Who Ordered The Mono No Aware?

So, I’ve been falling asleep in the cinema again.
Easily done for a man of my advancing years.
The darkened room. The comfortable seat.
An ice-cold bottle of imported beer beforehand.
I fell asleep watching Michael Haneke’s ‘Time Of The Wolf’.
I fell asleep watching Wim Wender’s ‘The Wrong Move’.
I fell asleep watching Peter Brook’s ‘Marat/Sade’.
And I fell asleep watching Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Le Mépris’ too.
This is my second Ozu in 7 days, and my
body's buckling just a little under the strain.
My throat is red raw, and my brain is drowning in its own mucus.
I’m finding it somewhat hard to breathe, truth be told.
Have my eyes turned pink yet? I can’t see in this light.
To be invited into a Japanese home
is to be afforded a very great honour.
And the guest always takes priority.
Remember that. And always remove your shoes upon entry.
4:3 is an aspect ratio which complements Ozu’s world of domestic interiors.
It’s all about the hearth and the home afterall.
For therein lies the hot emotional core.
A clock chimes. A wife behaves obsequiously.
A businessman pours green tea over a bowl of plain rice.
Western brand names hint at an off-screen American occupation.
The pop-and-crackle of fluff on the film print
perfectly reflecting the noise inside my weary head.
I start to hallucinate about halfway through the film.
I see a spectral figure standing in my peripherals.
He's looking straight at me. Not at the screen.
And he's addressing an audience from a lectern.
He doesn't see the young ultranationalist
drawing his wakizashi blade until it’s too late.
All things are transient. This knowledge I humbly receive.
Pathos is sometimes chastened. Eye-lines can be disconcerting.
His fate etched upon a tatami mat. Hidden behind a a shōji screen.
He rests now, peacefully, alone in the void.
Only after the door has closed behind me,
do I put my hat and my coat and my brogues back on.

Inejiro Asanumaa is assassinated on national TV

Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up

See there; a mock orgy in the High Desert.
A 20-mule team from Joe Chaikin’s Open Theater
writhe around in the arid sand and volcanic dust.
Amidst the Playas and the Stardunes. Amongst the fossilized
remains of mastodons and camels and old gold prospectors.
And you may dig it. Or you may choose not to.
But the sun is beating down on them. And, man, it’s pretty far out.
And man, it may also be in possible violation of The Mann Act of 1910.
The Girl is wearing turquoise. The Boy has a loaded pistol in his sock.
Howls of derision await them. The front
cover of ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine awaits them.
Marriage to Dennis Lee Hopper for one.
Death in the state penitentiary for the other.
Listen there; can you hear the sound of Jerry Garcia
swirling amongst those convex badland convolutions?
Roscoe Holcomb, John Fahey and The Pink Floyd too?
But stay tuned brothers and sisters, for there are going to be fireworks.
And then some. In Peckinpah slow-motion. And from multiple angles.
Using miniatures. And long-lenses. And the pages
of that there National Geographic
will be left a-blowing in the wind.

Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin TV Interview

Final scene from Michelangelo Antonioni's 'Zabriskie Point'

Alan Moore Doesn't Watch The Watchmen

From the moment the screen turns a beautiful shade of
smiley-face yellow, I’m confident that the next 162 minutes
are going to far exceed any of the expectations I may have had.
The Warner Bros. logo appears. Black on smiley-face yellow.
The Legendary Pictures logo appears. Black on smiley-face yellow.
The DC comics logo appears. Black on beautiful smiley-face yellow.
Prepare yourself for the smell of Nostalgia. Here comes the human bean-juice.
The dirigibles and the triangles and the
geodesic domes are all present and correct.
See there, the genetically-engineered lynx.
See there, the Gunga Diner fast-food wrappers.
See there, Jon Osterman's big blue uncut cock and shaven blue ball-sack.
Believe me, I don’t miss the presence of the psychic alien squid thing.
And I don’t miss the excerpts from ‘Tales Of The Black Freighter’ either.
I don’t even mind that Hollis Mason dies off-screen. Really I don’t.
Thing is, I can still remember the first time I saw
those magical words; “Suggested for Mature Readers Only”.
I can still remember the day I underlined the phrase
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” in a school library book.
Darren Aronofsky decided to make ‘The Fountain’, rather than run the gauntlet.
Paul Greengrass passed. Terry Gilliam went so far as to say it couldn’t be done.
If I’m losing you, then tough-titty. Either ride out
the storm or go cry in somebody else's cornflakes.
This film simply wasn’t made for you. And what’s more, I’m glad it wasn’t.
They’re even playing ‘Hallelujah’ on the soundtrack.
And what’s more, it’s the original Leonard Cohen version.

Play the retro 80's Watchmen arcade game

'Watchmen': the Saturday morning cartoon version

Sugar On The Mound

I don’t know much about baseball,
but I do know that it’s far-and-away the most
popular sport amongst the people of the Dominican República.
Nothing else even comes close. God, Fatherland, Liberty, Baseball.
Makeshift diamonds on every empty parking lot. Jumpers for bases.
Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos is 19 years old, and a rookie pitcher
for the Quad City Swing in Davenport, Iowa. He’s a young man,
a long way from home, with an uncommon ability on the mound.
Smokeball. Curveball. Knuckleball. Okie-Dokie. Backdoor slider.
His all-time favourite ballplayer is Roberto Clemente;
a Puerto Rican who won 12 (twelve) Gold Glove Awards,
made 3,000 career base hits, and became the first Latin American
to be elected into the prestigious MLB Hall of Fame. Posthumously.
Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos is played by Algenis Perez Soto. He’s been
playing baseball since he was 9 years old. ‘Sugar’ is his film debut.
Writer/Directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck took a chance on the kid.
And the kid doesn’t let them down. He keeps his eye on the game.
The infectious sound of the bachata music follows him wherever he goes.
It’s only as the end credits complete their upwards roll
and the lights come back on, that I’m reminded
of the fact I’m sat here all alone in the cinema stalls.
But hey, it's not like this is a new experience for me or anything.
She’s stood me up before, and she’ll no doubt stand me up again.
9th inning. 2 strikes against. Oh say it ain’t so, Joe.
Go on, Joe, say it ain't over till it's over.

Official Website for the movie 'Sugar'

Filmed In Mexico In Panavision

So there’s me, Chuck Heston,
Richard Harris, Jimmy Coburn Junior,
Warren Oates, Rodeo Slim Pickens,
L. Q. Jones, Cannonball Taylor
and Robert Golden Armstrong.
Out on the High Road, pursuing renegade Apaches.
Out on the High Road, pursued by French Irregulars.
Bloody Sam's trademark catsup red
staining the arroyo and the whinstone
and the waters of the Rio Grande.
Claymore and Colt and mini-howitzer.
Mules and buzzards and howling prairie wolves.
Mariachi guitar, south-of-the-border harmonica
and some of that old-time bareknuckled sucker-punching.
I know they don’t make them like this anymore,
just as surely as I know that
my heart is broke right now.
It needs time alone in the hot white sun.
Time to wallow in the charcoal of old cookfires.
For she is my scar tissue. And beyond doubt my Achilles Heel.
Leaning forward, I spit into the dirt,
wipe my mouth with the back of my hand
and, taking up the trailing reins,
ride up through the low juniper
to rejoin the column
as they turn and ride on towards
the crumbling walls of Durango.

Trailer for Sam Peckinpah's 'Major Dundee'

No Canines Were Harmed During The Making Of This Motion Picture

When I make my next film, there’ll be a dog in it.
And yes, you can hold me to that.
There’s something about the way
they gaze directly down the barrel;
right into the heart of the lense
and straight through to the other side
- observing this farcical human puppet-show
in farsighted lateral shades of sepia.
Glassy-eyed like some shellshocked Tommy.
A two thousand yard stare which says;
I know God is dead, and what’s more, I knew
he was dead long before Freddie Nietzsche did.
A quiver of the snout. A lolling tongue. The faintest twitch of an ear.
What can I say? It gets me every time.
Writer/Director Kelly Reichardt certainly knows the score.
Her new film, ‘Wendy & Lucy’ stars Michelle Williams
as the eponymous Wendy, alongside Reichardt’s
very own pet dog, Lucy, as the eponymous Lucy.
Uncredited for her role in her owner's previous film, ‘Old Joy',
Lucy is a golden brown mixed-breed bitch.
What one used to call a mongrel. Or a mutt.
Her page at the International Movie Database lists her as Lucy (XXIX).
Lassie was played by a male Rough Collie.
Toto was played by a female Cairn Terrier.
The Littlest Hobo was actually played by 2 different
German Shepherds, both of whom were called London.
But let’s be honest about this, compared to Lucy,
they were all just show-offs. Sideshow acts. Circus freaks.
Lucy's from more of a Lee Strasberg kennel-of-thought.
Her recognition at this year’s Fido Awards stands testament to that.
Based on a short story by Jon Raymond, ‘Wendy & Lucy’
is set in a small town in Oregon's Cascade Mountains.
Much like the Union Pacific locomotives
that moan in the night like beached sealions,
our two heroines just happen to be passing through.
En route to Alaska in a second-hand 1987 Honda Accord.
The film cost just $300,000 to shoot and lasts for 90 minutes.
Which is about 630 minutes in dog-time.

'Wendy And Lucy' trailer

Lucy The Dog at IMDB

The Fido Awards (The Doggie Oscars)

Trailer for a short film in which I play a dog reincarnated as a man

Schenectady County, New York State Of Mind

If a one-handed
Charlie Kaufman
stood there clapping,
in a facsimile of a lonely forest
built entirely within a metaphysical warehouse,
and there was
no-one there to hear him...
would he still make a sound?

Trailer for 'Synecdoche, New York'

Man Is Man’s Delight. But Also His Bane. Twas Ever Thus.

This isn’t a Stockholm I instantly recognise.
The tangled streets of The Gamla Stan aren’t paved
with köttbullars, lingonberries, or tubes of Kalles Kaviar.
There are no clogs, no wet snuff, no pickled herrings
and no painted wooden Dalahorses to be seen anywhere.
What we get instead are a random collection of
plain, drab, bleached-out backdrops
populated by an assortment of
plain, drab, bleached-out people
going about their plain, drab, bleached-out little lives.
Like zombies. But without the bloodlust.
A stout alcoholic woman and an Arab barber.
A disgruntled psychiatrist and a heart-broken groupie.
A kleptomaniac. A tuba player. Various business consultants.
And a shoal of grey-skinned balding Nordic men and women.
For this is the Stockholm of Roy Andersson.
A Stockholm with a distinctive visual flavour all of its own.
Just like the France of Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro
has a distinctive visual flavour all its own.
Just like the ocean and the India and the America of
Wes Anderson has a distinctive visual flavour all of its own.
Constructed from 50 single-take deadpan vignettes,
‘You, The Living’ took the veteran commercials director
three years to make, and used
an estimated 62,342 metres of film.
Benny from ABBA composed the musical score.
The incessant, recurring, futile lives of its characters
are interspersed with wistful maverick dream sequences.
Or perhaps the whole film is meant to be viewed
as nothing more than one long static waking dream?
Afterall, doesn’t "real-life" feel a lot like that sometimes?
Andersson knew Ingmar Bergman apparently.
Didn’t like him much though. They didn’t get on.
I remember reading somewhere that the Swedes drink
more cups of coffee per capita than the Italians.
But I’m not really sure if I believe that or not.

Roy Andersson's 'Du Levande'

The Scandinavian Kitchen on Great Titchfield Street, W1W

No Commercial Value. Non-Pornographic. For Cultural Use Only.

So, there’s this short film I made
which has been travelling the world.
It lasts for 18 minutes and 20 seconds.
Except, occasionally, it lasts for 19 minutes and 3 seconds.
Depending on the speed of your projector.
25 frames-per-second as opposed to 24.
For the record, I’ve never had a Scandinavian girlfriend.
That part of the film’s narrative is entirely fictional.
But much of the rest of the film’s storyline
is inspired by things that really happened.
I guess “based on a true story”, is how the
freelance tagline writers of the world
might choose to describe it.
The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
You know the score.
Thing is, somewhere along the line,
this offbeat little romantic comedy of mine
also began proving itself to be
somehow wonderfully miraculously
prophetic too. Life imitating art, imitating life. Or somesuch.
The girl came back. Just like she does in the movie.
If that’s not giving away the ending too much?
She sat next to me in the darkened auditorium yesterday.
Her hand-in-mine. And she saw the
heart-on-my-sleeve dedication to her
up on the big-screen for the first time
as the credits rolled, white text over black.
The screening lasted for 18 minutes and 20 seconds.
Not that either one of us was counting.

"Pop-Promo" from 'English Language [With English Subtitles]'

A Silent Light. A Holy Light.

Time lapses. The Earth undercranks.
Night sky gives way to dawn sky
gives way to widescreen daybreak
gives way to Old Colony
of Christian Anabaptists nestling in
Neo-Biblical landscape of Northern México.
Plautdietsch dialect carries on the morning breeze.
Bread is broken. Ears of green corn stand tall.
The enfant-terrible is slowly working his magic.
The enfant-terrible is slowly weaving his spell.
Allowing ifluence of Tartovsky and Dreyer to seep on through.
Shows us Love. Shows us Betrayal. Shows us Forgiveness.
Teases out visual and spiritual tour-de-fucking-force.
Rains fall. Heavens rotate. Light flares in the lense.
Out through open window flies cabbage white butterfly.
Out through open window, and off
over hill and over dale
and across bend of slow-moving stream.
On to the place where the sun sets and the cattle low.
On to the place where the first stars twinkle from
on high.

Carlos Reygadas's 'Stellet Licht'

The Former Playground Of The Stars

Back in The Swinging ‘40s and The Nifty ‘50s
you couldn't move along Tahquitz Canyon Way
without bumping into the likes of
Bing Crosby, Humphrey DeForest Bogart,
Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Jnr or Judy Garland.
They came here to play golf and to sip cocktails.
They came here to escape the glare of the West Coast spotlight.
Al Jolson, Wladziu Valentino Liberace
and that arch-reclusive Greta Garbo too.
The Chairman Of The Board and his Rat Pack
came to Riverside County to play high-stakes baccarat
around a swimming-pool shaped like a piano.
Elvis and Precilla came here for their honeymoon in 1967.
Steve McQueen and his Porsche 356 Speedster
visited so many times during the early Nineteen Seventies,
that they knew the tarmacadam of Vista Chino Drive
and Avenida Caballeros like the backs of their hands.
Known more these days as a haven for senior citizens
and those of the gay-and-lesbian persuasion (33%),
Palm Springs averages 354 days of sunshine per year.
Now, that’s one hell of a lot of sunshine, let me tell you.
354 days of glorious sunshine and less than 6 inches of rain.
Date Palms thrive in that kind of climate. Which is lucky for them.
It helps their fruit develop high glucose, fructose and sucrose content.
Unfortunately for me, I’m not a Date Palm. I’m nothing of the sort.
I'm busy melting out here. I can feel my brain oozing from my ears.
Little wonder former mayor Sonny Bono enjoyed skiing so much.
The Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians
survived in the harsh desert for 500 years
without the need for Starbucks coffee houses
or used-car dealers or steak houses or casinos.
Their original name for the area was "Se-Khi",
which roughly translates as "The Place Of The Boiling Water".
Today, its 110°F in-the-shade, so it’s something
of a blessed relief that the cinemas are air-conditioned.
Less blessed, is the fact that most of the films
I've seen at this year’s Shortsfest blow so hard
they're in danger of coughing-up their own sigmoid colons!
Mad dogs and English short film-makers anyone?