About Some Meaningless Events (1974)

 

Director: Mostafa Derkaoui

Screenplay: Mostafa Derkaoui

Ephemeral Waves

 

In Casablanca, Morocco in the 1970s, we are in the middle of a bar among drinking patrons. The energy is that even a shoeshine boy is encouraged to come in, if just for cruelly getting him drunk and then kick him out. The film itself is a curious historical fragment from Mostafa Derkaoui, who here in this docu-drama makes what begins with a discussion of what Moroccan cinema should be, but ultimately leads to this question having wider implications.

Mostafa Derkaoui with his tiny crew eventually go on to have to question the ethics of filmmaking in this fictionalised documentary. At first however, they follow into the bar and the area in urban Casablanca among the cafes, filming the bar patrons and asking members of the public of what their nation's cinema should be. They will eventually be forced to view their medium and the society in a new light when, during a squabble in a bar, a younger man stabs another man, which forces them to think of how to depict reality, and the implications of this, when Derkaoui wants to talk to the arrest suspect.

Derkaoui's film, scored by Polish jazz for a very unconventional music choice that keeps this film's tone unpredictable, is compelling. What the film is in genre is less important, and apt, for a film whose title, denoting an insignificance, belays that Derkaoui's film completely deconstructs any image for outsiders of his country of Morocco. Even, to not be crass, to see a world here where some mentions a trip to a mosque, but is set in a location where the bar is populated and being drunk is not frowned upon, really offers an image that is distinct, one which undercuts what you would presume this world is. Firmly planted in the seventies, with the up-to-then current fashions, the Polish jazz in the score adding vibrancy, this undercuts any image a viewer not from Morocco can have of the country, including the famous 1942 Warner Brothers film made on Hollywood sets, by showing the real environment of the time itself. Even if clearly fictionalised, this has full verisimilitude we see, helped considerably that, before the ethics comes in, it is not actually a treatise on Moroccan cinema at first but a series of skits which let you listen in on the world, with many amusing moments. Drunken people ramble regardless of their language, and here a man will inexplicably appear to offer a weird fish to patrons to buy against their will, whilst one man is so annoyed a co-worker is drinking there that, at first appearing with a hook, he returns with a giant net to finally drag the co-worker out.

That Mostafa Derkaoui depicts this, played as real but staged, is him showing the ordinary world where the questions he has to ask are in context of, an energy letting one become comfortable to as you love the mood and atmosphere. This is especially in mind that the initial premise and the film itself is esoteric, a film-about-film, specifically a time capsule banned in his homeland, even if Mostafa Derkaoui is dealing with universal themes eventually. The discussion of Moroccan cinema, in casual interviews, continues from this in how the time is reflected, in the segments offering a snapshot of the culture where they are a country who mostly imported genre films from other countries and barely had their own cinema. With a diet of westerns and "karate films" like The Big Boss (1971) with Bruce Lee, Moroccan cinema is not as seen as reflecting the world, or as one female interviewee here suggests is too "intellectual", rather than covering issues for the regular person on the street has to deal with in their lives. One man refers to wanting "intimate" cinema, not wanting Morocco's to be like the commercial cinema of Egypt, and there is a sense in how, with the cinema itself mostly imported, that the voice itself is complex in what will be unique for this nation.

To know this docu-drama was banned by the Moroccan government is a surprise, except that, a literal fragment of life, this does show a bustling world of people who live and yet is one of living a life which is difficult, not hiding the uglier side when the figure who stabs another is introduced and heard, revealed as not a one-dimensional figure. When this figure is introduced, and when Mostafa Derkaoui finally gets to interview him in a jail, the notion of wanting to document even his side is suspect, to the guilty man himself who finds Derkaoui an irritant with no grasp of his situation. This film of some events is itself eventually thinking of how cinema, when thought of, has a lot of difficulty to try to understand the truth. The discussion just after the stabbing has the crew argue of how to depict the guilty party's side, or whether to actually do so, with the fear of becoming the capitalist commercial filmmaking they wish to condemn. That they openly talk of the seventies American cinema of the time, dubbed the true era of innovative and radical American cinema, having just been commercialism appropriating political cinema negatively shows that, in another time, hindsight of politics' virtues of art was less important that the truth being sincere. That the incident is about a disgruntled dockhand having killed his boss opens up the moral issues of how to deal with the subject where, with the issue of transferring a real story a film, you have to except that the figures involved are real people. Finally uncovered by the Filmoteca de Catalunya and scholar Léa Morin, who helped get the film restored, a film like About Some Meaningless Events truly denotes "world cinema" as I want it to be, completely unpredictable even if it was a narrative with conventional plotting in how you cannot predict what the trajectory is, with this as not even being a traditional narrative revealing more in its subject by how unconventional it actually is.

Vinnie's Tomb, Chapter One - The Road To Vinnie's Tomb (1997)

 

Developer: Global Star Software Ltd.

Publisher: Reldni Productions

One Player

Windows

Oddly enough you did not die. Instead, you landed on a strategically placed mountain of breakfast cereal.

Author's Note: This review only covers Vinnie's Tomb Part 1, which as is documented in the review, had a sequel game of a trilogy which never was completed. As of 2022, the second game, Vinnie's Tomb Chapter Two - Shine and Glow Vinnie (1997), is only possible to play if you can boot up an old mid-90s emulation of Windows, which emphasises that, in terms of emulation, PC and Mac software is its own vast land I have yet to even figure out, whilst Vinnie's Tomb Part 1 was converted for Newgrounds. Befitting this bizarre cultural item, even playing it is a story.

Vinnie's Tomb, Chapter One: The Road To Vinnie's Tomb, thus from here to be addressed as Vinnie's Tomb Part 1, is fringe as you can get. It is the creation is made more perplexing because of its context in the modern day. In Canada, there was a man named Troy Scott, and it has been addressed, though is vague, that he died of medical complications on the 4th December 2000¹, his work in music and games as a completely outsider now in the fringe preserved by a group he founded called Reldni Productions. His story, in the obscure vast planes of the internet, now has been mythologized by the holders of Reldni Productions with questions of validity, or at least a sense they want to tell their own strange take on his life. His story through Reldni is now part of the internet's Chinese whispers and mythology, as only fragments of his work, a couple of independently made games and music albums, which are available with an exaggerated back-story. Vinnie's Tomb itself was meant to be a trilogy of games, only for the Reldni Wiki for to talk of the late Troy Scott being kidnappped, mid-interview in 1997, by " by a ski masked figure in a black limousine" preventing the third game from happening². With the timeline involving Scott being frightened into isolated in 1999 by a figure by Mike Alfano², who is likely the same figure in Year of the Alfano (2000), a concept album where Alfano is a gangster figure with a temper and innovated a dance style called the Alfano about shuffling back and forth, undeniably this is a mythology. It does not include the actual truth of who Troy Scott was, if he died in the 2000s or not, and why Vinnie's Tomb, alongside other games documented in these preserved articles, existed in partial form.

The game alone, an ultra-low budget point-and-click adventure which plays to irony, would put some off. Playing to an absurdist humour that is deliberately random and clearly to amuse the creator, Vinnie's Tomb itself is an electronics store that, as time passed, became a tomb, the ancestor of its owner, a pierrot also called Vinnie, setting out to find his rightful hand-me-down. With deliberately bad craftsmanship involved too, this is also a work from the mid-to-late nineties, of the many deceased formats of Windows, to which this was made available for the shareware, with an aesthetic entirely of MS-Paint crudely drawn. I admit, as in all those weird fringes of the internet, all in danger of being lost if it ever was turned off, this belongs to that culture which many would feel would not be even worth preserving, but for me is compelling as part of the weird fixations and foibles of my fellow human being. Probably soaking myself in another's obsessions is a dangerous thing to do, and Vinnie's Tomb Part 1 has one joke which reminds one, as to discuss later on, where this interest in connecting to others should not forget when it is morally dubious, but this is one of those artefacts which was perplexingly fascinating.

Vinnie's Tomb Part 1, in spite of its long introduction, is a slight game, made available in 2016 by a Newgrounds user and coder Mike Welsh, whose interest in preserving over fifteen years of flash animation and work on Newgrounds in itself is to be commended. It is also befitting how this ended up on Newgrounds as the strange uncle of a site which, alongside being a hub for Flash animation before its creator Adobe ended the software in December 2020, is a hub of a variety of internet culture, be it indie games (even known ones), fan art, even animated and video game porn, and everything potentially cool and strange in-between of a variety of qualities and strange humours. Vinnie's Tomb, only from 1997 but a grandfather by now for internet culture, would have at least won a person over from the later generations for its ironic touch. You are warned of what to expect on the first screen when, with a crudely drawn sea creature nearby, the narrator with a strange accentuated accent does so to the player, and you hear what can only be described between a MIDI cacophony mixed with a knock off version of music by The Residents blaring out. You need to get past the bridge, a trick where you needs to find a way to cross without it collapsing, and if you manage to succeed with having to have to restart the game as you fell in and drowned, this turns into a rudimentary point n click with stream of consciousness wackiness.

Even this forced me to realise my taste for point n click games is still to be dealt with, impatience likely a factor for even the most rudimentary of presentations, with icons onscreen the only things to clearly click, to lead me to miss things. Vinnie's Tomb to be honest though, however, also has its fair share of esoteric decisions, especially as Part I has a lot of outright irrational ideas, where key items like cheese and underwear are acquired through a dialogue exposition text when you get certain combinations, or that the diamond you need to open a door is still needed, and needs to be wrenched out of the place it has been placed into. Or that you need to wear the glasses before knocking a yellow ball presumed to be the sun out of the left corner. Yes, even if this is rudimentary, it emphasises my disinterest in the point and click genre I need to overcome with, in how it feels like the puzzles are vague to procrastinate rather than ones based on actual common sense. Here the absurdist tone almost feels justifiable only because this game is very short and you can get back to the sections with ease, when others are longer and could even have game over conclusions.

Many will not even get through this, regardless of short length, as cacophony is apt for it all, a game truly weird for just the sake of being weird, sometimes inspired even if by accident for me, other times even for my forgiving taste in strange cultural objects feeling like it is trying and failing. Some odd cultural references that would be dated even in the nineties appear, of a snake in the garbage you need to talk to being bigger than Wayne Newton at Las Vegas, that "Donny Osmond is hosting a benefit concert there for seven legged spiders from a windy city...", or that one concern to get key items is to shut up a monster who sings like Leonard Cohen at night and keeps everyone up. These at least reveal the tastes of its creator which, in hindsight, is fascinating to learn of, but other jokes are not like this. It is random for the sake of it, sometimes succeeding for me even as accidental surrealism, but there is a fine line between succinct surrealism and just trying, or rambling humour which is a greater issue. All the voice acting, crudely recorded, has weird accents and intonations, all non-professional and crudely recorded in the modern day, and the music is likely to be maddening for some. (The Residents comparison, even though that band is superior and honed their music, is apt in mind that, if you played a song like Constantinople from Duck Stab (1978) in a loop, it might drive someone mad too, with the same manic energy here from a professional recording). The humour is the kind that amuses oneself but required your own codes of what you find funny, rather than what is funny to yourself but could gain a reaction from others even if shocked laughter. One joke, only one thankfully, crosses a potential line where the aforementioned snake you need to talk to, whose brother you meet instead, is meant to be a "queer snake". Not the worse language to use, and what Troy Scott meant with the term queer, either the derogatory term re-appropriated by LGBTQ people or the old term for being "odd", is up to meaning seeing how quirky the game is, but this is a good reminder to be aware when you even find entertainment or interest in soaking in these strange cultural objects to be aware of this.

In terms of aesthetic, most will be put off by it too. As mentioned, it is Microsoft Point to the point Scene 3, in grassy land before you enter the central cave of the narrative, has flowers drawn by the spray paint function of the software that are just dots. Text boxes, the old ones from old computers where you have to press okay to continue, present the exposition, and dialogue scenes are progressed by clicking a click-at-a-time slider at the bottom. One non-playable character you encounter is an invisible horse, only invisible (until you get to look at him) because it is explicitly said that the creator cannot draw horses. This is the moment where I find myself having to figure out what I feel for Vinnie's Tomb Part 1, a curious artefact I am glad to struggle through, am glad to learn of more even if it means having to go through the juvenile mythology behind it which obscures the actual history, maybe find joy slowly with that weird mythology, and admitting that this is not a game many would want to play. The game itself is a time capsule, not a great game, but alongside the fascination with this content, even this crude art style done without irony and deliberately could be appropriated for an indie game and you could get something that sells like a cult gem on Steam.

That later bit is not a joke, as considering the steps into old and even "ugly" aesthetic, like the embracing of old Playstation One era polygonal aesthetic, even Nintendo 64's Vaseline smeared polygons being looked back to for artistic interest, old crude low budget PC software, even Microsoft Paint-core, could be something you get a great game from. This, even if a mess, still has the whit around it to have secrets within it, even if such secrets involve a mini-game where you have to slowly manoeuvre your pierrot up screen, unable to even see the traps you have to avoid and thus having to go by pure luck. This is the type of work which, to be cruel, would be looked at as a exhibit to gawk at for how unnatural it is, a misfortunate creation in the world of video games which is yet artificially made to be like this too. The paradox is that, in among this, there are moments which captured my own taste in the weird which felt good, even if you have to scrape off so much which is not really that inspired.

And even that questionable content can be digested as it fascinates me as a cultural object from a different era like a museum exhibit, which makes this a confused one to deal with. Truthfully, only those intrigued by any of this should try Vinnie's Tomb Part 1. Part 2 was released in 1997 too, but still exists in form that has not converted to a more accessible form, one which requires a knowledge of how to run an old Windows emulator from the past. Part III itself never existed or is lost, and there is an entire history of titles which Troy Scott was said to have created, possibly lost for real from a time where immediate preservation was not common online. That this is all part of the mythology itself confuses things further. This follows the same camp as when fan fiction, both the truly worst and memorable, is exonerated and preserved online, though Vinnie's Tomb is an obscure work few may know of.  

This is, to be harsh again, a work of whims and rambling sense of humour, a stream of consciousness alongside the music Troy Scott made which Reldni Productions have made available for free, made as home-produced improvisations on what he could create. This is something most would not appreciate, but I have come to this entire catalogue with empathy even if I am to be cautious in that too. To openly borrow a joke from an actual video game critic and author, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, this is exactly like finding a dead squirrel with a fez on its head³, a curiosity to look at that raises questions. I find that metaphor cruel as, rather than being distracted by something odd on the side of the road, I came to Vinnie's Tomb willingly and with empathy for any misfit. The metaphor is more apt, artificially being kept back by Reldni Productions' mythology, this raises interesting questions, such as whether that is a hat or if the squirrel fell out a tree eating a yogurt³, and here whether Vinnie's Tomb is actually the outsider art piece uncovered from a passed creator, or this is entirely fabricated for some strange in-joke. That fabrication is harmless, thankfully not used for cheating people if it was revealed to be the truth, but it just asks further questions to scratch your chin about.

 

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1) This is referenced in Scott's biography on a fandom wiki, and is referencing the following on RootsWeb.

2) As documented in the third game's wiki.

3) This was befittingly taken from a review of The Good Life (2021) as premiered on November 10, 2021 on Escapist Magazine's website and Youtube, a game from the cult figure SWERY, the Japanese developer/Buddhist monk behind such strange video game titles to cover one day like Deadly Premonition (2010), which just from the review is a befittingly weird game one wishes to just play for its own bizarre content.

Workbooks Collection (2005)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin

Canon Fodder

 

Known also as Love-Chaunt in the Chimney, at least in the Zeitgeist DVD release of Cowards Bend the Knees (2003) which have these as an extra, this is among the many of Guy Maddin's career of feature length and short length films, but with the irony that, long before the Seance (2016) project, where he resurrected the lost movies of directors from Mikio Naruse to Ernst Lubitsch, Maddin himself has a lost film these are connected to. Seance, originally set up as a recorded live performance between Paris and Canada, became The Forbidden Room (2015), Maddin's delirious multi-narrative-within-narrative film, whilst the films also called the Workbooks Collection are just shorts from a project which was lost in a fire¹. This is a ghost, fused together and rebuilt from the remnants, including a tie-in to Cowards Bend the Knees.

The films are FuseBoy, Rooster Workbook, Zookeeper Workbook, Chimney Workbook, Audition 01 and Audition 02, blurring the lines between what survives of this project from the late nineties and Audition 02, which connects to Cowards Bend the Knees, a Guy Maddin film which does exist. This lost film started after Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, a 1997 production that for me was a pleasant experience but is not historically the best period for Guy Maddin. A documentary from the time, Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (1997), shows a miserable Guy Maddin, who eventually hated Twilight of the Ice Nymph, which was not seen as a popular work, and a terrible and frustrating experience to the point that the documentary almost has a near-memoriam tone of Maddin imagining his career ending. Made in his garage, some at the Winnipeg Film Group Studio¹, his solution to overcome that experience was a film entirely self produced with improvisation.

How it would have compiled together, an amalgamation of Herman Melville short stories stuck together with assistance from George Toles, is a question for me of interest as, including the two Audition films, the lost film's surviving forms are a curious set of experimental pieces entirely about mood. They precede the fetishishtic nature of Cowards Bend the Knees, the most overtly sexual film of his career, as well as touch a similar nature to old George Kuchar and Jack Smith films as improvised low budget productions literally filmed at points in the director's garage. Rooster Workbook is probably the most explicit, in which a nude woman crawls through homemade crawlspaces, whilst feathers and a rooster populate the visions in rapid fire, repeating scenes in the editing. Fuseboy, starring Guy Maddin regular Louis Negin, is the most implicitly erotic, at least in how Negin, in just tighty whities, plays a man possessed by an erotic memory of three younger men (or one his younger self with two) shirtless erotically mucking about fixing electric fuses.  

With Zookeepers Workbook, Maddin even explicitly references Les Chants de Maldoror, Comte de Lautréamont's transgressive novel which, cosnidering its high art status, is also a work where the God-hating transgressive lead has sex with a female shark, surprisingly more transgressive than even Maddin's own work at times but befitting someone, whilst more whimsically transgressive in his films, to reference. Most of the shorts also, shot in standard definition, feel even if from afterwards like prototypes from The Heart of the World (2000), a short film that, when it was commissioned and debuted at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival, was a huge turning point positively for Maddin with its Soviet rapid fire editing and aesthetical tributes. These shorts are to be absorbed, his obsessions felt like mood tapes with their repeating images, the Audition shorts, the first for Fuseboy, the later with cast from Cowards Bend the Knees, a curious pair to include but yet befitting, suddenly Maddin turning the viewfinder on his productions themselves. They all, whatever they call them, are a fascinating collection.

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1) As talked of briefly in Offscreen for An Interview with Guy Maddin: Dissecting the Branded Brain by David Church for Volume 10, Issue 1 in January 2006

Cowards Bend The Knees (Or The Blue Hands) (2003)

 

Dir. Guy Maddin                 

Screenplay: Guy Maddin

Cast: Darcy Fehr as Guy Maddin; Melissa Dionisio as Meta; Amy Stewart as Veronica; Tara Birtwhistle as Liliom; Louis Negin as Dr. Fusi; Mike Bell as Mo Mott; David Stuart Evans as Shaky; Henry Mogatas as Chas; Victor Cowie as Maddin Sr.

An Abstract Candidate Re-Evaluation

 

Guy Maddin is an experimental director yet he is not stereotypically avant-garde, his trademark style completely linkable to past aesthetics - silent film aesthetics with intertitles jostled against dialogue films, post-CGI affects, or between specific colour styles to monochrome. Varying per film, they are still his own. Guy Maddin can proudly claim every film of his is unique and distinct to the others, which even applies to his short film making, which few directors can do. Originally designed as an installation piece made more candid as a peepshow exhibition, separated into chapters as sixty plus minute epic altogether, Coward Bend the Knees even for Guy Maddin is his most overtly lewd, sexual and at times perverse whilst Maddin drags Maddin through the dirt.

Literally, as Guy Maddin (Darcy Fehr), an ice hockey player, is introduced, at a back alley abortion clinic in the back of a hairdresser's which is also a bordello, leaving his girlfriend Veronica (Amy Stewart) to die of an illegal abortion to lust after Meta (Melissa Dionisio). All is this is whilst in mid-operation, as he eyes the daughter of Liliom (Tara Birtwhistle), owner of a hair dressers. Meta wants revenge on her mother and her younger lover Shaky (David Stuart Evans), the captain of the ice hockey team, for murdering her father, loving to her and his hands blue because of the dyes used in his hairdressing work. Very clearly fixated on him to the point it is uncomfortably sexual, Meta plans to have her late father's persevered hands grafted onto Maddin, only for Dr. Fusi (Maddin regular Louis Negin) to throw them in the bin and paint Maddin's hands blues to pretend it was completed. I would not be surprised if Guy Maddin was evoking films like The Hands of Orlac (1924), the Austrian silent film great Conrad Veidt, as a pianist whose hands are destroyed in a train accident, is horrified to learn he may have had the hands of a murderer surgically attached to him, Maddin the director, having Maddin the star as a figure tempted by Meta to murder her mother and Shaky with the promise of her body, his hands seemingly possessed by the ghost of her father despite being his original ones painted blue.

And yet he ends up with Liliom, and Veronica, despite dying, comes back as a ghost/doppelganger working in the hairdressers and is having a relationship with Maddin Sr. (Victor Cowie), Guy's father. Somehow, in only sixty minutes, this perverse blackly humoured work juggles between intentionally falling off the rails and being tied up in a cohesive structure. Maddin deliberately goes against the notion that any event has to be the same as the rest of a story's structure, letting the events dictate the structure instead, including those that go into the completely absurd and goes against conventional rationalisation. For those not used to his cinema, this content exists in its own logic, that of lurid and unpredictable cinema from a yesteryear, a yesteryear that does not exist and comes from its own plane of reality. For those used to Maddin like myself, Cowards Bend the Knees is, even for a director who tackled taboos from the beginning, his most overtly lurid film.

Details like the onscreen male full frontal nudity in the post-hockey game showers, to Melissa Dionisio's nude scenes, to the set-up being that the narrative is taking place in semen being scrutinised under a microscope, Maddin is not kidding himself in the explicitness here. Gender balancing is found the poking of the male body as well as the female, which actually does happen when a large pare of buttocks is confused for a doorbell, scrutinising masculinity even to the point of a large close-up of Maddin Sr's penis as he used a urinal being witnessed when someone has the unfortunate position of trying to use the one just by him with no hands. Even the weird kinks the director-writer is known for feel more perverse here, like Maddin Sr. having, whilst commentating on hockey games, a breast carved from ice he fondles mid-match even with Vernonica's double on his arm. Even without the sexual edge, Cowards Bend the Knees befittingly is not your ordinary murder revenge story, particularly when it also has an ice hockey museum in the lofts of the ice rink, full of wax mannequins of dead hockey players who may not actually be dead, a clash with the elite Soviet ice hockey team of concern, out-of-left-field sexual practices not even seen in some porn, and blue filter, in a black and white film, to show the majesty of blue hands. It feels like Maddin, to the point he puts himself under the guillotine, fully investing in emasculating the male gender in its worse. A trademark I have seen in his films has been how much his work has been about men and their sexual libidos for all the worst aspects, emasculating them in the process.

Guy Maddin is a director to draw on obsessions and material almost dreamt of and does not soften them to seem conventionally rational to the viewer. To purposely undercut narrative conventions with non-sequiturs, absurdity, and bookend his works in narratives-within-narratives, here it is more intimate as, if My Winnipeg (2007) is entirely accurate in telling his own biography, Maddin grew up living above a hairdressers, whilst having both ice hockey part of his blood and a father who ran their team in Winnipeg.  His work is also an ode to cinema, not only to the film making techniques of the past, arcane rather than nostalgia, contacting once dead cinematic practices, but also an ode to the lack of pristine gloss. The concept of viewing films scratched up and with jittering frames is something we find sad to witness, desiring these films preserved, but there is something irresistible to seeing them with scratches too, textures that makes them unique compared to other films. In Cowards Bend The Knees, the images are also shown through a circle surrounded by complete black, of its peepshow origins and very old silent films, made to look like a blurred and damaged film print Maddin discovered in a basement of a Canadian home, sordid hyper stylised thrills that would have gotten the scissors on it by censors back in granddad's day. Frames moves and the actors are at points distorted into figures of pure grain as they are clear and beautiful in portraying these exaggerated archetypes. Entirely silent, with intertitles, it charges ahead with its content in quick, sharply edited images clearly learnt from Soviet propaganda cinema. The content itself manages to be shocking and surprising, yet this style compiles it all together into one cohesive whole.  He manages to depict consensual fisting just in Soviet montage, whilst being entirely unsubtle about it in a way evoking Sergei Eisenstein, a man who, alongside his genius was also very sexual open, someone who would have probably approved the scene with delight.

What does it say as well about the director when he names his less-than-great protagonist after himself? It may be fantastical in tone, but the ecstatic truth, to quote Werner Herzog, is that in doing so, Maddin admits with Maddin the character - spineless, a coward, a killer - failings he might have encountered in himself or other men subconsciously shown through the scenarios shown onscreen, exaggerated to an extreme. Then there are the autobiographical aspects. Maddin's mother in the role of Meta's blind grandmother, that he grew up with ice hockey, his father coaching an actual hockey team, as well as hairdressing being part of a family business. He would later go on to make the poignant and funny My Winnipeg which directly examined his titular Canadian homeland and his life, but in placing his own memories within content like this with its killer hands, and Elektra based influences and perversions, it is far from undermining it but using the absurd and perverse content to amplify and examine the effect these reminiscences. By way of dreams and the logic of a b-movie cum German Expressionist influence horror movies, what is enjoyable as a spectacle by itself means more when he is bringing a subconscious confession to this film, even through psychotronic, erotic murder melodrama and literary meanings. It also makes this a far better cult film than many others for providing more in its sixty minutes than most films. That the film does not end happily, yet feels perversely charming for the deaths, disappointments and someone taking their place in the wax mannequin hall of fame feels apt.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Eerie/Perverse/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

Games of the Abstract: Peggle Deluxe (2007)

 

Developer: PopCap Games

Publisher: PopCap Games / Electronic Arts

One Player

Microsoft Windows / Mac OS X / iPod / Windows Mobile / Java ME / BREW / Nintendo DS / Xbox 360 / PlayStation 3 / iOS / Zeebo / Android / PlayStation Portable

We can forget, more so now that we have games made with the budgets of mainstream Hollywood films, with storylines and cut scenes using the shiniest graphics, that games which are simple and focus on their game play are themselves to be appreciated, alongside the concept of games which can be appreciated by non-gamers, something which the mobile phone app market has been more commonplace with and is a holy grail in its own for companies to win over. Angry Birds (2009-) for example, playable with just a mobile touch screen, became so popular for its Finnish creator that it managed to have film adaptation, and even a tie-in Star Wars versions for a game. This is all for a game, in spite of controversially having a similar structure to Crush the Castle (2009), where you fire colourful birds at limbless green pigs in easily breakable castles, whose addictiveness for anyone, even non-gamers, I can attest to from playing the Facebook version when I was away from videogames. Peggle is the same too, the creation of PopCap Games, a company who just from two other franchises, Bejeweled (2001) and Plants vs Zombies (2009), have made themselves frankly the best of the best in terms of games for casual and non-games which, on phone apps but also available on multiple formats, gain an addictive foothold.

Peggle takes its inspiration from pachinko, the Japanese recreational mechanical game that is played for gambling which, as a cultural concept, is so dominant in Japan it is probably played by far more people than video games themselves, to the point companies such as Konami started to prioritise working on them. Pachinko, which has had video game adaptations too, is however randomised, entirely about sending the ball out and luck being on your side. Peggle, as played here in the Peggle Deluxe version, plays differently, where rather than firing the ball from below like a pinball, up with the intention of hitting the right target to gain pachinko balls, you can fire the ball in whatever direction you wish from the top of the screen. The desired goal here is to hit all the orange pegs onscreen with a limited number of balls to use. If you are lucky, you can get them in the bucket at the bottom of the screen, moving back and forth, to avoid losing a ball out of play, and the game has bog standard blue pegs, which give points but are less important, alongside purple pegs, which change position and give a points bonus, and green pegs, which are connected in the Adventure mode (or when you unlock them for other modes) to the Peggle Masters. These are a menagerie of cartoon figures that have their own special abilities, be it a magician rabbit that has a random wheel of luck, or a dragon with a fireball that burns through pegs. If you are lucky, getting enough points, including skill shots, can increase a bar up at least three times to be able to get a free ball (or two) to continue.

From here, the mechanics of the game are pretty much explained, which presents an obvious issue in terms of reviewing a game like this. It is so simplistic in premise, with the aesthetic dressing and a plot being the best peggle master, to really review without the danger of bizarre pretentious musings on tactics. I will be upfront in saying the game, as it plays, is exceptional though, admitting my laissez-faire attitude to shooting the balls out on whims, and enjoying myself, whilst growing some tactics as fewer orange pegs leave you having to figure out how to hit them with fewer ways to ricochet the balls to the. It is based as much on luck as it is skill, bouncing the ball off walls, the other pegs and hazards, but it works and it is a testament to the creators that this allows casual entertainment, luck in winning rounds, but you can play and learn how to succeed especially as there is an unlockable Challenge mode which ups the difficulty with specific goals to work through. It is fine tuned in the Peggle Deluxe version to the point that, over an Adventure mode, or the other modes, that you cannot complain in the slightest about it. There is nothing unconventional about the game, any strange turns, but I appreciate the skill from PopCap Games to have a game which does tap into an aspect of these casual games, deliberately engaging the player with quick hits of dopamine when you succeed, but is actually a well made game with a distinct gaming mechanic to it.

This does get into the one detail against this game, the one mark against Peggle that, for all my joy of it, undercuts the experience in being able to give it a high status even though I enjoyed the experience greatly - that being the aesthetic, which for me personally is very bland. This does not include the big trademark of Peggle, being that when you hit the final orange peg, with slow motion zoom when the ball is near it, an excerpt of Symphony #9 - Ode to Joy by Ludwig van Beethoven plays as the ball has the chance to enter one of multiple slots for a final points boost, which is that joyous dose of energy to the brain that is charming in its inclusion. The issue is entirely that, for a game perfect in mechanics, never was one where I wished it had such a better aesthetic. The look of the game is a cute, pastoral aesthetic, very Western, of unicorns and cute critters. Some of them are frankly stereotypes, like the dude hamster, to the frankly dubious guru owl, whose Zen Ball is still a great special, as the computer for 75% percent of the time worked out a better shot for me, but is still appropriating Eastern mysticism in an eye rolling way. Peggle, to be frank, and in respect to the creators' hard work, does not suit my aesthetic in the slightest. If there ever was a game, without changing the mechanics or including anything that compromised them, would have been such a better game with a lick of paint, this would be it, and never was there a case of even the most stereotypical of Japanese video game clichés being welcomed if from an actual Japanese studio having been brought in just to renovate the look and nothing else. Even if Peggle as a game kept me compelled throughout it, that one touch, if the aesthetic was entirely different, separates this from a great game to just a good one. Peggle 2 (2013), created after PopCap Games were bought by Electronic Arts, has a far more cheery aesthetic when looked at, but this review exemplifies a factor I will take into consideration for what I find are great games, even when they possess very clear flaws.

American Job (1996)

 

Director: Chris Smith

Screenplay: Doug Ruschaupt, Randy Russell and Chris Smith

Cast: Randy Russell, Matt Collier, Ed English, Gary Ganakas, Dan Layne, Eric Lezotte, Dave O'Meara, Charlie Smith, Tom Wheeler

Ephemeral Waves

 

Some may be aware of American Movie (1999), the follow up to this film from director-future producer Chris Smith, which was a documentary on Mark Borchardt, a micro budget filmmaker from Wisconsin who, in a deadpan humorous tone, strived to produce and make the no budget Coven (2000). Almost no one has likely heard of American Job, a film I openly admit to only seeing finally due to someone leaking a VHS rip online, doomed to a rare ultra obscurity in spite of the follow-up from co-writer/director/producer Chris Smith becoming a cult hit and warranting interest. If Smith however was able to release this again, I would recommend we all pay for a copy, with only the caveat that you have a taste for the bleakest (and blandest) of humours in regards of the existentialism of minimum wage work.

Randy Russell, playing an unnamed character I will just call "Randy" too, is a thin bespectacled young man drifting in his twenties. Job searching, which I can attest to at least many years unemployed trying to even find work, is a nightmare, but even I look to this depiction of minimum wage wincing, more so as unfortunately American Job  decades later has not aged at all in what it depicts barring technological tweaks to work environments. It is difficult to avoid politics in a review like this, but the film is so deliberately beige in tone that it is not really politics based on parties, but a greater existential one of why things work as they do. You will watch the doldrums of work here, and know how little Randy and real people would be paid for similar jobs, and it would force one to contemplate even with a sick humour how society actually functions.

It is weird how minimal paid work can yet be some of the most important that you need to have in a functioning society. Yet here work is purely abstract, even with its listless tone being humoured forcing one to consider half these jobs to feel strange if you were to stop and reconsider why they exist. Randy, as he travels on, is as befuddled by how everything works as much as willingly drifts onto a new job. What you get here, in the netherworld of middle Americana, feels like an exhibition of the strange social mechanisms of the modern day, or frankly even early human civilisation. Even if a telephone marketer for insurance could argue their work is important for society, the job Randy is on in the end, as depicted, is so bland I am glad that it questions the validity of many. Even if fast food is viewed by some as more than just a luxury of the modern day, someone like Randy has to work in one, the image of long hours and the possibility no one has changed the fry cooker as unpleasant as it questions the nature of the work. It is neither a sense of business being inherently evil, unless it directly sacrifices lives or the environments, but when in this context, everyone is doing a job that really does not make sense, does not get paid well or feels like accidental purgatory, as one point Randy does read a book, one which leads to one of the bleakest jokes. This even evokes Franz Kafka, an author arguably bleaker than this film, on one of his more perversely happy days, the first job we see involving a machine, among many using chemicals for plastics likely harmful to person or tree, to make plastic pellets. It is a machine which only allows seconds between action to rest and is apparently making these plastic pieces for "testing reasons" with no further detail. It could a machine for the sake of manufacturing for all we know.

The sense of bleakness, the VHS rip watched adding a further blank inertness, is contrasted by how in the right mood you could find this funny. Director Chris Smith clearly does not paint even the managers in this world as bad in principal, only likely cogs in a machine where everyone is middle age or aimless younger men, and the work is just work without any sense of context. Environments look bland and even if working around what was practical in terms of sets and casting of women, the fact the strip club Randy is taken too at one is a blank room in red light is apt, as men watch aimlessly on at a woman nearby, only seen by her feet and for all we know not even nude. It is with a perverse sense of modern life also being humorously banal in a societal way as well. Randy in his own way defies the world around him as much as follows it as everyone else, from ignoring the money pools among multiple staff for lottery tickets, which he tragically ends the film not doing by being tempted into buying one from a store, to sneaking a trip into the bathroom to eat what looks like a dough-like substance. Considering as well, at the fast food restaurant, we as he looks as surprised as day's food left is deliberately ruined so no one can have it, you do have the moments of seeing business as evil when it is purely mechanical without any grip of reality to it, wasting resources for the sake of a place which, least in this film, the staff are as likely miserable as the customers we never see.

Here the passions are found, in a graveyard shift team, in the guy who feels you can recycle coke bottles by cutting them in half to have funnels and cups, even if he realises there would be less demand for funnels. It is a film, if you said it was a comedy, which would get many blank faces in response to this, with its static scenes being documentary-like to the point of blankness, where even the commentary on an amateur level you can make on its themes feels perverse due to its deliberately inert nature. Based on scenarios by Doug Ruschaupt, Randy Russell and Chris Smith together, you can argue American Job baring little details is a film about nothing, for the prepared compelling and testament to its virtues in how I want to revisit American Movie. Among documentaries I have seen which were praised, only to feel slight when I viewed them, I want to revisit American Movie, and feel these two films by Chris Smith may actually need to exist as a permanent double bill, as one provides the inert day-to-day, whilst American Movie's Mark Borchardt now feels like a person to idolise. Better to make low budget films whose titles are pronounced "oven" when you can, regardless of budget, than to merely drift through life.

Secret Defense (1998)

 

Director: Jacques Rivette

Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Emmanuelle Cuau and Jacques Rivette

Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire as Sylvie Rousseau; Jerzy Radziwilowicz as Walser; Grégoire Colin as Paul; Laure Marsac as Véronique / Ludivine; Françoise Fabian as Geneviève; Christine Vouilloz as Myriam

Canon Fodder

 

Secret Defense is what would happen if you took an Alfred Hitchcock thriller and brought it fully into real world ramifications. Here, Sylvie (Sandrine Bonnaire) learns from her brother that their father's death, though to have fallen on railway tracks, may have not been an accident, linked to former associate Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz). Deciding instead of said brother to go with a firearm, the consequences of violence are great, as the truth of what transpired in the past is brought to the surface, and an innocent is killed, forcing the grim weight of guilt to be felt by Sylvie along the way.

In the spectrum of New Wave directors, you have Jean-Luc Godard at one side eventually becoming even more radical than even when he started, François Truffaut held as the most traditional, and everyone in the group finding their trademarks. Among them, Rivette is fascinating in how his is between both the most radical members of that movement - Out 1 (1971) to Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) playing with the length and style of storytelling - yet also someone who does focus on narratives greatly with his script collaborators, Pascal Bonitzer working with him from the eighties onwards to the end of his career. Secret Defense is very graspable in its narrative, very easy to be drawn into as a genre premise, yet spanning nearly three hours with the dynamic being the repercussions of these events, the banality of the world including all the issues surrounding what these characters' histories are but also the time in-between. When contemplating the act of revenge, Sylvie even getting to the stage to kill her father's murderer leads the viewer and her to experience the long train ride to his countryside home, sobering herself up at the train's bar and the sense of preparation there. Hesitating, an innocent is killed by her, and acting out perfectly by Sandrine Bonnaire, the remorse and horror is lingering, including the strange Stockholm Syndrome scenario she ends up with in afterwards with Walser, both perversely sympathetic in helping her but near to almost dominating her now she has failed shooting him. The thriller switches to a drama as the point of the death, her father's death, becomes more complex itself.

Slow burn, it could sound crass to say this film is shot and composed calmly as one could say of a lot of French cinema from this era like a homogenised mass of filmmaking from this era into the 2000s, focused on dialogue, natural real locations in urban and rural French areas, emphasis on one huge name in the cast in Sandrine Bonnaire common for me among them. Yet this was a time for cinema, among other moments before and afterwards in style, where this staple aesthetic format was so common it lead to interesting results to more of these films I see. So many titles follow a similar aesthetic style, sold literally by distribution companies like Artificial Eye in the UK (who sold Secret Defense on DVD) as their meat and potatoes, yet also had countless fascinating figures within it like Rivette or Raul Ruiz with Comedy of Innocence (2000) who helped add their own slants to this template. As a mass of French world cinema, it brings up reoccurring tropes of note with many of these films, like Secret Defense, being about middle class France that is full of individuals full of neurosis, skeletons in their closets, and with these films unpicking at issues within these groups despite the gentle elegance of even their living rooms.

A strong independent woman who works as a scientist, working on something as singular as medical cell research, Sylvie is nonetheless dragged into an abstract concept of human thought, not tangible but with us for centuries, called revenge. Middle class here is fraught with undisclosed secrets and distant families as her mother is uncomfortable conspiring with Walser, the man behind the murder of her father, who whilst his moral spectrum in the end becomes more complex, is still frankly a womanising sleaze for all his virtues. Revelations expose family skeletons, as it brings in the suicide of Sylvie's older sister. A trait of Rivette's magical realist period, between Celine and Julie... and Duelle (1976), even appears in how the accidental victim of Sylvie, played by Laure Marsac, has a sister never mentioned as being a twin but is also played by Marsac, one introduced who Walser to replace his secretary immediately begins to woo. Even class itself is reared up as, with a childhood friend to Sylvie's working as Walser's maid, there is still the divide that, when he wishes her out, she is out off from this drama even with an intimate friend barely able to hide the trauma of her killing and the weird tension around Walser they have.

Even in mind to my homogenisation theory of certain French cinema, Jacques Rivette was a director of a quiet aesthetic in spite of his layering narratives or stretching beyond three hours with many of his films. He was not someone who relied on elaborate editing or huge aesthetic affect. In fact what makes his work distinct too is how he draws his elaborate narratives genre into a grounded world, such as Celine and Julie Go Boating being a magical realist romp, involving magical sweets that let one see a bizarre purgatorial drama, set in real mid-seventies France. Here as well, the ordinary world of Parisian environments tones and shapes this thriller premise, banality first with the thriller plot intertwined and not from visa versa where as Alfred Hitchcock himself did with humour and/or added tension.

Even how Rivette, in the little music here, ends on medieval classic music on the end credit, an odd choice at first, makes sense as barring firearms, this narrative would be the same in Arthurian tropes of knights or set even in an older ancient time, where accidentally killing the wrong person is just the beginning of the vicious cycle of revenge and death that closes the film out even if things are covered up. Revenge is a sticking point which, here, where even the context for why is it desired should be questioned. An obscure work for Rivette nowadays, which is ironic knowing very accessible the film is for outsiders to his cinema, Secret Defense is a compelling narrative work in mind to this and its exceptional virtues.

The Halt (2019)

 

Director: Lav Diaz

Screenplay: Lav Diaz

Cast: Joel Lamangan as President Nirvano Navarra; Piolo Pascual as Hook Torollo; Shaina Magdayao as Haminilda Rios; Pinky Amador as Jean Hadoro; Hazel Orencio as Martha Officio; Mara Lopez as Marissa Ventura; Noel Miralles as Father Romero

Canon Fodder

Lav Diaz from the Philippines is a director I have had an erratic relationship with. A great deal of this is, honestly, being prepared to watch a director who is very bleak in his work, which frankly is also something to emphasis with Diaz for as he has placed it upon himself to chronicle his country's history - an American colony, even after its independence it went under a military dictatorship and, referred to herein this dystopian sci-fi narrative, the future of his country - all whilst with just this film also writing the script, editing it, being a co-cinematographer, the composer and the production designer. The other issue is more subjective and an artistic issue which I do struggle at times with, that Diaz's trademarks include films beyond the conventional confines of running time. Directors, unless they devote themselves to epics or get the status of a Martin Scorsese, do not necessarily make films even up to three hours frequently anyway, but Diaz has been able, with the sacrifice a larger access until streaming, to make seven plus hour films throughout his career, to the point those under three are the surprise ones of note. The issue has been whether Diaz can sustain this length for me, but as a five hour plus theatrical film, The Halt has a worthwhile sense of expanse, over multiple characters, to work with.

Unfortunately coinciding in production just before the 2020 coronavirus outbreak, a combination of a devastating flu epidemic called the "Dark Killer" which decimates Asia, and a permanent darkness over the Philippines due to a volcanic eruption has left the country weakened in its setting of 2034. These are background to the real narrative, how in the midst of these circumstances a corrupt political leader named President Nirvano Navarra (Joel Lamangan), a mentally unstable and violent figurehead, has taken rule, bolstered by generals including one of his seconds Martha Officio (Hazel Orencio), a female second in command who leads the soldiers that execute and rid his enemies secretly. Contrasting them, in night scenes shot in regular urban areas in Diaz's trademark monochrome, are government drone bots patrolling the streets, cyborg sex workers and women like Haminilda (Shaina Magdayao), a former history teacher, working as one herself, and the underground resistance, including Hook Torollo (Piolo Pascual), a former musician who is called on to help cleave Navarra away even by trying to assassinate him.

This is still a Lav Diaz film, slow cinema drama with prolonged scenes of dialogue, picking here as much at the current day through a hypothesised world not dissimilar to the one this was made within, dealing with how one overcomes authoritarianism whilst having a very obvious but significant referrals to his nation's history and existence he has been documenting in his career, such as a female psychologist Haminilda goes to specialising in the idea that the Filipino people have forgotten their pasts in a form of amnesia, one with political ramifications. This is yet curious in how genre tropes have been broiled down to their perception within a Lav Diaz film, altered by his template. Sci-fi tropes are moulded to fragments, of mentions of sex robots but not seen, normal flying drones used for scenes alongside extras in military fatigues and staged explosions to represent the military's skirmishes on enemies. An attempted sniper assassination by Hook is a key event in his change in attitudes, questioning the true way to save people, and skirting a knife edge, Lav Diaz even has a lot more explicit sexual content here then other films as, seeing even the lives of the villains as complicated emotional people, Martha and her lover/female assistant Marissa Ventura (Mara Lopez), the later becoming conflicted by Navarra's actions and hiring Haminilda constantly, are explicitly gay.

As mentioned, The Halt even humanised the villains regardless of their moral evil. This, in contrast to a work like Season of the Devil (2018), a "musical" based on the era of Ferdinand Marcos which yet felt like prolonged anguished work which could have been more focused at a shorter length, marks The Halt with great weight especially its longer length, both in how it is willing to do this without hiding the fictional characters' evil, and contrasting the other side in Hook facing an existential crisis. Navarra is still a dangerous egotist, who claims to speak to God, but is here a more complex figure close to reality. The way Diaz and actor Joel Lamangan depicts him, even if Navarra could speak to God, the voices in his head overburden him so much in their negative views to him, maybe even as forms of all those he has had killed haunting him, that he has to put on noisy rock music to block them out. His stability is certainly to question, with a scene showing his mother in a mental health clinic and Navarra is emphasised as a child man, psychologically immature but tragically become a dangerous despot than an innocent. With his own private zoo of ostriches and crocodiles that are fed the meat of his victims, he represents the leader who, despite many eccentricities that would question their appropriateness, becomes the head of a violent institution, practical as the lynchpin for military figures who wish to gain power to support his violent impulses to lash out. Martha is arguably more evil, a sadist, and even she has a humanity in her own love for her assistant Marissa, who tragically to her own undoing develops humanity as well as a one-way emotionally connection to Haminilda after she and Martha hire her for a threesome. Criticisms can still be made, honestly, of these villainous characters, as morally irredeemable figures, being attempted to be fleshed out in a way that may prove crass in themselves - involving LGBTQ characters as evil or involved, how mental health is depicted - but at the same time the banality of these figures, the result of when people follow others on ideals regardless of whether morally good, is a really complex and bluntly honest concept for director-writer Lav Diaz which is not simplistic at all. These people are not defined by crass stock archetypes - their sexuality or their mental stability - and the scary thing is that any of these figures, as Diaz and the performers who play, could have been good human beings but, obsessed with nationality, the agenda to improve the country, the desire for power or infantile disregard for human life, all of them became tyrants.

For a director who wishes to have these long form documents of his country's scars, The Halt is a surprise in how it effectively a dystopian drama but he is being more upfront in even questioning how those who fight the morally evil should do so as well, where even Hook, a diehard radical, ultimately finds his own original ideas, or the notion of violent rebellion, as ultimately useless when helping the victims, especially children, grow up well and wiser than those before is a harder yet morally more powerful weapon he considers better to use, one that may actually break the cycle he is part of. This film was made in the late 2010s when a series of reactionary cult of personality figures were elected across the globe, including Philippine's own Rodrigo Duterte, a controversial figure whose decisions and opinions, including his approval of extrajudicial punishment (and execution) of drug dealers and criminals, does make him a figure whose influence on Lav Diaz, if there, becomes one of tiredness, a sense of an endlessness parade of figures who claimed for a greater path for their country under their ideas only for many deaths to happen, regardless of if justifiable or not. The Halt, for all the dystopian content and his history of documenting the worse in his country's history, has Diaz showing some hope, even if exasperated, for the ordinary person wanting a solution that breaks the cycles and constant deaths in real life even he has documented. The poignancy is found early on when a Christian priest Hook is friends with, a true hero in his empathy who will be crushed by Navarra's forces, wishes there were people playing angry metal songs to exorcises their frustrations. Diaz here even feels sick of the constantly dethroning of dictators, who can still be replaced, when growth of humanity to save people, to connect and learn from the past, is what he clearly wishes for. From Diaz, the philosophy from The Halt is as wise as you can get.

His filmmaking, as can be previously seen in other films before, are glacial still scenes between actors, almost always shooting in black and white in his career, which here adds emphasis to the nocturnal world, not hiding he shot in the streets (with real advertising around the locations) but playacting a scenario of the Philippines just a few years ahead being stuck in darkness. As a result, there is more verisimilitude and realism in a dystopia where cafes still exist for characters to dine within, but ever a chance of the military to stop your car and take you to your tragic end. Really only accessible by streaming due to the lengths of his films, I split viewings of Diaz films up, and yet never was there a director, whether he actually succeeds in each film or has had one that has not worked for me, where the novel structure really makes sense. When he succeeds as here, the lengths are for a good reason for numerous characters to be fleshed out. This is a shorter film for him, and even in five plus hours this feels as if there is nothing which feels like an expansion but still as concise as he could be with the narrative. Even how this resolves its narrative, where this concludes not through a revolution but Navarra trying to return a ball to children, adds a sense of greater weight in reality. This ends with a new beginning, but with an election talked of an radio, the end is open to suggest nothing changes and, even in mind to real life, killing for the sake of killing even if to punish enemies of the country will still happen, already too much as Lav Diaz has covered in his career. That there is a semblance of hope, and the final image is of a young boy dragging Navarra poster alongside a rural road, is not mainstream closure to the narrative, but instead looking on, as before, to those hopefully as for Hook in this narrative has wanted who will have a better life. The Halt is optimistic for the director-writer, but still is not going to ignore the bleakness of its ideas.