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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: COMING APART (1969)

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DIRECTED BY: Milton Moses Ginsberg

FEATURING: Rip Torn, Sally Kirkland, Viveca Lindfors

PLOT: A psychiatrist sets himself up in an apartment overlooking the East River where he beds a series of women, all the while heading steadily toward a complete mental breakdown.

Still from "Coming Apart" (1969)


COMMENTS: It’s hard to appreciate just how strange the conceit of Coming Apart must have felt to moviegoers in 1969. Here in the second quarter of the 21st century, when people document their lives frequently and extensively, the sheer strangeness of a man choosing to capture his illicit second life on film just doesn’t come across the same. Viewers at the time were surely perplexed by a film that seemed to be composed entirely a footage taken from a single vantage point. It must have seemed like nothing short of voyeurism, the worst kind of candid camera. Contemporary reviews of the film frequently flail about for the one point of comparison they have at hand: James McBride’s groundbreaking pseudo-documentary David Holzman’s Diary. But while this intentionally self-aware movie has similar vibes, Coming Apart is something very different. Ginsberg crafts a silver screen salute to a man who feels compelled to chronicle his life for a very compelling reason: self-loathing.

Torn’s erstwhile analyst has ditched his career and his pregnant wife, creating a new identity for himself by setting up shop in a Kips Bay love nest. He doesn’t seem at all clear as to why he’s doing this, and for reasons even he can’t begin to unpack, he decides to film everything, making this an early example of the found footage genre. The footage we find is largely his attempts at seduction, successful to varying degrees; but while this is a film with plenty of sex, it’s much more about the manipulations and deceptions that are perpetrated just to get to the act. The wayward Dr. Glaser is an easygoing seducer, but he gets no enjoyment out of it, neither the hunt nor the kill.  He’s like a man grazing at the buffet not because he’s hungry but because there’s food. Anyone approaching Coming Apart looking for sexytimes is likely to end up as disappointed as Glaser.

For anyone who knows Torn primarily from the lacerating deadpan he brings to later projects like Defending Your Life, Men in Black, or “The Larry Sanders Show,” his work here is revelatory. He deploys his gravelly baritone infrequently, communicating largely through the subtlest of expressions. It can feel like he’s hardly acting at all, until a crucial scene late in the movie when he goes nearly catatonic and you realize just how emotive he has been all along. Most of the women opposite him, such as Lois Markle’s aspiring fetish-lover or Lynn Swan’s mercenary young mom, are richly detailed, although they can feel melodramatic by comparison. The characters who avoid sex are the most grounded, like Viveca Lindfors’ ex-mistress who tells Torn to his face that his charms won’t work on her anymore. Standing out among the crowd is Sally Kirkland, whose growing mania is grounded by her shockingly total lack of vanity or guardedness. Her role could easily be viewed as “the crazy broad,” but she earns respect and sympathy by giving nothing less than her all. The idea that Torn’s hidden camera captures these people so authentically justifies the gimmick.

While the filming technique suggests gritty realism, the characters and situations we encounter feel forced, as most of Glaser’s sexual partners bring their own lunacy to the show. Were it not for the bad doctor’s slow-motion breakdown, it might be easy to interpret the film’s message as “women be wack.” It is interesting, though, to see documentary formalism deployed in an experimental manner. In the early hangover following the sexual revolution, Ginsberg’s daring feature has the smarts to get out of the way and let the stories of the shellshocked survivors speak for themselves.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… almost every image is half real, half the reverse of reality, which is, I suppose, a legitimate cinematic equivalent of the way one automatically supplements reality with fantasy in conscious experience…  the screenplay, like the film, eventually drifts in a horizontal direction into a kind of foggy confusion.” – Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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

Coming Apart [Blu-ray]

Coming Apart [Blu-ray]

  • Rip Torn (Men in Black) gives one of the great screen performances as a psychiatrist secretly filming his own mental breakdown in Milton Moses Ginsberg’s classic exploration of dark eroticism and self-referential cinematic form

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CAPSULE: ALTERED PERCEPTIONS (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Jorge Ameer

FEATURING: Oran Stainbrook, Matt Fling, Danny Fehsenfeld, Vincent Giovanni, ,

PLOT: Pandemic, violence, and sedition threaten to destroy the United States; a father and son embedded in opposing political organizations are its last hope.

COMMENTS: Like most movies, Altered Perceptions ends with the standard notice, “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” I’m going to go ahead and ignore that. With characters like slimy Senator Ted DeMarcos, bigoted Governor Ron San Diego, and an obvious George Santos look-alike as a spineless henchman (sportingly portrayed by director Jorge Ameer himself), it is clear just which politico goons the filmmaker is referencing. Indeed, the protagonist’s name—Alex Feretti, son of Dr. Feretti, a Whitehouse disease big-wig—echoes a certain Dr. A. Fauci of pandemic fame.

And what a pandemic! Sure, Covid was bad enough, but it seems that the vaccines and boosters for it trigger a nasty mental deterioration coupled with homi- and suicidal violence in many who received it, especially blacks and HOMOsexuals (emphasis mimicking DeMarcos’ singular pronunciation). This leads to chaos in the country, which a gallery of secessionist goons take advantage of, ultimately requesting that all Blacks and HOMOsexuals who have received the vaccine voluntarily check in to observation facilities in America’s South and Southwest. And oh yes, it affects the elderly, too (cue not-at-all-President-Biden being called on to step down); and what with the pre-eminent disease guy (aforementioned Doctor F̶a̶u̶c̶i̶ Feretti) being a prominent homosexual, it’s all looking very bad for various put-upon groups.

The paragraph above is ill-wrought, so as to better give you an idea of the narrative flow of Altered Perceptions—and I haven’t yet even touched upon the fully-frontally nude time traveler who is desperate to enlist the help of Alex Feretti, who is not only the son of the nationally known doctor but also the top aide to Senator DeMarcos. These shotgun blasts of social commentary, interspersed with interludes of well-intentioned guesses at what a gay relationship is like, crackle over the course of two hours as we watch society collapse from both macro- and micro-focus. And before I forget, there’s a strange plot from North Korea brewing as well.

Jorge Ameer kept my interest throughout, it is true. But much of that stemmed from the constant crinkling sound I heard as the plot unfurled. The screenwriter is a neuropsychologist, and while axes are ground, its never clear what they ultimately end up swung at. Ameer is obviously earnest, but his technical (and storytelling) proficiency is only a few notches above Tommy Wiseau’s. The acting ranges from C- to B+, with son Feretti scoring the former and father Feretti the latter, rendering their interactions one-sidedly stilted. And while I don’t hold clunky special effects against anyone, others do—and are so warned.

Still, I much prefer a film’s reach to exceed its grasp than vice versa, and while I could reel off any number of further quibbles, I’d feel petty doing so. Ameer takes a stab at making a Big Movie with Big Ideas under the restraints of a low budget. If you will allow the use of a crummy double-metaphor, Altered Perceptions is like a slice of Swiss cheese: there are plenty of holes; but also like a slice of Swiss cheese, it holds together just enough to make it a notable addition in the greater Sandwich of Cinema.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… this is a glitchy, channel-surfing trawl through recent American history, where the dialogue is stylised and repetitive, the characters dumbed down, and the narrative unbelievable to the point of surrealism. Yet this is part of the point: for here, as in a Neil Breen film, artifice is foregrounded, the medium is the message, and ultimately it is the viewer’s perceptions which are altered, as Ameer – who also plays one of DeMarcos’ aides – infects us all with the maddening irrationality of America’s contemporary culture wars.”–Anton Bitel, Projected Figures (contemporaneous)

Altered Perceptions [Blu-ray]

Altered Perceptions [Blu-ray]
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List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: HUMAN HIGHWAY (1982)

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DIRECTED BY: Neil Young (as Bernard Shakey),

FEATURING: Neil Young, , Dean Stockwell, , , , , Devo

PLOT: A formless counterculture comedy centered around a garage/coffee shop in Glowtown, an irradiated community located by a nuclear plant in the dystopian near future.

Still from Human Highway (1982)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Did you know that, in the early 1980s, Neil Young farted around with filmmaking under the pseudonym “Bernard Shakey” and got Devo and a bunch of aging Hollywood acidheads (Dennis Hopper, Russ Tamblyn, Dean Stockwell) to run around in a goofy apocalyptic musical comedy? You gotta hand it to Young–he can’t act, he can’t direct, but he can make a weird movie.

COMMENTS: Just a hunch, but when Neil Young invited Dennis Hopper and pals out to the California desert to make a movie, there may have been drugs on the set. The cast is not afraid to go all out and look ridiculous, which might be due to being too high to care. Human Highway is a series of mostly improvised vignettes set in the Southwestern dystopia of “Glowtown,” centered around a gas station/diner, with side trips to the local nuclear power plant where Devo work as singing, glowing waste disposal engineers. There are several plot threads: imminent nuclear war, a harried Dean Stockwell trying to cut costs and raise prices to turn a profit, Lionel’s hopeless crush on a waitress, and an upcoming talent show. There’s also a flying saucer piloted by “oil-rich Indians” that shows up every now and then. All of these storylines get dropped when Lionel is conked on the head with a wrench and has a dream sequence consisting of about three Neil Young music videos strung together. He wakes up to the apocalypse, and a dance number.

If nothing else, the cast is interesting. Devo is featured prominently, and Booji Boy (a childlike band mascot/character played by Mark Mothersbaugh in a rubber mask and falsetto) gets some of the best bits. Hopper plays a couple of different roles besides the cook, but he isn’t memorable in any of them. Stockwell doesn’t have a lot of material to work with, and Tamblyn has even less, relegated to the role of Young’s sidekick. With fake buck teeth and oversized glasses, Young is OK, I guess, as Lionel the dopey hick mechanic—but why give himself the toughest comic role, rather than handing it off to one of his buddies who knew how to act? After Neil jokes that he should have died of radiation poisoning because he worked on radiators all his life, we start to get the feeling that the comedy might be intentionally lame, just like the backgrounds he and Tamblyn pedal past on their bicycles are intentionally fake. It’s like a parody of a movie (which is different than a parody movie).

Despite the fact that the flick, which was a goofy lark up to that point, grinds to a halt when Lionel has his rock star dream sequence, more songs would have been nice—if they had been scattered more evenly throughout the film. The musical highlights include Devo doing the folk standard “It Takes a Worried Man (To Sing a Worried Song)” (twice), and a novel New Wave-y collaboration with the band on Young’s “Hey Hey My My” (with Booji Boy squeaking the lyrics while Neil delivers an acidic guitar solo). And who can forget the closer, a surreal post-apocalyptic Casio deconstruction of “Blowin’ in the Wind” (recast as “Breakin’ in the Wind,” with Booji reciting lyrics like “and how many sweating hands will pull pulsing pickles, bright and orange, spewing liquid vile and green”)? Pitched as an anarchic musical rather than an improvised indulgence, Human Highway may have had a shot at being a successful cult film, instead of a legendary oddity sought out by fans of the featured performers.

Human Highway was made in 1982, and for some reason filmed in a 4:3 aspect ratio—did they have a TV audience in mind? (It was made at the dawn of MTV and the USA Network’s edgy “Night Flight,” where it would have been a perfect fit). In any event, Highway was barely screened during its initial theatrical run, but found a small audience on VHS. In 2016 it had a limited run re-release in Young’s “director’s cut” edition, which trimmed 8 minutes off the running time. A budget DVD, in a cardboard sleeve, followed later in the year.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…never released until it came to home video in 1996, which is surprising: while it’s certainly way too weird to have played to mainstream audiences, it should certainly have done well on the midnight circuit that still existed when it was made.”–TV Guide

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