Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #304: Being John Malkovich (1999).

 

Struggling puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) reluctantly accepts an office job to make ends meet for himself and his pet enthusiast wife Lotte (an almost unrecognisable Cameron Diaz). As a clerk his professional life is uneventful, until one day he stumbles upon something most bizarre and unexpected behind a filing cabinet: a portal that leads directly into the brain of Hollywood superstar John Malkovich (playing a fictionalised version of himself, obviously). So then, of course, he opens it and becomes John Malkovich for 15 minutes, after which time he's removed from John's brain and dumped onto the New Jersey turnpike. Craig then tells Lotte and his playful, free-spirited colleague Maxine (Catherine Keener) about the portal and, after gradually convincing them that none of what he's saying is ridiculous horseshit, they both, too, join in on the fun in becoming John Malkovich. Along the way, Lotte and Maxine get to know each other, and all three of them come to understand more about their own psychologies from having literally entered and meddled in somebody else's.

Frequent collaborators Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman have since made off-the-wall movies like 2002's Adaptation., 2020's I'm Thinking of Ending Things, 2013's Her and my personal favourite, Jonze's 2009 masterpiece Where the Wild Things Are. And it all started here for both. Being John Malkovich made Jonze, aged just 30, one of the youngest ever Best Director Oscar nominees and Kaufman was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay (they both lost to Sam Mendes and Alan Ball respectively for American Beauty). This is a proudly weird film, but its weirdness is the tolerable kind in that the premise is weird, but how it's explored is very lucidly handled and what it's meant to allegorically represent is ultimately quite relatable and profound. In other words, it's never weird just to be unique or ostentatious. Cusack does his usual shtick, but Diaz is surprisingly effect in a role that's both dramatic and comedic and Malkovich revels in playing a highly exaggerated literal version of himself, but Keener (who herself was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar; she lost to Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted), is easily the standout with an excellently layered and understated turn in a role that was probably harder than it looked. It's also sharply edited, filmed with crisp energy, and a pulsatingly effective score is ladled over it all.

Again this is certainly a postmodern brain-teaser that demands your disbelief to be suspended, but if you can do that, I think you'll find Being John Malkovich to be an engaging and rewarding filmic statement about human psychology and relationships. 9/10.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #303: My Mistress (2014).

 

Charlie (Harrison Gilbertson) is a lonely and sheltered 16-year-old boy on the Gold Coast reeling from the recent discovery of his father committing suicide. While then trying to find outlets to ease his grief, he meets Maggie (Emmanuelle Beart), a French housewife who just also happens to be, albeit secretly, a BDSM dominatrix. After landing work with her as a pool boy (nothing cliched about that, huh?), Charlie soon has the hots for Maggie and becomes a willing participant in her private sexual games. Meanwhile, his life outside Maggie's house is almost as dramatic but much less interesting to him.

Look, admittedly what grabbed my attention about this 2014 Aussie erotic drama was the sexual content but even with that, I found My Mistress increasingly insipid and even tame. I can only liken it to a piece of chewing gum: initially it's absolutely delicious, but from a lack of variety its flavour runs out after about 20 minutes. The BDSM scenes are discreetly handled but I just got the sense director and co-writer Stephen Lance either deliberately or was forced to water them down to avoid the movie getting an R rating, and the rest of the narrative they're in I found seriously dull and hackneyed. The lack of a music soundtrack compounded this, and there's no sense of romanticism or lushness in the cinematography either.

Beart, one of the icons of modern French cinema, seems to enjoy spicing her screen image up here as a publicly conservative yet privately wild housewife, and Gilbertson keeps the sweet innocence to a pleasant minimum, but their efforts only make somewhat of a difference. For me, My Mistress is an underwhelming and timid telling of a narrative that could've been tactful, daring and brilliant. 6/10.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #302: 12 Monkeys (1995).

 

In 1996, a deadly virus decimated the Earth's population. The survivors had to take shelter underground, and a group called the Army of the Twelve Monkeys were allegedly behind the outbreak of the virus. Jump forward to 2035, and James Cole (Bruce Willis) is a prisoner in an underground compound who's chosen to travel back to 1996 with a cure to save humanity. However, he is erroneously sent back to 1990 instead, when after trying to tell authorities he is from the future to save humanity from the impending virus, psychiatrist Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) diagnoses him as a paranoid schizophrenic and has him sent to a mental hospital. There he meets anarchic legitimate patient Jeffrey Goines (an Oscar-nominated Brad Pitt), whose late father Dr. Leland Goines (Christopher Plummer) may have held the answer to stopping the virus. Cole now fails an escape attempt but then returns to 2035, before finally arriving in 1996. From there he kidnaps Dr. Railly and forces her to take him to Philadelphia to hopefully find the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, or a trace of Dr. Goines.

In true Terry Gilliam form, this movie is very weird; however, alongside his less mainstream works like Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, it's actually conventional, at least visually. It's far more cerebral than either of those ones, which are both visually and narratively postmodern and outlandish. I'm not sure Gilliam is as well-suited to science fiction as he is to fantasy, which tends to be more spontaneous, but kudos to him nonetheless for diversifying here and his direction patiently unravels the very technical and esoteric themes in this narrative that are very characteristically SF. Husband and wife David and Janet Peoples' notably smart and lucidly plotted screenplay, based on the 1962 French film La Jetee, meshes well with Gilliam's understanding interpretation of it, and Roger Pratt's photography and Mick Audsley's editing combine to keep everything flowing evenly. Finally, Willis, Pitt and Stowe each make their characters jump engagingly to life and collectively form a strong trio of anchors through the narrative.

I don't think it's quite good enough to have inspired a TV adaptation, nor is it as brilliant as Gilliam's previous effort, 1991's The Fisher King, but 12 Monkeys is nonetheless a refreshingly brainy mainstream science fiction thriller that demands you pay attention to its maze-like structure, and amidst this interminable real-life pandemic it may have acquired even more relevance still. 9/10.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #301: 3some (2009).

 

Jose (Adriana Ugarte), Marcos (Nilo Zimmerman) and Jaime (Biel Duran) are arts classmates at a Spanish university. To help Marcos with his impotence, Jaime sets him up with Jose, whose portrait Jaime has agreed to paint for their course. Once Jose and Marcos get acquainted, Jaime joins the fold and they have a menage a trois which exposes, among other more physical things, their shared and subjective dreams and feelings. Soon, however, Marcos and Jose become rather uncomfortable with the situation, and Jaime refuses to give Jose his portrait of her once he completes it, which deepens the estrangement.

This very erotic Spanish romantic drama from director Salvador Gonzalez Ruiz and writer Enrique Urbizu and based on Almudina Grandes' novel is very strongly reminiscent of Alfonso Cuaron's Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001) and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003) as a sexually-charged coming-of-age film with twenty-somethings. But while it initially has considerable spice and charm, for me it peaks (in more ways than one) about forty minutes in. I had no problem at all with the sexual content; in fact, admittedly I watched it primarily for that. But those scenes are so frank and daring yet tactful, and so stuck together in one section of the film, the rest just didn't come close to being as vivid for me. The two afore-mentioned films were more cohesive and effectively sensual for me because they spread their racy content throughout their durations with adequate gaps in between and also touched on other topics rarely explored in such films like politics and bourgeois culture. This one, meanwhile, has flavour that lasts about as long as bubblegum's for me.

The three principals have adequate chemistry together and give understated, natural and (given the content, brave) performances, but for me 3some collapses under the burden of its narrative and the misjudged rendering of that. I also thought it needed more of a soundtrack. 6/10.