at the base of it, the world that’s threatened in the thing (despite computer metric-assisted paranoia) is an artificial one: a male-exclusive, experimental sentry post/outcast society that poses no particular challenge to a fallen trickster god. its world is exactly like the world of alien, a thoroughgoing, blue-collar boys club where it’s inhabitants are defined by their jobs and their toys. the juxtaposition with the fragility of  the arrangement of the outpost is immediately apparent and very convincing in how it’s conveyed to be so tenuous, despite how rugged and weathered our heroes are (or how we’re meant to take them). the fact that an act of compassion unleashes the thing amongst the americans is meant to heighten the later paranoid and reactionary stance in the same way that the monstrous birth in alien heightens that particular film’s icky yonic terror. this undermining is very present in a lot of john carpenter’s horror work, where men find specific difficulty in coming to terms with the irrational.

the thing is unmistakably a masculine nightmare, then, about the self-determined ideal. this is not an inherently masculine trait, but is unmistakably chauvinist in the way it rejects companionship and community for a stoic and blank watchfulness. consider that at this view of rugged individualism is dispatched during the aforementioned computer scenario. in it, wilford brimley’s character watches the simulated “thing” organism travel from dog, to man, to men, ultimately prefiguring a scenario in which all of humanity is assimilated in an invasion of the body snatchers style apocalypse.  however, the scenario the film concerns itself is the way the organism travels quite vividly from man-island to man-island. what’s undermined is that this coolly rational man (who soon becomes coolly irrational) doesn’t quite grasp is how the organism can so easily travel amongst them. they are, in the social sense, unicellular and competitive.

in other words, there is no genuine bonding. outside of the mortal fear of intimacy, compassionate personal relationships are completely downplayed in this world. any empathy or warmness is a trait of the “weak” men that succumb to the thing, first the dog handler, then the doctors and auxiliaries who are dispatched suddenly and brutally. this doesn’t exonerate the paranoid stance of the “hard” men like childs and mcready, rather, it hastens the inevitable. the themes concerning trust in this film aren’t so much about any reactive stance to fear because that fear was already extant before an extraterrestrial was. this is the subject of all of carpenter’s horror, the more vague and protean, the better. indeed, this is the undercurrent of all horror – especially when the thing (i.e. any and all primitive, universal fears) is external, it is explicitly internal. the thing is a social monster.

the explicit external threat is the changeable female body, the explanation for the performative alienation on the part of the men. this performance is a show for the benefit of each man’s peers; a show of prowess, alertness and also, of total impotence. this threat embodies everything outside the rational because while it can pass for lifelike, it doesn’t want to. its chosen form is goopy and undulating with a man’s face, not because of some failed metamorphosis but because of self-awareness. it is entirely unlike the parasitic spores in invasion of the body snatchers, who just want to reproduce peacefully, the thing wants to sow havoc and discord. unlike other horror animals, who may be misunderstood in their roles as predatory, the thing is entirely malicious and intelligent.

once the threat escalates, the only recourse is in the toys and the bluster; they bully each other around never realizing that the problem worsens because they deliberately estrange themselves. they are not so much confused in communication as unconcerned with persons other than themselves, so they seek personal empowerment in the symbols of dominance: dynamite, flamethrower, etc.  this failure of community is curiously what makes neil marshall’s inverse scenario the descent so good, as a woman-exclusive group (besieged by a very masculine troglodyte cannibal clan) has a breakdown not due to external forces, but hidden feelings and agendas.

the coup de grace of this film is how the third act forces the audience to realize that there was never any hope of overcoming the thing in this way. much as in night of the living dead, which hinges on the fact that the character we most identify with is actually wrong, the expected application of nerve by the hero is folly. as we see earlier, when macready’s party inspects the camp of the norwegians, the thing essentially contrived for itself a game that pit men against one another. they see their own fate and recognize it but don’t recognize anything else. this bleak joke has a punchline: the quintessence of social manhood, on top of the world and obligated to nothing but itself.

you can’t name too many films where the heroes’ big plan involves suicide by implosion. four stars.

there has been a curious vogue in horror films, an undercurrent of nastiness and cynicism that reflects a very adult view of the world. senseless violence, inexplicable misfortune, bitter fate, human depravity, revenge, selfishness, vindictiveness, venality, exploitation, sadism – these are all common themes to such films as disparate as the ruins, blindness, 28 weeks later, antichrist and the strangers. to a grown-up, there will never be anything more monstrous than the human animal. nothing will ever exceed his capacity for hatred and cruelty, except, of course, the unfathomably inhuman. in these narratives, there is hardly any room for the full range of emotion, save for a tension-breaking laugh or two.

there are exceptions, of course. there are many oppressively grim films that manage to incorporate comedic elements that amplify the horror. antichrist, for example, is bone-chilling in its bleakness but it has a talking fox and an opening scene that’s so darkly humorous that it immediately disorients the viewer who is expecting something quite serious. day of the dead is incredibly arch and yet it loses none of it’s unrelenting hopelessness.  in a extreme example, the entirety of rosemary’s baby is laden with comic irony to the point of being lighthearted.

this isn’t to suggest that hausu is some horror opus or even particularly scary at all, for that matter. it would be more accurate to say that the film is horror-themed, much in the same way that the haunted mansion at disneyland is horror-themed. serious horror fans might find themselves amused rather than unnerved by an affair that is so broadly farcical that it can’t truly be compared to a more austere take on the genre. yet there is something really inspired about the way it slightly unnerves the audience; there is no railing of rationality to grasp onto to pause the endless descent into hysteria.

this film is a vibrant amalgam of novelties, (somewhat) conventionally guided by an experienced screenwriter but somehow unladen with the fixations and neuroses of adults. hausu depicts nothing resembling reality. in many ways, thematically and aesthetically, it’s reminiscent of dario argento’s feverish suspiria, a film that is very much reflective of it’s author’s particular obsessions. in that film, a virginal young woman succumbs to a series of bizarre events, each more disconnected, nonsensical and ethereal than the last. this otherworldliness climaxes as it often does, by total destruction through implosion, fire or flood. even in its frivolities, hausu does manage to tap into something that is ostensibly horrifying; like lovecraft’s writing, the haunted videotape of ringu and atari 2600 games, people tend to react strongly to abstraction.

what makes this film so memorable is its fearless gush of imagination. literally every single scene contains some gag – one novelty after another of every kind, sight gags, puppets, effects and every kind of melies-style audiovisual trickery you can imagine. all of the girls in the film are characterized broadly so that they can be pulped in spectacularly animated ways – disappearance by futon, consumed by sinister piano and shocked by a rogue light fixture are some of the ways they go. there’s real potency and energy in these images, even though they make us howl with disbelieving laughter. nearly everything in this film tells us it’s okay to laugh, yet we still consider this a horror film.

the fun of a film like this is that it acknowledges the unalterable power the irrational has over the rational is the ultimate terror. this is the universal thralldom, at least part of the explanation why comedy is the constant companion of death, taboo, terror and fear – and not just as a coping mechanism, though that is certainly near to the heart of it. to attempt to reconcile every danger concievable, metaphysical and otherwise, reverts the individual to the fearless ignorance of imagination where the individual contains or controls the whole world.  the alterable world of a child’s imagination still recognizes the fear of death; rubbery ghouls and cartoon skeletons, killer tomatoes and stay puft marshmallow men are the precursor to later, more serious memento mori.  way before the sullenness of adolescence sets in, we are in on the cosmic joke. as we grow older, we don’t find that quite as funny.

ideally, humor doesn’t rationalize or flatten the effect of horror, it amplifies it. the adult lens for this kid’s tale introduces irony, something commonly found to be both hilarious and terrifying. the idea that some unseen force has it’s own malevolent sense of humor, like some diabolical pattern recognition hardwired into human beings, is tough to shake. rather than some boringly literal mad axeman, what heightens the fear in hausu, such as it is, is the ridiculous scenario of being stalked by some cruel and hilarious fate. these stakes, ridiculous though they may be, resist comparison to cornball scooby-doo scenarios that render funhouse horror toothless and tepid. the originality of hausu is that it never strays too far from the carnival, the commercial and the comedy sketch but somehow never dilutes its unnerving quality.

scooby-doo, incidentally, is what we want kids to see. hausu is what kids see.

three and a half stars.

a great many of these italian murder mysteries, nonsensical and nonlinear as they may be, commonly feature antagonists that express themselves through their crimes. they fixate on details, they prolong suffering, they reach climax by committing ritualistic murder. in giallo auteur dario argento’s words: “nothing is more appealing than the death of a beautiful woman.” the nearest thing in america to the giallo is the slasher film, both prominently concerned with annihilating young women in infinitely depraved ways. there have even been literate homages to the genre, notably hitchcock’s lurid frenzy and the powerful, chilling henry: portrait of a serial killer. the common criticism of these genres is that they occupy a space just below pornography, reveling not just in violence, but a kind of violent repudiation of sexuality where debased psychopaths become moral avengers. in these films, some bystander is inexorably drawn into the world of the offender, ostensibly investigating these shocking crimes but, really, losing his or her identity to the obsessions of another. it is no wonder, then, that many of these films end with the protagonist being revealed as complicit in or responsible for these crimes. few genres come with such a damning autocritique of its audience.

william friedkin has the puzzling reputation of an embattled director who has had his career nearly ended by a couple of legitimately excellent films. the first of these is sorcerer, a sweat-drenched remake of wages of fear, was a massive flop that earn well deserved acclaim until years after it slunk out of theatres. watching it now, it is thoroughly modern, much like the french connection and the exorcist, so unlike the bloated blockbusters of the era. it’s difficult to imagine critics ignoring how tense, well acted and lean this film is, but tellingly, it’s earned it’s current reputation as an equal to other overlooked thrillers like the killing and manhunter. cruising is the second of these films, coming under heavy fire on both ends – from the nascent gay rights movement for depicting nastier elements in gay nightlife subcultures and from social conservatives for depicting any aspect of homosexual life whatsoever. al pacino, for a time, infamously refused to acknowledge the film for reasons unknown. it also failed critically and commercially, for years considered an unsavory novelty.

much like sorcerer, however, cruising is an unqualified success to modern eyes, no need for a “cult” modifier. this is a film of all rough edges. as the audience, we follow the narrative as uneasily as pacino’s alternate universe frank serpico. if the fringes of the narrative weren’t so entertaining, it might be easy to see how some uninterested viewer could knock this film for being meandering and confusing. most films don’t have the germs and the cripples on the soundtrack. most films don’t have a fisting scene as a minor detail in a tableaux of depravity. most films don’t have al pacino taking amyl nitrate and jerking around on the dancefloor like he’s being riddled with bullets. most films don’t have this. the case to be made for this movie is inevitably concerned with the small details, the side characters, the narrative ellipses. consider the cameo by powers boothe as a leatherwear shop owner, explaining to the naive detective the finer points of the hanky code. consider the scenes in the park – like some dark fantasmagoria new york as seen in the warriors or the wiz, at home in either movie, really, with a night-time hangout in the park revealing a balmy open-air market for anonymous sex.

this doubles as a completely valid criticism for this piece, for any genre movie with distasteful subject matter (murder, not homosexuality). it can be argued that it reduces gay life to sexual fetish and fixation, or that it makes being homosexual synonymous with such deprivations as participation in prostitution, reckless and promiscuous sex or sadomasochism. it’s easy to take the narrow view and view cruising as a condemnation, a square’s journey into some sexual orient that leaves him warped forever. it could be said that steve burns “goes native”, observing, then mimicing, then becoming – the confusion in the narrative is a consequence of shedding away the standard thriller plot. when burns masterfully ensnares the killer, it almost happens too quickly, as though the resolution of the murder mystery is a subplot. indeed, during the final confrontation with the killer, the emphasis is placed on how easily burns preys on his suspect and how well he has ingratiated himself into the lifestyle. the arrest itself is a gag, a double entendre – a reversal of burns’ s&m awakening ends with an incomplete sexual encounter, an intrusion of the duty on the desire.

this also makes the ending somewhat unambiguous. burns’ relationship with his gadfly neighbor is platonic, but still bothersome because it directly interrogates his sexual identity. riffing on the generic “deep cover” trope of the protagonist struggling with his assumed identity, there’s no mistake that the neighbor is murdered directly following the arrest of the killer. there is no question whatsoever who the second killer is. what is actually ambiguous is what personal need it satisfies for steve burns. is it to expunge any traces of lingering doubt; literally, a violent reassertion of his heterosexuality? is it to exorcise this thoroughly unpleasant experience? it certainly seems that way as he stares at himself in the mirror, shaving and scrubbing himself clean of his alter ego? steve burns might the old steve burns or a new man. steve burns plus something. steve burns who has reconciled himself with a piece of his personality he might not have never discovered on his own. it could the ultimate aim of his specific fantasy or, more likely, the release of a frustrated tension that had been building for duration of the film. it’s important to note that steve isn’t repulsed by what he sees at all, what he finds repugnant is his own temptation. hell of a metaphor for the time it was released.

four stars. only a handful of films in the genre are as unique in tone.

in the private files of j. edgar hoover, broderick crawford’s titanic performance is transformative. his characterization of the legendary fbi director is so nuanced that it elevates a pretty cheap and cheeky film to something resembling a great film, rather than pop-culture runoff. in sobibor, et al., yehuda lerner brings a movie star’s easygoing coolness to his recounting of a true story that makes it more thrilling than any heist film, actually allowing the audience to feel exhilarated despite the director’s best efforts to mute any emotion other than solemnity. timothy carey’s performance in this film is so batshit that it completely overshadows every other aspect of this film, for better or for worse.

taken in its entirety, this film is pure psychic strain, unfiltered blasphemy from a guy who was in tune with his own eccentricities rather than in thrall to them. world’s greatest sinner is remarkable because there’s never quite a wink to the audience – obviously there are several moments where carey’s face is seen in extreme closeup, practically mugging, but it bears no resemblance to the snideness you’d associate with the overused device of fourth wall breaking. instead, like many of the better movies of this kind, the hausu and demons 2 of this world, you have a sort of playful guilelessness and a real feeling like the filmmakers want you to laugh with them. for all it’s supposed sacrilege, after all, it’s ultimately a tale about a man going to god – by way of ken keseyesque absurdism.

by now, the youtube compilation of nicholas cage losing his mind in vampire’s kiss has been well circulated and well discussed, a flame-fanning tribute to cage’s legendary nuttiness onscreen and off. not to be prejorative towards the always watchable cage, but there’s something very contrived and self-effacing about this kind of performance. it’s as though cage imagines himself a scene chewing (rather than fly-chewing) renfield, employing his night-school method acting chops to inhabit the character of a total maniac. his performance is so unnatural and lunatic that it has to have been staged that way, a calculated craziness for a built-in cult appeal. much better directors have corralled this peculiar urge of cage and structured much better films around his jittery, awkward tics, see: lynch in wild at heart, woo in face/off and the coens in raising arizona.

that kind of over-enunciation of the stanislauski method is brilliant, in a way, especially as it relates to an older movie like world’s greatest sinner. cage, undoubtedly familiar with carey’s twisted character acting in kubrick’s the killing, paths of glory and a score of 70′s tv appearances uses method to go totally theatrical, not so much chewing the scenery as wolfing it down. carey uses his unique theatricality to stare film’s stodgy, stagey acting down through hooded eyes, gritting his lines through his teeth sardonically. unlike cage, he used method to be more like himself, probably because he couldn’t help it. the character of “god” hilliard for all intents and purposes is timothy carey, the ultimate proof of this being the final shot at the very end of the credits of carey’s hands offering up the film blessedly, being writer/editor/producer/architect/subject of it all.

the scattershot editing and pacing of the piece is suitably chaotic as well. given the erratic production schedule of the film, it’s expected that the sequences vary in tone and quality, resulting in something hardly seamless. what is surprising, however, is that the editing gives a distinct impression of being deliberately funny. there are plenty of moments, usually featuring jump cuts, of edits to carey’s seething putdowns, canoodling with teenage girls, stealing communion wafers and drinking milk that are nothing if not purposefully made. the effect is uncanny, something that isn’t usually used to describe comedy but fits well enough. so much of what we identify as comedy is very regimented, either a reference to, a subversion of or an anticipation of a routine, a set-up and a punchline. so much of what makes this film hysterical is that there often is no punchline, there really isn’t any recognizable reality to subvert. on a whim, a nobody insurance salesman invents punk rock, calls himself god and has the free world in his grasp.

this is a film that eschews most things literal, as good films tend to do. in god hillard’s cavelike throneroom/command center, there is no discernable entrance or exit. in reality, it’s likely that this takes place in some black draped room in carey’s or a friend’s home, a pisspoor set on a shoestring budget. in the hyperreality of film, more important anyway in carey’s estimation, this room is a private universe. god hillard is superego unleashed, dictating impossible demands and achieving them because, well, why not? the filmmaker has no obligation to slavishly recreate something resembling a consensus reality. carey’s world is as idiomatic as he is.

it couldn’t be more fitting that a cult movie has an apocalyptic sense of humor. three and eight-ninths stars, because nobody’s perfect.

as a debut film for director jeff malmberg, this must have seemed like stumbling upon the sentinelese. the subject, mark hogancamp, is a lonely artist who was rendered disabled by a homophobic attack by 5 drunken youths at a bar in kingston, ny. the story, to put it simply, is about hogancamp regaining mastery of his own body and relearning how to become sensate. unable to afford psychological therapy, unable to sit idle, hogancamp decides to create his own therapy by constructing a 1/6th scale town, populated by lifelike 1/6th scale dolls to act out exciting scale-world fantasies with his rugged alterego “hogie”. what follows is quite complicated.

hogancamp’s peculiar hobby is no mere indulgence, for him, this simulacra is as part of his world as his part time job at the local bar is. while totally sincere about the playacting, he’s no idiot – he seems quite aware of the fact that this town he’s created is his inner world. as a man struggling to reclaim a sense of who he once was, he tellingly does not use his fantasy primarily as an escape from life. when he literalizes this fantasy with painstakingly detailed figures, he acknowledges that he must negotiate difficulties with his disability openly and honestly.  in other words, hogancamp’s fantasy isn’t self-deluding, although ostensibly it is wish-fulfillment.

as an unconventional therapy, this does seem quite precarious and indulgent. a viewer could easily get the impression from hogancamp that his brain damage affects his judgement to the point of being unable to tell reality from the contrived melodrama of marwencol. his lonliness, not just in the sense of being physically isolated but being truly alone in his profoundly troubling disability exacerbates this feeling because part of what makes mark so remarkable is that the way he expresses himself is so nakedly optimistic. it’s easy to get the impression that many in this situation would be deeply traumatized to the point of being rendered immobile, yet hogancamp seems bursting at the seams to express himself in some way. if, as he puts it, those men “kicked all the memories out of [his] head”, it would seem that the trauma of  a coma and the subsequent brain damage couldn’t remove his personality.

hogancamp himself is something of an enigma, as well. we learn little by little throughout the film that he is a recovering alcoholic, an expressive and tortured artist and a heels and hose crossdresser, among other things. his exuberance when describing his marwencol scenarios is predictably childlike to some extent, but also somehow grim and determined. even before the attack, it’s not clear whether or not he thought himself an artist but what is clear is that self-expression seems to be compulsive. the existence of his obsessive and habitual “drunk journals” from his former life suggest this kind of expressive necessity as though being inebriated further compelled it. he makes art to make art that can have a holistic effect on his well-being, which is why he’s so utterly bemused by the fact that he has an audience and the respect of his contemporaries. he perceives his audience is even tighter than the small circle of friends and acquaintances he keeps (who he honors with their own doll alter-egos), i.e. himself.

this hermetic interiority inevitably invites comparison to other “outsider art” icons such as darger and gosch. his mannerisms, like chain smoking and heels fetish, suggest david lynch and the late charles crumb. there’s an uneasy play between his cognitive difficulties and small town sensibilities that makes him seem very out of place in a sophisticated setting like a manhattan art gallery, almost like his authenticity and outsider status is being exploited for urbanites.  this is suggested by the film but never totally explored, probably because malmberg does intend in many ways to present things from hogancamp’s perspective. after all, as fascinating as the creator is, his art actually is the star of the show. his photography is completely arresting and naturalistic – as the editor of the arts magazine that promoted his work put it, “without a trace of irony”. for lack of manual dexterity and mental clarity, there is a surprising easiness to the work. the lifelike dolls don’t appear to be posing in the photographs at all; any random shot feels candid and energetic even as doll joints jut out incongruously. rigid faces appear on the verge of speaking. the overall effect of this photography gives the viewer the impression of a grecian frieze or comic book paneling where every photograph suggests another and so on to imply a narrative communicated entirely with visuals.

in the second act of the film, hogie is ambushed and tortured by a roving pack of ss (sound familiar?), he is nursed back to health by his bevy of  townswomen. in parallel, mark hogancamp is describing his attempts to come to terms with the attack, going so far as to revisit the spot where the attack took place. malmberg depicts these important moments leading to hogancamp’s decision to attend his gallery showing because even if they didn’t take place contemporaneously, malmberg feels it’s important we get to experience mark’s triumph over his trauma. in a way, this does feel like a hokey and obvious way to realize the relationship between the fiction of hogie and the reality of hogancamp, except for the fact that hogancamp himself undercuts the director with his own oddly affecting ending that recalls matheson’s the incredible shrinking man.

three and a half stars.

viewing this film at the ifc center in the west village was more or less ideal. the intimate screening rooms in particular make for an experience evocative of a gentrified porno theatre, which presumably would be perfectly apropos for enter the void. overall, the venue completely contributes to the audiovisual effect and greatly enhances the psychedelia. this movie that promises the thrills of shock, horror and vulgarity that you might expect from a seedy little theatre, but much like the venue itself, it’s buffed to a sheen, calculatedly cozy and completely safe. this doesn’t damn enter the void so much as hold it back, for a film that threatens so often to explode into synaesthesia, it never really does.  the hallucinatory aesthetic then comes across as a false front, candy to satiate the audience while the story turns ever toward Meaning.

the capital-m meaning is Melodrama of a decidedly freudian bent, using the six bardo of tibetan buddhism as a framing device and narrative framework. since the use of freudian psychoanalysis and tibetan thanatology is so facile and obvious, it’s helpful to view it as exploratory rather than critical. just the fact alone that the tibetan book of the dead recurs as a motif is suggestive of noe’s intent to use that text as a decoder ring for the ultimate mystery of the film. this is a particular kind of bone-headed literal-mindedness that makes films like inception maddeningly expository and ultimately laughable. this is far from suggesting that obscurity or opacity are inherently more meaningful traits, but that the tendency to over-explain is abuses the wonderful gift of figuration, either with visuals or language. purely as a visual spectacle, enter the void lacks a dimension of abstraction that truly makes it feel “out of body”.

instead it stubbornly commits to a series of recurring shots that are less disorienting and more familiarizing, which makes the experience seem disappointingly to-the-letter. opting for a third person videogame style couched camera at critical plot points is another one of these cinematic tropes that seems novel and becomes wearying as the film goes on. when the protagonist, oscar, enters the liminal life-death state (hypothesized by a mentor character to be “the ultimate high”) that experience is considerably less hallucinogenic than a drug trip, which is nonsensical. oscar’s experience is hellish to be sure, but not transcendentally hellish, it’s a very mundane hell spiced up with throbbing bass and neon outlines. the ghostly, spiraling, fincher-style overhead shots are similarly used to ill effect; often turning the sensation of a wandering spirit to a mere fly on the wall, ferrying back and forth across shinjuku town as though purgatory had its own personal chauffeur.

there are powerful moments, though, mostly using the use of sound and strobe lighting. the scene that takes place during the fifth bardo in the love hotel is jaw-dropping and perhaps noe’s most masterful use of his own aesthetic to realize the thogal visions. noe depicts this phase with an energy and relish only hinted at earlier, as an erotic tableaux entirely bathed in pulsing fluorescence. here the voyeurism of the protagonists intermediate state is at its sensory zenith as he ultimately experiences consummation of his freudian longing for his sister/mother figure. this tantric redemption is made possible by the filmmaker deftly depicting the unusual bond between the two siblings in flashbacks that connect sex with death and reconciliation of the two with incestuous longing. these elements are conveyed especially well by the sister character, linda, played in the present as spacey and carnal and in the past as terrifyingly hysterical. the characterization of linda admittedly mitigates a great deal of the straightforwardness of this film, being just unusual enough to complement the trippiness of the experience.

ultimately this is frustrating because from an acclaimed non-studio director, you expect a certain amount of abstruseness – not just to pat the audience on the head for being perceptive but also to delve beyond what needs exacting explanation. a sensory experience doesn’t beggar exposition. bogging itself down with unambiguous particulars is how the film threatens to run aground. without the need to explain every little plot movement, the incongruous interplay between a psychotropic buddhist death-cycle and requiem for a dream-style melodramatic morality play could be highly entertaining. without hanging glittering signs on every motif and theme, the visuals could fulfill the promise of freeing the film from such a limiting and vacuous narrative. noe has a ways to go, even as a gussied-up exploitation film director.

the most stimulating thing in the film is the opening credits. not impotent, but not potent, either. two and a half stars.

lanzmann’s sobibor, 14 october 1943, 4 p.m. is a tremendous film with one glaring, maddening authorial decision that alters the character and trajectory of a truly exciting story. unfit for the solemnity of shoah, this film is mostly an extended interview with yehuda lerner, a soviet jew who survived a remarkable 8 escapes from nazi captivity before being sent to sobibor. once again, we have a film so totally carried by the charisma of its lead protagonist, in this case, a bonafide israeli national hero that led the only successful uprising at a nazi concentration camp. lerner is a captivating presence that recalls a golden age hollywood star rather than a war hero, he’s suave, easygoing and well coiffed. he remembers his own story as an intersection of incredible fortune and foolish bravery and recounts it animatedly. lerner’s story of resistance is so absolutely remarkable that he can still scarcely believe the details. it’s a story that’s so compelling that it needs no adornment whatsoever other than lerner’s own lively gesticulating.

and yet, where lanzmann gets himself into trouble is that his ponderous cinematic techniques bungle lerner’s storytelling. nevermind the opening sequences where we are reintroduced to lanzmann’s trains, mausoleums and placards by way of extended static shots; the mournful treatment of the subject matter reconnects us to the aesthetic of shoah. in that film, the languages are so multivarious that the use of subtitles and a translator contributes to this aesthetic of a pan-european suffering under the third reich. by using translation (read: repetition), lanzmann approaches something ritualistic and lyrical – that repetition is texturing.  the subjects speak for themselves in yiddish, czech, polish, etc. and the translator speaks for them to us, in french and english subtitles. much in the same way that the train motif provides the narrative impetus for shoah, the stylized presentation of recapitulating stories provides the character of the film. in sobibor, it’s senseless.

sobibor is a film with one subject and one interview. the profusion of tongues was well suited to the many different accounts of the previous film, but here, it’s a dire misstep. there is no reason whatsoever that lerner’s testimony needed to be translated from czech to french, then subtitled in english in real time. about halfway through the interview, you sense the subjects obvious restlessness – not only in the sense that the translation is exhausting but also that lerner is so eager to tell his story. instead of keeping us in the story and letting the interviewee guide the film (which he is more than capable of doing), lanzmann makes the puzzling decision not to omit the interaction with the french translator. even for a french audience, this defies sense because there is no scenario in which a serious filmgoer would object to subtitles. even at 92 minutes, this seems to unnecessarily pad the film and stampedes a legitimately exciting story.

of course, the question to ask is whether or not lanzmann intended this frustration, to liken it to his decision to create sobibor as a companion film is to make the assumption that as a serious filmmaker, he wants to deny a certain kind of engagement from the audience. that is to say, is lanzmann trying to frame lerner’s story in the most boring possible way to lend gravitas? it seems pretty clear that the pacing of the film is a conscious decision which would make it at least plausible that the director means for the audience to ruminate on the larger context rather than experience the story in a sensationalistic way. in that case, why present the story outside of the context of shoah? it’s difficult to deny how thrilling lerner’s story is, yet here we are, watching an incongruously dull film that is trying its damndest to turn an exceptionally stimulating story into a Boring Old Person story. to that, i can only say: in no way does an anomalous story of resistance against persecution belittle the unfathomable suffering of the victims of the holocaust.

two stars for a great star, a unique perspective and completely baffling execution.

if there’s one basic truism i can take away from the criticism on this film after the fact, it’s that the manichean take on evil is reductive and insufficient. it rewards the uncritical, venerates the unthinking, it justifies the existence of bone-evil but can never explain or understand it. from the film itself, manicheanism is useless, simplistic junk, the multiplicity of perspective puts lie to it. a lot of the reaction to the film is seemingly moralistic, that the film violates a taboo by not only humanizing hitler, but sympathizing with him and even exonerating him. by the filmmakers admission, this is to indict the body politic that lifted him up. by casting hitler as the first man created by film, the man of the 20th century, suddenly, the bystander is complicit. in this film, the volk, past, present and future, is on trial for surrendering history and culture to mesmerists and astrologists.

the carnivalesque of the 4 acts renders the nazi period as a grand farce, each skit and soliloquy laden with  grotesque irony. the wagnerian soundtrack soars nostalgically amidst tours of nazi party fineries and neo-classical architecture. often in the foreground, the runes and totems of the party alternate with mannequins dressed as the common deutschlander, the businessman, the ss agent, the man on the street. these sequences are all conversations with the dead, among the dead. the symbolism of the dead discoursing freely was a powerful statement in the context of a then-divided germany, it suggests that the weight of guilt alone cannot exorcise the past. the past is the present; it must be negotiated and reconciled. if one narrative dominates, history just becomes that narrative and nothing else.

one of syberberg’s many arguments is that the emptiness of commercialism was as detestable as any of the reich’s excesses. this is where he is seen as an apologist for the regime, where the nazi era united the german character, the resultant identity crisis postwar was a fugue. what makes this perspective so unsavory is that we are so used to the history of the german state being reported from without, rather than within. syberberg’s invocation of the liberal/jewish narrative is interpreted as perjorative because his perspective lies with the perpetrator-by-proxy, i.e. the german people who democratically elected the nazi party into power. far from arguing for the return of nationalism and racial supremacy, his target is the banal consumerism that characterized western germany. his moral objection is that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater, a repugnant ideology with an arguably utopian substance was discarded for substanceless, dehumanizing materialism. this is where the nazi past connects to the debased present, where ideas are prostituted and devalued for commerce.

this is the irony of the juxtaposition of the officialized multimedia narrative of the party. in seizing the past for themselves, the party and its leaders defile culture, appropriating artworks and music in a wager to make philosophy actionable. the cruel trick is that this poisonous ideology does appropriately honor the conquerors and tyrants of the past. the neo-classicalism is grandiose, yes, but not a gross misappropriation. in honoring themselves, we remember the conquerors and tyrants, any ploy to abolish history is done so with the knowledge that memory and legacy can be manipulated. in the same way, the choosing of a rune and attendant symbols to abstract the political is both forward looking and backward looking in the way the sinister nazi mythology intended. their commercial offspring – puma, volkswagen and the like, are all too aware of the power of branding to self-mythologize, to make oneself part of a cultural pantheon with striking design and effective sloganeering. in this way, the nazi legacy is unending. far from flattering to the mea culpas and handwashings of the postwar world, syberberg resists the obvious, which would be to disconnect this movement from any continuum and treat it as though it were some aberration. a central assertion in this film is that history is a conspiracy, a “film of memories” in which confused, disparate threads are pulled together to form a narrative, not so much recorded or remembered but cast as in a play or film.

is that the central controversy of this film? that audiences cannot view this film with the expectation that it will congratulate them for finding the ideology repugnant or laughable? after all, only the figure of hitler is caricatured (and even then, he is still referred to as a fraternite). the ideology is presented as intended; a grandiose message with an equally strident soundtrack. the equivocation can be attacked blindly, in light of the fact that syberberg sets his film as against opportunistic and arrogant moralism that hypocritically exploits the suffering of the third reich’s victims for a horrorshow while condemning the perpetrators. in the spacey wanderings that permeate the film, is syberberg proposing some sort of holistic reconciliation with dead monsters? can this film be taken as an accidental apologia for supremacists in its zeal to condemn reactionary critics? it’s difficult to say, given the ambiguity of the affection for the idealized past of Germany with its ubermensch peasant, forever toiling for love of his fellows. it’s hard to determine whether this nostalgia is genuine – there are the wistful episodes at the eagle’s nest that gaily recount the mundane details of hitler’s schmoozing and late naps, but there is also a skit where hitler, the soul of germany, is played as peter lorre’s killer in m, consumed by the pathological desire to despoil. syberberg posits that righteousness didn’t silence hitler and reason didn’t defeat him. he is a phantom that haunts the present. to tell a simple narrative about that history encircles it and divorces it from the present.

yet the film avows itself of a simple reactionary stance by it’s sheer breadth. it covers so many interpretations that it resists the attempt to paint it as polemical. what syberberg has done is much more substantial than simplistic sermonizing, dynamiting an easy narrative and in its place, erecting an uneasy narrative that refuses the easy contentment of cursing the condemned. this is a work of art that transcends its politics. 4 stars.

watch it here

In terms of special effects, The Gene Generation phones it in whenever possible, particularly when it comes to scenery. For example, here’s their vision of some sort of Viking air-ship cruising past some battlements toward what resembles a veiny mesa from hell:

If this was 1995, I’d be absolutely enthralled! But it’s not. They can’t even make water look decent. WATER! Probably the most well-established of all commonly-used CG textures; one which is available in multiple free forms in almost every production platform available to filmmakers today. There’s grudging respect to be given to an animator who decides to lone-wolf it on this point and render something in the manner of an old-school animated gif. At best, the effects rise to the Blade Runner PC game. For the nostalgic, all becomes forgivable.

Things don’t improve with each new character: an old Obi Wan steampunk wizard looking guy (Robert David Hall) with a tracheostomy who communicates like those creepy videos in Myst. A burn victim go-go dancer at a Mad-Max themed industrial rave bar. The gambling-addicted brother of the main character (sexy Dragon Lady assassin) with his emo bangs-flop and comic relief bff. With every movement, leather creaks. It creates a sort of fart-y effect which adds levity to scenes which should otherwise possess a sense of gravitas.

Bread, wilted lettuces and… a big fat veiny throbber?

It’s unclear what, if any direction the actors were given. Perhaps they were given the freedom to dictate their characters’ mannerisms and diction and this was overwhelming, particularly to younger actors without years of experience on TV dramas to fall back on. More likely, the horrendous dialog (which jerks you through interpersonal interactions more unbelievable than the entire world they take place in) rendered improvement via delivery impossible. Mostly you just pray for everyone to stop talking so that Bai Ling can kick someone with her giant goth moon boots, or walk around fidgeting with her ridiculous future-weapons.

The Sauron of the movie appears sporadically and it’s unclear who the villain is for quite some time. To complicate matters, all of the “good guys” are unlikeable, stupid, selfish and impossible to feel even compassion for. Thus whenever this dude appears with his wacky-genes sister:

Long-awaited Addams Family / Pirates of the Caribbean crossover pix

You’re just praying his weird incest hippie ass Senator Palpatines the shit out of everyone. I wouldn’t get in the dude’s van but I’d politely clap if he devastated some punks.

In another “Meanwhile…” a contextless and sweatpants-clad hacker rustles about in his nerdcave, working on something we’re not meant to comprehend (a transponder.. to fix the genes.. but he doesn’t know they have THE CHIP! none of this is explained). I feel a certain kinship with him as he labors in front of his Victorian laptop.

cool screensaver bro

]]> http://www.pube.us/2010/09/gene-generation/feed/ 0 http://www.pube.us/2010/09/gene-generation/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Pubes/~3/2hcQikd_rxo/ http://www.pube.us/2010/09/portrait-of-the-young-artist-as-a-dipshit/#comments Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:39:26 +0000 woodoo http://www.pube.us/?p=39 whoever made reefer madness obviously had never smoked weed in his life. he ended up being mostly right, anyway.

insaniac is a good teachable lesson, in the sense that it shows us just how much we take for granted in even low budget films. this movie illustrates definitively why you should never put the cart before the horse. the lesson you need to take away from this movie, even if you’re someone who’s only ever picked up a camera to film a kitten yawning, is that your overblown vanity project needs to have the barest modicum of effort put into it. that driving urge is the difference between fulfilling your need for self-expression while looking like an egomaniac and just looking like an incompetent egomaniac.

there’s a scene in this film where the lead character, autumn, sits bolt upright from a dead sleep and immediately drinks out of a liquor bottle. that’s the kind of film insaniac is. everything in it is uncommitted as the nonsensical title and that’s what i can’t stand about cheaply made films. money is hardly ever the problem; if you’ve got an idea, you can’t quarter-ass it. this is a movie made by someone with a future in medical billing. this is a movie made by a person who dropped out of community college to become a dog groomer.

i’m totally okay with a movie having zero budget. admittedly, it’s completely intellectually dishonest of me to compare the writer/producer/director of this shithouse with the late eric fournier or david lynch, two guys who are genuinely just wellsprings of ideas. however, the entire shaye st. john saga is at least as long as two features and was made on negative budget. the huge difference between this film and those youtube “triggers” is an element of craft; given that both this film and the shaye shorts are beholden to the commonly held notion of dream logic, you might as well discuss lynch as the exemplar.

INLAND EMPIRE is as cheap looking as a feature film could possibly be, but you’re not aware of it at all because it clearly doesn’t matter to david lynch what kind of budget he has to work with. his vision is so singular that you readily allow yourself to invest in the technical imperfection and stilted, inconsistent acting in his films.  you never find yourself talking about the technical details of his films, except to mention how he sees the camera as a vehicle; a conveyance. his concern as a director is disorienting and unnerving you, not impressing you.

i’m okay with people casting themselves and their dowdy friends as characters you’re meant to invest in. i didn’t sit through His Master’s Voice for nothing, in fact, what i most enjoyed about it was the amateurish scenery chewing from drama students using the stanislausky method to inhabit characters slightly different from their actual selves. hmv is unquestionably wretched in a way only a student made serial drama about college students getting superpowers can be. the whole affair is a misguided melange of nerd universe influences, a little power rangers here, a little teary eyed k-drama there, a pinch of insipid anime cliches, a dash of LARP. it’s defiantly unoriginal and banal in an oddly celebratory way.

watching invokes a familiar feeling, a feeling which anyone who questions his own aptitude at any artistic endeavor feels. it’s an embarassing twinge of recognition when he sees something that is so self-evidently terrible, a real life depiction of a creative nightmare. i do, however, admire the exuberance on display in hmv – the kind of overweening earnestness you get from someone trying to make something from nothing. there’s something to be said for believing your own bullshit to serve as motivation to create. the fact that the subject matter is just so facile and uninteresting is what kicks the crutch from under hmv. to find out your striving is less than promethean is devastating.

i’m even okay with irritating, elliptical in-jokes. one of my favorite shows as a middle schooler was a local access show called egg tv, in many ways the essence of bizarre anti-humor that formed my comedic sensibility. egg tv has zero production values. it’s shot entirely in the woods, in alleys, in the various living rooms and dens of the circle of friends that make the show.  the wigs are atrocious, the sound mix is terrible, nobody can act, and worst of all, 9 times out of 10, they don’t even bother out editing out themselves laughing at their own terrible jokes. much like the musical acts featured on the show from time to time, you can tell none of it was rehearsed ahead of time. and yet, if it were produced, directed or written any better, it would be practically unwatchable. as it is, it’s perfect.

insaniac possesses none of these qualities. it isn’t funny, it isn’t charming and it assumes you give a crap about any of the stoned idiots wandering in and out of the film. the most entertaining thing about it is that the movie was obviously shot in some sort of abandoned building as nearly every scene is shot in unfurnished rooms. even the scene set in a “psychiatrist’s office” looks like it’s in a squat. a plastic ficus is what passes for set dressing. a broom closet passes for an apartment. actually, i take that back, a squat would actually be better because it would appear to be lived in. everything in this film just looks like an unrented room in a suburban office campus.

that’s it, really, there is literally nothing else to latch onto in this film. you’d think people who get high all the time could come up with dream sequences that weren’t lame and obvious. i can’t even praise the filmmakers gumption for making a film because it’s so stillborn. the only thing they followed through on was releasing the damn thing. if you have a camera and no ideas, sell the camera. no stars.