Surreal

Twin Peaks - Fire Walk with Me

Alternately fascinating and frustrating--and no doubt deliberately so on both counts--this controversial Twin Peaks installment (it was roundly booed by mystified audiences at the Cannes Film Festival) appeared in theaters after the series was canceled, serving as both prequel and coda to the whole remarkable Twin Peaks phenomenon. Designed especially for dedicated followers of the series (it would just bewilder anyone else), Fire Walk with Me further investigates the murder of Laura Palmer by exploring events that took place before the series's brilliant debut feature (Twin Peaks: The Premiere), up to and including the long, dark, terrible night of Laura's death. Familiar Twin Peaks denizens Sheryl Lee, Grace Zabriskie, and Ray Wise (as the three members of the Palmer family), Kyle MacLachlan, Peggy Lipton, James Marshall, Dana Ashbrook, Miguel Ferrer, Mädchen Amick, and director David Lynch himself reprise their series roles (with Moira Kelly subbing for Lara Flynn Boyle as Donna Hayward), joined by an equally motley group of guest stars, including Harry Dean Stanton, David Bowie, Chris Isaak, and Kiefer Sutherland. --Jim Emerson

Shows the week preceding and leading up to the death of Laura Palmer in the small town of Twin Peaks.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 26-FEB-2002
Media Type: DVD

The Saddest Music in the World

Only the mind of Guy Maddin could conjure up The Saddest Music in the World, in which a double-amputee beer baroness invites musicians of all nations to compete in a grand music competition... in Winnipeg. The only thing zanier than the plot is Maddin's style, which makes the film look like a lost artifact from the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari era, a jumble of Expressionist compositions and gauzy focus. It helps if you're already a fan of the director of Careful and Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, for this is not Maddin's most cohesive picture. Kids in the Hall stalwart Mark McKinney is a little too arch as a sharpie returning to Manitoba, but Isabella Rossellini is delicious as the "Beer Queen of the Prairie." By the time she straps on a pair of hollow glass legs filled with bubbly lager, you're either delighted by this movie or you've given up. --Robert Horton

When a legless beer baroness in Winnipeg announces a contest to find the world s saddest tune a pint of trouble brews among a fractured family competing for the $25.000 prize. As the disturbing depths of the links between themselves the baroness and an amnesiac nymphomaniac are exposed. One thing becomes clear: it will take more than a pool of alcohol to their sorrows.Special FeaturesThe making of the Saddest Music in the world:Teardrops in the SnowThe Cost of the Saddest Music in the World: the Saddest Characters in the WorldOriginal Trailer3-incredble short films by guy MaddinSystem Requirements: Running Time 99 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: MUSICALS/MUSICALS Rating: R UPC: 027616911704 Manufacturer No: 1007029

Naked Lunch - Criterion Collection

You are now entering Interzone, William S. Burroughs's phantasmagorical land of junk, paranoia, and crawly things. Best travel advice: "Exterminate all rational thought." In David Cronenberg's superbly shot, unnerving warp on the Burroughs novel, the novelist himself becomes a main character (played in an implacable monotone by Peter Weller), with elements from Burroughs' life--including the shooting of his wife during a "William Tell" game, and bohemian friends Kerouac and Ginsberg--added to frame the book's wild visions. This is, ironically, a somewhat rational approach to an unfilmable book (and it makes a hair-curling double bill with Barton Fink, another look at writerly madness, with both films sharing Judy Davis). Cronenberg is a natural for oozing mugwumps and typewriters that turn into giant bugs, of course. But in the end, this is really his own vision of the artistic process, rather than Burroughs's hallucinatory descent into hell. --Robert Horton

Un Chien Andalou

Un Chien Andalou remains a startling artifact suggesting ways in which film can express the subconscious. The result of Luis Bunuel's collaboration with Salvador Dali, the 17-minute, 1929 film was designed expressly to shock and provoke. Opening with the canonical eyeball-slashing sequence and divided into baffling "chapters", this is a work of art obsessed with religion, lust, decay, violence, and death. Un Chien Andalou isn't simply one of the great works of the surrealist movement, but a segment of cinematic DNA that irrevocably altered the aesthetics of film. In its tangled corridors you find the seeds to the disappearing-mouth bit in The Matrix, the carcasses strewn through Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts and pretty much the entire oeuvre of David Lynch. --Ryan Boudinot

Filmed in Paris in 1929, UN CHIEN ANDALOU is regarded as the first film produced purely from within the Surrealist movement and is a landmark in the history of cinema. Loving treatment to DVD includes, as bonus material, an interview/documentary with Jua

Luis Bunuel's L'Age d'Or

Faust

Jan Svankmajer's long awaited follow up to his acclaimed "Alice" is an equally astounding version of the myth of Dr. Faustus. Merging live action with stop motion and claymation, Svankmajer has created an unsettling universe presided over by diabolic life size marionettes and haunted by skulking human messengers from hell.

Weekend

Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Buñuel enjoyed an ardent misanthropic duel in the '60s and '70s, but who won is anyone's call. Godard's Weekend lays down the trump in a harrowing and darkly funny allegory in which social mores fray along political lines. Played out in a metafilm in which characters question their own reality, a morally bankrupt Parisian couple tries to leave the city on a much-loathed country holiday with the wife's parents. Along the way, endless traffic jams, sudden violence, and vistas of gory car crashes underscore their corrupted values. Their lethal encounter with the in-laws and kidnap by an anarchic band of radical cannibals finds the couple--and presumably "decent" society with them--reverting to a nasty primitivism. The idea is of course that the bored, apathetic heart of the bourgeoisie is never far from acting out its most homicidal fantasies. --Alan E. Rapp

Little Otik (Otesanek)

Surrealist master Jan Svankmajer (FAUST, ALICE) brings a famous Czech legend eerily to life in the darkly hilarious cautionary tale of LITTLE OTIK. An ordinary couple, Karel and Bozena, are unable to conceive a child. When Karel digs up a tree root and whittles something vaguely resembling a human baby, Bozena's maternal longings transform the stump into a living creature with a (literally) monstrous appetite that can't be met with baby formula. Svankmajer brilliantly mixes his wicked humor with his subversive politics and love of mythology into a stunning live-action fable for our times. This Edition also features Svankmajer's surrealist THE FLAT

Songs From the Second Floor

While it falls squarely into the precious category of love-it-or-leave-it art-house oddities, the hypnotically absurd Swedish comedy Songs from the Second Floor is certainly unlike any other movie you've ever seen. That alone is reason to check it out, and many pleasures await those who are receptive to director Roy Andersson's conspicuously offbeat worldview, presented here as a series of marginally connected vignettes illustrating a bleak world that has literally ground to a halt. A perpetual traffic jam lurches through an urban landscape imbued with post-apocalyptic atmosphere, a ghost town populated by pale, shell-shocked citizens bereft of hope and teetering on the edge of collective madness. Characters and plot are nonexistent in any conventional sense; it's as if Andersson has cast himself as a detached God, gazing upon these lost souls from a distant remove, as if they were fish in a tank, lumbering through their oppressive city like zombies at the dead-end of civilization. Described by critic J. Hoberman as "slapstick Ingmar Bergman," this highly unusual film is certainly not for everyone, but if you're on its wavelength it's sure to prove unforgettably amusing. --Jeff Shannon

One evening somewhere in our hemisphere, a strange series of illogical events take place: a clerk is made redundant in a degrading manner; a lost immigrant is violently attacked in a busy street; a magician makes a terrible error in his act…sleep on this night does not come easily to the citizens of this town.

The following day, the signs of chaos are taking hold as the madness grips a board of directors and the city itself is strangled by a horrendous traffic jam. In the midst of this mayhem, one person stands out: Karl - covered in soot from the fire he had set to burn down his furniture store in order to get the insurance money.

While the new millennium is casting its web and creating a vast mental breakdown, Karl gradually becomes conscious of the absurdity of the world and realizes just how difficult it is to be human.

Phantom of Liberty - Criterion Collection

Any serious lover of film eventually (if not immediately) succumbs to the genius of Luis Bunuel. The bottomless wit and unsentimental clear-sightedness of the Spanish master is evident throughout his career, but Bunuel has the added bonus of never tapering off, never losing his edge. The Phantom of Liberty was produced when Bunuel was in his mid-70s, and it's as hilariously impertinent as anything he ever made. Along with his (and anybody's) key collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere, Bunuel strings together a series of reverse-logic dreams and surrealist blackouts, which flow from one to another without building into anything like a conventional storyline.

A nurse at an inn is sidetracked by a foursome of poker-playing priests, while an S&M couple down the hall invite everyone to their room for a drink and a show; a sit-down party has guests seated on toilets around a table; a police commissioner receives a phone call from his dead sister. None of it makes sense, except that it makes absolute sense. By the time a little girl is reported missing by her frantic parents, despite the fact that she is manifestly with them in schoolroom and police station, the film has entered the zone where comedy and unnerving observations come together in a perfect way. Many top European actors participate in this exercise, including Michel Piccoli, Monica Vitti, Jean Rochefort, and Jean-Claude Brialy. Perhaps the format limits the film from gaining the resonance of latter Bunuel films such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or That Obscure Object of Desire, but it's a marvelous surrealist variety show. --Robert Horton

Bourgeois convention is demolished in Luis Bu±uel's surrealist gem The Phantom of Liberty. Featuring an elegant soir#e with guests seated at toilet bowls, poker-playing monks using religious medals as chips, and police officers looking for a missing girl who is right under their noses, this perverse, playfully absurd comedy of nonsequiturs deftly compiles many of the themes that preoccupied Bu±uel throughout his career-from the hypocrisy of conventional morality to the arbitrariness of social arrangements.