Tuesday 18 June 2019

The Cinema of the Abstract Class 2018-19 [Part 1]


What's the practically goal of a fake series of awards for an amateur film blog? Keeping track of what was really the best I found and discovered, and that I revisited after many years, which thus keeps me focused as well as helps define what really abstract work is. Mainly this is for the best, the favourites and the one list of failures whose existence was still there if thankfully a tiny list from a good year.

It's also a very good way to keep the blog tidy and efficient, the cut off point the 14th June 2018 to the 14th June 2019. Why? That was the day I started this blog, thus sandwiching these lists' choices (cinema/TV/even internet meme) between the ill fated final film of Mae West (Sextette (1978))  to Robert Zemeckis' curious doll based drama Welcome to Marwencol (2018), which if anything is as appropriate a duo for a list of oddities, the surreal and misbegotten as you could get.

Oh and before you the reader ask, how does a blog nominate, when it's entirely about strange and experimental productions, the "Weirdest" for one aware? Simple, the films/shows whose histories and productions are as strange as the content, just to clarify those choices; the rest are written as clearly as hopefully possible with links to the original reviews.


Most Disappointing:

No one's perfect...

5. Ultraforce (1995): Arguably the work here, an ill-fated attempt to adapt Malibu Comic's line of heroes into a super hero team animated series, I had the most fondest thoughts of (still thinking of it or just the episode which ends on a hero playing a saxophone on top of a skyscraper in victory), but I'll be the first to say it's also a lame and cheap American cartoon show production which was as much a pain to sit through.

4. Sextette (1978): No way near as bad as its reputation suggests, but a legitimately tragic final role for eighty four year old Mae West is an ill-advised attempt to recoup her old Hollywood sex appeal with bad music, worst sexual innuendo, and Timothy Dalton and Alice Cooper dragged into the midst of it.

3. Carnival Magic (1981): [Spoiler Warning] Not even an ending where a hyper intelligent talking chimpanzee trying to commit suicide, which is truly memorable,  doesn't make up for the first three-thirds of Al Adamson's attempt at a family film sleep inducing. [Spoilers End]

2. Female Human Animal (2018): Shot on videotape, a psychosexual drama inspired by the work of Surrealist painter/author Leonora Carrington, with interview footage of her, should've been something truly unique but instead becomes tedious and feels like it completely missed the point of the subconscious subject. Only the end credits filming the production of film wrapping felt remotely weird.

1. The Amazing Bulk (2012): A no budget Incredible Hulk pastiche entirely shot on green screen with pre-existing animated models. No way near as bad as expected, and in the middle it get legitimately weird when they throw in all the random animation they purchased, but it still feeling trying how lazy the production was even with its miniscule resources.


Underrated:

For those works tragically maligned by the stiff competition...

Honourable Mentions:

c. Automatic at Sea (2016): Matthew Lessner's curious oddball psychodrama was at points obvious but thankfully got much more inventive and rewarding halfway through, by the time the meta breaking of reality, inappropriate activities with bicycles, abrupt Togo (from Manos the Hands of Fate) cameos and a great synth score were introduced.

b. Disconnected (1984): Director Gorman Bechard sadly finds embarrassment in his ultra low budget slasher oddity, but thankfully let Vineger Syndrome in the States still restore and release it, understandable as it feels a bit of a mess, literally bisected in two by two separate plots including one of being menaced by phantom phone calls, but the viewing experience is as gleefully unique as you'd want from an obvious genre recovery like this.

a. Blood Feast 2 - All U Can Eat (2002): It was Herschell Gordon Lewis' return to his infamous splatter genre creating nasty...only to have more nudity, more irony and be a hell of a lot more weirder beyond John Waters as a Catholic priest. And I mean fucking weird, emphasis on appropriate use of an expletive to emphasis this...

5. Ai City (1986): One of the maddest things created in the eighties Japanese anime boom, a dystopian psychics sci-fi movie which seems to have written its script in cut-and-paste form.
4. Poison (1991): Todd Hayne's impeccable and emotionally resonant anthology of three parables of homosexuality.

3. The Beast Pageant (2010): Two men, Albert Birney and Jon Moses, even had to use Kickstarter to create this bizarre musical/horror/lo-fi film about a man who escapes a totalities hellhole, lead on by a singing cowboy that suddenly grows out of his side away from his TV/advertising delivery system/metaphorical prison. Everything is as weird as it sounds, and bless the creators' cotton socks, they made something both utterly sweet at times as well as freakish.

2. Rise And Fall Of A Small Film Company (1986): Jean-Luc Godard's feature length episode of a detective TV show where, instead of adapting the novel he was meant to, he uses it as a basis of his musings of the state of film making as well as still make a fun and legitimately entertaining drama still. As long as Godard's career has been as insanely prolific as it is, we're going to recover these old titles and preserve them, as this recently restored work was, and hopefully more gems like this one will be uncovered.

1. The Clowns (1970): Considering Federico Fellini's TV movie documentary/fictional hybrid is about the history of clowns, it's as exciting and good as that sounds.


Weirdest:

The longest list of nominees for good reason, as befitting this blog which covers weird productions a lot, these curious tales just in terms of their production histories aren't easily forgotten let alone their final results.

10. Redneck County Fever/Re-Animator Academy (Both 1992): A no budget shot-on-video production...but a hicksploitation comedy with Bill and Ted wannabes? Yep its as peculiar to watch as it is to imagine ever being a success, but the same individuals behind this film, as one of the leads makes a cameo in the later, also made Re-Animator Academy, a shot-on-video mockbuster of the Re-Animator franchise with ridiculous amounts of fake heads being punched off, an unnecessary (and bad tasting) streak of sexism, gangsters straight from a cartoon and a burnt severed head of a stand-up comedian cracking one liners. They're strange and deserve each other, especially as in marathon they only got a bit past the two hour mark together.

9. Lasagna Cat: Sex Survey Results (2017): Start a Garfield parody web series on YouTube in 2007, where you recreate strip followed by videos set to pre-existing (and potentially copyright infringing) songs of note. Then you return ten years later with a new series you spend a budget on, have a shot-by-shot Miani Vice parody within, a shampoo bukkake joke with John (or his perfect real stand-in) from Garfield involved, John Blyth Barrymore the existential truth of a Garfield newspaper strip over the score to Kundun (1997) for an entire hour, and end on a four hour plus marathon of your fans' number of sexual partners that finishes on a freakish horror-shock feast partially spoken in Polish and with explicitly full frontal male nudity.

And the weirdest part? I gave a very negative review for the most part and yet, aware that copyright issues could easily harm Fatal Farm's creation in the future, I'd now gladly sit through the web series again. Its also given me the most traffic directly to the blog, by way of a two part blog post that may have been too bloody long, which just adds to the madness of the thing on a personal level.

8. Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991): The first film streamed over the internet (in the early nineties) also happens to be about bee television, living missiles and reincarnation, and was made with stock footage, early nineties digital animation and footage of the director-writer in a bee keeper's suit wandering various locations. And it's not weirder than most films...?

7. TerrorVision (198X): One day, or who knows when, the Lifetime Channel supposedly screened a shot on video micro-series horror anthology with very risible practical effects and curious plotting. Dissapearing for decades until suddenly finding itself online, that show was thus TerrorVision.

6. Holy Pafnucio (1977): A black humoured opera from the cinematographer of El Topo which includes shocking images and a Patty Hurst stand in among its curiosities.

5. In the Aftermath (1988): Mamoru Oshii's Angel Egg re-cut with live action footage by Roger Corman's New World Pictures to make more sense, but becomes significantly less so.

4. Escape from Tomorrow (2013): Secretly filmed at Disneyland and as strange as that turned out...

3. Régime sans pain (1985): Raul Ruiz is given a music video project, turns it into a musical sci-fi drama a feature's length.

2. John from Cincinnati (2007): HBO commission a religious surfing noir oddity, surprised it only lasted a season

1. The Evil Within (2017)/Flexing With Monty (1994/2010): Two films with tumultuous filming histories and the tragic passing of one figure of importance each between them - The Evil Within a tale of obsession for its late creator Andrew Getty, a heir of the legendary Getty family whose creation is uncomfortably but also triumphantly presented onscreen, the latter the promo reel for the late Trevor Goddard that should've been which is as mad as a box of frogs. I will not trivialise either film, as both tales of passing are sad, but said films not only turned out to be utterly memorable, both deserving the award, but the pair happen to be as mad as a box of frogs equally.



Best Production:

As aesthetic and craft are as vital to great abstract cinema as their content...

Honourable Mentions:

e. Holy Pafnucio (1977): Considering Rafael Corkidi's talent as a cinematographer, his work here as a director with his production crew were just as elegant as his famous work with Alejandro Jodorowsky. Yes it's controversial at points, just in the opening scenes with the Ku Klux Klan appearing among others, but his precisely shot style is memorable and the treatment of the opera compositions, even with nearly added and profane lyrics, magnified his strange ideas even more in the respect shown.

d. Poison (1991): Juggling three different aesthetic styles - bright saturated colour, stark b-movie horror monochrome, a documentary structure - Todd Haynes manages to make all three stand out considerably.

c. Welcome to Marwen (2018): It may been probably one of the least advised films to make in his career, just from strong negative reaction and box office, but Robert Zemeckis' animation of artist Mark Hogancamp's World War II doll village is something to admire in blending live action with CGI.

b. The Clowns (1970): Even on a TV budget, Federico Fellini makes films better than most.

a. Boro in the Box/Living Still Life/The Wild Boys (2011/2012/2017): How the hell do you describe director Bertrand Mandico's style? Guy Maddin's pansexual ultra-lush and colourful French cousin.

5. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975): One of the most formally precise, and intentionally claustrophobic and stressful films made, entirely appropriate for showing the psychological downward trajectory of a Belgium widowed mother.

4. Boogiepop Phantom (2000): A very difficult but utterly rewarding anime sci-fi horror TV series whose non-chronological structure, washed out and drained aesthetic, and heavy (and inspired) use of noise and music is something to behold, likely to have induced tremors from its original audience on 2000 era Japanese midnight television.

3. Alipato - The Very Brief Life of an Ember (2016): Khavn De La Cruz goes "fuck it", varies between a camera being briefly placed on top of a moving goat, emotionally sincere still scenes of contemplation and pure visual-audio mayhem.

2. Night is Short, Walk on Girl (2017): Because Masaaki Yuasa cannot be pinned down in the slightest as an animation director.

1. The Wolf House (2018): A difficult Chilean production where the entirety of its film is animated using a stage, furniture, paper-mâché, ordinary objects, painting animation on the walls, and so much more that this absolutely masterful production feels like a constantly shifting art form than a filmed work.


Best Acting Performance(s) for Men:

Honourable Honourable Mention:

Happy Hour (2015): I feel embarrassed forgetting how good the male cast of Happy Hour was and how important their characters were, in lieu to this being one of the best female ensembles you could get in any production, so here I'll break the rules a little to make up for it.

Honourable Mention:

d. Intruders (1992): CBS' mini-series adaptation of Budd Hopkins' book Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods, of UFO abduction testimonies, is helped a lot in its eventual progression to actual aliens with  Richard Crenna playing the sceptical but open minded psychologist tackling two abduction cases.

c. The Headless Eyes (1971): Not a great film, not necessarily a "great performance", but Bo Brundin as an eye gouging artist serial killer literally sounds and acts like he was actually insane mid-shooting.

b. Occidental (2017): An ensemble - Paul Hamy, Idir Chender and Hamza Meziani - nobly play this game of mis-presumption and cat-and-mouse in a hotel, making even the paranoia that Chender's got too much Coca Cola in his possession sinister as well as funny.

a. Rise And Fall Of A Small Film Company (1986): Legend Jean-Pierre Léaud obsesses over casting extras in a delusional but noble act, whilst Jean-Pierre Mocky as his producer has kittens and laments when French cinema production was once so much better than it was.

5. Keep An Eye Out (2018): Benoît Poelvoorde as police Commissaire Buron interrogates Grégoire Ludig as a witness to an expected death, even appearing in each other's recollections as eyewitnesses. Add Marc Fraize as an (unfortunately too) enthusiastic one-eyed police officer and you have many laughs to be had.

4. Welcome to Marwen (2018): Robert Zemeckis' film is problematic in how it deals with the traumas and life of real life artist Mark Hogancamp, even though I'll defend the film as a flawed gem, but at least Steve Carell both in the sympathetic and uncomfortable moments does his best to add layers to the character and his doll stand-in.

3. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972): Is it blasphemous to have a legendary Luis Bunuel film, with the crème of European cinema actors of the time, this low on the list? I've always found his work like this more driven by the script and his style, but when even Michel Piccoli in a comically short cameo steals the film briefly, this is still a heavy weight in terms of great performances.

2. Flexing With Monty (1994/2010): Tragically only really known for Kano in the 1995 Mortal Kombat film, the late Trevor Goddard should be known for this - shouting like a maniac about the virtues of body building, cut like a Greek god in his giant man sized hamster wheel of steel, and farting whilst representing the worst aspects of a body obsessed egotist whilst humping a stuff Polar bear in arseless leather chaps.

1. John from Cincinnati (2007): Whilst I will completely understand most people not liking this series in the slightest, I have to at least give John from Cincinnati credit for an ensemble who, in spite of bizarre dialogue and scenarios, stands out and are utterly memorable whether the show ever got any depth or not - Ed O'Neill having full conversations with his pet birds, Dayton Callie as a saxophone playing drug dealer who finds his consciousness, Luis Guzman as the sane one in the middle, even Austin Nichols as the titular John who, for all his potential annoyance, has a naive charm that lingers long after the series might've baffled many.


TO BE CONTINUED...

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