Bizzaro Film Review: Rubber

Man, I do not know what to say about this movie. And don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I don’t have an opinion here. The problem is, that I’ve got two of them. One opinion is that this film is sheer cinematic brilliance. The second is that it is the worst kind of pretentious crap.

And the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced both opinions are right.

Rubber is a film about a killer tire. It is also a film about the way people expect a film to be made, and why they’re willing to accept some breaks from reality but not others. I think.

Therefore I am.

The movie opens with a shot of a dirt road with chairs standing of the middle of it, looking vaguely like some kind of surrealist painting. Then a car pulls onto the road and swerves back and forth hitting every chair, just so, making it fall over without doing any damage.

At this point you’re probably wondering what this shot has to do with anything. Luckily the car pulls up in front of the camera, and a man dressed as a sheriff gets out of the trunk and explains it, saying that in all films there are certain elements which are included for “no reason” and that this is a film that explores the deeper nature of that practice. Then it is revealed that instead of addressing the camera, the man was in fact addressing a group of people who are getting ready to watch the movie happen in real-time with binoculars in the desert. Then a discarded tire wakes up and starts rolling around killing things.

Yes. It’s that kind of movie.

Probably the most interesting aspect of the film is the continued interaction between the sheriff and the viewers. And when I say, “continued interaction” I mean, “repeated murder attempts.” I would guess that this was supposed to symbolize something about the artist/viewer relationship, but since we are assured that this is a film about things that happen in films for no reason I’m gonna say that he’s probably doing it just to be weird.

And in the end, it kinda works.

Rubber isn’t what you’d call a good film, but it is a film that sticks in your mind and makes you think.The cinematography is masterful and though the bizarre nature of the film wears out its welcome after a while, luckily it doesn’t overstay for too long, wrapping up at a neat 82 minutes.

It’s an unusually accessible arthouse flick, that toys with questioning the very nature of fiction. It is both delightfully playful and utterly serious, leaving the viewer wondering whether he should be laughing or thinking.

And the answer is, as always, probably both.

Bizzaro Film Review: Grace

If you’ve seen this poster I think you pretty much get why I watched this movie. I mean seriously, that’s a baby bottle filled with blood. How are you gonna pass that up? And for once, the movie behind the visual lives up to every hint of weirdness and horror promised by the poster.

You can sum up Grace‘s premise in two words: Zombie. Baby.

Here’s the scoop: a mother conceives a child and carries it almost to term, but then a horrific car crash results in the deaths of her husband and the baby in her womb. The mother is devastated, but decides she wants to carry the dead baby to term. And when the baby is born she loves it back to life. Yeah, I know it sounds stupid, but trust me, somehow, in this movie, it works.

But as we’ve learned from the master himself “sometimes dead is better.” Because baby Grace came back…different. Outwardly she still looks like a normal human child, but instead of feeding off her mother’s milk she thirsts…for BLOOD.

What, too dramatic? Okay, I’ll back off a bit.

And not just any blood either. Baby Grace needs human blood. Oh, and did I mention that the flies are gathering in swarms around her crib?

But in spite of her thirst for blood, baby Grace isn’t the monster in this movie. She’s just a baby. She’s got no special powers, nothing noticeably unnerving about her nature. She just needs “special food.”

No, the real monster in this movie is motherhood. No you didn’t read that wrong. This film makes mothers in particular and women in general out to be something truly terrifying. The men who appear don’t seem to be much more than pets, weak willed accessories with slightly more status than a handbag, or slimy unlikable opportunists.

But the women…they cheat, lie, kill, lie some more and generally ruin the audience’s perception of an entire gender. With Grace’s mother at least some of this is understandable. She’s doing the terrible things she does to keep her child alive. But the rest? The scheming grandmother who is so obsessed with motherhood that she forces herself back into lactation, or the former lesbian lover who…well she’s a vegan. I mean she kills people too, but that’s not nearly as terrifying as veganism.

I do not know how such an anti-feminist film got made in the twentieth century.  But I’m glad it did. Because it works. It really works. Its that increasingly rare brand of horror that builds suspense through tone and pacing rather than splashing buckets of gore at the screen, a good reminder that little things can still be scary.

Little things like flies. Crawling into a baby’s nostril.

If that sounds like your cup of Earl Grey then give this movie a shot. It will unnerve you. But more importantly it will make you think.

Bizzaro Movie Review: Alice

Yep, you read it right. I’ve gone soft and decided to review one of these moviefilm thingies. Why? you may ask. Mostly it’s because I want to expand your horizons to include a truly unusual and astounding works of celuloid art. Also, it might have a tiny little something to do with the fact that I haven’t quite finished reading the book I had planned for this week.

Alice, a film directed by Jan Svankmajer is a surreal adaptation of the surreal book Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

But It certainly isn’t the only film adaptation. In fact it would be improper to speak of the impact of this film without acknowledging the efforts that came both before and after. Of course, the Walt Disney animated version of the story is probably the most famous, but according to my research (which consisted of me checking Wikipedia, so there high school teachers) there have been twenty-three different film and television adaptations, the most recent of which was the abomination of cinema directed by Tim Burton.

In fact Burton’s film presents an excellent starting point for understanding just why Jan Svankmajer’s is so brilliant. Burton’s film was a big budget blockbuster, designed to appeal to millions. The problem is that Alice in Wonderland isn’t a very appealing story. In fact, it isn’t truly a story at all. In my view Burton’s main failure was that he tried to inject drama into a narrative that has none.

The mad hatter is not a leader of a rebel army. Alice is not the last best hope for Wonderland. The Jaberwock is not a dragon. And Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum are not not not NOT IN WONDERLAND!

Whew. I’m glad I got that off my chest. Anyway, the main point is, that whatever magic the original story had came from the fact that it wasn’t a story at all, but rather a series of random and surreal events happening in a disjointed almost dreamlike manner. Jan Svankmajer’s Alice gets this. Not only does it get it, it embraces it with open arms.

At one point as I was watching the movie with my wife she asked “Why is Alice hiding from the white rabbit, when before she wanted him to take her with him?”

To which I replied, “This is a movie where stuffed animals come to life. This is a movie with socks that burrow holes through a wooden floor. This a movie with a character that has the body of a crocodile, bird skull for a head and is wearing a Santa hat. There is no reason. That’s the point.”

In fact the pure genius of Alice is that Jan Svankmajer seems to have looked at Lewis Caroll’s original work and said to himself, “You know this isn’t nearly weird enough.” And while the basic plot follows the original text pretty closely, Svankmajer’s visual interpretation of it is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. All the special effects are done with stop motion animation, which, rather than taking away from the movie’s believability adds volumes to its creepy surrealism.

This is definitely not a movie you want to show to your kids. Unless you want your kids to have the best nightmares ever. Tim Burton thinks he’s got unique visual style? He’s got nothing on Jan Svankmajer. Don’t believe me? This is Tim Burton’s rendering of the caterpillar.

This is Jan Svankmajer’s version of the same character:

Tell me that isn’t just wrong.

Bottom line. I liked this film. Sort of. In a squirming uncomfortable squicked out kind of way. As with most of the books I review here it probably isn’t for everyone. But if you love the original book as much as I do, if you’ve yearned to see a movie made by someone who understands the original source material, then you owe to yourself to see this movie. I promise you there will never be another like it.