indefinite articles

The Coen Brothers caused a sensation with their 1996 Fargo. It wasn’t just the Minnesotan inflections, Frances’ McDormand’s fine performance, or the infamous wood chipper that caused such a stir - it was also that the film stated that it was based on a true story, making the insane events of the film come off as being even more outlandish than they would be if it were simply a work of fiction.

As you likely already know, the Coens’ statement was… well, a different kind of truth. The Coens had hobbled together various facts from various true crimes, but had turned those bits and pieces into a wholly original and completely fictional film. Serbian director Dušan Makavejev’s films tend to occupy the same, “not-quite-fictional” space the Coens briefly touched on, and blur the line between fictional narrative film and documentary even farther.

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Quick, what do you get when you cross the protagonist from any high-grossing movie from the past year, a pop culture celebrity, and a cliched comedic trope? If you’re one of the millions who have seen one of the many spoof movies penned by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer over the past several years, you probably already know the answer to this one. The response of the millions of viewers who have seen Date Movie, Epic Movie or Scary Movie 3 has been nearly unanimous: “a steaming pile of crap.”

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In 1988, playwright and monologist Eric Bogosian and director Oliver Stone got together to take Bogosian’s off-broadway Talk Radio and bring it to the big screen. It turned out to be an incendiary fever dream, a disturbing and vertiginous descent into the dark underbelly of America brought to the surface through call-in lines and AM radio waves. The film didn’t make a whole lot of money, but it got a lot of attention and four stars from Ebert.

In 1996, Bogosian joined forces with Richard Linklater to do the same with subUrbia, Bogosian’s off-broadway satire about the misguided youth of America. Linklater must have been an obvious choice for the producers, as he had just made three slightly comic, curiously observational, now classic films about youth — Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and Before Sunrise. Unlike Talk Radio, subUrbia barely made it into theaters. It’s not on Netflix.

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If you’ve never read Philip K. Dick, being familiar with him only through one of the many big-budget sci-fi action films that bear his name in a “story by” credit, you likely think that his books are violent, pulpy actioners, short on character and long on battles, chases and twist endings. The thing is, they’re just not like that. At all.

Dick’s novels are often quiet, funny stories about the human condition, with a focus on awkward personal interactions, religious experiences (both drug induced and not), and quotidian matters involving making one’s way in the city, interfacing with popular culture, and living with a partner. Sure, they generally have a mindblowing sci-fi premise, but it’s always seemed that Dick’s books
would be better adapted by a romantic from the French new wave with an ear for dialogue like Eric Rohmer than the likes of Ridley Scott or Steven Spielberg. This was proven not only by Rohmer disciple Richard Linklater in his fantastic adaptation of A Scanner Darkly, but also by French director Jérôme Boivin in his adaptation of Dick’s Confessions of a Crap Artist, Barjo.

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You’ve experienced it before. The acting is broad and exaggerated. The situations are absurd, and keep getting more and more ridiculous. There’s a comedian in the lead role, so you look at the back of the DVD case to see whether the movie’s supposed to be filed under comedy. You start looking for things that are supposed to be jokes or gags, but they’re not there.

You’ve entered the world of the uncanny comedy. While some dark satires — Brazil, Southland Tales, anything authored by Bret Easton Ellis — may deliberately use the devices of an uncanny comedy for unsettling effect, and to lampoon social constructs and vices, other films fall into this universe unintentionally. Films like Gung Ho. Hudson Hawk. An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. And, perhaps, Tropic Thunder.

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You’d be forgiven for thinking that Survive Style 5+ is just another J-Horror knockoff, riding the coattails of Takashi Miike and Ichi the Killer. I mean, right in the first scene, you’ve got Tadanobu Asano — better known as Kakihara in Ichi — as a sullen killer, trying to bury his wife. You also may think, early on, with all the hitmen and petty thieves in the film, the splasy, stylish titles and the killer soundtrack, that Survive Style 5+ might be taking on Tarantino’s style and slipstreaming it into Japanese film.

But you’re pretty likely to be shocked and surprised when you realize that the primary influence isn’t really Miike, and probably isn’t Tarantino — Survive Style 5+ owes more to the candy-colored set design and surreal scenarios of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse than the grittier world of independent cinema. It’s just as much fun as you’d imagine.

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Underground filmmaker William Klein has had a strange and storied career. His 1966 film Mister Freedom is a crazed classic of surrealism and satire, referenced in works by Beck and Pizzicato Five. His earlier Who Are You, Polly Magoo? is an eye-popping journey into the world of fashion in 1960’s Paris. His documentary, Muhammed Ali: The Greatest, is considered to be the definitive Muhammed Ali documentary. But this article isn’t about those films, all of which have been released on DVD and — believe it or not — are available on Netflix. Zazie dans le métro, with production design by William Klein, is a kid’s movie for adults, a surreal fantasy of Paris, a manic melding of Amelie with The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.

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You will now listen to my voice. Every time you hear my voice, with every word and every number, you will enter into a still deeper layer, open, relaxed and receptive. I shall now count from one to ten. On the count of ten, you will be in Europa. I say: one.

So begins Lars Von Trier’s Europa, released as Zentropa in the United States. Shortly after the narrator finishes his hypnotic spiel, Von Trier plunges the viewer into a gorgeous, cinemascope, black and white vision of a world drenched in horror and confusion — Germany in 1945, immediately after the war. The Kafkaesque scenario that follows is beautiful, horrible, dryly funny, wrenching, exciting and enervating. Unlike the failed experiments of many other movies profiled here, Europa is a genuine masterpiece.

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Imagine how perplexing 1967’s Casino Royale would be in a world where James Bond never sipped a martini. Imagine watching 1995’s The Brady Bunch Movie without ever seeing Mike, Carol and the kids on television. Consider for a moment how strange The Monkees would look if The Beatles never made it out of Liverpool. Finally, imagine Fearless Frank without the iconic comic book of the same name. What’s that, you’re not familiar with Fearless Frank? Don’t worry — nobody else is, either. Fearless Frank is that strangest of beasts, a camp parody of a character that never existed. This is Adam West’s Batman in a world without DC, Tim Burton or Chris Nolan.

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OK. So, Freddy Krueger, Joanie from Joanie Loves Chachi, and My Favorite Martian walk into a bar. No, no, this isn’t a joke — I’m pretty sure it must have happened during the filming of Galaxy of Terror, a terrible little movie made inexplicably entertaining by some truly wonderful cast and crew choices.

Let’s get this out of the way first — the soundtrack to Galaxy of Terror sounds like The Residents got drunk, packed up their Oberheim, and went and performed a 90-minute jam riffing on the WGBH bumper theme with Mark Mothersbaugh. Wait, no. I just made it sound good. Let me start over.

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