#WTW: Donnie Darko

(#WhatThomWatched Chapter Seventeen a.k.a. The Tangent Vortex...?)

Donnie Darko

(2001, Richard Kelly; 20th Century Fox disc)

Donnie Darko boasts strong visuals; excellent early performances from Gyllenhaal siblings Jake and Maggie plus Jena Malone, Daveigh Chase, Ashley Tisdale, Seth Rogen and more; and an intricate puzzle-plot that is sublimely creepy and (at least the first time around) freighted with significance. It’s purposely (and effectively) set in the near-past, in a late-1980’s that allows it to comment mildly on the Bush/Dukakis presidential contest while also evoking a viewer’s own younger days, largely through the soundtrack (which includes songs by Tears for Fears, Joy Division, and Echo and the Bunnymen). But it’s also a product of a near-past era of filmmaking, another beneficiary of the post-1990s indie boom that produced such low-budget and imaginative first films as Shane Carruth’s Primer or Christopher Nolan’s Following (and subsequent Memento). Director Richard Kelly’s longer 2004 recut notwithstanding, this is a film that benefits from its rough edges, leaps of logic and general shagginess.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays a high school student in suburban Virginia with an unusual problem: he hallucinates a man in a fur-and-metal rabbit costume who demands that he leave his home at night in a sleepwalking trance and break water mains, commit arson, and worse. But this is offset by several points that seem to be deliberately opposing the tropes of similar stories: he’s got a loving family, plenty of friends, a couple of caring teachers, and a genuinely concerned psychiatrist in whom he can confide; he’s caught the eye of the new girl in class and has no problem getting to know her; and most unexpectedly, he sees his terrifying rabbit when he takes his meds, not when he goes off them. Yes, some of the school personnel are awful, and there’s a pair of bullies who menace him, but the villains (particularly a self-help guru played by Patrick Swayze) are all as cartoonishly flat as if they’d been inked into the film by hand. This dearth of stereotypical problems forces the viewer to really focus on Gyllenhaal’s internal state: he’s being told that the world will end unless he intervenes, and he seems to be following a trail of clues that points to time travel as the final answer.

The actors are committed — the new faces, old hands, and ringers alike (for the honor of using their names, stars like Swayze, Noah Wyle, and Katharine Ross (!) are rewarded with two or three Big Scenes apiece; Drew Barrymore also earns an executive producer credit by having believed enough in the early script to get the movie made). Mary McDonnell as Donnie's mother gives a performance that neatly externalizes the pain and difficulty of raising teenagers, and Holmes Osborne is convincing as a loving and defensive father. Sean Smith and Ronald Fisher as Gyllenhaal’s best friends are bewildered by his sudden odd behavior, and Malone is intrigued and intriguing in turn as his love interest. As for Gyllenhaal, he’s in almost every scene.

Reminds me of:

It’s a lot for one character to carry. Donnie is, annoyingly, that exceptional kid who is too smart for his teachers, who stands up to the bullies and wins the arguments, who confounds adults with his depth, and in the end is the unthanked savior of the universe — all with little to no evident irony. He’s like Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield if Holden were 100% right and everyone else was a “goddam” phony. A key scene has Donnie confront his hallucination with the question “Why do you wear that stupid bunny suit?” To which the rabbit — his name is Frank — replies “Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?” It sounds profound, or at least meaningful, on first viewing, but diminishes the more you think about it. As an example of what troubled teen Donnie might think is profound, it’s gangbusters, but the movie seems to expect us to honestly be wowed.

There are strong echoes of other films. For example, towards the end students in Halloween costumes strike out on bikes for an urgent ride through town; it’s so reminiscent of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial that it can’t be an accident. Scenes of Samantha Darko’s dance troupe Sparkle Motion — serious and earnest, unaware that they are oversexualized for 4th graders — make a similar satirical point as Happy, Texas or the later Little Miss Sunshine, though there’s not much development of the idea here. Closeups of the elderly Roberta Sparrow (suffering from dementia, her neighbors think, but she might be a time traveller!) as her younger self in a group photo are zoomed into like the final photo closeup of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

Some of these may not be conscious homages to films or genres, but these examples hint at a flaw with Donnie Darko: It wants to be too much —a horror movie, a science-fiction puzzle, a coming-of-age story, but also social commentary, a gloss on the 1980’s, and even a comedy — and it never finds a tone which supports all of these elements at once. For some, myself included, the story works fine (even given the tone shifts) without a full explanation of how the science-fantasy mechanics operate. But Kelly did not create his movie in this form; infamously, he was forced to cut 20-30 minutes from his original festival version. When Donnie was a massive seller on DVD, purchased and watched by a far larger audience than it had in its theatrical run (opening a film about a plane that falls out of the sky a few weeks after 9/11 didn’t help), Kelly was invited to cut a completely new version for another theatrical release in 2004. That version added chapter delineations with interstitial imagery and explanatory text purportedly taken from the book The Philosophy of Time Travel (an imaginary textbook written by the Sparrow character); these snippets make many of the events in the film logical — “logical” in that they support a giant backstory in which beings from the future can implant suggestions in someone’s mind to guide events, and in which a tangled set of physical rules governs the fabric of the universe. The additions, taken at face value, explain the plot; but without the mystery of inexplicable events, the movie can only be as good as its mythos — which does not rise far above that which high-school Donnie might cook up with his buddies between conversations about Smurfs. In the original version, the lack of explanation for the same vaguely fanfic-y rules creates a true tension — how much of what transpires is only happening in Donnie’s mind, whether fueled by madness, drugs, placebos, or reality?

This is arguable, superficial and a little mean, but in my opinion Donnie Darko shares a trait with Forman’s Amadeus: in each case, its director released an extended version which doesn’t play as well as the original. (But there are many, many fans of the director’s cut of Donnie. If you’re one, educate us in the comments for this post, won’t you?)

But then — the guilt!

I loved this film so much when I first watched it; it’s rare for something to fall so far for me on a second viewing. That’s not how rewatching usually works. I remember being very excited for Kelly’s second big feature as writer-director, Southland Tales in 2006. But as the movie’s release approached, the early critical response soured quickly. I never did wind up seeing it and it tanked equally with critics and audiences; his 2009 The Box never even appeared on my radar (though it was slightly better received). I feel bad about it all; maybe I’ll give one of them a spin someday, but I’m booked through 2018 at this point. He’s got a new one in the works too. Maybe I can start fresh. (Defenders of Southland Tales, feel free to join the Donnie director’s cut fans in the comments.)

Pitch:

Donnie’s utterly creepy mirror-stare both at himself and, later, at Frank . . . . Between this and Svankmajer’s Alice, it’s a wonder that anyone can keep a pet rabbit in the house and still sleep at night.

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#WTW: I Walked With a Zombie

(#WhatThomWatched eleven . . .)

I Walked With a Zombie

(1943, Jacques Tourneur; from the Val Lewton Horror Collection, Warner Bros.)

RKO producer Val Lewton was an undisputed master of suspense and psychological, internalized horror. Working with a stock set of actors, writers and directors throughout the 1940’s, and known to have taken a heavily hands-on and detail-oriented (and often uncredited) approach to the scripts, his films are impeccably designed on miniscule budgets. Cat People from 1942 is his most recognizable title (especially after the light-years-more-graphic remake in 1982), but I Walked With a Zombie must run a close second. Essentially Jane Eyre reset on a South Seas island, a nurse played by Frances Dee has come to a wealthy sugar plantation to care for the catatonic wife (Christine Gordan, in a nonspeaking role) of owner Tom Conway. His younger brother James Ellison is a troubled drunk; the matriarch Edith Barrett indulges her sons while hiding an odd relationship to the island natives and their voodoo-based religious ceremonies. Dee is attracted to Conway, but as a honorable person she decides to channel her energies into helping Gordan recover and Conway restore his marriage. Of course, she can’t help but run up against several family secrets, long-held grudges, and cracks in the community’s façade.

For anyone unfamiliar with Hays Code 1940’s horror, Walked might be difficult to get into. It’s got very few scares, no special effects, little supernatural content, and no real villain. To enjoy this (or any other Lewton film), the viewer has to become an audience member of 1943, when the “exotic” voodoo content was new and exciting, and the calypso music was almost completely foreign to Americans (in fact all evidence indicates that the Sir Lancelot performances here are the very first appearance of calypso music in a film). To that end, the sets and art design are gorgeous and never betray the low budget. Walked is beautifully filmed in rich contrasts of light and dark; despite the almost completely soundstage-based setting, there always seem to be breezes stirring from off-screen. Not only does this contribute immeasurably to the illusion of being on location, it also causes the viewer to remain uneasy, scanning the dark recesses of the screen, watching for something to emerge.

The characters and performances are remarkable as well. Barrett as the mother (despite being the same age as the actors playing her “sons”!) has a particularly natural style. After meeting the stiff and formal elder and the morose younger brother, her confident and easy way with Dee makes it easy to believe that she is holding the island’s inner workings in the palm of her hand. Sir Lancelot was a hugely influential calypso singer/composer and Walked is the first place most people saw him, with his own song “Shame and Sorrow” figuring heavily in the plot; he plays an unnamed town-troubadour type paid to entertain diners in the square who sings ballads about the plantation’s past (and puts ideas in Dee’s head). It’s an innovative and effective form of exposition in a show that has lots of information to convey in what is an astonishingly compact story. There’s also a weird Dee voiceover that vanishes halfway through the movie, just as the story is turning to its creepier content.

In retrospect, the zombie Carrefour (Darby Jones) is not only completely benign, but he is the person who can be seen in the opening footage under the credits, in a long shot on a well-lit beach on a peaceful shore; this scene, which doesn’t appear again in the movie proper, establishes the exotic location but certainly is not menacing or scary. That would seem to imply right up front that the native culture is nothing to be feared, which turns out to be true — the “demons” are entirely within the history of the white family of plantation owners. In fact, the whole native culture is handled with (relative) respect; yes, it is invented and non-authentic, but it is not exploitative; compared with most popular films of the same year, African-American actors are shown as equivalent to caucasians, and not used as comic relief. And the made-up details are evocative and effective as metaphors for slavery and other racial-imbalance-of-power issues that are not otherwise openly addressed: the village custom of gathering to weep and mourn when a child is born (a tradition, we are told, that stems from their slave ancestors) might seem silly, but upon reflection is a clever way to indicate a strong community awareness of (and audible disapproval of) the overlords’ past status as slaveholders. The driver that picks up Dee at the dock and brings her to the Hammond estate is a gentle and dignified corrective to Dee’s initial wide-eyed acceptance of the island. The wooden ship’s figurehead that graces the grounds, a remnant from the slave ship that brought the original residents to the island, is so striking that we almost expect it to fulfill some supernatural function in the story — perhaps it will animate like Mozart’s accusing Commendatore statue; this is a horror film after all! — but in the end it is exactly what it is: a completely non-metaphorical reminder of the blood and inhumane toil that allowed the foreign plantation owners to thrive, no matter how benignly they try to treat the island now.

Reminds me of:

I haven’t really seen any other contemporary movies which attempt to depict this kind of subculture (the ones that try do a mostly poor job, apparently). Jungle cultures do put me in mind of Werner Herzog’s three astounding collaborations with Klaus Kinski that are jungle-set; the best of these (and one of the greatest movies I’ve ever experienced) is Aguirre, the Wrath of God, but the one that is probably closest to the island culture here is Cobra Verde. Needless to say, Herzog’s recreations in the 1970’s and 1980’s are far closer to the real thing than this or any other 1940’s take, not to mention shot on location. (Though that said, the voodoo sequences here are reported to be well-researched and are presented to be taken seriously.)

After commenting on the effectiveness of the Mystery Man played by Robert Blake in Lost Highway, I have to note that Jones’s Carrefour is rendered ultra-creepy by exactly the same no-tech trick: His character holds his eyes wide open and is never seen to blink, even in lengthy shots. (Of course Jones had a build and look that kept him playing a similar character for most of his career, perhaps not to his satisfaction.)

All right, this descends into the “mere coincidence” category: As it happens I watched this and the previous Living in Oblivion on the same night. Oblivion ends with a credit block that I reproduced in the last entry. Mere minutes later, in the opening credits for Walked, I caught this:

Too fun. (And you can even see the “I” and the “zombie” doing the “walk” of the title, just behind this text block.)

But then — the guilt!

I will admit that I was unprepared for Walked’s light touch and literary tone when I began the movie — the lurid title had me expecting something more B-movie like a William Castle or Roger Corman film. Of course those campy movies come later, in the late 1950’s and the 1960’s; the movies produced by Val Lewton and his contemporaries were high-class (despite the titles, which were apparently pre-selected by RKO). I should have remembered that I had the same experience with Cat People several years ago — expecting it to be more thrills ’n’ chills, it took me a while to get into the groove.

I listened to the Steve Jones and Kim Newman commentary on this one (both are Lewton and horror genre experts), and their work as well as the tribute site by Erik Weems were very helpful. I tried to keep all of the observations that I made above my own, but I’ll admit that I did not really notice or appreciate the lighting effects on my first viewing; once clued in by Jones and Newman, the lighting artistry was very apparent (nothing, particularly peoples’ faces, is ever broadly lit without filtering shadows from vegetation, blinds, or ironwork). All in all I came away with a higher level of appreciation for Lewton, and I’ll need to both re-watch Cat People and also complete his other 1940’s output at some point (The Seventh Victim and Bedlam sound particularly — troublesome).

Pitch:

I’ve already mentioned Sir Lancelot’s calypso ballad which provides exposition, heightens dramatic tension, and is beautiful all at once. He actually sings this in two halves, in separate scenes, and the second of these — as he advances on Dee and the passed-out Ellison, emerging from that darkened background, all traces of his earlier subservience gone — is the menacing highlight of the film.

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#WTW Glance: The Imitation Game

#WhatThomWatched Glance*: 

The Imitation Game

(Morten Tyldum, 2014; In theaters/Disc release details not yet announced)

Recommended for: People interested in cryptography, and/or World War II, and/or British biopics — and/or Benedict Cumberbatch.)

Although there have been a couple high-profile movie treatments of seminal cryptographer and father of the modern computer Alan Turing (most notably Breaking the Code from 1996, with Derek Jacobi as Turing, and based on the same source material), The Imitation Game is really the first attempt to fully address both Turing’s contributions to World War II and his illicit life as a gay man in 1940’s England. Benedict Cumberbatch excels at portraying Turing’s social awkwardness and preternatural intelligence alike; there are also excellent roles for his real-life codebreaking team at Bletchley Park including Keira Knightley as a mathematician determined to operate outside the societal restraints imposed on women. It’s handsomely produced, intelligently written, and well-paced, but beyond being a simple prestige picture it also shows a very specific and shameful example of historical intolerance for homosexuality, in a clear and straightforward way.

Reminds me of:

Other well-made British-cast British-subject biopics — though I don’t usually get into “standard” biopics over the new-school versions from directors like Michael Winterbottom, who seem determined to upend conventions (cf. his depictions of Tony Wilson in 24 Hour Party People, or Mariane and Daniel Pearl in A Mighty Heart). This one has a few of the trite, old melodrama beats and is not terribly faithful to the historical Turing. But I was still impressed at the larger statement it was able to make about Turing’s sexual preference and the way his work could stand in more than one metaphorical way for his personhood and his struggles. I’m pleased to read about scholarship which indicates that his actual life may not have been nearly as abject as what we see here, but at the same time Tyldum and screenwriter Graham Moore have made creative choices which allow Turing to represent much more than just himself; after all, as we learn from a post-film credit, 49,000 other people in Britain were also convicted of gross indecency. The Turing Test is a powerful metaphor for the coded lives these men and women had to lead.

As it happens, in my ongoing (and slow) quest to read everything by Neal Stephenson, I’d recently finished his excellent Cryptonomicon from 1999. This semi-historical novel includes several real Bletchley Park (and rival) codebreakers, among them a far cheerier rendition of Turing. Stephenson also goes light years beyond the complications presented in this film; the final stage of Imitation Game, where the disinformation campaigns begin to kick into gear, is the starting point of the book which (in addition to loads more guns, sex, and haiku) has a much higher level of complexity. For anyone primarily interested in the cryptography problems of advanced warfare, I recommend Stephenson.

But then — the guilt!

As effective as it may be, the movie's still not the accurate story of what happened or what Turing or the Bletchley Park crew did. Showing “science” (or any higher-order creativity) on-screen in ways that audiences respond to is really hard. But as viewers, we should continue to push filmmakers and other artists to do the work and turn these concepts into forms that we can experience and understand. The movie that somehow manages to embody the actual innovative leaps of a Turing (or an Einstein, or a Van Gogh, or a Mozart) and make an audience feel them will be a marvel. (I put this in the BTTG section because I can't readily think of a successful example. Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev is the best parallel I can come up with; in that case a book somehow fully embodies and passes on to the reader the experience of painting, in three incredible pages. I haven’t seen Ed Harris’s Pollock — maybe that captures a similar creative moment in cinematic form? Well, if a movie example comes to me, I won't cheat and edit out my admissions here — I'll post it below in the comments. Feel free to contribute your own!)

Pitch:

Knightley and Cumberbatch's scene together where she denounces his clumsy attempts to push her away is an impressive one — she’s doing a lot of emotional work with a small set of lines.

*For movies and shows which are current — in theaters or streaming — I'm posting a short, less-spoilery take on #WhatThomWatched (and generally only when something really strikes me as worth passing on). These shorter essays are labeled Glance.

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#WTW: Thieves Like Us

(#WhatThomWatched six!)

Thieves Like Us

(Robert Altman, 1974; MGM DVD, also available on Blu-Ray)

Everyone understands the idea of product placements in movies and television shows, ranging from subtle (corporate logos in 2001: A Space Odyssey) to obnoxious (the McDonald’s-funded Mac and Me, e.g.; Cracked has this one nailed), to knowing self-parody (twenty-odd years ago, Wayne’s World had Mike Myers declaiming “Contract or no, I will not bow to any sponsor!” while holding up a Pizza Hut box). But the constant appearance of Coca-Cola in Thieves Like Us doesn’t feel anything like advertising; instead, it’s just the most obvious textural detail in what might be the best representation of the Depression-era American South in all cinema. Coke is everywhere: advertised on round tin signs at every store, of course, but also sponsoring the State Penitentiary; its familiar bottles grasped by many characters (most often by Shelley Duvall’s Keechie), but also, empty, lined up on mantels and porches; and in one scene, hawked from a vendor’s truck in the town square, with seemingly every kid in the county running up with their nickels. Coke represents an affordable luxury (sometimes just barely so); as such it’s also an actual working part of the Southern economy (again, so slightly; at five cents a pop it can’t fix everything). It’s also a still-current symbol for nostalgia that seems to have always been nostalgic.

Equally ubiquitous in the world of Thieves: radio. Characters listen to the radio for important plot points, of course; our lead Bowie (Keith Carradine) wouldn’t know the fate of his fellow bank robbers without a radio in his car. But radio is fundamental to the 1930’s in every way: it’s in the background of many scenes both audibly and visibly; characters often listen to the same programs from different vantage points or sets, and the radio’s content always comments on the primary action. Most boldly, Altman sometimes allows the stream of radio noise to slip away from realism and into direct dialog with the film’s images; for example, as Keechie and Bowie edge into a physical relationship, a radio dramatization of Romeo and Juliet’s love sonnet plays out and loops back and back again to repeat portions of the dialogue and narration verbatim.

Similarly to many of Altman’s best movies, Thieves Like Us depends less on plot and incident and more on character and tone. Its ending might be its weakest point, since the conventions of a crooks-on-the-run yarn demand that the law must eventually catch up. But in contrast with that possibly purposely brief resolution, the center of the film is gloriously stretched out and extended. Carradine’s character went a bad way when he was impossibly young, just a teenager, and he sees himself as an inevitably bad person even as we (and Duvall’s character) can easily see all of his good. He falls in love with Duvall while laid up in hiding in her barn after an injury, and his weeks of recovery away from his partners and safe from discovery allow the two of them to play out a fantasy, a different life of domesticity for them both. As simple as the idea may be, and as quick as it is to sketch out in words, Altman instead chooses to allow these scenes to go on at length while the world outside seems to stand still, and their new life is allowed to get as far as a little house of their own and future plans apart from Carradine’s criminal past. When the wheel begins to turn again, the viewer is crushingly aware of what the couple will lose. That languorous, idyllic center of the movie is quite literally the pause that refreshes. 

(Hmm — clearly Coke is on my mind.)

Reminds me of: 

For all of his brilliance Altman seems to be polarizing and I am firmly in the pro- camp, as future #WTW postings are sure to prove. There are lots of connections between Thieves and his other work but the most obvious to me is his use of sound here (the endless radio broadcasts, encompassing the news, commercials, “Gang Busters” and other famous serials) akin to M.A.S.H. and the camp’s P.A. announcements, or Nashville and Hal Phillip Walker’s megaphone car. In terms of story, Thieves Like Us obviously bears comparison to Bonnie and Clyde; where Penn’s movie chose to focus on the Barrow Gang’s presage of celebrity culture, and the couple’s fascination with fame, Bowie in Thieves desperately wants to be normal, unknown, the opposite of notorious. He and his co-criminals do scour the newspapers and the airwaves for any mention of their adventures, but — at least for Bowie — it seems more a practicality intended to keep them one step ahead of the police. There’s very little celebration among the outlaws, here; crime isn’t a catalyst for sexuality, as in Gun Crazy, or a shared bond, as in The Honeymoon Killers — it's just necessary for survival.

But also — the guilt! 

Among the comparisons I can draw, I can’t compare Altman’s film to the other high-profile movie that was made from the same Edward Anderson source novel, Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night — I’ve never seen it. I also never watch an Altman without feeling guilty that I don’t watch him more often. His films are fine literature in a world that’s increasingly tuning out for the movie equivalent of tweets and listicles. Hopefully #WTW will shame me into rewatching some of the best — California Split, The Player, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 3 Women — and also spur me into hunting down some of the ones I’ve never seen — I hear there’s a new-ish release of Brewster McCloud, for instance.

Pitch: 

Amongst all the intertwining of the criminal life and run-of-the-mill life in 1937 Mississippi, there’s a brilliant scene where Carradine’s partners (played by John Schuck and Bert Remsen) practice for a bank job with Remsen’s girlfriend and her kid brother playing the bank employees, chairs up on a table to represent teller’s cages, literally a grown-up’s game of make believe. When things go sour in the play-acting version, you can sure bet things won’t be any sweeter in real life.

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#WTW: Judex

(deep breath — it's the inaugural #WhatThomWatched  . . . .)

Judex 

(Georges Franju, 1963; Criterion spine 710)

If a person already loves silent film, and is used to the damaged black-and-white frames and the sometimes mistimed playback speeds, maybe even has built up the patience to watch six- or ten-hour serials from the 1910's, then seeing Judex — Franju’s modern homage to famous French crime serials — is like watching that tiny flickering square expand to life-size: wide compositions, sharp contrasts, and of course full sound, and yet still with those period details: early-era clothes, cars, and drawing rooms, pulp-fiction guns, knives and subterranean cells, and the most obvious-seeming light and dark used symbolically for good and evil. 

But trying to suss out those light/dark beats shows surprising intricacies. Two women, both introduced on a sun-swept lawn, begin to circle each other with their blacks and whites: while the dutiful daughter is dressed in black to mourn the father she thinks is dead, his faithless lover is conspiring with her real partner in their modern street clothes; as night falls, the partners don black catsuits to sneak back into the man’s mansion, only to encounter the daughter in her white nightgown . . . . By the end the villain has disguised herself in a nun’s habit to kidnap the incapacitated daughter, whose unlikely champion — a circus acrobat in a white leotard — will fight hand-to-hand with the villain on a roof; they are abstracted in one shot to just their legs, two black, two white, struggling to keep a purchase on the sloping rooftop.

   

Reminds me of:

The five-film Fantômas serial, of course; the master criminal there has a thousand times more personality but can’t touch the 1960’s Judex for sheer style . . . . The relentless pileup of events is a kind of link between those serials, some of the earliest examples of popular film that we still watch, and the current need for thrillers to one-up themselves scene after scene, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility — yet the anachronistic camera irises and intertitles here invoke a kind of gentility . . . . And: Could Wes Anderson have possibly been thinking of Judex when he shot the meeting between Sam and Suzy in Moonrise Kingdom? It’s easy to imagine that he was. “No — I said, what kind of bird are you?”

But also — the guilt!

For years I’ve been too squeamish to watch Franju’s Eyes Without a Face — reviews always seem to use the word “grue” — but I need to grow up; the included short documentary Franju le visionnaire convinces me that I should see it. I also need to catch the original Feuillade serial from 1916; both it and Les vampires have been reissued in affordable DVD sets by Kino.

Pitch:

For those who adore a particular kind of surrealistic whammy, the scene where Judex is first revealed (from the feet up) is thirty seconds of perfection.

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