Documentary, Imaginary US Cinema

#62 – All Art is a Sham

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(2014, US, 80 min) Dir Alex Gibney. Cast Anthony Kane.

The gazillionth documentary from Gibney in the last couple years and the simplest in execution, being basically an illustrated talk from Kane punctuated with interviews with him and with famous faces that either back or dispute his thesis. And what a thesis – Kane famously quit The New Yorker in 2005 to write the book this documentary is named after, causing a kerfuffle in the arts in the process. The big idea, from the man himself: “We’re always told that what separates us from the animals is math, science and art. This is bunk – the first two undoubtedly serve a purpose but art only exists to fuel our narcissism. All art, no matter how misanthropic it appears to be, exists to reinforce our status and worldview. It’s essentially propaganda that is made by us, for us. In my book I describe it rather crudely as masturbating while looking in the mirror but that’s what it is – a luxuriating in our own self-regard while we destroy all around us in fulfilment of our childish gratification. Anyone who tells you otherwise – about the transformative nature of art or whatever else – has a stake in making you believe that to be so.” This is from a former cultural reviewer too! He expands on this with reference to the history of art, from Monet to Hirst, cave painting to Tarantino. The only time the unflappable Kane loses it is at the end, at a Q&A when an audience member calls him a fascist. “I am not a fascist,” he replies, red-faced, “The fascists loved art because it flattered them! I require no such flattery!” The film, much like the man himself, is mad and occasionally bizarrely persuasive. “Once we cast off the shackles of art,” he concludes, “We will finally be able to grow up.”

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Imaginary US Cinema

#61 – Laika

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(2008, US, 60 min) Dir Alex Lopatin.

A film about the famed first dog into space, directed by Russian-American artist Lopatin: “I wanted to make a film about how I felt about Laika,” he has said, “Initially it was going to be an installation, more free-flowing and associative like my usual work, but I discovered that it was impossible, for me, to make a film about her that wasn’t her story.” He funded the film entirely too and the amount of money up on the screen is testament to his commitment to the subject. It’s not a conventional biopic either, not that a canine biopic has much trouble being mistaken for one. It’s a diptych – the first part about Laika’s discovery on the streets of Moscow and her training up to the point where she is sent into space as well as being about the people who trained and grew attached to her. The second, shorter part follows Laika’s story on Earth as it’s been told from the moment she left the it’s orbit to date, specifically focussing on how she died and the cover up of the facts surrounding it. One benefit of this method is that while we get to hear the heart-breaking particulars of how she died we’re spared a reconstruction of the event. A great, sad film that, disappointingly, will more likely than not stay in the gallery and won’t make it to the cinemas that it deserves to be seen in.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema

#60 – Los Data

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(2006, US, 110 min) Dir Jay White. Cast Seann William Scott, Diego Luna, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Humberto Busto.

Bored programmer Joe (Scott) works for internet company Doodle, the kind of benign behemoth that fills its floors with foosball tables and vintage arcade games – exactly the kind of environment where Joe could get away with doing nothing all day if his bosses didn’t require work from him. Unfortunately for them Joe secretly knows nothing about programming but hits on an idea – for a fraction of his own huge wage he hires a programmer in Mexico called Juan (Luna) to do his work for him so he can lounge around all day and not get fired. His bosses, seeing how much he’s doing while still committing to the social aspects of the company give him a significant pay rise. The email confirming this is seen by Juan, who has access to Joe’s email, and when he sees how much he’s getting screwed by Joe he enlists his criminal brother Sebastian (Busto) to get revenge. Soon every aspect of Joe’s life is under Juan’s control and he has to go offline and get to Mexico to sort it all out. Hijinks follow with Joe ending the film having been drugged with peyote, blown up and, of course, finding a newfound respect for his Mexican neighbours and love with Moreno’s Claudia. Pretty good fun, gamely played by the cast and it doesn’t push the message button too much despite obviously being a parable for society and inequality and stuff.

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Childrens, Drama, Imaginary British Cinema

#59 – Penny for the Guy, A

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(1983, GB, 82 min) Dir Adrian Fisher. Cast Jim Patrick, Alison Patrick, Tony Cousins.

Another slice of magic realist life from the long lost Adrian Fisher, director of Creepy Crawlies and By the Light of the Blood Moon. If Terry Gilliam and Ken Loach got together they would come close to Fisher’s films. Jim and Alison – a real life brother and sister aged eleven and nine respectively – play brother and sister Jim and Alison. The two of them apparently live inside the bonfire that sits on the green of a Liverpool housing estate with their friend, the Guy (voiced by Cousins). The Guy is a kind of a father figure to the children, telling them stories at night about when he was a merchant seaman, the places he went and the things he saw – all of which is animated like a magic lantern show, or like the cut-out figure films of Lotte Reiniger. Every day the kids tour the depressed streets with their Guy in a wheelbarrow, petitioning for coins. Of course the finale of the film is Bonfire Night and of course their house is burned with the Guy atop it but this isn’t a tragedy, it’s portrayed more like this is the natural end for all of this and indeed the final scenes of the film show Jim piling what wood he can find on the blackened ground of the fire, his sister putting some old clothes into their wheelbarrow for the new Guy. An odd film for sure with great, naturalistic performances from the children.

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Action/Adventure, Imaginary Hong Kong Cinema, Science Fiction

#58 – Cyborg Hamlet

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(1983, HK, 105 min) Dir Jackie Woo. Cast Jackie Woo, Rosamund Kwan, Phillip Ko.

No real need for a synopsis here as it’s basically, as above, Hamlet with a cyborg. Okay, yeah, so what’s the deal, I hear you say: why’s the guy a cyborg? Fair enough, maybe it’s a bit different. Okay, so John Hamlet runs the biggest electronics company in Hong Kong and his proudest achievement is his cyborg son. Young Hamlet (director Woo) was on death’s doorstep when his father, apparently without repercussion, grafted a load of metal to him in order to save his life. Of course his father dies in mysterious circumstances, his electronics empire being taken over by the shifty Tony Claudius (Ko) who is also having his way with Hamlet’s mum, in case murdering his dad weren’t enough. Cyborg Hamlet is thus all sad in a rainy alley one night when the genuinely terrifying ghost of his father appears and demands bloody vengeance. Who is Cyborg Hamlet to decline? It all goes a bit off-piste from there – slaughtered henchmen didn’t play the biggest part in Shakespeare’s original text from what I can recall. Between crushing skulls in his metal hands there’s still time for some romance with Rosamund Kwan’s Ophelia before she goes mad (which is the bad guy’s fault too of course) and then it all comes to a bloody head at the wedding of Claudius and Hamlet’s mum which involves a massive martial arts rumble across three floors, a daring rooftop chase and someone getting a big metal pole like a javelin through the face. Great fun but no good for revision, kids!

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Comedy, Drama, Imaginary Swedish Cinema

#57 – Svalbard

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(1985, Swe, 100 min) Dir Tomas Kinnaman. Cast Stefan Gustaf, Harald Solberg.
Another animal-centric film from Kinnaman, following the international success of When I Was Born a Canary with this similarly contemplative but more expansive film. Mild mannered Peder travels to Svalbard to study the seabirds there (his favourite being the long tailed skua) and staying at the Norwegian station. Much of the film is without dialogue, following the characters as they traverse the vast empty spaces of the island – if you get the opportunity to see this on a cinema screen you should jump at it just for the landscapes. There’s a particularly deadpan Scandinavian sense of humour at play here too – you can see it in the way the camera pans from the flocks of birds on the beach to the gathered scientists watching them, huddled together in the brightly coloured jackets that identify them by the country they’re from, Peder in his yellow Swedish jacket by himself on the edge of the frame. The drama of the film is handled in a similarly removed fashion. While on their way back to the station in the coming night Peder and his Norwegian friend Ole are attacked by a bear. There’s nothing heightened in the moment, no music or close up or anything like that – you can see the bear coming from the distance and Peder readying his gun. He shoots it, it falls to the ground and that’s it. You can’t see nature loving Peder’s face in the scene as he’s facing away from the camera but Ole can and his placing his gloved hand briefly on his friend’s arm speaks volumes.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Action/Adventure, Black and White, Drama, Imaginary British Cinema, Silent

#56 – Captain Clock & Co.

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(1938, GB, 42 min, b/w) Dir Albert Clock. Cast Albert Clock, Samuel Teats, the Workers of Yew Street Pot Factory.

By 1938 the film world had been taken over by sound and even holdouts like Japan had been converted. The islands of resistance were few. One such island was that of Northern Irish auteur Albert Clock who quietly produced sixty films from his base in the city of Belfast from 1910 to 1942, all of them silent. “Sound perverts the purity of the medium,” he once said and while the ideal is shared by many, it seems unusual for Clock to be invoking the notion of purity when his films are of the quality he achieved. Albert Clock was the last in the line of the once great Clock family who sold his inheritance so that he could realise his dream of becoming to Belfast what the studios were for Hollywood. The only difference was that while the studios made films made by lots of different people, Clock’s studio had only the one artist – Albert Clock himself. On the one hand Clock had a firm grip on the medium technically, deploying all the tricks that would have Griffith revered but lacking the populist touch for sure, being that all of his films depicted usually made up tales from Clock family history. In Captain Clock & Co his grandfather (played by Clock) is portrayed fighting the Zulu (local pot makers in blackface) at the Battle of Blueford (which is made up). Despite the variable quality of the acting and the fact that the battles take place mostly on the beaches of Murlough Bay (for the sand, presumably) it’s stirring stuff with the kind of grit and realism that would be commendable were it in the service of actual history.

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Black and White, Drama, Imaginary US Cinema, Silent

#55 – Lodge-House, The

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(1915, US, 65 min, b/w) Dir Rudolph Henry Barrett. Cast Thoda Deane, Thomas Meecham, Alice Batt.

One of only six films made in the space of eighteen months by the unknown Thoda Deane who was being positioned by upstart company Star Film Productions as a ‘vamp’ rival to the likes of Theda Bara, Valeska Suratt and so on. Unlike the other five The Lodge-House was a success, even inspiring a minor craze in ‘cat’ collars (although I’m not sure what these are exactly). Unfortunately for Deane that success didn’t transmute into popularity for herself and soon enough she was, like so many others, tossed aside for the next in line. With all prints lost pretty much everything we know about The Lodge-House comes from posters and lobby cards that survive and there aren’t many of those. The most substantial source is an issue of Film Explosion found in a Long Island coal bunker in 1982 which includes a summary of the plot as such: “Mean Deane is at it again and this time she has Meek Tommy Meecham in her sights. Can he resist? Can YOU? Sweet Alice Batt will have to fight for her man in the ‘Lodge-House’ of SIN that she calls HOME! She demands PEARLS! She demands DIAMONDS! She demands THE WORLD!!” As you’ll admit, that’s some pretty vague stuff. The pictures show a pretty boilerplate melodrama of the day enlivened by the striking Deane with her slim face and big, dark, cavernous eyes and the set of the Lodge-House itself, which looks like an Orientalist’s opium nightmare.

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Childrens, Comedy, Horror, Imaginary Turkish Cinema, Science Fiction

#54 – Meto in Space!

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(1974, Tur, 67 min) Dir Esen. Cast Esen, Arzu Gorgun, Melek Okay.

I have to confess from the out that the only version of this film I’ve seen is of an nth generation VHS copy – it’s colours all blobby, it’s picture all shot to hell and without subtitles – that was downloaded on the recommendation of an aficionado friend of mine who is in possession of a lot of free time and standards that are minimal. While I wasn’t disappointed in the film vis-à-vis it’s badness I can’t say that I can recommend it entirely either. Meto (Esen, also director) was apparently a children’s entertainer in Turkey in the 1970’s and this was his second film (the first, called simply Meto, is for some reason not as mental). For humour think Benny Hill but coarser and more crudely sexual – the ‘comedy’ mostly involves Meto chasing buxom and scantily clad women around a cardboard set meant to be outer space (for production values imagine Ed Wood working on the cheap). Oh and Meto also is in possession of a grotesque nose that looks like the resulting offspring between a penis and a flute. I have no idea about plot at all but every once in a while something that looks like a flashback happens and there are all these colours and spinning disks and either someone dies horribly (eaten by spiders for example) or else their clothes fly off. Are these Meto’s powers? The idea that this might be family entertainment boggles my mind. The fact that this might be entertainment for anyone boggles my mind. If you hate your eyes, ears and mind then do yourself a favour – find this now.

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Horror, Imaginary Japanese Cinema

#53 – Dark Tentacles

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(1999, Jap, 63 min) Dir Hiroya Hino. Cast Yukie Inoue.

I don’t know about you but if – all those years ago, back in more innocent times – if then someone had suggested to me the erotic potential of tentacles I would probably have smiled and nodded whilst backing away from them slowly. Of course now that the internet has opened our eyes to these things actually being things it’s harder to think of anything uncomfortable or unpalatable that hasn’t been exploited by some deranged pioneer or another, all of which is a long-winded way of saying that here is Dark Tentacles, should you want it. It’s the age-old story – an anonymous woman (let’s call her AW) is chosen by some sort of grotesque and many tentacled pan-dimensional fiend to bear its terrible spawn. Apart from a brief prologue showing AW looking in shop windows while the dread beast monologues its plan, the whole thing takes place in her apartment where said hell creature does its gross tentacle thing. It doesn’t go straight to it though – there’s 63 minutes to fill here people! No, there’s a slow and agonising preamble involving AW held down and tortured by the slippy limbs with lots of close-ups of her agonised features and vulnerable regions. It all goes downhill from there when the pixels come out… The whole thing ends with poor AW swollen with the pan-dimensional fiends offspring. It looks like it was shot on a camcorder in someone’s actual apartment which makes it worse in a couple of different ways and though the creature itself is well realised I’d probably have preferred that it hadn’t been. Easily avoidable.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

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