PINK COFFINS

 "you should take the time to look at it. it tells a story."
"about what?"
"about me."

As goodbuddy Bryan Enk continues to bring his body of work from the workmanlike port of Vimeo to the open seas (and much larger audience) of the YouTubes, one of his key works remains at the former. A dark suburban fantasy, Pink Coffins occupies a key place in Bryan's oeuvre, and it's not an easy work to unpack. That it exists in two versions - the initial 52-minute cut created in 1995 and a two-hour, four episode version released three years later - makes analysis more difficult, and the world is extended further by the two-decades-later companion piece The Passion of Paul Ross (which I reviewed years ago, right here.) But the very existence (and the experience) of these multiple manifestations serve as a lovely extension of the parallel lives, bodies, and worlds explored in the work itself. 

Yet for all of its otherworldly flourishes it remains a deeply personal work for Bryan. He told me as I was revisiting the full work that the original version (hereafter referred to as PC52, to make things easier on Your Writer) was his favorite of his own films. I recalled a preference for the four-episode cut (as it was the first of Bryan's films I'd ever seen, at the start of our friendship) but on revisiting I found that PC52 was the neighborhood movie I remembered PCI-IV to be. And PCI-IV had become.....quite something else.

So. Pink Coffins unfolds over a couple of nights (Halloween, then mid-December) in a mythically-charged Bowling Green, Ohio. PC52 patiently takes us from scene to scene as we meet the duos populating this liminal zone: Paul and Doug Ross, a pair of ne'er-do-well brothers bent on achieving notoriety by unearthing interred coffins and painting them pink; Anthony, the troubled young man across the street from them, attempting to enjoy his evening with Veronica, whom he met at a bar; and Sam, a just-as-troubled psychic next door to them, who vainly attempts to persuade roommate Todd that Veronica isn't who/what she seems and that Anthony's in real danger.

I suggested that Pink Coffins was an act of skin-shedding - still employing the tools Bryan used as an undergrad filmmaker yet looking ahead to a larger future. Not a huge analytical leap; the first words of the Se7en-esque closing credits are GOOD NIGHT BGSU, a farewell to Bowling Green State University. Bryan's theatre work at BGSU informs much of Pink Coffins: we move linearly from place to place, each couple's story unfolding patiently like scenes in a play as each pair of actors bounce comfortably off one another. In the absence of a plot there's a disquieting mood that takes hold from the very start and only escalates across each scene. The consumer-grade video gives the thing a texture that serves it well.

And if young Bryan's use of some decidedly UNlicensed tunes feels like the retention of freedoms allowed an undergrad filmmaker, it helps attain a larger-budget grandeur. This isn't just a young punk putting his favorite tunes into his movie; Bryan uses the songs to shape the mood, the edit, the progression of the film at hand. The film's placid prologue is set to Type O Negative's "Paranoid", and with a patience very rarely taught to undergrads accumulates a strange but undeniable emotional heft as Paul Ross steels himself to confess his crimes to the authorities. And the song continues to play as the deep emotional release promised in this scene is jauntily passed by, a pair of uninterested but clearly aware cops breezing past penitent Paul, a what-the-fuck moment that registers comedy underneath the heavy song, even as it bestows some menace upon the ambiguity of the moment. The songs in the rest of the movie are never just there - they often feel diegetic, yet jolt us when they stop, more than once, at moments of realization or mystery throughout the rest of the movie.

Enk's earliest works plundered his favorite movies with joyous abandon, but the movie posters that line the characters' walls exist as signifiers of much more than the taste of the actors and their director - one senses that the faces of Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche are taking in more of the events unfolding before them than we ever could. There are some overt, even fannish, references to some of young Enk's favorite filmmakers. but other moments find Enk applying what he learned from his favorite filmmakers and giving their gestures his own twist - even the credits that arguably spoof those of Fincher's Se7en become even more unsettled as Enk introduces then corrects spelling errors within them.

Something given voice within each of the couples of the film is our legacy, an ongoing preoccupation with what we will leave behind, what mark we'll leave upon the world. The characters share this preoccupation with their creator, on the loose in the world outside university, attempting to shape his own legacy with what he hopes will be some kind of thesis. The shape as well as the mood of Pink Coffins is informed by Bryan's senior year study of existentialism; the film is in part an illustration of Kierkegaard's Three Stages of Life's Way, with each couple repping The Religious Life, The Ethical Life, and the Aesthetic Life. (My own such studies happened a few years prior and one time zone over from Bryan's. My B- means this aspect went by me but it's not a bad skeleton upon which to flesh out a story exploring these impulses.)

PC52, then, is an act of taking stock. An expansion of the acting ensemble. A summation of our man's work, so far, and a lighting out for further territories, with a thought to what the future might bring. It ends with one of our couples accepting that maybe they weren't meant to be remembered but embracing the freedom of being nothing, nobodies. An undergrad existentialist realization, but a cheerful one. The final shot is of these characters' makeshift grave markers, a letting go and embrace of the unknown...

....that switches to a negative, the pink turning a vibrant purple.

We can look at that last gesture as an underscore of the shift in perspective. Revisiting it I tend to look on it as the door opening to the world through which PC52's more unearthly characters entered the film, a portal to other places. A door that the resolution of PC52 didn't close. Hell, maybe it's the door through which Enk returned to Bowling Green for PCI-IV...

A thundercrack kicks off each episode, then a prologue before a rather rocking opening theme by the band Paper Plate, with different credits each episode. Enk's favorite filmmakers won't be absent from this version (nor will all of the unlicensed tunes of previous), but this opening leaves the Se7en pastiche in the dust. Even if he can't escape the orbit of Bowling Green or these characters who inhabit it, they are addressed now by quite a different artist.

The story's expanded. (The logistical mystery behind the expansion I prefer to leave unsolved - did everyone keep their costumes for two years? had young Enk really cut out that much dialogue?) Episode 1 (Faith Healer) largely revisits the first half hour of PC52 - Paul's non-arrest, Anthony and Veronica, Sam and Todd. The expansion begins in earnest in Episode 2 (The Doppelganger Effect) and the Brothers Ross, the impostors in the trunk, and the stranger next door take focus. Jason Hugh Smith's Intruder becomes a much more overt presence of evil, and the deepening of his character allows much of Pink Coffins' story to gel; Todd's violent outburst in PC52 and PCep1 can easily be written off to just the psychic vibes given off by Smith here, which fester beautifully in this episode and grow stronger across the remaining episodes. Episode Three (Creeping Through the Macabre) mixes things up further with new characters, including a wildly unpleasant elder Ross brother (a caustic turn by Brendan Cain) and a Mystery Girl (Elizabeth Cashman), escalating matters on multiple fronts. And under the watchful, unbelieving eyes of a pair of increasingly checked-out cops, Episode Four (Bury Me Standing) builds to a suitable, even powerful climax, including a brief but startlingly well-executed fight scene ("it took a few tries," Bryan told me of a particularly remarkable piece of business) and a final reunion that offers a powerful emotional payoff that puts a button on the whole thing.

If this remains the work of a youthful storyteller (the female characters would deepen in Bryan's subsequent works), it retains that fuck-it-let's-do-it energy even as it becomes more complex and (let's say it) mature before our eyes. More professional, too, as Bryan brings a number of new collaborators in who all make their imprint, from David Waldman (a film/theatre collaborator from NYC, whose color timing strengthens Bryan's visual touches) to special effects artists Lino Stavole and Doug Acosti (genuinely startling work, effectively deployed) to Yuri Lowenthal as an otherworldly DJ whose late-night news reports are uncannily focused on the otherworldly matters at hand. And Bryan begins his long association with Paper Plate here - what the film loses with the unlicensed tunes (largely) gone is more than made up for by the fruits of a director/composer relationship. The band's songs haunt the radio in this revised Bowling Green, and their instrumental works lend tension and drive to the movie's extended suspense sequences. Their pulse is particularly effective in heightening the tension throughout Episode 2.

It was a pleasure to step back into the liminal zone of my friend's Bowling Green, and renewing the acquaintance with the people who populate it and the actors who played them (Steve Bishop and Joe Hunsaker as the Brothers Ross, Andy Hunsaker as Todd, and John Klump giving some lived-in paranoia as Sam). I'm not sure what Bryan's plans are for this, one of his finer, most personal early works. As Ohio has recently become a hotbed of indie horror activity I'm hoping it will take its place among the off-kilter opuses set and shot there, and continue to extend Bryan's presence in that community. I hope more people will experience Pink Coffins for the first time, and that they find it as thrilling, funny, and moving as I do,

BENEATH THE SEA IT SINGS

Fresh from the release of Pentagram Girl (you have watched it, yes?), goodbuddy Bryan Enk has returned to the realm of the cinematic monologue with Beneath the Sea It Sings. And I don't know if it's the Long Island City shoot's proximity to water but the maritime mood is strong in this one (stronger even than in Bryan's previous sea jaunt, The Final Voyage of the Good Ship Demeter). Stories like this seem to hit Bryan every so often, and even his earlier monologue films dodged what is often a stagebound feeling by deploying an effective cinematic counterpoint to keep them engaging, and engrossing. But of course in the end such a story's strength rests on the shoulders of its teller. In Beneath the Sea it Sings, performer Julia Kolinski delivers. 

From the start the energy in her expressive eyes gets our attention, and as she obsessively relates the story that she alone has lived to tell, so does the filmmaking accelerate to meet her energy, shifting at the perfect moment to a semi-seasick handheld camera, catching the distortion of reality through digital means. The production design shifts from realistically capturing the sounds around her (footsteps on the deck above, the sea sounds muffled outside the hull) to sliding inside her crystalline perceptions to capture her madness, to the point that we feel mired in the inevitability of her fate. And though the music by Nick Olman comes on too strong too early- one longs to hear the song inside the sea rendered on a hurdy-gurdy, say, or a concertina - it too weaves its own spell as Kolinski's passion and horror rise to match its level, and that song stays in our heads after the curtain falls.

Bryan has unleashed a mess of his movies on YouTube, and I'm glad to see them finding new audiences there. This one will be live there at the end of January, and for the newcomer it's a good place to start with his work, and at a good time: a seabound story for late on a winter night, provoking a dreamy chill.

THE SHOOTIST

 "How can I hate John Wayne upholding [Barry] Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when he sweeps Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?"

Godard's paradox is as timely as ever as we contest the value of older works, made by people out of fashion whose notions and ideals are out-of-sync with our own. Looking over Wayne's history, his beliefs, his staunch (though not necessarily rabid) conservatism, his support of HUAC, I'm at best disappointed, clinging to a notion (supported by his history) that he'd have despised Trump even as I lament his support for Reagan. None of this, however, feels like anything I have to square with anything else, and I can simply say I love John Wayne in The Shootist.

Some say they can't honestly evaluate the film as it is so intertwined with details of Wayne's own life: like his character, Books, Wayne had contended with serious and painful cancer; though not seriously ill during filming, Books would be Wayne's last role. But I embrace it all, and accept that Wayne had been an actor long enough to know how to use what he had experienced to make his character more true. That perhaps knowing this might be his last film he got several old friends and colleagues cast in the picture (just about everybody in this movie gets dialogue with Wayne - it feels almost entirely composed of two-hander scenes). That after multiple late-career works that contrasted Wayne with younger actors to represent a conflict between establishment elders and activist youth, he engages in an actual conversation with that younger generation (fleetly represented here by Ron Howard).

The movie stands tall as the tombstone of an icon, and indeed The End of the Western As We Know It, and it serves movingly in these capacities. But it opens wide as a story of simple mortality, of a man in his last days long after his time has ended, occupied not just with dying on his own terms but simply living in the world with the time he's got. Imparting something resembling a legacy to those who might wish to carry it forward, enjoying every encounter in the simple company of old friends and new. Riding that new-fangled train they have, wishing a pretty girl well (he can't even imagine the women's movement coming up in this new century, but his good wishes to her are genuine), making plans for his own end. And when that end finally comes he can see the future moving forward without him, and he knowingly, lovingly nods. May we all be so embraced in our final days, and may we all, whatever our pasts, be open to serve as vessels for this kind of life, and love.

THE KILLER (2023)

 It's an artfully executed, engaging, and expensive trifle. It isn't the ubiquitous brand names that do it, necessarily - the rampant brands only call attention to how difficult it is for an op like the Killer to remain unknown and off the radar. (And there's just, JUST, a little subversive giddyness at seeing the Amazon buying process taking up this much screenspace in a Netflix product.) That kind of anonymity costs, and the movie is as artful in showing us this as everything else. But the non-showy yet conspicuous outlay of cash becomes as obvious in Netflix's case as it is the Killer's - most obviously, it doesn't repeat the mistake of The Gray Man and actually takes us to the locations of each chapter.  

The French comics upon which this movie is based come to the States in handsome, hardcover volumes, and such lavish presentation is at odds with the pulp roots of this kind of storytelling. A similar and strong disconnect is felt as we mentally tally up the expenditures on this insular, noirish tale of process and procedure. (I had a conversation with a filmmaker friend a while back, who lamented that his new film would only not look like a student film if he'd had six times the budget. This conversation popped into my mind as I clocked the number of caterers listed during The Killer's closing credits - the food budget alone would likely have allowed my friend to commission a Reznor/Ross score for the work in question.

These issues aside (and they are largely my issues) the thing moves from start to finish, kicking off with a title sequence that's as quick a read as the title page of a comic. The movie builds nicely around Fassbender's almost non-performance as we clock the stark differences between what he thinks and what he does, observing with interest as he steadily breaks his own rules while something like humanity begins to surface. Fincher's style remains archly grand, and he seems to be leavening his own arsenal with a couple of tricks lifted from Soderbergh (who has himself lifted much from Fincher). For all its outlay on travel budgets each chapter is as tightly inscribed and actor-driven as the extended scenes of a Tarantino film; Fassbinder's suppressed laugh at the parable/best joke of 2023 levelled at him by Tilda Swinton is a crystalline moment, one of many scattered across the movie. But The Killer never feels as messy as a noir about a violent, meticulous but increasingly desperate man should. Netflix may have given Fincher the largest toybox with which he has ever played, and as fun as it is watching him cut loose, and watching this thing move, but we're never really on for the ride.

WILL-O'-THE-WISP

 "...it gives us wood, and so many wonders..."

Joao Pedro Rodrigues has a lot on his mind here, and just comes out and says it. Were he a younger filmmaker one might see this 67-minute opus as a kind of mood or aesthetic board, as it feels like a mess of things he wished (no, no, needed) to address.  The symmetry of the palace dining room scenes and the classical tableau re-enacted by lusty firemen suggest Greenaway formalism; these touches are often so delirious yet composed that Rodrigues perhaps has been hit with an Andersonian whimsy and is running like hell with it (maybe through a screening of Titane from which he grabs a healthy shot of firehouse eroticism). There's even a bit of Godard in Prince Alfredo's naive but sincere appropriate of Greta Thunberg's speech in articulating his mission to his parents; he doesn't (yet) have the words, but he feels the urgency, and he's desperate enough to save the dying planet that he's willing to forsake his royalty and become a fireman.

That directness may be key to our salvation, as laid out here - André Cabral's fireman Alfonso has plenty of reasons to distrust the motives of the young prince, and lays them out clear; but Alfredo recognizes the chip on Alfonso's shoulder, acknowledging the trauma that put it there (and even his own complicity in that trauma). But their attraction and love is undeniable against all this. The film parallels this in macro: even as it directly addresses environmental devastation and fascism (hell, it's the only new movie that has people dying of COVID) it acknowledges the need for pleasure and transcendence, which it more than delivers, through the delight of its forms, the warmth of its music, some truly offbeat comedy, more peen than you can shake a stick at, and an absolutely sensational dance sequence after the midpoint. (Bummed as I was to have missed a couple of screenings of this, I was happy to be able to rewind and watch this sequence two more times after the end.)

Days later, and I'm thinking its brevity in relation to its themes is more an asset than a limitation. It's never messy in placing so much in its runtime, and doesn't pretend to any easy answers to the issues it presents, though generous enough to suggest that its pleasures remain within our reach. It's one of the year's best (and greatest).

Unnamed Footage Festival 6(66) - five days!

My friends are back (and this is therefore not a totally objective post) with a new iteration of the Unnamed Footage Festival, a celebration of found footage horror, faux documentaries, narrative films that tell their stories through in-world cameras, and other fascinating narrative/documentary hybrids. 

I noted previously that "more and more movies are being made that confront issues of fantasy and reality in increasingly hybrid and bizarre ways, and UFF continues to cheerfully mutate to embrace them." During a conversation between screenings last year, film programmer Joel Shepard noted that this makes the festival a difficult thing for which to give a simple, elevator pitch, and that's what makes UFF so interesting. And though the designation for this sixth year (UFF 666) is a signal that it is leaning more on the found footage horror sub-genre it was initially largely formed to celebrate, there's still notable and considerable variety in the approaches taken by the filmmakers to make this a more than worthwhile stop for horror fanatics and adventurous filmgoers.

As a preview, I'll go through the five days of UFF666, noting my targets along the way. (Times TBA as of this writing.)

The whole thing kicks off at the Alamo Drafthouse (2550 Mission Street) on Tuesday, March 21, with a prelude screening, if you will, of a 35mm print of Matt Reeves' Cloverfield. One of the more widely-released and seen found footage horror films (and maybe a bit undervalued, thanks to the backlash against its odd viral marketing strategy), the film tells the story of some friends in New York City frantically trying to survive the rampage of a mysterious monster wreaking havoc on the city. It's everything you want in a found footage horror movie, leavened nicely with giant monster carnage, at least one demolished national landmark, and a keenly felt and played romantic subplot. 

UFF666PROPER opens Thursday, March 23 at Artists Television Access (992 Valencia Street). The fest's first feature is Mean Spirited, the first in a string of movies this year in which horrible social media influencers encounter maybe-a-bit-disproportionately-horrible fates. And it's being chased with the second edition of Don't Stop Recording: "This Is Really Happening" Power Hour, a wild and mind-bending collection of the most violent and bizarre moments from favorite and freaky found footage features. You'll want a beer for that one; UFF will provide.

UFF5 offered the theatrical premiere of Robbie Banfitch's far-reaching experimental horror film The Outwaters, and the film went on to become one of 2022's cult favorites. Banfitch cited UFF every chance he got for taking a chance with his film, and on Friday, March 24 he returns to UFF and the Balboa Theatre (3630 Balboa Street), bringing with him a pair of short Outwaters prequels (Card Zero and File VL-624) and his new world premiere, Tinsman Road, which promises a quieter yet engrossing mystery framed as raw miniDV documentary footage.

UFF then jumps to the recently-revamped (and quite lovely) 4 Star Theatre (2200 Clement Street) for a full weekend of screenings March 24 and 25. The final weekend is always a plethora of sensations, and it's well worth parking oneself and just letting the movies happen to one. Saturday/24 you have a pair of short film programs; the Shakespeare-in-Screenlife opus R#J; the politically-charged Lebanese haunted house story What Is Buried Must Remain. Sunday starts strong with the Portrait of Jason-modeled The Gulf of Silence (a feature length interview with fictional UFOlogist Dr. Laura Gale); the day's offerings include 2011 Australian indie sensation The Tunnel (and a new-ish making-of feature, The Tunnel: The Other Side of Darkness) and the Chilean black metal forest horror Invoking Yell.

New festival sponsor Good Vibrations will be on hand to give away a bag of carefully selected toys after Saturday's late show Safe Word, a kinked-up and delightful-looking roman porno from UFF favorite Koji Shiraishi. Similarly spicy is Sunday's marathon-viewing of the Onion's darkly-hilarious, dead-on reality TV spoof Sex House.  And the whole festival ends triumphantly with Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva; the first film in this presumably-ongoing series was one of the most convincing and engrossing faux-docs this writer has ever seen, and director Dutch Marich returns to the Nevada desert to track more mysterious disappearances there, and document the emotional fallout back home.

Marich is but one of many filmmakers who will be present to discuss their work with you. Though I've highlighted the screenings that caught my interest I may well have skipped over what'll turn out to be your favorite UFF offering - the complete schedule, including start times and details on the short films accompanying each screening, can be found at the Unnamed Footage Festival's website. See you in the dark.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME

-So this thing came out when I was ten, and I remember two things about its release: first, the poster declaring that it contained "SIX OF THE MOST BIZARRE MURDERS YOU WILL EVER SEE." Second, a little blurb on the ads that said that due to the bizarre nature of the ending of the movie no one would be seated during the last fifteen minutes of the film. Now this was toward the end of the period when audience members would just show up whenever for a movie, then stick thru the next screening until they were caught up to the point at which they'd entered. But in my fevered brain I imagined screenings of this movie being cleared with fifteen minutes to go, with an ending so terrifying that it would only play to empty houses. A potent thing in the imagination of a young cinephile.

-It wound up on cable a year or two later, and Dad and I watched it. I finally saw six of the most bizarre murders I would ever see, and was seated in the family room as that bizarre and unwatchable ending played out. And at the end I thought, well, that....wow, that's crazy.

-About twenty years after that I'm working at an arts center on the other coast, and I get it in mind to program a small retrospective of films by J. Lee Thompson (likely a tribute series, as he passed away around that time). The initial thought was his Oscar-nominated The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear, and maybe a couple of the Bronson collaborations from the 80s. The series didn't come together, but over the course of researching Thompson's career I saw that he'd directed Happy Birthday to Me. And I thought, well, that....wow, that's crazy.

-Rewatching the movie now it falls in that interesting '80/'81 place where the slasher is taking off but isn't quite a franchise-ready model. So this shares the more overt murder mystery aspect of many of the more interesting movies in the subgenre at the time, and even though it reveals the killer about 2/3 through it still retains a trick or two up its sleeve. There's interesting and subtle social commentary as a bloody swath is cut among an elite clique of a hoity-toity prep school. And yes, it is startlingly violent, though I believe I've seen at least six other murders in movies that I'd consider more bizarre than those captured here. And none of the much-ballyhooed murders are anywhere near as genuinely disturbing as a protracted surgical sequence during one of the movie's numerous flashbacks.

But if you're looking for assurances that this thing was in fact helmed by a guy who'd been nominated for an Oscar, they're there. Thompson clearly studied/was aware of mystery and suspense filmmaking, including the nascent subgenre in whose ghetto he was working, and attempts to grasp the style of his contemporaries. (The black gloves worn by the killer suggested he'd given giallo a once-over as well.) His composer Bo Harwood had learned his craft alongside Cassavetes, but this isn't his first horror movie, either, and he delivers a fully-orchestrated and shaded score. And Thompson's old school enough to unleash castle thunder during the storm that rages outside the climactic birthday party.