ZODIAC KILLER PROJECT

One can not fault Charlie Shackleton for wanting to continue a film he couldn't make: a true crime documentary spun from The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge, by CHP officer Lyndon Lafferty. After the rights to the book were spontaneously withdrawn by the writer's family, the adaptable Shackleton spun his work into a sketch-like description of the movie he woulda made, constructed largely with evocative B-roll footage of the sunlit California suburbs within which the Zodiac Killer lurked, archival photographs, and Shackleton's own probing narration. Shackleton expands the film to include consideration of the tropes of true crime, and an examination of our obsession with the genre. The film aspires to meta as it considers how many of the stylistic tics of the genre have become cliches, and how inevitably Shackleton may have deployed them on his own project. 

But this very quickly reaches the tiresome level of a stranger enthusing about the project he didn't make, and becomes downright risible each time Shackleton congratulates himself with "pretty good, isn't it?" after describing a climactic point in his narrative (a certain tongue-in-cheek feeling makes these statements no less irritating). Shackleton's previous project, The Afterlight, was a wordless collection of film clips from movies whose actors are no longer with us, and we quietly form our own attachments to these people, and the narratives suggested by their respective film clips. Existing as a single 35mm print, The Afterlight is only screened with the filmmaker present. One feels watching this current film that Shackleton is quick to manage his audience's perceptions of his material (since he can't be present at every screening), and the movie winds up deeply inhibited by Shackleton's over-present approach. As evocative as the photography becomes, at no point does Shackleton let us connect the dots or envision the movie ourselves, and his gestures toward micromanagement of his audience's responses become infuriating.

Duran Duran/Ian Emes: The Chauffeur

(copied from Letterboxd, where your proprietor is placing just about all of his film writing these days. But I'm back at the House to stash this piece, which is long and in-depth enough to warrant an entry. I'm safekeeping it here as there are self-declared movie police who regularly and arbitrarily purge music videos and similar not features from that site because "wah wah wah music videos aren't movies." Imagine being such a person, reader, and shudder. now please read on.)

THE SONG: even in the heyday of their pop reign Duran Duran, largely thru the power of keyboardist Nick Rhodes, had a foot firmly planted in the weirder musics of their time. So just as Rhodes' hero David Sylvian completed Japan's decisive turn from trash glam, ending Obscure Alternatives with a moody, downbeat instrumental "The Tenant", so did Rhodes shut nearly the rest of the band out of the studio to end their jet-setting chart-smash Rio with "The Chauffeur," a largely electronic ballad rife with moody sonic imagery. With Simon LeBon matching the song's tone with one of his darker vocal tracks and lyrics, the track brings Rio to a poetic, ambiguous close, and foreshadows the downright avant-garde territory Rhodes and LeBon would explore three years later in Arcadia.

Though the band was initially miffed to have been cut from this part of the session, the song soon became special to all of them, for a number of reasons. (The song remains a steady presence in the band's setlists, and a dark horse favorite of many a lifetime fan, this one included.) Having made enough music videos to compile an album of them, the band decided it made sense to commission a video in which none of them appeared; this song seemed a natural fit for such a clip.

THE VIDEO: Animator and fashion director Ian Emes responded to the assignment with an erotically-charged short film that, bizarrely, isn't the smuttiest thing on that album.* Shot in gorgeous black-and-white we see a woman being taken in a limousine to an underground dalliance with a girlfriend, watched longingly by her otherwise dutiful chauffeur in his rear-view mirror. Though the narrative charts its own course Emes latches hard onto the mood and sonics of the track, the ominous drones matched by abstract shots of black pearls thrumming insistently in the limousine floor. Scantily dressed as they are the women in this film never lose their artful poise, and as arch as the thing feels it maintains an engrossing intensity. And if you get on its wavelength the climactic transformation might even reduce you to tears. 

THE HISTORY: So all of the kids who snagged this album (the "young people with lots of energy" that LeBon once said were the fans DD were aiming for) wound up exposed to high-end lesbian erotica via this clip (as well as the transcendent yet as-artful-in-its-own-way smut of * = Godley & Creme's cut for the night version of "Girls on Film"). It only made us like and respect that band more; it's hard to take seriously criticisms that the band were just vapid pretty boys for teenyboppers when they were marrying their songs to imagery that was unmistakably and seriously adult. That kinda gesture is what gives a band like DD staying power - the YouTube page for the video is rife with comments from older fans now old enough to understand the mysteries within who are still captivated by the clip, and younger fans being blown away by it for the first time. I'd be astonished if it ever actually ran on MTV, and yet it remains one of the best clips that the music video age ever gave us.

THE NAKED GUN

Having listened to director Akiva Schaffer talk at length about his process and goals on this thing (and, having caught up belatedly with The Lonely Island's Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and vowing to catch their stuff in theatres going forward) I was both in the tank for this and open to what Schaffer and crew were trying to achieve. The movie walks a number of thin lines - keeping the spirit of the original films alive while being its own thing, managing a plot that can handle the weight of this volume of jokes while still being clear and engaging as a story, an attempt at riffing on media as familiar to today's audience as 50s/60s cop shows would have been to TNG's 80s audiences, balancing a gentle but joke-intensive spoof on cop media with the political realities of the audience lives in a world where authoritarianism and lack of accountability run rampant. 

And on all of these fronts the thing succeeds more than handily - Liam Neeson sends up his work as a grizzled lone man of action and maps it beautifully into the legacy of Frank Drebin; Pamela Anderson offers a similarly funny take on the femme fatale rife in neo-noir. But this thing gets extra oomph from some surprising emotional affect, a split second in which Neeson lets us see Drebin, the out-of-time out-of-bounds lone wolf, squaring up for a kick-ass action scene...and deciding firmly to kill no one before fighting his way through. Some will suggest I'm overthinking/emoting here but this absolutely squares with the fundamentally decent humanism that radiates from Schaffer in his gentle interviews as well as his no-holds-barred podcast with The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers. And this lovely crystalline moment, too, folds in perfectly with the non-stop comic onslaught of the film as a whole. The movie never slows down long enough to make a show of its considerable heart; it just beats with the same effortless timing as everything else in it. 

(Parenthetically, fans still longing for yet another Lonely Island video after SNL50 absolutely get one here with the "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" sequence.)

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. 

BLOOD DAUGHTER

This will not be an objective post by any means - it's as much a celebration as a review or analysis. The fact is, my good friend and occasional collaborator Bryan Enk is screening his new work this month. It's called Blood Daughter, and it's his latest in an ongoing series of work (dating to his very first films) based on Bram Stoker's Dracula (the novel, and Coppola's film). This new movie brings Alex Johnson, the daughter of longtime cast member Chuck Johnson, into the extended family of collaborators in the title role. I am the first civilian to have seen the movie. I am delighted to say it's the finest work Bryan has ever done.

Bryan casts his net even farther out this time, brining in elements, appropriately enough, of Dracula's Daughter and Nadja (and, in a key moment, Murnau's Nosferatu) as he pushes the story, begun in 1993, to the present, in which daughter Abby lives in a tower, her needs being met by her father and a number of servants kept in his thrall. Abby seizes the initiative and kicks off a battle for her own soul, which fractures into various fragments with which she spars as the moment of reckoning approaches.

For those familiar with Bryan's earlier films there's much to enjoy in seeing his gang back together, here as the same characters at significantly older ages - Andy Hunsaker's Claudius is clearly wearied from the intervening decades of investigating fucked up paranormal shit; hilariously, the late-40s David Jarrell brings the same youthful mannered pomposity to Lord Henry that he did in 1994, like he stepped directly into this one from Dracula Returns. 

I wondered if many of the tight references to the earlier work would be lost on those coming to the corpus for the first time. Word from the initial screenings is that the resonance of these moments is felt, if not fully understood, by those meeting these characters for the first time. But Bryan's knack for fleet but slaying throwaway gags remains as sharp as ever, as does his ability to mine supernatural tension from concrete, every day settings and detonate little dream bombs with recurring phrases and images. Even if you're meeting these characters for the first time there's much to sink your teeth into.

And then there's Alex.

Alexandria Johnson has been present in this series, quite literally, from her birth (announced by the director in a meta-epilogue to Bryan Enk's Dracula). She takes focus here in thirteen roles (full disclosure: I'd missed a couple until reading Bryan's helpful list), and makes the single greatest, auteur-qualifying contribution I've ever seen an actor make to a Bryan Enk film. The dance between the earlier films and this new one, between youth and age, the various selves of the characters, is the most ambitious thing I've ever seen Bryan attempt, and Johnson's performances (as Abby's various selves and holy shit as the characters of the previous movies) are crucial to how fluid and effortless it all seems. The style of interacting close-ups continues as Abby and her Father begin their conflict in earnest (and Jeff Miller plays the weariness of eternity better than many on-screen vamps) - when the two finally collide in frame together the impact is fraught and thrilling.

I don't know what future this thing is going to have - whether it will become a festival sensation, an eagerly discussed movie that brings deserved attention to the earlier films, or yet another low-budget horror flick lost among the sea of them in the anonymizing streaming landscape. I'm invested in it, and am hopeful that the light of my friend's film does make it to the entire world, even more. Mainly, though, I just hope you get to see it, and dig it. Don't be afraid. Do as you will.

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022)

It's very much an old master returning to the stage with a greatest hits collection, which is no bad thing. There remains much pleasure to be experienced seeing and feeling the familiar technosex/bioport/ stilted dialogue/coexistence of analog and digital technologies (and what that coexistence suggests about the chaos of our time). But it's not the recognizable tropes that had them running for the exits at Cannes; on the other hand if you want the familiar, you deserve what you get seeking it in the corpus of David Cronenberg. 

He ups the in-world stakes in a way that will alienate part of his audience, especially in the US at this particular moment, but it only underscores the urgency of the questions he's always been asking, questions that he (and we) are running out of time to explore: what are we making of our world? How are we changing to adapt to it? Do we possess not just the capability but the faith necessary to discard what we knew to embrace a future that may be better than our present? 

On top of all of this: excellent use of the spaces in Athens to underscore the movie's themes; uniform commitment on the part of the cast; one of the best kisses I've seen in a movie of late; and the thing's funnier than you'd expect.

BENEDETTA

Anyone cornered by an atheist at a cocktail party knows that militant denial can be just as tedious as blind piety. You don't have to be among the faithful to be bored by films that bash religion. I'm as mindful (and weary) of the centuries-long and still ongoing cruelties and violence inflicted in the name of God. I fear that Hollywood has embraced the same awareness, to the point that filmmakers are allowed to indulge in a form of religion-bashing that makes for uniformly lazy storytelling. Jo Brennan's carefully articulated review of Rose Glass' SAINT MAUD helped me understand why these movies have failed - for the most part, having made the observation that the church is corrupt, or that faith is the habitat of the delusional or the traumatized or the hypocrite, some filmmakers may be left sitting on a smug cushion of "oh did I just BLOW YOUR MIND?" while their movie just stops, having nowhere else to go.

To be sure, Paul Verhoeven casts a whole lot of aspersion on the church in BENEDETTA; particular attention is paid to the tight grip the church makes on finances (the Abbess even makes the blunt point that her convent is not a charity), as well as the naturally human impulses that fly in the face of religious comport, human urges that only intensify under the weight of religious duty. And the thing has willful, even giddy, irreverence all through it, from its basis in the story of a 17th century lesbian nun to the fact that it's, y'know, a movie by Paul Verhoeven (who announces his intent from the start with not one, not two, but three scenes of scatological eruption blasting forth in the first half hour).

But the movie benefits strongly from Verhoeven's masterful touches. The hypocrisy of the church is revealed with a great deal of earthy humor (there is legend-level nun-side-eye in nearly every scene - just because they're devout doesn't mean they lack opinions), and Verhoeven and cast are as uninhibited in delivering Benedetta's visions as they are her sex scenes. There are generous cinematic allusions as well, mainly to Verhoeven's movies (Benedetta's sexuality confounds authority as strongly as Rachel's in BLACK BOOK; oddly, we also get a few nods to ROBOCOP, especially in the first third) but also Hitchcock's (a nun's ascent up a tower leads to an earthly plummet, as in VERTIGO - and what else is the inspired dildo but 2021's best Macguffin?).

But where Verhoeven leaves the wanna-be-blasphemers in the dust is in his earnest appreciation for, and preservation of, the mysteries of faith. The ambiguity is what drives this thing, as are the questions it raises that it is too smart and generous to answer for us. The earnestness with which Benedetta's love for Bartolomea intertwines with her love for Jesus is palpable; like Jesus, she squares the human with the divine in perfect harmony, and the true hypocrisy of the church manifests in its inability to recognize or understand this (indeed, that Benedetta attains her divinity through embracing her pleasure scares THEE SHIT out of the patriarchy, aghast that she, not they, were chosen.) The mystery is preserved right through the final title card of the epilogue, after which Verhoeven's credit tags the thing as loud as a thump on a Bible. The movie is funny, raunchy, downright horny, human, and ambiguous; and only one truly possessed by faith could have made it. Hallelujah, and amen.

THE GRAPES OF DEATH

Some of the greatest horror films are the saddest, the ones that capture the melancholy of being far from what you know, and knowing you will never return. The empty train that takes you to a world you no longer recognize. The friend who disappears. The newcomer who, through the sheer oddness of his body language, seems to bring hell with him. The landscape that looks too, too calm, the unsettled emptiness that surrounds you, wide open and free and making you know that nothing you knew no longer exists over the horizon. The intensifying nightmare around you, as everyone you meet is either deranged and psychotic or as helpless as you. And even when you find the one person you were heading toward in the first place they too have changed, and are begging for death. You don't feel the event that triggers all of this, it's just a slow escalation, a feeling of drowning when there's no water in sight. The finality that arrives and settles, for good, now that everything you knew is gone. 

Zombie horror is rife with movies that explore this emptiness. There may be no modern cinematic zombie more iconic than the first: Bill Hinzmann's awkward but suited creeper shuffles in under thunder as NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD opens, wandering aimlessly through the empty cemetery before turning his sights on Barbara and Johnny. Hell does indeed come right behind him. And it explodes in George Romero's follow-up DAWN OF THE DEAD; the first third of the movie sketches in unforgettably economical terms how a zombie outbreak would lead to the absolute end of civilization, gelling nowhere so convincingly as when Fran's co-worker stares into space announcing, as he starts to truly grasp it, "Our work here is finished."

That horrible void literally spreads around the world, and a melancholy becomes pronounced in movies like Lucio Fulci's ZOMBI; there we start to feel that all bets really are off when dead people start moving and killing (the walking dead rarely feel so fundamentally wrong as they do in this film), and Fabio Frizzi's despondent main theme seems set to the rhythm of society's final heartbeat. Werner Herzog is more grandiose in NOSFERATU-PHANTOM DER NACHT; Klaus Kinski lends to his anti-human, parasitic Dracula an absolute helplessness to stop the feeding frenzy that is slowly murdering the world, and the victims can only live it up and get drunk even as the rats and coffins stack up around them.

With a resume that includes multiple surreal erotic vampire stories and hardcore pornography, Jean Rollin may not appear to be one who'd uphold this approach. To modern eyes used to the by now well-established tropes of modern zombie horror, THE GRAPES OF DEATH plays it surprisingly straight (indeed, it was Rollin's first critical and popular success.) The film makes more explicit the environmental threat that lurks in many of Romero's films: here, a new pesticide contaminates a remote French vineyard, infecting all who drink the wine made there with a disease that rots them physically and psychologically. The infected share with Kinski's Dracula an occasional terrible awareness that they are powerless to stop the violence they spread.

But the dream space Rollin actively investigated in his earlier work lends an expansiveness to THE GRAPES OF DEATH that only underscores its horrors. We experience the story largely anchored to Elizabeth (a sympathetic turn by Maria-Georges Pascal) and see this nightmare grow through her eyes. Though she weathers a number of one-on-one encounters with increasingly diseased and terrifying ghouls, many of the film's most striking moments see her isolated in expansive settings, airy but suffocating, as we see her options disappear around her.

Though Elizabeth's passivity is irksome to some viewers (just as Barbara's near-catatonia in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was, despite it being a logical response to the horror surrounding her), Pascal manages to hold our sympathies as her situation disintegrates. Anchored in the immediacy of her reality, her environment immerses us, and through her perspective we watch, we feel the world sliding beyond our control. Her reality becomes a nightmare, and we feel her hopelessness as that nightmare contaminates reality. Philippe Sissmann's sparse analog score feels even sadder than Frizzi's - it wouldn't surprise us to see him tinkering on a keyboard just out of frame, looking resignedly out into an abyss. The movie seems not to end as much as stop, and sticks with us so deeply that we feel that walking away from the movie will only take us deeper into its landscapes. I don't think we necessarily need to live in a world in which a pandemic continues to rage and keep us isolated from our loved ones to feel Rollin's void resonate powerfully post-experience, but it's sure as hell helping. 

the cat-turd on the cupcake

So late October 1993 I'm visiting a friend. Said friend is busy the weekdays I'm with him so I'm alone in his place. Waking up on my own damn schedule, I've time to myself. On two of those days, I figure, well I know he's a right-wing bogeyman but I've never actually seen his show directly so, in the interest of engaging alternative viewpoints to one's own, I spend the noon hour, on two consecutive days, watching The Rush Limbaugh Show.

I remember this was the time Al Gore was running around pushing hard for NAFTA, engaging the wiry H. Ross Perot in debate over the issue. To my surprise, Limbaugh credited Gore with winning that argument and laughed Perot off as an unhinged lunatic. So I thought well, alright what else does he have. My memories of specifics are hazy (by all means, if your recall of what you watched in October '93 is more crystalline than mine, please sound off), but I sure as shit remember how I felt at the end of both episodes: that for about the first two-thirds the man spouted rational, sometimes dull, occasionally-relatable common sense, but by the end of the episode he'd say at least one thing so heinous, at best illogical at worst out-and-out hateful, that just cast aspersions over even the agreeable shit.

You're at a buffet party, and you're walking along a dessert table upon which is placed a grid of totally passable, maybe even tasty-looking, cupcakes. You think yeah I'll give one of these a try but upon reaching the end of the table the cupcake you're about to grab has a cat-turd, placed oh-so-artfully, in the center of its icing. You draw your hand back, thinking, well, I'll grab another one but the cupcakes across the entire table (which are, at a glance, about 90% cat-turd free) now all seem suspect.

Anyone I spoke to about Limbaugh's show (aside from those who embraced all of it) noticed a similar ratio: yeah, anyone can be down with about 75% of it but that other 25% is just unconscionable. That 25% would be cherry-picked and soundbitten over the ensuing decades held up both as upright and correct straight-talk by rightists and lamentable dialectical evil by the left. (I'm positive the DNC raised thousands, if not millions, from those outraged by Limbaugh's excesses, and thus amplified his outrages among their consituents - it's why I'm convinced the Boeberts and MTGreenes of the Trump Republicans will never be ousted from their seats, as their hateful blathering provides too much easy copy for fundraising emails.)

And in fairly short order the inherent cruelty of that 25% became a political party's entire platform. More and more of the party faithful, confronted with that spread, went straight to the cat-turd cupcakes out of preference and chowed down. (Many, many more, who were initially more comfortable in the rational, common sense-fuelled 75% would eventually shrug and dive into those tainted cupcakes, out of loyalty or weird expediency. And they could no longer argue from a place of rationality without their opponents smelling the cat-shit on their breath.)

He should have been held at arm's length; instead he was amplified and held aloft. Discourse was coarsened and eroded, and his hatred and pettiness, his sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia etc. etc. etc, is now the standard of one of America's leading political parties. May he descend quickly, and may all who blindly parrot and echo his utter contempt follow in short order.

top two, 2020

It's too, too late for a list, and I'm not even qualified to make one, really; for most of the last year my movies have come through the same screen as my news, my work, my socializing, etc. etc. etc. and a certain amount of weariness has set in as I feel an exhaustion that is, at this point, universal. It is a small thing, indeed, to not have been able to dive into cinema as usual, and a smaller problem, still, in the face of so many others. But it's a facet of what's been lost this year, a calamitous toll that even a modest retrospective like this must acknowledge.

So what I haven't seen outnumbers what I have: FIRST COW, the SMALL AXE series, SOUL, POSSESSOR, MANK (though I've little interest in that one, oddly), and many of the other heralded masterpieces of the year have gone by. In these times of nonstop anxiety and no-small-problems, the pain of not having had the experiences necessary to make any kind of guess as to the state of current cinema just calls attention to the larger issues plaguing all of us. Year-end list-making, in the face of that, seems a trivial indulgence, at best. I can't and won't list my ten favorites of what I saw and call that an educated guess as to what went down on our screens this year.

But two movies mattered deeply to me:

Made in 2018 in the run-up to the ascension of Bolsonaro, the queer Brazilian western BACURAU perfectly captured the mood of this fractious year; its arrival on American screens about a month into lockdown was just the rallying cry many of us needed. The story of a small Brazilian village beset by imperialist forces bent on its eradication struck a blow for the representation of those Bolsonaro would suppress. But its political urgency was matched with a knowing savvy for the thrills of genre cinema; without wanting to be too specific, it was the rare movie that captured the spirit of the work of John Carpenter beyond a shallow name-check. Between the passion of its politics and the effective staging of its suspenseful moments BACURAU emerges as one of the finest, and most galvanizing, action movies of recent memory.

If Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles captured something universal about 2020, then Gaspar Noe (of all fucking people) cast a spell to create brighter things for 2021. Noe's eight-minute SUMMER OF '21 promotes a forthcoming fashion line from the house of Yves Saint Laurent, so naturally is a feast for the eyes. But fashion houses are, perhaps unsurprisingly, generous in the leeway they give artists to present their work (indeed, a friend reminded me that Moschino observed social distancing by showcasing a 2020 fashion line through an astonishing puppet show). And even as YSL seem to have reined in Noe's more antisocial impulses the powerful cinematic sensibility he's honed over the years - his fluid camera, his breathtaking use of split-screen, his intrinsic grasp of the power of music (here a knowingly-deployed remix by SebastiAn of the Summer/Moroder smash "I Feel Love") - is used to powerful effect here (as is a silent but theatrically-present grande dame performance by Charlotte Rampling). With its fashion mansion in the middle of a dark and Gothic forest the movie feels as occult as SUSPIRIA, and one doubts that its COVID-resonant imagery is accidental (it begins with a heroine alone in a disheveled tower, then fleeing from an unseen menace - we can all surely relate). The models take their places in an audience, distant from one another but present together in their moment, and the image feels like a hopeful telegram from an immediate future. 

May we all remain safe, and eventually re-congregate to share such moments. See you in the dark, eventually.

quarante et un minutes pour le 3 decembre

fast track associations
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.