Tag Archives: Religion

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: UNITED TRASH (1996)

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aka The Slit

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DIRECTED BY: Christoph Schlingensief

FEATURING: Udo Kier, Kitten Natividad, Joachim Tomaschewsky, Johnny Pfeifer, Jones Muguse, Thomas Chibwe

PLOT: The wife of a gay German UN commander stationed in Africa gives birth to a child who is declared the new messiah; when an accident causes the boy to be horribly injured and endangers the UN mission, an escalating battle for power arises between the power-hungry commander, a religious leader who has declared war on the Vatican, and a chieftain who is attempting to actualize his dream to ride a ramshackle rocket into the White House to kill the American president.

Still from United Trash [AKA The Slit] (1996)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Movies can be weird, they can be strange, they can be bizarre, but it’s rare to come across a movie that is actually insane. Under the trappings of satire on a global scale, United Trash offers a critique of international affairs forged in the crucible of late 20th century daytime talk shows. There is not a single character in the film who isn’t as awful as they can be, nor a situation that is not plussed to become the most grotesque version of itself. So many fluids are spattered across the screen, everyone is subject to abject humiliation, and not a single institution fails to be undermined. Rarely has a film’s contempt for its subjects been so blatant and so complete, nor has a commitment to the most base appeals for a laugh been pursued so vigorously.

COMMENTS: In a career cut appallingly short by cancer, Christoph Schlingensief racked up a remarkable number of achievements, including staging a Wagner opera at the Bayreuth Festival, making plans to build a performing arts center in Burkina Faso, and curating a retrospective of his art that was staged posthumously at the Vienna Biennale. In cinema, he created a trilogy of films exploring the trauma caused by both the rise of Hitler and the process of German reunification. (The last of those, Terror 2000, also sits in our Reader Queue.) And in the middle of all this, he directed a film in which Udo Kier paints himself in blackface, dons a skirt made of bananas, and dances like a monkey in front of an audience of Africans while stroking the center banana aggressively. It’s an extraordinary career.

United Trash features one of the most game casts I have ever seen. There’s not an ounce of shame among the lot of them. They got the note that subtlety would be punishable by death, and they responded by going furiously over the top. Keir leads the way with his relentless prissiness, matched by a frequently naked Natividad raving maniacally about her lack of sexual satisfaction. They are surrounded by actors working just as hard to win the title of Least Restrained Performance, including a Hitler-mustachioed doctor/rocket scientist, an amoral, sexually ravenous, Vatican-hating priest, and Keir’s absurdly bewigged, unexpectedly jacked, child-molesting Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: UNITED TRASH (1996) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

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DIRECTED BY: Abel Ferrara

FEATURING: Harvey Keitel, Frankie Thorn, Zoe Lund, Paul Hipp

PLOT: A dirty cop indulges his many addictions as he pursues the culprits behind a horrible sexual assault on a nun.Still from Bad Lieutenant (1992)

COMMENTS: Central characters who are bad—flouting conventions, horrifying the prim and proper, indulging the id—are the stuff of Hollywood cliché. Between all the bad moms and bad teachers and bad Santas, these comical antiheroes can feel played out. But Abel Ferrara would never be lumped in with conventional showbiz trends, and his Bad Protagonist can in no way be misconstrued as a good-natured rebel thumbing his the nose at society. If anything, it’s the “Lieutenant” that’s superfluous in this title: our hero is a bad detective, a bad dad, a bad colleague, a bad gambler, a bad Catholic, a bad john. He drinks (sometimes upon waking up), he smokes crack, he shoots heroin, and he steals cocaine and sells it to drug dealers, keeping a little for himself to snort off any handy surface (including pictures of his daughter’s first communion). He robs criminals. He cajoles his colleagues into giving them their money and turns around and makes terrible bets with it. He cavorts with prostitutes, extorts teenagers for humiliating sexual favors… hell, when he shows up to a double homicide, he takes a lingering look at the victims’ breasts. And this is long before we witness him hurling vulgar invective at Jesus Christ. Ya get it, folks? The guy is just spectacularly bad.

Lost in the wonder of Nicolas Cage’s out-there turn in the quasi-sequel Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (and a third film supposedly in the works set in Tokyo and to be directed by Takashi Miike) is the fact that the original was a deliberate shocker in its own time. Ferrara pulls no punches, dramatizing every despicable moment in exacting detail as part of what my colleague Gregory J. Smalley called “an overwrought, magnificent Christian parable that sought to demonstrate God’s infinite capacity for forgiveness by presenting a character that audiences couldn’t forgive.” Bad Lieutenant is a Book of Job for its audience, dragging viewers through the muck and the mire and daring them to re-evaluate their notions of sacred and profane.

One should always be hesitant in using the word “brave” to describe an acting performance; it is just acting, after all. But Keitel’s work here is undeniably go-for-broke, and sometimes it borders on comedy to see just how horrible he’s willing to appear. He never stops talking, only yielding when a woman injects him with smack. He’s hostile to nearly everyone he encounters (including one of his kids portrayed by his real-life daughter). Contemporary critics made much of a full-frontal nude scene, a traditional line-in-the-sand for mainstream cinema, but Keitel is arguably even more naked in his fully clothed, emotionally raw confrontation with Christ, letting all his feigned confidence and gruff bravado drop in a desperate cri de coeur. The film’s Act 3 twist, in which he makes a series of questionable choices in an attempt to find redemption, only makes sense because Keitel has laid the groundwork for a character for whom no decision is unthinkable.

Bad Lieutenant is outrageous in the extraordinary awfulness of its title character, but not especially weird. Keitel’s troubles are entirely of his own making, and his desperate attempts to keep his head above water while insisting on tying more and more weights to his ankles have become more common in recent years, most notably in the frantic machinations of the Safdie brothers. Bad Lieutenant would make an excellent companion piece to the Apocryphally enshrined God Told Me To; both films force their central detectives to confront the nature of the Almighty and their unstable faith in the face of events in the living world, although their journeys are nearly polar opposites.

There’s an entertaining piece of subtext in the way Keitel’s fortunes mirror the championship baseball series that soundtracks the film. We learn from the outset that a comeback by the hapless New York Mets from a 3-0 deficit in a playoff showdown with the rival Los Angeles Dodgers would require nothing short of a miracle. (It’s a feat that would actually be pulled off for the first and only time 12 years later, by the 2004 Boston Red Sox.) Naturally, Keitel has stopped believing in miracles and so forsakes his hometown team, continuing to put his money and his life behind the ascendant Dodgers and slugger Darryl Strawberry, a prodigious talent who himself was infamously brought down by drugs. Of course, Keitel is in so deep to his bad bets that when things go south, he swivels on a dime from attaboy-cheering to racial epithets, punctuated by a gunshot to the car radio. Yes, he’s a bad, bad man, but it’s not his badness that brings him down. It’s his failure to heed the advice of another Met: “Ya gotta believe.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an illuminating, excoriating descent into the cesspool of sin, self-loathing and defilement. This is not an easy film to watch… This bizarre ecclesiastical dimension is what makes “Bad Lieutenant” more than a shallow wallow in the muck. Ferrara does make his moral points, and though one feels dirtied in the process, there is an accompanying feeling of purification as well.” – Hal Hinson, Washington Post (contemporaneous)

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

Bad Lieutenant (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

Bad Lieutenant (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

  • A degenerate cop who snorts coke, bets on playoffs and drinks himself into stupors starts to pull himself out of the abyss when he investi- gates the rape of a nun who refuses to press charges.

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Capsules

CAPSULE: ADAM’S APPLES (2005)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Ulrich Tomnsen, , Nikolas Bro

PLOT: Priest with a troubled past tries to provide a way to redemption for a young neo- Nazi.

Still from Adam's Apples (2005)

COMMENTS: An aggressive man arrives at a chapel as part of a social reintegration program. Accompanied by two other ex-criminals, he will strive for personal redemption under the guidance of an enigmatic priest with some controversial methods and a tragic past.

Sometimes redemption is just an apple pie away. A trivial purpose, the baking of an apple cake, motivates the young neo-Nazi protagonist, and becomes his path. However, this tale is not really about him, or at least not only about him. He is mostly a vessel to introduced us to his mentor, the  priest, a tragic figure hauntingly performed by one of today’s most acclaimed European actors, Mads Mikkelsen (a close collaborator of director Jensen).

And what a personality this priest is! Even though he has been struck by many misfortunes in his life, he maintains a sense of confidence in himself and in God’s plan, while striving to remain a role model for others. Not everything is as it seems, though, and it is gradually revealed that his calmness is an effect of his constant denial to acknowledge burdensome tragedies. He will have to confront his demons, abandon hope, and embrace stoicism if he wants to obtain true happiness and find salvation. Shots of the priest in his car—either as a driver or as a passenger—masterfully convey the ups and downs of his mental state.

What we have here is not exactly a character study, however. Hints of the supernatural and the magically realist, like crows and worms that try to prevent the baking of the apple pie mentioned above, give this tale the sense of a religious parable. Moreover, the movie draws a comparison between Mikkelsen’s priest and the Old Testament’s Job, making this movie akin to a modern retelling of the classic tale.

From start to finish, this is a grim and haunting cinematic experience, an art-house oddity with parabolic tones and much religious symbolism. It is recommended mostly for fans of religious dramas in a contemporary setting; ‘s Calvary (2014) and the Danish series “Ride Upon the Storm” by Adam Price are similar, even when they stray away from the weirder aspects of this work.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The performances are spot-on, as all play this darkly funny material as if they are in a deadly serious Shakespearean drama, highlighting the situation’s absurdities and asking us to consider how much our reality is shaped by our preconceptions, beliefs and, yes, faith.”–Dan Jardine, Cinemania (festival screening)

Adam's Apples

Adam's Apples

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

Apocryphally Weird

61*. ON THE SILVER GLOBE (1988)

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Na srebrnym globie

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Recommended

“The Ministry may have had various reasons for curtailing production, but it’s not inconceivable that someone there simply thought that another 40 minutes of this stuff might just have been too much for viewers’ sanity.”–Jonathan Romney, Film Comment

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Andrzej Seweryn, Jerzy Trela, Iwona Bielska, Grażyna Dyląg, Waldemar Kownacki,

PLOT: Three astronauts are stranded on an Earthlike planet and populate it with their offspring over the years. Decades later, another astronaut, Marek, travels to the planet and is revered as a messiah who the people believe will lead them to victory over the birdlike Shern. Meanwhile, back on Earth, it is revealed that Marek was chosen for the mission by two scientist, one of whom was his girlfriend, who wanted him out of the way so they could continue their affair.

Still from on the silver globe (1988)

BACKGROUND:

  • Based on the novel series “The Lunar Trilogy,” which was written by director Zulawski’s great uncle Jerzy Zulawski.
  • In the books, completed in 1911, the “silver globe” is the Earth’s Moon; in this modern adaptation this obviously had to be changed to an extraterrestrial planet. The Moon location explains why travel between the two locations is a relatively simple and quick matter.
  • After his second film, The Devil (1972), was banned by Polish authorities, Zulawski moved to France in a mutually-agreed-upon exile. When his first French production, The Important Thing Is to Love (1975) became a prestigious art-house hit, the same authorities invited him to return to Poland to work on a project of his choice. He chose On the Silver Globe.
  • On the Silver Globe had a torturous production history. In 1977 Polish authorities shut down the shoot before completion, citing both cost and ideological objections, and ordered the footage destroyed. Fortunately, this instruction was not completely followed (in the film’s prologue, Zulawski laments that the government “murdered” 1/5 of his work). In 1988 the director was able to reconstruct the surviving footage and create a nearly complete film, using narration spoken over new footage of Polish streets to fill in the gaps for the missing scenes and hiring new actors to overdub some of the old ones. The reconstruction debuted at Cannes in 1988. You can find more detail in El Rob Hubbard‘s reviews of the film itself and on the documentary Escape to the Silver Globe (2021).
  • Much of the dialogue was taken or adapted from various mystical texts, rather than from the novel itself.
  • Voted onto the Apocrypha by readers in this poll.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: On a beach, dozens of soldiers are impaled (apparently through the anus) on spikes which must be thirty feet high. (One crane shot shows us an actor who is actually precariously perched on the pole.) Two robed Pharisee types in leprous caked makeup converse as they are shot from below, with the torture victims soaring above them like orbiting bodies in the sky.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Messy orange-blooded bird/woman sex; interplanetary travel pill

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: On the Silver Globe is a Cubist science fiction epic, presented as if it were being performed by a severely stoned 1970s avant-garde theater troupe enacting obscure Masonic rituals on a beach in Estonia at a point when every single actor is undergoing either a devastating breakup or a profound existential crisis (usually both). Without commentary, the plot is nearly impossible to follow in a single viewing, but the movie is definitely something you’ve never seen before.

Trailer for On the Silver Globe reconstruction

COMMENTS: On the Silver Globe‘s plot is so difficult to divine that  Continue reading 61*. ON THE SILVER GLOBE (1988) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MAGDALENA VIRAGA (1986)

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DIRECTED BY: Nina Menkes

FEATURING: Tinka Menkes, Claire Aguilar, Nora Bendich

PLOT: A sex worker endures a dreary, repetitive existence soliciting and servicing clients, and then is accused of murdering a trick.

Still from Magdalena Viraga (1986)

COMMENTS: One ever-present danger in reviewing films is that your assessment will miss the boat because you, the reviewer, are not the movie’s intended audience. Yes, cinema is a mass media and no creator can guarantee that their work will be understood as intended by everyone, but issues of language, race, gender, culture, and the like are always out there, hinting that you may not get all the nuance you need to give a movie a fair shake. So my antennae are out for a film whose director describes it as a “hallucinogenic journey through the boundless vortex of unadulterated Female space.” It just may be that this particular film has not been crafted to reach me.

Of course, even I can recognize that the life of Ida (played by the director’s sister, Tinka) is pretty grim. We watch her ply her trade with nearly a dozen different clients, and the scenes of Ida at work are brutal in their length and detachment. Menkes shows nothing explicit, but the drudgery of the experience is awful enough. She employs a steady closeup that never leaves Ida’s deadened, detached expression. Even as we watch her endure the grunts and pants of her john, she evinces no emotion whatsoever, completely removed from the moment. On one occasion, we’re treated to the preamble to the act—two people seated on a bed, tired and unmoving and refusing to make eye contact—which is possibly worse. Another time, her partner bounces atop her so manically that she is forced to enter the moment, pleading, “Slowly!” It is a joyless existence, categorically designed to render her passive and intellectually irrelevant. Not that anyone would be up to the challenge of a conversation. At the end of one such encounter, she tries to engage: “I dream that I often long for water. I dream that when I close my eyes, I see water. When I close my eyes, I do see water. What is water?” Her trick’s vacant response: “I dunno.”

When demonstrating the dehumanizing situation in which Ida finds herself, Magdalena Viraga is potent cinema. Menkes defiantly subverts the decades of entropy that have enshrined the male gaze in the fundamentals of filmmaking. Unfortunately, there’s another layer of story that feels less like a feminist cri de cœur and more like a thumb on the scale. Ida’s tale is told in a nonlinear fashion, so we know from the outset that she has been arrested for murder. As the details of the crime and the case against her are revealed, we’re forced to reckon with a movie that wants to present facts that demonstrate the unfairness of the situation while insisting that we ignore the absurdity of those facts. It’s a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose bargain.

Some explanation: we see the murder itself (a cold act with all the speed, action, and even nudity that the rest of the film steadfastly avoids), and it would seem impossible for the crime to be blamed on Ida, especially since her explanation that the blood covering her is menstrual should be easy to establish. Regardless, there’s no hint of a trial. Instead, we get a scene where the prison warden tells Ida’s friend, hilariously, “I’m sorry, but we must execute murderers. It’s absolute policy,” as though she had been trying to negotiate the return of a faulty product. And then there’s the jail itself, with an interior that resembles a monastery, complete with a cell containing a stained-glass window, a table like an altar, bars composed of ornate metalwork, and a large crucifix on the wall. The fact that everyone in the prison is forced to attend mass in a well-appointed chapel gives the game away; Menkes is also here to call out the Church for its role in the oppression of women. It’s a reasonable charge, but the realism and the allegory mix poorly.

I can imagine a version of Magdalena Viraga where Menkes commits entirely to a presentational, Brechtian style. Tinka Menkes’ delivery of her lines is uniformly flat, a fact the film leans into by staging scenes where she and her fellow sex workers stare directly into the camera and intone resigned koans. Much of the impenetrable dialogue in the film is actually drawn from the poetry of Gertrude Stein, Mary Daly, and Anne Sexton, meaning our characters literally have no words of their own. In this version of the film, Ida isn’t a person at all, but symbol of all the women who quietly suffer the indignities heaped upon their sex. The efforts to make her relatable, to lend credibility to her as a character, only shortchange the message. I guess what I’m saying is, I wish that Magdalena Viraga wasn’t quite so concerned with being crafted to reach me.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[a] visually appealing but plotless surreal film … It’s an unusual and powerful tale that is filmed in a dreamlike landscape and in a metaphysical world where meaning is not always rationally apparent.” Dennis Schwartz, Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews

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

MAGDALENA VIRAGA

MAGDALENA VIRAGA
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