Here are the weirdest movie moments of 2019. The past twelve months have been a pretty spectacular one for cinema, with box office records being broken right and left and acclaimed films pushing boundaries in exciting new ways. Whether you were a comic book movie devotee, a lover of foreign language films, or just in need of a sturdy adult drama, there was plenty to keep you sated in 2019.
Amid the highlights, there were some truly bonkers movie moments. Think of the scenes that made you do a double-take or the trailers that sent the entire internet into a frenzy of confusion. Even in major blockbusters, there were plenty of points where familiar stories and themes took wildly unexpected turns.
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Sometimes, weird is good, and then there are times where you can’t help but think about what on earth the studio was thinking when they committed to such decisions. To celebrate the best of the bizarre, here are the absolute strangest moments from 2019's movies.
Everything in Serenity
The year kicked off with a movie so inexplicably bonkers that critics encouraged people to go see it blind just to experience the chaos for themselves. Sadly for Aviron Pictures, the so-bad-it's-good reviews did nothing to bolster the box office of Serenity, which barely scraped past $14 million on a $25 million budget. Rest assured, however, because this film is guaranteed to be a midnight movie madness favorite for years to come. Serenity opens with Matthew McConaughey playing a fishing boat captain obsessed with catching a giant yellowfin tuna named Justice. His ex-wife (played by Anne Hathaway) appears and offers him $10 million to kill her new abusive husband.
So far, it's classic film noir in terms of its story, and then all of a sudden it goes off the rails. It is soon revealed that Dill is a character in a video game designed by his real-life son as a means to cope with his father's death in Iraq and his mother's violent marriage. It's easily the twist of the year, one that M. Night Shyamalan could only have dreamed of. The movie itself is genuinely entertaining, albeit not in the way the film-makers probably wanted. If nothing else, Serenity was a wholly unique experience that deserves your attention after a few beers.
The Sex Box in High Life
Iconic French director Claire Denis made her English-language with High Life, a bleak science-fiction drama that dealt with weighty issues regarding penitence, consent, and whether or not humanity deserves to live. A deeply pensive and often deeply frustrating film, High Life was a welcome reminder of what sci-fi on film could be outside of the more bombastic franchise fare. It's also a deeply sleazy film, and the moment that most exemplifies that is the F**k Box. This all-black device exists to encourage the prisoners on board the ship to masturbate so that the maniacal scientist Dr. Dibs can conduct her reproductive experiments. In the scene where we see Dibs (played by Juliette Binoche) use the box, sex has never seemed bleaker or more clinical, driving home High Life's themes of separating sex from humanity. It makes sense in context but when you first watch it, you're simply bowled over by the strangeness of watching beloved Oscar-winning actress Juliette Binoche get herself off on a giant black dildo.
Death by Art in Velvet Buzzsaw
Dan Gilroy's satirical horror Velvet Buzzsaw flew under the radar after dropping on Netflix at the beginning of February this year, but there was a lot to appreciate in this balls-to-the-wall spectacle of art and death. An ensemble of art-world specialists and hangers-on become obsessed with the cache of paintings discovered in the house of a dead man named Vetril Dease. As the market goes into a frenzy over this newly discovered master, it slowly becomes clear that Dease's legacy is far more sinister than mere paintings, and soon people start dying through particularly unique means. Toni Collette is killed by losing her arm in a hole in a spherical sculpture. Jake Gyllenhaal gets his neck snapped by a robot hobo. Zawe Ashton's body becomes consumed by melting paintings until she is absorbed into the walls. Rene Russo's death comes courtesy of her own tattoo. It's not a brilliant movie but you should watch Velvet Buzzsaw just for artistic death.
Let’s Get Ready For Dumbo!
Disney movies don’t tend to go weird so much these days, especially when it comes to their exceedingly expensive live-action remakes of animated classics. These are films designed to not stray far, if at all, from their source material, all in the name of making a safe bet that’s guaranteed to make bank at the box office. Of the three remakes Disney released to theaters in 2019, Dumbo was the only real failure, both critically and financially, having only grossed around $353 million, barely doubling its budget. Tim Burton’s reimagining tried to update the story for modern audiences, adding a misguided subplot involving a Walt Disney-esque entertainment mogul and themes of the downsides of selling out to massive conglomerates that couldn’t help but feel ironic given which company had just purchased Fox for $71 billion.
It made sense that Burton and Disney would want to change some of Dumbo’s more problematic elements, especially the jive-talking crows, but their substitute was utterly ridiculous. Instead of getting the crows’ song, audiences got Michael Buffer, the MC best known for his work on boxing and wrestling matches, to cry out, "Let's get ready for Dumbo!" The moment was an obvious play on his trademarked catchphrase "Let's get ready to rumble" (so yes, Disney did have to pay to use that line) that made no damn sense and only proved to be a distraction from the rest of the film. It almost made you miss the crows.
Everything in The Fanatic
Did you know that Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit fame directed a film this year and that it starred John Travolta? That in and of itself is enough to warrant The Fanatic’s place here, but it does get even stranger. Travolta plays Moose, an autistic super-fan of action star Hunter Dunbar, played by Devon Sawa. When Dunbar rejects him after he asks for an autograph, Moose breaks into his house and ties him up. Everything in The Fanatic is a series of choices that must have made sense during production but come across as bafflingly misguided in the finished product. Travolta is certainly committed in his performance but his tics and clichés as an autistic man border on offensive. It’s a deeply hateful movie that doesn’t seem to understand how basic human emotions work. The Fanatic is the kind of movie you expect to see as a parody of bad movies on The Onion and it surely won’t be long before it appears on an episode of the podcast How Did This Get Made? It also holds the distinct honor of being the first Travolta movie to get zero stars from RogerEbert.com, which is no mean feat given the actor’s presence in Battlefield Earth and Gotti.
The Joker Dances. A Lot
When Todd Phillips and Warner Bros. announced that they planned to release a Joker origin story with a hard-R rating that would appeal more to Oscar voters than the typical DC fan, there were certain things that we could easily expect would be part of the movie: Lots of violence, a bleaker tone, a story more rooted in realism. However, it seems safe to say that few of us could have predicted just how much of Joker’s two-hour running time is taken up with dancing. For a lot of Joker, Joaquin Phoenix’s award-winning performance is defined by moments of strange physicality that morph into interpretive dance, set to Hildur Guðnadóttir's thrilling cello-focused score. It’s a testament to Phoenix’s skills that such moments soar rather than fall flat (a dance critic for The New York Times even complimented his work.) Still, there are certain things that you just don’t expect in comic book movies, even those that pride themselves on “not being like other comic book movies”, and the Joker dancing is one of them.
Meryl’s Brownface in The Laundromat
Of the two Netflix movies director Steven Soderbergh released in 2019, The Laundromat was supposed to be the one with big Oscar hopes. It quickly floundered once critics actually saw it, with the satirical dramedy’s attempt to do for the Panama Papers scandal what The Big Short did for the financial market collapse failing hard. The Laundromat tried to combine vaguely surreal irreverence with hard-hitting economic truths, but that only lead to baffling scenes such as the moment where Meryl Streep’s character disguises herself as a Panamanian woman. Wearing a large fake nose with dark hair and big sunglasses, as well as a distinctly dark tint to her skin, Streep looks like a racist caricature of a Central American woman, complete with a laughably bad attempt at a Panamanian accent. At best, the moment is a misguided attempt to add to the movie’s heightened tone. At worst, it’s hugely offensive and startlingly out-of-date for a 2019 movie. It’s probably for the best that this film sank without a trace.
Robert Pattinson’s French Accent in The King
David Michod’s take on Shakespeare’s Henry plays, The King has its moments of ingenuity and appeal, but overall it’s a rather lifeless affair that doesn’t capture the political or charismatic force of the real-life or Shakespearean re-imagining of these historical figures. There is one bright spot, however, in the form of Robert Pattinson playing the Dauphin. Here is a deliberately ridiculous character, a spoiled fop of a human being whose mania would be laughable if he weren’t so dangerous, and Pattinson clearly had a ball playing him. Nothing could have prepared viewers for Pattinson's French accent, which is somewhere between Inspector Clouseau and the chef from The Little Mermaid. It’s as over-the-top as you can imagine and almost discombobulating to hear, given how deeply self-serious so much of The King is. It makes you hope he brings those accent chops to The Batman.
Mermaid Sex in The Lighthouse
As evidenced by the previous entries in this list, Robert Pattinson may have had the weirdest year in cinema. How do you top all the weird sex stuff in High Life and that hysterical French accent in The King? You do The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers’s staggering follow-up to The Witch. Overall, The Lighthouse is a much stranger and more hallucinogenic effort than The Witch, with Eggers blending together Herman Melville with Greek mythology, a touch of Lovecraft, and a whole lot of farting. Willem Dafoe’s butt-trumpeting is a particular delight, but in terms of sheer oddness, the crowning moment of The Lighthouse has to go to Pattinson getting it on with a sexy mermaid. In a moment that may or may not be a dream, a deeply pent-up Pattinson masturbates while thinking of a beached mermaid found on the desolate island he is stuck on with Dafoe. He notices that the mermaid conveniently has a very large frontal vagina, like a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, and the pair get it on.
Cats. Just… Cats
Most people haven’t seen Cats yet, so a comprehensive critical understanding of the movie cannot be given yet, but from the moment this project was announced, there was no way it wouldn’t be one of 2019's weirdest movies. The very concept of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber deciding to turn a collection of T.S. Eliot poems into a dance-oriented musical was odd enough in 1981, long before it became one of the most popular West End and Broadway shows of all time. Adapting that show into a movie was always going to elicit a series of questions from audiences, and the trailers alone sent the internet into a frenzy. Nobody could decide which part was strangest: Was it the “digital fur technology”, the strange body proportions of these cat-people, the grab-bag cast of major stars that included James Corden and Taylor Swift, or the endless questions over the scale of this world, which made the cats seem as if they were either six inches or six meters tall. Say what you want about Cats – and the internet definitely did – but it certainly doesn’t look like any other movie from 2019, for better or worse.