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CAPSULE: THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Michael Felker

FEATURING: Adam David Thompson, Riley Dandy

PLOT: After a bank job, a brother and sister retreat to a safe-house whose operators task them with thwarting an intruder, lest the pair become “wiped.”

Still from Things Will Be Different (2024)

COMMENTS: The finger prints of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are all over Things Will Be Different. Time lopping, mysterious antagonists, and close quarters abound. I can easily see why they hopped aboard Michael Felker’s project as executive producers. But Felker deserves the credit for crafting this delightful outing: he wrote and directed the screenplay. (He was also good enough to slip Benson into a cameo.)

A worried phone conversation over a black screen: something is amiss, the two speakers need to lay low, and it should be all over in less than two weeks. Cue opening scene. Sidney, scoped hunting rifle over her shoulder, enters a diner to meet up with her brother Joseph, seated at the restaurant’s counter, and also carrying a scoped hunting rifle. They retreat to a remote farmhouse, scaring off a few randos who contact the authorities about these gun-toting desperadoes. As the cops arrive, Joseph and Sidney dive around the empty manse, feverishly resetting the clocks and then retreating to an upstairs closet furnished with a rotary phone. Following exact instructions from a cluttered notebook, they telephone someone, leave a cryptic message, and wait.

And wait. Their first fourteen days go by pleasantly. They noodle around the property and consume the provisions provided by someone. On the final day, they clean up, and wait. And wait. And they discover something went wrong, forcing the siblings navigate the strange technology which allows their temporal disappearance, and reckon with their impressively dispassionate minders who inform the pair that they must have them “wiped” in order to minimize trouble. Trouble for whom? From what? And just how, exactly? The days and weeks and months drift by, as Sidney explores archives and sifts through the house’s mementos in search of answers, while Joseph makes a shrine of the bolted metal safe containing the hand-held tape recorder which acts as their means of communication with the future.

Things Will Be Different grips you, whether you’re watching the ups and downs of Sidney’s and Joseph’s relationship, or being drip-fed information about the menacing intruder—not too menacing, though, as there’s a Say Anything boombox nod—and the clerks running the show (and time) off-screen. Felker’s world hints at an administrative grandiosity to space and time, and Benson’s character is revealed as something of an office jockey who just happens to be responsible for some heavy-duty quantum physics-challenging maneuvers.

I suspect there are holes in the film’s logic, though there may well not be. In either case, Felker makes us invested in his characters: the brother and sister who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, as well as the functionaries burdened with the thankless task of pleasing their superiors. At the end of the day, manipulating time is just a bureaucratic chore undergone with the same zeal as any 9-to-5 office work. However, in Things Will Be Different, there really isn’t an “end of the day”—just the hope that on the next run-through, things may be go differently.

Things Will Be Different is currently available for digital rental or purchase. A DVD release is scheduled for late January of 2025.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a funky and eclectic science-fiction tale that aims to keep the genre weird.”–M.N. Miller, Geek Vibes Nation (contemporaneous)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MEGALOPOLIS (2024) – THREE TAKES

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Keep reading for alternate takes from Giles Edwards and El Rob Hubbard

DIRECTED BY: Francis Ford Coppola

FEATURING: Adam Driver, , Jon Voight, , , , Lawrence Fishburne

PLOT: In mythical New Rome, inventor Caesar Catalina can stop time and has invented some kind of miracle substance called “Megalon,” but demagogues and rivals scheme to ruin him.

Still from Megalopolis (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Megalopolis is a movie conjured by an 85-year old film genius that feels like it could have been made by a fresh film school graduate, if someone had given the kid $120 million dollars and tasked him with making an Important Statement. And I mean this all as a compliment: Coppola here is as brash, fearless, ambitious, and pot-dazzled as a twenty-four-year old tyro with stars in his eyes. Acting your age is for politicians, not filmmakers. The resulting movie is a bizarre mashup of Titus (1999), Southland Tales (2006), and Metropolis (1927), and if the entire city of New Rome constantly glows with a golden hue, it’s because the movie’s bananas.

GREGORY J. SMALLEY COMMENTS: Francis Ford Coppola conceived of the idea for Megalopolis as early as 1977, so you would think he would have had some of it plotted out already when it came time to sell his winery and finance the film in 2019. But, by all appearances, he decided to throw away whatever notes he had made in the previous decades and just wing it. The movie is plotted like a Shakespearean epic—when it’s plotted at all. The basic idea is that America today is a lot like Rome as it neared the end of the Republic and slid into the grandest despotism the world had ever seen. The solution, in Coppola’s view? We need more dialogue, because, as Caesar says, ” when we ask these questions, when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.” Also, it might help to have the unexplained ability to stop time, and to develop some new material called Megalon, which can do everything from design evening gowns for virginal pop stars to form the basic building blocks of the conveyor belts in an inner city Garden of Eden. Sounds like a job for Elon Musk—no, wait, we were shooting for a utopia.

Cesar Catilina (Driver) is some kind of hard-drinking Nobel Prize winner/architect who sleeps with socialites and reporters. Franklyn Cicero (Esposito) is the no-nonsense mayor who hates Cesar because he’s not pragmatic enough; his bright daughter Julia (Emmanuel) wants to sleep with Cesar (and support his utopian dreams). Cesar’s uncle, Crassus (Voight), is the richest man in New Rome, with all the altruistic humility that position implies. He marries entertainment reporter Wow Platinum (Plaza), who has also been sleeping with Cesar. Crassus’ son, the brilliantly named Clodio Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MEGALOPOLIS (2024) – THREE TAKES →

Video Review

WEIRD VIEW CREW: DEMON SEED (1977)

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There’s no demon in the movie, but “TRS-80 Seed” just didn’t have the same ring. Pete concludes it’s a weird movie (and a possibly a prophetic one), but not necessarily a great watch ( concluding it’s like The Story of O meets Lawnmover Man). Julie “Don’t Look Now” Christie stars, Donald “Performance” Cammell directs.

Demon Seed (1977) [Blu-ray]

Demon Seed (1977) [Blu-ray]
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: WOMB (2010)

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AKA Clone

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DIRECTED BY: Benedek Fliegauf

FEATURING: Eva Green, Matt Smith, Lesley Manville, Peter Wight, Hannah Murray

PLOT: A woman impregnates herself with a clone of her dead lover and raises the child to adulthood, grappling along the way with the confusing nature of their relationship.

Still from Womb (2010)COMMENTS: “She is the victim of artificial incest,” the snooty mom declares. “Her mother gave birth to her own mother.” In the universe of Womb, the battle lines have been drawn, and the detractors of the ability to bring loved ones back through the science of cloning view the procedure as an abomination. What makes the moment funny is that the prickly parents who are lecturing our heroine on the immorality of the practice would be nearly apoplectic if they had any idea how far she’d taken it. They’ll find out soon enough, and we’ll get to see her go even further.

Its shocking premise powers Womb. To his credit, Fliegauf is never coy about what’s going on here. The main character raises the only man she has ever loved as her own child. The implications are significant, and she experiences urges both maternal and carnal, sometimes simultaneously. The most powerful images in the film are the ones that bring this contradiction to the surface. Many a horror movie has labored to create a moment half as shocking as the scene where 10-year-old Tommy stands up in the bathtub he is sharing with the mother who has cloned him from her lover and proceeds to recite a poem while she stares up at him. Is the look on her face pride? Lust? Both? Womb readily embraces every awkward moment, crafting discomfort out of such scenarios as Rebecca’s meeting with college-age Tommy’s new girlfriend, or a wordless confrontation with the biological mother of Tommy’s genetic material upon seeing her resurrected son for the first time.

Watching Perfect Sense was a terrific reminder of how much I enjoy the work of Eva Green, and it’s great to see her particular brand of repressed passion deployed here. With her icy beauty, her deep and commanding voice, and her uncanny ability to balance outward coolness with an interior fire, she presents a vented steeliness, letting out glimpses of her conflicted soul in careful portions. When her adolescent son falls on top of her in what would be a playful moment under any other circumstances, Green carefully betrays an electric thrill that lies beneath her calm demeanor. It’s easy to see what initially attracts her to the laid-back enthusiasm of Smith, and later what drives her to both impulsively bring him back into the world, and then hide him away from it.

Rebecca is a fascinating character, emotionally immature at best and morally corrupt at worst. (Notably, Tommy is killed while en route to conduct some eco-terrorism against the very cloning plant that will soon give him renewed life.) The film suggests that Tommy’s untimely demise has trapped Rebecca in amber, forcing her to bring him back to the very moment when his life stopped in order for her life to go forward. Some critics have noted that Green never seems to age over two decades, but they often fail to notice that she doesn’t grow in any other way, either. There’s a strong suggestion that Rebecca has retained her virginity over all this time (one scene makes explicit that clone Tommy is delivered via caesarean), which gives context to the concluding scenes that take Womb into a new level of weirdness and discomfort.

Here again, Fliegauf doesn’t shy away from the most interesting questions, no matter how skeevy they might seem. If you’re picking up on some will-they-won’t-they vibes, rest assured that you’ll get an answer, and even if you correctly anticipate exactly what is going to happen in Womb’s final 15 minutes, there’s still genuine shock value in seeing it all play out, and particularly watching Green’s shifting reactions. It’s unusual to encounter a movie that so readily indulges your innate morbid curiosities without itself being grotesque or devoid of morality. Womb is patient but focused, sometimes tedious but rarely dull, transgressive but calmly and soberly so. It anticipates the protests of those like that angry mother, and it responds with a nod and a thin smile.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Yeah, it’s as weird as it sounds, but sadly not as exciting… The upswing is that Fliegauf has created a certain mood for the film through its staging and its cold bleak setting works well with the subject matter. It’s just a shame that the script can’t match it.” – Niall Browne, Movies in Focus

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

Womb [Blu-ray]

Womb [Blu-ray]
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Capsules

CAPSULE: FREE LSD (2023)

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Free LSD is available for VOD purchase or rental.

DIRECTED BY: Dmitri Coates

FEATURING: Keith Morris, Dmitri Coates, Autry Fulbright II, DH Peligro, David Yow, Chelsea Debo, Chloe Dykstra

PLOT: An aging sex-shop owner takes an experimental erectile dysfunction medication that sends him to an alternate reality where he’s lead singer of the punk band Off!.

Still from Free LSD (2023)

COMMENTS: Free LSD joins a small group of narrative movies made by bands. Not movies that are basically filmed concerts, or movies made by others to exploit the popularity of a band like A Hard Days Night or Head, or big-budget adaptations of prog-rock concept albums like Tommy or The Wall, or even movies written by musicians but directed by professionals (the Foo Fighter’s Studio 666, ‘ This Is Me… Now)—but movies written and directed and performed by the rockers themselves. Successful examples of this subgenre include ‘s 200 Motels, the Talking Heads’ True Stories, and (at least arguably) the Flaming Lips’ Christmas on Mars.

Of course, for every musician-led effort that’s a qualified success, there are many more that are mixed bags at best: the improvised psychedelia of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, Paul Simon’s box office bomb One Trick Pony, ‘ heartfelt but adolescent K-12. And so it is with punk supergroup Off!’s offering to the genre. Musicians bring a unique perspective to filmmaking, but they aren’t filmmakers. So when they try their hands at this new medium, we hope for something that departs from the usual, but expect something that isn’t overly polished: something raw and ragged and maybe not wholly coherent that nonetheless sustains a level of exotic interest for adventurous viewers. That is exactly what we get with Free LSD.

One of the first problems bands face when making their own movies is that the band members will act in it. Lead guitarist Coates, writing himself an alternate reality role as a coke-sniffing, secretary groping music exec, does the best in front of the camera—but since he also serves as director, it might have been stretching himself too thin to also play the lead. Bassist Fulbright is serviceable as a cult member/ladies’ man. Drummer Peligro has few lines and is in a coma for much of the film, but he had a good excuse—he was undergoing chemotherapy as the movie was being shot. It only seems natural to cast your lead vocalist in the lead role, but that becomes a big problem here, because whatever his talents as a frontman and singer, Keith Morris lacks any emotive qualities as an actor. (At one point the script requires him to do a spit-take; I wasn’t entirely convinced he actually spit, despite seeing the liquid spewing from his mouth). Hidden in a heavy wig and fake beard, Morris plays an aging hippie who runs a sex shop during the day and hosts an Art Bell-style UFO radio show at night, who is also the improbable erotic target of a hot twenty-something barista with pink hair who favors miniskirts and disfavors brassieres, and has a thing for sleazy graying bohemians who can’t act. Unfortunately, Morris’ monotonously-enacted story takes up the entire first act.

On one level, Free LSD serves as a sampler for Off!’s album of the same name: there are a handful of partial performances of album cuts, just enough to tease fans, but not so much that the concert scenes overwhelm the story. As for the plot—it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s not really an issue. It’s not even clear where the bad guys come from—they seem like they should be aliens, but the promotional material claims they’re an “advanced AI species.” Unless I missed a throwaway line, nothing in the actual movie attempts to explain their origins or motives. But Free LSD isn’t a serious hard sci-fi movie, it’s a movie about a group of eccentrics who take an experimental boner medication and find themselves in the region of the multiverse where they’re famous punk musicians. It is loosely structured in three acts—introducing the premise through Morris’ character, getting the band together, triumphing over the baddies at the end—but it wanders all over the place. In this case, the digressiveness is a feature, not a bug; it allows us to take in scenes like popping in for no real reason as a street hustler with pierced nipples and a red cowboy hat, an erectile dysfunction parody ad, stopovers at a never-explained inter-reality beekeeping waystation, and an ending where Off! goes metaphysically platinum by giving away free samples of their Viagra-based psychedelic (delivered via blotter tabs that look indistinguishable from LSD) with their latest album to inaugurate an era of peace and love. Given the level of acting here and the generally low production values, a conventional narrative would have doomed the film to failure for everyone but hardcore Off! fans. Instead, there’s just enough insanity in the mix to hold your interest.

Musician/comedian Jack Black produced, and has a small role in the film (appearing remotely via cellphone). On a sad note, DH Peligro, who stepped in at the last moment to replace Off!’s regular drummer (who had another commitment), died in late 2022, soon after the film was completed.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this incoherent feature debut from writer-director Dimitri Coats of the punk band Off! is no The Wall.”–Josh Bell, Crooked Marquee (contemporaneous)