Tag Archives: Recommended

Canonically Weird (The List)

172. ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW (2013)

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“Imaginate, what we can do, when Tomorrow there’s another YOU?
On the other side, we will realize
Wishes really do come, come true.

Imaginate, imaginate, imaginate, imaginate, imaginate,
like we can do, wishes really do come true…”

“Imaginate” (from the Escape from Tomorrow soundtrack)

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DIRECTED BY: Randy Moore

FEATURING: Roy Abramsohn, Elena Schuber, Katelynn Rodriguez, Jack Dalton, Danielle Safady, Ahnnet Mahendru, Alison Lees-Taylor, Stass Klassen

PLOT: A day in the life of an American family vacationing at Disneyland… or Walt Disney World… or at least some Disney related theme park. Only this day starts out with Jim (Roy Abramsohn) getting a call from his boss, who tells him that there’s no job for him to return to. Things can only go downhill from there, but everything is filtered through a cheerful veneer. From a spreading cat-flu epidemic, to stalking teen-age girls, brainwashing by Park cyborgs, it just goes to show that “bad things happen everywhere”… even in the Happiest Place On Earth.

Still from Escape from Tomorrow (2013)
BACKGROUND:

  • Escape from Tomorrow was the “buzz” picture at the 2013 Sundance film festival, with most of the talk centering around the fact that much of the movie was shot surreptitiously at Disney World by the crew while posing as ordinary tourists.
  • The release of Canon’s 5D Mark II Digital SLR camera was the spur to get the movie made; the image quality was cinematic and the cameras small enough to allow a crew to shoot surreptitiously.
  • Pre-production was meticulous, every shot planned and blocked out weeks ahead of time, due to the limited window of opportunity, even to the point of charting out the position of the sun.
  • Post-production was done in South Korea, mainly due to the editor and producer’s contacts, but also to not allow word of the project to get near Disney.
  • Although it was widely assumed that Disney’s notoriously litigious legal department would act swiftly to stop distribution of Escape from Tomorrow, the corporation decided the wiser strategy to protect their brand was to ignore this small independent film rather than bringing additional attention to it.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: An immobile Jim, head replaced by a mini-Epcot dome, uniquely captures the tone and intent of the film.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:The film’s subversive commentary on Disney’s hold on the collective imagination has a solid bite that has not been previously approached as directly as it is here, by actually shooting on Disney property completely in plain sight – in the belly of the Beast, so to speak. The black and white photography also helps in making that familiar world appear alien. Plus, a mad scientist turns a guy’s head into the Epcot center.


Escape from Tomorrow original trailer

COMMENTS: “Jim, listen to me. Don’t let your imagination run wild. It’s a transitional period.”

Continue reading 172. ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW (2013) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

171. SIN CITY (2005)

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“It’s pretty damn weird to eat people.”–Marv, Sin City

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DIRECTED BY: , , (“special guest director”)

FEATURING: , , , , Nick Stahl, Jaime King, , , , ,

PLOT: The movie tells three stories (with some common characters) set in the mythical Basin City: in one, a police detective risks his life to stop a child-killer. In a second, a brutal, mentally ill criminal hunts down the men he believes killed the only woman who ever showed kindness to him. A final strand tells of a suave assassin who attempts to prevent someone else’s accidental killing from turning into an all-out war between the cops, the mafia, and the self-governing prostitutes of Old Town.

Still from Sin City (2005)
BACKGROUND:

  • A fan of Frank Miller’s original series of Sin City comics, Robert Rodriguez wanted to make the movie as true to the book as possible: “a translation, not an adaptation.” The actual comics were used as the storyboards. The stories selected were “The Hard Goodbye,” “The Big Fat Kill,” and “That Yellow Bastard” as well as the short “The Customer is Always Right.”
  • Rodriguez shot the opening segment, “The Customer is Always Right,” in one day as a proof-of-concept to convince Miller that he could do justice to the art style. He then used that clip to convince actors such as Bruce Willis and Benicio Del Toro to sign on to the project.
  • Rodriguez insisted that Miller receive a co-director credit on the film, but the Directors Guild of America objected to the credit (they do not allow co-directing). He then decided to give Miller full credit, but Miller refused. Rodriguez then resigned from the Guild so the co-directing credit could remain.
  • Quentin Tarantino directed a single scene in the movie (a segment from “The Big Fat Kill” involving a conversation between the severed head of Del Toro’s “Jackie-Boy” and Clive Owen’s “Dwight”). Tarantino directed for a salary of $1 as a way to repay Rodriguez for composing music for Kill Bill: Vol. 2 for $1.
  • The movie was entirely shot on Rodriguez’s “digital backlot” (green screen studio) near his home in Austin, Texas.
  • Sin City screened in competition at Cannes and won the Technical Grand Prize.
  • Plans for a sequel (based on Miller’s “A Dame to Kill For“) were announced immediately after the film was completed; the followup feature was delayed until 2014, however.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: From the very first frame—a woman in a blood-red backless cocktail dress on a balcony staring out over a steel-grey city—Sin City‘s pulp Expressionism is consistently startling and poetic. Since we’re fascinated by the weird, we’ll select the first sight of the Yellow Bastard, the bald, satellite dish-eared pedophile killer dyed the color of French’s mustard, as our unforgettable take-home image from the movie.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A marriage between the mythologies of film noir and violent comics, Sin City‘s bloody tales are set in an abstract urban hellscape inhabited by invulnerable tough guys and rough sexy dames. They play like the lost works of Raymond Chandler’s alternate universe grandson, written to scrape up a few bucks for a bottle of booze while he was down and out in Gotham City. With a cast of cannibal serial killers, jaundiced pedophiles and ninja hookers, the adventures of the hard-boiled demigods of Sin City are as fantastical as its random splotches of color in a monochrome landscape are visually unreal.


Original trailer for Sin City

COMMENTS: Sin City earns its “recommended” label almost solely on the basis of its visuals (bolstered by some finely weird touches), and not for its Continue reading 171. SIN CITY (2005) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: UNDER THE SKIN (2013)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Glazer

FEATURING: , Adam Pearson

PLOT: An alien in the form of a beautiful woman skulks around Glasgow in a white van hunting for single men, whom she collects for some unknown but supposedly nefarious purpose. Eventually she becomes confused by her own temporary humanity, and her physical body starts to shut down.

under-the-skin-UTS_Still_2_hi-res_rgb
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: With an acute vision and a puzzling but highly rewarding plot, Under the Skin is easily among the best of 2014, and may well turn out to be the weirdest. The action moves slowly, but is filled with wonderfully bizarre imagery and powerful space-y scoundscapes. Its storytelling is inventive, and nothing is obvious.

COMMENTS: Under the Skin opens with abstract images of space and birth, with the sounds of a woman learning to talk played over the ambient score. An unnamed biker pulls a dead woman into a van, in which a naked Scarlett Johansson takes on her appearance, and her clothing. The next day, she begins her unexplained quest for bodies, driving around and innocently asking for directions while slyly prying into her prey’s background. If they have girlfriends or family, or are on their way to meet friends, she leaves, but if she determines them to be alone and single, she invites them back to her weird abandoned-looking house. Entranced by her beauty, they follow her blindly until they are absorbed into the floor, sinking into black goo. When she comes upon a disfigured young man (Adam Pearson), she falters in her single-minded mission, and begins to look for human experiences, though she is generally unable to understand them.

Adamantly maintaining a “show, don’t tell” attitude, Jonathan Glazer teases his audience with nibbles of information, encouraging us to assemble the puzzle pieces ourselves. This type of storytelling forces us to carefully consider every image presented, questioning characters’ unstated motives and giving a close reading to each scene. The movie is almost palpably quiet, relying little on dialogue and offering a mix of natural background noise and unearthly music, leaving a lot of room for inner thought to fill in the stillness. We must connect how the silent biker is related to Scarlett Johansson’s character, what purpose the abducted men serve, what prompts the protagonist to abandon her hunt, and why she seems to be struggling with her alien body. All of this information is made available to us, if we pay attention. Every shot is precise and deliberate, with many scenes carefully constructed through the use of hidden cameras—so many of the men interacting with Johansson are at first unaware that they are in a movie. There is an intriguing combination of gritty, rainy urban areas, dark but lush forests, and weird alien spaces, plus the juxtaposition of hidden-camera verism and sci-fi unreality. It is at once unsettling, confusing, exciting, and utterly compelling.

This is, for the most part, understated weirdness. Glazer’s non-expository, matter-of-fact style belies how inventive the film’s approach really is. He reveals an alien’s view of our world, and often makes humanity as strange to his audience as it is to his protagonist. The men’s thickly-accented, slang-ridden speech is often confusing (to this American viewer, that is), and common human rituals are made to appear odd. Why do we wear make-up? Or eat chocolate cake? Or have sex? An extended sequence shows a family spending time on a rocky beach, but the parents leave their toddler on the shore as they swim out to save their drowning dog. The protagonist watches this dramatic scene from afar, a nonpartisan observer, not so much uncaring as she is disengaged, never moved to help or hinder because their plight just isn’t related to her. Even the considerable nudity is approached with a sense of detachment, and made to be completely nonsexual despite the context. Though her origins are never actually mentioned, there is no doubt she is an alien creature, a hunter given human form but never made to understand the person she inhabits. The sick joke is that while visually she embodies the human equivalent of prey—female, beautiful, small, alone—inwardly she is a powerful predator. Under the Skin is a strange and dark thriller that manages to wryly comment on gender stereotyping and (straight) sexual relations without actually delivering any kind of message. As a film, as a story, as a work of art, it simply is.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Under the Skin sometimes feels like it should be more elusive, but the moment you try and lock it down it slips away from you, going off into weirder territory.” –Matt Prigge, Metro

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: ENEMY (2013)

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Enemy has been officially promoted to the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies. This initial review is left here for archival purposes. Please read the official Certified Weird entry and post any comments there.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Mélanie Laurent, 

PLOT: A history professor becomes obsessed with tracking down a man who appears to be his exact double.

Still from Enemy (2013)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: We have an unofficial rule that we won’t add a movie to the List until it’s come out on DVD, so we can study its nuances closely. You shouldn’t wait that long, however. If you love cinematic weirdness, you owe it to yourself to get out to the theater and catch Enemy now.

COMMENTS: Enemy begins with the epigram “chaos is order yet undeciphered…,” and I admit to having yet to decipher the twisty web of chaos the movie spins. Beginning with a fractured montage depicting one of those impossibly elegant and depraved invitation-only live sex shows that only exist in the movies, Enemy emerges from its abstract opening to focus on Adam, a melancholy history professor currently lecturing on the methods dictatorships use to keep their citizens in the dark about how they are being controlled. Adam’s life consists of little more than work and joyless sex with his girlfriend until one day, almost on a whim, he watches a movie and catches a glimpse of an extra who looks exactly like him. While most of us would find such a discovery “neat” and invite our friends over to the screen confirm the resemblance, Adam’s reaction is different: immediate uncomprehending horror, followed by an obsessive need to track his double down. Even the way we are shown Adam’s discovery is unnatural; we watch as what appears to be a lighthearted costume drama playing out on his laptop screen, except that there is no sound, only the ominous strings of the film’s thick (and excellent) neoclassical score. Villeneuve’s direction pumps out a subtle, constant stream of anxiety: the characters’ overly alarmed reactions to everyday events, throwaway lines of dialogue suggesting layers of unexplored subtexts, the cold and lonely modern apartments both Adam and his doppelganger glide through like ghosts, the jaundiced pallor of the movie’s interiors. But it’s not all endless cinemaitc restraint, as some startling arachnid imagery and a shot of an upside-down woman with an insect head attest. Altering his bearing to portray either the sensitive Adam or the brash Anthony, Gyllenhaal gives the best performance alongside himself since Nic Cage in Adaptation. From a technical standpoint his acting is sure to impress even causality snobs who scoff at Enemy‘s obscure logic. I had an issue with the ending—not with its content, but with its abruptness—but the movie’s unexpected final shot will provide enough speculative tinder to fuel a small industry of interpreters for years. Villeneuve shows an ability to evoke a panicky existential dread that rivals and fellow Canadian , while Enemy‘s concern with the frailty of identity places it somewhere on the venerable Persona spectrum.

After helming the Certified Weird Maelstrom (a drama narrated by a fish) and the grotesque gluttony short Next Floor, Denis Villeneuve’s career seemed headed for a more conventional turn after he scored more populist successes with the drama Incendies (2010) and the thriller Prisoners (2013). We’re happy to see he retains his urge toward the strange. And while Isabella Rossellini’s imprimatur always adds weird credibility to any film she appears in, we’re almost as thrilled by Sarah Gadon’s presence. Her preference for roles in oddball movies continues to impress—if she keeps this string up, she could become the next generation’s Isabella.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Gyllenhaal is impressive in a weirdly original thriller from Villeneuve that trips over its many legs at the finish.”–Jeff Baker, The Oregonian (contemporaneous)

Canonically Weird (The List)

163. 3 WOMEN (1977)

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“I’m trying to reach toward a picture that’s totally emotional, not narrative or intellectual, where an audience walks out and they can’t say anything but what they feel.”–Robert Altman (quoted in David Sterritt’s Criterion Collection essay)

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , Robert Fortier

PLOT: A young girl named Pinky begins working at a spa in California, where she eventually becomes roommates with her idol, Millie, who is a few years older. Millie believes herself to be popular, inviting people over for dinner parties and out on dates, but in reality nearly everyone avoids her except for Pinky. Then, after a near-fatal accident, Pinky undergoes a radical personality change…

Still from 3 Women (1977)
BACKGROUND:

  • Robert Altman conceived the picture after a dream he had while his wife was hospitalized: he dreamed the title of the film, the location, that it involved personality theft, and that it would star Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek.
  • 3 Women was made without a traditional screenplay. Instead, together with writer Patricia Resnick, Altman devised a 50 page treatment. The movie was then shot in sequence, with Altman writing out the next day’s scenes the night before, and the actors improvising much of the dialogue. Duvall wrote all of her character’s diary entries herself.
  • The murals were painted by an otherwise nearly unknown hippie artist working under the name “Bodhi Wind.”
  • Duvall’s performance won her a Best Actress nod at the Cannes Film Festival.
  • The movie was not available on home video in any form until 2004, due to the distributors’ failure to negotiate rights for Gerald Busby’s avant-garde musical score.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The paintings that decorate the swimming pool walls: strange creatures with scaly legs and baboon faces, engaged in bizarre, violent courting rituals. A male stands with his arms outstretched and his stout penis hanging proudly between his legs while females scatter, looking over their shoulders and baring their fangs at him. Shots of these two murals, which inside the movie’s reality are painted by Janice Rule’s character, occur over and over throughout the film, including over the opening and closing credits. Oddly enough, the shot most associated with 3 Women—the one that illustrates the DVD cover and accompanies most reviews—doesn’t even occur in the film. The photograph of Sissy Spacek entwined in Shelly Duval’s arms as they recline against a fresco depicting one simian lizard creature strangling another was a promotional photo. 3 Women is that kind of movie: the type that’s best represented by something lying outside of its own boundaries.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: 3 Women is based on an uneasy dream suffered by Robert Altman, and incredible performances by Sissy Spacek and (especially) Shelly Duvall turn it into a collaborative dream. Although most of the movie is naturalistic, with nothing happening that could not quite happen in our reality, there is nonetheless a dreadful sense of illusoriness, as if we’re seeing events through a gauze.


Original trailer for 3 Women

COMMENTS: Tucked away on the long stretch of nowhere between Persona (1966) and Lost Highway (1997) lies 3 Women, the 1970s iteration Continue reading 163. 3 WOMEN (1977) →