Every year, intrepid directors make hundreds of films that will never be seen. Most of these films deserve to vanish from the face of the earth, but some don’t get distributed for more subtle reasons; they may not have a traditional story arc, or they may lack standard “likable” characters, or they may be trying to capture something conventional storytelling can’t express. In an era when the entire oeuvre of mediocre stars like Shannon Tweed and Richard Grieco can be found at your local video store, it’s startling that movies that take chances—even small chances—will languish in obscurity. The Pigeon-Egg Strategy and The Bible and Gun Club, both screening this week at the Grand Illusion, aren’t radically avant-garde, but still the filmmakers had to distribute the films themselves in order to get their work seen.
The Pigeon-Egg Strategy
directed by Max Makowski
plays October 30November 12 at Grand Illusion
The Bible and Gun Club
directed by Daniel J. Harris
plays October 30November 12 at Grand Illusion
The Pigeon-Egg Strategy is the more ambitious of the two. Its intertwining stories center around a group of assassins dressed in suits, ties, and bowler hats, who might have stepped out of a painting by the surrealist René Magritte. Exactly why these men are killing their seemingly random victims never gets explained. Meanwhile a novelist has written a children’s book about ghost soldiers in China trying to stop time, a book that these assassins believe is about them. The story constantly swerves, sidetracked by a publicist trying to convince a political candidate to grow a goatee, which leads into a discussion of how people all over the world use the same gestures to describe a goatee, which crosses with another set of characters talking about other slightly absurd topics. All of these off-course narratives are slowly folded back into the world of the assassins; connections are drawn through overlapping conversations and coincidental encounters that are meant to mount into a sense of mystery and larger purpose, something like what one might get from an intricate story by Borges. The metaphysical web drawn by The Pigeon-Egg Strategy isn’t as satisfying as that; like a surrealist painting, it’s more about the implication of an idea than the idea itself.
In The Bible and Gun Club, five salesmen from the Anaheim franchise of a Bible and gun company travel to Las Vegas for a convention, where they shamble around the neon-lit strip like Tarantino gangsters gone to seed. They go on sales jaunts to the trailer parks surrounding Vegas; they flirt clumsily with foreign air stewardesses at poolside; and slowly their individual lives unravel. The middle-aged, heavy-set salesmen are played by strong character actors; it’s a pleasure to see a movie dominated by people who are rarely allowed to be at the center of a story. The subculture they inhabit isn’t real (though it’s amusingly believable that selling guns and Bibles goes hand in hand), but it’s explored with a documentary style that gives it an insidious realism. When two of the salesmen get invited to watch the shooting of a porn film in a hotel room, the scene has more authenticity than all of Boogie Nights. Some of the salesmen are more sympathetic than others, but they’re all pretty oafish. Nonetheless, they’re engaging in a way that has nothing to do with what supposedly makes a character “likable.” Though the movie makes some uneven gambits with absurd violence toward the end, the salesmen never lose their emotional truth. Whether their behavior is funny, alarming, or just pathetic, that integrity—combined with a great Vegas-flavored soundtrack—makes this casual, rambling film truly enjoyable. You can see why no studio would touch it—it’s a black-and-white quasi-documentary satire about lumpy, balding losers that’s more funny-peculiar than funny-ha-ha—but sometimes, a dish with little appeal on the surface can prove surprisingly tasty.
