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| Scene from Why Don't You Play in Hell? |
It is with great joy that I announce the beginning of the annual Listmania Series. As usual, it is best to start things off by recognizing something offbeat. Last year saw a whole column dedicated to Spring Breakers being the most memorable film of 2013. This year, I decided to dedicate a whole column to the 10 weirdest moments in cinema. These aren't necessarily the best of the best, but in some cases, they are better than that because of their desire to swing for the fences and just be, as stated, really weird.
1. Lucy (dir. Luc Besson)
It is the masterpiece of weirdness that plays scrappy with cinema's rich history by incorporating everything from Sergei Eisenstein to Stanley Kubrick, creating a fever dream of ideas that aren't necessarily always coherent but make for some of the most exciting cinema of the year. After Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) consumes a drug that unleashes capability to use 100% of her brain power, the film goes off the rails and doesn't stop. It incorporates all of space and time under the disguise of a sci-fi action film. It may not be as intellectually deep as it thinks, but it is never predictable and nobody could accuse the film of having a familiar ending. It embraces the illogical with technical flourishes and leaves the audience baffled, never figuring out if that's a good or bad thing. Still, there hasn't been a film this creative all year.
2. Why Don't You Play in Hell? (dir. Sion Sono)
This may be the funnest cinematic lecture of the year. Encapsulating all of Japan's film history, it combines Yakuza, martial arts and an infectious toothpaste jingle. Not a moment goes by where the film isn't constantly confusing the audience from its structure to its kinetic storytelling approach. The final half, which features a camera team called the "Fuck Bombers" filming a violent showdown is one for the ages. It's violent, meta and full of strange technical tricks that makes The Raid 2 blush. It is beautiful, encapsulating an entire culture's form in one medium in a gleeful, shiny and never uninspired package. If nothing else, it is one of the only films to date to have blood splatters turning into different colors of the rainbow in a beautiful, sadistic fashion.
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| Rosamund Pike |
3. Gone Girl (dir. David Fincher)
From the commercials, you wouldn't believe that this is one of the weirdest films of the year. In fact, it is hard to even say why without spoiling the entire thing. The can of worms that develop in the second act are insane and may catapult Rosamund Pike into the biggest actresses out there. Her wonderfully sadistic and misleading performance may seem a little soft at first, but when the layers pull back, things get more icky and the metaphor for marriage becomes more unnerving. The film is weird because she is such a great character that cinema right now didn't know it needed. Ben Affleck is pretty great, too.
4. Under the Skin (dir. Jonathan Glazer)
Scarlett Johansson is two-for-two in the weirdness camp this year with this eerie film that is so abstract that it doesn't give her a name. In between scenes that combine chaotic loneliness into transparent imagery and the weirdest sex scenes of the year, there's a hollowed out performance that adds beauty to the unknown. The film can have many interpretations, including a deeply rooted commentary on the problems with the male gaze. It may not be heavy on dialogue and when it is, uses a lot of guerrilla film making techniques that rely on improvisation. It is unsettling yet beautiful and there are few performers who are silent, strange and as sexy as Johansson in this. If the first few minutes in which speech is developed over the formation of an eyeball doesn't get you in the mood for the greatest art house film of the year, nothing will.
5. The Zero Theorem (dir. Terry Gilliam)
It has Christoph Waltz playing video games, Tilda Swinton rapping and a church dedicated to Batman. This isn't to discredit the fact that the scenery looks like an urban Speed Racer with the colors popping at your face. The film itself isn't always successful, but it is hard to talk about weirdness without acknowledging Gilliam: the master of weird. He has too many toys and his pallet too many colors, but he manages to make things pop with life and introduces us to a world that is bizarrely beautiful and estranged from our own. By the end as we focus on his naked torso on a beach (I won't say how he gets there, but it is very weird), we feel like we have been taken to a new corner of cinema in a pleasurable, delicious way that sadly is lacking from a lot of the sci-fi films that it would compete against.
6. A Field in England (dir. Ben Wheatley)
The film pretty much lives up to its title in a minimalist drama that serves just as much as a period piece as it does a very strange acid trip. While the construction is based around soldiers recovering after a long battle, it paves the way for a lot of trippy imagery that may not make a whole lot of sense, but when put alongside the Jim Williams score, it makes for a meditative trip into the surreal. The film itself doesn't make a lot of sense and is as a whole a little unbalanced. Still, for its sheer passion for being weird, it is hard to leave it off of this list, let alone in the top five. The weirdness benefits from the beautiful cinematography and the experimental feeling that anything can go wrong at any second and barely doesn't in the best way possible.
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| Left to right: Jake Gyllenhaal and Jake Gyllenhaal |
7. Enemy (dir. Dennis Villeneuve)
No, this film doesn't make the cut because of it being a story of mistaken identity and a question of clones. There's two other films that would have made the list if that was the case. While Jake Gyllenhaal delivers the strongest of the three, the real charm comes in the symbolism and the story. Who is who? The story begins confidently and then ends with a lot of conflicts that make this one of the most taut thrillers of the year. However, be warned if you have arachnophobia. The spider symbolism is constant and rich throughout this entire film and ends with one of the most jarring images out there. It is weird and makes you think in the best ways possible. The symbolism itself is powerful if you take some time to think about it. If nothing else, this is the intelligent weirdness entry on this list.
8. Noah (dir. Darren Aronofsky)
This one isn't on the list because of it taking a religious text and turning it secular. It isn't even that the story itself doesn't make sense. It is more what the director edited to make his story that way. For starters, the film decided to avoid the lack of realism of God by bringing in rock creatures to help build the ark. Add in that the rest is replaced with a story about the faults of man and you get a biblical epic that is just as much about being a crazy man as it is about beliefs. While the montages are really effective, there's little doubt that the surreal addition that was probably created to appeal to a more secular audience only makes this already weird story weirder. If nothing else, it is the weirdest epic of the year as it journeys to be so many things and ends up being its own perplexing product.
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| Eva Green |
9. White Bird in a Blizzard (dir. Gregg Araki)
This is a film that I wish would have been weirder. On top of being a story that involves Shailene Woodley coming to terms with her controlling mother's issues through sex, the film tries to be trashy, but feels limited and tonally all over the place. Even the reliably weird Eva Green feels toned down. However, it is in the closing moments that everything begins to piece together into a weird family drama that is nostalgic, sexual and cathartic in ways that dramas usually aren't. It isn't the most successful kind of weird, but with a story as trashy as it could have been, it's weird enough to get a mention here.
10. Bird People (dir. Pascale Ferran)
Not all weirdness needs to be these big, vibrant images that cause a visceral reaction to your subconsciousness. Sometimes it only takes one small element to mess with your brain. In this particular case, one small CG bird will do the trick. For some reason, a maid turns into a sparrow and goes flying through the city. We see the airport as David Bowie's "Space Oddity" plays. We watch as it interacts with people in a way that no trained bird ever could. While the rest of the film is up for debate, the middle portion is a beautiful masterpiece of what computerized images can do and how it can benefit stories instead of distract. Most of all, it will be weird that you're that invested in watching a sparrow for as long as you will.
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