A wrestling match between two masked figures builds in intensity as a mesmerized audience incites ever more violence.
CONTENT WARNING: This short has strong stylized violence.
Tag Archives: Violence
CAPSULE: FUNNY GAMES (1997)
DIRECTED BY: Michael Haneke
FEATURING: Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Mühe, Arno Frisch, Frank Giering, Stefan Clapczynski
PLOT: Held captive by two charming but very twisted psychopaths, a family tries to outwit them as they are forced to play sick parlor games.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Funny Games is a more substantial captive torment tale than most. It features enigmatic villains, and unconventional breaking of the fourth wall. At times parts of the plot are relayed from different points of view. But overall it is still a straight-forward psychological thriller, too conventional in structure and subject to be considered weird.
COMMENTS: With son Schorschi (Clapczynski) in tow, rich yuppies Ana and Georg (Lothar, Mühe) arrive at their vacation house on a remote mountain lake ready for a quiet summer of relaxation and solitude. And what better setting for it than a security gated compound in a security gated community where everyone minds his business and doesn’t come knocking unless invited?
Despite their hi-tech Maginot line of fortified privacy, Ana and Georg have no phone line to their house. Their only link to the outside world is Ana’s cell phone and she’s not prone to be careful with it. No matter. Nobody is planning on getting in touch with them, nor is anyone expecting contact from the couple for a few weeks. Or longer.
Of course, all of the security in the world is useless when one lowers the drawbridge to admit a Trojan Horse. Charming Peter, a guest of friends down the way, shows up to borrow some eggs, and of course Anna lets him right in. Peter accidentally destroys her phone, and then just can’t seem to leave.
Peter’s friend Paul arrives, and the next thing you know, the family watchdog is mysteriously dead. Now neither Peter nor Paul can seem to get out the door and go home. Georg. who had been out, returns and won’t listen to Ana’s assertion that the beguiling young men are trouble. One mustn’t be rude to guests. Georg discovers too late that he should have listened to wifey for a change. He meets the business end of one of his own golf clubs—with his knee. And a Continue reading CAPSULE: FUNNY GAMES (1997)
53. BRONSON (2008)
“I always wanted to make a Kenneth Anger movie, and I wanted to combine great theatrical tradition and British pop cinema of the 60s, which was very psychedelic, and at the same time, to make a movie about a man who creates his own mythology. It had to be surreal in order to pay off.”–Director Refn on Bronson
DIRECTED BY: Nicolas Winding Refn
FEATURING: Tom Hardy
PLOT: Narrated from a theater inside his own mind by Michael Peterson (later to rechristen himself Charles Bronson, his “fighting name” ), the movie is an aggressively stylized account of the true story of Britain’s most notorious prisoner, who spent 30 years of his 34 year sentence in solitary confinement for his violent behavior. Peterson knocks over a post office with a sawed-off shotgun and receives a seven year penitentiary sentence; inside, he finds he has a natural affinity for institutional life as he nurtures a burgeoning passion for taking hostages and picking fights with prison guards. Shuffled from prison to prison, and serving a brief stint in a hospital for the criminally insane, Peterson is furloughed, becomes a bare-knuckle boxer and adopts the name Bronson, and lasts a few months in the outside world before finding himself reincarcerated, at home once more.
BACKGROUND:
- The movie stays true to the spirit of the real life Michael Peterson/Charlie Bronson, while omitting many facts and inventing others. The real Charlie Bronson has won several awards in prison-sponsored contests for his artwork and poetry and has published several books, including a fitness guide and an autobiography titled “Loonyology.” In one of his hostage-taking escapades, he demanded an inflatable doll, a helicopter and a cup of tea as ransom.
- Before incarceration Michael Peterson actually worked as a circus strongman, which may be where he developed his distinctive trademark handlebar mustache and shaved pate.
- Danish director Refn was previously best known for the gritty, documentary style Pusher trilogy, a look at the criminal drug dealing subculture in Copenhagen.
- Some of the paintings appearing in the film and in the animated sequences are actual drawings by the real life Bronson. Examples of Bronson’s artwork can be found here.
- Actor Tom Hardy put on about 40 pounds of muscle for the role. Previously best known as “Handsome Bob” in Guy Ricthie’s RocknRolla, Hardy is poised to become a breakout star, slated to replace Mel Gibson in the new “Mad Max” series.
- Cinematographer Larry Smith began his career with Stanley Kubrick, working as an electrician on Barry Lyndon and a gaffer on The Shining before graduating to assistant cameraman for Eyes Wide Shut.
- At the film’s London premiere, a tape recording of Bronson’s voice was played, stating, “I’m proud of this film, because if I drop dead tonight, then I live on. As long as my mother enjoys the film, I’m happy… I make no bones about it, I really was… a horrible, violent, nasty man. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not ashamed of it either, because every punch I’ve ever flung in my life I’ve taken 21 back.” This incident caused the Prison Officers’ Association to complain, because it is illegal to record a prisoner in a British prison without authorization. The Association also accused the film of “glorifying violence.”
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Bronson turning himself and his art teacher into living paintings in the very strange finale.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Hyperstylized to the point of surreality, Bronson is biopic as mythology, an appropriate tack when dealing with a self-deluded, self-promoting subject. The portrait that emerges is not so much of a fascinating but essentially unknowable real-life sociopath as it is a portrait of Bronson’s pseudo-artistic attempt to create a public image as an antihero, with notes of humanizing sympathy but also with plenty of knowing irony added to deglamorize its subject.
Original trailer for Bronson
COMMENTS: Tom Hardy’s performance in Bronson undercuts my theory of acting. I Continue reading 53. BRONSON (2008)
30. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)
“The story functions, of course, on several levels, political, sociological, philosophical and, what’s most important, on a dreamlike psychological-symbolic level.”–Stanley Kubrick
DIRECTED BY: Stanley Kubrick
FEATURING: Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee
PLOT: Alex is the leader of a small gang of violent, thrill-seeking youths in England sometime in the indefinite near future. After a home invasion goes bad, his “droogs” betray him and his victim dies, and he is sent to prison. The government selects him to undergo experimental Pavlovian conditioning that makes him violently ill when he becomes aggressive, then releases him onto the streets as a “reformed” criminal, only to find he is helpless to defend himself when he encounters his vengeful former victims.
BACKGROUND:
- A Clockwork Orange is an adaptation of the critically acclaimed 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess. Burgess was ultimately unhappy with this treatment of his novel, because in his intended ending for the story, Alex voluntarily reformed. This final chapter of redemption had been excluded from American prints of the novel—the version Kubrick worked worked from—at the request of the American publisher. Kubrick’s version ends with evil triumphant. Although Kubrick had not read the final chapter of the novel before beginning the film, he later stated in interviews that he would not have included the happy ending anyway because he thought it rang false.
- The title—which is not explained in the movie, only glimpsed briefly as a line of text on a typewritten page—comes from an expression Burgess overheard in a bar, “as queer as a clockwork orange.”
- Burgess created the elaborate fictional jargon Alex uses by mixing elements of Russian and Slavic languages with Cockney slang. Much of his original dialogue found its way into the movie.
- A Clockwork Orange was Stanley Kubrick’s next project after his previous weird masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It was also young star Malcolm McDowell’s first feature role after starring in a 1968 weird film, Lindsay Anderson’s If…
- A Clockwork Orange was the first movie to use Dolby sound.
- The movie was released in the United States with an “X” rating, and was later cut slightly and re-released in 1973 with an “R” rating.
- The film was blamed for several copycat crimes in Britain and Europe, notably, a gang rape in which the rapists sang “Singin’ in the Rain” during the assualt. Kubrick, an American who lived in the United Kingdom, was also reportedly stalked by some deranged fans of the film. For these reasons, Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange from distribution in Britain, both from live screenings and on video. The self-imposed ban lasted until Kubrick’s death.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: A Clockwork Orange filled with as many iconic images as any film of the last fifty years. Scenes like the one where Alex and his costumed droogs walk cockily through a deserted city in slow motion have consciously or unconsciously been copied many times (compare the similar slo-mo shot of the uniformed gangsters emerging from their breakfast meeting in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs). Probably the most instantly recognizable image is the opening closeup of Alex’s sneering face, wearing a huge false eyelash one one eye only. I selected another memorable Malcolm McDowell closeup, the one of Alex as he’s undergoing the Ludovico technique, with wires and transistors attached to his head and metal clamps forcibly holding his eyes open so he cannot look away from the violent images on the screen, because it works as a perfect ironic metaphor for a film we cannot tear our eyes away from.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Although the plot is simple, and realistic in its own speculative way, Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is so hyper-stylized with its bizarre poetic language, sets, costumes, music, broadly exaggerated performances, and the improbable karmic symmetry of the plot that it seems to take place in a dream world or a subconscious realm. The action, which takes the form of an ambiguous moral fable, occurs in an urban landscape that’s familiar, but fabulously twisted just beyond our expectations.
Original trailer for A Clockwork Orange
COMMENTS: A Clockwork Orange did not have to be weird. The story could have been Continue reading 30. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)
24. BEGOTTEN (1991)
“In BEGOTTEN, a time is depicted that predates spoken language; communication is made on a sensory level.”–E. Elias Merhige
DIRECTED BY: E. Elias Merhige
FEATURING: Actors from the experimental theater group Theater of Material
PLOT: A man sitting in a chair disembowels himself with a straight razor. A woman materializes from underneath his bloody robes, and impregnates herself with fluid taken from the dead body. She gives birth to a convulsing, full grown man, and mother and son are then seized and tortured by four hooded figures bearing ceremonial implements.
BACKGROUND:
- Each frame of film was painstakingly manipulated to create the distressed chiaroscuro universe of the movie. According to the technical production notes, after the raw footage was shot, “…optimum exposure and filtration were determined, the footage was then re-photographed one frame at a time… it took over ten hours to re-photograph less than one minute of selected takes.”
- It has been reported that the film was inspired by a near death experience the Merhige had after an automobile accident.
- Critics from Time, Film Comment, The Hollywood Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and New York Newsday each named Begotten one of the ten best films of 1991. Novelist and photographer Susan Sontag called it one of the ten best films of modern times.
- After Begotten, Merhige went on to direct the music video “Cryptorchid” for Marilyn Manson (which reused footage from Begotten) before landing a major feature, Shadow of the Vampire (2000)–a horror film about the making of Nosferatu, starring Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck and John Malkovich as Murnau.
- Begotten is intended as part of a trilogy of films. A second film, Din of Celestial Birds, which deals with the idea of evolution rather than creation, has been released in a 14 minute version that is intended as a prologue to the second installment.
- After its brief run in specialty arts theaters, including stints at the Museum of Modern Art and Smithsonian, Begotten received a very limited video release, first on VHS and then on DVD. Merhige explains that this is because he does not believe that these formats are truly capable of reproducing the look he intended for the film:
There are so many arcane, deeply intentional uses of grain, light and dark in that film that it is closer to Rosicrucian manuscript on the origin of matter than it is to being a “movie”…. When I finished the film I never allowed it to be screened on video because of how delicately layered and important the image is in conveying the deeper mystery of what the film is “about”… this is why it is no longer available on DVD until I find a digital format that is capable of capturing the soul and intent of the film. My experiments in BluRay have been promising.
- Nevertheless, a (bootleg?) Begotten showed up again on DVD in 2018.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The painfully graphic image of “God disemboweling Himself” with a straight razor–shot in the grainy, high-contrast black and white–is not easily forgotten.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A minimalist, mythic narrative of grotesque, ritualized suffering enshrouded in astonishing abstract avant-garde visuals and a hypnotic ambient soundtrack. Love it, hate it, or admire the technique while criticizing the intent—everyone admits there is nothing else quite like it in our cinematic universe.
Original trailer for Begotten
COMMENTS: Begotten is a difficult film to rate. It does not set out to entertain, and it does not Continue reading 24. BEGOTTEN (1991)