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Apocryphally Weird, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

63*: WE ARE THE STRANGE (2007)

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“We live in strange times. We also live in strange places, each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universe are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own.”–Douglas Adams

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: M dot Strange

FEATURING: Voices of Halleh Seddighzadeh, David Choe, Stuart Mahoney, Chaylon Blancett, M dot Strange

PLOT: In the phantasmagorical metropolis of Stopmo City, two outcasts—eMMM, a boy with the head of a doll, and Blue, an ethereal, suffering young woman—search for a cherished ice cream parlor. Ongoing battles between grotesque monsters make their journey perilous. An avenging hero, Rain, defeats many of the monsters, but when the ultimate evil is revealed to be a harlequin-faced beast of a man called HIM, eMMM and Blue will have to confront the menace themselves.

Still from we are the strange (2007)

BACKGROUND:

  • M dot Strange is the nom de cinema of San Jose-based Michael Belmont, who in addition to dappling in animation is a  web designer, musician, and video game creator.
  • Demonstrating multiple animation styles, the film was created on multiple platforms of varying sophistication and complexity, ranging from Adobe After Effects to Mario Paint.
  • M dot chronicled the making of the film in a series of videos (like this one) that built a fan base of more than a million YouTube followers. Upon its release, the trailer for We Are the Strange racked up 500,000 views in its first four days.
  • The film received the Golden Prize for Most Groundbreaking Film and the Silver Prize for Best Animated Film at the 2007 Fantasia Film Festival.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: So it is foretold: “He will return and strike down evil with a fist made of aluminum foil. Then, we will celebrate with many scoops of iced cream.” And so it comes to pass, when a bubble-shaped automaton emerges to face off against the big bad, and the hellscape Power Ranger at the controls is revealed to be our diminutive dollboy with the M on his forehead. For a film that devotes itself to style over substance and a pervasive gloom, it’s an unexpected flourish of feel-good storytelling and a nifty summation of the director’s particular blend of high-tech and lo-fi animation techniques. Alas, the promised ice cream is not in evidence.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Living, hungering arcade game; a trip on the ice cream train

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Multiple forms of animation and visual styles share space in a bouillabaisse of dread and visual overstimulation. Stop-motion mingles with computer-generated anime, and both appear alongside 2D paper-folding and hand-crafted miniatures. Every scene feels crafted to be as outlandish and disturbing as possible. The randomness of it all is sometimes eclectic, often cacophonous, and frequently intriguing.

Trailer for We Are the Strange (2007)

COMMENTS: This is not the first time that a movie challenges us to Continue reading 63*: WE ARE THE STRANGE (2007) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE WAVES OF MADNESS (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Jason Trost

FEATURING: Jason Trost, ,

PLOT: Agent LeGrasse is charged with investigating a distress signal from an ocean liner which has veered off course into the center of the Spacecraft Cemetery.

COMMENTS: A throwaway line at the start of The Waves of Madness reveals a great deal in hindsight. Ambling drunkenly to the bar on a massive ocean liner, a passenger seeks a final drink for the night—some Scotch—and is mistakenly served rum. No matter, he assures the embarrassed bartender, “It’s all going to the same place.” Little does our tippler know: it is indeed. Every single passenger, all of them doomed.

Jason Trost wastes no time laying down the story and style in The Waves of Madness, a tight little bit of Lovecraftian adventure that appears to be the launch of his next recurring movie universe. We quickly meet Agent LeGrasse, a professional working under the direction of an unspecified global organization. “The Elders of the Sea” (an ominously christened vessel if ever there was one) has an emergency—one so dire that its distress signal explicitly advises against anyone coming to the rescue. Despite this, LeGrasse boats over, docks his craft, and explores the floating derelict with nothing but his handgun, a few flash-bang grenades, and backpack stuffed with “Plan B.”

Anyone familiar with survival horror video games and  side-scrollers will immediately observe Trost’s inspiration. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen lateral camera movement packed so densely anywhere else. Trost nails ‘game logic,’ too, adding to the experience. LeGrasse discovers an in-g̶a̶m̶e̶ -movie clue about how light can stop the menace, and before a pivotal bit of actioneering, counts aloud to determine how many seconds he has to enact a tricky maneuver. There’s even what appears to be a escort mission (and like most gamers, LeGrasse wants nothing to do with that); but this ends up being part of an underlying ambiguity explored more thoroughly through the three timelines that concurrently unfold as our jaded agent delves deeper into the mystery.

Trost knows his roots in the gaming world—and has now provided evidence beyond the delightfully ridiculous foray into epic levels of DDR in his FP saga. The Waves of Madness isn’t groundbreaking. We’ve seen most of these pieces before: lost cruise ship, strange cult doings, mysterious eldritch entities, hard-boiled gunman, and so on. But the director (and screen-writer, and producer, and one of the soundtrack musicians…) has distilled his various inspirations into a pleasingly particular experience, which will click on all the nostalgia switches for many viewers—and hopefully inspire others to investigate what it is Trost is celebrating.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…as the strong-jawed, eye-patched, laconic Legrasse wanders through this seaborne hellscape as though he were trapped in a Thirties horror adventure or a surreal noir – even though he comes with technology (mobile phones, digital downloads, a portable ‘nuke’) very much from our own age – his own past, present and future become similarly confounded…The highly mannered nature of Legrasse’s experiences on the ship has the viewer too constantly questioning their reality… this is hokey retro fun, turning one man’s trauma into genre-bound pandemonium, and reinterpreting cinema’s fantasy worlds as (un)safe spaces for drifitng pyches [sic] to explore.”–Anton Bitel, Projected Figures (contemporaneous) 

The Waves of Madness

The Waves of Madness
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Channel 366

CHANNEL 366: SCOTT PILGRIM TAKES OFF (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Abel Góngora

FEATURING THE VOICES OF: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michael Cera, Satya Bhabha, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, , Brie Larson, Alison Pill, , Brandon Routh, Jason Schwartzman, Johnny Simmons, Mark Webber, Mae Whitman, Ellen Wong

PLOT: Slacker bassist Scott Pilgrim must defeat seven evil exes in order to win Ramona Flowers, the girl of his dreams… but a surprising outcome leads Ramona to investigate her own romantic past and the new world that has resulted. 

Still from Scott Pilgirm Takes Off (2023)

COMMENTS: When Scott Pilgrim vs. The World was unleashed upon audiences, the entertainment world braced itself for the perfect synthesis of teen romantic comedy and arcade-style fighting action, the arrival of Edgar Wright in the big leagues, and the birth of a storytelling phenomenon. And the result was… something less than that. The film captured the spirit of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s anime-inspired comic, Wright’s dense candy-colored melange of light and sound was groundbreaking, and the movie’s cast would ultimately be revealed as a murderer’s row of silver screen talent. But crowds did not throng to to the cinemas, and the film fell well short of breaking even at the box office. So Scott Pilgrim did the only thing it could do: it became a cult object.

The thing about cult objects is that their dedicated fan base can sometimes inspire the development of more product, but re-capturing that initial magic is often be such a fruitless pursuit that the reality is worse than the longing for more. So it’s not a question of whether the arrival of a Netflix animated series featuring nearly the entire movie cast lending their voices would produce a response from the most devoted Pilgrim-heads, but whether that series would leave diehards fulfilled, or furious. Intriguingly, “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” charts a course that feeds into the nostalgia machine before almost immediately pulling the plug on it.

As if wanting to reassure faithful viewers that this is the very same material you fell in love with over a decade ago, the premier episode plays out as a near-repeat of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World’s first act, re-introducing all the familiar characters and playing out the meet-cute between slacker-dreamer Scott and doe-eyed dream girl Ramona. But the big twist—which is so fundamental to the miniseries’ execution that the producers begged critics to embargo the surprise during its release, so let’s just consider this a big ol’ SPOILER ALERT right now—is that Scott loses his first showdown with a member of the League of Evil Exes. Leaving nothing behind but a few coins, our ostensible hero is gone, with seven episodes to go. (Essentially, the “Takes Off” part of the title should be interpreted in the most Canadian manner possible.) And what we’re left with is the World Continue reading CHANNEL 366: SCOTT PILGRIM TAKES OFF (2023) →