Hey kids! Magazine round-up time;

I got the new Plan B in the post yesterday, and it’s just swell. Haven’t had a chance to give it a through going over yet, but from the bits I have read; Miss Amp nails my mixed feelings on the new look Le Tigre perfectly, Neil Kulkarni’s column is essential reading for absolutely everybody (but of course!), even if I don’t agree with him 100%. The Peel tributes are lovely, the illustrations are stunning, little contributions from Jeff Lewis, Herman Dune and the mighty Bearsuit are a pleasure, and, hey, the LCD Soundsystem feature is pretty cool too. I nearly wet myself reading a sentence in a proper magazine that invokes both Fluxblog and It Came From The Sea as “cutting edge tastemakers”! And to think people laughed at me when I told Barbelith was where the cool kids hang out! Well, actually they didn’t laugh at me because I said nothing of the sort, but maybe I should have done.

Also, everybody should get the new Terrorizer (or at least read it in the shop) purely for the hilarious and totally Tap-esque Gorgoroth / 1349 tour diary. It’s written by a German fanzine dude who’s clearly a huge fan, but yet he seems absolutely oblivious to the damage he’s inflicting to the fine line between Black Metal’s mysterious power image and it’s farcical reality;

“After a long discussion and Infernus seriously threatening to cancel the gig, the local organiser finally convinces a local woman, who turns out to be the housekeeper, to offer her private bathroom.
‘It’s nice to have some young guys around’ volunteers the woman in her 40s, and her teenage daughter seems to agree after Infernus takes his turn in the bath. ‘What a nice guy,’ flirts the youth.
…
The mother and daughter seem to recover after the show and sit happily talking and drinking tea in their kitchen with 1349, who are still in full stage dress waiting turns to shower. A bizarre scene with Frost still clad in his black cape! Meanwhile, Infernus tries to explain his musical vision; ‘Black Metal has to deal with Satanism or a Satanic outlook on life, without that it is by definition not Black Metal!’”

You said it dude.

I also picked up the new Wire as well. I haven’t had a chance to read it or listen to the free CDs yet, but with a cover feature entitled ‘In Praise of the Riff’, it’s sure to make good reading.

I’ve turned into such a magazine whore since I lost my internet access. I’ll be out looking for the new ‘Loose Lips..’ today too.

Here for you to enjoy is part 2 of my Film Watching Journal, covering four films which I watched over the course of one day a couple of weeks ago. There’s some fairly obvious exposition of reasonably well known films in there perhaps, but this might end up in Gist at some point, so I thought I may as well do it in full magazine style. Writing about films is weird. Unlike music, which has a well-established framework of writing convention to fall back on*, it’s difficult to know quite where to start when trying to fully convey your impressions of some utterly bugfuck movie. It tends to take a lot of words and, in this case, the valuing of clarity and honesty over linguistic style. Hang on, what the hell am I doing here? Self-critique? Fuck that, let’s just get on with it!

*well ok, cinema has one, but I haven’t read enough of it.


FILM WATCHING JOURNAL PART TWO;

22/10/04

Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer, US, 1965)

Found a copy of this in the market for £4. Gear!

Those already familiar with this particular legendary piece of pop culture dynamite can probably live without my comments, but for the uninitiated, read on;

Russ Meyer is often perceived as being purely a porn director, but I think that sells him a little short. This astonishingly titled feature for instance involves little more than a gang of bad-ass Amazonian go-go dancers driving fast cars, cracking wise and beating the shit out of people. All good clean fun. It’s generally regarded as Meyer’s masterpiece, if not the defining film of the whole exploitation cinema ‘movement’, and not without good reason – it’s little short of mindblowing, especially placed within the context of other ‘60s b-movies.

You see, b-movies from this period are usually pretty disappointing. With their sales pitch based more heavily than ever around their salacious posters, taglines and titles, the films themselves tended to end up as little more than mildly diverting kitsch oddities. Much to the chagrin of modern day losers like me trying to get some kicks out of them. Faster Pussycat on the other hand delights all concerned by turning out to be a terrific blast of punk rock filmmaking, and one that actually delivers on all its lurid promises.

After a brilliantly nonsensical opening monologue sets the scene, Meyer’s girls bestride the earth like avenging giants, towering over puny mortals and scattering them in their wake. (Regardless of his obvious chauvinist agenda, the way Meyer presents women as such insanely powerful beings is truly unprecedented, even by today’s standards.) A never-ending stream of the most ludicrous faux-hipster put-downs in film history are alternately bellowed with gusto and sneered through curled lips. The editing and direction is as whacked out and lively as anything the post-MTV generation can come up with, and the totally bizarro storyline actually manages to become pretty engaging, as a brutally minimal kidnap/greed/revenge drama starts to assert itself amongst all the craziness.

Best of all though is the VIOLENCE! It’s mental! The gleefully psychotic parade of beatings, stranglings, stabbings and car wrecks that draw the film toward its gristly conclusion are some of the most shocking and gratuitous ever seen in American cinema up to this point, and the way Meyer orchestrates all this sexually-charged carnage is just insanely joyful.

What more can I say? Quite simply the holy grail of trash cinema.

Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, US/UK, 1999)

For one reason or another, I’ve never got round to seeing this, despite being a moderately heavy Kubrick fan. Probably I was put off by the underwhelming “Kubrick goes out with a whimper” press reports, the snoozeville storyline, and the presence of the ever-despicable Tom Cruise.

So… the verdict? Well it’s a flawed film, no arguments there, but on the whole it was a lot more interesting than I had reason to expect. And it is also, I would contest, a very weird film indeed. Not weird in the sense that it’s full of crazy mad shit – it has a slightly more insidious and low-key kind of weird. It’s just full of so many baffling anachronisms - it’s rare to see such a widely released, expensive film in which it’s so difficult for the viewer to make sense of exactly what was going through the filmmaker’s head.

For example: the New York street scenes are obviously filmed on really unconvincing sets – melodramatic lighting, almost entirely deserted, no graffiti or litter or anything, probably two-dimensional buildings if you look hard enough. I guess this is probably a result of Kubrick’s famous refusal to film outside England (which you’ll remember also led to the rather unconvincing looking Vietnam in Full Metal Jacket), but nevertheless it looks ridiculously corny in this day and age, and you’d think they’d have made a bit more of an effort.

Related to this, various minor details just seem, well, just plain wrong really. When was the last time you saw a jazz club where the anonymous pick-up band playing inside (the film identifies them as such) have their framed photographs on the wall outside to entice customers in? And assuming such a club exists, would random shmoes wandering in off the street be treated to “would sir care for a drink?” personal waiter service? Does that happen in New York? And what about the bit where Cruise has a run-in with a well-dressed and well-spoken street prostitute on a central shopping street, who proceeds to take him back to her spacious city centre apartment? What the hell? These weird inconsistencies seem to point to the work of a man completely removed from the realities of day-to-day life. You could claim the film was deliberately stylised, were it not for the frequent and unexplained shifts in aesthetic tone – in complete contrast to the ludicrous street scenes and the baroque stylings of the Kubrick set-pieces, the bits dealing with Cruise’s office and home life are clearly (and hopelessly) striving for realism.

Also unusual is the film’s meandering and fragmentary narrative structure. Like some previous Kubrick films (A Clockwork Orange in particular), Eyes Wide Shut seems devoid of any strong beginning/ middle/end framework. It just lollops around for a bit heading nowhere in particular, goes through a series of carefully planned scenes and random events and then just ends after a while without seeming to make any real point about anything. No wonder the critics couldn’t get on with it – there are certainly few other Western film directors who’d ever be granted the privilege of spending so long making such a vague and strangely pointless film

Beyond all this though (and I’d hesitate to actually class the above as faults), Eyes Wide Shut still has a lot to recommend it. Primarily I’m talking here about the whole of the central orgy / cult happening sequence. Absurdly baroque and excessive in both style and subject matter, it recalls the ‘60-‘70s S&M decadence of directors like Ken Russell, only with far more in the way of pomp and classicism. It’s an absolutely stunning slice of filmmaking, as good as anything from one of Kubrick’s masterpieces. It manages to capture all the potent power/hidden secrets themes that come from that whole decadent-aristocratic-satanist vibe a thousand times more effectively than Roman Polanski’s dismal ‘The Ninth Gate’, which it superficially resembles.

It’s a pity nobody could have convinced Stanley to release this section as a short and ditch the rest.

Actually, that’s not entirely fair – there are plenty of other good scenes. Like the bits where Tom Cruise visits that costume shop in the middle of the night… they’re just, like, totally bizarro! And hilarious! And make no sense! It’s, like, suddenly ‘David Lynch directs!’ or something! Amazing!

Oh, and one more thought before I finish; does it occur to anyone else that all of Tom Cruise’s style, mannerisms, dialogue, behaviour etc. in this film is uncannily close to that of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho? It’s really rather disturbing, although come to think of it, Cruise is rather like that in all his films…. Man, considering all those creepy yuppie characters he played in the ‘80s he should SO have been cast in American Psycho, it would have been post-modernism-tastic!


Horror Express (Eugenio Martia, Spain/UK, 1972)

On, now this is cracking stuff. Apparently cooked up by the Spanish producer because he had a big model of a Trans-Siberian railway train left over from making a Russian historical epic, this ropes in Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as rival scientists travelling from Mongolia (or, y’know, some other poorly defined cold Oriental place) across Siberia. Lee has dug up a frozen apeman of “vast scientific importance” which he’s keeping in a heavily padlocked crate. There’s a fine selection of Murder-on-the-Orient-Express style walking clichés in support, including a Mata-Hari-esque Chinese spy lady, a Polish Countess and – yes! – Rasputin (or a thinly veiled fictional version of him). You’d think the rest would just write itself really, but there’s some unexpectedly ingenious craziness to enjoy along the way.

Instead of just coming back to life and eating people, the apeman is in fact inhabited by an ancient disembodied intelligence that moves from body to body, absorbing the knowledge of its victims by boiling their brains and making their eyeballs explode. Cushing performs an onboard autopsy on some unfortunate guard and discovers “his brain.. it’s smooth!”. By some means I didn’t quite understand, Lee puts a slide of the apeman’s eyeball under a microscope and discovers that he can see visions of dinosaurs, primordial slime and – bloody hell! – distant stars, hyperspace and the formation of the solar system! Far out!

Meanwhile the train murder mystery scenario rumbles along at a lightning fast pace, with the bodies piling up so fast that you’d expect any sensible passengers to leap from the windows and hope for the best. Rasputin hams it up brilliantly, turning up every five minutes to rave about “Ze poweeeyyr ov Saaaatan!!” and wave his crucifix around, Cushing gets a classic bit of dialogue - “Monster? But we’re English!” - and before you know it Christopher Lee is fighting off an entire train carriage full of reanimated soldier corpses with a sabre and a shotgun! And just when you think it can’t get any better, Telly Savalas turns up as some kind of cigar-chewing Cossack warlord with a New York wiseguy accent and starts beating everybody up. Incredible.

Gummo (Harmony Korrine, US, 1997)

Reviled by critics and shunned by audiences upon release, Harmony Korrine’s only feature length film to date (he’s otherwise well known in certain quarters for directing shorts and music videos, writing the script for Larry Clark’s ‘Kids’ and hanging about with indie-cinema royalty) has gradually built itself an impressive cult following, and it’s easy to see why – it’s certainly unlike anything else you’re likely to catch on late night TV. Ostensibly a freeform roving camera examination of the depraved and hopeless lives of underclass white trash youth in an isolated mid-west town, Gummo presents an engaging, unusual and perhaps even beautiful picture of America as a sickening dystopia in which drooling malnourished imbeciles raised with barely a shred of education or guidance scrabble to maintain their undignified existence amid the ugly remnants of gutter level pop culture and junk food mass production.

It’s not quite as much of an ordeal as that description suggests, and although the endless parade of shock value subject matter could make difficult viewing for the squeamish or easily offended, things are lightened by black humour, morbidly fascinating attention to detail and a crew of oddly sympathetic characters, their potential as human beings destroyed not by their own failings but by the relentlessly hellish environment forced on them from birth. The film concentrates throughout on the destructive and tragically confused adolescent behaviour given free reign by such surroundings, but even the most perverse activities are filmed with a careful and observant eye, imbuing the whole film with a sense of almost loving naivety and innocence which is in part strangely reassuring, and in part utterly disturbing. This contrast is perfectly expressed by the film’s soundtrack – a jarring mixture of FM chart pop and Norwegian black metal.

Beyond it’s many cinematic strengths though, Gummo leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and one that has nothing to do with dead cats, spastic drool or mouldy hamburgers. Basically, the film’s main mode of expression is that of a psuedo-documentary, complete with shakey, poorly focused camera work, dogme style naturalism and even straight-to-camera ‘interviews’ with the protagonists. This is generally handled well, resulting in scenes that are both comically exaggerated and utterly convincing. Are herein lies the problem: no matter how much is cribbed from neo-realist film traditions, Gummo is NOT real, it’s a deliberately crafted fiction. And isn’t the idea of a bunch of film school grads and LA movie brats (Chloe Sevigny’s in it for krists sake!) pretending to be grotesque inbred rednecks and presenting the results as reality rather, well, conceited and distasteful..?

Gregg Araki’s ‘teenage apocalypse’ trilogy of films explored similar themes and imagery, and achieved a similarly challenging impact from within the context of a stylised and exaggerated nightmare world. From an ethical point of view if not necessarily a cinematic one, Korrine may have been wise to follow that lead. It’s telling that (for my money) the most affecting sequences in Gummo are the ones which most strongly diverge from realism – the lo-fi TV imagery/voiceover montages and the beautifully surreal scenes featuring the kid with rabbit ears.

Don’t miss a chance to see it, nevertheless.