March @ 366 Weird Movies: AMELIE, STOKER, OUR HOSPITALITY, "Foutaises"

[Rev. Powell]

In like a lion!

PERSONA (1966): Certified Weird! "f you are a fan of the identity-morphing brainteasers Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001), or Performance (1970), or Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977), or Fight Club (1999), or Abbas Kiarostami‘s Certified Copy (2010), then you owe it to yourself to check out Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. Bergman did the psychic switcheroo first, and he did it best."

RETURN OF THE KUNG FU DRAGON (1976): "Ah,  kung fu, the weirdest of the martial arts! You never see a devotee of judo using her martial prowess to put her hands all over a street vendor’s stock of steamed buns, or a karate master hanging out with an red-nosed androgynous dwarf who looks like Bjork’s stunt double."

HIGHLANDER II (RENEGADE VERSION) (1991): ". Everything is wrong in this movie, but the most memorable and ill-considered scene has to occur when bad guy Michael Ironside, fresh arrived from the past, commandeers a subway train; for no good reason he uses his magic powers to make it go really fast, exposing the passengers to G-forces so powerful that most of them are violently hurled against the back wall of the train, and cause one guy’s eyes to pop out of his head (?)"

UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929) (second take): "The ants in the stigmatic palm are weaved into a woman’s armpit, followed by the image of a sea urchin. The result is shrewdly discomforting and challenging film poetry."-AE

[Rev. Powell]

More March madness...

JOHN DIES AT THE END (2012): "It rapidly transitions between wry humor, gross-out gore, paranormal mystery, hallucinatory freak-outs, and sci-fi adventure, all set amidst general confusion. This is the type of film that was made to be a cult classic, with little hope for or interest in appealing to a wide audience."-AK

JULIEN DONKEY-BOY (1999): "Switching from familial underwear wrestling matches to hidden camera thrift store excursions to snippets from a freakshow talent contest, with all the footage apparently shot by a drunk and edited by a psychotic, the movie Julien Donkey-boy is as schizophrenic as its protagonist."

LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE (2012): "One of the best things about this curious, multifaceted cinematic work is that it’s about many things at once, even as it seems to be a simple, if oblique, story fragment about love and mistaken identity."-JM

SATANTANGO (1994): "Everything is caught in Tarr’s courageously mundane odyssey: buzzing flies, raspy coughs, and repetitively ticking clocks are beautifully preserved in celluloid amber."-AE

[Rev. Powell]

Marching on...

PROSPERO'S BOOKS (1991): Certified Weird! "...the fairy slave Ariel is played by three separate actors, the youngest of whom urinates nonstop, and that a team of white horses suddenly wanders onto the set during Miranda and Ferdinand’s courtship scene. Your high school English teacher would not approve. This is acid Shakespeare."

SLACKER (1991): "Memorable characters range from the UFO enthusiast who accosts passersby to explain his theory that we’ve been on the moon since the 1950s to the tomboy who’s looking to fence stolen celebrity gynecology artifacts, cheap."

GIMME SHELTER (1970): AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN SEMPER: "Gregor came back to school afterwards, and he had somehow got hold of a duplicate of the footage from Gimme Shelter where the guy gets killed: the one guy that the Hells Angel is knifing, a poor black guy who is wearing a lime green suit. Gregor had this footage and he showed it to us. We were all just mesmerized that this had happened..."

CHINGASO THE CLOWN (2006): "Unfortunately, Alex de la Iglesia‘s impressive The Last Circus was released in 2010 and pretty much stole the thunder from any subsequent clown vs. clown slugfests. Sorry we didn’t get to the review before that, but even a glowing review from us wasn’t likely to make the difference between funding 'Chingaso' and letting the poor guy hang up his floppy shoes for good."

[Rev. Powell]

...out like a lamb.

AMELIE (2001): "...although I appreciate Amélie for what it is, part of me will always think the script would have been punchier if one of Caro’s cannibal butchers has popped up to thin out the cast."

STOKER (2013): "...lurid, loopy, and occasionally lovely..."

OUR HOSPITALITY (1923): "Our Hospitality is replete with inventive sight gags (a tunnel is cut to fit the train, a horse’s rear-end is disguised as Willie in drag), but it’s really a sophisticated, yet simple retelling of the Rome and Juliet narrative."-AE

"Foutaises" (1989): "The 'foutaises' surveyed here may be trifles, but (despite the fact that one example is 'something so amazing you wouldn't dare put it in a movie') they are the kinds of peculiarities that taken together describe the day-to-day realities of human existence more accurately than a montage of big moments would."