quarante et un minutes pour le 3 decembre

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appear on parade
appear on parade

Going on nine months under shelter-in-place, finding occasion today to celebrate 90 years of a filmmaker who has changed how we view cinema, how we view the world, how we view the world through cinema, how we view cinema through the world.

Stuck in semi-isolation from the world, noting firmly that it is NOT in accord with my desires, my mind jumps haphazardly from one thing to another. The isolation feels huge to me, but I have no illusions that my own perceptions are the world. My problems are tiny compared to the hundreds of thousands in my country alone who have died, and the families left mourning in their wake, and those who have recovered forever physically changed. Even as a new administration waits in the wings, their imminent arrival heralded by optimism and delight that finally there will be functional adults in charge, my anger remains at the administration that for the sake of raw power has allowed so many to be ground beneath the greed and stupidity of a homicidal septuagenerian toddler they allowed to take charge.

"And now there's Nazis again," laments a new favorite artist in a routine captured last year, through the same screen through which I take in news, entertainment, socializing. How sadly timely, then, the first episode of Histoire(s) Du Cinema, which posits (among many, many other things) that the explosion of World War II in 1941 was reality's revenge on cinema. How random and ugly the hate raging so strongly in the world that such forces are given such free reign to diminish our progress, to shit so wetly on our world, to undermine our imaginations, to deny the reality of the epidemic taking so many lives and livelihoods.

Forgetting about extermination is part of extermination itself.

The venues of pulp escapism are no help. Comic books are mired in their own capitalistic crisis of imagination - les Grand Deux, Marvel and DC, are both accepting their current lot as IP farms for big studios, the comics serving as placeholders, keeping their characters on ventilators to support their most important iterations on screen.

The King in Black, le Roi en Noir, began His invasion of comics yesterday, the first issue in the main book of a crossover that takes in damn near all of the heroes in the Marvel universe. A lifelong fan of comics, I want to be fired up by this thing, and I look at previews in vain for anything that will stimulate my imagination. All I see in the first nine pages are the beats of the same story - a massive threat from outer space approaching earth, the world's heroes gathering to counter it, the first waves of defense crumbling in the face of the oncoming threat.

I'm tantalized enough by the basic premise - that the main character among the heroes is steadily reformed villain/anti-hero Venom, a conflicted human given superpowers through his union with an alien symbiote that covers his face and body in a shiny black alien skin. The main villain, the titular King, is Knull, the alien monarch of such symbiotes.

On paper it's a richly evocative, sci-fi goth horror action epic, a grand war waged dans les ombres, and I look across sample pages for anything to hook me deeper in. I honestly can't tell from what I read if Donny Cates is a good writer or not (much as Matt Fraction's voice was completely drowned in the similarly far-reaching FEAR ITSELF crossover in recent memory). The script hits the same beats as universe-wide crossovers before it - the forces of INVASION! seem to have made a stop into Hot Topic before attacking Earth this time 'round, but there's nothing in what I see to suggest that anything is different in this current story that will once again change the face of the Marvel Universe forever. (Parenthetically, I note that Al Ewing's sterling IMMORTAL HULK book has a single-issue crossover with KING IN BLACK - it's a beautifully written, self-contained episode, but it would have worked with any other villain in the place of the symbiotes.)

plus ça change, 

plus c'est la même 

chose

And I feel my age as I recall my past (nostalgia = our pain), remembering the moment in 1983 when a comic changed me, when Ororo flew down from the sky to rejoin her teammates and shocked them, me, le monde, with her appearance. Her long white mane shaved to a mohawk, clad in punk/BDSM leather. A woman with superpowers in ink, showing this regular human boy in flesh and blood what and who it was.

As little as twenty years ago a writer now retired in disgrace dared to take Pekar's maxim that you could tell any story in words and pictures to the internet, and for a while a berserk imagination ran riot in comics as this man and those he inspired breathed life into the medium. More specifically, into the work of the Big Two.

But a dear friend reminds me that mainstream comics are now in a "shut up and play the hits" headspace, and I fully understand the market forces that are forcing that condition. And recognize all too well the fingerprints of faceless committee that turn that all-is-possible medium into so much

I can not shake the feeling that we're in a time when we need wild creativity to take us outside ourselves, and sketch out new possibilities. These necessities are intangible, and thus completely foreign to the MBAs in charge of what we see. I'm hoping the administration revving up to take center stage next month (no matter how grossly the current diva continues to make its curtain calls insisting that The Show Must Go On) will take to heart the necessity of these intangibles, that it realizes that a better future is not just a childish daydream of its youngest constituents.

I yearn not for a past in which wilder flourishes were possible. I yearn for a present where such flourishes occur with regularity, exploding from flatscreens and magazines, eating away at the fabric of our dull reality to form doorways into better worlds. Where they blow fresh air in our faces, allowing us, even masked, to truly breathe.

And so I'm watching Godard, and much of it flies right past me, but I savor the incredible poetic ideas that detonate cleanly in my head, delighting that this man remains alive and active and even now is finding ways to bend the medium. I've read that he's working on two different projects right now, and can't wait to see them.

It amazes me how radical even his simple, direct gestures are. I muse how powerfully it would hit if, five minutes into Avengers Endgame, the audience were confronted with white text on a black background, no sound

Could anything dropkick the audience into the story faster? It's such a basic idea that it's amazing no one does it. It would be the first thing the suits would cut from the movie.

Contempt remains, a dense and powerful story of The Dream Factory and those caught within it. A thrilling portrait of a brilliant artist pissing away the tall Hollywood dollars, and not a terrible place to start, if you're looking.

Bon anniversaire, sensei. Et merci.

ANGST

Based on the disturbing case of Werner Kniesek, a man who committed multiple murders in a brief period of release from confinement, this movie captures the scheming of an anomic young man fresh out of prison. We are privy to his thoughts, his plans, his history, and his vision for his crimes as he goes from one potential victim to another, eventually winding up in an isolated-enough house where he terrorizes and systematically murders three members of a family. He leaves the scene of his crime, and heads into the world to wreak his larger vision upon the world.

I felt great after seeing this.

Though banned for its graphic violence, and long a hidden gem sought only by the most savvy and brave cult filmographers, this bleak and brutal film speaks way past the Video Nasty audience. It is tense, disgusting, scrupulously honest, and morally sound. It is also subtle but unflinching in capturing the vast gulf between a would-be murderer's narcissistic delusions and his abjectly pathetic reality. Erwin Leder is marvelous as the nameless antagonist, so far gone in his psychosis that he is at times too comically incompetent to realize the grandness of his psychotic visions, the cool and calculating sadism of his ongoing internal monologue constantly undercut by his external struggles with the dead weight of his victims, his hapless premature ejaculations, his complete and utter inability to even pass for normal at a glance. 

The movie is stylish but not showy. It is marvelously shot by Zbigniew Rybczyński (fresh off an Oscar win for his experimental short TANGO), who gives us maybe four looks in the movie that aren't vertigo-inducing crane shots or invasive close-ups. Tangerine Dream's Klaus Schulze underscores the thing with a menacingly percolating score. Gaspar Noe cited it as a strong influence (and one suspects Lars von Trier took notes, as well), but it's refreshing how devoid of post-modern irony the thing is. 

After binging horror franchises from Friday the 13th to Hannibal it was downright refreshing to watch a movie that flinched from neither the consequences of its psycho's crimes nor the confused dimensions of his humanity. Without finger-wagging or side-eying us it renders its verdict directly: this deranged asshole has a special plan for this world, and is to be kept away far away from everybody. Let us hope voters in November are as lucid.

Thirteen

0. I'm not necessarily a fan of the slasher genre, though I've seen an adequate horror-lover's share of them. With many, many hours to fill under COVID, and the franchise almost entirely available on the streaming platforms I'd just started watching regularly, I figured what the hell, I'll watch the Friday the 13th movies. This would be a chance to finally see the first two movies in the series (as well as some others I'd only seen in parts on television). I don't presume to make A Definitive Statement On The Series And Its Relationship To The Larger Culture (Or Even To Horror Cinema). I've watched the movies, done some (though not all) reading of background*, and recorded my impressions. My rankings of the series and other data bits are at the end; I've loved none of them but appreciate some more than others.

* = Stacie Ponder has written up all of the films over on her still-indispensable blog Final Girl - I'm grateful to her particularly for calling my attention to the often-berserk logos the movies threw at us. Such off-the-wall gestures are often where a low-budget movie's spirit truly lies, and more than anything it's those gestures that kept me engaged with the series even as one dead teenager began to resemble all the others.

1. the First

At the start there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to take from this seeing it for the first time 40 years on - you know who the killer will be revealed to be, and you know who's going to jump out of the lake in the epilogue, so finally seeing it is really just a chance to finally say you saw it, to check it off a list. So you recalibrate a bit, and try to be open - I know the basic story (which can be summarized very, very easily), so I look to the margins as openly as I can to see what else is there.

There's some (not a whole lot, but some) sensitive work by the cast, one or two memorable character turns, and a richly atmospheric setting. It all happens in less than 24 hours, during which clouds gather and then a rainstorm rages and subsides (and I like how the storm registers as an event in the movie, bringing an open quiet within which the tension builds nicely). Henry Manfredini's famous score feels sketchy, a few synthesizer and vocal noises put together as horror miniatures, but it works. Watching it forty years on it's odd how the gore effects, which were so scandalous in 1980, are barely lingered on. The violence isn't thrown in our faces long enough to really disturb us, though perhaps forty years later this series' true legacy is how it has desensitized us to this kind of violence. (Ballard's prophecy that we'd be ruled by elected psychopaths has come true.)

It does wear its influence of Bava's BAY OF BLOOD on its sleeve, mainly in the quiet and emptiness that surrounds its murder sequences. There are some unsettlingly fleet touches as well (the quick dart of a hand behind a curtain is the bit I remember most keenly). Movies hold one's interest with a lot less; franchises, though, you'd hope would be built on a base less flimsy.

2. the Best

The first film was trying something new but wasn't sure what; it built from the influence of a quietly atmospheric Bava film, but some of the spaces in the movie feel accidental. This one has a model to build on - we've done this before, let's expand on what worked - and is stronger. Better realized and delineated characters (including a few you actually come to care about), wild stylistic flourishes (Jason's reveal is sublime - Terry screaming and unleashing her shit right into the camera is bravura),

more elaborate kill scenes (including a great bit where a chair breaks under Jason's weight - we don't see onscreen psychos get tripped up by accidents enough). Even Manfredini's score is better resourced, his electronics boosted by some confidently-laid string arrangements that don't rip off Herrmann's PSYCHO themes. Bloody summer fun, if you can overlook the wild gaps in logic. I imagine Amy Steel's performance will remain one of the series' best leads. (EDIT: Indeed it did.)

3. Comin' At Ya

The creative team take a couple of steps back here - in part 2 they knew they were making a genre movie but that genre movie let its characters breathe and had strong connection between the set pieces. Here all the attention has been paid to the 3-D pop-outs with no care or detail put into anything else - Steve Miner made a more-than-coherent movie with 2 but seems handcuffed by the demands of the 3-D (and, no doubt, a studio that suddenly realized this franchise was a money-maker), and for all the eye-popping effects (right there on the title card!) the result is dramatically inert. Can't believe it took TWO people to write this, the most dull and rote script in the series (so far). Richard Brooks' Jason moves around like somebody's sprightly grandpa. The final barn fight gives it some oomph, with a lovely interior Louma crane shot that's more thrilling than any of the in-your-face effects.

4. the "Final" Chapter

A lot of the fans seem to love this one, and I understand why. Offbeat actors like Crispin Glover and Corey Feldman are brought in and given bits to do; I'm not as taken with Glover's dancing as some, but it's a solid step toward the flourishes that I value in genre programmers. The characters across the board have a spark that was missing in part 3 (the Jarvises are particularly likeable - the film would have benefited from a few more minutes with them), Jason's bulkier and more formidable, the killings become even more elaborate (Tina's slo-mo defenestration in the rain is GORGEOUS). Director Joseph Zito seems to have given this one a bit more zip, though it appears that's because everyone in the cast was totally unified in absolutely despising him.

INTERLUDE. THE LAKE.

If we assume that these movies are all in continuity with one another, oddities quickly emerge: we see Mrs. Voorhees driven mad enough by her son's drowning to terrorize Camp Crystal Lake for two decades. And yet her son survived and was close enough to witness her murder and thus get fired up to embark on his own rampages (and how the hell did he get to Alice's apartment and back?). The sprawling geography of 2-4 (which take place over about four consecutive days) suggests that the environs surrounding Crystal Lake are fairly vast, which might explain (might) how Mrs. Voorhees never saw the makeshift shack her son built within walking distance of the camp. I'm not surprised the video game took it all in - the designers must have had a field day with such evocative and expansive territory to map out.

5. A New Beginning

And here I part with the slasher orthodoxy - this widely-reviled entry has (as I make these notes) given me the most entertainment so far. It doesn't have jokes but it's nonetheless very funny: the smash-cut from Joey's axe murder to the POLICE SQUAD! shot of the arriving siren makes me laugh just thinking about it. Part 3 had actors struggling with a nothing script and as a result had no energy; this one has actors full-tilt embracing a nothing script and is a lot more fun. It keeps looking for something else to cram into the formula; what character bits can we explore, what skills did an actor say they had on their resume that we can have them do on camera. The characters feel...not real, exactly (the bickering greasers are straight out of a Sha Na Na skit - you can either shut down and hate the movie or roll with it and giggle, like I did) but it's fun to spend time with them (Violet's robot-dancing to Pseudo Echo's "His Eyes" is a particular highlight; Reggie, Demon, and Anita in the van is another).

6. He Is Risen

A whole mess of strong performances in this one: Thom Mathews is rootably determined as by-now-the-series-protagonist Tommy Jarvis, and Jennifer Cooke is more than likeable enough to sell her bewildering turn as his besotted co-hero; David Kagen plays a fine meat-and-potatoes arc as her lawman dad. Well-embodied by enthusiastically jobbing CJ Graham, Jason's supernatural rebirth starts its own continuity (which is smart), and the thing is surprisingly light-footed and pleasant-spirited. Tonally consistent (and Imma credit Tom McLoughlin, the series' first ever "written and directed by" credit) and downright silly at times (with Manfredini actually creating POLICE ACADEMY-style comedy score for the paintball sequence), but much of the comedy comes from actual jokes. In an odd first we actually see the camp counselors counseling campers at the renamed Camp Forest Green (hilariously, McLoughlin lingers on the shot below longer than a who-we-are-and-what-we-do Powerpoint presentation).

7. The New Blood

There's the series' best story here: the story of a girl beset by abilities she doesn't understand and a guilt she'll never shake, of the shadowy lake that seeded her talents and still holds her close, of the energies that still manifest around her upon her return to the lake, of the unspeakable evil she accidentally frees from the depths of the lake, of the doctor who says he's trying to help her but seems to be guiding her via his own agenda, of her escalating fear as she tries desperately to embrace the human comforts around her, her anguish at losing everything, her terror turning to anger as she finally becomes who she is, becomes strong enough to contain and destroy the horror she unleashed, of her finally seeing the love that was always there, in the lake, of her leaving her past behind, her old world burned down as she confidently steps forward toward the new.

Paramount was given all these elements (assembled by the wildly ambitious producer Barbara Sachs), as well as a stunt team leader who took so seriously the iconography of the villain he was asked to play that he set a record for being on fire. With a team poised to deliver something next-level, Paramount instead asked for the same idiot teenagers, more of the same gratuitous nudity, the same shallow formula. Few involved saw it as anything more than a job, and a job is what we got.

Tina Shepard deserved better.

8. Takes A Boat Ride, And Then Manhattan

The lower budgets of the earlier efforts made for sleazy viewing, but also allowed for genuine strangeness and off-kilter moments. The good news in 8 is the production values are higher: this one has some of the series' best camera work, and the characters are an improvement on the previous, feeling lived-in and semi-motivated (indeed, Saffron Henderson and Martin Cummins sell a shaded and tangible friendship between rockergirl J.J. and video student Wayne - you can imagine her crushing out on him thanks to his resemblance to David Sylvian). But the interesting ideas don't breathe and get glossed over, the spontaneity has been choked out of the series (even the endearing daftness of the title logos is gone - this thing has a generic Manhattan-in-the-80s title sequence that could have played before any movie set in Manhattan in the 80s), and it lingers on the suffering of its characters past the point of entertainment. It is firmly and unmistakably the product of capitalists at this point, which might be the scariest thing about it.

9. aw, hell.

It took Jason longer to get to Hell than it did for him to get to Manhattan. Paramount just threw their hands up and gave the franchise to New Line, and New Line resumed the ongoing battle to turn this thing into something. This one plays like the second part of a movie for which the first part doesn't exist - suddenly Jason's a worm that jumps from body to body and there are various agents after him. It's crazily mixed and gets a coupla points for some engaging character bits and inspired lunacy (a diner gets attacked and the entire counter staff take arms up in defense). To be damn sure it ain't lazy, but it gives us way too much to just take on faith, and there's nothing on screen to really give a shit about. Even Manfredini's just randomly stabbing at his new digital keyboard at this point, which mirrors the scattershot, throw-it-all-at-it approach of the movie as a whole. A movie this insane should be more fun.

X.

Couldn't find this one, and at this point in the series-thru I was getting punchy and contrary so damned if I was gonna buy it. My memories of this thing are good, with Kane Hodder as implacable as ever in both classic and future mode; Lexa Doig and Lisa Ryder effectively swapping their ANDROMEDA roles; David Cronenberg in a fine turn, during the movie's prologue, as an asshole scientist. I recall this being breezier than the others, more consistent and sure of itself - it feels like director Jim Isaac was given a solid script and a decent effects budget and left to it. (And how dismaying it was to find, while reading up on this movie, that Isaac died in 2012 - I wasn't the world's biggest PIG HUNT fan, but I would have been curious enough to watch another film from him.)

11. vs. Freddy...

Some of the luster has worn off, yet it's still my favorite movie in the Friday the 13th franchise. With director Ronny Yu (veteran of a mess of wuxia films and BRIDE OF CHUCKY) helming the thing the deck's stacked in its favor. The characters are richer (and even mourn the deaths taking place around them), and Jason becomes a semi-realized character rather than a cinematic device that exists solely to eviscerate teenagers (Yu's decision to recast Ken Kirzinger in the role since he had more soulful eyes than Kane Hodder pays off). The story leans hard into fantasy (and harder into a Universal horror influence than even McLoughlin did in part 6) and is better for it, with a nice balance between the milieux of the title characters (artfully color-coded). Freddy's quips make him unpleasant and gross as opposed to evil; Kelly Rowland's sassing of Freddy is an unmotivated low point that nearly derails the thing. TIMELY BONUS: the treatment of Freddy's rampage as a public health crisis. And the climactic battle delivers.

12. 09

Jared Padalecki and Danielle Panabaker lead a cast who could have done a lot more than they were asked to; their sympathetic work, some solid camerawork, and a tight contraction of years of continuity are undone by ugly sadism, under-baked supporting roles, derivations from other movies, and just too much bullshit (I can buy that Jason built a shack in the woods; I can buy the crawlspace underneath; I can buy neither the vast network of tunnels nor the rusty school bus within them). I'm really glad to have finished a damn-near-full series view-through.

13. TL;DR

I rank'em FvsJ; 2, 6, 5, X, 1, 4, 7, 9, 8, '09, 3-D. Favorite kills: the rain defenestration in 4; the face-thru-metal in 6; the liquid nitrogen in X.

ZABRISKIE POINT

It ain't no fucking metaphor. Especially now.

And it wasn't the craziest idea back in 1970, either - Michelangelo Antonioni wasn't the first foreign filmmaker courted by Hollywood (Jacques Demy covered similar near-Hollywood geography just a year prior, after all). We'll hook him up with some solid American writers and he'll do for 60s counterculture USA what he did for Swingin' London, right?

Right?

The thing was a nearly-legendary failure. Mainstream critics were alienated by Antonioni's usual poetry, and the hippies MGM were hoping to flock to the thing stayed away. Some argued that the nuances of American politics at the time were outside Antonioni's grasp, an assertion supported by his weary, paper-thin lead characters and attention to landscape.

But it grabbed me the first time I saw it, and it's deepened for me ever since. My sense is that Antonioni was absolutely true to what he saw during his American sojourn, because it's the America I see: the political left arguing about minutiae, blockaded by the police while the forces of capitalism work quietly and insidiously in the background. (And there seem to be some strong moments of connection with co-writer Sam Shepard, an ideal match for the project - the lonely cowboy at the bar and the swirling of car lot banners are particularly Shepardian moments that Antonioni realizes beautifully.) The whole thing is enough to make an earnest revolutionary wanna snag a plane and just fuck off somewhere.

And when what we love is taken from us, when only a bland, dull life awaits us, with our land paved over, our rich history packaged sold and forgotten, when the walls of the box truly manifest and start suffocating us, the only reasonable and effective revolution is one of absolute and utter destruction.

I've argued before that I see Michelangelo Antonioni as a fantasist, that where others see metaphors for the pain of contemporary living I see a science fiction imagination running artfully riot. And so I see the grand finale of this movie not as a metaphor for Daria's emerging revolutionary consciousness but as her direct willing of the destruction of everything. (The Carrie Ending, I call it.) But within this fantasistic take I understand that it's Antonioni's realistic assessment of what he observed during his time here. As Kiyoshi Kurosawa would decades later, he internalized and fully understood what he was seeing here, and simply looked ahead and found an apocalypse as the inevitable, even necessary, conclusion.

And so I'm thinking of Zabriskie Point today. On this holiday from which I've been disconnected in recent years and especially so today, as the world around me erodes under the weight of an uncontained epidemic, with the loss of home and community very real threats for me and so many I know, the government's dithering incompetence now firmly hand-in-hand with deliberate malevolence. On this day in which BLACK LIVES MATTER is painted on countless streets but Breonna Taylor's murderers (Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison, and Myles Cosgrove) remain free. I can't buy into the celebration of the spirit of America while I can see so clearly how that spirit has been corrupted and subverted and twisted to fuck over, dehumanize, and kill so many of its own citizens.

On this July Fourth, these are the only fireworks I really want to see.

Imported: The List

A link-crazy post, to keep the House tidy. Your proprietor is on Letterboxd, and will link to my reviews of the films below there.

Top Ten Movies seen for the first time during lockdown, on Cinephobe.tv

(all movies US unless specified)

The City Girl (Coolidge, 84)
American Hot Wax (Mutrux, 78)
Citizens Band (aka HANDLE WITH CARE) (Demme, 77)
The Black Marble (Becker, 80)
Face to Face (Sollima, Spain, 67)
Who Can Kill A Child? (Serrador, Spain, 76)
What the Peeper Saw (Bianchi/Kelley, UK, 72)
Night of the Juggler (Butler, 80)
Midnite Spares (Masters, Australia, 83)
Crazy Mama (Demme, 75)

70s-ish Horror Stay At Home Double Feature

Different times.

This thing has sat unwritten for a while - it seems stupid to write about cult movies when such large and devastating issues are unfolding outside the House of Sparrows. But the House is safe on lockdown, well-resourced and comfortable, if cluttered. And one of life's deepest challenges is that it doesn't stop - we don't cease to be ourselves or lose our interests just because we're under quarantine.

Upping the internet bandwidth and speed on this end has been an absolute godsend, making for better newsgathering and vastly improved viewing options. Loath as I've been to dive into the whole streaming sphere the distraction has been more than welcome, and it's been good to finally catch up with things that had eluded me previously. (Indeed, in honor of Walpurgis Night, I think tonight is the night I finally take in Sarah Phelps' adaptation of Christie's The Pale Horse.) And it's been a pleasant surprise to find that the internet doesn't necessarily inhibit spontaneity (serendipity, even), that streaming movies occasionally co-mingle with the artful clarity of in-cinema double features. Two movies taken in on different platforms within 24 hours of one another had a lot to say to me, and each other.

Jack Starett's Race With The Devil has an absolute dream quartet of actors (Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Loretta Swit, and Lara Parker) as two married couples who take off in an RV for an off-season vacation, and run afoul of a cult of Satanists who spend the last hour of the movie stalking and chasing them across half of Texas. It's wildly implausible and incredibly fun, with our heroes responding with the hysteria and anger you'd expect people to feel under such dire straits. And it's an engaging combination of horror movie and car chase caper, with mounting paranoia and truly inspired stuntwork throughout. It's gritty enough to engage on the grindhouse level, and one might be surprised to recall it slipped out into the world with a PG rating.

Horror filmmaker and musician Rob Zombie would have been around ten when Race With The Devil was released, and it's very easy to imagine the mid-1970s monster kid Zombie must have been seeing it multiple times. I hadn't intended to follow Race with a thematically similar motion picture, but Zombie's indie horror opus 31 would sit very comfortably beneath Race on a double bill, taking in as it does the story of a group of clowns who pile in a van and head off on a road trip only to run afoul of an oddly-aristocratic cabal who force them into a violent game with death as the stakes. (Sealing its kinship with the prior movie, the movie takes place on Halloween, 1976.)

31 clinched my suspicions that there are two Rob Zombies - a consistent-but-unimaginative writer and more-than-competent director - vying for supremacy of his brain, never mind his films. The story is a rote re-hash of The Most Dangerous Game that teases but doesn't pursue an obvious line of class-consciousness. But it's beautifully executed on a largely crowd-funded budget, unfolding in a palpably grimy setting shot through with moody atmosphere and striking use of color. There's always something to look at, and the textures of skin, wood, fog give it a tangibility that makes for effective horror (cinematographer David Daniels takes over for longtime Zombie shooter Brandon Trost and proves just as adept in making Zombie's outre world look and feel real.)

Most of the characters of 31 speak in the same colorful yet witless white trash patois that Zombie has been putting in the mouths of 85% of his characters since House of 1000 Corpses, and most of the villains stalking them through the movie's lethal factory maze match the cheerful vulgarity of the protagonists with a similarly Southern-fried sadism. The cast uniformly commit to and sell their dialogue - as limited as Zombie's scripts often are I can't recall an actor who did anything less than demanded of them. Many horror filmmakers have either a strong visual sense or a sure hand with actors, but Zombie has both, and I suspect that many actors who continue to work for Zombie genuinely enjoy doing so. (The most striking figure is cut by Richard Brake as nominal-lead heavy Doomhead, who brings such terrifying and charismatic intensity to his monologues that I wished they'd been written by almost anybody else.)

This double-feature of not great movies took the edge off a couple of quarantine days, and offered a welcome reminder that cinema remains a living, breathing thing. An actor's medium that presents you new work by old favorites and introduces new favorites in even less-than-auspicious settings (I'd pay real money to see Richard Brake's MacBeth). A venue for ever-new, visceral thrills. A companion and friend even, especially, in times like these. As my new favorite channel says so charmingly, stay home/stay alive, friend.

THE HUNT

Twelve...eleven people with remarkably similar backgrounds find themselves on an open grassy plain, and are picked off with startling alacrity by unseen hunters. The quarries quickly realize they have common politics, and their roles in this hunt seem to confirm their absolute worst conspiracy theories about the liberal elites.

It wants so, so badly to tweak and provoke you. And indeed the delayed release of THE HUNT plays right into its story, with pre-emptive outrage becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. But anyone who sees this has little to be outraged or fired up about. As a straight-up hunting humans thriller the movie delivers the goods: the pacing of the action is more than solid, with the opening salvos of the hunt keeping us off-kilter as our anchor characters wind up quickly dispatched. A well-placed flashback brings us up to speed with the impetus behind and reasons for the hunt, setting the table for a charged and well-staged final confrontation.

All of which would be just dandy if the movie didn't reduce so many of its characters, on either side of the political fence, to crass stereotypes. Its efforts to muddy the waters with some welcome ambiguity come too late to really resonate with the action comedy preceding, and the end rings hollow where it should soar. (An interview on the movie and its surrounding controversy with director Craig Zobel is somewhat helpful, as within it he cheekily declares himself an "equal opportunity offender," which relieves us of the burden of giving a shit about anything he says.) As striking and even engaging a thriller as it often is, its broad satire renders the thing too shallow to be anything more than a diverting thrill-ride. Which wouldn't be a problem if it weren't congratulating itself for being the most controversial movie of the year.

Unnamed Footage Festival: Five Films

The Unnamed Footage Festival holds a unique place among indie genre film festivals. It was initially conceived to spotlight new works in found footage horror; the subgenre started (in earnest) with the “rediscovered” film shot by the ill-fated filmmakers of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, and that style has been embraced by many low-budget horror films since. But UFF has expanded their scope to include films that embrace some of the storytelling tactics of those films and expand on their strategies to pursue complex narratives and startling emotion. Films shot with the camera taking a single, fixed perspective; fake documentaries; appropriated footage recut into new sequences that suggest new narratives and pose questions about authorship, privacy, and ownership of the image; 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.

Full disclosure: the programmers of UFF are all dear friends, and I even introduced a screening at the festival last year. I follow UFF as not just a fan of low-budget horror and other modes of offbeat filmmaking, but as one invested in the work of my friends and enjoying their programming through the perspective of a friend hip to their tastes and processes. So here, to celebrate their third year in operation, to explore some of the things I find notable about their work, and to give others an “in” on what I find distinctive about the programming, are five of the many things I’m excited to check out at UFF.

(I’m going to have to miss both the opening night screening party at Artists’ Television Access, and the next night’s screening of MANIAC at the Little Roxie, so all of the screenings listed below take place at the Balboa Theatre at the dates and times listed. The full schedule for the festival is here.)

SKYMAN – February 29, 2pm
A man who encountered an extraterrestrial as a boy eagerly awaits the alien’s return, and this documentary captures the days leading up to their expected rendez-vous. I’m excited to see a movie so firmly in UFF’s wheelhouse that abandons horror completely, and I’m moved that Daniel Myrick, one of the directors of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, is both sticking to the aesthetic of that monumental film and aiming for something humanistic and transcendent. If you’re completely horror-averse but want to attend and support a scrappy independent genre film festival, this is the one you want to go to.

MURDER DEATH KOREATOWN – February 29, 7pm
A young man disappears during his private investigation of a neighbor’s murder, and the footage he shot documenting the larger conspiracy around the crime is assembled by an unseen but dedicated acquaintance. According to the program this was submitted anonymously. I can’t tell if this is a fake with which my friends are gamely playing along: they haven’t told me and I haven’t asked. I accept and embrace the mystery, and brace myself for wherever this takes us.

THE LOCK-IN – February 29, 11pm
The discovery of a pornographic magazine unleashes unspeakable evil among a group of teenagers during an all-night event at their church. Yes, this is an Evangelical found footage horror movie, and it’s quite unlike any other movie I’ve seen. It has the torpor that comes with many movies made by non-professionals, and is too pious to really deliver the gruesomeness you’d expect in a horror film. And so when it does throw a jump-scare at you, the effect is delightful. I was at the screening where programmer Clark Little sprung it on the rest of the team; this is a movie he champions, out of love for the truly-out-there reaches of no-budget cinema (and a little cultural masochism). I suspect the effects of this at the end of a long day of programming, attended by the inebriation of a late-night screening, will be absolutely mindbending, and that Clark’s intro will be one for the ages.

NOROI: THE CURSE – March 1, 12:05pm
UFF gives over a couple of slots of its final day to a celebration of Japanese auteur Koji Shiraishi. I can’t quite recommend A RECORD OF SWEET MURDER screening later Sunday night, but there’s enough artistry and imagination in that one to make me want to see Shiraishi’s earlier work. This one is notably the longest movie in the festival, taking in an abundance of characters and covering a number of different supernatural and psychological horrors in its documentary shot by a disappeared expert in the paranormal.

FRAUD – March 1, 2:15pm
I don’t understand why I enjoy novella-length movies (50-60 minute running times), but I’m delighted that so many of them pepper the UFF schedule. I’m quite keen on this one, in which filmmaker Dean Fleischer-Camp turns YouTube home movie clips shot by a suburban family into a 52-minute anti-capitalist odyssey.

CREPÚSCULO

Doctor Alejandro Mangina is so sick he doesn't want to get well. Specifically, he has encountered old flame Lucia, posing for an art class, shortly before leaving the country and the chance encounter has inflamed his passion for her. These feelings are so intense they awaken a tumescent darkness inside him, a passion not diminished by either his time away or Lucia's marriage to his friend Ricardo.

If Noir City has screened a movie hornier than CREPÚSCULO, I regret having missed it. The movie singlehandedly puts to pasture any notion that black-and-white movies were/are haughty and sexless. In terms of noir history it takes the erotic heat of John Dall's first look at Peggy Cummins in GUN CRAZY or the drum solo from PHANTOM LADY and sustains that energy for 108 bewildering, exhilarating minutes.

But the machine that energy fuels is a delightful and fiery cinematic contraption. Writer/director Julio Bracho's theatrical bona fides are on glorious display, from the shadows that fall over the characters during moments of intensity to the gorgeous poetry of the language: the subtexts come pirouetting gorgeously out of the mouths of the characters, but the beauty of the language keeps us grounded in their emotions. The sensuality of the lead performances keeps us fully engrossed even as the more heady literary fanices unfold: Mangina has just authored a book outlining the psychological disintegration of a single subject, and we get the impression that his book (also called Crepúsculo) is adapting itself before our very eyes. And when the single first-person narration is suddenly taken over by all three participants in a crucial scene it feels like we're leaving the planet.

During her sterling introduction alongside Noir City impresario Eddie Muller, Morelia Film Festival director Daniela Michel noted that Crepúsculo was the favorite Mexican film of the late "man of cinema" Pierre Rissient (which is enough to make me happily, humbly, reassess some of my unfairly stodgy impressions of the man.) Academic questions such as "what qualifies this as film noir?" are promptly forgotten as we feel like we're being absorbed into the warm, lush darkness of an overriding supercinematic consciousness. The invitation from a filmmaker like Bracho to dance is like the moment an irresistible femme fatale winks at us, a seductive shadow that promises rapture even as it shuts out the light. Leaving the cinema after such an engaging and luscious tryst we pull the shadows around us, willing the joy to linger, closing our eyes to trap the darkness, to let twilight linger just a little while longer. That is noir, ice cold and hot as hell.

The Office Oscar Pool, And How To Run It

First, tell your supervisor that you want to do it. Don't ask "Hey, is it okay if I put together an Oscar pool for the office?" Say, "I think it'd be cool and fun if I put together an Oscar pool for the office." After all, the Oscars are one of the biggest shared spectacles of the year. More crucially, your supe will more than likely want in on it, and will say yes.

Then: Email the office the details. For a nominal sum (like $5 - not a bankbreaker, but enough that they won't just throw away their guesses), they can participate in your Oscar pool. The person who guesses the most Oscar winners correctly gets the money collected.

You can go whole hog and get everybody to guess all the categories, but do NOT limit it to the ten major categories. Those'll be predicted in every news organ around the world the Friday before, and so you'll have the pot split by several coworkers who waited til the end to submit their guesses. The more minor categories are often where the pool is won. (Indeed, each time I've run the office pool it was Best Costume Design or even Best Makeup that put the winner over.)

In the email out to everyone copy the categories and nominees into the body of the message. When people return their picks to you, they need only delete the nominees they don't believe will win. Their list, in an ideal world, will look like this (or at the very least follow this format):

BEST PICTURE: Bokeback Mountain
BEST ACTOR: Antonio Banderas, PAIN AND GLORY
BEST ACTRESS: Cynthia Erivo, HARRIET
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Brad Pitt, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Kathy Bates, RICHARD JEWELL

etc. etc. etc.

And if a list is in the body of an email back to you you can just print it out, on a single page even.

So give people until the close of business the Friday before the Oscars (Friday, February 7) to submit their lists and their money to you. Most people will want to wait that long to see the major papers' predictions Friday morning, though you need not mention this in your initial email. AGAIN: Most of those predictions will be limited to winners in the top ten categories, which is why you'll want to have your coworkers betting on a larger number of categories.

Watching the Oscars with these lists on your lap, checking off every correct answer on each list, will be an absolute blast. I guarantee this. You're likely to be more excited by the competition between your coworkers than anything happening on screen.

On Monday (February 8), the participant with the most correct guesses gets the pot. If multiple participants tie with the most correct guesses, split the pot evenly among them. You might also considering awarding a small sum ($7, say) to a participant who submits the sole correct guess for a major category. (Years ago, Amy didn't think Crash would win Best Picture, since Brokeback Mountain was widely believed to be a shoo-in for it, but in her heart couldn't not vote for it - she was the only one who voted for it, and was rewarded for her faith with a small prize [the aforementioned $7]).

Monday morning, either before or after you dole out the prizes, send an email to the participants (NOT the entire office - non-participants probably don't care, after all) announcing the winners, and list off the participants and their number of correct guesses.

In the end it'll be a fun diversion for the office, and an Oscar-improver for you. If you think of something I didn't suggest above to make it work better for you, then by all means do it (and leave a comment here telling me what you did). From this point on, how things go in your Oscar pool is entirely up to you. Your word is final.

(And under NO circumstances are you to share your own list with your coworkers.)

Happy betting!

(Arguably the most useful thing I wrote for a now-defunct workblog, saved by the Wayback Machine.)