Tag Archives: Quentin Dupieux

220. REALITY (2014)





FEATURING: , Kyla Kenedy, Jon Heder, Jonathan Lambert, Élodie Bouchez, , John Glover

PLOT: A young girl (improbably named “Reality”) spies a videotape inside the entrails of a wild hog her father shoots. Meanwhile, Jason, a French-speaking novice director, gets the green light for a screenplay he is working on about killer television sets, but only if he can find an Oscar-caliber scream of pain to insert in the film. Jason’s producer producer is also funding a fiction film from a former documentary director who, coincidentally, is using Reality as his lead actress, while the stressed would-be filmmaker finds he is having nightmares that are increasingly difficult to wake from.

Still from Reality (2014)

  • Réalité, Quentin Duepieux’s fifth film, was a French/Belgian co-production. The story is set in southern California, although many of the characters primarily speak French.
  • Although Duepieux usually scores his own films, the only music in this film is a repeated phrase from Philip Glass’s “Music with Changing Parts.”
  • The male Award Presenter in Jason’s dream is Michel Hazanavicius, Academy Award-winning director of The Artist (the female Presenter is Rubber‘s ).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Jason’s recurring dream where he is at an awards ceremony, awaiting announcement of the award for best groan in movie cinema history. He’s the lone human in a sea of blank-faced mannequins in tuxes.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Viscera video; eczema on the inside; this film doesn’t exist yet

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: In his short five film career, Quentin Dupieux has established a distinctive—and divisive—comic vision. His absurd sense of humor takes killer tires, dog-turd detectives, and electronica-snob cops and tosses them into twisted, self-aware scenarios. Reality sees him take a darker turn, venturing deeper into his subconscious, foraging for nightmares.

U.S. theatrical trailer for Reality

COMMENTS: In Reality, a mother reads a bedtime story to her Continue reading 220. REALITY (2014)


Reader recommendation by Caleb Moss


FEATURING: , Ramzy Bedia, Johnathan Lambert

PLOT: After he is released from being institutionalized in a mental ward facility for seven years because he was accidentally framed for the murders committed by his high school friend Georges, Blaise is flung into a strange, incongruous near-future where 1950’s kitsch a la “Happy Days” and extreme body modification mingle together swimmingly.

Still from Steak (2007)
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Quentin Dupieux, as readers of this website are fully aware, has a young, idiosyncratic film career replete with odd meta-humor and other peculiarities. This sadly maligned debut feature is no different: it distinguishes itself through its mixture of ageless plastic surgery disasters, masochistic cricket bat gang rituals, wryly absurd dialogue, and very warped buddy comedy dynamic.

COMMENTS: Blaise is a very unfortunate, albeit slightly dimwitted, individual to be friends with the likes of Georges, who is by all accounts a superficial opportunist who carelessly places Blaise into predicaments that cause his mind to slowly unravel until he becomes a disfigured shadow of the loser Georges once was. If the previous description makes it sound as if Quentin Dupieux created something along the lines of a heart-wrenching melodrama, then fret not: this film is incredibly funny, sporting strange conversational oodles which skewer humor trends, clique culture, and even a few self-referential jabs at Quentin’s own career as an electronic musician. Also noteworthy is what may be some of the finest use of shallow focus framing in Quentin’s output, quietly transforming the bandage-wrapped, post-op profile of Georges into something distorted and rather unnerving.

This film features some of Quentin’s most ambitious sound production as well, pulling together fellow French electro collaborators Sebastian Tellier and SebastiAn on board to produce a consistently eccentric and addictive soundtrack which fades and swells in and out of the film’s oddity-rife tapestry.


“In many ways Steak is a much weirder film than Rubber.”–Rich Haridy, Rich on Film (DVD)




FEATURING: Mark Burnham, , Arden Myrin, , , Marilyn Manson

PLOT: Los Angeles cops sell weed (hidden in dead rats), harass aerobics dancers, blackmail each other, and compose electronica; anything but fight crime.

Still from Wrong Cops (2013)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: With a few exceptions (like a fatally wounded music aficionado who refuses to kick the bucket), this black comedy is missing the unique conceptual meta-humor of Quentin Dupieux’s first two movies. It plays more like mildly edgy sketch comedy—it’s almost mainstream.

COMMENTS: One strange lesson you’ll take out of Wrong Cops is that American peace officers love European-style techno music. The other lesson is that, although Quentin Dupieux does surreal comedy well, his general outlook is too bemusedly sunny (a la genial absurdists like ) to create a truly biting satire about policemen behaving badly. True nastiness doesn’t seem to be in Dupieux’s makeup, so Wrong Cops ends up being more like Bad Grandpa than Bad Lieutenant. Although the movie’s cops are intended to be morally corrupt, only Mark Burnham‘s Officer Duke comes off as totally depraved; Eric Wareheim’s breast-obsessed patrolman, for example, is far too teddy-bearish to disturb, even when he’s forcing women to disrobe at gunpoint. The desire to make a black comedy about cops behaving badly mixes poorly with this director’s basic lack of cynicism. (The unexpected sweetness of Dolph’s search for his missing dog in Wrong was a better fit for his sensibilities). The not-quite-dead body that is never disposed of is one dark moment that works, as is Officer Duke’s spontaneous, pot-fueled eulogy about Hell on Earth that closes the film, but in general the somewhat flat comedy routines are more mild than wild.

With five cops to follow (plus a pair of gay officers who show up occasionally but don’t have a plotline of their own), there’s a lot going on, and Dupieux makes the movie into something of a L.A. block party by inviting a number of recognizable bit players. Eric Roberts stops by as a movie director, and is in there for a few minutes, while her “Twin Peaks” hubby has a slightly larger role as a police chief presiding at a funeral. Marilyn Manson (out of makeup) plays a hassled teenager; despite the fact that he’s in his forties, he is actually surprisingly convincing as a misfit kid. Unobtrusive but obvious references to Rubber and Wrong are also placed in the movie for Dupieux fans. The sprawling cast adds to the sketch-comedy feel, although the overarching plot (which is partly told out of sequence) is more carefully constructed than most viewers give it credit for: if Officer Duke never harasses David Delores Frank about his taste in electronica, the movie’s big tragedy never occurs. Dupieux’s core fan base will probably be pleased with this entry—and it does have its weirdly funny moments—but personally, I’m getting diminishing returns on his unique sense of humor with each subsequent film. The abstract meta-comedy that seemed rule-rewriting in Rubber has become expected and merely entertaining by the time we reach Wrong Cops.


“…tonally weird and totally forgettable.”–Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle

151. RUBBER (2010)




FEATURING: Stephen Spinella, , , Wings Hauser

PLOT: To begin the movie, a policeman hops out of a car trunk and explains that “no reason” is the most powerful element of style. We then see a group of people assembled in the desert; a man in a tie hands out binoculars and they are told to train their eyes on the horizon. Through the glasses they watch a tire come to life and observe as it learns to move and blow up heads, eventually stalking a beautiful young woman who ends up in a motel in the middle of nowhere.
Still from Rubber (2010)

  • Quentin Dupieux records electronic music under the stage name “Mr. Ozio.”
  • Music videos aside, Rubber was Dupieux’s third film, after a 45-minute experiment called Nonfilm (2002) and the French-language flop comedy Steak (2007).
  • Dupieux served as the writer, director, cinematographer, editor, sole cameraman, and co-composer of Rubber.
  • Robert the Tire was rigged to move with a remote controlled motor, moving the cylinder like a hamster in a wheel.
  • Rubber cost only $500,000 to make, but made only about $100,000 in theatrical receipts.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Obviously, it has to be a shot of Robert, the world’s most lovable and expressive killer tire.  We’ll go with the moment when he is standing in front of a Roxane Mesquida mannequin, tentatively rolling towards her, wondering whether it is a real girl or not. You can almost see the furrows forming in his tread as he mulls the situation over.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Well, it is a movie about an animate tire that kills things by making their heads explode telekinetically. That would be enough for most movies, but Rubber rolls that extra mile by adding a metamovie subplot concerning a Greek chorus/focus group in the desert who watch the action through binoculars and comment on it. What emerges from this collision of slasher-movie spoof and Theater of the Absurd is the most clever, original, and hilarious movie mash-up in recent memory.

Original trailer for Rubber

COMMENTS: Why does Rubber start with an extended monologue, full of examples from classic movies, explaining that the film you are about to see is “an homage to Continue reading 151. RUBBER (2010)



FEATURING: , William Fichtner, , Alexis Dziena


Still from Wrong (2012)








NOTE: Rubber has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of All Time; the official Certified Weird entry is here.

DIRECTED BY: Quentin Dupieux

FEATURING: Stephen Spinella, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser, , Robert the Tire

PLOT: A group of strangers is assembled in the desert, given binoculars, and told to watch.

Still from Rubber (2010)

Through their lenses they see a tire come to life, roll around, and develop explosive psychokinetic powers. A heavy amount of death and destruction follows.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: I think the “sentient rubber tire goes on a killing spree” premise is strange enough to consider it for the List, but the framing of the story as a metafiction involving some self-aware actors, a homicidal accountant, and frequent commentary from a famished “audience” reveals an added layer of weirdness as well as refreshing imagination.

COMMENTS: A number of flimsy wooden chairs sit haphazardly on a dirt road in a desert locale.  A cop car drives up and manages to hit everyone single one.  Police officer Lt. Chad (Spinella) pops out of the trunk of the car, takes out a glass of water, and proceeds to address the audience with ruminations on the presence of “no reason” in film.  Why is ET brown?  Why do the characters in Love Story fall in love?  Why doesn’t anyone ever go to the bathroom or wash their hands?  No reason.  Even in real life the phenomenon exists.  Why can’t we see the air all around us?  Why do some people love sausages and other people hate them?  No reason.  He explains that Rubber itself is “an homage to the no reason, that most powerful element of style.”

It’s nice to have a straightforward, bluntly in-your-face preface like that, especially when the film that follows really does its best to live up to the officer’s words. The story rolls along as aimlessly as its star tire, reeling in new characters and letting them go just as easily, and leaving a trail of bodies in its wake. There is never an attempt at explanation- how did this tire “wake up” and take on a life of its own? Just how much does it understand? Why can it makes things explode? Just who is in charge here? Everything can be chalked up to “no reason” and the audience can sit back and enjoy the ride.

Of course, not much actually happens in Rubber.  There’s only so far one can go with a silent killer tire in an isolated desert.  With pleasing special effects, Robert the tire rolls around, crushes a few bottles, mutilates a few wayward animals, and blows up the heads of whatever jerks get in his way while pursuing a pretty lady to a motel and enjoying the finer things in life, like late-night television programming.  The police step in when the bodies start to stack up, and conspire to destroy him through subterfuge.  Throughout it all, the squabbling “audience” in the desert gives their own commentary, cutting in during the requisite shower scene and other horror-movie clichés.  When the characters in the film sleep, they sleep.  It soon becomes clear that they’re trapped out there, left to the mercy of a sadistic “Accountant” (Plotnick) who takes his time feeding them.  The function of this audience is never explained (of course), but they seem to serve both as a satirical Greek chorus and a joke on the actual audience.

The concept and script begin to lose steam towards the end, but Dupieux smartly keeps his film to a trim 82 minutes, and the innovative meta-film approach, alarmingly high body count, and general irreverence ensure a fun (and weird) time is had by all. The hilarious performance by Spinella and the ridiculous ending give it an extra layer of enthusiasm.


“..an uber-cerebral spoof that is at once silly and smart, populist like a mildly trashy B-movie yet high brow like absurdist theater.”–Farihah Zaman, The Huffington Post (festival screening)