the trap is sprung for their strange investigation: there’s a play of light through a crystal ashtray, and as Levi enters from the kitchen, both men witness it hovering.

The LA setting and pervasive mystery-cum-layered-conspiracies brings to mind Under the Silver Lake, but this digs more deeply through time and space while achieving a personal, claustrophobic tone. Nearly all the action—supernatural and otherwise—occurs in the two-room apartment. (Well, three-room, I suppose, but we never see an oft-mentioned bedroom.) While John and Levi pursue answers to the localized irregularities (suspects come to include an ancient Pythagorean Society, pre-historic alien visitors, and brain maggots from cats), the pair attempt to document their findings. However, both are prone to lying and to showmanship. What is on-screen is unreliable, and there may be nothing really going on outside the norm.

But that’s the point. This is actually a film about two men, reaching middle age, having achieved nothing. John is professionally washed-up and a member of an evangelical apocalypse cult, Levi is a registered sex offender (for reasons both amusing and tragically bureaucratic), burdened by guilt over his responsibility for his sister’s unfortunate downfall. The exploration of the mystery around them acts as a vehicle for their own self-revelation. A poignant scene near the finale has the pair of them recording the other, going blow-by-blow about how they’re both losers who have either destroyed their lives or never built one in the first place; as they exchange accusations, every item in the apartment floats around ominously.

The cinematic world of Something in the Dirt exists within The Endless‘ troubling confines, and the ultimate fate that Levi faces echoes that risked by the two brothers in their earlier film (itself an expansion of the vision first laid out in Resolution). The implication is that the inscrutable entity which is playing with time and space is now broadening its grip. The nonsensical conspiracy-fluff behind the rabbit holes within rabbit holes is interesting (“We’re not going into Dan Brown territory, are we?” a skeptical Levi inquires of John early on), but the meat of Benson and Moorhead’s message is closer to the philosophy found in Steppenwolf. We are doomed to repeat and re-digest this farce that is our life; but this condemnation brings with it our hope for salvation. Eventually, we might figure out the true pattern, and everything will make sense.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Once again, Benson and Moorhead prove that they can produce a stellar, original film with a tiny fraction of the budget of bigger Hollywood filmmakers. The movie landscape is a far better, weird, and beautiful place with them in it.”–Chris Evangelista, Slash Film (festical screening)