Rhinoceros Eyes - Canadian Theatrical Release, DVD Release and Review

Joy, oh joy! Aaron Woodley's Rhinoceros Eyes is finally going to be playing on Canadian Screens this fall (Thank-you Capri films for having a little vision! But did you have to be so vague?) Rhinoceros Eyes did play in limited release in NY and LA in the spring of 2004, and I was lucky enough to catch it in 2003. Wooley is the nephew of Canadian Auteur David Cronenberg, and he certainly shows in this picture that the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree.

Aaron Woodley's site indicates that a DVD is expected in the Winter of 2006. Ouch, that is a long wait for a movie that will certainly be on my DVD shelf!

Trailer: Downloadable Quicktime (16MB)

A large part of Rhinoceros Eyes, a wholly unique and original film, takes place in a prop-house that is a cross between a gigantic warehouse and a haunted dusty labyrinth. The props are the discarded remnants of thousands of plays and films of the past and at times in the film they scuttle together to take on a whole new life. There is a love for cinemas past in this film represented not only by the props, but by many of the characters: The Noirish femme fatale, the Colombo-ish detective, the three oddball doofus-types that work the front counter of the prop-shop, the Tor Johnson mask which may as well be a character, the confused hero Chep and the shy ticket taker at a local theatre. You have seen these characters before and you haven't. They all conjure up fragments of echoes of past films while simultaneously adding a quirky freshness. There is a movie-within-the-movie that plays like a cross between Cleopatra, Morocco, and the soap opera General Hospital.

At the same time, the movie is ultra-modern. It was shot in HD Digital (the same process to make the two most recent Star Wars pictures).

Rhinocerous Eyes convincingly walks the line between the disturbingly macabre, the scene with the dancing old lady with the prosthetic arm is brilliant, and farcical comedy. A bar-fight (on Halloween) between the prop-shop owners and a bunch of guys in ape costumes prompts one of the biggest laugh-out-loud moments I've had at the movies in a long time. Also, there is another movie-within-the-movie which is a surrealist porno called Betty Buncakes.

The story is a surreal fable-like love story about a young man who lives in the prop shop with not much of a grip on reality and his attempts to please a customer who asks for some of the most outlandish props. But that brief synopsis doesn't do the movie justice. There are more layers beyond this, that just do not fit well into sentences. Michael Pitt, who plays the child-like lead, Chep, has been making quite a name for himself from Dawson's Creek in the late 1990s to Hedgewick and the Angry Inch, Bertolucci's The Dreamers, Asia Argento's The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, and most recently playing Kurt Cobain in Gus Van Sant's Last Days. This very unusual performance sets the tone for the entire picture.

The small, small story has a level of intimacy that the fleshy films of Cronenberg never achieved until Spider. In many ways Woodley has woven as rich and evocative tapestry as uncle ever has and this is his only his first feature. I'm expecting great things in the future.