Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (28 page)

Premise:
Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale) is spurned by co-workers after he’s involved in a workplace accident that results in a man losing an arm. Reznik blames the incident on the new guy—an employee that nobody else seems to have seen.
Why it’s crazy:
Trevor barely eats and hasn’t slept for two years. Watch him descend into madness in this ultimate example of method acting. Bale (who portrayed Batman the following year) nearly starved himself to lose more than 60 pounds for the role.

NORTHFORK
(2003) Drama

Premise:
Set in 1955, this visually stunning film follows the few remaining residents of Northfork, Montana—a town about to be submerged by a new dam. A priest (Nick Nolte) stays behind to take care of a sick orphan, Irwin (Duel Farnes).

Why it’s crazy:
Irwin believes he’s a lost angel who has fallen to Earth and had his wings amputated by humans. Other angels visit him. Look for Anthony Edwards as an eccentric angel named Happy, and Daryl Hannah as another named Flower Hercules. Kent Turner of
Film-Forward.com
says, “This droll, surrealistic fantasy is like a gentler David Lynch hallucination.”

There is a type of bird called a
butwink
.

ERASERHEAD
(1977) Horror

Premise:
The plot—largely left up to interpretation—revolves around a couple’s challenges raising a horrifically deformed baby.
Why it’s crazy:
Disturbing imagery abounds in director David Lynch’s first feature film. Critics have called this cult classic both “baffling” and “a masterpiece.”

HEAD
(1968) Musical

Premise:
After their successful TV show ended, the Monkees (Peter Tork, Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, and Michael Nesmith) released this take on politics, hippies, and pop culture.
Why it’s crazy:
Hyped by the studio as “the most extraordinary adventure, western, comedy, love story, mystery, drama, musical, documentary satire ever made,” the film has a plot that’s almost impossible to follow. Just enjoy the strange vignettes, bizarre visuals, and great music.
Head
was cowritten and produced by Jack Nicholson.

FREDDY GOT FINGERED
(2001) Comedy

Premise:
Starring, cowritten, and directed by comedian Tom Green, this loosely plotted film stars Green as Gordy, an unemployed cartoonist who still lives at home and tries to frame his father (Rip Torn) by saying he…did something to Gordy’s younger brother, Freddy.

Why it’s crazy:
As bizarre as it is offensive, the film had to be edited down to avoid an NC-17 rating—and it’s hard to imagine what Green cut out. Roger Ebert gave it a rare “zero stars” review but later said, “The thing is, I still remember
Freddy Got Fingered
. I refer to it sometimes as a milestone. And for all its sins, it was at least an ambitious movie, a go-for-broke attempt to accomplish something.”

MEMENTO
(2000) Mystery

Premise:
Directed by Christopher Nolan,
Memento
stars Guy Pearce as Leonard, a man who suffers from
anterograde amnesia
:

When brain-damaged patients give bizarre answers to questions, they are said to be
confabulating
.

Every few hours, he loses the memory of everything that has happened to him since an unknown man attacked him and killed his wife a few years earlier. Leonard’s only clues to finding the killer are the notes and tattoos he leaves on his own body.
Why it’s crazy:
The film begins at the end, and all of the scenes take place in reverse order. As eFilm critic Scott Weinberg wrote, “It’s a joyously twisted Rubik’s Cube of a movie.”

AFTER HOURS
(1985) Comedy

Premise:
Martin Scorsese’s film about one night in New York City follows Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) as he embarks on a quest to find a woman he met in a restaurant (Rosanna Arquette).
Why it’s crazy:
“Darkly comedic and delightfully manic,” wrote
Entertainment Today’s
Brent Simon, “This is a fresh, funny look at one man’s downward mental and emotional slide into an evening of unmitigated SoHo hell.”

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
(2008) Drama

Premise:
A playwright named Caden (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) writes a play about his life and, through the course of the film, creates a city-size set in a Manhattan warehouse.
Why it’s crazy:
This movie within a play within a movie within the lead character’s mind(?) is difficult to explain. Most critics who praised it agreed that one viewing isn’t enough to truly appreciate screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s (
Being John Malkovich
) directorial debut. It gets especially crazy when actors are brought in to play Caden and his friends and family; the actors soon take over the lives of the people they are playing…or something like that. (Uncle John really needs to watch it again.)

MOVIE-STAR CONFESSION

“It was always very strange when I was young and would meet someone who genuinely seemed to be afraid of me. They couldn’t separate me from the monster I became in a movie. You wouldn’t believe how often people ask me to make my head spin around.”

—Linda Blair, star of
The Exorcist

Celeb phobia: Cameron Diaz is grossed out by doorknobs. She won’t touch them with her bare hands
.

THE TOURIST OF DEATH

Here’s a recipe for an Internet phenomenon: Begin with a major disaster, create an improbable image that cuts to the core of the disaster, and then distribute the image to a stunned and gullible public
.

I
NBOX HORROR
Were you one of the millions of people who were e-mailed this photograph in the weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001? A young man wearing a black ski coat and knit cap is standing on the observation deck of the World Trade Center with Manhattan in the background. Behind him, a jet airliner is flying straight for the building, just seconds away from crashing into the floors below. The date stamp on the bottom right corner: “9-11-01.”

By telling two conflicting stories—the blissfully ignorant tourist, and the hijacked plane that was about to take his life—the image perfectly captured the sense of security and complacency that Americans felt before the terrorists shattered it and “changed everything.” The caption on the photo drove home the point even more:

    This picture was from a camera found in the wreckage of the WTC, developed by the FBI for evidence and released on the net today. The guy still has no name and is missing. Makes you see things from a very different position. Please share this and find any way you can to help Americans not to be victims in the future of such cowardly attacks.

WAIT A SECOND

The photo was convincing enough at first…until people took a closer look at it. Why was the tourist wearing a coat and hat when the attack took place on a warm summer morning? Why was he on the observation deck a half-hour before it opened? Why was the plane in the photo coming from the north, when it actually approached from the south? Oh, and why was it the
wrong kind of plane
? But those inconsistencies didn’t slow it down. According to columnist J. Scott Wilson: “In one day, I received no less than 150 copies of it from various readers, friends, and acquaintances. Despite the numerous impossibilities present in the photo, folks just seemed to accept it at face value.”

YouTube streams as much data in three months as the world’s radios and televisions stream in a year
.

But not everyone. Many wanted to know: Who was this guy? Who manipulated the photo? And why?

But before any answers were found, the image took on a life of its own all over the Internet. Several Web sites sprang up, such as
TouristOfDeath.com
and
TheTouristGuy.com
, featuring shots of “Waldo” (as he came to be known) showing up in other photos of historic disasters. There he was, posing in front of the
Hindenburg
as it went down in flames! And then in Tokyo, while Godzilla laid waste to the city! And there he was back on the World Trade Center, but now, instead of a plane, he’s about to be done in by the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from
Ghostbusters!

WHODUNIT?

All the hype and spin-offs only added to the mystery of who this man in the photo really was. Over the next few weeks, commentators and pundits alike blamed everyone from bored students at MIT, to a “true-blooded American” attempting to stir up patriotism, to Osama Bin Laden sympathizers who wanted to gloat. And then, in early November, a 41-year-old Brazilian businessman named José Roberto Penteado sent an e-mail to
Wired News
: “I believe that some friends planted my face onto that body.” He said he’d never even been to New York and couldn’t explain why someone would do it, but the guy in the photo looked just like him.

Penteado became an instant celebrity. He appeared on several Brazilian talk shows and was featured in news stories all over the world. People approached him on the street and asked for his autograph, and Volkswagen’s Brazilian subsidiary offered to buy the rights to the image from him and put it in a series of TV commercials. Suddenly, Penteado stood to profit…for doing absolutely nothing at all.

There was one problem, though: Although he resembled the Tourist of Death, why didn’t he have the original photo that his head was lifted from? And why was his jaw wider than the Tourist of Death’s? And, when people really scrutinized it, Penteado’s face appeared to have a different shape altogether.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world in Hungary, a group of friends knew for certain that Penteado was a fake, because they knew who the
real
fake was.

Strip aerobics, punk aerobics, and antigravity yoga are all fitness fads
.

EXPOSED

Back in November 1997, a 21-year-old man named Peter Guzli from Budapest, Hungary, had taken a vacation to New York City. While sightseeing, his buddy snapped a few shots of him on top of the WTC. Nearly four years later, shortly after the attacks occurred, Guzli found himself drawn to that picture folder. On a lark, he searched online and found an image of a plane (which was actually sitting on a tarmac in Houston, Texas, when the photo was taken) and then used Photoshop to cut the plane out of the picture and superimpose it over the background of his vacation shot. He added the fake time stamp and sent it to a few friends as a joke…never expecting that one of them would send it to
his
friends, who then sent it to
their
friends, and so on, and so on.

The more famous his doctored image became, the less Guzli wanted anything to do with it. He knew that a lot of shell-shocked Americans would take offense at his attempt at dark humor. But then, when Penteado’s fame began to spread, Guzli’s friends urged him to come forward and claim the money for the VW commercial himself. Guzli refused, so his friends decided to do it for him. Two months after the picture first went viral, images with and without the plane were posted onto a Hungarian news site. From there, the mainstream press got hold of the pictures, and the Tourist of Death finally had a name.