Southland Tales (2006)

 

Director: Richard Kelly

Screenplay: Richard Kelly

Cast: Dwayne Johnson as Boxer Santaros; Seann William Scott as Private Roland Taverner / Officer Ronald Taverner; Sarah Michelle Gellar as Krysta Now; Mandy Moore as Madeline Frost Santaros; Justin Timberlake as Private Pilot Abilene; Miranda Richardson as Nana Mae Frost; Wallace Shawn as Baron von Westphalen; Bai Ling as Serpentine; Nora Dunn as Cyndi Pinziki; John Larroquette as Vaughn Smallhouse; Kevin Smith as Simon Theory

An Abstract List Candidate

 

We're a bisexual nation in denial....

As I consider it, every decade should have a notorious film like Southland Tales. They may not have to be a great film, or even in the science fiction genre, but they should be an attempt at capturing the zeitgeist of the era including the pop culture of the moment. There can be more than one per era, but Southland Tales definitely feels for better or for worse a nice exclamation of the 2000s.

It is worth bringing up another example for this idea of mine, a perfect example for capturing the nineties' zeitgeist being Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995), which juggle science fiction material (recorded memories alongside their voyeuristic nature) alongside pre-Millennium anxiety and an explicit parallel to the Rodney King riots of Los Angeles. Southland Tales, surprisingly, is also set in Los Angeles, also is mixing real life politics with science fiction, but is also at times intentionally funny. Like Bigelow's production, which hurt her career, Southland Tales became an albatross for Richard Kelly, the Donnie Darko (2001) director following up his cult hit with this, knee deep in the George Dubya Bush presidency of the Patriot Act and conflict in the Middle East, hovering up the music and pop culture stars from the era in a film which was not well greeted originally.

Talking about Southland Tales means, as well as admitting how weird it is, about addressing its notoriety. Richard Kelly's career, baring The Box (2009), has never really gotten going and Southland Tales was an insanely ambitious project, a six chapter tale with the first three graphic novels, followed by a two and a half hour epic starring a gamut of figures that exist between 2000s pop music and the World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment company. Said film, set in a time after a nuke is set off in Texas, leading to mass surveillance and a strange conspiracy involving an amnesiac action star Boxer Santos (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and went as well as a zeppelin made of lead.

I openly admit that I hated the film when I first saw it, and even now, I will admit that until you embrace the film, it can be a perplexing mass of tangents, something I have grown to love now that has be passed. Set over three days, Southland Tales moves towards the end of the world, as described by Private Pilot Abilene who is played by Justin Timberlake, a physically scarred war veteran who mans a gun turret by the beach and deals in illegal liquid karma, part of a new energy source in this world where World War III took place and targeted oil rich companies in the Middle East, leading to an energy source based on ocean waves which has a side result of a new narcotic. With mind to the Cannes Cut and the Theatrical Cut being now able to be both seen, the later with a lot of exposition brought in to make sense of the world and the Cannes Cut not being as difficult to grasp, if missing key pieces, a lot of the issue with Southland Tales is less the film being difficult but that it throws so much onto the viewer. A television series, in a madder alternative world, would have had a time to bring in all this material too and likely have been cancelled after one season, as Kelly had the luck to be able to make this film in the first place but was burnt by this type of storytelling being an acquired taste for many.

Beyond this, many pieces are shown to us and rummaged about in a mass. Santos, married to the daughter of a Republican politician in the midst of a campaign trail, wandered out of the desert with no knowledge of he is, with a porn star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) his new girlfriend and co-author of a pulpy movie script with him that accidentally foretells the end of the world. This apocalypse involves two Sean William Scotts, that Liquid Karma's creator Baron von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn), and his cabal of assistants including Bai Ling and Poltergeist's Zelda Rubinstein, are sending monkeys through dimensional rips and are aware their sea powered energy is starting to slow down the Earth's rotations, and that pimps do not commit suicide. Add to this a neo-Marxist movement to try to overthrow the Republicans, including an underground severed thumb trade, and a plan to blackmail people through a staged racist cop shooting with an avant-garde poetry duo in comically big prosthetic noses, and this film does skirt a line between relevance even into the modern day and being ridiculous.

And Southland Tales is as mad as a box of frogs, but unlike other scattershot projects, this feels too perfectly focused to have been merely indulgent. For everything that feels like Richard Kelly's project was escaping out from under him, like the decision to have three graphic novels begin the tale, there are also intentional moments of real pathos and are legitimately hilarious, too well thought-out to have been stupid or bad creative decisions. Also of significance is how even the cast there is, whether on purpose or not, feels itself a deliberate mirror of the era. Pointedly, this reflects the era post 9/11, starting in a prologue (shown as a home video shot by two young boys) of a nuke being deliberately dropped on Abilene, Texas. This escalates to an extreme version of mass surveillance, which allows it always in case of possible terrorist activities, and where someone even has to monitor the cameras set up in the toilets at LAX airport as part of their job. Whilst pockets of seriousness are here, Richard Kelly finds the impending end of the world as a bizarre carnival.

In the centre of this is Dwayne Johnson who, sadly due to the failure of this film, was cautioned away from these types of projects. This is a shame as, if you had seen any of his work as a professional wrestler, Johnson was a bolt of pure energy where he finally showed his persona and he is exceptional here. His wrestling work if you were to look back on it sadly has dated in places, due to a lot of it being around a hero or villain who used bullying and homophobic/transphobic content in his speech, but Johnson also changed considerably when he became the film star, practically a different human being over the 2000s on who took his best virtues, his ability to cut speeches with energy and his body language from professional wrestling, and bring it to a new career. I remember watching in wrestling of him as a kid (and returning to it) which shows he was capable of being either the charismatic hero or the obnoxious heel. The time period I grew up with him was even when his dalliances with Hollywood would eventually take him away in the early 2000s, even incorporating it into an obnoxious arsehole that looked down on wrestling despite only having been in The Scorpion King (2002) as a lead. This is Johnson before he had fully become a Hollywood star and at that time, which is a fascinating sight to see, just after his pro wrestling career as a full time job and just before a full film career. Playing a nervous and clueless figure trying to rationalise the madness around him, he is good. Just in his nervous hand gestures, he is transferring his craft from one medium to another.

The cast in general flirts with other areas of entertainment, even in a limited time, and all of them stand out. Even minor roles being taken by the likes of Christopher Lambert, as an illegal arms dealer working out of an ice cream truck, or Jon Lovitz stealing a scene as a psychotic cop stand out. Seann William Scott, who would still have been seen as Stifler from the American Pie films, is probably the person who has the least scenes but manages to gain sympathy as a huge part of the film, playing literally two people, whilst Justin Timberlake gets arguably the best scene, a drug induced musical number where he lip synchs to The Killer's All These Things I've Done, a song whose vague lyrics go gain weight in this context. The only person who feels they have to stretch is Sarah Michelle Gellar. I have come to appreciate her role as Krysta Now, but the character itself could have actually been better if an alternative casting choice and/or a different characterisation had transpired. I can suspend disbelief of an alternative world where Krysta Now has a talk show, where she and other porn stars debate topics like teen horniness with full explicit swearing. Even the fact Christine Now has her own single is not that insane - an iconic disco song More, More, More is by real life adult star Andrea True - but probably I can see needed another television star who had a bit more salt to her personality take the character further. An actual adult film star from the era would have added to the weight of the character, and to the idea of Kelly bringing in a variety of pop cultural figures of the 2000s.  The touch of being a stereotypical simpleton, whilst leading to so much that is funny, does also feel like Richard Kelly's one mistake in juggling the serious and the comedic, which does not really equate with many female adult stars if you find interviews with them.  

Regardless, what makes Southland Tales what it is, a huge factor to how it likely became as decisive as it did but there were defenders even at that original release, was that it plays a merry farce of the material. It is very political, but the left wing characters are punch down to as being pathetic, ridiculous or petty as the conservatives are seen as tyrants, conspirators or just evil rich white people. Kelly can have a major scene, where the armoured police force raids the Marxist Anarchist group trying to overthrow the political system, only to both cast an actor with dwarfism as a SWAT member for a clear height contrast, but never ridiculed, but also having filmmaker Eli Roth have a cameo being shot dead on a toilet. As a result, there are moments of real sincerity, but also a fake advert for a liquid powered car literally fucking its competition through the tailpipe, which the characters in film even find bizarre.

Does this even work? That is difficult for me to say now as I have lived with the film so long it has won me over. Even a criticism early on of Sarah Michelle Gellar's character does not mean I do not love the film exactly as it is, more so as the theatrical version against the notorious Cannes premiere version is good enough as it is, with more initial exposition to set the world up and less odd tangents about Dungeons & Dragons which never plays out in the main narrative. If it is intentional how complicated the film's plot is, Kelly envisions the period he made the film as one of pure weirdness, as apt as scoring the film to music of the time such as the Black Rebel Motorcyclists or Muse, the NME magazine darlings of the era,  or having Moby compose the soundtrack. When it works, I find Southland Tales does succeed especially if you consider parts of it as comedy, to which it can be hilarious and plays as melodrama at times.

Johnson is great as mentioned, making his reaction stick to more mainstream roles sad, but you have many interesting roles. One, for example, is Wallace Shawn as Baron von Westphalen who gets to relish the lines and delivery before you also have to include Bai Ling, a very unconventional cult actress, adding her idiosyncratic acting or filmmaker Kevin Smith in so much prosthetic makeup to the point I have not realised all this time he was the character he was until this review. And there are many moments that stand out. Some are clearly indebted to others - in lieu to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001), he hired singer Rebekah Del Rio to perform a rousing version of the Star Bangle Banner with a string quarter that would make anyone patriotic - but also a lot of sincerity.

Considering its opening, a tragedy, there is by the end of Southland Tales a melancholy. It is an insane film at times, juggling tones that many would find off putting, such as a woman demanding to give The Rock a blowjob at a crowded beach with a firearm at hand, but does not lose the fact, as Strange Days did, that its mania gives way to a lot of despair. As Kathryn Bigelow's also possessed in its darkness and chaotic finale, both films conclude around a giant party around the whole of Los Angeles with violence breaking out, coming off with exhilaration but loss. Strange Days in fact ended in hope, whilst in Southland Tales has the world end not with a bang, but with a pratfall, an ATM machine being dragged to Mexico, a floating ice cream truck, and a mirror image forgiving a man for his failures so he can find solace. Kelly sadly was hit hard by the film's notoriety, and did not make a film ever in the rest of the 2000s and 2010s, only produce or write a couple. It is a shame as, as is mostly the case, these notorious failures are usually compelling. Southland Tales for me is also brilliant.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Weird

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

The Sword and the Claw (1975)

 

a.k.a. Lionman

Director: Natuk Baytan

Screenplay: Natuk Baytan and Duygu Sagiroglu             

Cast: Cüneyt Arkin as Süleyman Sah / Kiliçaslan; Bahar Erdeniz as Ayla; Yildirim Gencer as Kumandan Antuan; Cemil Sahbaz as Altar; Reha Yurdakul as Rüstem Bey; Anuska as Sabbah; Tarik Simsek as Komutan; Ekrem Gökkaya as Papaz Basaryos; Necdet Kökes as Zipzip; Aynur Aydan as Prenses Maria; Yusuf Sezer as Demirpençe  

Ephemeral Waves

 

You can't even open a door for me - idiots!

Those moustaches - a trite thing to start a review on, but for this return for me into Turkish genre cinema, among the many trademarks of them, it has also included a strong facial hair game on the male cast. When their rip-off of Spiderman, in 3 Dev Adam (1973), had eyebrows so strong his mask couldn't contain them, then the moustaches in this film, smash cutting to a battle between rival armies, will be just as magnificent.

To be more serious, The Sword and the Claw is one of the best made of these Turkish genre films I have seen, but that unfortunately means that, even if they were more technically shambolic, this film does lack the unpredictability of a film like 3 Dev Adam, a double edged sword for a film which imagines a Jungle Book scenario (a young boy raised by lions after his king father and mother are slain by a warring leader) with a Medieval sword epic and pulp action, but could have done with a lot more weirdness than we got.

It does evoke old Asian kung fu films from the seventies onwards, not just the Hong Kong films but Korean and Taiwanese films, I have seen on old second hand DVDs with less than stellar prints, and English dubs with a tendency to add egregious cussing and a lot of odd flections in the voicing. This is notably a more preserved and shining work, as this is a preserved released from the American Genre Film Archive, the first Turkish genre film I have seen as intended with its bright look and a very colourful production. Even the costumes and production design with comic book like bright colours (especially purple), adds a bit of distinction of note when I have usually seen films like this in muddy forms online. The voice acting is still peculiar; not to blame AGFA or the original Turkish film production, but one factor to overcome for this version of the film is that the English dub is "subdued" to say the least. As in monotone and bad, that was a clear influnecing factor on the film for me in its sluggish moments.

Personally, as a fan of AGFA even if I have to import their releases, I can still appreciate this film even as an okay piece of pulp than one of their more idiosyncratic titles. You can still see a style of filmmaking different from today emphasised by the fact it is more technically solid in its production - from the excessive use of trampolines in having the characters bound around, to the fact that to show the lead being raised by lions, in-between the archive footage, you do have a young boy onscreen with a real lion cub, which is insane to image being done on a set decades later. Certainly, I can get behind this type of obvious pulpy genre cinema, and it does have a sequel called Lionman II: The Witchqueen (1979), which could have elaborated on this world is films were churned out. Certainly, Cüneyt Arkin is a striking lead who does not even have to talk for the most part, whose main trademark is mostly jumping on his opponents and pawing at them, leading to a lot of red paint gore being smeared on extras' faces. It is surprising to think that Turkey, both as a country known in terms of cinema in the modern day for the likes of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and being mainly a Muslin country, had genre films like this which skirted with gore and even a little bit of eroticism. Certainly the amount of the hand trauma here in the film, including being lopped off, is excessive if part of the tone.

The problem is ironically why a film like Turkish Star Wars (a.k.a. Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam) (1982) is difficult for many to enjoy, and also why it would be impossible to release legally without the copyright being a nightmare. Turksploitation is a world of the unpredictable, a drastic left turn from acclaimed art house films like Ceylan's. Even if I adore the arthouse films, and many of genre films from any country disappoint, there is something tantalising about the few Turkish films I have seen being as wild as they can be, wilder than The Sword and the Claw despite AGFA'S promotion of it. In fact, beyond the gore, this is a far more subdued production in the world of whiplash editing and abrupt use of Star Wars music. In the perfect world, with men with steel lion claws scaling whole castle walls in real time and throwing soldiers around like ragdolls, this movie would have had a greater manic energy and absurdity to match its admirable attempt at being more cohesive.

Fado, Major and Minor (1994)

 

Director: Raul Ruiz

Screenplay: Raul Ruiz

Cast: Jean-Luc Bideau as Pierre; Melvil Poupaud as Antoine; Ana Padrão as Ninon; Jean-Yves Gautier as Joachim; Arielle Dombasle as Leda; Bulle Ogier as Katia

An Abstract List Candidate

 

This dream only contains overseas products.

Obscurer in the career of Raul Ruiz - it was effected early after its release due to rights issue¹ - Ruiz was originally going to Portugal, which he had already made a film within and would after, to adapt Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband. This film turned out differently and, coming off as a broken record or fittingly having a line from a previous Raul Ruiz review echo in another from a director known for ghosts hovering in his work, this seems deceptively subdued for the Chilean filmmaker. Then, having thought this, the film decides to go into his stranger territory when a young girl submerged her face into a glass jug of water, spooling tuberculosis related blood from her mouth like a ribbon.

This is, however, a film which feels like a transition point for Ruiz is approaching. Gone is the unpredictability in Ruiz's filmmaking from the eighties - the bizarre and memorable camera angles and shots, the heightened colour palettes - but focused on a further eeriness which is coupled, with a small role by French legend Bulle Ogier, to the films he would make with huge European stars and John Malkovich. Fado... is a strange, increasingly darkening film in which we start with Jean-Luc Bideau          as Pierre, a tourist guide who suddenly forgets what he is meant to talk about and slowly unwinding as a person. A young man called Antoine (Melvil Poupaud), a cruel man, with his daughter appear in his life. Unable to remember his past, Pierre is encountered by this young man in connection to the death of a young woman, a spectre of an incident where a woman hung herself he was connected to.   

Spiralling from there, Pierre encounters Ninon (Ana Padrão), a young woman who is an erotic dancer as well as a maid, intertwined with a series of increasingly dark and perverse vignettes which intertwine with Pierre's past. Following Ruiz's love for stories-within-stories, Pierre's past when learnt, shot in monochrome, is of being an encyclopaedia salesman, one whose habit of seducing married women comes to haunt him as he sees both side of a relationship, between the husband who goes to erotic shows off to the side, and the woman herself who is a gilded bird in a cage, one whose life ends in tragedy. Fado... definately follows closer to Ruiz's interest in films following their own worlds then necessarily consistent elaborate plots, sinking further into perplexing and unsettling territory.

Definitely, this even in a filmography of a director who will gladly tackle the subject, is the most kinky and even perverse of the Ruiz films I have seen, where images seen and not seen (and merely talked of) add a corporeality and even bleak humour, such as eating soup in front of a hanged woman by accident, or when Ninon offers to have sex with Pierre in a men's bathroom, turning into a farce when other men complain that it should be a place of relief, watching through the open cubicle door, not for fun. Some of the content, merely evoked, is extreme and fully into transgression when Pierre is taken to a home ran by women, and dominated by them, despite being the harem for a male character, where the abortions are done downstairs and the obsession of Antoine to shot the dogs they keep owning stems from a sexual taboo. At some point, including the later revelation, even Pierre, a man comfortable with a lot of sex and even keeps scented cards of the women he has been with, finds himself learning of material which is too much.

It is an acquired taste, but Ruiz's film has a progression in mixing the darkness and a twisted sense of humour with ease, feeling for the most part in the first half fully grounded into reality until Antoine suddenly starts eating glass, blood coming from his mouth, and not batting an eye to this. There is an entire tangent in Pierre's past, arguing with a man over a hat, which leads to said hat floating in front of them in public, the film's more and more dripping in the surreal without losing its more calmer and mood based production. Cinematographer Jean-Yves Coic sadly did not do much more after this film, which is a shame as, with Ruiz moving away from his complete unpredictability from the eighties to gestating the irrational in a grounded aesthetic look, Coic makes the film look appropriately moody to match the tone. The Portuguese location as well, an idyllic coastal town our initial setting, is appropriately calming at first until the film descends into the peculiar. The cooler colour palette itself adds a distinct touch.

The humour is there too, which balances this out. For all the heightened melodrama, taken to its extreme by the finale which could be confusing for some on the first viewing figuring out what has been resolved, touches show the absurdity. Like all Ruiz films, penned by him usually, the dialogue is memorable when someone says "An encyclopaedia is a luxury.", or that the response to seeing his master dead, hung upside down and shot in the head, a male staff member weeping copious tears running down his face in cartoonish exaggeration. The references to the Tarot, cards which have developed occult symbolism, will likely to be found the more you see the film. That Fabo, Major and Minor is sadly an obscure film is tragically going to undercut the ability for many to even see the movie, but if access was easier I can see as with all the director's work a lot to uncover.

Two years later to this film, Ruiz would make Three Lives and Only One Death (1996), one of Marcello Mastroianni's last films, and I can see the inevitable leanings to a different type of Ruiz gestating. Including an unexpected tangent in the United States, a thriller with William Baldwin called Shattered Image (1998), Ruiz's career would go through a brief huge tangent in big adaptations like Marcel Proust, and there is a sombre richness prickling through Fado... alongside his dark humour and absurdity which would grow.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Weird

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

 

==========

1) Referred too HERE.

Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983)

 

Director: Raúl Ruiz

Screenplay: Raúl Ruiz

Cast: Jean-Bernard Guillard as The Sailor; Philippe Deplanche as Tadeusz Krasinski, The Student; Jean Badin as The First Officer; Nadège Clair as María; Lisa Lyon as Matilde; Claude Derepp as The Ship's Captain; Franck Oger as The Blind Man; Diogo Dória as The Sailor's Sister's Fiancé

An Abstract Candidate

 

Don't stare or you'll end up like me.

Initially, I could almost view Three Crowns of the Sailor as being more subdued than some of the other productions I have seen just from Raúl Ruiz's eighties period, but then again his films can be subjective, and as this French production continues its world becomes more and more dreamlike as it continues. It is certainly one which is structured carefully and simple to grasp - a student (Philippe Deplanche), after murdering hsi professor, encounters a nameless sailor (Jean-Bernard Guillard), who will help him escape onto his ship providing he provides him three Danish crown coins before dawn and listens to his tale. Set in (mostly) black-and-white, this bookend follows on, in full colour to the sailor's experiences when he encountered the crew of the Funchalense and left home. The ship, naturally, is mysterious, travelling on its way from Singapore to Tangiers, the sailor encountering various people who will become memories to create a new family from when he has left his.

The crew themselves are eccentric and alien. The captain is obsessed, even in his dreams, of singing Beethoven's Ode to Joy, and there is a cruel hierarchy including that those loyal to the ship have letters marked in tattoos to their skin, connected to a tapestry the captain is sewing with the letters on in his spare time. When one crew member decides to throw himself overboard in disgust to his lot, he immediately appears the next day obvious to what he has done. They do not even use the bathroom; at least defecate, as the sailor learns when instead they sweat maggots from their skin. Obviously, something is amiss, [Spoilers] as Ruiz is adapting the Chilean legend of the Caleuche, the ship of the dead, from the Chilean director. [Spoilers End] But he is less interested in the obvious narrative then the sailor's journey, which in itself is an ode to the world of storytelling, where Ruiz himself in his career would have tangents, diversions and layers of stories upon layers which is continued here.

The sailor's life on the ship will lead him to encounter in Singapore a doctor in the body of a young boy, aging backwards like Benjamin Button if not fed, to a young woman in a Columbian brothel called Maria whose meek manner is contrasted by her living quarters, a bedroom where on the bed and even hung on the ceiling are many dolls, with glowing ominous eyes, and where she keeps her possessions in a full sized coffin, including marking all the men who come to her on the lid in chewed up multi-coloured gum she has had. To see Ruiz's work, especially in the rare moment you are graced with a fully restored version than the VHS hazed rips that a lot of his career exist in, shows how exceptional he is as a filmmaker but also how unconventional. The eighties was his most prolific and weirdest part of his career, and with the legendary Last Year in Marienbad (1961) cinematographer Sacha Vierny with him, Ruiz's world here is a thing of eerie beauty. Rich coloured gels and lighting dye the world, filmed in natural locations, from the purplish of purples to the reddest of reds. One thing, seeing his work as it should, which stands out is his curious and inspired framing of shots which keeps one off-guard, inspired by his love of Orson Welles and his use of the visual frame. He is obsessed with objects and figures in the foreground and background, taking advantage of the three dimensional space in the two dimensional image, whether a hand buttering food, a cup or even a scabby wart covered foot.

The most amazing thing about this beautiful aesthetic is that Three Crowns of the Sailor was originally commissioned as a made-for-television film. That is not a bias against made-for-television films, as if anything with a man who made moving images in all mediums as one breathed oxygen, Ruiz here with Vierny, ­his wife and frequent editor Valeria Sarmiento, and everyone who collaborated on the project effectively show the a television commission is good enough to be shown on even a theatrical screen. This style is, also, where Ruiz can wrong foot a viewer. Sometimes it is overt - a bravado first person shot from the captain of the ship playing cards with the sailor, giant hands with cards greeting one in the image - but as the film becomes more and more haunted, and weirder, the style is able to effortlessly bring this about in mood. Three Crowns is subdued at first, a slow burn as the sailor enters the world of sailing, but even this is marked in oddness. The celebration for his leaving by his family and the neighbourhood is heightened, even before a frame or two is edited in of men with masks on, and whether a result of damage of the restored negative/film source or intentional, it starts the many scenes with blue faded marks on the image itself.

The introduction to Maria, in her oblique and apologetic tone and her collection of dolls, introduces more of the surreal in the sailor's tale. His story is less overtly bizarre, fed on the influence of classic storytelling Ruiz will gladly even evoke in a library shelf of such titles in one scene, but in exaggeration. A scene with a young boy who saves his life has many globes of the world in the room, and when he does become overtly surreal, the sequences are more striking. The most striking is Mathilde (Lisa Lyon), the erotic dancer the sailor becomes fixated on, until the point he learns that beyond her mouth, her body is literally like a doll's. This can be interpreted in a crass way, that she herself blatantly says she has to do everything with her mouth, but even to the point of fake female genitalia we discretely see placed on the table, the most surreal of scenes in Three Crowns of the Sailor, and its most extreme, also is definitely one few would have expected to find in a film. It also still means something as, in his search for something real, the sailor's finds himself trapped in another illusion again as a result than what he wanted.

On a surface level, Three Crowns of the Sailor was just a wonderful, strange pleasure of storytelling itself. A work which is entirely about the spun stories of the sea, the sailors exchanging them and spiralling out in their elaborateness as they are retold by others. The only consistent, between the ship sinking only to return in another harbour to a blind man who lied so much one cannot gather truth from him, is money which proves the sailor's downfall. Even said money, in various currencies, blurs into each other in what it is. Said film, by itself, is a thing of utmost beauty even in its strangest and unnerving aspects, for the story of the student returns and, in his hasty and violent reaction to the sailor's stalling, he realises the trap he has found himself in. As a film, part of the tapestry I found myself submerged in years ago, tales-within-tales, it is an experience I am ever grateful to have had finally.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Surreal

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

Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (2019)

 

Director: Miguel Llansó

Screenplay: Miguel Llansó

Cast: Daniel Tadesse as Agent D.T. Gagano; Agustín Mateo as Palmer Eldritch / Batfro; Guillermo Llansó as Stalin / Roy Mascarone / Agent D.T. Gagano (Cartoon Version) / Stalin's Assistant; Solomon Tashe as Batfro; Gerda-Annette Allikas as Malin; Rene Köster as Captain Lagucci; Lauri Lagle as Alfons Rebane; Carlo Pironti as Mr. Sophistication

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Stop sodomising me agent, and try to find a way to wake up.

I think it says a lot about Llansó's film that even its country of origin is bisected into many. A Spanish filmmaker partially filming in Ethiopia, which was the backdrop for his theatrical debut Crumbs (2015), but also Estonia and Latvia. The one thing we can confirm is that the resulting product, helped into birth by Kickstarter funding, is eccentric.

Effectively imagining if the Cold War existed in a pop culture morass, this has the C.I.A. against the Soviet Union in cyberspace over the Psychobook, an imagined world in tech accessed in chunky old virtual reality helmets. As expected, the virtual world is not so safe, as is to be found with the unfortunate end for a C.I.A. agent whose eyes get burst. Instead, Palmer (Agustín Mateo) and Gagano (Daniel Tadesse), the later the star of Crumbs and the lead, have to take over. The later, planning to retire with his girlfriend Malin (Gerda-Annette Allikas) to fund her kickboxing academy, and maybe take his obsession with pizza margherita to creating his own restaurant, has however to do one last mission. Tragically, this leads to his consciousness being lost in the Psychobook whilst a computer virus in the personification of Joseph Stalin, by way of a paper cut out which is stop motioned to speak on an actor's face, is trying to acquire power through hacking his enemies.  

It feels apt that, in this genre mash-up, that two of the co-producing territories are Estonia and Lativia, formerly two Soviet controlled territories behind the Iron Curtain, time having turned real history into Cold War pulp stories which Llansó has deliberately bastardised here. The other espionage films, though, may have not had Ethiopian kung fu masters named after pasta dishes, post-dubbed voices, and Batfro (Solomon Tashe), a man in an Adam West era Batman costume (with the insignia blurred on his chest), who is probably a villain but definitely hates drugs, in spite of the fact a Soviet propaganda film playing on a "Better-Ethiopian" television shows him snorting blow at his swanky mansion. A film like this, in the modern form of cult film, can be a double edged sword in that they skirt the line between reward and the danger in their style and weirdness, where after their fifteen minutes of fame they can disappear after being hailed as new cult films. This film to its credit has the advantage that, just two films in his career, Llansó has a style entirely of his own. Something which depends on whether he can, even if he decides just to make pulpy weird genre films, sustain a compelling world of his own from the virtues he has here.

A huge thing in his favour is that, having to work with a low budget he had to sustain with a Kickstarter fund, Llansó's solutions are completely unique. The world of the Psychobook for example, whilst in reality and having real actors, brings in a curious form of stop motion where some actors move with herky movements, encapsulated by the bizarre and even profane decision to have their faces paper cut-outs, rendered to speak, of famous figures. Palmer and Gagano for example, though the later becomes himself trapped in the virtual world, compete their spy work with the faces of Robert Redford and Richard Pryor as talking masks, the former in hindsight Llansó showing some savvy, or even unintentionally, by evoking Three Days of the Condor (1975), a "proper" conspiracy thriller fed from an era of disillusionment and paranoia whose lead's face is replicated here. It feels befitting, rather than trivialising the true sadness of the Stalinist regime, that Joseph Stalin, a despot behind many purges, is now reduced to the visage jerkily moving, and visibly wearing Nike shoes as one zoom in shows. Once a figure whose visage was likely seen on many framed pictures in Soviet Russia, that he is now surrounded by Mr. Sophistication (Carlo Pironti), a man so cartoonishly accented in his Italian accent to compensate for being an elderly man, and Batfro, is an apt punishment in terms of being embarrassed in death.

A lot of the film does feel of a post-ironic era of weirdness for the sake of weirdness, which I have become more averse too simply because too many of these films come about, get praise, and then suddenly disappear because they are not with much after the initial reaction, even if you are fond of them in the initial afterglow of the theatrical experience. Truthfully, the intentionally absurd edge means Jesus Shows... is not abstract to me at all, because it shows its hand in being ridiculous immediately and never really comes off as dumbfounding in what weird thing it does. What it does however, and I am hopeful for Llansó in regards to, is that this is made by someone willing to be brave in their work, including the fact there are moments from its three directors of photography where they clearly shot on film, 16mm to be precise, which is a surprise to think was done for production value and adds a texture to the world onscreen.

Llansó also clearly knows the references he is winking at, as he even has the Adam West Batman, uncensored, in the film even if it is a bizarre television advertisement playing in the background with Batgirl talking about finance. Pre-existing footage of submarines jars with chiptune music, and old archaic tech matches with video game logic, where an unseen voiceover says "Round 1" when the pasta named kung-fu masters fight an Ethiopian Shaolin monk protecting the "Ark of the Covenant".  An old portable television, now housing a man trapped without a body, evokes melancholia and sadness in the same think where, returning to the kung fu fighters, suddenly one has to think of Wakaliwood in Uganda, and that one day we will be getting even more martial arts films from the various African countries with all the people who can perform actual high kicks in the continent as we also see here.

There is a danger, if a hundred years passes and cinema lives still, where one has to ask who will get any of these references but in a way Llansó is treading into references some people even now do not get, like Redford being a face, or that inexplicably fly men with laser eyes appear to evoke old b-movies, one of which may have been Jesus Christ trapped in a controlling monster costume full of variety box chocolates of enlightenment. Inexplicably in the middle of writing this review, I am thinking of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), a film full of references most will have not heard of in just forty to fifty years, both films subsuming the viewer into the past and forcing them to rethink symbols, and even if Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway has to be released with a glossary of references in a hundred years, like a Penguin Classic film release, it at least is a film of its own quirks as much as references. It is distorting the references, and even if you do not get any of them, the film sustains a logic and compelling nature that, if it wins you over, then digging into the references will grow and nurture your admiration for it. Even if I strongly suspect it is closer to the pastiche films of now then a legitimate alien oddity I am drawn to, to the film's credit Jesus Shows... has so much I admire that I did love it, so much to see Miguel Llansó one day pulling out a real alien on me when I least expect it.

Certainly, he does so much right. The thing which won me over was that, whilst there is chiptune in the score, also good in a soundtrack made by three different people, he has for the score mostly jazz. An exceptional jazz band soundtrack, between cool jazz to avant-garde, which is not a score you usually have in a wannabe-neo-cult film, would have needed time to composer, and is beautifully idiosyncratic. His casting is also something unique and admiring. Daniel Tadesse, who is a compelling screen figure, is in real life a hunchbacked man with dwarfism, whose character whilst called a dwarf at times or worst (by the villains mostly) once or twice is never played off his appearance but his acting charisma. His girlfriend Malin is a big, statuesque woman, not a conventional thin figure but a big sturdy figure, and there is never a joke about Tadesse and Allikas' visible physical differences as characters as a joke. The Ethiopian setting, even if the cast are cartoonishly post-dubbed, is still people from the country, including the aforementioned individuals playing kung fu experts who are competent, making the comment earlier about wanting African martial arts films something likely to happen one day and being prayed for. Llansó's decision to even have the film partially set in Ethiopia, like a curious Werner Herzog of gonzo weird cinema, is felt with love and with none of the film being patronising, taking in the natural locations and locals as something to admire. Even if the film has characters named Spaghetti and Ravioli, said film is paradoxically also going to make its weirdness progressive and encompassing the world in all forms at the same time.

And returning to the idea earlier, one has to ask what will people reflect in the historical books on the Cold War in a century's time? Here it is reduced to conflicts between unseen figures, where even the C.I.A. will make their agents disposable, burying the bodies in the beach and cremating them in the sand, with the paper masks literally leading to a mask hiding other masks. Will anything from history of that era mean much, as here Llansó has to express it through video game fight scenes and post-dub silliness? Spirituality is strangely more relevant as, whilst he is proven not to be the Messiah, the Jesus here with his boom-box crucifix is the path to freedom and as much shows the meekness not to presume Himself a divinity, merely a guide to help another. More so especially as the film gently falls into subjective reality twists Philip K. Dick might have raised a thumbs up with, as naturally reality as is can be questioned with reality-within-reality-within-reality concerns.

In fact deciding to put everything into the blender like most neo-cult films, with the danger still there of this not having lasting impact, is at least helped because Miguel Llansó has a film which, straightforwardly told for all its weirdness, does have an emotional current and characters we like. With Daniel Tadesse's Gagano as a figure we follow in this farce and feel for, it helps the film especially when it brings in its own weird logic, like the human mouth being used for a credit card machine or Batfro, and having something to follow having to adapt to all this. Certainly, after seeing this film, I have nothing but positivity and optimism for Miguel Llansó as a filmmaker and can see him, if he can, staying in relevance if he works from the virtues here and hones them.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Weird

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

The Woman Who Ran (2020)

 

Director: Hong Sang-Soo

Screenplay: Hong Sang-Soo

Cast: Kim Min-hee as Gam-hee; Seo Young-hwa as Young-soon; Song Seon-mi as Su-young; Kim Sae-byuk as Woo-jin; Lee Eun-mi as Young-jin; Kwon Hae-hyo as Mr. Jung; Shin Seok-ho as Cat Man; Ha Seong-guk as Young Poet

Canon Fodder

I mean, our consciousness can easily interact with cows.

Returning to Hong Sang-Soo, even if the film is made by a male filmmaker, this is certainly a nice tonic from any macho bravado. The Woman Who Ran, as a series of vignettes following Gam-hee (regular collaborator Kim Min-hee) as she meets up with female friends, is entirely about the female voice. When men do appear they are annoyed "robber" cats are being fed, stalking someone or from an ended relationship that still causes friction.

Deceptively, Sang-Soo is a distinct auteur with his own voice. The issue is that his style, minimal camera movement and long scenes of conversation, is a style many have followed suit with too. The reason why Sang-Soo is distinct is that, once he started to be prolific in his films, he developed a repetitive series of obsessions with films which developed their own rhythm and arguably their own world. His cinema really works if you are able to see many films from them, each within themselves vignettes, and likewise this is the same.

Deceptively as well, there is seemingly little under the surface with The Woman Who Ran, which in many ways proves a greater power. The titular woman is presumably Gam-hee, but she has not fled anyone. She is, for the first time in her married life, separate from her husband who has had to travel for a special event. In place of this, she has decided to meet up with women she is friends with or knows. That in itself is a surprisingly refreshing result as many of them are older women or figures remotely alien to any project, usually dreaded, from other male directors who can sometimes go for stereotypes.

The opening sequence will be a make or break but is certainly something special to witness, even in Sang-Soo's career, for how relaxed and sweet it is. Three women bond and hanging out, wanting to become vegetarians, admitting they think cows have more beautiful eyes than humans, but still liking meat. Saying how macho roosters are, pecking the feathers off the back of hens' necks in the coup their neighbours have, which reads as having a greater depth in hinting as the film progresses. It also passes the Bechdel test but in a way that does not feel contrived. I have been hesitant about about the test, though it comes from a justifiable wish to have positive female figures in cinema, entirely because attempting to simplify the need and depictions in a test can itself muddy the issues of even good representations. Sang-Soo himself even in the film does not necessarily think of himself as being a feminist here, despite the positive female characters he has, done on purpose when one of the characters is an obnoxious and selfish male director like a self-deprecating stand-in.

There is also a little bit of new technique being hinted at by Sang-Soo even if it might be missed. Certainly he does not change his style a lot, as one of the only distinct things he does with the film technically is his beloved zoom lens, but using security cameras and having characters (and the viewers) see events through them is an interesting touch. The film, unlike others, does not play with subjective reality. "Seemingly" straight forward, it however finds different ways to play with the viewer. The act of cutting up apples to offer to Gam-hee is repeated by two people, and with a pleasing touch, the film Gam-hee goes to see in the final act is entered by us for the end credits, on an idyllic beach with the end credits over them. If there are hints of drama and turmoil, those segments with the security cameras or screens-within-screens offer a fascinating new touch for Sang-Soo as a filmmaker, prominently that when before he would have his characters expose their emotions through too much alcohol being consumed, this alongside changing the dynamic of his films' in look also hints at the layers around Gam-hee. She merely plays the watcher of other peoples' lives and their complications. Be it the young woman living in the basement of the apartment complex she first visits, a lone figure with her own concerns and issues, to the one dynamic moment of the film for Gam-hee herself of accidentally bumping into an ex who is now an old friend's husband, an older man, which leads to a tense moment at Cafe Emu at an art gallery/cinema.

Beyond this however, this is one of his most pleasing films. Whether the greater depths which need to be picked at - which is always been a bugbear in terms of Sang-Soo being now more readily available in his films but not for public purchase with ease - one thing for certain is that, emphasising women here, the film has a drastic and compelling reward. This is cinema with a compelling interest, and it is telling, as he was already doing so in his previous work, men are usually not great people in the slightest. One exception is Gam-hee's husband we never see or hear from, only that they have had a great relationship, something which drastically contrasts the unfortunate case for one friend, an older woman who had a one night stand with a significantly younger male poet only for him to keep hanging outside his door.

To try to consider the film in more detail, certainly this is a project which, by itself, would grow for a viewer the more they picked at it. Certainly for myself, this will be the case, though arguably the MVP in terms of scenes, in the conversation with the neighbour who wishes for two women to stop feeding cats and prioritising them over human beings, is Sang-Soo's trademark zoom suddenly going to a cat sat in the left hand corner of the frame outside an apartment, licking itself nonchalantly and yawning. Like the bar keeper in Yourself and Yours (2016), also watching on as the drama unfolded around him like the cat in this film made four years later, Sang-Soo as I go on with his filmography, as an auteur beloved by art house critic, is yet someone I am loving for the little pleasures and lightness of touch more whilst appreciating his great craft. Here definitely, the zoom lens is used perfectly for a feline figure in an almost comically inspired punch line.

Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987)

 

Director: Norman Mailer

Screenplay: Norman Mailer (with Robert Towne)

Based on a novel by Norman Mailer

Cast: Ryan O'Neal as Tim Madden; Isabella Rossellini as Madeleine Regency; Lawrence Tierney as Dougy Madden; Wings Hauser as Luther Regency; Debra Sandlund as Patty Lareine; Penn Jillette as Big Stoop; John Bedford Lloyd as Wardley Meeks III; Frances Fisher as Jessica Pond

An Abstract List Candidate

 

I'm a law enforcement officer, and it turns me on.

If I step back, I find the fact a Pulitzer Prize winning author helmed a Cannon Group released film, also produced by Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope Films, is a strange thing to even conceive let alone know the notoriety of the film. The oddest thing is knowing Mailer, of a school of American literature, came to cinema first in a series of low budget and ultra improvised films alien to Tough Guys Don't Dance, where infamously in Maidstone (1970) actor Rip Torn came at him with a hammer for real out of annoyance and the footage was kept in. The background is as appropriately strange for a very odd film.

Subdued and with a lush score from Angelo Badalamenti over the idyllic coast of Provincetown, this feels Lynchian and comes off as one of the more perplexing touches to a film which defies a lot of genre. Effectively, whilst there are likely films within this ballpark from decades earlier, Tough Guys predates the stranger crime films like The Big Lebowski (1998) and Inherent Vice (2014) that would get popular, where ex-con Tim Madden, as played by a very dishevelled Ryan O'Neil, is suffering through his wife Patty Lareine (Debra Sandlund) leaving him only to end up in a labyrinth of backstabbings, murders and a weird horror edge. Set up as a series of flashbacks, with a sombre reconciliation with his cancer stricken father, the film sits on a knife-edge. The horror-like edge is there, with talk of ghosts in his house, pirates off the coast of Massachusetts, O'Neil's blackouts especially when he finds that there are parts of two bodies in the basement he does not know the origins of. And the séance which his wife decided to have, leading to her deciding to leave him.

Tough Guys Don't Dance was not well regarded when it was first released. Few, when it was, liked the film with one of the exceptions being film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. Personally, I think this is a grower for me in that, whilst bad taste does streak the film, just for the end credit song alone, this is a compelling film; one where, if he did not admit it was as much a dark comedy, would be a surprise from Mailer as, contrary to its reputation for ridiculous dialogue and moments, it feels on purpose to be this perplexing in tone. A huge factor to consider in that, over this elaborate pulp narrative, a large part of its obsessions is with masculinity, a huge factor in Mailer's obsessions as an author. The film is crass and offensive in places - women get a short shrift and the homophobic slurs are used - yet it feels on purpose, as the men are neurotic, psychopathic and deceptive. A large part of this film, as with the source novel, involves these male characters not being comfortable in their sexuality, where the fear of being gay is drastically contrasted by an obsession and openly homoerotic borders.

And even the women in this film get to sling forth and back zingers in an over-ripe, profane language such as Debra Sandlund, whose filmography is not large at all, as a Southern wife of Madden who clawed and schemed her way to riches (including leaving an Evangelical preacher husband played by, naturally, magician and known sceptic Penn Jillette). Crime stories can something be as overripe as melodramas are, one usually targeted to a male audience whilst the other to women; gendering genres and types of cinema is deeply narrow minded and crass in general, but especially as Tough Guys Don't Dance posits that crime stories can be just as much melodramas.

A large part of the film is a lot of male ego, contrasted by powerful women, who are fragile and lot of angst as a result. As much of the film, as Madden is pulled in a strange course of events involving drug money and severed heads, is him being loomed over by the new police chief Luther Regency among other figures, as played by Wings Hauser in a role surprising subdued for a man know for cutting loose. Never was a film where masculinity is bandied about and bombastic, with Hauser of all the cast the most restrained for the most part, doing well playing a man close to an edge, until a break happens and you get an over-the-top moment involving facial paralysis and ridiculous mumbling. The notorious nature of the film is just how crass and over-the-top the dialogue can be but, as a melodramatic production, everything feels ripe with a legitimately strange edge. I have mentioned this feels like a predecessor to films like Inherent Vice, more arch and knowing films of that ilk, and honestly I wonder if Mailer had have made the film in the nineties or onwards, we may have gotten a more positive reputation for the movie.

Certainly, it has strange and illogical touches. The first flashback, in a structure which coils in on itself in medias res backwards, is as eighties as a Cannon Group production could be when the narrative begins at a party. Cocaine in lines being snorted on a table; eighties hairstyles and synth drum programming pop; a woman taking her clothes off down to a skimpy g-strip to greet Wings Hauser at the door; Debra Sandlund randomly playing a trumpet and then saying her golden pubic hairs were burnt by the college football team. Infamously, many know this production just for one scene, held as the worst line delivery in cinema, where O'Neil flatly shouts "oh God, oh man...!" in a sequence Mailer kept in. YouTube unfortunately is a format which reduces history to one clip without any context, and whilst that moment is an odd creative choice, in context it fits a film which is openly absurd. Mailer, if he has not deliberately made a dark humoured narrative, must have been amazingly oblivious to it, as so much of this feels on point. It is a film where the line "Your knife is in my dog" is spoken sincerely, but the random appearance of a pet dog is more perplexing for myself than the line, when we have never been introduced to Tim Madden having pets before then. The dialogue in that scene itself felt like a zinger a Coen Brother might have penned, and a lot of the film feels openly going for moments to shock or cause a viewer to laugh in a crime story of broad people self-destructing.

Certainly in terms of a pulp genre film, where the narrative once it is all explained is fully entrenched in clichés and tropes of the crime genre, the more overt and out-there aspects gain a greater sense of meaning even if there are eyebrow rising moments throughout. The amount of references to sex and masculinity, taken from the source material by Mailer too, feel intentional and his dialogue, as a legendary author, is so idiosyncratic it is compelling. The unexpected connections to David Lynch, whilst fully its own creation, really add an additional level as well. Isabella Rossellini, as the love of Madden's life Madeleine who he lost, fits the film's world fully, one where when after a car accident and losing her ability to have children it may seem strange for her to request cocaine from O'Neil in her hospital bed but, with her conviction and the tone already set up, feels fleshed out in its own mad logic. The music by Badalamenti, as naturally melodramatic as for Lynch, fits the tone perfectly as a score so emotionally welled up it almost at times feels like it will collapse into itself. That it sometimes does hit madness at some point does keep you on edge.

This is a film helped by its production quality. One of the most disarming aspects finally watching Tough Guys Don't Dance, contrary to the legend I had built up of a shambolic production, is that Mailer (who never helmed a film after this) helmed a solidly put together picture. One where he was aware of cinematic language, as an evocative moment using the camera really stood out, exiting a police station office from Hauser by moving the camera aware from him and the filing cabinets around him. So much is very well made it does make the stranger content even stranger. Again, everything in Tough Guys, for all its madness and legitimately odd tone, feels on point rather than a randomly thrown together production. Even in mind to Mailer's brief dalliance with Jean-Luc Godard - both walking off King Lear (1987) as Godard was hinting at an incestuous nature to the characters Mailer and his daughter Kate Mailer were to play, and that this film was released only days around Godard's - ominous seagull sounds, like those throughout King Lear, appear in one scene in a perverse synchronicity between the films as a result. That this film itself, in its apparently idyllic ending, which abruptly happens, has an uncomfortable edge of O'Neil staring almost to camera as he closes a front door to his new house, with ghoulish (almost screamed) laughter in the audio track, adds a sense of this entire experience provoking the viewer and keeping them on their toes.

Whether this film is digestible for most viewers or not, it absolutely needs a proper re-evaluation as a film that was belied against its will. The Cannon Group's later reputation, goofy yet fun b-pictures and weirdness, whilst as much of their charm, has accidentally not helped these curiosities from their cannon get wider interest - the John Cassavetes film Love Streams (1984) notwithstanding, what of this, King Lear, Robert Altman's Fools for Love (1985) or Raul Ruiz's Treasure Island (1985)? -  but the apparent view this was just a bad folly without looking back at it is an imp that needs to be exorcised off its shoulders. I openly admit that, the longer I think of this, I might grow to admire Tough Guys Don't Dance more and more as time goes on. I might even fall in love with the perverse bastard of a film.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Grotesque/Weird

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