Or, a bunch of films you should go find, nerd cinefile. Glasses on!
Seeing the Zellner Brothers shorts on Wholphin- the incredibly perfect fairy tale, Quasar Hernandez, on this site, and the existential comedy, Flotsam/Jetsam, on Wholphin No. 3- reminds me of the times I rejected their films from the festivals I worked. Sorry guys, we have talked about that. Lots of good films don’t make it in. It was not until I saw all your shorts together, including Q.H., did I remember seeing The Virile Man back when, and realized it was very good. In The Virile Man, David Zellner (poor directors all act), hides in a closet and calls a real help line, trying to explain that, although he throws like a girl, he is really virile. Even after years of Monty Python and Kids in the Hall, I somehow missed true, strange comedy when it hit me in the face. Now, the Zellners have played Sundance three times and the world is right again.
Track down their shorts and/or their lost-but-fun feature, Frontier (2000), the lo-fi satire on Russian films, which always seems to be during a war, although focusing mainly on two people. Frontier ups the ante by following people in the middle of nowhere, through a country named Bulbovia, long lost in history, until this film was found. Their feature is as subtle and funny as their shorts. Be ready for the pacing and remember I said subtle- it’s not a slapstick kind of comedy. No fear though, the end is epic.
A pseudo-sequel could be Jim Finn’s new feature, Interkosmos (2006), in which Finn (poor directors all act), plays a deadpan Russian cosmonaut whose love life suffers in space. The film is interspersed with scenes of everyone on Earth putting on these lavish dance routines with commie cheerleaders. As do the Zellners, Finn makes a lot of cool out of a little budget. He features an awesome homemade spaceship, as well as entire roma-dramatic scenes played out as nothing more than subtitles over floating space footage. Beautiful and funny. Even smart.
Both the Zellners’ and Finn’s features are almost-parodies of Jake Mahaffy’s, War (2004), which tells the story of a drunken preacher, a junk-man, a failing farmer and a roving teenager in a lost forest world (rural Pennsylvania). Mahaffy weaves psychotic religious radio, endless landscapes, and real, human faces into a vivid story. Okay, not so much a story as a ghostly atmosphere of the disappearing rural life in America. The film is so effective that almost all of the structures in the film- houses, barns, oil rigs, a bridge- are now gone. Creepy.
Although he says he was too young to properly gain from his experience, it still looks great in print. Mahaffy lived in Russia for two years, attending a school of cinematography, and even had a chance encounter with the master Sukorov. War ruminates on flickering Russia, with eerie black and white images that are partially hand-cranked, giving the effect of watching civil war photography. He later synced up sounds and used narration to pull it all together.
Constant narration reminds me of my favorite short film, Openminds (2001), made by Joe Sedelmaier, the longtime famed commercial-maker responsible for the fast talking FedEx man and “Where’s the Beef?” For Openminds, take the character actors from those commercials doing speedy dialogue under voice-of-God narration, then tell the story of a family who created fake trees during WWII and then morphed into plastic surgery phenoms, then, switch the focus to the exploitation of television rather than selling burgers, and with quick-but-smart editing, you’ve got a genius 35-minute short that seems like Terry Gilliam directing Catch-22. Joe himself went through a major transformation with this film. He started wide-eyed in 1970, but was forced to shelve the footage in order to embark on the aforementioned commercial career. Come 2000, he retired and was finally able to finish the great short with some new footage and a lot of new wisdom.
Which brings me to what I’ve been trying to say: Catch-22 (1970) is totally underrated. Everyone hears about the big cast, the hot young director and the famous book, and expects too much. The cast is endless: from the young superstar, Jon Voight, to the mastermind, Orson Welles (poor directors all act), and it becomes funny every time a famous face suddenly shows up, only, looking 30 years younger. But it’s supposed to be funny, right? It’s a sardonic treatment of war by Mike Nichols, the wonder-kid, who, fresh off The Graduate (1967), picks an impossible book to tackle on screen? Audiences probably expected a Dr. Strangelove (1964) level of perfection, which is not fair. Think of it as a no-budget cold-war movie showing the fallacy of government by championing its rah-rah values, starring a talented, albeit not so famous (yet) cast, under a young, overachieving director, and it works much better.
