Dane Benko

The Dance of Reality is More Like a Shuffle

The first time I ever saw Amarcord, I had had my wisdom teeth removed and was on some pain killer that contained codeine. My mind slipped in and out of attentiveness as for one moment there are young boys frolicking with naked large women, another moment Nazis and dancing through the streets, and at any moment silly or sober everyone’s uniform was more or less some form of clown caricature.

Jodorowsky’s Dance of Reality roughly matches this experience, though it’s only slightly less somniferous than actually being on codeine. Like Amarcord, Dance of Reality is an autobiography in the small vignettes projected through the kaleidoscope of the Carnivalesque. Jodorowsky returns to filmmaking after 23 years of expanding into other media such as Tarot decks and comic books, to explore his own childhood with his usual in absurdist spiritualism, slaughtered animals, and background characters of various deformities.

Still from Dance of Reality — And creepy masks.

The story follows young Alejandrito, child of a family of Russian Jews in Ibanez’ Chile. His father Jaime Jodorowsky is a strictly atheistic, high strung admirer of Stalin, and his mother Sara Jodorowsky a heavily bosomed and spiritual mediator who delivers her lines entirely in libretto (sometimes to the tune of the score, sometimes not). The underlying structure of the movie is difficult to sum up without going into detail about all the various trials and tribulations of the family, but overall Jodorowsky the younger has to deal with his father’s constant and sometimes contrary attentions toward masculinity, pride, and appearance even as such attitudes eat away at Jaime, leading him ultimately on a spiritual adventure after a few near-fatal run-ins with Ibanez himself. Jodorowsky himself shows up as a guardian angel to comment on the proceedings and to give his younger self much needed sympathy.

Sara acts as the spiritual conduit between them, often providing just the right ritual, observation, or attention to save the two men from themselves. Though her esteem grows in both men’s views, it raises from zero in the case of Jaime whilst grows larger for the adoring Alejandro.

Perhaps because of the autobiographical nature of the stories, or perhaps because of his age, Jodorowsky has contained himself somewhat on the freakshow aspects. He also seems to be taking the opportunity of digital production to make add even more saturated colors and even a bit of computer generated effects. The uncanny valley of CGI works in Jodorowsky’s favor here since the movie already looks and feels so strange anyway.

Certainly the movie manages to slip in and out of a solid dreamy feel, though like Jodorowsky’s other movies, its loose structure and whimsical tangents eventually promote exhaustion rather than awe. Jodorowsky has this terrible habit of running a movie a good half an hour or more longer than its purpose, and at least in this movie the fat is between the scenes instead of loaded at the end. Like a codeine trip, it is at points aware and attentive, and at other points only seems like you’ve nodded off a bit, but with a stronger awareness of passing time. And hey, this time it doesn’t seem like he actually put his actors on LSD. Hopefully. At least I don’t think he did.

One of the better aspects of the movie is the costuming. Jodorowsky starts right off with clowns, but from there forward most people have costumes just like their usual uniform in society – except the exaggerated colors and design go to show that even in the way we dress, we caricature ourselves. The same sort of Carnivalesque joke underlines all of the production design, even in the case of the landscapes he chooses to shoot (broad oceans and absurdly large mountains). So the movie is a consistently a pleasure to watch on that visual level.

All that DUFF in Retrospect: The Druid Underground Film Festival 2014

by Dane Benko

Last week the Druid Underground Film Festival played at Anthology Film Archives for a two night engagement. Created by Billy Burgess in a punk venue in Los Angeles back in 2006, The Druid Underground Film Festival provides “a traveling powerhouse of the most bizarre and provocative films on earth!”

Poster for May 28th DUFF show at Spectacle Theatre — Not featured: testicles, wallet, and watch. Well actually, probably testicles.

But what does ‘underground film’ mean? ‘Underground’ is the type of word that provokes strong expectations, but those expectations will vary person to person. Underground implies both independence and some significant degree of obscurity; it’s rarely used as a pejorative but the implication is that it should be. With increased accessibility of the Internet, is anything truly ‘underground’ anymore?

In 2011 I attended the Alternative Film and Video Festival in Belgrade, a festival for ex-Yugoslavian and international experimental film. Each year during the festival the festival hosts hold a panel discussion where they discuss the semantics behind their choice of the term ‘alternative’ to describe the particular type of movies they show.

The problem is, many forms of experimental filmmaking are no longer really ‘experimental’ in the sense that the filmmakers making them are drawing from a rich tradition of specific cinematic techniques. Or to call it ‘amateur cinema’ implies that it’s unprofessional even though the original term ‘amateur’ meant ‘lover-of’ or lover practitioner instead of trade practitioner. ‘Independent’ cinema has not only been taken by more or less American groups of non-studio feature length filmmakers, but the dimunization ‘Indie’ refers to a genre of youth stories featuring specific tropes.

Sometimes it’s called ‘non-narrative’ or ‘anti-narrative’ cinema even though some of it has a narrative. Sometimes it’s ‘subversive’ cinema even if it doesn’t particularly subvert any real or theoretical authority. Bryan Konefsky of Basement Films in Albuquerque calls it ‘undependent cinema,’ as in cinema released from the dependence of market, genre, or other established forms.

So anyway, what the hell does ‘underground’ even mean? It turns out that this two day event was bookended by two found footage films (actual found footage, not the horror movie subgenre popularized by cheap disposable income teen money seeking substudios), the first by Billy Burgess himself and the second from a Massachusetts VHS mixup collective called The Whore Church. These presentations could be considered the thesis statement and conclusion of Burgess’ programming tastes respectively.

Still from Rich Polysorbate's "Smerdly's Seahorse" — Form follows function. You think this guy’s face is weird but if you had a mirror you’d see your reaction to this movie looks identical. (Still from Rich Polysorbate’s “Smerdly’s Seahorse”

Burgess’ Self Defense and the Occult for Teens and Law Enforcement is a mashup of Christian, instructional, law enforcement, cult movies, and related content featuring witches, troubled teens, and a fairly linear progression from outright existential anxiety to mystic world destruction. The story itself is fun, but Burgess’ selection of content (self-professed to be administered by a mixture of drunkenness and instinct) is pretty much like his curating of the festival as a whole: a sort of glorifying abject attraction to sensationalistic sub- or countercultural communities.

The Whore Church Mixtape Vol 1 is very similar, except that Night II turned out to be more explicit (perhaps even pornographic) than Night I, and so was this found footage film to Burgess’ own.

What do Christian hymn singers with baby voices for self-accompaniment, witch-hunting police officers, suicidely depressed teens, prurient pornography, movie monsters made of slime and torn skin, rednecks destroying cars and furniture, and television advertisements for clairvoyant ambulence chaser lawyers have in common? A hugely orgiastic celebration of pure excess.

Which would all be silly and even merely overstimulating if it weren’t for the fact that occasionally you can tell that the subjects featured in the films represent what some people actually feel, believe, or even do in real life. ‘Real life’ being somewhat of a misplaced term here, being that each of these people and communities represented all seem to live in their own warped geography of reality, whether they consider themselves to be the authority or anti-authority. Fear of witches isn’t significantly different than fear of communism or fear of youth, hence ‘witchhunt.’

Basically, the Druid Underground Film Festival makes the argument that boiling under the surface of culture are subcultures, one and all ready to pop… or preferably explode. And yes, most of the films are fictional, but those that are fictional often function in and of themselves as attacks on the overhead pressure of non-underground society. When not fictional, such as the Jan Soldat film ‘Law and Order’ featuring an aged S&M couple who’ve been together in East Berlin since before the wall fell, it just punctuates the fact that much of the content shown is not as much wish-fulfillment fantasy as perhaps some people would want it to be.

Most of the footage was lo-fi, either being shot that way or an accident of the copying and compression for presentation. There were a couple stand out technical films that only serve to make the whole presentation feel weirder. One was Clown Town, an Expressionist film either shot at a very low frame rate or possibly even stop-motion animated (of live actors) that leads an uncanny motion quality that will fuck your dreams. Another was the viral video “Danielle”, the compositing production where a woman ages from infant to elderly in five minutes (featured at the end of Night II after a series of videos that seemed to be about creeping fatality, more or less).

Thus as proclaimed by the mixtapes, the films Billy Burgess likes to select exist at the intersection of commingling spheres of alternative realities, whether those realities stem from histories pagan, punk, cult cinema, horror, or even anti-communist.

Fortunately, it’s not quite over yet. The Druid Underground Film Festival will be continuing at Spectacle Theatre in Brooklyn May 28^th for the long form shorts program. You still have a chance to watch Satanists and sex fiends release some of that workaday pent up frustration you’ve been emotionally snowballing.

Oh, and Billy Burgess gives away prizes. Though it’s unclear whether these would be the sorts of prizes you really want to win.

A Primer on the 7th Annual Druid Underground Film Festival

by Dane Benko

Since 2006 The Druid Underground Film Festival has been a traveling powerhouse of the most bizarre and provocative films on earth!

Now it’s arriving at the Anthology Film Archives, with two screenings on Monday, April 21^st at 8pm and Tuesday, April 22^nd at 8pm.

The poster for the 7th Annual Druid Underground Film Festival — This is your brain on cinema.

Let’s start with the usual information. What is the history of this festival and how’d you get it started?

Billy Burgess

The DUFF is the accumulated result of my lifelong journey meeting filmmakers in late night trains, liquor stores, breaking bottles in alleyways and through the US mail. As an organization I’ve been doing it for 8 years. We started in LA when I lived on a single mattress on the ground in a noise/punk venue where I was assigned to book 1-3 events a week. Being a filmmaker who knew a lot of unrepresented artists, it was easy to find the work as I was surrounded by it. At that time it was a monthly event.

Now we are an organization which receives hundreds of submissions a year and I just got back from a California tour screening in LA, SF and Humboldt County. We’ll be in NYC at Anthology Film Archives April 21st and 22^nd.

So booking was your coffee money while you started fitting underground cinema into that space?

Billy Burgess

Yeah. Right out the gate I challenged the state of the venue itself. When I booked Metal shows I would project Mike Kelley and his bizarre, evil looking videos almost to trick people into expanding their minds.

Why’d you bring it to New York?

Billy Burgess

Taking DUFF to NY is a logical direction of the fest as a lot of work is international. NYC is the most international city in the US, making us accessible to weirdos from all over the world.

This will be the NY premiere.

Oh, I did not know that. What’s your outreach out here been like thus far?

Billy Burgess

We did a DVD release party in Brooklyn but Anthology will be the full main program.

I got a team of dedicated video freaks to distribute 1000 flyers around the city. People who contacted me because they saw that what we were doing was different than any other fest. Also a comic book store (Forbidden Planet) has been spreading the word about the show. They’re great.

I get approached by people on the subway who recognize me from the campaign now, which is great because they either make films or know someone who makes films. We are just growing a great little community day by day.

That sounds like a pretty old school style of social outreach. You shared your Tumblr page with me and I know you have a Facebook page, have you been gaining any traction on digital networks?

Billy Burgess

Yeah the social media version of us is out there. I think it’s good that more people are turned on to getting regular updates on the fest. We have some pretty NSFW pix on our Tumblr that I’m proud of.

This year we released a Best of the Fest DVD, 13 shorts and more accumulated form the first 5 years that showcases work from Rodney Ascher (Room 237) and Damon Packard (Reflections of Evil) as well as a badass embroidered patch we got sewn up in Woodstock available at our shop online.

It’s important that above all else the physical material of the movie trade be showcased because real culture is on the street, not in cyberspace.

That gets us to the meat of the question. In this day and age of YouTube channels, the proliferation of independent film festivals, easier access of foreign works through digital distribution channels, and audiences fragmented amongst various media, what is “Underground Film” and how does one go about curating it?

Billy Burgess

Something great happened when technology got cheaper. With video uploading on the Internet came unprecedented access. Anyone can make and distribute a movie, but the downside is that the precious gems are a lot harder to find and get lost out there. But they’re out there.

Most film festivals are content in collecting submission fees from their call for submissions, booking one screening and calling it good. I’ve heard of festivals contacting filmmakers who’ve shown at Sundance to book their films sight unseen.

This to me isn’t progressive culture. Progress is challenging the system to present works which are subversive and present new images to the scene. This includes so-called experimental films which tend to be exercises in technique and not truly experimental in that sense.

The dagger point of experimental film, in my view, should be the in creating new images and that is what you’ll find at Druid. No matter how polished or accomplished, if I’ve seen it been done before it won’t go in the program. Our culture doesn’t need another film festival of film festivals, it needs a shock to the system.

Still from Brennan Hill's "Hero/Psycho" — You non-film types may not know this, but VHS tapes taste like iron and sandwich bags. (Still from Brennan Hill’s “Hero/Psycho”)

It’s meaningful, then, to show this at the Anthology Archives, which holds much of the history of American experimental film.

Billy Burgess

Yes. Anthology is one of the last of the US theatres representing the original masters of experimental cinema.

Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, these people were my heroes and i was lucky enough to see their work on VHS as a kid. I took my 1st girlfriend’s virginity to Invocation of My Demon Brother playing on loop on a TV in the living room of my Mom’s house.

These masters came from a place within themselves. This is the point. So much of our society is a recycling of external images and this is why our movies suck now. It’s bullshit. We need new filmmakers with the guts to go inside themselves to the innermost secret place and come out filming!

Is there an opportunity then for the DUFF to nurture the growth of local underground filmmakers?

Billy Burgess

Absolutely. We are working on a platform for winning filmmakers to communicate online so that they can work together internationally.

I also encourage anyone who has been inspired by any film or been turned on to new ideas to contact the filmmaker in some way. Even if it’s just a YouTube comment like “Cool movie,” it can be a tipping point for a filmmaker who may be on the verge of calling it quits.

Filmmaking isn’t in a vacuum. We make the work so that the world responds and if the world does not, sometimes we lose a mad genius of cinema. The responsibility lies on you.

That being said we’ve had a lot of great people meet at our screenings and now are working on each others films.

So you’re no longer monthly, but yearly, and you’re a traveling film festival. Do you have any plans to take it other places than LA and NY, or do you have any shared programming with other festivals?

Billy Burgess

We are now doing a yearly event, yes. In fact we received so many entries this year that our long form shorts and features are screening on May 28th at Spectacle Theatre.

We are open to traveling and are cooking up new projects for NYC. We do a free raffle at every screening and will be giving away like over $300 worth of prizes or something crazy this year. Lots of crappy VHS and tickets to weird events. The Found Footage Festival has also generously donated some goodies to the pot.

Still from Danilo Parra's Torture Room — DUFF’s test audience kitty is nonplussed. (Still from Danilo Parra’s ‘Torture Room’)

Why should people choose to get their asses in those seats on Monday and Tuesday nights versus all the other events happening across this vast metropolis?

Billy Burgess

If you come to DUFF you will see an exhibition of totally new ideas and images! You will see actual live footage of the devil with an erection arrested on the side of the 5 freeway! You will see bizarre and hilarious animations from all over the world! You will see (in action) a bicycle make love to a live human being! You WILL leave the theatre laughing, conversing with fellow theatergoers and filled with inspiration for days to come!

The Passion of Noah

by Dane Benko

Darren Aronofsky has been making movies for a decade and a half, but the unprecedented financial success of Black Swan finally leveraged his name to new budgetary heights. Like with any filmmaker making this transition, the question of the new film becomes whether the filmmaker does better work under financial or studio constraints.

Well then Aronofsky decided to make his next movie about Noah, adding the almost inevitable controversies and reactions of audiences to religious themed movies. Early news was out of the playbook of a trainwreck in the making: something about six-armed angels (associated sound of people flipping through the Old Testament to remind themselves of whether or not this was mentioned anywhere there), Paramount requesting a different ending (associated conspiratoid grumblings of yet another Great Movie that Never Was), and a trailer that made the movie look no different than any other fantasy epic (hissing release of built-up schadenfreude from various people who aren’t fond of Aronofsky’s movies). Sarcastically or not, people wondered if Noah was going to be portrayed in his drunken state.

A poster of Noah — Call me crazy but I think Aronofsky’s next film should be Moby Dick, and Paramount should use this EXACT SAME POSTER to promote it.

As such, Noah has the supreme misfortune of being the type of movie that people go into with more than just their own personal baggage, but something closely resembling a hoarder’s attic-worth of preconceptions, expectations, and personal juju looking for concrete examples to fill the Madlibs form argument they’ve prepared for any Internet debate they expect to get into.

Thus, to cut to the chase, the easiest way of summing up Noah would be to say that it’s still very much a Darren Aronofsky product, so your enjoyment of the movie is going to be highly correlated with your appreciation of his work in general. More importantly, it’s sincere.

The problem is that it throws you into the world of Noah so quickly, it takes some time to adjust. From this issue will derive most criticisms of fantasy epic style to the film: quick introductory titles roll the audience through the first stories of Genesis; a young boy Noah watches his father Lamech get murdered over Epic Acting Barotone Voice dialog, and it’s but a few more speeches from Russell Crowe over the importance of plant and animal life to his kids before we’re already to giant crumbling rock monsters in an especially scorched area of a dying over-industrialized Pangaea.

What’s happening here is that we find Noah on the outer reaches of the wasteland the descendents of Cain have turned much of the Earth into, living a rough but comfortable life with his wife and three children Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Unfortunately The Creator (if I recall correctly, ‘God’ is never used in this movie) sends him a premonition of the flood in a dream, and so the family must travel to Noah’s grandfather, Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins being ridiculously awesome) to inquire whether the premonition holds any hope for salvation. Along the way the family comes across Ila (Emma Watson), an orphaned and wounded young girl that Shem takes an immediate liking to, cross the sordid band of raiders lead by Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), and discover The Watchers, six winged angels that fled Heaven to help humans and, in punishment from the Creator, were literally ‘encrusted’ in the rock of the Earth. So yes, there are giant, groaning, polylimbed golem/angel hybrids aiding Noah on his journey.

Noah Screencap — I guess it does take a lot of trees to build a big enough boat to hold that many animals… oh wait they haven’t begun yet. Oh. Ohhhh….

Whereas much of this may seem overwhelming in detail and underwhelming in purpose, it is world building that reveals quite a lot about Noah’s belief in and relationship to his Creator. Noah lives in a world where rock angels and giant floods aren’t surprising. It’s a new world: three short, quick shots of a snake, an apple, and a rock in a fist detail Noah’s entire history and lineage, his comprehension of the world. In the world of the film, the presence of the Creator is clearly felt.

So Methuselah helps Noah finish his premonition and the building of the ark begins, but for Tubal-cain in the forest amassing an army to take it. It’s here that the movie hits its stride. All of the characters in their own way, even the villainous ones, are motivated by a complete existential threat against their own survival, humanity’s survival, and the world’s survival, and the lack of clarity or direct communication of the Creator, the ineffableness of the whole end times thing, sends them in great personal trials. Noah’s dedication to the Creator’s will makes him sometimes blind or even adverse to the needs of his family (especially his increasingly lonely son Ham). Ila is barren, an issue that stakes the very survival of humanity in her romance with Shem and puts to question the Creator’s abilities to provide for the increasingly hopeless family. Even Tubal-cain, the heavy, sees the Creator’s ambiguity as permission to take over the world so that humanity can thrive on the basis of its resources.

By the time the animals have arrived and the rain actually starts falling, the movie really only has one last big battle scene and the associated ‘epicness’ of it fades away. We’re left with a traumatized family on a very small, very dark boat, who have to live with the first hand experience of massive amounts of death, no hope for the future, and a tightly wound mess of resentments with each other. The Creator isn’t communicating, Noah’s devotion to his instructions has reached the level of madness, and Ham plots vengeance.

Most people know the ending of this story, and so special attention should be brought to Aronofsky’s peculiar brand of darkness. It is well suited for the material once you have the obvious-in-retrospect realization that, well, Noah is an incredibly dark character. Also worth pointing out is that Aronofsky’s two most spiritual movies are both the ones with the most levity in regards to leaving the audience with a feeling other than sheer depression.

At the root of both movies is the strength of love against the ineffability of mortality. And for a director whose movies often make people feel like killing themselves, in both The Fountain and Noah, Aronofsky shows a sincere belief in the higher meaning of that love.

Oculus: Perspective Shifts between Past and Future

by Dane Benko

Ten years ago, the Russell family was met with tragedy. Young siblings Tim and Kaylie were separated after Tim shot their father to stop him from mauling their mother. Tim was taken to an insane asylum and Kaylie left with their parents estate, which she used to put herself through school in pursuit of antiquities to investigate the past of this mirror that their parents bought, and which Kaylie believes to be haunted.

Well now Timbo is getting out of the looney bin and Kaylie has, with a hefty bit of foreshadowing, managed to find the mirror once again. The two return to the house, where Kaylie has set up an elaborate system of cameras and safeguards to attempt to prove, objectively, that some paranormal force is responsible for the mayhem.

Oculus Poster feature Karen Gillan — Not to be confused with the virtual reality company Facebook bought recently, though the poster could double as the massive facepalm felt Internet-wide.

From this bare bones narrative, Oculus starts to do something a little different. Kylie’s set up is almost a direct answer to every horror filmgoer’s wish that the characters try a little scientific controlled setting observation of their perceived ‘supernatural occurrences.’ She has multiple cameras set up with alarms to alert her re: battery, recording media, and food breaks, and then various alarms to remind her of the alarms; outside check-ins, inside kill-switches, and replacement parts. Meanwhile, her manic flyover of these things are met by equal measure with the recovered patient psychobabble of Tim, who attempts to explain how Kylie and he clearly must have invented their memories of any particular ghoulish influence on an otherwise very real tragedy.

But as they go about gearing down to prove or disprove the impossible, the memories of that night resurfaces in each, and the movie cuts back and forth between the mirror’s seduction of their father in the past and the psychological tricks it plays on them in the present.

Structurally, Oculus is really interesting. It has to balance moving back and forth between Kylie and Tim’s perspectives, including moments where either character is not entirely sure what they are seeing is real, while also moving between the perspectives of the elder Russells, who aren’t prepared to know whether what they’re seeing is real.

With all the perceptual shifts and the motif of the cameras, one would think Oculus would go with the found footage subgenre, but writer/director Mike Flanagan keeps it clean and focuses on balancing the two tempers of his story while building up to the ultimate crescendo.

Oculus still — Well the mirror is pretty and all, but seriously, when’s the Rift coming out?

It’s not all as clean as it could be. The cross-cutting allows some opportunities for older Kylie and Tim to separate where otherwise their separation would have to be contrived. If you watch closely, their movements through the house don’t always follow a rational path. However, the movie excuses itself by doing two other things instead: the movements of the adult siblings do follow the movements they traced as a kid, in matched action between the tragedy of the past and the boiling intensity of the present; and the younger siblings seem to be as much haunted by their elder selves as visa verse, in some cases even crossing paths within the same frame.

Which choreography actually is quite pleasureable to watch, if you can handle things like peeled fingernails, broken teeth, and the occasional gleam of some floating demon woman’s eyes flickering along the movement of slamming doors with disproportionate hinge:oil ratio. Oculus is a pretty standard haunted object story, and, well, centers around a mirror. Expect tilt focuses revealing shockers from dark corners and lights to be persistently unlit.

This movie features some interesting casting choices from the wide world of geek chic, mainly Karen Gillan from Doctor Who and Katee Sackhoff from Battlestar Galactica and Riddick. With the situating of the recording gack, it seems like Oculus is aiming for a higher level of film nerd, but ultimately it wraps itself neatly in stock horror and is better for it, as with all the other structural things going on, the movie could have become messy quickly.

What the Muppets Most Wanted was Time to Think

by Dane Benko

2011’s The Muppets came with a big question mark for most fans over whether any post-Henson treatment could be up to snuff. As it stands the movie managed to capture a closely studied and caring revival of the franchise. The creative team behind the movie fought for the old Muppet magic against fan doubts, the financial question of a neglected franchise, and even Frank Oz’s dismissal. Nevertheless the movie not only managed to win the acceptance of fans, but also has managed its first sequel.

Muppets Most Wanted returns The Muppets director James Bobin and co-writer Nicolas Stoller, and switches out the warm and quirky presences of Amy Adams and Jason Segal with slightly sharper-edged comedians Ricky Gervais and Tina Fey. Those are promising indications going into a movie that starts right out with the Muppets’ surprise and slight confusion at the metajoke that they’ve been selected for a sequel, which they sing and dance about being not as good as the original (and also take some time to remind you that many other movies came before). Whereas the Muppets have always been self-aware, this metajoke is also laced with the slight sarcasm of the costar comedians.

Darker hues descend as a froggy criminal mastermind named Constantine (who looks just like Kermit, save for a big mole and sour face) engineers a break-out from a wintery gulag somewhere in Siberia. This intro is madcap and frantic, and from there the movie whisks its way into a meeting between the fleece troupe and Ricky Gervais playing a one “Dominic Badguy” (the latter is pronounced ‘Bahd-gwee,’ though the character may be lying). Dominic offers the Muppets an opportunity to go on a European tour, a trip Kermit is somewhat hesitant about but quickly drowned out by the enthusiasm of his friends.

Before the scene even ends Dominic is revealed to be working for Constantine on a scheme to set the Muppets up for a great heist. Dominic is Constantine’s ‘Number 2’, a status made much of and bluntly by the egomaniacal Constantine. It’s not long before Constantine manages to dispatch Kermit as himself back to the gulag, and wind his way into the troupe under the claim that his strained Russian accent is ‘a cold.’ The Muppets, too excited by the new allowances they have for their acts and the suspiciously sold-out venues on their tour, hardly notice anything is amiss, and the intricate workings of the heist begin.

Now it’s up to Kermit to find a way to escape passed Tina Fey’s gulag security guard with a second comical Russian accent (and a crush on Kermit), while the ever wide-eyed Walter begins to suspect Constantine and his comical Russian accented attempt at a comical Kermit accent, all while the crew is chased down by a strange partnership between Sam the Eagle, the comical American-accented CIA agent, and Jean Pierre Napoleon, the comical French-accented Interpol agent.

The Muppets Most Wanted still — Name the cameos, but hurry it up people, we have a lot countries to cross-cut to.

Am I going too fast for you? Because this movie goes fast. Jaunty musical numbers cover up demolitions. Strained comical accents talk over each other. And Kermit spends most of the playtime either getting physically yanked and jerked around or yelling in frustration to be heard. After an hour and change, Muppets Most Wanted begins to make you wonder if Bobin and Stoller forgot to add the Muppets’ brand of introspection to this otherwise monotonously bombastic movie.

Luckily the movie eventually finds its way (possibly a little late in the game), and it’s also hilarious. Despite its loudness, Muppets Most Wanted manages to plaster a big dopey grin on your face, and the payoff is that the frenzied antics and comical German, Spanish, Irish, and English accented location jumping eventually lead the gang to realize they should probably stop talking, settle down, and listen to each other once in a while. Eh, form follows function, possibly.

It’s another crowd pleaser. Hopefully, however, the next film will have a lot more breathing room and few less comical accents. And by the way, Frank Oz still thinks it sucks.

RoboCop Gets an Upgrade

by Dane Benko

Paul Verhoeven’s original Robocop was a cheeky satire of American trends such as urban alienation and consumerism, with a few lashes at the military-industrial complex. As it turns out, his use of a transhumanist hero and further revelations in AI and robot warfare ended up foretelling actual modern developments in military tech, and a bankrupt Detroit further created ideal conditions to dust off the old stop-motion cell-printed story and review the tropes with a little hindsight and a lot more CGI.

Brazilian filmmaker José Padhila has decided to keep the remake close to its source material, or at least its plotting. This is not so much a remake as an upgrade, changing the details of OmniCorp and the media to fit a more familiar modern landscape and introducing hot topics such as drone warfare and the surveillance state to less wink and more nudge the viewer into understanding exactly what the Robocop story is all about. Though still gleefully satirical, Verhoeven’s prescient mirror has become Padhila’s shrill soapbox.

Part of the issue is that though RoboCop is still tongue-in-cheek, it keeps biting its own tongue. Padhila comes from Brazil bearing Elite Squad, a down and dirty low budget film about a Brazilian troop attempting to take down drug dealers in Rio de Janeiro. Elite Squad’s roughness and grit is given a good try in RoboCop, a move that doesn’t translate well to the film’s budget and sense of fun. Instead, most of the action actually plays across like a teaser trailer protracted to a couple hours’ length, always dancing around the hero as if we’re supposed to get excited we may get our first look at him. Problem is, this is the actual movie. We have our good look at him.

Luckily Padhila isn’t even able to keep it up. As the CG starts taking over the camera slows down and steadies up, and when RoboCop isn’t running around shooting baddies and blowing stuff sky high the movie becomes much more stable. It’s even pretty good.

Alex Murphy is taken over by Joel Kinnaman, who sustains the characterization created by Peter Weller, more or less. Much more interesting is his supporting cast, including Michael Keaton as OmniCorp CEO Raymond Sellars and Gary Oldman as the corporation’s super prosthetics scientist Dr. Dennett Norton.

These two are wonderful. Sellars tries to finagle his way into the US market despite a ban on OmniCorp’s military tech stateside, while Norton engages a transhumanist’s wetdream. Sellars wears his sleaze like a beacon, Norton can’t resist temporary lapses of his own conscience to play along and push his work further than he’s ever done before. After Murphy gets blown up by an evil Detroit cartel, Sellars sees an opportunity to sell the US public on security tech. Together Sellars and Norton cleanly step over each arbitrary moral boundary they set for themselves in order to package Murphy up for release date (egged along by a marketer named Tom Pope, played by Jay Baruchel of all people).

RoboCop (2014) still — This, guys, is why you should see RoboCop.

The rest of the story you’ve either seen in the original or is a spoiler alert for newbies. The movie is punctuated by a screaming Samuel L. Jackson as media pundit Pat Novak, a character that’s kind of hard to explain, as he’s basically an even more histrionic amalgam of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, constantly punching out the fourth wall to glare at the audience in the off-hand chance you don’t get it (hint: you’ll get it). Jackie Earle Haley appears as the aggro’ed gun obsessed mook that every modern science fiction metaphor of the 1% has to have hanging around to add some sort of firepower to their otherwise physical inaction of being evil because money and corporations (see: Sharlto Copley in Elysium, though that character was a lot more ratty and fun). And there’s the street baddies for RoboCop to take down, led by crime boss Antoine Vallon.

So there’s plenty of work for RoboCop to do, but nothing as exceptional as watching the intricate process of Sellars and Norton incrementally destroy Murphy’s consciousness and cause from behind computer screens and lab windows as Murphy struggles to become a real boy and cut the puppet cords. The root of the story is here and is where the movie should have kept its focus.

As stated before, the story sticks rather close to the plot points of the original, in this case to its detriment. It’s like a Facebook update, attempting to fit in more of everything but mostly just annoying regular users.

“The Wind Rises”- Leaving Hearts in Freefall

by Dane Benko

A certain amount of stretched heartstrings was inevitable with viewing Miyazaki’s ‘Farewell Masterpiece’, but even major fans of his work will find themselves ill prepared for what they are getting into. The Wind Rises isn’t just Miyazaki’s farewell masterpiece but simply his best movie. Ever.

Although Miyazaki is generally known as a children’s fantasist in anime style, his work has always had an amazing range, from the lighthearted fairy tale of Ponyo to the morally ambiguous and yet profoundly mythic Princess Mononoke. That’s not to say that even his light fare such as My Neighbor Totoro doesn’t have its amount of darkness and his darker fare such as Spirited Away its playful whimsy. Its his ability to balance and give consideration to all aspects of his storytelling that makes him a master storyteller. Miyazaki has always had a strong ability to guide viewers through honest and appreciative stories that sought the good in his own characters.

Which is why it feels weird to say that The Wind Rises is Miyazaki to the extreme. It seems like a contradiction in terms but is entirely accurate. In The Wind Rises, he manages to make a movie more beautiful to watch and more enchanting to experience… and more troubling to think about and more heartfully traumatic… than anything else he’s ever done. He even pushes his visual style to the limit.

The story is drawn from two sources, both equally heavy. The primary focus is Jiro Horikoshi, real life Mitsubishi engineer in the years leading up to World War II. The story starts with Jiro as a young boy, who meets famed aeronautical engineer Giovanni Caproni in a dream. The whimsical Italian shows Jiro his new design and encourages Jiro’s desire to become a designer, with the warning that planes are meant for flight, not money or war. Upon waking, Jiro’s path is realized and he sets himself immediately to work, studying harder than his fellow students and quickly gaining attention amongst the industry for his knowledge and drafting skills, until he becomes head engineer on a new project of which history buffs will know the outcome.

The second source is Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a novel about two lovers, one ill, on a mountain retreat. This source is cited directly by characters within the movie and quotations from Mann employed in the dialog. On his way to Tokyo University, Jiro meets a young woman named Nahoko Satomi, and their lives are thrown together as an earthquake derails their train. Their paths cross again on a mountain retreat, their blossoming romance overseen by Nahoko’s father and a cheery German, in Mann fashion of which literary buffs will know the outcome.

If you are neither a history buff nor a literary buff, don’t worry. You’ll still be clear about the outcome. Jiro the character designed by Miyazaki has an almost preternatural sense of causality, in a manner graphically represented by his slipping in and out between day-to-day work and dreams. His dreams themselves always seem to be of two parts, an initial thrilling, zero-gravity flight amongst the clouds, followed by bursts of flame and smoke and crumbled, blackened planes. Despite setbacks and accidents both real and imagined, and the foreboding effects of Japanese and world politics around him, Jiro is driven by his love of work and Nohoko, sometimes in equal measure, seeking beauty in design and willing to pull influence from the natural places and things around him.

Jiro’s mindset is reflected in the movie’s astounding visual style. Miyazaki has pulled together the minutia of historical detail; he delights not only in the planes from the perspective of Jiro, but also designs and fashions from the era. He plays with optical trick in his possession (as well as an eye for optical distortions and illusions), causing the whole movie to feel dizzying and cerebral. And he places in full view deeply unsettling images of Japan in despair and disrepair, calling forth images of earthquakes and war and not necessarily showing natural or man-made disaster as two separate phenomena. All of this set against a Japan in economic recession, struggling to gain a foothold even as they recognize that they’re twenty years behind the Germans.

It’s worth at this point acknowledging that there are elements of this movie that are going to affect a Japanese audience much more profoundly than an American, or international, one. The Wind Rises seems like a cheery enough title, until you think about The Land of the Rising Sun. And the various images of devastation are not only sourced out of a major national trauma in history, but an existential dread that island has always suffered over the next earthquake or similar natural disaster.

Still from The Wind Rises — Parents, please consider this movie’s PG-13 rating seriously. This is not Ponyo. End stop.

And yet. The Wind Rises still manages to be a celebration of imagination and art. Jiro’s passion is infectious; his and many side characters’ love for airplanes, design, technology, and engineering is honest and intoxicating. It’s no surprise that Caproni’s early warning to a young Jiro is hardly recalled to Jiro’s mind after. The work he does fulfills him, Miyazaki celebrates it, and the audience can’t help but be infected by that enthusiasm.

Thus, Miyazaki passes the torch, and to no one in particular. Rather, he leaves the power of imagination and design to those who will be taken by it, with the prerequisite warning: it’s not for money or for war.

Miyazaki’s oeuvre as a whole has a tendency to make a person want to go running and dancing in a field. This movie ends in such a field, and the field is empty. The audience is left with a decision to either accept the emptiness of the field, or regret it. And Miyazaki makes a good argument for accepting it. It’s a very strange, somewhat perturbing, and yet powerfully seductive.

He’s not necessarily gone – apparently his retirement from film directing just means he’s going to be putting more work into drawing manga – but he’s making the outcome as clear as he can be. It’s difficult to imagine closing out with a more definitive final note.

The Square: The Learning Curve of a Revolution

by Dane Benko

In December of 2010 I went on leave from my job in the United Arab Emirates to visit Egypt with a coworker. On the first night after we landed in Alexandria, he crashed out in the hostel and I wandered around to get a feel for the streets. I ended up walking through a street demonstration with several people giving speeches in Arabic over megaphones, but I was not aware of what the speeches were about. The fact that I wandered into the demonstration at all indicates my poor situational awareness.

Later, in Cairo, my coworker asked a taxi driver, “So what do you think of Mubarak?” The taxi driver said, “I cannot speak about Mubarak, but I feel eventually we will have to speak about Mubarak. Because, see, we cannot talk about Mubarak, so we have to talk about Mubarak. You see?” Unfortunately, that would be the full extent of my personal experience with what later became internationally known as the Arab Spring, which swept the news a full week after my return from Egypt. I didn’t even know what I was looking at until various media told me.

Tahrir Square during the demonstrations — “Tahrir is a symbol of power. If you hold Tahrir, you hold control of the country.” –Aida Elkashef

Three years later, Netflix has distributed a documentary called The Square, after Tahrir Square in Cairo, which came to be the focal point of mass protest against Mubarak’s and subsequent regimes. The Square has been nominated for Best Documentary in the 2014 Academy Awards. It comes at a point where the topic is so familiar that many people have already solidified their opinions about it, but it’s a new look into the revolution from filmmakers that have been recording the mass protests in secret for several years.

Coming into the documentary with my personal experience as a prelude, I wanted to see how the documentary presented the events in a different manner than the walled-in thirty second clips embedded in shimmering red and blue motion graphics presented in major mass media outlets. As it turns out, the concept of media becomes an underlining metanarrative to The Square’s attempt to reclaim the Arab Spring for the populist revolutionaries.

A range of characters includes Ramy, a musician; Khalid Abdallah, an actor known for his role in The Kite Runner; and various activists, painters, and civil rights watchmen. The main plot, however, surrounds two protestors known as Ahmed and Magdy. Ahmed is a young populist seeking a brand new Egypt after living his entire life under Mubarak’s rule. He’s introduced speaking about his childhood, history, and hopes in the revolution while walking down the street in a heavily vignetted tracking shot that seems to be aiming more for focus tilt and ends up being a serendipitous dreamovision in high contrast DSLR. Magdy is introduced less stylistically as an interviewee attempting to represent the Muslim Brotherhood.

The cameras let themselves be rolled along waves of protestor movements, successfully pulling off a giddy and delirious effect to match the revolutionary fervor as more and more voices join in to describe their hopes of the future. Surprisingly early on in narrative time, Mubarak steps aside and everything seems renewed. And of course, shortly after everything gets much, much worse.

It’s there that the movie gains its focus (though starts racking focus in tighter and tighter focal lengths) to tell a three part narrative of the revolution from the ground level. Mubarak turns out to be only the first part, as the military then moves in and outstays its welcome long enough to set up a Parliamentary election (swept by the Muslim Brotherhood) and a Presidential Election (that goes to Morsi). Mubarak, the military, Morsi: the three acts, each who have access to their own mass media to write a narrative. A military general known as Bekheit insists in an interview that the military was the start of the revolution. A television recording of Muhamed Morsi insists that it was the Muslim Brotherhood.

Without access to mass media, Ahmed, Magdy, and other protestors start gathering together whatever cameras they can to record everything, communicate to each other through social networks and street-level word-of-mouth, speeches, and demonstration, and share videos on YouTube. Khalid Abdallah becomes a sort of Metatron, using his media and entertainment experience and the advice of his father (often a floating head in a Skype window) to put these videos into context and keep eyes on the streets and away from figureheads. Their instinct in this matter is well founded as the demonstrations become targets of brutality and the cheerful characters we met earlier on are beaten, imprisoned, and shot at with live rounds. Warning: the documentarians don’t look away.

Meanwhile, Ahmed and Magdy’s relationship starts to drift as Ahmed becomes more and more aware of the significance of finding a universal, non-military and non-religious constitution, and Magdy’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood starts to get ambiguous. On the one hand they are both principled men who feel dedicated to those they supported before, but on the other hand, the realities of conflict and differing opinions rears its ugly head just in time for the new regime to start dividing the ranks of protestors against themselves. Neither man is able to keep everybody on their side of the fence, and the two of them even struggle not to argue amongst themselves.

In the end The Square is merely the first act of a larger narrative history has yet to tell, but it firmly takes the perspective of the populist protestors to fight against the representations of the military and Muslim Brotherhood. It’s also worth studying as a look into the learning curve of a revolution, as individuals are increasingly left with the burden of representing themselves and their fellow activists coherently and in a manner that doesn’t get subverted from above or contradicted from below.

Slaughter Daughter releases its inner demons onto DVD

by Dane Benko

Slaughter Daughter poster — My first question is how such a great title was still available.

This week finds the final cut of Slaughter Daughter newly out on Brain Damage films. Slaughter Daughter comes courtesy of director Travis Campbell, the writer of Troma’s Return to Nuke ‘Em High, taking up the camera with original Nuke ‘Em High alumnus Leesa Rowland.

Those who know Troma need no further introduction, but for the uninitiated, Troma is the demon child of Lloyd Kaufman, conceived of a tradition of a low budget horror production grandfathered by the likes of Roger Corman and Herschell Gordon Lewis, but bastardized into something beyond B-Grade (or even F-Grade). It found its ultimate recognition in the form of a famous cult figure known as Toxie, from a series known as Toxic Avenger. If films are meals with Hollywood being fast food and a good European art film a type of fine dining, Troma is discarded balut found outside a leaking radioactive waste facility.

Those in the know are aware that none of the above is negative criticism of what Troma is or represents. Kaufman is keeping to a method of branded and consistent cult no-budget filmmaking that has maintained a culture of its own. Those whose knowledge of cult cinema terminates at Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films may find themselves horrified and sickened by the production value alone, but for those who love to bathe in abject excess from the fringes of festering film, Troma is iconic. Though Slaughter Daughter is not a Troma release, it and distributor Brain Damage fit firmly within this genealogy, and the production talent keeps it in the nuclear family. Slaughter Daughter is everything hysterical, madcap, and shrill, all of which lends itself an abject, magnetic energy. For fans, this energy is exciting, though some audiences may be forgiven for finding it exhausting.

Slaughter Daughter still — My second question is how this luscious beauty is still available.

Vamp actress Nicola Fiore plays Farrah, the titular daughter of Rowland’s Phyllis. After being stood up at her wedding, Farrah suffers a breakdown and goes into self-imposed isolation. She becomes fascinated by a serial killer named Jackson Miles, and she follows his movements with literally orgasmic passion until Phyllis’ engagement with the snobbish Willard Neff awakens Farrah’s inner monster.

Tim Dax plays Jackson Miles, one part machismo-drenched prison brat and two parts hallucinogenic fairy tale godmother. Dax (whose tattoos such as a luchadore mask-like helmet design are part of his personal style and not makeup from the production) does actually pull off a strange guiding warmth to Fiore’s intensity, counterpointing Rowland’s performance as the self-involved and disingenuous Phyllis. Within the insanity of the movie contains an actual underlying logic of the relationships, as the abandoned and dismissed Farrah seeks a lover, a father, and a friend, all of which only she can consummate on her own terms after she’s failed to find it from her family (father is dead, brother is impotent, step-father’s a douche, you get the drill). She weasels her way into meeting Miles in person and the two, ah, execute a plan focused on Phyllis’ rooftop wedding.

And from there… well the movie is called Slaughter Daughter. You know what this is. The rest is the falling action as a roller coaster ride complete with a cameo by Lloyd Kaufman emceeing as the minister of the wedding.

The final cut of Slaughter Daughter was recently shown at The Producer’s Club, hosted by Campbell and Rowland in person. The movie has taken a long journey from its production. Shot in 2012, it won best feature film at Orlando’s 7th Annual Freak Show Film Festival that year, but various sound issues compelled Campbell to clean it up before Brain Damage’s release.

As far as the quality of the final cut is concerned, it looks and sounds great considering the context. Campbell has managed to keep a look of washed-out color of cheap film bathed in sickening pale light cast through green, red, and yellow gels, while updating it to digital by adding a bit of glitch art to fragment the frames. Whereas it ain’t Luis Bunuel, it still achieves more psycho-seductive charge on a lower budget than something like Black Swan. You just have to let the glurge wash over you and accept it for what it is.

Dane Benko

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