Saturday Matinee: Head

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By Jake Walters

Source: The Long Take

At the beginning of Head, Monkees’ drummer Micky Dolenz runs away from a legion of fans and dives off a bridge into a body of water. If this is too-obviously following in the footsteps of its prankish predecessor, A Hard Day’s Night, where the Beatles suffered a similar crowd-sourced fate, it also blows it to smithereens. Rather than canonizing the ‘60s, Head offers a comeuppance, jumps into the deep end of the next decade, dissolving into an aqueous, collective, diffuse space called the early ‘70s.

 Soon enough, the band performs the phenomenal, acid-stained rocker “Circle Sky,” a mission statement of the band’s newly serious attitude toward their music that ultimately unweaves itself in the very act of coming into being. If the song promises progress, a band achieving new heights of self-worth and self-ownership, the lyrics offer a vision of eternal return that culminates in fans rushing the stage only for the band to be crumble as mannequins, material constructs of composite parts, all image and no flesh. Rather than personal authenticity, the film explodes into gleeful mediation, a promise that ostensible freedom only masks new modes of control, that genuine originality is only one more mask. Head marked the band announcing their recovery of their own catalogue as an exercise in self-becoming, and in doing so they paradoxically destroy themselves. We’re off to the race in the opening minutes, in other words, but we’re also lost in an abyss. In the band’s go-for-broke stylistic tour-de-force, they go beyond playful monkeying around and instead monkey wrench the nuts and bolts of the machine that made them.

Writer-Director Bob Rafelson had concocted, quite literally, the band’s image, explicitly turning the “fab” in their PreFab Four image from Fabulous into Fabrication. Slotting the band members into artificial roles and shuttling them through various mostly unexplained situations, The Monkees television show was the epitome of pop post-modernism, a roguishly disobedient experiment in televisual liquidity that was also a vexing and mettlesome portrait of four lost souls struggling to maintain stable selves amidst a polymorphous and unmooring world. While the show largely took this playful casting aside of reality in stride, testing and teasing at systems of popular imagery from the relative inside, Head is a more cynical, explosive affair, a downright nasty exercise in self-deconstruction. The band look and sound tired here, being pushed and prodded in and around sets, sequences, and sketches, forced into new roles and identities all while being asked to maintain their artificially constructed image. In almost every sequence, they’re running to or from something, or being walled in by forces that seem increasingly opaque and invisible as the film continues, as though it alone simply cannot visualize what ails it, cannot conjure the totality of overlapping enigmas constraining it.  

Thus the film imagines pyrrhic victories like Dolenz futilely punching a Coca-Cola machine in a desert, an amusing parody of the Wild West saturated with corporate malfeasance. When Dolenz finds a tank, presumably arrived from one of the other sequences, a faux war film turned into a bunker football game, the film understands his demented-grin glee as a sign of his exhaustion. (It’s less surprising than it may seem that Dolenz was originally considered for the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 film, a role that went to Rafelson’s friend Jack Nicholson). Later, the film reveals that at least part of the film takes place in the hair of past-his-prime Western actor Victor Mature. If the band are Sea Monkeys, those mischievous little devils, they’re also head lice, itching and scratching, propagating profusely, dancing on the brain of classic Hollywood Western cinema.

In doing so, Head turns to televisual flow as termite art, eating away at cinema’s hollowed form. They at least have the good grace to take Mature along for the ride, recognizing that his name is so apt for an antagonist for the band’s acid-scrawled juvenilia that you’d forgive the band for thinking they’d conjured his whole career up whole cloth just to appear here. Head’s finale, where the band escape and escape again, dissolving themselves in a literal age of Aquarius only to find themselves in another more pernicious prison in the back of Mature’s truck, is as vicious as anything Godard or Antonioni created, perhaps because it establishes its critique of what Guy Debord called “the spectacle” from within Hollywood’s own entrails. Imagining a cinematic diarrhea, Head constantly and incessantly spews the band back into the desert, the biome that, in films, books, critical theories, and head-trips alike, so frequently serves as the unformed and deconstructive space of the mind. Here, the film joins Monte Hellman’s The Shooting in questioning whether this formlessness was simply an Ouroboros, an imaginative ego trip for minds to spew their own thoughts out and have them talk back to us. The further we spread horizontally outward, the more we end up right where we started.

Admittedly, Head’s head-scratching ambition, which involves chasing a kind of cosmic self-abnegation on the part of both the band and the film, requires an energy that doesn’t come easy for the film, nor its characters. The film’s paradoxical atmosphere of curdled zest thrives on never really progressing anywhere, and the film seems all too self-aware in naming a key, Ringo Starr-ish song “Do I Have to do this All Over Again.” Head’s endlessly frictive relationship between freedom and enclosure figures television as a prison-like black box and an implosive void that reorients and revises itself constantly, shifting tonal and textural registers. Or does it? Part of the film’s argument is its own triviality, and, daringly, the band figures the remarkable heterogeneity of its sequences and sketches as little more than a smooth paste. That’s a damned, damaged thing for any film to do. Head shoves it down our throat, cackling, and the ‘60s seem to die in the process.

Score: 10/10

Saturday Matinee: Eega

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EEGA Is The Best, Most Insane, Most Inventive Film Of The Year. Catch This Fly While You Can!

By J. Hurtado

Source: ScreenAnarchy

There is a reason that S.S. Rajamouli is considered the most innovative director in the Telugu film industry, and Eega is the perfect illustration of why he deserves to wear that crown. The film is completely insane, endlessly enjoyable, and absolutely unique. Eega is the best film about a man reincarnated as a housefly avenging his own murder that you will ever see. It isn’t easy to find, but I highly recommend looking through the list of theaters linked below for a screening near you, you’ll come out of the auditorium a changed person.

Nani, played by an actor of the same name, is a free spirit, a young man whose only goal in life is to woo the beautiful Bindhu (Samantha). Bindhu works at a non-profit organization, and as such she makes the occasional cold call looking for donations to keep her wheels moving. One day she is unfortunate enough to call on Sudeep, played by Kannada film star Kiccha Sudeep, a wealthy land developer with a skeezy look about him and a weakness for pretty young things. When Sudeep learns that Bindhu has a crush on Nani, he kills his only rival for Bindhu’s hand and attempts to make his move, but Sudeep didn’t count on the transcendent power of love. Reincarnated as a common housefly, Nani proceeds to make Sudeep’s life a living hell. With a bit of persistence and some help from his former human flame, Bindhu, a plot hatches and the pair plan their vengeance in some of the most amazing sequences I’ve ever seen.

First thing’s first, I think it is only fair to note that I saw Eega in its original Telugu language with no subtitles. While I was able to pick out a word hear and there (anyone who watches enough south Indian films learns to say “I will kill you” in a number of languages and dialects pretty quickly), the script and dialogue were completely lost on me. That being said, at no point during the film did I feel lost, the plot and story are completely understandable even without subtitles, and while literal understanding of the dialogue may have helped, I would have no problem walking right back into another unsubtitled screening of Eega and watching it all over again.

Now. Eega. Where to start. First of all, the very concept of the film is completely insane. How does one turn a non-verbal housefly into (a) a compelling protagonist, and (b) a believable threat to a human antagonist. Rajamouli’s scripting and marvelously inventive story handles both of those concerns with aplomb. In spite of the lunacy of the concept, at no point did I feel that the characters were acting in ways that didn’t fit the story or the universe that was created for them. The fly is not endowed with any superpowers, he doesn’t talk or crack jokes, he doesn’t really do anything that a fly, in sentient, couldn’t do. And I bought it; hook, line, and sinker.

There are so many ways that this film could have failed. One big worry of mine was the fact that the idea of an avenging housefly makes the filmmakers necessarily reliant on massive quantities of CG, something with which even the biggest Indian productions still have problems. However, to my delight, the CG was never distracting, not even for a moment. I suppose if I’d been bored I could have taken the time to dissect the flaws in the technical aspects, but those moments just didn’t exist in this film. It never stops moving, it’s incredibly well-paced, and at right around two and a half hours, that’s quite a feat in and of itself.

One standout performance in the film comes from Telugu film newcomer, Kiccha Sudeep as the villainous Sudeep. The requirements of the role have Sudeep acting largely opposite an imaginary fly. The fly goes into his ears, up his nose, into his eye, and gets literally and figuratively into his head very early on. His ability to convey this character’s decaying mental state in the midst of all of the chaos around his is remarkable. He is manic, he is sincerely threatening, but most of all, he’s legitimately hilarious. Sudeep has these crazy bug eyes that scream madness and say more with a glance than many actors can with three pages of monologue. In a performance that goes long stretches with no dialogue at all, Sudeep steals the show, and was my favorite human character in Eega.

However, I cannot leave this review without talking about the craziest thing of all, that goddamned fly. I suppose that everyone has had the experience of being pestered by a fly or a gnat at some point in their lives, but not like this. Nani’s perseverance is remarkable, and the continual invention on the part of Rajamouli to make him a sincere threat to Sudeep is remarkable. Only S.S. Rajamouli could show a fly causing a human to roll his car in a most spectacular fashion to end the first half of the film, and then follow it up by making that seem like mere distraction for the really good stuff.  There’s a training montage with the fly lifting weights and running on a makeshift treadmill for Christ’s sake! And it doesn’t feel out of place AT ALL.

Every time I thought I had a handle on Eega, it threw me for a loop in the best possible way. Eega is easily the most flat-out entertaining film I’ve seen this year, bar none, and I didn’t understand more than half a dozen words of dialogue in the whole thing. It’s that good. It’s often said that the best filmmakers know how to show, not tell their stories, and if that’s the criterion for master filmmakers, S.S. Rajamouli is someone you need to know about. Incredible action sequences, inventive storytelling, technical excellence, and laughs and gasps that just keep coming; Eega has it all.

I happen to know for a fact that there are forty seven screens in the USA showing Eega this weekend, and only about ten of them will have subtitles. If you are near one of those ten, I will punch you in the throat if you miss this film. If you aren’t near a theater with subs, don’t be a fucking pussy, you don’t need them to enjoy this remarkable piece of work. Eega is a winner, plain and simple.

Saturday Matinee: Sylvio

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By Bill Arceneaux

Source: Film Threat

Perhaps doomed to go unnoticed on first viewing, there are lovely and thoughtful moments strung throughout Sylvio, made up of slow gazes and floating / falling particles. Dust in the sun light, bubbles in a fish tank and snow on a street corner provide temporary reprieve from reality and unexpected bursts of clarity for lead gorilla Sylvio (played by himself) and new friend Al (co-director Kentucker Audley). These short bits of time are first used to express the doldrums of unfulfilled life – via a water cooler and kitschy toys first – but as the scenarios shift, so go these bits, matching emotion for emotion. Most impressive and done with little to no dialogue at all, we gather what we need to know and ought to feel about a stone faced gorilla and his exhausted buddy.

Movies like Sylvio are, in their own way, slapstick. Not in the traditional Three Stooges manner, mind you, but in a more subdued way. A more atmospheric and emotional way. Silently slapstick, I’d say, in the way that I consider Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel a little slapstick. In that film, this goof genre is mostly rude, crude and blunt. For Sylvio, which wears its heart on its sleeve, the funny is not when our hero breaks stuff on cue, but when the absurdly silly meets the dramatically genuine. It’s an almost tragi-comedy of over exaggerated clumsy like circumstances. It reminds me of (despite the stone face reference made a paragraph ago) Harold Lloyd, the everyman involved in the impossible. Our lovable and heartfelt gorilla matches the man with the glasses by being a hopeless romantic who is sensitive and capable of anything. A double bill with Grandma’s Boy might be in the cards.

The plot is, to boil it down, UHF from the point of view of an office clerk version of Stanley Spadowski. Which is, to boil it down again, brilliant. The World’s Greatest Janitor and TV Star trophy holder isn’t as disillusioned when we first meet him in the Weird Al movie, and is certainly more flat out ridiculous than Sylvio’s Sylvio, but he’s just as childlike and fantastical. Being a gorilla, living alone and greeted after work by depressing microwavable dinners, Sylvio’s one outlet of release comes in the form of his puppet show short films, The Quiet Times with Herbert Herpels. This is no Spadowski’s Clubhouse – more “Moral Orel” and Anomalisa. His shows are hilarious on one hand, giving us an inner id that we wouldn’t expect from an everyday working animal. On the other hand, these segments provide terrifically innocent insight into Sylvio’s background, his hopes, his dreams and his worries. They’re enough to bring about teary eyes.

I was at first concerned that, given the nature of Kentucker Audley’s video essays for The Talkhouse (which are great), Sylvio may be some sort of joke or prank, poking fun at the themes within and the audience without. An Andy Kaufman routine, essentially. But, thinking on it, I came to the conclusion that this doesn’t matter. Kaufman’s comedy was outlandish and utilized trickery for sure, but also came from true places deep inside of himself. He meant no ill will. I don’t believe this movie is a play on our minds, but even if it were, it comes from a good place and would only enrich our collective experience. Yes, it’s a film based on a Vine act. Yes, an app famous gorilla can make do more than perform tricks. No, the slight of hand here is not at our expense nor is it exploiting anyone. Sylvio is hilarious and deeply kind, granting us an adaptation more depthful than expected from internet stardom.     

We could all stand to have the kind of spaced out observational moments of self reflection that Sylvio so nicely performs. Be it stars or rain drops, zoning out American Beauty style, even for a few seconds, might be enough to make one appreciate the little things. Or the bigger thing… am I spinning out of my head? Could Sylvio be such a perfectly constructed trick on critics like me, making us miss the forest for the trees? DID Andy Kaufman fake his own death? Nah. Perception is reality, and intent is usually irrelevant. No matter what, Sylvio gave me belly laughs and evocative feels. Thus far, it is my favorite film of the year. A most disturbing year, but still.

Sylvio (2017): Directors: Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley / Writers: Albert Birney, Kentucker Audley and Meghan Doherty / Stars: Sylvio Bernardi (as himself), Kentucker Audley, Tallie Medel

Watch Sylvio on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/watch/video/16458238

Saturday Matinee: The Projectionist

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The Projectionist Is a Biography as a Mirror Reflecting a City’s Change

Abel Ferrara’s documentary excels as kind of cultural microcosm, rich in its broader implications.

By Sam C. Mac

Source: Slant

One difference between The Projectionist and Abel Ferrara’s earlier documentaries is the point of focus: Instead of being specifically anchored to the exploration of a particular geography, Ferrara traces an immigrant’s experience of both the culture he comes from and the one that he adopted as his own. Nicolas Nicolaou, who came to the U.S. as a boy and has been working in New York City movie theaters since the 1970s, retains deep ties to his home in Cyprus, where his wife is still living—and where the film begins.

Ferrara uses his typical mosaic approach of rendering an environment to gently cut against Nicolaou’s straightforward narration, in which he chronicles his youth and the social conditions of his hometown, in between casual banter with Ferrara. “It’s a lot of work, Abel,” Nicolaou mutters, while displaying one of the old fishing nets that his father used to use. “And those years, you couldn’t sell fish.” But The Projectionist soon uproots itself, just as Nicolaou’s father once did, and relocates to New York City, where it becomes clear that, in actuality, Ferrara’s latest documentary isn’t all that different from his previous ones.

Though the film is framed as a biography, Ferrara is much more interested in the monumental transformation of space that’s taken place around his subject’s life. In particular, The Projectionist is about the decades of social and political change that have shaped New York through the representative example of the city’s relationship to cinema—both the way it’s been depicted in the movies themselves and as an industry that’s been subjected to various efforts of reformation. Nicolaou’s subjectivity serves essentially the same purpose as Ferrara’s own did in 2010’s Mulberry St., a tribute to the Little Italy neighborhood that he used to call home. But in its mapping of a culture that’s experienced rapid diversification of its population, and the backlash to that progression, The Projectionist also connects to 2017’s Piazza Vittorio.

Nicolaou’s career spans the heyday of the adult movie theater business—which, as Ferrara emphasizes, coincides with the most popular period for arthouse films in New York’s history—through the Giuliani years, and that administration’s clean-up of the city, to a contemporary culture of big corporation’s “colluding” to monopolize, and to put privately owned theaters, like those that Nicolaou runs, out of business. Ferrara clearly has affection for Nicolaou as a kind of mirror image of himself: Both began their careers in New York around the same time, albeit on almost opposite sides of the industry, and both have survived mainly by adapting to the times and trusting their intuition. But there’s also something bittersweet implicit in that comparison: Nicolaou has built a stable, family-run business around his passions (one that his wife manages remotely from Cypus), whereas Ferrara’s path hasn’t been so profitable.

For a lesser filmmaker, the schism between artist and businessman that exists between these two men might evince contempt. But Ferrara’s approach to documentary has always been much less about his personal feelings, or polemical intents, than an intense sense of fascination. The only problem with that driving interest is that, especially when combined with a subject so close to Ferrara’s passion, it can lapse into sentimentality. Indeed, there are too many scenes here of Nicolaou voicing his abiding love and belief in the power of cinema, and without being questioned by Ferrara, most prominently when the former shows off the fancy interior of the Vynl nightclub that he owns and operates out of a building that, prior to its conversation, had been a theater of one kind or another dating back to the 19th century.

Where The Projectionist ultimately excels, however, is as the kind of cultural microcosm that makes Ferrara’s other documentaries feel at once urgent and incredibly rich in their broader implications. In Mulberry St., the transformation of one urban neighborhood becomes a representation of generational changes in modern Italian-American culture writ large, and in Piazza Vittorio, the transactionally motivated societal values of an immigrant-run marketplace in Rome are treated as a metaphor for the social conditions in contemporary Europe. Though painting with a bigger canvas this time—and exercising slightly less precision—Ferrara is able to frame Nicolaou’s experience of the New York movie theater business over the last several decades as one that parallels the director’s struggles in the film industry, and as illustrative of a major city’s radical reshaping of itself.

Watch The Projectionist on hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/movie/the-projectionist-abel-ferrara/19645989