Tag Archives: Post-apocalyptic

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: KING LEAR (1987)

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William Shakespeare, Jr. V: “Just what are you aiming at, Professor?”
Professor Pluggy: [farts]
Goblin maid: “When the professor farts, the moon things are trembling.”

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , Jean-Luc Godard, ,

PLOT: After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster destroys all world culture, William Shakespeare Jr. V, descendant of the famous playwright, seeks to rediscover and re[Lear]n his ancestor’s works; simultaneously, Professor Pluggy investigates the phenomenon of cinema.

COMMENTS: Godard and the cinema – what more can possibly be said? To begin at the end: his 1967 film Weekend concludes with Godard [in]famously declaring the end of cinema. The enfant terrible of the French New Wave returned twenty years later with a post-apocalyptic adaptation of a Shakespeare tragedy in which he equates the non-existence of cinema with Cordelia’s poignant “nothing.” Godard details how this all came about within the film through metanarrative threads woven among scenes adapted from the titular play plus digressions into his many cinematic obsessions.

Godard’s Lear takes place “after Chernobyl.” Despite this premise, the film isn’t convincing as science fiction. It never explains how exactly Chernobyl managed to wipe out the arts beyond a one-sentence statement. Godard isn’t interested in hard science; he has other things on his mind, “no things” to be c[Lear] (or not).

Despite being structured around absence and loss, there’s a lot to unpack in this dense palimpsest of sound, text, and image. Among many literary references besides Shakespeare’s King Lear, details of famous paintings from art history frequently interrupt the action. Intermittent title cards define the film’s “Approach” through a variety of terms (“King Lear: A Clearing”, “King Lear: A cLearing”, “King Lear: Fear and Loathing”, “No Thing”). The chaotic sound mix consists of Beethoven sonatas distorted, slowed down, and overlaid with intrusive Buñuelian noise (seagulls, slurping soup, ocean waves, pigs snorting). Two competing voiceovers, reciting lines from Shakespeare, even drown out the dialogue of the (in-movie) actors.

In Godard’s hands, adaptation turns into an exercise in free association. The seagulls represent Chekov; the waves, Virginia Woolf. “L’Image“, by surrealist poet Paul Reverdy, quoted at length, describes “the image” as “a pure creation of the soul. It cannot be born of a comparison but of a reconciliation of two realities that are more or less far apart. The more the connection between these two realities [birds squawking loudly] are distanced and true, the stronger the image will be, the more it will have emotive power.”

Reverdy’s two realities reflect the conflict between Lear and Cordelia, the dual missions of William and Pluggy to rescue the world’s culture from oblivion, and Godard’s real life struggles with his producers to get the film made. Only two scenes from the actual play make it into the final cut. The entire film explores the opening scene with Lear and Cordelia’s argument. The tragic finale ends up distilled into a single frame.

Fresh off the string of John Hughes films which made her famous, Ringwald portrays Cordelia with patience and melancholy. As “Don Learo,” Meredith recounts the lives of famous gangsters and his own accomplishments with crotchety zeal and professional pride. He tells his daughter with conviction that loss of character is worse than losing money. She remains silent after this anecdote and when he angrily demands a response from her, she utters the famous “Nothing” which exemplifies the loss at the heart of the tragedy.

The rest of the film consists of William scribbling in a notebook while trying to regain his ancestor’s brilliance, and Godard himself as the enigmatic Professor Pluggy, a recluse who spent twenty years in his “editing room” trying to rediscover “the image.” So what exactly is Godard aiming at, amid all this audiovisual clutter? Pluggy serves as a narrator of sorts, yet he consistently mumbles his lines through one side of his mouth like he’s suffered a stroke (I turned on the disc’s closed captioning to make sure I understood what he said, but sometimes the captions simply read “[speaking indistinctly]”).

This muddled “approach” perplexed the few contemporary critics who saw it (many being weirded out by Pluggy’s wig of A/V cables). After the film’s premier at Cannes, the production company didn’t know what to do with it. Lear saw an extremely limited release in Los Angeles and New York then it sank without a trace before being released in France for the first time in 2002.

Nearly forty years later, it can be seen on physical media. In an era witness to the actual death of film stock and the transition to digital video technologies, Godard’s concerns about the future of cinema, and the power and virtue of film makers, remain eerily prescient. An unsatisfactory experience as a Shakespeare adaptation, Godard’s Lear intrigues as the very type of cinematic artifact of the late twentieth century his characters endeavor to excavate within the movie, an ongoing quest to find the image pure and true.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Daylight surrealism at its finest. Goddard is using this meta-textual dreamscape to lull you into an emotional place to explore one of the greatest moments in literary and artistic history. . .”–Andrew J. Eisenman, Elements of Madness [Blu-ray]

(This movie was nominated for review by Deadly Serious Andy, who remarked “I’d love to see the reaction of a roomful of people expecting a ‘normal’ take on the story.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LIVE FREAKY! DIE FREAKY! (2006)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: John Roecker

FEATURING: Voices of Billie Joe Armstrong, Tim Armstrong, Theo Kogan, Kelly Osbourne, Davey Havok, Asia Argento, John Doe, Jane Wiedlin

PLOT: A denizen of a future, post-apocalyptic landscape discovers an account of a narcissistic cult leader and his murderous spree in Hollywood in the latter half of the 20th century. 

Still from Live freaky, die freaky! (2006)

COMMENTS: A line of defense of bad comedians is to complain when they get called on the carpet for telling offensive jokes that punch down. “Don’t be so offended,” they love to say. So it’s not an auspicious start for Live Freaky! Die Freaky! to kick off with a title card that warns us, “Rated X, not for the easily offended.” It’s a litmus test. If you’re in any way put off by what follows, you have no one to blame but your own uncool bleeding heart. Because giving offense is very much the order of the day.

Make no mistake, writer-director Roecker wants so very badly to shock you with his profane irreverence. Live Freaky! is a bouillabaisse of slanderous characterizations, insulting stereotypes, cheeky musical numbers, and puppet gore. It’s a parade of sub-“Davey and Goliath” animations naughtily saying the dirtiest things they can think of, and then winding up covered in blood. Everyone fails every possible variation of the Bechdel test because everyone endlessly boasts about their depraved sex practices (and one character indulges himself even after death). The meet-cute between the film’s lunatic messiah and one of his aspiring acolytes is a lengthy scene of explicit stop-motion doll sex while singing a jaunty music hall tune. It’s the creation of someone who saw Team America and concluded that the way to make that film’s notorious sex scene funnier would be to just do more of it. 

I suppose Live Freaky! is a bold example of not really caring about anything at all. From the moment we see a live-action post-apocalypse vagrant unearth an old copy of Healter Skelter (sic), we’re launched into a looking-glass version of the Charles Manson story where the inexplicably charismatic miscreant may be bad, but at least he’s a man of the people. His victims are portrayed as even worse: drug-addled, sex-obsessed, vulgar and dismissive of anyone who isn’t rich or famous like they are. Oh, wait. I’m sorry. Did I say Charles Manson? Of course I meant Charles Hanson. Absolutely nothing to do with that other fellow. In fact, you can tell that the filmmakers have done their due diligence removing any trace of the Manson family’s rampage,  because while the names may all seem familiar, they’ve cleverly replaced every first initial with an H. Yep, this story is about Sharon Hate and her friends Hay and Habigail. Totally different. You can’t possibly sue them. It’s all 3-D chess with these guys.  

The movie openly embraces a punk aesthetic, which is presumably why the voice cast is comprised of several major figures from the punk rock scene, led by Green Day front man Billie Joe Armstrong essaying Charlie through what feels like a Redd Foxx impression. He’s joined by Tim Armstrong (no relation) from Rancid, John Doe of X, plus friends from Good Charlotte, AFI, Blink-182, Tiger Army, White Zombie, Lunachicks, and the Transplants. (Also Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Go’s, which is just depressing.) And then they hand this collection of punk all-stars a series of lame songs without an ounce of punk in them. And aside from their punk bonafides, the other thing cast all have in common is that none of them can act. Every line is delivered as if it was the only take of a script received five minutes before recording. The closest thing we have to a professional actor, Ozzy Osbourne’s daughter Kelly, plays her grotesquely vain socialite with the same snooty, over-enunciated whine throughout. The best analogy for the cast I can think of is a bunch of friends who come over to help you move. Everyone’s there to lend a hand, but they’re really just there for the pizza.

This kind of thing is tolerable in a show like, say, South Park because the creators are such committed libertarians. Yes, they’re bomb-throwers, but their targets are usually the high and mighty, the terminally humorless, and blinkered illogicians. There’s a brief glimmer of satire in Live Freaky! in a 20-second scene where the prosecuting attorney bemoans the degeneracy of Charlie and his crew, and then celebrates all the money he’s going to make off the book he’s writing about the case. But that’s it. Who is the movie really out to take down? Hollywood, maybe, although not any Hollywood that bears relation to life as lived by actual human beings. The rich? They’re not so much worse than the murderous, dumpster-diving poor. No, there’s no real target here, except the audience. Basically, the filmmakers are just hoping someone will take offense. They want the glory of having ruined someone else’s day. Well, mission accomplished.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This 2003 [sic] film is a weird concept, done in a weird way and done with a weird sensibility.  Nothing about this feels normal… To quote a great man, ‘This movie sucks!'”– Alec Pridgen, Mondo Bizarro

(This movie was nominated for review by Sam, who called it “Pretty terrible, but incredibly weird!” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

CAPSULE: LOVE ME (2024)

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Love Me is available on VOD for purchase or rental.

DIRECTED BY: Andrew Zuchero, Sam Zuchero

FEATURING: ,

PLOT: After the apocalypse wipes out Earth’s entire population, an AI-equipped buoy connects with an AI-equipped satellite that holds a digital record of humanity, and together they decide to recreate a human relationship in virtual reality.

Still from love me (2024)

COMMENTS: Love Me, the debut feature from real-life married couple Andrew and Sam Zuchero, debuted at Sundance in 2024 to underwhelming reviews, but managed to get a theatrical release a year later based on the strength of stars Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun. The overall reaction to the film has been tepid, both from critics (who have tended to find it too obvious) and audiences (who have tended to find it too outlandish). Still, although not without flaws—including an unwillingness to pursue the most interesting ideas it raises—Love Me is original and adventurous enough to elevate it above the usual dreck that litters the romance genre.

Although the core romantic relationship inevitably falls into cliché (including the mildly offensive trope of a hysterical girlfriend who demands every detail be storybook perfect as a way of eluding her own insecurities), the film feeds off its high concept post-apocalyptic premise. The most interesting part of Love Me, in fact, is its nearly experimental opening, which shows a spinning globe briefly shrouded in a flash of nuclear flame, before zooming into the planet for a time lapse montage showing the passage of innumerable days. Stewart’s smart buoy, equipped with a scanner shaped like an eye, clicks to life and her speech module gets stuck on stutter mode as her programming resets, post-apocalypse. Meanwhile, Yuen’s satellite, a kind of eternally revolving monument to humanity containing  pedabytes of data, is already fully operational. The two beings connect and, via the satellite’s archive, try to reconstruct what it means to be a human being (in the 21st century, at least).

The film’s take on A.I. remains willfully unexamined (the movie is not about A.I. at all; the characters could just as well have been aliens). The answer as to how these machines developed emotions like loneliness and curiosity is a little thing called “willing suspension of disbelief.” Love Me‘s technological focus is more on current Internet culture and social media, and the take seems positive enough at first: the A.I.s effectively investigate human behavior through YouTubes and memes, encountering genuine human miracles like baby laughter reinforcement loops. As the film goes on, this attitude develops more a satirical edge, as it becomes clear that modeling a relationship on an influencer’s Instagram feed won’t lead to an accurate simulacrum of human connection. But the attempt creates a dual romantic metaphor for the film. On a shallow level, it’s a warning about the destructive influence of the unobtainable sanitized fantasies presented on social media as model lifestyles, as the buoy slaves to in vain to perfectly recreate a spicy quesadillas/whimsical onesie/”Friends” marathon date night video she’s seen starring an Instagrammer (also played by Stewart). On a deeper level, one on which the viewer must do most of his or her own work, Love Me can be viewed as an existential parable about persona and authenticity. The buoy and the satellite can only meaningfully interact in a shared virtual reality where they are represented by their chosen avatars—which is almost a religious scenario, when you think about it.

The film’s audiovisual elements are good, for the budget. Many reviewers complained about the midfilm virtual reality section being too long and repetitive; it’s easy to see where they are coming from, even if I don’t share their level of frustration. Once the movie shifts into live action for the final act, Stewart and Yuen show real chemistry and passion (as they must, since there are no supporting actors to turn our attention to). Josh Jacober’s solo piano accompanies the film throughout, in a fashion reminiscent of a silent movie score. And the film features a one-billion year fast-forward, which sets a record by exceeding even the eons-spanning smash-cut from 2001.

While there’s no question Love Me doesn’t soar to the thoughtful heights of similarly-themed movies like Wall-E, Her, or A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, it easily exceeds the low standards we expect from the romantic movie genre. While it’s not something I’d recommend actively seeking out, if you’re a couple who finds yourself with 90 minutes to kill on an evening, you could do a lot worse on date night (for example, mail-order Mexican food and a “Friends” marathon).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a daringly weird debut, executed with real style and vision. It’s an oddity that’s bound to appeal to fans of similarly strange high-concept love stories, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”–Tasha Robinson, Polygon (contemporaneous)

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: GOODBYE, 20TH CENTURY! (1998)

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Zbogum na dvaesettiot vek!

DIRECTED BY: Darko Mitrevski, Aleksandar Popovski

FEATURING: Lazar Ristovski, Nikola Ristanovski, Vlado Jovanovski, Toni Mihajlovski, Petar Temelkovski, Sofija Kunovska

PLOT: In a fractured timeline, we encounter a man in a post-apocalyptic world in search of a hidden place where the fate of everyone is foretold on a wall, a turn-of-the-century brother and sister who marry for love over the objections of their family, and a man in a Santa Claus suit on the eve of the new millennium who stumbles into a strange funeral.

Still from Goodbye, 20th Century! (1999)

COMMENTS: You can instinctively know that a thing exists and yet be completely unaware of it until you’re face-to-face with it. Consider “toothpaste tube designer” or “menu photographer.” Their existence is completely logical, yet you’ve never had to consider their existence. So it goes with the surprising subject of today’s review: the cinema of Macedonia. Of course there would be a history, given its place in the Ottoman Empire at the dawn of film, decades as part of Yugoslavia, and running all the way through a naming spat with Greece. It makes perfect sense that there would be such a thing, but, I mean, who knew?

First-time directors Mitrevski and Popovski are clearly cinema aficionados. The first segment, a typical violent futuristic wasteland, immediately conjures up thoughts of Mad Max. The closer is a harsh ian urban nightmare with hints of esque style. There are more familiar references to be found, but the movie I think they were most eager to ape is Pulp Fiction. With its time-jumping thruline and a flashback vignette knotting the two halves together, Goodbye, 20th Century! feels like an attempt to do with a Balkan post-war flair.

We open in the far-off world of 2019, which follows the journey of Kuzman, a post-apocalyptic pariah who seemingly cannot die. His encounters with a band of Road Warrior-style toughs features some intriguing imagery, most notably a pair of designated wailers who carry masks with them to multiply the mourning. Later, after an intended execution fails to do the trick, he has an intriguing encounter with a prophet who tells him that he must defeat a green-haired jokester/maniac (think of a certain archfoe of a particular dark knight) in order to reach a kind of memorial wall. That effort, combined with a sexual assignation with a tattooed lady who is revealed to be Kuzman’s sister, brings him the release from life that he seeks. It’s not exactly logical, but it makes for a tidy tale. In fact, the most surprising thing about it is that it ends, with half-a-movie still to go.

The other major story takes us back in time 20 years, specifically to the last night of the century, when a man dressed as Santa Claus endures the apathy of the public (and the insults of a young Kuzman in particular) before hoping to retire to his apartment for the evening. Instead of his bed, he walks into a surreal funeral taking place in a completely white room, attended by stern figures in black. A dark farce ensues, including a flatulent old woman, a purloined toupee, and a pair of hipsters who completely misread the room by bringing champagne and a boombox and spiking the koliva. Meanwhile, the very same prophet who advised Kuzman on how to die in 2019 is here to help prepare the body in 1999. It’s all very wacky and deliberately unfunny, and since we know from the earlier tale that the apocalypse is at hand and it’s just a matter of time before the funeral itself descends into homicidal mayhem. (Appropriately, the madness is scored by Sid Vicious’ version of “My Way.”)  Naturally, this culminates with the creation of that very same memorial wall, meaning we’ve come full circle.

It all feels very metaphorical, and probably much more meaningful if you had lived through the miseries of Macedonia in the last decade of the millennium. I suspect the key to understanding Goodbye, 20th Century! lies within the interstitial vignette that connects the two halves. Presented as a historic look at the first wedding ever captured on film in Macedonia (the prophet appears here as the cinematographer, making him amusingly but pointlessly immortal), it’s actually the tragically brief tale of a brother and sister whose incestuous love ends promptly with the groom’s immediate murder. “If this is how the 20th century started,” the narrator flatly observes, “who can tell how it will end?” Violence is endemic, the movie says, even genetic, and considering how the former Yugoslav republics were mired in war in the years following the breakup, such a dismal outlook seems understandable. Everyone dies. Hope is a fool’s errand.

And yet.

Seven years after the dissolution of Yugoslavia and four years after the first Macedonian film to earn an Academy Award nomination, the country submitted this strange quasi-anthology as its attempt to repeat the achievement. It did not get the honor, but instead has eked out an afterlife thanks to its unusual structure and snarky attitude. (Consider that the film’s title is revealed after a trip through a toilet.) The movie has survived, the renamed North Macedonia has survived (with its very own cinematic tradition), and indeed all of us continue to muddle our way through a seemingly unending social nightmare. Maybe the apocalypse isn’t inevitable. It’s a nice thought to have as we embark upon a new year that feels like it could be more grim that the last. So raise a glass. Goodbye, 2024. Maybe the future won’t be the end of everything. Maybe instead of destroying the planet and marrying our sister, this time we’ll get it right.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Utterly bizarre, this first feature by Macedonian multimedia bad boys Aleksandar Popovski and Darko Mitrevski weds “Mad Max”–style grunge futurism, silly-mythic solemnity and anarchic humor to ends that make no sense whatsoever — proudly so, one suspects.” – Dennis Harvey, Variety (contemporaneous)

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

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ENDGAME (2000) / OPERATION: ENDGAME (2010)

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The second highest-grossing motion picture of all time—the product of a little indie shingle that hit the jackpot, called Avengers: Endgame—is also by fiat the highest-grossing motion picture of all time with the word “endgame” in the title. That’s not as easy a title to grab as you might think; IMDb lists several dozen features, shorts, and TV episodes that have relied upon the handy term for the final moves of a chess match, most of which preceded Marvel’s grand finale. So it’s probably the law of averages that put two different Endgames on our reader-suggested review queue within spitting distance of each other. Aside from their titles, these two films share exactly two common elements: they both use hurtful language with reckless abandon, and they are both shot on film. Beyond that, you couldn’t ask for two similarly titled stories to be further apart in style, tone, and subject matter. What makes them both worthy to bear the standard of games that end? Let’s dig in.

ENDGAME (2000)

DIRECTED BY: Conor McPherson

FEATURING: , , Charles Simon, Jean Anderson

PLOT: In a barren house at the end of the world, a blind and decrepit old man lives with his parents (who occupy a pair of rubbish bins) and his hobbled servant, who is contemplating a departure.

COMMENTS: Let’s give a warm welcome back to Samuel Beckett, previously seen round these parts waiting for a friend. Another entry from Irish television’s epic “Beckett on Film” cycle capturing all the great writer’s stage works on celluloid for posterity, Endgame is here to deliver the author’s vision of a bleak and doomed future for the human race, precisely according to the author’s wishes. The set is an almost-empty room, devoid of any decoration or furnishing that isn’t occupied by an actor for the duration. Beckett was notoriously allergic to anything ornamental (as with Godot, he originally wrote Endgame in French to curb any tendencies toward florid vocabulary), so what we see and hear is not just what matters but all that matters.

What we can see is definitely a surreal nightmare. All four characters are stricken with various invalidities. Hamm, the apparent lord of the manor, doesn’t enter so much as he is unveiled, and when he speaks it is to declare himself the center of the universe. “Can there be misery loftier than mine?” He is immobile, and thus relies upon the assistance of a crippled man who is himself unable to sit down. The apocalypse has obliterated everything outside of this room. (“Nothing on the horizon?” Hamm asks. “What in God’s name could there be on the horizon?” Clov replies.) And then there are the upstage trash cans that Continue reading THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ENDGAME (2000) / OPERATION: ENDGAME (2010)