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...

Welcome to Marwen (2018)

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Director: Robert Zemeckis

Screenplay: Robert Zemeckis and Caroline Thompson

Cast: Steve Carell as Mark Hogancamp / Cap'n Hogie; Falk Hentschel as Captain Topf / Louis; Matt O'Leary as Lieutenant Benz / Carl; Nikolai Witschl as Rudolph / Rudy; Patrick Roccas as Stefan / Stevie; Alexander Lowe as Werner / Vern; Eiza González as Carlala; Leslie Zemeckis as Suzette; Merritt Wever as Roberta; Gwendoline Christie as Anna; Stefanie von Pfetten as Wendy; Janelle Monáe as GI Julie; Leslie Mann as Nicol; Neil Jackson as Kurt / Major Meyer

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

In 2010, a documentary called Marwencol was made by Jeff Malmberg, one I saw many years later, taking a while to reach the UK (taking nearly the whole decade for a proper release let alone a mere DVD). It's subject Mark Hogancamp, after a violent beating by multiple men at once, lost most of his memories and found solace in creating a fake town in the midst of World War II with one male doll representing his idealised heroic self, many female dolls openly based off women in his real life the main populous of the town alongside Nazis as the villains. His tale is fascinating, and he became an acclaimed artist/photographer as his photographs of Marwencol, as the village was christened, became better known. As material for Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis though, considering the additional details of Hogancamp's life and how Zemeckis tries to convey it, makes Welcome to Marwen such an odd mainstream production to ever green light.

It's also Zemeckis after, weirdly, adapting the central material from documentary Man on Wire (2008), about Philippe Petit's legendary high wire stunt between the Twin Towers, into the fictional film The Walk with 3D scope. In general Zemeckis has had a curious history since the late nineties of pushing himself further into new technological potentials with cinema; hell, arguably Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) was too in combining two dimensional character with actors like Bob Hoskins. In-between this he's made dramas (Flight (2012), Allied (2016)) but also had his history with full motion captured characters with the likes of Beowulf (2007). In many ways this feels appropriate as, to depict the world of Marwencol (Marwen here at first), Zemeckis' first idea is to have his cast (including his real life wife and scholar Leslie Zemeckis) contrasted with versions of them with their faces digitally placed onto dolls. That's just skimming the top of what idiosyncratic (to say the least) decisions he took.

Openly, the idea of adapting Hogancamp's life into this film is problematic for myself, to condense a very difficult subject, but I came into the film with this moral standpoint on the artistic endeavour in mind, so took the decision to view this movie as a fictionalisation in its own world. As a result, the tears and awkward nagging strains of the film, under it's apparent and clichéd tale of overcoming one's burdens, makes it also one of the few legitimately interesting adaptations of a real figure I have seen. Most biopics or inspirations tales taken from real life, even those acclaimed, are usually simplistic and reduce the virtues of heroes to trivialities, hard work of creators to mere motages, or make material up. Welcome to Marwen has an issue that its subject is idiosyncratic (at least in the version depicted) that would raise questions without additional context.

He is a sympathetic figure, though there is an innate difference between the real man and his stand-in in Steve Carell which without the original source is a curious character to depict to say the least, someone who has built a WWII town where he is on man in a world of sexy dolls, figures openly based on real women even in his town that, whilst strong fighters, still wear fetishized clothes. That Hogancamp in real life, as told here, was violently beaten up (while very drunk) for confession his interest in wearing women's clothing does complicate this in a lot of ways, but this is still a character in fictional form, without the original context, that will elicit a lot of complicated reactions from viewers. He's sympathetic because he was discriminated against, because he was once an illustrator who lost most of his memories (as the real Mark Hogancamp) and reduced in this version to a disabled state, and because here he is depicted in Carell in having traumatic PTSD that is subconsciously drawn into Marwen(col), the Nazis obvious surrogates for the transgressors who hurt him. But still, this is still a curious world of fetishishtic female dolls and one man's boy's own adventures that occasionally burst through with stark death and with people in fictional Hogancamp's lives directly interacting with him outside of Marwen. It's not easy material and Zemeckis seems to obfuscate and load it to be much more difficult to digest, something as much to pin on co-writer Caroline Thompson, whose career between Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands (1990), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)) and films like Black Beauty (1994) really emphasises the schism on hand and that partially this was deliberate.

This was meant to be a big hit for Universal Pictures. Yet the sexual undercurrent, for a twelve certificate film in the UK (allowing twelve year olds to see it), is laced in so much complexity on the subject its incredibly adult, raising an obvious discrepancy between mainstream culture and art which transgresses this especially from outsiders like Mark Hogancamp. Mark Hogancamp's original work wasn't as exaggerated as this depiction, which in itself leads to a drastic change of tone as the production both adds more artificiality to the material and, with the hyper sexuality of plastic dolls, raises the undercurrent to a jarring level. Whether it's Roberta (Merritt Wever), the employee at the model store who clearly loves Hogancamp, who even comments about the absurd amount of times her doll has her shirt ripped off, or  that one of the dolls (played by Mrs. Zemeckis) is based on a porn star (allowing Leslie Zemeckis in none motion capture form to play her as a French maid bursting out the seams in a film-within-in-a-film) there's a lot of baggage about gaze and eroticism, not the stereotypical male gaze but a complicated form. That, "complicated", is an understatement in this fictionalised Hogancamp's gaze and how he has tried to cope with his trauma by interweaving women in his life through dolls but with an erotic side to it. Even without details from the original Marwencol, (no mention of catfights in the fictional version), this still means you have a muddy morality to deal with and, by accident and also deliberately prodded at in the script at the same time, any side able to be hit even in the same scene, you have to digest it whether you like it or not.

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The film thankfully doesn't try to hide this. It may seem odd how some of the women are more than happy to be figures in Marwen - something which Marwencol the documentary went out its way to deal with but interviewing them - but that entire section of the fictional Mark Hogancamp is where some of the most compelling aspects come to play, The film takes it time to depicts the steady friendly relationships of these women and how for Hogancamp now, life is merely getting by, frankly coping with buried trauma, whilst merely being able to talk to these women, completely empathetic to him and always wanting to know how their doll forms are, is as much them doing as much as they can to help him as it is part of being in a small town where everyone knows everyone, from his Russian caretaker Anna (Gwendoline Christie) to co-worker at a bar named Carlala (Eiza González).

Some aspects however will stick out with an uncomfortable jagged edge, that being the burgeoning relationship between Hogancamp and his new female neighbour Nicol (Leslie Mann) who he develops a crush on, but with a discomforting obsessive edge to it with her doll stand-in being his counterparts beloved, something which the film openly deals with. As much as this world has figures like G.I. Julie, a small role for singer Janelle Monáe, based on a former war veteran who helped Hogancamp overcome his initial physical trauma in hospital, this subplot with Nicol does actually get to the stage it feels like it's going to turn into a Todd Solondz film but suitable for twelve year olds, something utterly unexpected and jarring for this mainly light hearted film meant to be inspirational.

Knowing how and why Hogancamp's work came to be also makes Zemeckis' creative decisions with Marwencol itself even stranger but clearly deliberate. It's fascinating, actually praiseworthy, in spite of the divisiveness of his run of motion capture films how his decision to motion capture the dolls to the cast, and embrace the artificiality, is inventive and has a lot of additional weight to the various quirks on hand. Hogancamp's own world was unconventional already, not wanting to forget Deja Thoris (as played by Diane Kruger here), a blue haired witch who (in the documentary and here) eventually brings in a time machine and was the figure looming over Hogancamp's stand-in doll, here a crux to Hogancamp's anxieties and the weight pressing him down alongside the Nazis, here never actually dying truly as they are merely dolls who get up a while later. Zemeckis may sanitise some of the details, but he still stages the Nazis whipping the male doll in a fetished way, an icon photo that is recreated with as much a sick humour here, able to get away with a lot for this film because the action is entirely done with fake dolls but still containing these emotional splinters.

There are also moments which are entirely subjective in whether they are meant to be sincere or unintentionally more muddied. Hogancamp's speech of the "female essence" he finds in owning and wearing women's shoes does have an oddness to it, whilst later his comment about women being the strongest of all is undercut in an action scene involving a Delorean stand-in time machine and a doll getting a stiletto shoe to the neck.

Does Welcome to Marwen work? I'd say yes, if that I'd suggest the film only starts to slip in how hastily it tries to wrap everything up for the ending in spite of the psychological baggage making it impossible to, the story (in lieu to Hogancamp's real life alcoholism before his assault) about this version eventually having to overcome addiction. Aside from this, the tonal shifts and conflicts the viewer will have is a lot more credible in dealing with such a subject matter than trying to be morally sanitised or judgemental. It cannot hide the darkness of what Mark Hogancamp suffered through, and even the kitsch of the CGI doll village scenes, because it completely exaggerates what were a form of psychological diorama into an exaggerated boy's own adventure, has a strange effect particularly as a) the melding of real actors with these dolls is eerie if visually incredible, and b) the artificiality at hand even being part of its world is weird to say the least. What the real Mark Hogancamp created with his camera and his town was profound, whilst this is an odd work we see onscreen adding new layers even when it fucks up the tone badly at points, an expletive I feel if appropriate language to use as this film is still a mess, but a compelling and ambitious one, spoken with love rather than to offend anyone in this production (including Steve Carell who, bless him, actually gives a great performance) who tried their best.

Robert Zemeckis to his credit does his damndest in terms of high quality of Hollywood production and, if anything, to use it for a much more complex work even if sometimes unintentionally is a far better use of such production. I've found myself drawn more to these "divisive" works which usually are slaughtered critically in film publications or newspaper reviewers, though Welcome to Marwen has its defenders, as the moments which cause issue are usually the most interesting and more layered details. When a film is praised to the hilt there 's a danger, proven too many times, that it's just heading for obvious details which are copied, always evoking for myself an off-the-cuff comment made by a character in Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls about how easily manipulated viewers are when emotions and an audience's moral righteousness are exploited for drama. Here however, even if at times there are clear moments as here which do need to be questioned as creative decisions, there's a risk at hand that is so much more interesting, the moments of something tonally amiss getting an actual reaction from myself and forcing me to have to think of what exactly my opinion is. It at least offers more to talk about after a viewing.

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Escape from Tomorrow (2013)

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Director: Randy Moore

Screenplay: Randy Moore

Cast: Roy Abramsohn as Jim White; Elena Schuber as Emily; Katelynn Rodriguez as Sara; Jack Dalton as Elliott; Danielle Safady as Sophie;  Annet Mahendru as Isabelle; Alison Lees-Taylor as the Other Woman

In terms of prodding Mickey Mouse square between the eyes, I'd argue Escape from Tomorrow, "illegally" shot in Walt Disney World and Disneyland with an incredible amount of planning and tactics, is far more morally good and artistically interesting than in comparison to Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010), where one of the major scenes is where artist Banksy actually left a dummy dressed as a Guantanamo Bay detainee under a ride. Revisiting Exit Through the Gift Shop, I found the Guantanamo Bay dummy stunt to be deeply problematic and obvious as a political statement, like a lot of Banksy's work skirting merely surface imagery with little else. That's before we look to the greater concern that, before we started having public places like Disneyland to train stations warn patrons of packages and odd abandoned object,  not only did the stunt stop a ride but would've left innocent tourists distressed for an idea that barely made a public resonance after the initial news on the incident.

Arguably Escape from Tomorrow skirts an issue with filmic patrons without their permission, but this is an ideological issue with all art from documentaries to photography, and rather than a cheap shock tactic it at least takes a far more interesting route - the grotesque but sincere mid life crisis of Jim White (Roy Abramsohn), a mild mannered husband whose break down, and the weirdness he encounters, just happens to be at Disneyland with his wife and young children, adding to the tension. In a tale where the central cast posed as regular tourists and the crew walked around with film cameras that looked like tourist cameras and scripts on iPhones, director Randy Moore is not exactly exploiting actual Disney tourists either; hilariously the one mention of "Disney" in the dialogue is bleeped out yet no one at Siemens complained they were depicted as a cabal behind shady experiments Patrick McGoohan might worry about.

Fears were understandably brought up that Disney might sue, yet history itself shows where that lead when they targeted Air Pirates Funnies by Dan O'Neill with other artists, an underground parody comic who kept drawing the comic regardless of how much Disney sued him. He lost, a lot, but history has made Disney look monstrous to people like me when O'Neill, as the underdog, is stubborn upon the subject to this day. Whether this had any subconscious influence with Escape from Tomorrow, or if the Disney of now would rather ignore the film, is an interesting thought theory. Hilariously they even acknowledged the film in their historical canon as part of the online supplement of Disney A to Z: The Official Encyclopedia.

First let's get to the obvious - that, whilst an innovative and controversial production, it's still about a male midlife crisis, which I point out as this has been used as an accusation against Escape from Tomorrow, likely because of all the bad (and numerous) films about male midlife crisis that indulge in the worst attitudes particularly when it comes to being an older man and sexual desire. Not necessarily the idea that it shouldn't be dealt with, but needing examples like the film that at least dissect it. Starting with our protagonist losing his job over the phone on his family vacation, the film never tries to be on his side as, in one of the more uncomfortable if sickly humorous tangents caused by the anxiety of his age and disconnect from his wife Emily (Elena Schuber), he starts ogling and following two teen Parisian tourists, all whilst in general the world starts to become odder and he starts to collapse. I don't believe protagonists are meant to be inherently sympathetic, actually a problematic ideology for me that is blameable on us viewers, as we've trained ourselves to innately be in our lead character's shoes rather than non-partisan onlookers. Instead, characters should be like in literature, meant to be subjective figures we are meant to watch from afar, even both good and bad as this film demonstrates. Here, Jim White is ordinary and this is capable of both being sympathetic (loss of livelihood, disconnect from all his family) but also absolutely misguided in his behaviour (being a perv over young girls still wearing braces; taking his young son on an adult ride like Space Mountain despite the fact it'll make him throw up). It's more artistically rewarding than if he was entirely sympathetic or just a bastard.

Even before things escalate, when he starts drinking and loses large quantities of blood from a foot injury, there are already figures on attractions suddenly glaring at him with malice and fears of "cat flu" contaminating the park. Escape from Tomorrow plays with both the ideas of urban legends and Disney itself. Accidental decapitations on rides, emu secretly being used on the menu and prostitution of the actresses playing the Disney Princesses, to motifs from Disney's storytelling itself being reinterpreted, from one of those actresses (Alison Lees-Taylor) as an older woman now becoming a Disney villainess, right down to a hypnotising necklace, to the entire weird aspects of Disney's animation being subconsciously drawn from. Disney, despite being the more wholesome company back in the early 20th century when it came to animation, was still producing strange stuff like the Skeleton Dance (1929) to the Night on Bald Mountain sequence from Fantasia (1940) that belong to a different era when family entertainment could still be creepy. Stuff that I haven't seen since I was a toddler on their VHS still lingers like the Pink Elephants sequence in Dumbo (1941) or the transformation of the evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the later references in Escape from Tomorrow.

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Even if Escape from Tomorrow is more adult than the Skeleton Dance (1929) - with its nudity, gore, Siemens' Spaceship Earth building (dubbed a giant testicle) being a secret conspiracy base - there's innately something eerie for me as well about carnival rides and animatronic figures. They fascinate me, are even charming, and show incredible artistic craft, but I can also see how menacing they can be which this film taps into as well. As much an additional layer is found for me as a viewer as, born with autism, I once found incredible discomfort with large crowded areas and loud sounds; even now, whilst more comfortable in public environments, a place as shown here where there's little space to breath and rides you can't hear yourself on would still unnerves me and is something that Escape from Tomorrow does play on for terror. The only better example of this idea would be Damon Parkard's Reflections of Evil (2002) where, shot "illegally" in an E.T. ride at the Universal Studios theme park, he turned an attraction into a noisy hellscape¹.

Technically, circumstances naturally dictate how this film was put together, but it's amazing how coordinated director Randy Moore and his crew were in making the film. Arguably, their circumstances helped as, forced to plan shots and scenes ahead of time, they made a much more precise and stylish film as a result than if they had time to improvise. The monochrome look itself was as much a practically, to control the light on camera better, but itself is far more effective than if the film was shot in colour. Barring some CGI and black demon eyes on characters to dictate menace, a lot of Escape from Tomorrow's weirdness is to be found using the environments or ridiculous plot points they can show with use such as what exactly happens (fatally) when someone gets cat flu. As a result, barring those few heavy handed attempts at being eerie, where inexplicably the film was compared to David Lynch, Moore's film instead is much more its own curious beast that spins the worst holiday possible as its horror, and takes advantage of this idea.

In terms of a message from this, two anecdotes from Randy Moore really spell out a subconscious significance². The first is that Disneyland was once a place he and his father used to go to a lot, only for their estrangement due to his parents' divorcing creating a phantom layer to those memories. Second was when his wife, from the former Soviet Union occupied country Kyrgyzstan and a nurse of a hospital, once upon being in Disneyland commented that it was worse than being at the "psych world at the hospital". Rather than making it a political jab at Disney itself, Escape from Tomorrow is far more interesting as a result when it's about how a place of magic and imagination, yet the people within it, the tourists, nonetheless bring their own anxieties there. Rather than a condemnation of Disney, it imagines that Walt Disney's desires of enrapture people at his theme park may not necessarily go that way when the burdens of life and a general murk of existence complicates the clean, incredibly rigid ideology of Disney as a company. The only real sense of politics, the one that is to target and became part of the background of the film production, is that Disney's extraneous history of enforcing this clean wholesomeness (from how difficult it apparently is to get a job at Disneyland to keeping Song of the South (1946) off shelves) is completely alien to how complicated human beings are.

This is poignant as, whilst the ending does get into a vague and curious little suggestion of multiple realities, which is really the one major flaw of the film, there's a nice sense of layering and metaphor (even as the man who'd prefer being explicitly fantastical in his stories) that the conspiracy that eventually comes in, suggesting that our protagonist may be required as a person of great imagination like Uncle Walt, is brought on by his subconscious anxieties and desires to wish for a better life. Even then, the multiple realities layer does have in itself a nice touch that, if there are more nuisances in the plotting to build to it, it still evokes the message at hand that the idealised world desired is still awkwardly against the reality.

Shot within the confining spaces of real tourist environments, a drama is built upon that would be rewarding as it is without the weird additions, like a mumblecore drama with a higher production value in the location shooting; that Emily, whilst painted more as the stereotypical distant wife, has become bored and is embarrassed more than offended by her husband lusting after teens, and that in a nicely nuisance detail there's a schism between the daughter loving her father more whilst the son is deliberately antagonistic to him at points but loves the mother, one that comes ahead in the most disturbing scene which involves hitting a child at a breaking point and the fallout from it. Escape from Tomorrow may not be perfect, but considering what the film came from and how it even got to be, I have to admire any sense of complexity and creativity from such a potentially risky endeavour. The one single aspect of the stunt pulled off by Banksy, according to Exit Through the Gift Shop filmed by artist Mr. Brainwash (Thierry Guetta), which was of interest in spite of the cheap shock of the stunt, was the intense and disturbing level the interrogation of Brainwash by Disney and FBI agents went up to afterwards when he got caught. God only knows what stern words Randy Moore would get if he or any of the crew and actors were actually caught; maybe just banned permanently, but as these films intertwine, it offers an alternative reality in itself to consider.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Weird

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

From https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTUwMjUy
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1) Damon Packard was also permanently banned from there as a result, adding a nice synchronicity to today's topic.

2) https://www.indiewire.com/2013/01/sundance-2013-escape-from-tomorrow-director-randy-moore-says-im-a-product-of-disney-world-41668/

Machorka-Muff (1963)

From https://66.media.tumblr.com/74eb93ec8ddcd123be6593d
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Directors: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet

Screenwriter: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet

Based on Bonn Diary by Heinrich Böll

Cast: Erich Kuby as Oberst Erich von Machorka-Muff; Renate Lang as Inniga von Zaster-Pehnunz

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

Straub-Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, are a duo that evokes weight. They are heavy weights of European art cinema but, in the many discrepancies where prolific names weren't available to us plebeians, are not as well known in English language cinematic culture in comparison to their reputation. Thankfully, knock on wood, the current restorations of their catalogue and widening availability (even physical releases in the USA by Grasshopper Film) will rectify this. Interestingly the first work they ever put together was a short named Machorka-Muff, a very straightforward fragment of narrative stepped in a thick morass of satire. This was far from the image of "difficult" filmmaking as has been presented, and eventually appears, in this duo's work.

Machorka-Muff the character (Erich Kuby) is a former colonel for the Nazi army who is to preside over an opening ceremony for a new institute, as much to salvage the reputation of another high ranking Fascist soldier of yore. He plans to marry Inniga von Zaster-Pehnunz (Renate Lang), in spite of her previous seven marriages and she being a Protestant to his Catholic, with interest in having an adulterous relationship with another's wife since he does enjoy "petty bourgeois eroticism". (Actually, in muted tone, a hilarious line the many times I've watched this eighteen minute short this year; again not expected from Straub-Huillet in the damnedest to be writing actual jokes in their scripts).

He gets the girl, gets to preside over the ceremony and political powers coinciding with public opinion may push for more pro-militarisation, the fragment of a world here, based on a short story by Heinrich Böll, entirely to his favor. And yes, made in 1963, this is only two decades after the defeat of the Fascists and World War II, and is made in West Germany, so this is all disturbing. Hell, this feels disturbing and close to the bone in the 2010s even if you the reader have more conservative politics to me the writer, as it feels the coolest of satires as Machorka-Muff gets all he wants without his past with the Nazis flashing consciousness of guilt.

From https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/wp-content/
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Straub, in a written title card, calls this an abstract visual dream, but not abstract in what my view of avant-garde/weird cinema is, played as a narrative clear, calmly (but very well made) short film. It feels however, just into the 1960s, modern for the time, not needing to hammer its concerns home as it itself as a subject should alarm. This also shows their tendencies, within an accessible context, of the directors' trademark of very precisely put together films, cut and constructed so there's no fat to this particularly story; this is something to bear in mind as, with the same author, they also made Not Reconciled (1965), a story told in only fifty three minutes which weaves multiple time frames and situations into one of the densest films possible. Almost deadpan, Machorka-Muff has lines which should elicit perverse amusement as well as disbelief, such as comparing his seven war wounds to Inniga's former seven husbands. How banal all is, even her threat in the last dialogue, that her family's influence can alter politics, just a casual remark pouring tea, is a dark and more honest swipe at far-right wing politics, also itself satire as even these worse case scenarios of the upper class in power are utterly bland individuals if you stop and stare at them like here as zoo exhibitions.

It's not a surprise, when even after World War II former Nazis were said to just be able to go into German politics or the economy without fuss, that Straub-Huillet would make this short as a warning. I suspect all the newspapers they cut to in montage are all real, arguing for remilitarisation of Germany, even Christians arguing that violence can be necessary in opinion pieces, despite a) there being a clear cut difference between just war for soldiers to protect and rampant violent militarisation, and b) no sane Christian should argue for violence over benevolence, and c) this is just over twenty years from when Adolf Hitler was in power.

It's a nice, sudden and sly short to being from; Straub-Huillet, even Straub himself when his life partner passed, have a daunting and large filmography, going from ancient Greek texts to documentaries, a non nonsense almost-documentary view on the legendary composer Bach (originally their intended debut before falling onto Machorka-Muff) to even adapting Franz Kafka. It is nice to know though, like all interesting auteurs, that if they only had a short length of film, they could make something still compelling, and that they weren't averse to accessible cinema as long as it stuck in the craw of the viewer.

From https://assets.mubi.com/images/notebook/post_
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The Amazing Bulk (2012)

From https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/
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Director: Lewis Schoenbrun

Screenplay: Keith Schaffner and Jeremiah Campbell

Cast: Jordan Lawson as Henry Howard; Shevaun Kastl as Hannah Darwin; Terence Lording as General Darwin; Randal Malone as Dr. Werner von Kantlove; Juliette Angeli as Lolita Kantlove; Jed Rowen as Detective Ray Garton; Deirdre V. Lyons as Detective Lisa Tuttle

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

This is the first of Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs, which will retire the Non-Abstract Abstract reviews in favor of tidying the blog up and add more elegant style to the work, mainly aesthetically and a title for these non-abstract films I'm covering that rolls off the tongue more.

Made in 2012, I first learnt of The Amazing Bulk through Obscurus Lupa, a female web video host (real name Allison Pregler) who probably did the sardonic review of bad obscure films long before most; I'm not a fan of these types of videos, but to Lupa's credit, rather than soft targets she had the decency (and still does) to dig the deepest, to never given in to the obvious, once a huge fan (and still admiring her work to this day) just for how her reviews in particular covered the prolificness of cinema from the 2000s onwards, an entire cultural flotsam-and-jetsam few of us would probably watch unless by chance that she delved into deliberately, an entire catalogue that could easily be forgotten and lost but, chronicled by someone like Lupa, is just as strange as great canonical weird work if absolutely painful to sit through. Few of them will probably be remembers, and even the few know like David DeCoteau's A Talking Cat?! (2013) feel like they're skirting the fringes of fame, without judging their merits, based on irony only, but, whilst they exist, it's worth covering such examples to gauge what the 2010s in particular were like for these curious cheap creations that were released just before and during streaming becoming popular. So, like a perverse tribute to first learning of The Amazing Bulk from one of her videos, here I am much later covering it.

The notable thing about The Amazing Bulk is not the amazing coincidence that its similar to the Incredible Hulk, a comic book series of interest, but that barring the actors and an occasional prop (a fake purple monster hand too), the entirety of this film is set in green screen with animatiom which looks like it's from a mid nineties video game. It's not even Ralph Bakshi's Cool World (1991) in terms of the interaction between the actors and the sets as, shot only over five to six days, this feels equivalent to visual decor to a theatrical performance of a very peculiar sort rather than a great integration of the two sides.

The premise is generic, the kind that you can boil some superhero films down to, openly borrowing from the Incredible Hulk how scientist Henry Howard (Jordan Lawson) is like Bruce Banner, working for General Darwin (Terence Lording) to create an experimental super serum that, after many ill fated tests on CGI rats which caused an alarming amount to vanish into puffs of CGI smoke, finally works but turns Howard into a CGI purple monster of varying sizes, something just big and other times large enough to make a helicopter a toy he can pluck out the air. Whenever he gets angry or mildly constipated¹, the Bulk causes destruction to CGI vehicles in the vicinity. Why this is not like most superhero films is that, looking like the world of an edutainment game from my past, The Amazing Bulk was created with a lot of pre-existing models and materials. Characters don't even run or walk for large amounts of time, only gyrate on the same spot as the background moves instead.

From https://i1.wp.com/psychodrivein.com/wp/wp-content/
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The film never transcends to a state of true weirdness because, whilst many will already be put off by its quality, the worst part for me is that for all its irony, director Lewis Schoenbrun has openly admitted The Amazing Bulk was more a challenge to make an ultra-low budget superhero film and thus it plays itself safe in plot. The thing is, growing up once hating a lot of these no-budget films, now admiring them but picky, that it is never the technical or aesthetic quality now that was then and now the true issue with many of these films, but how so many feel so stridently obsessed with recreating plots that I found predictable in higher budgeted work, let alone with the factor of whether they could actually recreate them (if at all) on lower budgets. The Amazing Bulk does feel mercenary as a result in its creation, where even factors like its bizarre choices of animation, bought from the likes of eBay, Digital Juice, Animation Factory and Turbo Squid Inc. among others, are never implemented in a way showing actual risk or a sense that the director is an eccentric.

Probably the most fascinating thing about director Schoenbrun instead is his claim to have assisted on Richard Williams' The Thief and the Cobbler (1993), notorious an animation feature film which first started production in 1963 and, after a bastardised 1995 Miramax theatrical release alongside various re-edited versions in existed, had to have three bootleg "Recobbled" cuts made available by fans up to this current day to try and bring Williams' work to existence. I cannot help but wonder, speculate, if that ever had a subconscious influence on Schoenbrun's mix of various "found" props and a desire not to be stuck in a scenario of an endless, arduous production as, for better or worse, the production time was so short in terms of shooting everything.

Sticking to its plot, it does mean any real sense of eccentricity is lost baring a few grasps of pleasurable weirdness. It's thankfully not a pain to sit through, strong enough to tolerate this type of film now, but it's with good reason few would watch The Amazing Bulk without having an allergic reaction. This means that, in terms of the story rather than the production values, the few moments of eccentricity offer what I wish the film should've been in a drought for most of the film. Introducing our villain Dr. Werner von Kantlove (Randal Malone), with his fake German accent and beau Lolita Kantlove (Juliette Angeli), the film offers some much needed absurdity in how, for all his bad hamminess, in his best mock Dr. Strangelove/poor man's Tim Curry performance, you still have an interesting joke character who is explicitly impotent yet in a loving relationship with the simple minded Lolita, both having found a way around this by blowing up national monuments, depicted with stock photos with small CGI missiles turning into CGI explosions over them. Then there's General Darwin, the Thunderbolt Ross of this world, who at times sounds like he's an older man losing his marbles, either improvisation or the script, which as a result manages at least some actual laughs from his abrupt shouting of lines.

Between Darwin's abrupt hatred of dust to Dr. Strangelove and Lolita's ongoing love, the deviant scientist wanting to blow up the Moon (regardless of it destroying the ecosystem if he did) with his bubble headed girlfriend by his side, these joke characters are so much more interesting than a film that wants to be sympathetic with our lead and his romantic interest, a Betty Ross stand-in Hannah Darwin (Shevaun Kastl). And yes, Stanley Kubrick references in the text may stand out; Schoenbrun is a huge Kubrick fan, and whilst the references are embarrassing at times, it's at least a quirk of interest as, in one of the few virtues of the film technically, the director wisely chose good (and public domain) classical compositions²; anyone who wanted to heard Also Sprach Zarathustra over a CGI science bench being shaken about and a fake purple monster had popping up behind it will be able to knock it off their bucket list if they watch this film.

The idea of cinema which makes so many bad decisions it transcends and becomes unique is one I find has weight as the Millennium has encouraged a greater sense of irony to our viewing but also a greater sympathy for filmmakers, as technology allowed for more homespun productions which have to struggle and sometimes overcome their limitations or the circumstances in their making. The surrealist in me sees this in lieu of what is called the "marvellous", celebrating the try-hard as much as taste which transgresses middlebrow mainstream culture, but there's a difference between the absurd from the bland and merely bad. The Amazing Bulk is not Things (1989) or After Last Season (2009) sadly.

The closest moment is when the Bulk, when the US Army turn on him, goes on the run from explosions; its established early, as to get to Kantlove's CGI castle, a literal one barely guarded by male extras in mock Medieval helmets borrowed from a heritage site gift shop, our lead crosses past a golf course and immediately a leprechaun afterwards among details in the background, something which is taken further with Lewis Schoenbrun eventually using even the least appropriate animated figures regardless of tone and logic. Scored the 1812 Overture by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the chase scene is ridiculous but also compelling as a CGI Bulk flees across various (tonally different) locations. CGI tanks, CGI Robin Hood archer, CGI superhero, CGI pug dog superhero, CGI gecko using a CGI computer in a CGO desert, CGI submarine, CGI children playing with CGI footballs blissfully ignorant of the CGI Bulk nearby being attacked with CGI explosions, all CGI gaudiness but, whilst un-defendable in terms of good taste or quality, the only moment something actually strange takes place for an entertaining level of absurdity. The rest of the film, though, is a low budget superhero film that, whilst breezes past with pace that never slogs, is still a really bad and bland production. For every CGI car smaller than a cast member crushing them, The Amazing Bulk never finds a well of personality to compensate, never finding a charisma more interesting and instead more concerned with normal plotting despite that being innately the worst part of the production.

From https://i0.wp.com/psychodrivein.com/wp/wp-
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1) I apologize to actor Jordan Lawson for such a joke, probably too cruel for my usual writing, but with his stern look a constant, it cannot help but remind one that even two actors like Eric Bana and Mark Ruffalo probably had to struggle with even just making anger and repressed rage look credible in any movie, let alone ones where they turn into the Jolly Green Giant on steroids.  

2) Barring an awful MIDI version of Ride of the Valkyries, but that's the least of the film's issues.