Tag Archives: Romance

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: A WOMAN’S FACE (1941)

Leave a comment

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Joan Crawford, , , Osa Massen

PLOT: Anna Holm stands accused of murder; during the course of her trial, the court learns of her unhappy past as a woman with a hideous facial scar that has led her into committing crimes against the populace that scorns her.

Still from A Woman's Face (1941)

COMMENTS: Anyone who thinks of Joan Crawford today is inclined to view her as a monster. A series of unfortunate films that concluded her career, including as Strait-Jacket, Berserk and Trog, could be to blame. It might be because of her role in the American Guignol What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and her rivalry with , mythologized in “Feud: Bette and Joan.” But let’s not kid ourselves. It’s mostly Mommie Dearest. Daughter Christina’s nightmare account of her upbringing and Faye Dunaway’s subsequent portrayal of Crawford as a legendarily campy villain cemented her reputation as an icy devil with the veneer of Disney’s Evil Queen.

This makes watching A Woman’s Face a peculiar proposition, because it acts as a kind of retroactive rebuttal to all the gossip and the negative imagery. Crawford’s put-upon heroine knows what you think of her (one poster for the film blares, “They called her a scarfaced she-devil!”), and she would only be too happy to play the part, if only her soul wasn’t so pure and broken.

A Woman’s Face (based on a Swedish film starring Ingrid Bergman, which itself was adapted from a French play) is at its core an examination of what makes someone do bad things. This film’s argument is that Anna isn’t bad, she’s just drawn that way. Her disfigurement at a young age has provided her with a life of rejection and derision, and she instinctively responds in kind. It’s no wonder that she immediately melts for Veidt simply for doing her the courtesy of not recoiling at the sight of her. And most of the people we meet early on seem to deserve her scorn, particularly the duplicitous Massen, upon whom Crawford vents her anger in a thrilling display of violence.

Unfortunately, this premise means that, once Crawford’s visage is restored thanks to Douglas’ ministrations, the machinations required to push her into a far more reprehensible crime feel extremely forced. Crawford’s heart is never really in the murderous scheme pressed upon her, especially after she meets the precocious moppet who is to be her victim. (It’s a genuinely heartbreaking moment when the kid displays a typical example of youthful insensitivity, and she reaches instinctively to cover her repaired face.) Veidt, meanwhile, is entertainingly evil but not actually that persuasive, an issue director Cukor would resolve more effectively four years later in Gaslight. So you just have to take it on faith that she might do this awful deed, even though there’s nothing to outwardly indicate this. Further examples of the film not playing fair with the audience: witnesses are interrogated in an order designed for maximum delay and misdirection (in what universe does the defendant take the stand in the middle of the trial?), and a decisive piece of evidence is withheld until late in the third act and further hidden from the film’s characters until the closing minutes. 

A lot of this is silly carping on my part, because this is classic melodrama, pure and simple. The Phantom of the Opera-esque scar lends a veneer of strangeness to the formula (as does an amusingly odd Swedish folk dance that takes up a surprising amount of screen time), but the real centerpiece is Crawford deftly playing to both extremes of her reputation. Perhaps only she would be strong enough to wield a gun in the film’s climax while also weak enough to lash out at the perceived manipulations of everyone around her. Joan Crawford knows you think she’s a monster, and she’s not ashamed to shed a tear over it, either.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A Woman’s Face is magnificently daft, but the gorgeously photographed Crawford’s intense, persuasive star turn and Cukor’s attentive, crafted film-making work make it compelling.” – Derek Winnert, derekwinnert.com

OTHER LINK OF INTEREST: 

Six Degrees of Joan Crawford – Karina Longworth’s deservedly acclaimed Hollywood history podcast You Must Remember This devoted a sextet of episodes to Crawford’s career and her position as “the quintessential female star of the 20th century.”

(This movie was nominated for review by s, who calls it “pretty startling for a 1940’s ‘women’s picture’” and says “(t)he third act is a real stunner.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE DREAMS OF RENE SENDAM (2022)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Joshua Zev Nathan

FEATURING: Jake Smith, Sophia Savage, Darwin Luján, Becca Huerter

PLOT: A socially awkward poetry student pursues relationships with classmates which mix up in his mind with his dreams.

Still from The Dreams of Rene Sendam (2022)

COMMENTS: Microbudget features require a different set of expectations from the viewer. Watching and appreciating them is a learned skill, not something that comes naturally to modern filmgoers accustomed to plots which are advanced by CGI as much as dialogue. Movies like The Dreams of Rene Sendam, therefore, aim at a niche audience. You need to be able to handle a minimalist presentation and develop an appreciation for what filmmakers can accomplish with little means. These films offer their audiences not spectacle and diversion, but authenticity and passion. Even when they don’t entirely succeed, I often develop a soft spot for them simply because they have more personality than big budget, focus-grouped features developed with corporate blandness. Such is the case with The Dreams of Rene Sendam.

Rene Sendam is a character study/romance infused with the spirit of poetry—in the wispy, hazy, undergraduate free verse mode. The main character is a poetry student, trying to pick up other poetry students in poetry class while we hear lectures and verses from a poetry professor. Unfortunately Rene, while quietly handsome and a sensitive soul, is so shy and awkward that he gives off creepy stalker vibes. His only friend is religious zealot Jim (Darwin Luján, who gives the film’s best performance, taking a word association game to apocalyptic lengths). As Rene wanders through the film writing poetry, he searches for what he really wants—love—as occasional surprising bouts of nudity and sex interrupt the proceedings.

Despite featuring in the title, Rene’s dreams aren’t much integrated into the film’s artistic framework. The fact that he sometimes (rarely) has vivid dreams that we are privy to is just a character trait, like bushy eyebrows or a love of houseplants. Although the logline brags that Rene’s “dream world threatens to rupture reality and put his friend’s life in danger,” the unruptured reality is that the simple love story that the script wants to tell could easily be rewritten to omit the brief flights of fantasy without changing anything. Unlike a low-budget feature like Strawberry Mansion, the microbudgeted Rene Sendam has no money to create dream sequences, so we get simple hallucinations like dinner served on a beach. This movie’s dreams are so like its realities that there’s little ambiguity to the proceedings.

Like its protagonist, Rene Sendam always has good intentions, even if it doesn’t always deliver on them. To its credit, its dramatic scenarios have enough variation to keep you reasonably engaged. Ultimately, however, the film lacks the budget to realize its purposelessness.

Trivia/disclosure: a 366 Weird Movies writer worked as crew on this movie and appears as an extra. I was not aware of this fact until after it had been selected for review. It is available for purchase, or try it for free on Tubi.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“While it doesn’t all work and is a bit too ambiguous for its own good, the extremely adult unrated drama ‘The Dreams of Rene Sendam’ gets points for sheer ambition.”–Russ Simmons, KKFI (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: LO (2009)

1 Comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Travis Betz

FEATURING: Ward Roberts, Jeremiah Birkett, Sarah Lassez

PLOT: Justin uses a spell book to summon the infernal spirit Lo to help him see his dead girlfriend once again, but the demon uses every trick possible to avoid fulfilling the command.

Still from Lo (2009)

COMMENTS: There have been many movies about demonic possession, but few about demonic summoning… and no other, that I can think of, where almost the entire movie plays out from inside the safety of a pentagram. (Lo‘s closest competition for time spent inside a thaumaturgic circle might be Viy.) For the first five minutes we watch Justin, in a pitch black room lit solely by candles, painstakingly (if clumsily) construct this magical barrier, following the instructions etched on the yellowed parchment of an ancient grimoire, christening the ritual with his own blood. He then speaks the magic incantation and successfully summons the demon Lo, a pathetic yet powerful devil with a partly exposed brain and useless crushed legs which force him to painfully drag himself from out of the inky blackness towards his summoner, angry and defiant but unable to cross the enchanted barrier and devour Justin’s soul. The spell Justin cast compels a boon from this creature. You see, he saw a demon drag his girlfriend off to Hell, and now he wants her back—or at least to see her one last time. And Lo must meet Justin’s demand—although, in classic Mephistophelian fashion, the spirit isn’t above resorting to temptations, tricks, half-truths, and twisting Justin’s requests in any way he can.

The way Lo achieves its aesthetic aims on a minimal budget is nothing less than magical. Darkness is an ally; the set is a essentially black box, props are minimal, and only the demon costumes consume a significant amount of dollars. The flashbacks that supply the backstory are told through reenactments on a stage Lo conjures in Justin’s darkened apartment. There are red curtains, applause, visible stagehands, and comedy and tragedy masks that react to the proceedings. For additional color, Lo also summons a fuzzy green demon rat, a lizard-headed Nazi demon, a pair of damned silhouettes who press against a saran wrap wall as they describe the torments of Hell, and a couple of (mediocre, but welcome) musical numbers.

The story advances almost entirely through the antagonistic dialogues of the demon and his summoner. Chances are good that you will guess the twist ending early on; but it’s such a perfect construct that it doesn’t detract from the poignancy of the reveal. Who can’t relate to falling in love with the wrong person, a love that might be mutual and true, but which fate and circumstance dictates must be temporary? And who can’t relate to the compulsion to understand the true reasons behind a disappearance, however horrible the answer might be? As breakup movies go, Lo supplies a real, mythic catharsis.

With all that it has going for it, I would love to nominate Lo for our supplemental Apocryphally Weird list. Is it ingenious? Definitely. Engaging? Undoubtedly. Passionate? Sincerely. Recommended? You know it. Weird? Ah, here is where the favorable adjectives falter. Lo is well off the beaten path of the average filmgoer—the one who doesn’t frequent this site. What we see in Lo, though, isn’t so much weird as offbeat, rare, counter-Hollywood: unusual in its approach, by necessity, but not so far out-there that it makes us question our notions of reality, or if what a film can and should be. So, despite the fact that we give Lo a high rating, we won’t be adding it to our List. That doesn’t mean we’re giving you a pass to skip it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a peculiar and experimental horror film about love gained, love lost, and the demons that can stand in your way. ‘Lo’ is an odd twist on Faust, and an entertaining indie film that impresses with its bare essential filmmaking.”–Felix Vaquez, Cinema Crazed (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by Kat, who argued “I’m a little surprised not to see Travis Betz’s Lo (2009) on the suggestion list. Like Ink, its imitations and inspirations are pretty obvious– but I personally think it outstrips Ink in a few key areas, never over-stepping its budget. I found it a little more bizarre, too, in the way it takes a simple trope of a premise and reels continually between drama and dark comedy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

List Candidates

FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL 2021: STRAWBERRY MANSION (2021)

2 Comments

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Rent Strawberry Mansion on-demand

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: , Albert Birney

FEATURING: Kentucker Audley, Penny Fuller, Grace Glowicki, Reed Birney, Linas Phillips

PLOT: In the future, dreams are taxed, and when a dream auditor goes to check in on an elderly woman who’s off the grid, he finds himself drawn to dreams that are more free than his own.

Still from Strawberry Mansion (2021)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: With themes reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and a handmade aesthetic straight from The Science of Sleep, Strawberry Mansion is the 2020s American indie version of a turn-of-the-millennium Michel Gondry movie. It may be a tribute, but it’s a worthy trip of its own.

COMMENTS: Dream movies are tricky, and making a dream movie on a low budget is even trickier. Strawberry Mansion addresses these limitations up front. The introductory dream is minimalist: an everyday kitchen, but painted entirely pink, into which comes a friendly visitor bearing a bucket of fried chicken. Throughout the movie, dreams will be conveyed using these types of simple props and sets thrown together in incongruous ways: actors dressed as Halloween-costume frogs (playing saxophones) or mice (in sailor suits); walking shrubs; demons with turquoise light-bulb eyes. Add in the occasional stop-motion animated skeleton or caterpillar to go along with some simple green screen, and you’ve proven that you can convey an otherwordly feel without millions of dollars of CGI.

The second scene addresses the non-budgetary conundrum dream movies face: the cliché of slippage between the waking world and the dream world, and the idea that the audience must be on guard to discriminate between the two. Our hero (a bureaucrat with the Brazil-ish name “Preble”) awakes to find himself craving chicken, and goes to Cap’n Kelly’s drive-thru, where the A.I. clerk tries to sell him a brand new “Chicken Shake.” Chowing down in the parking lot, he has a brief flash-forward hallucination—and that’s it, as far as the old “blurring the lines between dream and reality” bit goes. There is no “real’ world in Strawberry Mansion to confuse with the dream world. The premise of this near-future vision isn’t dystopian science fiction, but light absurdist satire. The very idea of taxes on dreams—dream of a buffalo, and you’re assessed a twenty-five cent bill; dandelions are three cents apiece—is something that would only occur to you in a dream. There’s no narrative confusion about whether we’re in the characters’ dreams or the movie’s reality, and there’s also never any sense that we’re meant to take this cinematic world as more than a dream itself. This dream-inside-a-dream structure frees us up to experience the movie on its own terms, instead of falling into the psychological thriller trap of trying to distinguish what is a dream from what is “really happening.”

As Preble, Audley is rather bland as a slouchy, glum bureaucrat, but that’s by design; his character contrasts with the grandiose poetry of dreams, which go beyond workaday realities. Penny Fuller‘s eccentric Arabella—when he asks her what she does during the intake interview, she describes herself as an “atmosphere creator,” so he jots down “artist” on his form’s “occupation” line—is the sweet but slightly ridiculous woman who will seduce him into a more fulfilling mode of being human. Strawberry Mansion is a manifesto for resisting the numbing effects of modern technology—represented explicitly by advertising—in favor of the playful freedom of imagination. This message is wrapped in a sugary confection about a man and a woman who have a deep but chaste romance based on shared dreams rather than the passions of the physical world. It’s funny, gentle, and filled with funny, gentle dreams to tickle your imagination. It may be the best dream you’ll have this year, and it’s well worth the bill.

Kentucker Audley is best known as an actor in indie circles, but he also founded the website NoBudge, which curates low-budget (and often weird) short films from up-and-coming directors. Audley and co-writer/co-director Albert Birney previously collaborated on the absurdist comedy Silvio (2017), about a gorilla news anchor going through an existential crisis. Strawberry Mansion is inexplicably named after a Philadelphia neighborhood. It debuted at Sundance and already has a distributor (Music Box), so expect to see it available to the general public later this year, by early 2022 by the very latest.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Many will surely find the metaphysical derring-do and aggressive weirdness of Strawberry Mansion too much of an ask, but for those prepared to dive down its nutso rabbit-hole, it offers a divertingly free-wheeling vision.”–Shaun Munro, Flickering Myth (festival screening)

Apocryphally Weird

18*. GREEN SNAKE (1993)

3 Comments

 Ching se

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

“Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel honoured?”–D.H. Lawrence, “Snake”

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Maggie Cheung, Joey Wang, Wenzhuo Zhao, Hsing-Kuo Wu

PLOT: After imprisoning the soul of a shapeshifting spider in a bowl, a monk spares the lives of two snakes, one white and one green. The two snakes take human form, seeking to learn the wisdom of our species. White falls in love with a scholar, while Green is more mischievous and seductive; eventually, the monk regrets sparing the pair, and seeks to banish them to their old forms.

Still from Green Snake (1993)

BACKGROUND:

  • As a director, and perhaps even more importantly as a producer, Tsui Hark is one of the key figures in the Hong Kong New Wave of the 1980s and 1990s.
  • Hark wrote the screenplay based on Lilian Lee Pik-Wah’s novel, which was itself based on an ancient Chinese legend. In the original tale the Green Snake is a subordinate character to the White Snake, but in the novel and movie they are of approximately equal importance.
  • The same folktale was the basis for The Sorcerer and the White Snake (2011) with Jet Li, and the recent Chinese animated hits White Snake (2019) and Green Snake (2021).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: An amazing moment occurs when meditating monk Fa-hai is bedeviled by lustful demons, who appear to him as bald women in skintight cat suits. Shocked when one appears in his lap, he leaps ten feet into the air in front of his giant Buddha statue, then fights the felines off with a flaming sword while they taunt him.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Monk tempted by pussies; snake joins a Bollywood dance number

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Tsui Hark has style to spare, but spares none of it in this feverish epic filled with Taoist magic and Buddhist mysticism. A spectacle for the ages, Green Snake goes beyond the merely exotic into the realm of the hallucinatory.


UK trailer for Green Snake (1993)

COMMENTS: Green Snake gives you everything you could want in a Continue reading 18*. GREEN SNAKE (1993) →