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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY (1947)

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DIRECTED BY: Hans Richter

FEATURING: Jack Bittner

PLOT: Once Joe develops the power to observe his inner self and secures a lease for an office—not in that order, mind—he enters the dream-selling business.

Still from Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: With the era’s avant-garde luminaries assembled here, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting all of them as they worked on the set. One room, a mountain of oddball talent, and dreams, dreams, dreams.

COMMENTS: The title, the talent, not to mention the where…: Dreams That Money Can Buy is one of the most American movies out there. It’s behind its time—it’s ahead of its time; it bounces gaily, and turns on a dime. Calder and Cage, and , and Man Ray: devising the dreams for the money you’ll pay. Three years, seven dreams, one Manhattan loft—and anchored by Joe, with his Cagney-esque coif.

Of all the random titles I’ve stumbled across, Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy stands out like flower-child noir; like a Seussian corporate video; like… perhaps nothing I’ve seen before. The opening credits clued me in to the fact that this motion picture (from 1947? sure, sure) was going to be more than a little out there. It was a pleasant surprise—again, from the start—to find it such a jolly jaunt through the deep subconscious up into the luminescently tactile, with the occasional staccato of life in the ’40s.

Meet Joe: “Look at yourself: a real mess, you’re all mixed up; snap out of it! Get yourself fixed up. Even if poets misbehave, they always remember to shave. Say, what’s the matter, Joe? Something gone wrong? Is your head on wrong? No! It’s terrific! Here’s something on which you can really pride yourself: you’ve discovered you can look inside yourself. You know what that means? You’re promoted! You’re no longer a bum—you’re an artist!” And a businessman. He sells dreams of desire, techno-futurism, and identity. We meet a pamphleteer offering membership to the Society for the Abolition of Abolition, or Daughters of American Grandfathers. On-screen audiences mimic on-screen-on-screen performances. A full-wire tabletop circus delights and astounds. Glittering mobiles tickle light across the camera lens. Our hero disappears, briefly, after receiving a wallop from a thug demanding a lead on the races. But while you may have recovered, Joe, beware the poker-chip’s probing eye…

Dreams That Money Can Buy is jam-packed with surrealism and lightheartedness: always sprightly, but never saccharine. The sights and sounds evoke the dreamy past, and the hazy future. (The closing track, composed for this mid-’40s feature, sounds like an obscure B-side from the late ’60s.) More fun-house than art-house, Richter and his team gaily crash the dour columns of haute couture and build a wonder-world from the freshly minted tumble of rubble.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Hans Richter, nothing daunted, has plunged into the realm of the abstract, the subconscious and the immaterial for his ‘Dreams That Money Can Buy,’ a frankly experimental picture… A critical dismissal of this picture would be unfair, since it is a professed experiment and there are some things about it that are good. Many of the image constructions, while obscure, are surprisingly adroit, and the musical score by Louis Applebaum is often more eloquent than the screen. Obviously ‘arty’ in nature, it still tries for new ways to frame ideas. For that it is to be commended.”–Bosley Crowther, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

Dreams That Money Can Buy

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: GOODBYE, 20TH CENTURY! (1998)

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Zbogum na dvaesettiot vek!

DIRECTED BY: Darko Mitrevski, Aleksandar Popovski

FEATURING: Lazar Ristovski, Nikola Ristanovski, Vlado Jovanovski, Toni Mihajlovski, Petar Temelkovski, Sofija Kunovska

PLOT: In a fractured timeline, we encounter a man in a post-apocalyptic world in search of a hidden place where the fate of everyone is foretold on a wall, a turn-of-the-century brother and sister who marry for love over the objections of their family, and a man in a Santa Claus suit on the eve of the new millennium who stumbles into a strange funeral.

Still from Goodbye, 20th Century! (1999)

COMMENTS: You can instinctively know that a thing exists and yet be completely unaware of it until you’re face-to-face with it. Consider “toothpaste tube designer” or “menu photographer.” Their existence is completely logical, yet you’ve never had to consider their existence. So it goes with the surprising subject of today’s review: the cinema of Macedonia. Of course there would be a history, given its place in the Ottoman Empire at the dawn of film, decades as part of Yugoslavia, and running all the way through a naming spat with Greece. It makes perfect sense that there would be such a thing, but, I mean, who knew?

First-time directors Mitrevski and Popovski are clearly cinema aficionados. The first segment, a typical violent futuristic wasteland, immediately conjures up thoughts of Mad Max. The closer is a harsh ian urban nightmare with hints of esque style. There are more familiar references to be found, but the movie I think they were most eager to ape is Pulp Fiction. With its time-jumping thruline and a flashback vignette knotting the two halves together, Goodbye, 20th Century! feels like an attempt to do with a Balkan post-war flair.

We open in the far-off world of 2019, which follows the journey of Kuzman, a post-apocalyptic pariah who seemingly cannot die. His encounters with a band of Road Warrior-style toughs features some intriguing imagery, most notably a pair of designated wailers who carry masks with them to multiply the mourning. Later, after an intended execution fails to do the trick, he has an intriguing encounter with a prophet who tells him that he must defeat a green-haired jokester/maniac (think of a certain archfoe of a particular dark knight) in order to reach a kind of memorial wall. That effort, combined with a sexual assignation with a tattooed lady who is revealed to be Kuzman’s sister, brings him the release from life that he seeks. It’s not exactly logical, but it makes for a tidy tale. In fact, the most surprising thing about it is that it ends, with half-a-movie still to go.

The other major story takes us back in time 20 years, specifically to the last night of the century, when a man dressed as Santa Claus endures the apathy of the public (and the insults of a young Kuzman in particular) before hoping to retire to his apartment for the evening. Instead of his bed, he walks into a surreal funeral taking place in a completely white room, attended by stern figures in black. A dark farce ensues, including a flatulent old woman, a purloined toupee, and a pair of hipsters who completely misread the room by bringing champagne and a boombox and spiking the koliva. Meanwhile, the very same prophet who advised Kuzman on how to die in 2019 is here to help prepare the body in 1999. It’s all very wacky and deliberately unfunny, and since we know from the earlier tale that the apocalypse is at hand and it’s just a matter of time before the funeral itself descends into homicidal mayhem. (Appropriately, the madness is scored by Sid Vicious’ version of “My Way.”)  Naturally, this culminates with the creation of that very same memorial wall, meaning we’ve come full circle.

It all feels very metaphorical, and probably much more meaningful if you had lived through the miseries of Macedonia in the last decade of the millennium. I suspect the key to understanding Goodbye, 20th Century! lies within the interstitial vignette that connects the two halves. Presented as a historic look at the first wedding ever captured on film in Macedonia (the prophet appears here as the cinematographer, making him amusingly but pointlessly immortal), it’s actually the tragically brief tale of a brother and sister whose incestuous love ends promptly with the groom’s immediate murder. “If this is how the 20th century started,” the narrator flatly observes, “who can tell how it will end?” Violence is endemic, the movie says, even genetic, and considering how the former Yugoslav republics were mired in war in the years following the breakup, such a dismal outlook seems understandable. Everyone dies. Hope is a fool’s errand.

And yet.

Seven years after the dissolution of Yugoslavia and four years after the first Macedonian film to earn an Academy Award nomination, the country submitted this strange quasi-anthology as its attempt to repeat the achievement. It did not get the honor, but instead has eked out an afterlife thanks to its unusual structure and snarky attitude. (Consider that the film’s title is revealed after a trip through a toilet.) The movie has survived, the renamed North Macedonia has survived (with its very own cinematic tradition), and indeed all of us continue to muddle our way through a seemingly unending social nightmare. Maybe the apocalypse isn’t inevitable. It’s a nice thought to have as we embark upon a new year that feels like it could be more grim that the last. So raise a glass. Goodbye, 2024. Maybe the future won’t be the end of everything. Maybe instead of destroying the planet and marrying our sister, this time we’ll get it right.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Utterly bizarre, this first feature by Macedonian multimedia bad boys Aleksandar Popovski and Darko Mitrevski weds “Mad Max”–style grunge futurism, silly-mythic solemnity and anarchic humor to ends that make no sense whatsoever — proudly so, one suspects.” – Dennis Harvey, Variety (contemporaneous)

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

Goodbye, 20th Century

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FEAR X (2003)

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DIRECTED BY: Nicolas Winding Refn

FEATURING: John Turturro, James Remar, Deborah Kay Unger

PLOT: A mall security guard travels cross-country in an effort to find the man who killed his pregnant wife.

Still from fear x (2003)

COMMENTS: Mall cops get no respect. And if you’re judging them by the standards of heroic crimefighters, well, they don’t deserve any. As officers without portfolio, the most they can hope to do is serve as glorified hall monitors. But that actually highlights their most essential skill. They are watchers, ever on the lookout for wrongdoing. It’s a talent that is both passive and invasive.

From what we can see, Harry Caine (Turturro) is good at his job. He readily spots small-time crooks on the prowl, he’s got a billfold crammed full of mugshots to help him pick out known miscreants, and a bottomless well of patience. So it’s his peculiar curse that his wife’s murder took place at the very place he works, giving him access to grainy video footage of the crime to obsess over. And it’s an equally striking coincidence that an inspection of the house across the street produces a critical clue that might just lead Harry to the killer. For someone with the ability to look closely, finding the answer is surely just a matter of time.

The first half of Fear X (a meaningless title that might as well be gibberish) is a portrait of obsession at a low-but-steady simmer, and it’s intriguing to watch Turturro play quiet and insular. The milieu is familiar; in a sparse apartment, he pores over a wall of photographs that is only missing red yarn to connect them. But there’s a gutting hollowness to his pain. He’s not interested in revenge, he insists. He just wants to know why.

Act II shifts the action from suburban Wisconsin to rural Montana (the film was shot in and around Winnipeg), but in truth, the location is an entirely different movie. Once he arrives in the small town in the Big Country (with its five-story motel), he enters a world filled with intricate mysteries out of a John Le Carré novel, long red hallways that would be at home in “Twin Peaks”, and images of roiling seas of blood crashing outside an elevator that are positively Kubrickian. It’s as stark a transition as Dorothy’s arrival in Oz, and while Turturro tries to maintain his internal devastation, he’s ultimately forced to confront the progression of strange occurrences, culminating in a circular argument with the likely assailant. That proves to be Fear X’s undoing, because while there’s nothing wrong with a film that leaves its mysteries unexplained, there’s something very unsatisfying about a story that suggests it’s foolish to look for answers in the first place. Turturro gets the exact opposite of what he wants—revenge without understanding—and as he tosses his meticulously accumulated pile of clues into the wind, there’s more than a whiff of condescension about his belief that he could ever hope to figure it all out.

In some respects, Fear X is an embarrassment of riches. In his first film on North American soil, Refn not only benefits from Turturro in the starring role, but he also enlists the services of Brian Eno to contribute to the score, Larry Smith (Stanley Kubrick’s cinematographer for The Shining) behind the camera, and a co-scriptwriter in the form of novelist Hubert Selby, Jr. (of Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream notoriety) turning in some of his last work. It’s a lot of talent thrown at a story that doesn’t really add up to much. It begins as a showcase for Turturro, then becomes a platform for Refn to show off his appreciation for the avant-garde masters. And if all you want to do is passively watch, it’s interesting. But we are not all mall cops. Sometimes, audience members are looking for a little more respect.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This is one hell of an interesting film… Refn continually proves he’s got vision, willing each subsequent project to be weirder and wilder than the one it follows…” – C. H. Newell, Father Son Holy Gore

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

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List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DAAAAAALI! (2023)

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Daaaaalí! is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Jonathan Cohen, , Pio Marmaï, Didier Flamand, Éric Naggar

PLOT: A journalist attempts to interview Salvador Dalí, but the painter’s erratic behavior and demands constantly cut her attempts short.

Still from Daaaaaali! (2023)
Anaïs Demoustier in DAAAAAALÍ! Courtesy of Music Box Films.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: If you asked who would be the most intriguing modern director to concoct a Salvador Dalí biopic, Quentin Dupieux’s name would be at the very top of the list. While other directors resort to bemused realism to tackle the Surrealist icon’s notoriously slippery persona, Dupieux is a kindred spirit who fearlessly jumps right in to what makes Dalí tick: the irrational, the nonsensical, the dreamlike. Confident in its refusal to explain its enigmatic subject, Daaaalí! is the only cinematic portrait one could imagine the real Dalí endorsing.

COMMENTS: More weirdly witty than funny and anything but insightful, Daaaalí! tackles its unknowable subject in the only way possible: as a dream. Aspiring journalist Judith somehow gets the famous artist to agree to sit down for a magazine interview, but when he finally arrives—after imperiously striding down a seemingly endless hotel corridor for long enough for Judith to hit the bathroom and order room service—he immediately shuts down the interview because there’s no camera. Then, when Judith reschedules and secures a camera for a second attempt, Dalí accidentally destroys it. And so on. Dalí serves as a negative force in the film, denying and sabotaging every plan that does not accord with his transient, selfish whims. It soon becomes apparent that, like Judith, we are never going to learn anything about the artist beyond his surface facade of arrogance.

But insight into the man is not what this movie is, or should be, about. Instead, Daaaaali! is thoroughly Surrealist in spirit, evoking Dalí’s aesthetics (and, equally, those of Dalí’s great frenemy, ). These men’s sensibilities are a perfect fit for Dupieux, who barely has to fine-tune his own eccentric predilections at all to tell this story. After the premise is established, we quickly spin off into a labyrinth of dreams and anachronisms (we see completed paintings, then later in the film we see Dalí in the process of painting them). Nothing encapsulates the playful narrative spirit better than the long digression (over a bowl of muddy stew with live worms) in which a priest tells the painter about a dream he had where he was shot by a cowboy while riding a donkey. That incident doesn’t end the dream, however; it keeps recurring throughout the film. We are quickly lost inside an arbitrary narrative structure that almost gets as confusing as Dupieux’s bewildering Reality. But we’re anchored in Dalí’s frustratingly quirky, self-involved personality, and in Judith’s repeated failure to capture anything of substance about her quarry.

There are basically four actors who play Dalí, plus one actor who plays old Dalí (a sub-Dalí standing to one side of the main story), plus at least one bonus Dalí who only appears for a few seconds. There could be more Dalís running about, but 4-5 Dalís seems like the most accurate number, without counting fractional Dalís. This use of multiple actors in a central role is, naturally, a reference to Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, just as the continuous failure to consummate the interview recalls the failed dinner party of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. The gentle anticlericalism shown by the repeatedly-shot priest character is also a decidedly Buñuelian touch. Dupieux adapts these Surrealist motifs so naturally that, as much as anything, Daaaaali! serves as a reminder that the Rubber auteur, while often trafficking in modern pop culture references like slashers and superheroes, is himself firmly anchored in the Buñuel/Dalí tradition. Dupieux even creates a living Dalíesque tableau to bookend the film: a piano with a tree sprouting from its cabin and a fountain spouting from its keyboard, draining into a piano-shaped pool. Although critics sometimes view Dupieux as a lightweight due to his prolific output and disinterest in tackling political or otherwise “weighty” themes, in actuality he stands nearly alone in carrying on this strain of classical European Surrealism. We may not learn much about Dalí in Daaaaali!, but hopefully people will learn more about Quentin Dupieux’s underappreciated talents.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… great fun and appropriately strange, with Dupieux delivering a dream-layered understanding of artistry and impatience with palpable glee… ‘Daaaaaali!’ doesn’t build to a stunning conclusion. It moves slowly to weirder and weirder encounters, doing so with an assortment of performers portraying Dali, with everyone offering their fingerprint on the subject, making for flavorful acting choices.”–Brian Orndorf, Blu-ray.com (contemporaneous)