Cinemania have my review of the big boxed set Stephen Fry's Inquisitive Documentaries. Is it good? It's Stephen Fry talking about stuff he's interested in, so if that sounds good to you it's very good.
The set includes Stephen Fry In America, Last Chance To See, Return of the Rhino (basically just another LCTS episode), and Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press. They're all good, go check out the review if you want more detail on why (it's MAAAAASSIVE is why I'm not going to rewrite it here).
Showing posts with label Cinemania. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cinemania. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Mouldy Sushi
Cinemania has my reviews of Dead Sushi and Mold. They're both deliberate attempts to make "good bad" movies, and both unusual in that they (mostly) succeed.
Mold is a homage to 1980s cheapies that manages to pretty much nail the tone (and horrifying-yet-hilarious practical effects) of its terrible source material and riff on it at the same time. The framing device about an American government desperate for a new weapon in the War On Drugs is an almost total red herring, but that's actually no bad thing as the real issues tied up with America's relationship with Colombia would probably have either been mishandled or have detracted from the film's manic go-forward energy.
Dead Sushi is the most-recent full movie* from porn-director-turned-total-insanity-director Noboru Iguchi who seems to specialise in this sort of thing. It's completely nuts from start to finish and, aside from a weird sense of permanent slight misogyny, is a lot of fun. All you need to know is that it involves zombie sushi and climaxes with a flying sushi battleship and an axe-wielding tuna-mutant.
*He directed the "F is for Fart" sequence in The ABCs of Death more recently. This appears to be entirely in character, if you look at his non-porn filmography. Actually, looking at his porn filmography on Wikipedia is pretty fun too, if only because the totally-functional-and-descriptive titles that pornos get are hilarious when translated from one language to another.
Mold is a homage to 1980s cheapies that manages to pretty much nail the tone (and horrifying-yet-hilarious practical effects) of its terrible source material and riff on it at the same time. The framing device about an American government desperate for a new weapon in the War On Drugs is an almost total red herring, but that's actually no bad thing as the real issues tied up with America's relationship with Colombia would probably have either been mishandled or have detracted from the film's manic go-forward energy.
Dead Sushi is the most-recent full movie* from porn-director-turned-total-insanity-director Noboru Iguchi who seems to specialise in this sort of thing. It's completely nuts from start to finish and, aside from a weird sense of permanent slight misogyny, is a lot of fun. All you need to know is that it involves zombie sushi and climaxes with a flying sushi battleship and an axe-wielding tuna-mutant.
*He directed the "F is for Fart" sequence in The ABCs of Death more recently. This appears to be entirely in character, if you look at his non-porn filmography. Actually, looking at his porn filmography on Wikipedia is pretty fun too, if only because the totally-functional-and-descriptive titles that pornos get are hilarious when translated from one language to another.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Profane is sort of Magic
Cinemania has my review of Profane. It's.... interesting.
If that sounds like backing-away-slowly "interesting", that's kind of a shame. I thought Profane was a good movie, I just hesitate to recommend an explicit BDSM picture with long unfocused psychedelic sections unreservedly, because it's either going to be your thing or emphatically not your thing.
It's hard to explain why I think this movie is good without potentially spoiling some stuff, so if you're desperate to hunt down a copy of Profane and hit it full-force with the Beginner's Mind (which is what I did, albeit inadvertently) you might want to stop reading and go organise that. If you want a pre-taste of what's about to hit you, but not to have things spoiled, here's Usama Alhaibi's Vimeo feed (the link is safe, but at least some of the videos are not even slightly Safe For Work - you have been warned).
Now read on...
I read a book of interviews with Tom Waits a while back, where he talked a lot about "the hair in the gate". Back in the days of reel-to-reel film, it was possible for pieces of grit or hair to get stuck in the gate that the film passed through. When that happened, the audience would see it superimposed over the picture, jumping about as the fast-moving film agitated it on the way past. Waits says that he enjoys the hair in the gate (a sonic equivalent would be someone else's music heard through a wall or in a crowded noisy market) because it forces audiences to make up their own minds about what's happening behind the distortion*.
Profane is very like that. One of the functions of the psychedelic segments and extended BDSM scenes is to confront you with "noise" that can't be processed logically and forces you to try and reconcile what you're seeing now with the information that was revealed in the more "documentary" scenes. As a result, it's hard to say what definitively what happens in the course of the film.
It's possible that Muna undergoes a spiritual death and resurrection in line with the Hero's Journey, and reconciles her cultural Muslim upbringing with her current life in a new sort of mystical spiritual synthesis. It's an equally valid interpretation of the events as presented to say that she fails to reconcile with Islam and becomes an atheist, or to say that the movie is an account of her total spiritual destruction and that by the end she has been entirely consumed and/or possessed by the Djinn. I know which of those I believe, but I'm fairly sure that someone with a different psychic makeup would draw an entirely different conclusion.
The other function of the psychedelic scenes is to mirror Muna's state of mind. This isn't new - lots of films have attempted to convey the experience of taking mind-altering drugs - but Profane is the first movie I've seen to attempt to show drug effects relative to one another, from a subjective point of view. Muna drinks and smokes pot as well as snorting coke and assorted crushed-up pharmaceuticals, and each drug changes the film in noticeable and highly characteristic ways. It's a really interesting device to try and get you into a character's head (as well as making a subtle point about allowable and banned forms of perception) and I thought it was really effective.
What Usama Alshaibi has done with Profane is a sort of Magical cinema. The closest cousins I can think of would be David Lynch or Alejandro Jodorowsky (I've also seen him compared to Kenneth Anger, but I haven't seen any of Anger's films so I can't really comment on that). Both Jodorowsky and Lynch rely on symbolism to carry a lot of the weight of their films, and construct them with a specific psychological impact in mind for the audience.
The Magical element of this is that, because the nature of the symbols is not explicitly decoded, the viewer's subconscious does a lot of the processing in line with their own perceptual reality filters. The full effect of the film is then felt over the course of the next few weeks or months as it slowly unpacks its baggage into the conscious mind. Because the decoding filters aren't "up" and screening the information as it comes in, charge** isn't lost or diffused and it's actually possible for the film to change you (albeit subtly) in ways a more straightforward narrative can't.
I am not the same person I was before I watched Profane - not much different, but certainly not the same.
* This could also be understood as forcibly opening up a gap between perception and reality (or "reality" as relates to the medium in question) as discussed here.
**I try hard to avoid New Age-yness, or "Magickal" language here, because my point is that Magic is a way of explaining a set of processes (for example "negative energy" is a metaphor, not a measurable physical phenomenon) that can be explained in other ways, but (I believe) less effectively. However, I can't think of a better word here. "Charge" in this context would probably be best described as the sense of emotional realness and immediacy in an idea - the difference between reading about something and experiencing it, for example.
If that sounds like backing-away-slowly "interesting", that's kind of a shame. I thought Profane was a good movie, I just hesitate to recommend an explicit BDSM picture with long unfocused psychedelic sections unreservedly, because it's either going to be your thing or emphatically not your thing.
It's hard to explain why I think this movie is good without potentially spoiling some stuff, so if you're desperate to hunt down a copy of Profane and hit it full-force with the Beginner's Mind (which is what I did, albeit inadvertently) you might want to stop reading and go organise that. If you want a pre-taste of what's about to hit you, but not to have things spoiled, here's Usama Alhaibi's Vimeo feed (the link is safe, but at least some of the videos are not even slightly Safe For Work - you have been warned).
Now read on...
I read a book of interviews with Tom Waits a while back, where he talked a lot about "the hair in the gate". Back in the days of reel-to-reel film, it was possible for pieces of grit or hair to get stuck in the gate that the film passed through. When that happened, the audience would see it superimposed over the picture, jumping about as the fast-moving film agitated it on the way past. Waits says that he enjoys the hair in the gate (a sonic equivalent would be someone else's music heard through a wall or in a crowded noisy market) because it forces audiences to make up their own minds about what's happening behind the distortion*.
Profane is very like that. One of the functions of the psychedelic segments and extended BDSM scenes is to confront you with "noise" that can't be processed logically and forces you to try and reconcile what you're seeing now with the information that was revealed in the more "documentary" scenes. As a result, it's hard to say what definitively what happens in the course of the film.
It's possible that Muna undergoes a spiritual death and resurrection in line with the Hero's Journey, and reconciles her cultural Muslim upbringing with her current life in a new sort of mystical spiritual synthesis. It's an equally valid interpretation of the events as presented to say that she fails to reconcile with Islam and becomes an atheist, or to say that the movie is an account of her total spiritual destruction and that by the end she has been entirely consumed and/or possessed by the Djinn. I know which of those I believe, but I'm fairly sure that someone with a different psychic makeup would draw an entirely different conclusion.
The other function of the psychedelic scenes is to mirror Muna's state of mind. This isn't new - lots of films have attempted to convey the experience of taking mind-altering drugs - but Profane is the first movie I've seen to attempt to show drug effects relative to one another, from a subjective point of view. Muna drinks and smokes pot as well as snorting coke and assorted crushed-up pharmaceuticals, and each drug changes the film in noticeable and highly characteristic ways. It's a really interesting device to try and get you into a character's head (as well as making a subtle point about allowable and banned forms of perception) and I thought it was really effective.
What Usama Alshaibi has done with Profane is a sort of Magical cinema. The closest cousins I can think of would be David Lynch or Alejandro Jodorowsky (I've also seen him compared to Kenneth Anger, but I haven't seen any of Anger's films so I can't really comment on that). Both Jodorowsky and Lynch rely on symbolism to carry a lot of the weight of their films, and construct them with a specific psychological impact in mind for the audience.
The Magical element of this is that, because the nature of the symbols is not explicitly decoded, the viewer's subconscious does a lot of the processing in line with their own perceptual reality filters. The full effect of the film is then felt over the course of the next few weeks or months as it slowly unpacks its baggage into the conscious mind. Because the decoding filters aren't "up" and screening the information as it comes in, charge** isn't lost or diffused and it's actually possible for the film to change you (albeit subtly) in ways a more straightforward narrative can't.
I am not the same person I was before I watched Profane - not much different, but certainly not the same.
* This could also be understood as forcibly opening up a gap between perception and reality (or "reality" as relates to the medium in question) as discussed here.
**I try hard to avoid New Age-yness, or "Magickal" language here, because my point is that Magic is a way of explaining a set of processes (for example "negative energy" is a metaphor, not a measurable physical phenomenon) that can be explained in other ways, but (I believe) less effectively. However, I can't think of a better word here. "Charge" in this context would probably be best described as the sense of emotional realness and immediacy in an idea - the difference between reading about something and experiencing it, for example.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
The Scar Crow
Cinemania has my review of The Scar Crow. It was pretty much the guide for how not to make a low-budget horror movie.
I felt like it was aiming for a sort of Severance meets The Wicker Man vibe (High Weirdness interspersed with witty sarcastic English people getting humorously murdered) but ended up flailing wildly back and forth between Troma-flavoured gore madness and the dullest possible kitchen sink melodrama.
All the synopses I read of this movie talk about the witch panics in early modern Europe (an interesting period of history and good for the High Weirdness angle). Unfortunately, The Scar Crow doesn't really dig into the material that deeply, and undercuts any point about the accused women being wronged by having its witches actually be wicked witches who truck with the devil and summon the dead.
Actually, the basic setup reminded me a lot of another terrible movie - Lesbian Vampire Killers* except that LVK was over the top and campy and actually bothered to flesh out its ludicrous back story. It also had the balls to pitch an imaginary sequel about gay werewolves post-credits.
Troma-gore can be pretty good if that's your thing (and the two Troma-y scenes in The Scar Crow are pretty hilarious**) but you have to wade through a lot of unlikeable men discussing their uninteresting relationship dramas to get there. Also montages - exercising montages, studying magic montages, burying a corpse over and over again montages, drinking montages, drunken making out montages, endless, endless, dull, dull montages.
On the plus side, this movie and The Mark of the Beast have taught me a valuable lesson - if the opening credits of a movie are just text over moving water and water is in no way relevant to the content of the film, it's probably going to suck.
* Disappointingly, just a movie about killing lesbian vampires - not (as you might have hoped) a movie about how lesbianism magically confers some sort of anti-vampire powers.
** Putting this down here so I can add a pretty pointless potential SPOILER WARNING... The first guy to get killed by budget-Jeepers-Creepers is killed by having his (obviously fake hot-pink plastic) cock ripped off in the cheapest-looking manner possible, complete with amateurish blood spatter from the "wound".
I felt like it was aiming for a sort of Severance meets The Wicker Man vibe (High Weirdness interspersed with witty sarcastic English people getting humorously murdered) but ended up flailing wildly back and forth between Troma-flavoured gore madness and the dullest possible kitchen sink melodrama.
All the synopses I read of this movie talk about the witch panics in early modern Europe (an interesting period of history and good for the High Weirdness angle). Unfortunately, The Scar Crow doesn't really dig into the material that deeply, and undercuts any point about the accused women being wronged by having its witches actually be wicked witches who truck with the devil and summon the dead.
Actually, the basic setup reminded me a lot of another terrible movie - Lesbian Vampire Killers* except that LVK was over the top and campy and actually bothered to flesh out its ludicrous back story. It also had the balls to pitch an imaginary sequel about gay werewolves post-credits.
Troma-gore can be pretty good if that's your thing (and the two Troma-y scenes in The Scar Crow are pretty hilarious**) but you have to wade through a lot of unlikeable men discussing their uninteresting relationship dramas to get there. Also montages - exercising montages, studying magic montages, burying a corpse over and over again montages, drinking montages, drunken making out montages, endless, endless, dull, dull montages.
On the plus side, this movie and The Mark of the Beast have taught me a valuable lesson - if the opening credits of a movie are just text over moving water and water is in no way relevant to the content of the film, it's probably going to suck.
* Disappointingly, just a movie about killing lesbian vampires - not (as you might have hoped) a movie about how lesbianism magically confers some sort of anti-vampire powers.
** Putting this down here so I can add a pretty pointless potential SPOILER WARNING... The first guy to get killed by budget-Jeepers-Creepers is killed by having his (obviously fake hot-pink plastic) cock ripped off in the cheapest-looking manner possible, complete with amateurish blood spatter from the "wound".
Friday, March 15, 2013
Life Without America or God Bless Principle
That sounds like a really heavy political post title, but it's actually just a flashy way of saying that I reviewed a couple more things for the good folks over at Cinemania.
God Bless America is Bobcat Goldthwait's* cultural revenge porn movie. Basically, he has a couple of characters talk about everything he hates about American pop/political culture at length, and then go and bloodily murder people who are thinly veiled caricatures of the stuff he doesn't like. On one hand it makes me a little uncomfortable, because "just murder every last motherfucking one of them" seems like such an American-movie solution to a problem (surely it would have been more subversive to come up with something shaped less like the things you're criticising?) but on the other, it's ironically a more honest approach than Michael Moore's just-an-outraged-regular-guy-for-reals pose.
Life Without Principle is a weirder and in some ways more interesting fish. I had a hard time writing the review, and am having similar trouble here because I really enjoyed it but all my attempts to describe it make it sound kind of rubbish. Theoretically a thriller, it's also a dark comedy and a complex and sometimes very slow meditation on avarice and the positive and negative power of money. I'd recommend it if you have patience and you're down with subtitles.
* As a side note, it makes me immensely happy that "Bobcat Goldthwait" is a real person's real name.
God Bless America is Bobcat Goldthwait's* cultural revenge porn movie. Basically, he has a couple of characters talk about everything he hates about American pop/political culture at length, and then go and bloodily murder people who are thinly veiled caricatures of the stuff he doesn't like. On one hand it makes me a little uncomfortable, because "just murder every last motherfucking one of them" seems like such an American-movie solution to a problem (surely it would have been more subversive to come up with something shaped less like the things you're criticising?) but on the other, it's ironically a more honest approach than Michael Moore's just-an-outraged-regular-guy-for-reals pose.
Life Without Principle is a weirder and in some ways more interesting fish. I had a hard time writing the review, and am having similar trouble here because I really enjoyed it but all my attempts to describe it make it sound kind of rubbish. Theoretically a thriller, it's also a dark comedy and a complex and sometimes very slow meditation on avarice and the positive and negative power of money. I'd recommend it if you have patience and you're down with subtitles.
* As a side note, it makes me immensely happy that "Bobcat Goldthwait" is a real person's real name.
Friday, February 15, 2013
The Mark of the Beast (and also I'm gonna try and write more stuff)
I'm reviewing movies for an outfit called Cinemania now. They tend to get a lot of horror/exploitation, non-English, art-house and documentary things - so that's obviously what I'll be reviewing. With any luck this'll prompt me to do more non-review writing as well.
The first thing I've done for them was Rudyard Kipling's Mark of the Beast - it wasn't very good. The short story I checked for reference, I found here if you're interested.
As a post-script to the review there (to sum up - the problems almost all stem from a clumsy transposition of the story form Kipling's India circa 1890 to a modern "Forest" which makes a very poor substitute) I had a minor revelation this morning. Actually, America does have a modern equivalent (or at least, enough of an equivalent for the story to make sense) to Kipling's India - the Middle East.
Sure, it'd have been on-the-nose to set the story there and might have made the movie quite controversial. However, it'd let the characters continue to be military with all the "protect your mates" culture that goes with that instead of no-one-in-particular civilians, as well as providing a plausible "subject population" instead of the movie's awkward references to "Natives". The questions that Kipling raised in his original story about the relative values of "civilised" and "uncivilised" lives, as well as the unease about the way that the use of torture subverts the cause it is used to support would also have made much more sense that way.
Oh well.
The first thing I've done for them was Rudyard Kipling's Mark of the Beast - it wasn't very good. The short story I checked for reference, I found here if you're interested.
As a post-script to the review there (to sum up - the problems almost all stem from a clumsy transposition of the story form Kipling's India circa 1890 to a modern "Forest" which makes a very poor substitute) I had a minor revelation this morning. Actually, America does have a modern equivalent (or at least, enough of an equivalent for the story to make sense) to Kipling's India - the Middle East.
Sure, it'd have been on-the-nose to set the story there and might have made the movie quite controversial. However, it'd let the characters continue to be military with all the "protect your mates" culture that goes with that instead of no-one-in-particular civilians, as well as providing a plausible "subject population" instead of the movie's awkward references to "Natives". The questions that Kipling raised in his original story about the relative values of "civilised" and "uncivilised" lives, as well as the unease about the way that the use of torture subverts the cause it is used to support would also have made much more sense that way.
Oh well.
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