Bad Boy Bubby

1993 cringe-fest

Rating: 15/20

Plot: The titular bad boy lives alone with his portly mother and doesn't leave their humble apartment since the air outside is poisonous and all. He spends his time playing with his kitty and sitting absolutely still until his biological father visits one day. Consequences of that visit force Bubby outside where he makes all kinds of new friends and embarks on a career in the arts.

Challenging, oft-difficult movie featuring incest, fat naked people, cat suffocation, and Bad Boy Bubby's lil bubby--all in the first fifteen minutes. Bubby won't exactly capture your hearts, but parts of his story will make you queasy in your stomach if you're into that sort of thing. I have to give credit for Nicholas Hope's performance of the character. Mentally challenged characters are difficult to pull off, especially when an actor is delicately maneuvering back and forth between tragedy and comedy with the character, and Hope does it very well. This movie is very funny, very very darkly funny, and I always appreciate it when a filmmaker can make me laugh and disturb me at the same time. Bubby's world can't possibly be real, more of an apocalyptic wasteland or the ghost of a third world country than anywhere in wherever the hell this is supposed to take place. Australia? It's a world bathed in gray, drab and dumpy, and there are definitely shots in this movie where it actually does look like the air is poisonous. Bad Boy Bubby doesn't have much depth although I do like the possible satiric jab at rock 'n' roll, but it's a unique and, if you're a little twisted, entertaining character study.

Note: Jen watched a big chunk of this one and really seemed to like it. She missed the aforementioned cat suffocation, incest, naked fat woman, and lil bubby, however.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

1970 sex ed video for girls

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Inceptionesquely, menstruating Valerie dreams a little dream and then a dream-within-a-little-dream, little-dreaming of earring-thieving vampiric chimera, foul grannies, guys with ukuleles, lustful priests, stake burnings, lesbian smoochings, and funky little poisoned demons. Thanks for the trip, Valerie!

As beautiful and as visually interesting this little Czech trip through a pre-pubescent girl's subconscious was, I'm really glad it wasn't much longer. I appreciate cloudy technicolor symbol-laden seemingly-plotless abstract and surreal foreign films as much as the next guy, but this is almost hyper-dreamy if that makes sense. If it's not the sexuality, it'll be the vampires that offend the sensibilities of the religious right, and there are some startling shots of the black-cloaked pale-faced, dysodontial, gaunt figure contrasted against the softer backgrounds of the village. The colors in this beg to be remastered. They're muted and fuzzy, maybe appropriately so, like colors worn away from being from once-upona fairy tale times. This is definitely a case where director Jaromil Jires (don't ask; I don't know him) makes up for the whole no-plot thing and what seems to be a limited budget with a consistent vibe, alluringly hypnotic. It's a frustrating yet tantalizing visual treat, like an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland without the hallucinogenics or a Heidi with fistfuls and a liberally dog-eared copy of The Softest Metamorphosis--A Nubile Girl's to Her Body and How to Avoid Priests and/or Vampires.

Brother's Keeper

1992 documentary

Rating: 16/20

Plot: The Brothers Ward have lived in the same dinky and rickety shack in the middle of Middle-of-Nowhere, New York. They've got the minds of four-year-olds but work hard. The other occupants of Middle-of-Nowhere, New York, don't pay much attention to them until Delbert is accused of murdering his brother for reasons ranging from euthanasia to, more bizarrely, sexual frustration. The townfolk rally around the brothers after he apparently confesses to the murder, an act that Delbert's feeble mind may not have fully understood.

Watching the Ward Brothers is a lot like watching the Beales in Grey Gardens, an oft-uncomfortable invasion of privacy that, at times, you almost feel bad watching. The brothers are simple minded, yes, but in a way, it's hard not to admire the simple lives they lead. It's just hard to believe that people like this exist in our fast-moving 21st Century culture, and that's even prior to the revelations that their dirty little shack might contain some dirty little incest secrets. So Brother's Keeper works as a cultural document. The dynamics of the whole city mice vs. the country mice thing added another layer, and the courtroom scenes were riveting. The documentarians treat the subject matter both objectively and lovingly. You can tell Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky spent a great deal of time with the brothers, and you get such an intimate portrait of them. We don't get all the answers because they don't really matter all that much. Brother's Keeper sets up more questions than it answers, but that's part of the beauty of it. I also really liked how this showed the media's despicably voyeuristic role in a case like this, the almost gleeful talking heads that flocked to Middle-of-Nowhere, New York, to report on the story. In the end, I felt almost happy that these filmmakers helped me see the humanity in this mystery, made me seem like a much better person than the slimy news reporters and the big city big-wigs. I ended up liking simple-minded Delbert quite a bit, and after the filmmakers contrast scenes with him admiring his chickens that he keeps in a run-down school bus converted into a coop with a brutally and graphically violent scene featuring a random guy slaughtering a pig, you just get the feeling that there's no way Delbert could have done anything cold blooded. Or maybe he could. Who knows? Euthanasia or death by natural causes? Perhaps it's the little liberal in me trying to get out, but I don't think it even matters.