It’s Halloween weekend again, and we went out of our way to select an extra special treat this year. Bennett Cain’s “Seed” is the most horrifying short we’ve had the privilege of introducing you to since our first Saturday Short, “Crooked Rot“. Enjoy.
Seed from Ben Cain / Negative Spaces on Vimeo.
When the mass public’s idea of “avant-garde” film is something like Rocky Horror Picture Show or Donnie Darko, or when their idea of a “cutting edge” auteur is someone like Tim Burton, then when (and if) they do get exposed to the real thing, the inevitable happens: shortly into the film, one hears grumbling, perhaps even aggressive anger, impassioned charges of pretension, and eventually, the sight of patrons heading for the nearest exit.
For those inclined, take this as a good sign to stay for the challenge.
“Elitism” in artistic taste has become a dirty word. Frequently, one hears the excruciatingly lame defense for not being to handle it, “Well, it’s just my taste and it doesn’t really matter”.
Actually, it does. Because your “taste” is a reflection of your willingness to confront and evolve past tradition, and that takes balls.
Even the so-called “cult crowd” has its limitations, and usually this crowd consists of mainly under thirty geeks who will inevitably become tomorrow’s conservatives.
Dispensing first of preconceived notions of “what film is” and “what film isn’t” and mantling an attitude of being “boundlessly expansive” undoubtedly helps in shedding the possibilities of conservative infections. In the true spirit of October 31st, this list celebrates a provocative nature in the medium of film.
1. E. Elias Merhige‘s Begotten (1990) has a texture of intensity unlike any other film. The fact that this silent, punk retelling of creation, passion, and apocalypse even made it’s way into the so-called art house circuit and festival scene amounted to a minor miracle. At nearly an hour and a half, this film admirably refuses to follow the arc of narrative ground rules and, therefore, will tax the post-Matrix crowd. A few amateurs feebly attempted to compare it to Eraserhead. Unfortunately, Merhige’s follow ups have been noble failures.
2. A.I. (Steven Spielberg/Stanley Kubrick) (2001) was already an extinct dinosaur when it was released, being, quite possibly, the last of the epic art films. It is a film that will not pay phony homage to its viewers, nor satisfy cursory cravings. Spielberg fans expressed disappointment and even outrage, which is understandable since their god, along with George Lucas, considerably helped reduce the art of film to happy meal-styled movie making. A.I. disturbed many viewers and, although it is Continue reading 2010 OCTOBER 31ST FRINGE VIEWING LIST: FILMS FOR THE BOURGEOISIE TO WALK OUT ON
DIRECTED BY: Mark Romanek
FEATURING: Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley, Charlotte Rampling
PLOT: Kathy,Tommy and Ruth grow up at the pleasant but isolated Hallisham Academy in a fictional Britain that never was; they fall in and out of love with each other and grow up to discover that the purpose of their lives has already been set for them.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s not weird, though the mix of genres is unprecedented. The premise is speculative—it would be science fiction had it been set in the future instead of an alternate past—but the execution is conventional, laid down with a Merchant-Ivory-ish gravitas.
COMMENTS: I’ll respect convention and won’t give away the “spoiler” for Never Let Me Go, despite the facts that 1). the trailer reveals it to the observant viewer who has seen a couple of key B-movies from which the premise is derived, and 2). the mystery surrounding the children of Hallisham Academy is divulged about twenty minutes into the film. Point 2) is key, because this movie works not by slowly revealing twists and secrets, but by keeping us watching in horror at the ironic inevitability of the children’s unfolding fate. Locked away from the outside world in the comfortable but disquietingly totalitarian Academy, the kids make up horrible stories about what happens to disobedient children who leave the grounds (dismemberment and starvation); their myths about their own fates persist into adulthood, but the audience always understands that they are doomed even as they cling to desperate hopes. One of the biggest problems with the film is that it lacks background detail; viewing things entirely from the perspective of the trapped children, we never get enough of a sense of the larger society and its skewed politics and ethics, and are left to raise a lot of issues for ourselves. Too many questions about this Brave Alternate World are left unanswered (primarily, why our protagonists go so gently into that good night, hardly struggling against their fate). The love story is predictable, but that doesn’t make it any the less emotionally affecting, thanks to some great performances. Carey Mulligan, a rising star, carries the film with an often heartbreaking performance: smarter and less prone to illusion than her companions, the despair starts to register in her eyes just a few moments before it reaches Garfield or Knightley’s. She also cries on cue, including a doozy that rolls down her face and ends up hanging off her chin for a second or two. Garfield, currently being groomed to be the next Spider-Man, is acceptable as the awkward and occasionally unbalanced male love interest, and Knightley is pro as the seethingly jealous and gently vindictive third point of the love triangle. Kudos go out to the casting director for signing a trio of child actors that are not only fine thespians, but are also almost perfect genetic models for their grown-up counterparts. The cinematography is pleasing, sometimes poetic, with lonely fields and deserted beaches lit by soft golden glows. Despite its effective mood of melancholy, however, the film never really takes off. Director Romanek seems self-conscious in adapting the famed literary property. He’s so careful to be respectful, restrained and tastefully subtle so that the film will come off as “serious” and “important” that the tale fails to live and breathe. (Having the lead character deliver the obvious moral in a closing monologue—just in case viewers missed the script’s Oscar-caliber metaphors—was a bad decision). The end result is a story that sends the viewer out mildly depressed, rather than existentially shattered. Despite not quite achieving its full potential, Never Let Me Go still a good choice for the arthouse patron jonesing for a flick with Brit accents, teardrops, and no car chases.
The film was adapted, with the author’s blessing and oversight, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed novel. Ishiguro’s main weird movie connection is that he wrote the original screenplay for The Saddest Music in the World, although director Guy Maddin and his writing partner George Toles significantly surrealized the British writer’s scenario. Director Mark Romanek’s previous feature was One Hour Photo (2002), an offbeat psychological thriller that cast Robin Williams way against type as a creepy, delusional photo developer. His first, hard to find feature Static (1985), about a worker in a crucifix factory who thinks he has found a way to take pictures of Heaven, is reputedly quite weird (thanks to L. Robb Hubbard for reminding us of that last point).
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
DIRECTED BY: Mark Region
FEATURING: Jason Kulas, Peggy McClellan
PLOT: Although it’s fairly incoherent, the core of the story involves two medical students working on a project and a serial killer who is stalking the area; telepathy and ghosts also play significant roles, and clunky “special effects” are added courtesy of primitive CAD software.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: “Huh?,” “um…,” and “whah?” are all equally valid responses to After Last Season. This movie may go down as this generation’s Beast of Yucca Flats: stultifyingly dull at times, but so full of misguided directorial choices and failed attempts at cinematic poetry that it takes on a dreamlike character. Watching After Last Season is like trying to follow a old timey radio monologue on an AM radio station with fading reception: you can tell there’s a voice trying to make itself heard, but the transmission is so garbled that the basics of the story become lost in static and long stretches of dead air. It’s difficult watching, for sure—thus the “beware” rating—but for intrepid curiosity seekers looking to experience the worst of the worst, it’s a must see. It has potential to become a The Room-like cult item. Time will tell if After Last Season gains enough of a following that its devotees storm 366 Industries World Headquarters and take the staff hostage, demanding this anti-masterpiece take its rightful place on the List.
COMMENTS: There’s a concept in cinema theory called “film grammar;” it refers to sets of filmmaking conventions that have been proven over time to work to tell a story to an audience in a coherent fashion. A director breaks these “grammatical rules” at the risk of confusing and losing his audience. Here’s a very simple example of a “grammatical” movie “sentence”: a two way conversation starts with a shot of the character who’s speaking, cuts to a reaction shot of the party who’s listening, then cuts back to allow the speaker to finish his thought. In After Last Season director Mark Region consistently exhibits atrocious film grammar: he will have his speaker deliver a line and then pause awkwardly, then cut to a shot of the listener Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: AFTER LAST SEASON (2009)
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DIRECTED BY: Abel Ferrara
FEATURING: Lili Taylor, Christopher Walken, Annabella Sciorra, Edie Falco
PLOT: An NYU grad student is bitten on the neck one night, leading her down a rabbit hole of moral and physical degradation.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The Addiction strips away the clichés from the vampire formula, replacing bats and theatrics with a personal disintegration reminiscent of Repulsion. What it lacks in weird imagery is more than made up for by its melding of Sartre, heroin addiction, and the supernatural, as well as the eerie atmosphere established by its chiaroscuro photography.
COMMENTS: Throughout his career, Abel Ferrara has made New York-centric films with a grindhouse flavor and an aspiration to artistry. In Ms. 45 (1981), he took on the rape-revenge film; with Bad Lieutenant (1992), he made a Scorsese-esque crime drama. Similarly, The Addiction is a one-of-a-kind vampire movie, marrying urban realism, graphic horror, and several films’ worth of existentialist banter. Although the latter attribute occasionally renders the film inaccessible, it also grants the characters’ neck-biting intrigues an unexpected gravity while making Ferrara’s serious cinematic intentions very clear. This is The Hunger for the smart set.
I Shot Andy Warhol star Lili Taylor plays Kathy, who’s en route to getting her Ph.D. in philosophy when a late-night run-in with a mysterious seductress (Sciorra) leaves a bloody gash on her neck and spurs a metamorphosis from mousy student to loud-mouthed blood junkie. In a series of violent encounters, Kathy’s newfound aggression (coupled with severe photosensitivity) spreads like a virus to her friends, professors, and even the strangers who harass her on the street. Late in the film, she meets an elder vampire named Peina (Walken) who teaches her to control her addiction while quoting William S. Burroughs and Charles Baudelaire; the ending that follows is puzzling but weirdly suggestive, as orgiastic indulgence and Catholic guilt come into play.
The Addiction is shot in high-contrast black and white, bringing expressionistic shadows in conflict with a tendency toward naturalism, especially as Ferrara’s camera prowls the classrooms and hallways of NYU. Taylor gives a stand-out performance as a woman rotting from the inside out, matched by her poetically hard-boiled voiceover. When she enters a university library, for example, she growls, “The smell here’s worse than a charnel house.” These lurid monologues color our perceptions of Ferrara’s New York like the saxophones in Bernard Herrmann’s score for Taxi Driver, drawing us deep into Kathy’s dissipation. And Walken, as usual, is the voice of demented authority, cavorting around Kathy’s exhausted body with his slicked-back hair and daffy energy. He’s only in one scene, but he casts a long shadow across the preceding film.
At times, The Addiction teeters dangerously close to being unforgivably pretentious; it’s packed wall-to-wall with philosophical jargon, grandiose statements about hell and morality, and vampiric metaphors for sex, drugs, and genocide. But the film’s saved by its (and Taylor’s) sheer conviction that something intelligent and well thought-out is being said. Even when the film’s open-ended chronology and its abstract conception of vampirism threaten to make the plot totally incomprehensible, you can hold onto Ferrara’s sincere interest in spiritual redemption and moral culpability. In the end, this thematic integrity, when brought out through Taylor’s uncompromising performance, blasts away any doubts: this is a totally different species of vampire movie.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![The Addiction (Limited Edition) [4K Ultra HD] [4K UHD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/4135mdzwlnL._SL500_.jpg)