Wrong (2012)

Director: Quentin Dupieux

Screenplay: Quentin Dupieux

Cast: Jack Plotnick as Dolph Springer, Éric Judor as Victor, Alexis Dziena as Emma, Steve Little as Detective Ronnie, William Fichtner as Master Chang, Regan Burns as Mike

An Abstract Candidate

 

Sir, I took it upon myself to paint your van blue.

A fireman taking a dump in the middle of the road, reading a newspaper in front of colleagues, pretty much sets up the tone of Wrong perfectly from the first scene. Its director-writer Quentin Dupieux caught the attention of people in the wider world, as a French musician who became interested in cinema, as a filmmaker with Rubber (2010), his absurdist take on horror, with a fourth wall breaking aspect dealing with the fictional nature of cinema where anything can happen for “no reason”. Wrong premiered at 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and as a French-US co-production, it presents an absurd story befitting its “no reason” obsessed predecessor. Our lead Dolph (Jack Plotnick) wakes up one day and cannot find his dog Paul, starting a series of non-sequiturs as he tries to locate his beloved pet. Even if it has its moments of absurd abruptness from the get-go - the neighbor, on his way out of town forever, gets angry and denies he jogs in the morning, and thinks Dolph’s sleeping robe is filthy and disgusting - there is a progression to Wrong which, in its own logic, befits the tone later Luis Buñuel lent into for his last act of his career. The difference is that, Buñuel subverted religion and bourgeois culture in the likes of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Here, we have to consider the leanings to more deliberately ironic comedy, expressed as one of the characters set up in the story, pizza staff member Emma (Alexis Dziena), is introduced over the phone to Jesus’ Organic Pizza when Dolph, trying to cope with the initial loss of Paul, ends up in a lengthy discussion about a logo of a rabbit on a motorcycle not making sense.

His story is the well worn one of a lonely man who struggles in life. Yes, it is absurd that at his work place it is raining indoors, but the more absurd detail is that he has been fired from the place for three months prior, and still goes to work for some semblance of connection to life. It is a bleak absurd humour to all this, as the world is conspiring against him in a variety of ways. Paul’s disappearance is revealed to be by a company lead by Master Chang (William Fichtner), revealed to be an organization that deliberately kidnaps pets, than returns them after time to create a sharper bond between randomly chosen owners, only for a mishap to cause Paul to become lost even if the driver of the van involved was killed instantly. As tragic for Dolph is the abrupt discovery, as his hired gardener Victor (Éric Judor), that his beloved palm tree has turned into a pine tree for reasons neither can explain. And for what could be seemingly a nihilistic story, as nothing makes sense for Dolph in his plight, what you also get is a work that manages perfectly to get the littlest deadpan joke to work without elaborate effects or a cartoonish pratfall. Even when things are stated they become funny.

The Luis Buñuel comparison is much more befitting, rather than a figure like David Lynch who Dupieux is not a fan of being compared to¹. One joke even feels like something a beloved filmmaker of mine, the Chilean legend Raul Ruiz, would be proud of, where a character abruptly dies of a stroke, only to appear again without anyone asking about his passing and seemingly miraculous resurrection. Buñuel is the right choice in himself anyway, as between the pair you see staged dramatic scenes, as this follows Dolph’s journey to locate Paul, being undercut by the surreal invading the scenes. This is not particularly the same as David Lynch at all as many of his most bizarre and unsettling scenes are always set up with something very amiss. Shot in California, with a starkness from being set entirely in the day, conversations in Wrong follow logic only for an absurd touch to come in, plot threads layering into each other. Emma the pizza store employee falls for Dolph over the phone, only to think Victor is him, and vice-versa when they met in the flesh, and the attempts to track down Paul include both the potential to learn telepathic communication with dogs through Master Chang’s writings, and a dog detective so precise to track his missing pets, he has figured out a way to take dog feces and access its memories of when it was inside a canine.  

Honestly the closest thing to a Lynchian moment is when Dolph is offered an adopted dog whilst Paul is being located, only to be offered a small child as if nothing is amiss. Most of this, however, is more ridiculous deliberately, but I would not necessarily say either it is ironic for the sake of wackiness either. Neither would I say it is nihilistic for the sake of it despite having used that term earlier. As a viewer born on the autistic spectrum, there has always been a sense, in adapting to society in general, a greater acute awareness of the aspects seemed to be normal actually making no sense and becoming nonsensical in my day to day. This is something which is felt in how Quentin Dupieux with this film definitely is playing to the idea nothing makes sense for Dolph whatsoever. There is a happy ending to this story, which actually proves the more rewarding choice to have gone with, as this presents us the right mix between the anxious and the intentionally silly, finding a right balance in even having the missing object of love being a dog in the first place, something that he chose rather than a love story between a man and a woman which would have been disturbing with this scenario instead².

With his wife Joan Le Boru as the production designer, the first with her as a prominent artistic director on her husband's films afterwards, Wrong as a distinct aesthetic, an American movie but with a sense of disconnect. Everything is sunny and picturesque, but contrasted by the back alleys and dog kennel locations which felt out of time. Even in the opening with the neighbor, who for reasons he cannot explains has to leave his home and drive off the end of the world, the scene between him and Dolph is noticeable, over just the road between their houses, in how they are shot with a sense they are so far away the neighbor cannot hear Dolph, and with them shot together the close ups feeling claustrophobic. White is a predominant colour but that is not a pleasant one, more disconcerting as Dolph himself is wandering along without a real grasp of control. Even that aforementioned happy ending is entirely out of his hands, a destiny as dreamt by another in precognition, as throughout too seemingly everyone else can be possessed by an unknown force to remind him to visit Master Chang at a specific time mid-conversation. The subplot with Emma even becomes overtly surrealistic, in the true classical art movement sense of this idea, in how it involves backwards footage being used, a child born on a beach who cannot tell the difference between a broken wine bottle neck and a sea urchin, and aptly for the Luis Buñuel comparison, someone waking up being buried alive in a casket without any context. What this means really is less a concern; surrealism was meant to shock one out of complacency, and as I have mentioned earlier, if there has to be a meaning to all this, just to experience a day in a life of an everyman who struggles to comprehend the world around him is justifiable as a meaning for an entire feature length story.

Wrong was a pleasure to witness, in mind that the earlier films like Wrong only really starting to be released in the USA when the interest in Quentin Dupieux started to exist. Thankfully over time that has started to change, but Wrong is still obscurer as a result of this. In mind that Rubber could have been a one-off, and no one would take interest in him if he suddenly showed none of the originality he had, thankfully Dupieux would become an auteur for the 2010s off the back of titles like this.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Surrealist

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

 

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1) Quentin Dupieux Explains Why He Doesn’t Like Being Compared to David Lynch, written by Greg Cwik for IndieWire, and published on May 4th 2015.

2) Writer-Director Quentin Dupieux Talks WRONG, Balancing Comedy and Anxiety, Links Between Random Elements, WRONG COPS, and More, written by Christina Radish for Collider, and published March 29th 2013.

Games of the Abstract: Jumping Flash! 2 (1996)

 

Developer: Exact (with MuuMuu)

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

One Player

Originally for: Sony Playstation One

 

Proceeding on from the first 1995 Jumping Flash, the second game does not attempt to break its established template. Instead, as before, a figure is stealing huge chunks off a planet, and playing as a robotic combat rabbit named Robbit, you have to go liberate each one. Things are different here as our original villain, Baron Aloha, is now the victim of this from a Galactus stand-in named Captain Kabuki; Galactus, the planet eating entity of the Marvel comic books, becomes here a very flamboyantly dressed figure here who collects land masses in giant glass jars for his own personal collection. To be honest, Kabuki does not get a lot to stick out; it neither helps when (for example) for the US release of the game, alongside giving Robbit inexplicably a gruff American accent like a cigar chomping grizzled war veteran, he is voiced as fakely camp with a tendency for bad puns. It is telling for Aloha, the victim initially on an asteroid, gets more to do. This is both with the most cut scenes alongside one of his minions, than that for the extra mode, he gets Kabuki to be a minion to end the Robbit. Plot is less an issue here than returning to this franchise, where developer Exact wanted to improve on the graphical prowess of the original game, using the sequel in terms of pushing the original Playstation hardware.

For those who this may be their first knowledge of this franchise, Sony for the Playstation had Jumping Flash before Nintendo's Super Mario 64 (1996) existed, and innovated the solid fundamentals of the 3D platformer. Jumping Flash 2 comes just before Super Mario 64 was released the same year, and before Sony would replace the Robbit with another platforming franchise that would take the crown for their mascot in this field, Naughty Dog's Crash Bandicoot coming also in 1996. Jumping Flash was inspired in getting around the issues of the new polygonal era of having the original 1995 game being a first person one, which Jumping Flash 2 follows with. Like the original game, if it isn't why fix it, where instead there is a sense of the aesthetic and general appearance of the sequel expanding on issues like draw distance and the general look of these worlds you hop in the air within. Robbit is played through his robo screen, wandering levels but with the more practical method to traverse everything being to use his jumping abilities, the first a hop and the other two. In the ingenious move of the series, the second and third jump leads to your screen looking down at where you land, allowing you to have precise jumping where you know where you will land, and can take huge risks on tiny little fragments of platforms floating over oblivion. The sequel's platforming fundamentals are still solid, so the quality of the game play is still as good as the first game.

As a sequel, this in modern parlance would be downloadable bonus levels, even following the exact template of six worlds, three levels each, and worlds two and four having one interior level each negotiating mazes. You do not need to find the four "EXIT" carrots as the prequel game, but four of Aloha's minions instead before going to the exit platform. Unlike the first game, with the worlds based on the tropes of platform games like a lava world and Egyptian themed ones, this is set around tropical and urban environments, set around Dr Aloha's secret resort planet base. This leads to this being a very unconventional aesthetic with one level being based on a Japanese hot spa, another being a constructions site etc. I had to take a while but it adds a cool touch, and especially with the harder versions in the Extra Mode, they become outstanding at points as much because of the graphical push the sequel has to improve its visuals. The carnival world of the first game returns and is changed into one of the best levels of this franchise as Stage 5-2, a circus level with cannons to be fired from, a minion to collect on a trapeze high wire swing, and running over a giant moving pack of cards. The aesthetic of these games is kept to their delightful best in its playful eccentricities as alongside enemies who are more obstacles in levels, like kiwi birds gliding on parachutes and anthropomorphic burgers. The music by late Takeo Miratsu is still vibrant here as for the first game too.

Were I to think of any flaws with the game, I have to be honest in saying that, if the second sequel was to have come not three years later as it did, the shooter mechanics of this game are starting to struggle and would have needed to be revised for the third game. Robbit despite his ability to squash enemies under him also has access to firepower, and whilst there were enemies in the first game you could not quite hit due to their height above you, there is now the issue that he shares with early first person boomer shooter protagonists that he cannot look up. The shooting mechanics in general feel like they just stay the right side of making Jumping Flash 2 still a fun game, but you see the struggles with this by the time, for the Extra Mode, you are trying to attack the final boss, Captain Kabuki, and wish you could pivot the screen up or have more fire power. The irony is not lost that, for a game which managed to succeed in something like 3D platforming, the one gameplay mechanic which was not the biggest concern was struggling for the second game. It did not however undermine a game I sadly never got to in my youth like the original game, but making up for it now, was worth the wait.

Manhattan Baby (1982)

 

Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Elisa Livia Briganti and Dardano Sacchetti

Cast: Christopher Connelly as Professor George Hacker, Laura Lenzi as Emily Hacker, Giovanni Frezza as Tommy Hacker, Brigitta Boccoli as Susie Hacker, Cinzia De Ponti as Jamie Lee, Cosimo Cinieri as Adrian Mercato, Carlo De Mejo as Luke

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Starting in Egypt, a young girl named Susie (Brigitta Boccoli), whilst with her family, is given a talisman by a sinister blind woman, and from here you get one of a few curiosities from Lucio Fulci's career. It is curious to have an Egyptian themed supernatural film appear in his career as, whilst Egyptian iconography would find its way round pop cultural media, in terms of cinema not a lot of films really exist for this trope at some point into the mid-century. Until The Mummy (1999) offered a brief exception, it feels like something never truly in the mainstream of cinema after the early 20th century. An aesthetic usually evoking mummies and pharaohs' curses, unless you are talking about other areas of pop culture like video games to animation where the use of Egyptian iconography feels disconnected from the reality, there is the inherently problematic colonial layers to real Egyptology which may have put people off this. Including the theft of Egypt's ancient history until we had to start giving it all back from the West, this is something which has to be considered alongside the fact that there has never really been many films at all with ancient Egyptian mythology either, just an outsider's perspective. Fulci's film does not even bother with really dealing with the complexities of treating this culture, beginning with Susie's father Professor George Hacker (Christopher Connelly) helping at a dig site. It can be accused of following the demonization of non-Western culture, in how an evil cult within ancient Egyptian history continues its legacy of terror through attacking Susie, but the vague dreamlike nature of this film thankfully neuters this greatly.

There is also the fact that, for most of its length, this is in the same ballpark as Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist from the same year, of a family being terrorised with the children under threat in a New York City apartment complex when Susie brings the talisman home. It is also a work whose obscurity likely comes from the unexpected restraint this has in context of this era of the director's career, not becoming gory except for brief snippets. Barring the brief sight of an Indiana Jones death trap with Fulci violence, the film leaves Egypt to be fully set in New York City, the Egyptian curse only important to allow certain symbolism from the sand to scorpions which Fulci is interesting in depicting. Instead, this is a horror mood piece, one of the more subdued films from this period. Fulci by now was becoming known for his extreme violence in his work, which you can see the contrast to with The New York Ripper (1982) released the same year, one of his most controversial and sleaziest films of his entire career. Instead here, whilst eventually gore comes, there is the built instead seeing that the talisman's aura is also affecting her brother Tommy, Giovanni Frezza a regular (and recognisable) member of Italian genre cinema as that blond child actor, whilst their professor father George spends part of the film blinded by ancient temple lasers.

It gets bloody, but it focuses more on the oneiric tone that films like The Beyond (1980) had entirely. This is still a film where a person is pecked to death by sentient taxidermied birds, but alongside its Egyptian theming, cobras menacing a Manhattan apartment, it feels at a distance from other films of the director's from the time. This thankfully has the woozy mood to compensate for this, with plenty of surreal images transpiring as elevators become possessed and the children's bedroom becomes a portal, spitting the office clown into the Egyptian desert dead on arrival, and ruining the carpet with sand fed by the Nile. Fabio Frizzi really helps with this through the score, adding to this film that does show Fulci's morbid eye for imagery, ending with even subtle images like someone dead partially coming through a bleeding white wall. It definitely feels like a film where, in another's hand, it would have been one of the cheesier films from the Italian genre wave, and it is still a film which could have done with a touch of something else to really grow into something special. Even without this feeling though, it is an idiosyncratic title, one that showed beyond flaws that its director and the production team helped raise it.

Poor Things (2023)

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Screenplay: Tony McNamara

Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray

Cast: Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, Willem Dafoe as Dr. Godwin "God" Baxter, Ramy Youssef as Max McCandles, Christopher Abbott as Alfie Blessington, Kathryn Hunter as Madame Swiney, Jerrod Carmichael as Harry Astley, Hanna Schygulla as Martha von Kurtzroc, Margaret Qualley as Felicity, Vicki Pepperdine as Mrs. Prim

An Abstract Candidate

 

There was something perversely delightful in seeing Poor Things in a multiplex in the afternoon, rather than at night at a specialist cinema. Despite having been a big prestige production, with a Best Picture nomination at the 96th Academy Awards, we are still dealing with a horror/dark comedy with very adult content and subject matter, sexually explicitly and proudly weird. Based on the work by Alasdair Gray, an acclaimed Scottish author and artist, and involving Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, behind transgressive and idiosyncratic productions in his homeland like Dogtooth (2009), it makes me proud that a director I always admired in Lanthimos managed to find a way to enter the British film production industry, with this a British-US-Irish co-production, and not yet compromise his interest in the idiosyncrasies and weirdness of human behaviour.

What we get is a retelling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein if taking the next logical step in how, once Victor Frankenstein created his being, the being becomes Dr. Godwin Baxter as played by Willem Dafoe, a begrudgingly accepted member of Victorian society and a teacher of human anatomy and surgery in London. Central to the film, as a huge contributor as a co-producer and the lead, is Emma Stone as the logical extension of the Bride of Frankenstein, or in this case the Daughter of Frankenstein in Bella. It is a slight spoiler, but she is a woman who originally committed suicide, throwing herself off London Bridge, only for Baxter to resurrect her with the mind of her unborn child in her womb placing the mother's mind, bringing to life a figure who starts as a grown woman with the mind of the child until she begins to mature psychologically. One of Baxter's students Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) is hired to record her progress, falling for her but with Bella herself always the central character, as her growing self awareness leads her to want to leave the house she has lived in all her life.

It is fascinating to see Lanthimos break through over the years, and here he gets to have the most visually ambitious of his work, an alternative Victorian era world where Bella is our centre, beginning to grasp the world around her slowly in a confined and artificial world under a father she literally calls God. Her journey, played as absurdist and deliberately provocative, is learning back to Dogtooth in the prologue, under her loving father's thumb until he relents to let her have a worldwide affair with a chad named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Dogtooth was about a patriarchal figure forcing a confined world on his adult children with their own logic, but here there is the inverse to that film where God relents and lets her, after her discovery of adolescence and her sexuality at the dining table, go off with this womaniser aware of the necessary to let her grow. To the growing frustrations of Duncan, Mark Ruffalo eventually becoming one of the funniest figures in the film for how increasingly exasperated he becomes, Bella's journey becomes existential as she grows and learns of the world in her own way.

The obvious themes, set in the Victorian era, is definitely with "civilised" society as reflected in all the men in Bella's life, how she is meant to be to them in terms of acceptable behaviour and manners, but it does avoid locking this theme to the past, thus neutering the thought experiments of this theme, entirely because this is also set in its own exaggerated world. This forces one to experience Bella's journey personally without necessarily the danger of a realistic historical depiction of the past possible to use as a distancing tool to how this still connects to the current world. It becomes more hypothetical, with its incredibly luscious set designs and fictional worlds, Lisbon turned into a fantasy land with cable cars in the air, but still dealing with the problems which Bella starts to pick up from around herself, all whilst growing awareness from her impulsive interest in the outer world to awareness of others and empathy. I have heard of readings of her as well in terms of the autistic spectrum which, as someone with autism myself, should have been obvious but does consider how much nuisance needs to be considered, from a female viewer with autism, to give a proper reading on this. Certainly, with Bella, though she is initially set up as the child-woman who gains weight to her life as she matures, I do see something I have come to develop as I become older as an autistic person, seeing normalised behaviours meant to be rational as more increasingly subjective and even questionable in their acceptable in behaviour ticks. This is reflect especially here with the taboos Bella casually cuts down as pointless as she learns basic pleasures, learns about her sexuality and her liberation, and all with eventual self awareness. Even if her own perspective separate from others, which is bolstered by the profane sense of humour, hers is a progress towards to better.

It is a great performance by Emma Stone. Committed certainly and willing to work with a sense of complete trust and skill to pull it off, as was the case for the likes of Angeliki Papoulia in his earlier made films, it is not for the obvious aspects like the numerous scenes of nudity which makes this a difficult role, but the initial version of her as a child-woman which she documented was insanely challenging to accomplish without some emotional strain¹. With the help of the script by Tony McNamara, hers like everyone's dialogue is full of idiosyncratic language alongside her own idiosyncratic movements, really needed together to make Bella succeed as a character. Wordplay to her distinct turns of phrase filter through the many subjects she has to deal with, such as her befuddlement of not behaving as she is supposed to be to men, or the wrongs of sex work as a credible method of liberation for her and for pay. This is alongside that idea earlier mentioned, as an autistic viewer, that you can see her finding the negatively weird and irrational behaviour which is supposed to be "normal" with the curiosity I and likely others on the spectrum have felt.

At one point in Lisbon, especially with the distinct costume designs by Holly Waddington, I could not help but think of Frank Henenlotter's Frankenhooker (1990), a deliberately tasteless title for a ridiculous premise he literally had to create within seconds in a pitch meeting but made into a memorable horror-comedy, but this becomes the logical progression of what that film hinted at but could not get to. That being how male figures built the perfect woman literally and metaphorically, a daughter surrogate here for Godwin and a perfect lover Duncan, only for her to become fully of her free will, a force of energy stomping around whilst the men are the exasperated ones who cannot comprehend she will not just be their idealised template for them to own. Ruffalo, who got a Best Supporting Actor nomination alongside Stone for Best Actress at the Academy Awards, is the perfect figure for this, the erudite git who gets the funniest lines when he cannot control and dictate what Bella is as a person, finding her way in her own logic and prodding his contradictory mood swings.

You tend to forget, when multiplexes are a place of usually teen friendly films, that we still can have very adult films in violence and sexually explicit themes once in a while, but normally not screened in the middle of a pleasant afternoon, especially when this gets to Bella eventually learning the complex realities of life and how to be empowered whilst working in a brothel in France. The deadpan nature depicting this type of content, even moments of extreme violence, however has been with Yorgos Lanthimos since his earlier films. What I did not expect him, whilst his cinematographer Robbie Ryan was inspired by Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 adaptation of Dracula², was to also have gone from a template for the New Greek Weird Wave of films of stark minimalism to possibly being inspired by Tim Burton all whilst retaining his own maximalist style.

The first act, Bella's childhood before she leaves her father's home, is almost entirely monochrome with a fish eyed lens to distort the world around her. A part of this helps lead the viewer gently into this world, as much as a film with prominent CGI effects alongside the practical ones as Godwin's home is populated with incredibly strange and well done animal hybrids never explained but he clearly created, like bulldog chicken hybrids or the duck dog. Burton is apt a comparison as, whilst sexual desire only occasionally crept into his films, Burton liked played with the macabre and sickly humorous, and with some of his films being as gory as this occasionally gets into, there is unexpected bedfellows with this film even if we get into themes of its own creators. Lanthimos is not that different in the morbid humour here, barring that he adds as well his own touches, his own influences in the artistic style of the film and his interest the viewing humanity like a scientist watches bacteria under a microscope, examining their weird behaviours since Kinetta (2005).

The more explicit politics is different to Burton too, at least in how they are treated here openly, really cemented when we get to Bella being on a ship between oceans and beginning to learn the harsh realities of life through a legitimate cynic played by Jerrod Carmichael. It never becomes heavy handed here due to the sense of humour this introduces between these moments, be it Mark Ruffalo having a meltdown learning his money has been donated to charity, to the brothel Madame in France played by Kathryn Hunter, covered in tattoos, having a frank and thoughtful attitude to her profession, open to Bella's inquisitiveness and for all her female employees whilst with a habit of playful love bites for her young female employees. The one moment where this gets close to heavy handedness to a detriment is addressing Bella's origins, needed to close her arch and introduce Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), who is arguably a stereotype due to the little time we get to fully flesh out his true evil. Of her past, he represents what is evil, the colonial soldier who says Jesus would beat her up with a baseball bat, as her husband from the past, for her sins, and yet abuses his staff for fun and believes in female circumcision. He is still worth having as he presents the last example of masculinity needed to be castrated in the film, the toxic patriarch, and the one closest to the period setting whose form still sadly permeates Western culture, the colonialist who with his home full of weapons and appropriate African icons distort the likes of the Christ's teachings to be pure white male empowerment fantasies, that of dictating the world to everyone not Anglo-Saxon or male. He is the true villain, as even Godwin for his crimes, including trying to create a new Bella, becomes in a nuisance to the film's virtue the father to her daughter she accepts and loves even for all his mistakes. In contrast, Blessington is the figure you need to see who makes even Ruffalo's Duncan just misguided. He argues, for a film already close to two and a half hours, that it needed to be three hours, to deal with the real challenge that enforces Bella's full growth as a figure, particularly as we could have gotten into more explicit issues of class conflict and colonial attitudes, and without losing the resolution we get, [Spoilers] involving goat's brains [Spoilers End].

In context to mainstream cinema, the stereotype rather than the reality including the image perceived of Best Picture Oscar nominees in the past, Poor Things is magnificently bonkers, transgressive and visually resplendent cinema that is to be appreciated. It is a delightfully expressive film, dealing with grim subjects still of the director's cinema but at a point he was able to escape being stereotyped to one form of cinema only. He fully emphasises the true meaning of the auteur theory, that this is his film but where we have to rightly credit as well the differences that came from the figures who contributed to this specific film - great performances, great scriptwriting, great production design from the sets to the model shot work, and a great score from Jerskin Fendrix, making his debut here in composing for a film, who at times evokes the scores Michael Nyman enriched the films of Peter Greenaway with, a huge compliment from my part to nod to. With knowledge Lanthimos tracked down Alasdair Gray before his 2019 passing to adapt the novel, only to learn of Gray's admiration of Dogtooth the film itself¹, adds a wonderful emotional bow to the work, which this was clearly a labour of love for Yorgos Lanthimos. He was able to clearly make a film without compromise, and Lanthimos and everyone in the production of this should pat themselves on the back, on the image onscreen or behind them, for the accomplishment.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) Exclusive: Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos on Creating a Woman Free of Shame in Poor Things, written by Emma Specter and published by Vogue for May 31th 2023.

2) Poor Things’ cinematographer on lighting a sex comedy, being inspired by Francis Ford Coppola, written by Jason Struss and published by Digital Trends on December 9th 2023.

Mad Dog Time (1996)

 

Director: Larry Bishop

Screenplay: Larry Bishop

Cast: Jeff Goldblum as Mickey Holliday, Richard Dreyfuss as Vic, Gabriel Byrne as Ben London, Ellen Barkin as Rita Everly, Diane Lane as Grace Everly, Gregory Hines as Jules Flamingo, Kyle MacLachlan as Jake Parker, Burt Reynolds as Jackie Jackson, Larry Bishop as Falco, Henry Silva as Sleepy Joe, Michael J. Pollard as Red, Christopher Jones as Falco, Billy Idol as Lee Turner, Angie Everhart as Gabriella, Billy Drago as Wells, Paul Anka as Danny, Rob Reiner as Albert, Joey Bishop as Gottlieb, Richard Pryor as Jimmy the Gravedigger

An Abstract Candidate

 

Mad Dog Time was one of those films flashed up into my attention at one point, in a context long vanished from my memory but occupying the space now given it, one which did initial come with a negative baggage whether it deserved it or not with how it was talked about. My first encounter with Larry Bishop, son of Joey Bishop, one of the members of the "Rat Pack" with Frank Sinatra, was negative when my younger self was not a fan of Hell Ride (2008), a Quentin Tarantino co-produced biker film, which I will have to return to with so much time having past that the old opinion has been forgotten let alone my memories of that film. That film was not helped as I was getting into cinema at the time of the "neo-grindhouse" wave of genre films, in the shadow of Tarantino's own 2007 project Grindhouse with Robert Rodriquez, which I was not a fan of back then. Ironically, Mad Dog Time found itself caught up in the shadow of Tarantino as it was lumped into the films post-Pulp Fiction, when it blew up in 1994, which led to a lot of self-reflective and dialogue heavy crime films come in from its wake. Mad Dog Time was cursed by a zero star review from Roger Ebert¹, one I am going to commit a blasphemy in saying is actually a pretty terrible review. It really does not get into anything about what the film is barring its obsession with dialogue eccentricities, such as the leads having similar sounding names, which is definitely absurd, but spends most of its time trying to think of absurd ways to describe something being pointless without actually needing a film to critique involved. This is something, as time goes on, and as I came to cinema in the time of the greater weight of amateur voices and the internet in opinion, where I find myself realising the film critics who became huge, usually the American ones like Ebert or Pauline Kael, were still figures with their own personal opinions even if they are still worth reading the reflections of.

That may seem insanely blasphemous to start this review with, but Mad Dog Time is definitely one of those subjective films you think is being too smart for its own good to the point of pretention, or you vibe with, and the Ebert review really does not get into what exactly Larry Bishop's film is, especially as it really sticks out next to other self reflective crime films I have seen from the nineties. For me, built with the help of Larry Bishop being friends with some of the cast and others willing to work on this lower budget film, Mad Dog Time from the get-go has an absurdist artificiality to the proceedings which was immediately interesting. This premise has been seen before and that is clearly the point as the film goes through with deconstructing this premise, in which a mob boss Vic (Richard Dreyfuss) is going to be let out the mental health hospital, and everyone is going to be dragged in and then likely dragged into a body bag, such as Mickey Holliday (Jeff Goldblum) for being with Vic's estranged girlfriend Grace (Diane Lane). From the get-go, there is a voice-over set against the cosmos itself explaining this is an alternative dimension, starting with an illustration of a nightclub only to turn into the real set, mostly locked into artificial world based on locations and sets. The best comparison points here, for the set up, is that for a film which Larry Bishop openly admits was inspired by the likes of Samuel Beckett²  this brings to mind too Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987), author Norman Mailer's infamous adaptation of his own novel which is a bizarre, sick humoured subversion of crime film tropes, and Jean-Luc Godard's Detective (1985), which does also fit into Ebert's criticism of Mad Dog Time, of being a film about "two or three characters [starting] out in a scene and [reciting] some dry, hard-boiled dialogue, and then one or two of them will get shot"². Godard's film, which was made as much to be able to make his controversial take on the Virgin Birth in Hail Mary (1985), has more of his introspective musings on art, and significantly less people being shot, but is as much an artificial dissection of the crime films he grew up with as much as Tough Guys... is a fresh take from a veteran author who would have started his literary career at their boom in pulp literature, and Larry Bishop’s film which comes from hindsight to them too.

This Godard comparison is apt, likely as for the late Swiss director’s film, the crime genre were always artificial for me. They are films I have seen from my youth, and they exist outside the reality of crime as artificial stories of morality, unless you see the films like his or even these pulpier versions which undercut and dissect these stories. Vic is going to finally leave the asylum but already chaos is brewing. By the first minutes, actor Michael J. Pollard of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) has been shot dead, and this beings the absurdity clearly here, that this is a world of mindless violence and power games where the sole outside world is a mortician, frequently mentioned, who clearly gets enough clients to work on in the crime world he can afford on-bench advertising. Roger Ebert's criticism of Mad Dog Time was that this was about characters just standing around and pontificating, which would sound pretentious if this was just meant to be cool. Despite some of these characters giving their opinion on the philosophy of life, this dialogue usually leads to funny one liners or the character coming off as ridiculous on purpose. So much is clearly written by Larry Bishop as a joke, everything clearly unhinged and pointlessly violent, beginning with whatever Gabriel Byrne managed to channel as “Brass Balls” Ben London. His is a deeply odd performance just in the accented cadence he chooses, but as the film goes, this becomes one of the best performances, as a rare comedy performance from the actor, and a sign of how artificial the film is.

It can be too "clever" with the naming of certain characters and its symbolism, which seem too obvious when you realise what is hinted in them, but with the eccentric wordplay, such as imagining all of Vic's personalities visiting his nightclub, you see Bishop was never interested in making these characters "cool". They are instead amalgamations of eccentric figures inspired by crime cinema and the Rat Pack, the group his father was part of and the music throughout nodded to. You could figure out a way to stage this in a theatre performance, which is a virtue, but the production design by Dina Lipton does add a lot to its playful eccentricities. Attempting to be the Iago to this Shakespearian tale, but coming off as a lame sleaze weasel, Kyle MacLachlan's base is literally a warehouse barring the abrupt cameo by his own personal aircraft, which is a hilarious non-sequitur alongside being introduced to his cronies, even Billy Drago, eating sushi. Throughout, the fact many scenes stay within warehouse spaces or Vic’s nightclub does not attempt to hide, as much as Godard’s Detective did in a hotel, these plot clichés being forced through this world and puncturing them inherently in the locations used.

The least expected people popping up adds on a first viewing, but to this film's credit, everyone gets something to work with which would grow on other viewings. Yes, that is musician Billy Idol of all people in a small role to challenge Jeff Goldblum to a duel, first revolver to kill the opponent to win, and he stands out, looking like he wandered off another crime pastiche, Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind (1985), just for telling Goldblum to fuck himself. This also presents the most cinematic part of the film, that all pistol duels are done sat down, usually behind desks, which is the type of thing I could see Seijun Suzuki having done, with the Hachiro Guryu team who worked on his films^a, when he dissected yakuza cinema out of boredom of the templates demanded of him by Nikkatsu studios. That is part of the reason why this grew on me as I was watching it, a film trying to be cleaver but undercutting its pretensions by both the quality of the performances and that it is deliberately exaggerated on purpose. All the films, many more well regarded, I have mentioned may be viewed as an excuse to defend Mad Dog Time with comparison, it is, but because this shares so many of their traits and their quirks, a few even maligned themselves, sharing a collected DNA between them all in doing different things to undercut this genre.

This also includes the fact Mad Dog Time is incredibly funny, with the fact that ninety percent of the cast dies by the end becoming part of its sick sense of humour, more so because the cast is full of diverse names who all get idiosyncratic touches, like cult legend Henry Silva as a narcoleptic heavy to the least expected Burt Reynolds cameo possible. That your two female leads are figures above this lunacy - Diane Lane standing as calm and collected, Ellen Barkin captivating as someone whose irritable energy is nonetheless contrasted by her character's love for Mick - does emphasis this too. The two figures who keep this world sane among the men are, ironically, Richard Dreyfuss despite being the character meant to be the ticking time bomb, playing the role in a calm of a man after having stripped everything away, and Jeff Goldblum, who radiates film noir charm that makes this, even if you hate the film, one of his best performances. Goldblum is trademarked for his nervous energy, but until he is caught off-guard and forced to try to outsmart his enemies by talking his way out of the situation, his character of Mick is cool and absolutely in control. Even if he has cheated on two sisters, in Grace, who they both know are not meant for each other, and her sister Rita, who is meant to be together with Mick in their love-hate chemistry, the character is still likable and it is because Goldblum plays the role so well.

Even that he can be rattled as a character works, because of Goldblum’s performance. Like a character from many older film noirs, he does play it like the underdog leads in that he is always precariously doomed, but always has the one liner to stick it into someone. Even one of the more abrupt turns, a fake copy of a hit man eventually played by Larry Bishop himself, feels like a pastiche from old pulp radio stories, emphasising how with all the back stabbings and shootings here, nothing is for certain and Mick has to figure out how to survive it. Considering someone pretends to have a heart condition, using Tic Tacs as a fake medication, for as long as they can for the right moment to kill someone shows the absurd lengths for nothing this deals with, the film playing to the idea of the pointless machinations of these gangsters striving for power only leading to chaos. Mad Dog Time was kneecapped itself when it was realised, one where the film won me over in the prolonged joke of Vic threatening Ben London to leave town, only to shoot him in the kneecap when he refuses and telling him to hop off from town. The pointless amount of death is the joke, and it is telling the sanest act is to decide to not draw the trigger on oneself and save another even if one last person is shot to accomplish this. Even that this ends with a sentimental finale, whilst part of the many aspects that may make this an acquired taste, made this a film that vibed for me perfectly. Film opinion is subjective, but with Mad Dog Time, it is weird now seeing this elusive film, dismissed back in the day, only to find myself looking at its negative reactions with surprise. Not necessarily because the film would appeal to everyone, truly an “acquired taste” in how much of it plays against conventions, but because whilst I absolutely see the imperfect moments and all that would put those off in its choices, I have seen a lot of films undermine the tropes of crime cinema like this even before Quentin Tarantino, the supposed reason for this film existing, and see this share all the virtues I have found in those films as here, winning me over as a result as an underrated production.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

 

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1) Roger Ebert's Mad Dog Time review, originally published on November 29th 1996.

2) Larry Bishop's interview as part of the Projection Booth podcast's review on Mad Dog Time, released August 20th 2021.

a) The collective pen name for Seijun Suzuki himself, Takeo Kimura, Atsushi Yamatoya, Yōzō Tanaka, Chūsei Sone, Yutaka Okada, Seiichirō Yamaguchi and Yasuaki Hangai.