If there’s one thing we like more than a talented, unconventional film director, it’s one who also writes extraordinary music. John R. Hand is one of these talented artists. His band, User Assumes Risk, mixes their disturbing electronic music with horrifying, gruesome images for a live performance that would make Marilyn Manson envious. CORRECTION: Although Hand is also a composer, the music in this video was actually written by Lemmie Crew.
Tag Archives: Experimental
SATURDAY SHORT: CHILDREN PURPLE (2007)
When coming across an artist like Justin Tomchuck, the task of selecting a single short becomes fairly difficult. Each video is very different from the next, while staying true to his unconventional style. Still, “Children Purple” seems to be just a tad more imaginative and wayward than the rest of his work. Enjoy.
48. INLAND EMPIRE (2006)
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“My response to viewers who are puzzled by the plots is, I don’t think you’re so puzzled as you may think. We all have a certain amount of intuition, and that is something that can be trusted and should be trusted… And so when you see something that’s abstract in a film, and you seem to be getting lost, the thing to do is to start talking to your friends, and they’ll say something and you’ll find yourself disagreeing with that, and realize that you really had formed opinions, and you had a scenario that made sense in your mind, and that’s valid. We know more than we think.”—direct advice from David Lynch on understanding his films
DIRECTED BY: David Lynch
FEATURING: Laura Dern
PLOT: INLAND EMPIRE shifts around on a dozen tectonic plates of varying levels of surreality, but the unstable base layer involves Laura Dern as actress Nikki Grace cast in a melodrama based on an unproduced Polish screenplay which was abandoned as cursed after its two leads were murdered. As she acts out the adulterous scenario, Grace becomes confused, coming to believe at times that she is the character in the screenplay. After consummating a relationship with her handsome co-star, that reality slips away and Dern is seen playing several different characters, wandering around in a series of loosely interconnected sketches that involve (among other stories) an abused woman confessing her hatred of men to a psychiatrist, the lives of a gaggle of lip-syncing prostitutes, infidelity dramas, and a sobbing woman watching a room full of bunnies in an absurdist television sitcom.
BACKGROUND:
- The film began as a series of individual short films shot on digital video, as Lynch was exploring the new format. After Laura Dern suggested working on a project with the director, Lynch later noticed recurring themes in the shorts he was shooting, and decided to put them together into a feature film.
- In his announcement for the movie and in interviews afterward, Lynch has said that he is done shooting on film and will work exclusively with digital video from now on, citing the greater freedom afforded by the format and going so far as to say that the idea of going back to film makes him feel “sick and weak.”
- Lynch reported that he wrote the film scene by scene, working without a finished script and trusting that connections would appear.
- The footage of the rabbits is recycled from a series of short films called “Rabbits” that was exclusively screened on davidlynch.com.
- Lynch has said he decided to title the movie INLAND EMPIRE after hearing Dern say that her husband hailed from that Southern California enclave, simply because he liked the sound of the words.
- Lynch invested his own money to get the film made. He also distributed the film himself, thus facing no pressure to make cuts to the finished product.
- David Lynch himself sings on the soundtrack.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The nattily-dressed, stiff and deliberately posed bunny-people from the series of short “Rabbit” films, who were so evocative that Lynch decided to give them a new home in INLAND EMPIRE.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: INLAND EMPIRE is David Lynch at his most deliberately unhinged, experimenting with how far he can stray from linear narrative while still producing a work that feels thematically whole, searching for the minimum number of recurring images and themes needed to stitch a piece together so that it tantalizingly approaches coherence without ever actually resolving.
Trailer for INLAND EMPIRE
COMMENTS: INLAND EMPIRE is a frustrating movie, or, more charitably put, a Continue reading 48. INLAND EMPIRE (2006)
BORDERLINE WEIRD: THE SHORT FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH (2002)
DIRECTED BY: David Lynch
FEATURING: Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance, Catherine Coulson
PLOT: A series of six short films spanning director David Lynch’s career from the
1960s through the 1990s. We track Lynch from his early years as a highly experimental student to a macabre master of the darkly surreal with these films that show a man who needed to grow and challenge himself as a creative force.
WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: As collections of short films go, this is one of the most mercurial and hard-to-peg I’ve ever seen. There’s really no denying the odd nature of Lynch’s efforts. The first film alone, a minute-long animated loop of six hideous plaster sculptures throwing up, stands as a timeless testament to Lynch’s nightmarish creative vision. And the gut-wrenching scope of his silent feature, entitled “The Grandmother”, is a window into the mind of a radically different artist than the one Lynch has become. But, honestly, the quality and sheer atmosphere present in most of Lynch’s features feels absent here, and there’s not enough memorable material to consider this a momentous release.
COMMENTS: Much like a renowned painter or an extremely colorful luchador, a filmmaker’s work becomes more lionized as his fame grows, even his mistakes. David Lynch is a very famous filmmaker, so it’s only appropriate that this assortment of short subjects should come out to cement his status as an iconic artist and a true visionary in the world of the nightmarish and the utterly bizarre. But those die-hard fans of the man who seek a diamond in the rough here, a Pollack behind the frame of this small cache of movies, will likely find themselves disappointed, or at the very least conflicted.
If short films represent the transformation of a filmmaker as as he/she goes from one project to another, this gathering of shorts spanning Lynch’s career is a shadowy, rocky road. Half of these films don’t desire to be much more than insubstantial experiments, hokey dumping grounds for ideas that are really just there to try something out. They merely exist in a tangible form for the consumer because of the marketable name of Lynch, not because they actually have some sort of deliciously demented merit and are worth seeing for any length of time. And while the three that are good are indeed very good, it’s easy to put this one on the borderline with the vibes I get from the other three.
Let’s break it down by feature, shall we?
“Six Figures getting Sick (Six Times)” – A minute long film loop featuring a set of six Continue reading BORDERLINE WEIRD: THE SHORT FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH (2002)
CAPSULE: SCARS OF YOUTH (2008)
DIRECTED BY: John R. Hand
FEATURING: Jeremy Hosbein, Amanda Edington
PLOT: A survivor of the apocalypse is conflicted about his mother, who is addicted to a
black fluid that keeps her eternally young but causes disorientation and scarring.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Scars of Youth is a beautifully lensed film, filled with dreamlike images and montages. Although not impenetrable, the tale comes across mysterious and weird, thanks to the oblique, overwhelmingly visual storytelling. Unfortunately, all this beauty pads a thin and unengaging storyline.
COMMENTS: Scars of Youth is easy to critique. It’s visually and sonically entrancing, on its own terms and even more so when you consider the low budget and lack of any special effects. On the other hand, the story is slow, yet hard to follow, and what we do discern of the tale doesn’t add up to very much. The audio in some of the necessary background exposition is deliberately distorted in an attempt to create atmosphere that creates frustration instead. The performances are substandard throughout; the amateur actors can’t convey complex emotions, and the third main character—a sort of adventurer who smuggles immortality fluid past the checkpoints of an unseen civilization to our hero—sports an unnatural laugh that is particularly off-putting. Almost every scene is drawn out for far too long, with actors staring off into space with melancholy expressions or wandering around state parks, disconsolately staring at wire fences. These elements of pure mood can’t take the place of dialogue or action. There is full-frontal nudity to liven things up, but the mother-son incest subtext, intended to provoke, is laid on far too thickly, with sexual symbolism slathered on with so little subtlety that it becomes embarrassing. On the plus side, the eerie ambient music is a highlight, and the photography is especially beautiful and far more professional than the narrative aspects of the film. There are beautiful shots of rippling ponds, closeups of bustling ant colonies, sun-dappled forests, and a consistent, painterly eye for color and composition. Blue filters are used on the interiors in the protagonist’s lonely room, which turn what would otherwise look like a garage with white sheets hung about for walls into something reasonably mystical. The black and white dream and flashback scenes are crisp and lovely; one brilliantly conceived sequence is grainy and filled with afterimages, as well as some of the film’s loveliest symbolism. These short, impressionistic moments are where Scars shines; they could fit comfortably as mood pieces inside a major production with more of a story to tell. They just can’t carry an entire film.
Hand’s earlier film, Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare, was a collage-like creation inspired by the visual styles of cheap and crazy 1970s drive-in horror movies. The look, sound and pace of Scars of Youth is, instead, a tribute to Tarkovsky‘s Stalker. Hand captures the general feel of the Russian minimalist master, but whereas the murky grindhouse visuals of Nightmare made the lack of locations, story and acting talent almost appropriate, the ultra-clean, professionally shot look of Scars of Youth highlights these deficiencies. Both films contain a few gorgeous images which, if they could be judged in isolation, would earn five star ratings; but, in both films we also get the feeling that we’re watching the work of a brilliant cinematographer and sensualist who has yet to find a meaningful story to tell. If Hand’s storytelling abilities ever catch up to the level of his technical skills, he’ll become the Stanley Kubrick of homemade videos.
A signed “limited edition” of Scars of Youth can be ordered directly from JRH films for $15.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“…another successful experimental tweaking of a familiar genre for Hand.”–Mike Everleth, BadLit.com