A survey of misplaced priorities throughout the universe.
Tag Archives: Philosophical
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ONE SOLDIER (1999)
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.
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:
(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.)
CAPSULE: THE ELECTRIC MAN (2022)
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DIRECTED BY: B. Luciano Barsuglia
FEATURING: Jed Rowen, 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)
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SOMETHING IN THE DIRT (2022)
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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:
366 UNDERGROUND: DENKRAUM (2020)
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Denkraum is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.
DIRECTED BY: Luca Paris
FEATURING: Manuel Melluso, Danilo Paris, Alba Barbullushi, Valerio Mariani, Ilaria Del Greco, Salvatore Di Natale, Giacomo Aversa
PLOT: Alex observes videos on a computer monitor for a new social network named “Denkraum” (which may also be a self-aware entity).
COMMENTS: I think it’s fair to call Denkraum a Surrealist film; although there might be a science fiction or even a mystical solution to its conundrums, any answers are buried under so many abstractions and layers of speculation and contradiction that the search for meaning becomes an exercise in the paranoiac-critical method. Fortunately, we have a director’s statement (appended to the end of this review) to provide some clues to interpretation. Even so, I think most viewers will be completely perplexed by the film’s ambiguities.
As a cinematic experience, the movie proceeds something like this: Alex (whose youthful baldness combined with a baby face make him look simultaneously thuggish and nerdy, a look that seems calculated to invoke Max in Pi) scrolls through videos on an app branded “DENKRAUM.” Every now and then, he clicks play and we “enter” a vignette and watch it play out. These may be real recorded events, memories, or dreams. Most are too dialogue-heavy to make much of an impression; in one of the better ones, four nymphs lead a man into a swimming pool and drown him while a woman in a red dress previously owned by a dead girl watches. Although they all seem to know each other and be part of the same social circle, it’s not easy to keep the characters straight or to construct any sort of narrative connecting them; this is probably intentional. When not watching videos, Alex texts with various characters or AI entities, stares at the portraits he’s hung on his walls, and walks the streets looking grim and intense, with a various color filters suggesting alienation. The screen is constantly invaded by text messages (originally scrambled, they decode before our eyes). Sometimes these come from characters in the videos, sometimes from “Denkraum” itself. They are rarely helpful (“There is a distant and hidden place where nobody listens to your screams and a drunken dancing snake.”). Are they real communications, or simply cybernetic manifestations of the voices inside Alex’s head?
Denkraum is packed full of themes, including a shadowy religious cult, schizophrenia, techno-alienation, postmodern philosophy, misogyny and sexual violence, stalker (but not quite Stalker) vibes, a possible murder or two, pseudo-fascist gangs, indistinct conspiracies, toxic homophobia, and apocalypticism. Even on multiple viewings, the choppy delivery of the ideas makes it almost impossible to form a firm interpretation of the film. Again, I suspect this is intentional: the deluge of information suggests a nightmare version of a Facebook feed, where a political rant is followed by a relationship update status followed by a kitty meme followed by a livestream of college girls making out, while various friends and acquaintances are Continue reading 366 UNDERGROUND: DENKRAUM (2020)