The second half of my Unplanned Surreal Film Festival Weekend. Also my second film of the year in Farsi, but this one is much lighter than the last one.
I didn’t remember anything I knew about this before I watched it, and I think that’s probably the best way to go into something as gloriously absurd as this. Without giving anything away, it feels a little like Wes Anderson directing Airplane (with second unit by David Lynch).
For the fake poster, I did a riff on the title. It doesn’t quite have the images available to balance out the same way as the original.
It must have been wild to be one of the half-dozen fans of The Monkees’ TV show who managed to find a showing of this movie, went in expecting a long-form version of the show, and getting this wild experimental film. It doesn’t always work, but that’s why they call them experiments.
Sometimes it’s hard to pick a source for the fake poster, and sometimes I watch a movie called The Monkey a day before I watch a movie starring The Monkees. And yes, Jack Nicholson really was the top-listed writer for Head. Easy Rider was funded by Monkee movie money.
I can’t imagine anyone wanting to live in Stephen King’s Maine. That place is scary… but it does give us some wacky movies. This is one of those movies that’s so violent and gory and goofy that it moves past horror and straight into cartoon. It’s not great, and it kind of fizzles at the end, but it’s a pretty fun ride. BONUS: features an Adam Scott cameo!
Turn the key and see what happens.
This is my second simian-themed movie of the year. I thought about basing the parody poster on one for Better Man, but those are all pretty boring so I went a different way.
I guess I also could have used the poster for The Tin Drum.
WARNING: One of the big twists in this movie is spoiled by the ad campaign, so my alternate poster below may also spoil that same twist. I think I’ll stick the featured image here to add some spoiler space (though I’m probably not going to spoil anything):
The good thing about this movie: spoiling one twist still leaves a bunch of fun ones unspoiled. The end is pretty predictable (especially given the voiceover at the start) but the ride to get there is a lot of fun.
I struggle to find images and a poster that wouldn’t spoil anything. In the end I sort-of copied the poster for a film that doesn’t exactly give away the twist that Warner Bros decided to spoil, but it’s in the same ballpark.
I thought I was going to watch the Oscar nominated animated shorts, but it turns out that theaters don’t honor tickets for a Monday show on a Tuesday. Weird.
So I watched this instead, and it was a heap of fun. I enjoyed playing “Hey, that’s that old guy I know… but young!”
This was the obvious fake poster for a movie about a guy wearing a white suit:
Last year I learned that there are special screenings of all the nominated short film categories. I went again this year, and… these didn’t do much for me, especially compared to last year’s nominees. Shorts should be the place where people make unexpected decisions, and these really don’t do that.
Mastodon has stopped showing the front page featured image, so I’m sticking it here so it shows up:
The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent
There is a man in this movie who does not remain silent. The main character watches him and nervously smokes cigarettes. Look, I know short films by design are exercises in eliminating as many details as possible without breaking the story, but this cuts out important details and then gives them back in the synopsis. If your movie requires specific research to make sense, you’ve probably cut too much.
Anuja
I’m also aware that short films thrive on ambiguous endings, but this one ends like it’s the first episode of a TV series.
I’m Not a Robot
This movie also has an ambiguous ending, but it works. My favorite of the five; it won’t win. Note to self: go see Companion.
A Lien
This felt like the successor to last year’s Red, White and Blue; a serious and important subject told in a forced and melodramatic way. It’s the better of the two shorts, though.
The Last Ranger
Another important story told generically. You’ll know so much of the story ahead f time you’ll wonder if you’re clairvoyant.
Since this is a collection of five unrelated shorts I didn’t make a parody poster, but I did throw together this:
There’s a thing on the Mastodon decentralized social network called Monsterdon, where people choose a cheesy old monster movie , watch it at the same time, and live comment on it. I don’t participate that often, but after the heaviness of No Other Land , the Hammer Films movie The Gorgon was exactly what I needed.
In a small European city that seems to exist in both the 1750s and the 1960s, a series of mysterious deaths has been occurring over the previous five years, The coroner declares they are all caused by heart failure, even though there’s a subtle clue that it might be something else: the bodies have all turned to stone. Could it be related to the mysterious woman who had a strange affliction around the same time the deaths started? I’ll never tell. Also: I learned that turning to stone starts with gray pimples on your forehead. Maybe it could be prevented with a little benzoyl peroxide.
This movie’s poster is a classic example of “You’ll get it if you see the reference poster.”
Basel Adra records his life protesting as the Israeli army slowly but intently – even gleefully – destroys his village in Palestine. The soldiers destroy schools and homes, drive people to live in caves, and murder and cripple the people of his village, all without any sign of care or remorse. A stunning document of the cruelty humans are capable of inflicting on each other.
See it if you can – it’s struggling to find distribution, despite near-universal praise.
I made a (slightly) alternate version of the poster, but this is not a movie that should be parodied.
I’m sure every scene in this played out as Hitchcock intended when it was released in 1958, but every time I’ve watched it the audience howls at the some of the nutty things Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie Ferguson says and does, including trying to solve every problem with brandy and forcing the woman he loves (after dating her for a few days) to completely change her appearance to look like the dead woman he loved before her. It’s a bonkers film, but it’s very watchable.
Also: I’m much more familiar with San Francisco now, so it was fun to be able to recognize locations.
Really dumb fake poster for this one (unlike my previous 100% brilliant creations). Whatever. I was never going to top the original Saul Bass poster.
Now I’m off to rub olive oil on my rubber plant leaves.
I saw three movies in the last four days. The first had a budget of $200. The second cost $100,000. This one has a reported budget of $180 million (but with all the reshoots it’s probably higher). This is proof that there is no correlation between movie cost and movie quality. Is this movie better than Who Killed Captain Alex? From a purely technical standpoint, sure. Is it nine hundred thousand times better? No. And it’s nowhere near as good as Tangerine, let alone being 1800 times better.
This movie seems to exist to tie up dangling threads that most viewers will either have forgotten or never seen. Do you remember the Celestial Island created when the Eternals stopped a cosmic egg at the center of the Earth from fully developing? Or when Hulk blood dripped into a guy’s head? Or even when the Falcon became Captain America after having an adventure with Bucky? I man, I do, but I’m enough of a nerd to have read the original comics. (Side question for nerds: Why do they call it Celestial Island? Did someone tell them that the big creature was called a Celestial?)
Also fun: the movie is built like a mystery, but what should have been a big reveal at the end of the film is spoiled by every single piece of advertising. Good job, marketing team! Harrison Ford applauds your out of the box thinking.
Poster Time!
My original plan was to make this into a romance like The Notebook, but then the original of this popped up and it was too simple to resist.
