Non-Abstract Review: Redneck County Fever (1992)

From https://a.ltrbxd.com/resized/film-poster/7/5/7/2/9/
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Director: Gary Kennamer

Screenplay: Gary Kennamer

Synopsis: Two airheaded males, university students, break down in the middle of the rural American South, finding themselves caught between drug dealers, a cop and a crazed cannibal in the woods.

[Spoilers Throughout]

Welcome to no-budget filmmaking at its most obscure. Shot of video, abruptly starting with no opening credits, looking like a home movie. Two men, one African American carrying a baseball and the other Caucasian, are in a car. Their accents are notable, because after the success of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), these two figures' accents are clearly the same surfer/stoner ones that Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter had. Fuzzier than an unshaved bear, the film for a while had no IMDB page, not even guessed date of release, although its clear from the fashions including awful zebra print sweat trousers matched to a mauve top that this was made in the early nineties. These two guy's car breaks down, leaving them stuck in "redneck" country to their horror unable to pay for the repairs. What is supposed to happen over the hour length of the film is a comedy, leading them to be more open minded about the region when they finally are able to leave, but it's a comedy as vague then you could imagine.

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mLYgcWzTxWo/ULJKDcVgy4
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Most of the film consists of our two leads - one of them the most extreme in ending his dialogue with "Dude!" and "Hey!!" all the time - dicking about in the local Texas woodlands. It's very difficult to try to review Redneck County Fever when, even though events do happen, there's no momentum. Avant-garde films about characters just walking in the woods, like this, have more momentum and extravagance to them in comparison. Arguably, weren't it for my masochistic tastes, this would be one of the worst things I've covered in terms of completely lacking energy to it, and yet for the lunatics who find material like this like myself, that's as much part of the incentive to watch Redneck County Fever in the first place. In-between having to find the money to leave, inexplicably getting involved with transporting cocaine in a possibly stolen vehicle, and singing Band on the Run aimlessly, enough for it to not be libel, you'd think there'd be excitement but it's an amazing anti-excitement I had to admire for being so unintentional.

Set in the South, banjo twang in the soundtrack, it's meant to be a comedy contrasting the city slickers mocking the Southerners, barely registering baring the accents however in terms of this culture clash. It doesn't help on such a low budget that most of the film is shot in generic woodland, on roads or by nondescript buildings. Static scenes of people talking is entirely the film's structure - if they weren't there Redneck County Fever would fall to pieces or be entirely about walking - and the notion of this being a comedy is nonexistent unless this was a unique take on non-humour. Even anti-humour have gags compared to this in the end, whilst this languishes in their lack of. In what transpires, they meet a hitchhiker who turns out to be a policeman. A preacher whose gift to bless cars so they start working again is actually a con only really stupid people would fall for. And, belying more of a traditional no-budget genre film, the pair also encounter a mad hunter in the woodlands who uses traps, a cannibal who remarks on the virtues of human bacon among other food stuffs whilst he has them tied up. He does bring something vaguely more interesting happening as he remarks on the various ways to prepare human meat and when the surfer dudes manage to convince him, through an explicit reference to The Most Dangerous Game, to let them go like an idiot to hunt them down again.

From http://dailygrindhouse.com/wp-content/uploads/
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You are stuck with a film that felt heavily improvised the most minimalist of filmmaking. You can even hear the director at one point, off-camera, giving directions when the actors get into a car. You expect, later on, the characters to relate the entire plot to the film's equivalent of a Southern Belle, as she artificially guffaws over each part, only for the film to thankfully cut to a caption suggesting time passed. An attempt at a shoot out at the end is played with a couple of actors, waving fake guns and hiding behind trees, Chekov's baseball being used for a second time in the film as an effective projectile weapon.

Altogether...this is absolutely un-recommendable barring those who willingly trawl through the outer regions of cinema. It doesn't even in sixty minutes sustain itself. If it deserves to be preserved, to be watched a thousand years from now in the fuzziness of its VHS version, it's because of what an oddity it is even in no-budget cinema, usually not  "comedy" like this when horror is usually common in that field. At one point, the film had no credits at all, making it a phantom. If the Letterboxd credits, the end credits on the end of the version I saw the same, are accurate this was the only film director Gary Kennamer ever made. Its producer, David DeCoteau however is a name you might recognise. Someone who openly admits he churns out films, he has fans and enough different periods in his career to map a time line of. In the eighties, his most popular era, he directed cult films like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988). By the 2000s into the 2010s, as an openly gay man, he made many films (many likely shot at his own home) where the main attraction was nubile young men with their shirts off. Than he's made a reputation, with films definitely shot at his own home, with the likes of A Talking Cat!?! (2013), in which Eric Roberts recorded his lines over the phone. He did produce no-budget films like Todd Sheet's Sorority Babes in the Dance-A-Thon of Death (1991) in the early nineties, so he may have likely produced Redneck County Fever, adding to his curious career as a director and producer. That background, and the film's weird anti-charisma, is as much how the film's going to get any entertainment value along its strange quirks. Just be aware for many it'll be death to sit through for most sane film viewers.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-foXpPvY9awE/
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Tag (2015)

From http://fr.web.img6.acsta.net/pictures/
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Director: Sion Sono

Screenplay: Sion Sono and Yûsuke Yamada

Cast: Reina Triendl as Mitsuko, Yuki Sakurai as Aki, Mariko Shinoda as Keiko, Maryjun Takahashi as Jun, Sayaka Isoyama as Mutsuko

Synopsis: On a trip out for an all-girls school, Mitsuko (Reina Triendl) is the only survivor of a freak incident where a gust of wind bisects everyone (even the bus) in half. To her surprise, traumatised and wandering back to school, she finds everyone on said bus is okay and back there. This is the beginning of Mitsuko finding herself in increasingly bizarre circumstances...

[Major Plot Spoilers Throughout]

At this point, I really am clueless in my opinion on Sion Sono. The director has been making films for over two decades and change now, and has overtaken Takashi Miike for many as a buzz name for cult Japanese cinema. Miike however, for all his reputation, had clear obsessions with male-male friendships, with outsiders and various themes, alongside a willingness to step into numerous genres. Sono, unfortunately, hasn't really themes barring a liking for bright colour and transgressive gore, and in the 2010s, it feels at times as he's narrowing his genres to less rewarding circumstances. Before Love Exposure (2008), the film that is viewed as his magnum opus - it's over hours long, it was a glorious experience for me and many to witness - he was one of the many fascinating Japanese genre directors in the early 2000s making strange but compelling films like Suicide Club (2001). Now he's even directed a TV mini-series for Amazon Prime called Tokyo Vampire Hotel (2017) but he's also in danger of predictability.

This is a criticism I am willing to concede if a film like The Whispering Star (2015) blows me away. However, when he's been serious, he's also made Antiporno (2016) - I've softened on it, but making an anti-porn film for the Nikkatsu reboot of pinku cinema series was not only just being a contrarian for the sake of it, but it was still exploitive and pretentious as hell. Tag's a complicated case of being predictable to a fault eventually when it looked like it would succeed eventually. The reason is a very simple, one line criticism - that the plot twist Tag eventually builds to is clichéd and dumb. Once the film shows its cards, the story is revealed to be that of a living video game character, cloned like her friend and teachers to be constantly killed off in an interactive spectacle. So it becomes a clichéd tale of a puppet removing her strings which feels less interesting than that of a schoolgirl fighting against predestined events.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qi88CjTRoiA/maxresdefault.jpg

For a while, before this problem comes about, Tag feels like it will have something much more to go with, feeling like a Sushi Typhoon film which decided to have more ambition barring being intentionally bad and prosthetic effects. The opening cannot match Suicide Club's mass teenage jump in front of a train, but the sight of half a bus trundling along with most of the occupants sans above their waist is something rare to see. You do suffer from bad CGI, and it's never explained why the wind's able to slice people in half (or like a perverted version of The Happening (2008) blowing up schoolgirl skirts at opportunistic times) but that becomes part of the sense of the irrational that seeps throughout the material. A participant in an utterly illogical world, Mitsuko is naturally traumatised, only that she'll find herself changing names and age as she goes along, the emotional anchor which helps her and the film her friends who act like guides to help her through the insanity around her.  

From there it is Mitsuko being thrown through various bizarre scenarios. The school where, after (admittedly) a sweet series of interactions between her and her friends, debating the idea of multiple realities and predestination, turns into the teacher recreating the Most Dangerous Game on the entire student populous. Or to a cross town race where, suddenly, leathered female assassins chase Mitsuko, or when Mitsuko is a bride at a wedding where the groom's a horrible pig man in a casket and the guests are all sociopaths to be fought. Noticeably as well, in one of Tag's cleverer aspects, there's a complete absence of men throughout three-quarters of its length, until the twist appears revealing the women to be characters with a game played by men. The film manages some semblance of logic in between before this twist where, truthfully, even if the segments make no sense together barring strange scenarios Sono came up with the characters are engaging enough for this to never matter. Reina Triendl as Mitsuko is perfect, being the listless and confused lead pulled from scenario to scenario whilst Yuki Sakurai as her closest friend Aki, by the end demanding Mitsuko to rip her in half to escape into the real world through a door opened between her, is sympathetic as the one figure who is a constant and helps Mitsuko through these maddening scenarios. So much so when, in one of the best moments of Tag, Aki's character was fleshed out enough that her male doppelganger and his recreation of her mannerisms, with the actor with similar eyes to Sakurai, is enough to convey who they are before the dialogue reveals it.

From https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d8/6f/e5/
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Production wise, bad CGI at the beginning excluded, even if it might've been deliberate for dark humour, Tag shows a lot of resource. The most noticeable is that Sion Sono discovered the drone camera, and if anything, the moment we've learnt to attach film cameras to flying remote control drones has proven to be one of the best things that could happen for an independent filmmaker. As Sion shows, the restrictions on creative ambition due to the expense of resources has been undercut by advantages like this, a drone camera having levelled the playing field to the point an aesthetics obsessive like myself can praise low budget films like this which use these drone shots, fluid movement as it sores across elaborate set pieces from below. It's an example of creativity that shows, when focuses, Sion Sono can be on-ball and be interest, rather than reliant of shock tactics like his least interesting films like Antiporno. Of note as well, in his good aesthetic decisions, is hiring a Japanese post-rock band named Mono to score Tag; it's the last type of score you'd expected for a cult film like this, but it adds a gravitas which helps the film out immensely.

Sadly, after that scene the disappointment sets it. Tag is compelling both as a weird cult film and also because, held together by an all-female cast, it is interesting to watch. The final act ruins this by leading to a very generic twist with pointless touches. That ultimately the creator wants to have Mitsuko reproduced with Aki's male doppelganger, and turning a fascinating take on a videogame character finding herself and escaping into the generic, obvious plot kind. That the game itself, scrolling between three scenarios at once, would be unplayable just emphasises that Sion Sono didn't think Tag as thoroughly as one would hope. So what for most of its length was hopefully building to something interesting from Sono, worth seeing still, does have the unfortunate lack of a decent ending.

Abstract Spectrum: Absurd/Psychotronic/Weird

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

Personal Opinion:

Tag gave me some hope that Sion Sono is still making good films. Tag also gave me Sion Sono's bad tendencies which have become apparent within the 2010s. A shame really.

From https://asianmoviepulse.com/wp-content
/uploads/2016/04/post/sion-sonos-tag/wedding.jpg

A 1000 Anime Marathon

A huge amount to cover from my other blog 1000 Anime, a frenzied month or more covering all of the following alongside Cinema of the Abstract reviews. So lets not dither about shall we?

Bubblegum Crash!
From https://www.midnightpulp.com/wp-content/
uploads/2017/02/07YlWL72-320.jpg

The first admittedly wasn't a great experience to revisit, Bubblegum Crash! (1991) an attempt to capture the lightning in a bottle of its more successful predecessor which failed considerable. As someone with a morbid fascination with old Manga Entertainment licenses, it was worthy of revisiting but as you will read in the review HERE, it managed to be worse than some of the more technically and dramatically incompetent anime I've covered on that blog.

A Branch of a Pine is Tied Up
From http://www.shortshorts.org/2018/tmb/2216.jpg

Taking a different direction came A Branch of a Pine is Tied Up (2017). Sadly Tomoyasu Murata's short, probably the first stop motion work I have covered, was a short only made available through MUBI's streaming side, so I felt guilty even reviewing the short, praising it as an emotionally affecting take on Japan's history of natural disasters and loss by magical realism and stop motion, but aware how difficult now it will be for many to see. Nonetheless the review is HERE  and in the perfect world, such reviews and potential interest could help make Murata's work more easily available.

Dragon Half
From https://somewhereinthemidstofnowhere.files.wordpress.com/
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Thankfully Dragon Half (1993), be it by the American release by Discotek or various old releases, is more readily available, sadly an OVA which barely got out of the gate before it was officially cancelled but in its two short episodes managing to have a lasting impact still. Especially for those who cannot stand most high fantasy, like myself, this is a perfect antidote and you can read of the absurd comedy HERE.

Armitage III: Poly-Matrix
From https://conceptionclearinghouse.files.wordpress.com/
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Somewhat more divisive for myself, though a fascinating curiosity from the past is Armitage III: Poly-Matrix (1997), a theatrical length re-edit of a larger OVA which brought in name stars for the English dub. Not a perfect production, definitely the weakest of all the works one of my favourite screenwriters, Chiaki J. Konaka, has ever had his hands in but, especially next to Bubblegum Crash!, a better example of the nineties sci-fi anime about robots and their interactions with human beings. The review can be found HERE.

Princess Tutu
From https://ibhuluimcom-a.akamaihd.net/ib.huluim.com/
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A significantly better production Chiaki J. Konaka had involvement in was the brainchild of female screenwriter Michiko Yokote, a two season production that is arguably one of the few anime I have covered appropriate for all the family. Its also arguably one of the most unique and best so far covered on the entire blog too, the meta-tribute to fairy tales and ballet named Princess Tutu (2002-3). Sadly not a series with named recognition in the British Isles, and a cult one only in the USA, a tragedy as this is one of the those rare cases of something so sweet but so clever at the same time. Out of all these reviews in this post, this is the one you should follow the review link for, found HERE, first as a priority than go back to the others.

Batman: Gotham Knight
From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ok0WAzAUZYg/maxresdefault.jpg

Tonally completely at odds, this ginormous bundle of reviews almost included the US-Japan co-production of Batman: Gotham Knight (2008), which should've been a triumphant anthology of Japanese animators tackling probably the best and most well known superhero characters ever. It wasn't to be but, as always when covering anthologies which take longer to detail for each segment, the results even if a disappointment in production still has moments of inspiration. Find the link HERE.

Thunderbolt Fantasy
From https://myanimelist.cdn-dena.com/s/common/uploaded_files/
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Finally, and again stepping outside of conventional anime, is the Taiwanese-Japanese glove puppet series Thunderbolt Fantasy (2016). Openly, my review which you can find HERE is probably not a common one in opinion, but if anything is to be gained from the series (planned for a second series in 2018) its that it at least encourages more puppetry based productions like it in the future. I just wish the screenplays were better in this particular case...

Back here in Cinema of the Abstract land, hopefully more reviews in the future. Prioritizing 1000 Anime is as much the maddening number of anime I have watched over the last month or so, but for this blog there are some choice entries to cover, so keep your eyes glued here.

The Clowns (1970)

Director: Federico Fellini

Screenplay: Federico Fellini and Bernardino Zapponi

Cast: Federico Fellini as Himself and a cast of real life clowns

Synopsis: In his childhood, recreated for this TV movie that is a hybrid between fiction and documentary, the legendary director Federico Fellini recounts being taken to the circus as a child only to be frightened by the clowns. Having a lasting effect, he with his motley production crew tour around Italy and France exploring the history of some of the greatest professional clowns to have ever existed, intermixing their histories with recreations by the newest generations of clowns.

In the midst of his golden period of filmmaking Fellini made The Clowns. He'd become a recognisable name even in the USA by this point, having already become a legend with films like La Dolce Vita (1960) and entering his hyper surreal and dream influenced era with Juliet of the Spirits (1965). By the point of The Clowns, he was moving on to be the Italian maestro whose name would be put in the title of his productions (Satyricon (1969) and Roma (1972)). Here, able to make this television movie, he recreates an incident where clowns traumatised him as a child and, coming as an adult with a longing to fully appreciate and admire their craft, creates a document dealing with their history. After the elaborate prologue, which feels like a prelude to the likes of Amarcord (1973), which shows child Fellini seeing a circus tent being erected outside his window, and the trauma he'd have with said clowns, what you get is an unconventional hybrid.

Whilst it's not as unconventional as Orson Welles' F For Fake (1973), it's the perfect comparison as the tag of "documentary" comes off as a joke itself when The Clowns defies and flaunts being an actual document, with the crew characters themselves, cameos from the likes of Anita Ekberg, and culminating into countless recreations and performances in a circus ring by clowns. It gleefully undercuts the border between truth and recreation fully, Fellini the director and the character within his own film grabbing together a crew, including the comically underappreciated female assistant, to begin an escapade to learn of the history of clowning in Italy and France. "Escapade" is perfect as the level of mirth on display if infectious, the film artificial and Fellini playing as jokes with real former clowns as characters playing themselves, and yet discussing their lives and craft even in the midst of this. Willing, as the symbolic moment of the entire film itself, to have a bucket land over his mid-speech for a one shot joke. If it's all true, and hasn't been lying like Orson Welles was in F For Fake, it's a fascinating take at a dying art, going into the past with clown archetypes of yore examined. Tipping the hat to legends, it's a noble task, cutting to recreations of these clowns by new disciples of face paint and slapstick who stand out as well.

From https://theleastpictureshow.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/clowns-1.jpg

Fellini at this point was exceptionally indulgent, the discovery of Carl Jung and the esoteric permanently changing his cinema after 1965. Even when fantasy appeared in the likes of 8½ (1963), and overblown spectacle matched by his stand-in Marcello Mastroianni getting a space rocket launch built for his next feature, it tipped over the edge further mid-sixties onwards. I was once not a huge fan as a younger and dumber viewer to these later spectacles, though I still sympathise with those who'd agree with my younger self arguing his later work leaves one with cinematic indigestion, especially if one is not used to Fellini's style. For me now, older and smarter, and able to digest said style fully, I now adore it and am amazed he was able to get away with some of the sights you see in these films. Even on a TV budget, Fellini gets away with a lot even in the "normal" scenes for The Clowns, deliberately staged. Anita Ekberg playing herself can cameo to pose around big cat cages at the circus whilst legendary French actor/director/former clown Pierre Étaix, obscurer in English speaking worlds but a significant figure in his homeland, has a segment as himself where his recorded film from his own clowning family's past sadly burns up in the projector. In neither case, as with any appearance, is the film trying to be real document in the slightest which deliberately undermines the viewer's sense of reality. Even if real facts are on display, it's a very interesting viewing experience when the film's presentation gleefully undercuts the notion of documented verisimilitude.

All playful, entirely irrelevant. Utterly unconventional as it still maintains absolute respect for the clowns themselves, a sadness felt as a circus which had its own building became a beer hall after the decades past. The sense that clowning will become lesser appreciated, more so nowadays, is more enforced as even on the cusp of the seventies The Clowns talks of it being forgotten. In the modern era the likes of Stephen King's It, coulrophobia is a more known idea and the bizarre phenomena that was the 2016 evil clown sightings, really cruel jokes that got out of hand in multiple countries with people dressing as clowns and frightening members of the public, didn't help in the slightest. But it really makes a startling reminder, even in this humorous tribute, that by the seventies clowning was seen as antiquated by this film's viewpoint. That a lot of its figures, the archetypes of clowns and those who donned their face paint in real life, vary from before the 20th century to before the 1950s really does emphasise how old a profession it is. In The Clown's testament, it makes itself a real document by just talking about the subject matter in detail.

From http://images3.static-bluray.com/reviews/5065_1.jpg

The clowns here are not creepy Its either, not even the mainstream examples like Ronald McDonald, but an old profession with a real, tangible history to it untainted at this point by crass commercialisation. To those of the clowning profession reading this review, or if you the reader know any as friends or relatives, The Clowns is absolutely rewarding just for the clowning sequences themselves, which become the most unconventional aspect of the entire film. Farces in a circus ring where all manner of surreal gags involving their exaggerated movements and props, on and off themselves, entertain us the viewer. Some assistance are helped by the power of cinema, but most of what is seen is likely what would be performed on stage, and they are bizarre. Fellini, in one of the odder moment very early on, has a montage of various types of public figures drawn very likely from his own childhood, from gossipers to members of the fascistic Italian office, portrayed as pure caricatures to show that the clowns themselves usually took inspiration from the manners of real people, their exaggerations given context in a very inspired and clever inclusion on his part. Taken to its most extreme is when, lamenting the tragedy of clowning's failing fortunes, the film ends on a literal clown funeral. It is arguably one of the standout sequences in any Fellini film, a mad scenario between clowns lamenting the loss of their friend and also prating around or the carriage driver arguing with one of his own horses. Eventually it goes on so long clowns start to have to bow out in exhaustion, a feverish end for a high note. Certainly a  stand out as a big sequence within the director's career.

Abstract Spectrum: Delirious/Eccentric/Expressionist

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

Personal Opinion:

An obscure but rewarding entry in Fellini's career. Certainly a film I have immense interest in for him and my ongoing obsession with anything involving circuses and carnivals. Also in term of his career, The Clowns is not only a great film by itself but a very interesting prelude to his later work. I can see when he jumped away from conventional narrative structure with this film, and the breaking down of features into vignettes and segments interlinked is certainly see here more than the work of the sixties. So it's also a good film to find to bridge to the likes of Amarcord too.

From http://www.emiliodoc.it/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/clowns8.jpg

Alipato: The Very Brief Life of an Ember (2016)

From http://rapideyemovies.de/wp-content/
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Director: Khavn

Screenplay: Khavn and Achinette Villamor

Cast: Khavn, Dido De La Paz, Marti San Juan, Robin Palmes and Bing Austria

Synopsis: Split into multiple segments, Alipato begins in the near future with a child gang, led by the Boss and all the infant and adolescent children left abandoned on the streets, stealing and killing an adult in their way. Events spiral out of control when the Boss decided to rob a band, the off-screen robbery and its disaster leading to many years later when he is finally released from prison as an older man back into the slums and to the members still alive.

To experience Khavn's film Alipato is difficult to describe. Honestly Khavn's style, the poet/musician/songwriter/filmmaker starting properly in 2004, is arguably of his own.  So much its really on multiple viewings a film like this can be absorbed, where even its prologue catches you off-guard. Handheld camera. Quotations from the likes of Muhammad Ali, quotes talking of both the slums of Manila to fighting gorillas, with a man in a gorilla suit involved. A musical number at night that is elaborate and takes quite a few minutes amongst its fire lit figures. A pan into a television where, in this futuristic tale of poverty dystopia, the Natural Pornographic Channel (sic) plays, the news broadcast banner at the bottom talking about none of the other members of U2 expect Bono caring if African children starve, all as an obnoxious Western host sets up the hell the slums have become.

From https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZjc4YjhiMGMtYzg
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To tone of Alipato is a vast  carnival, these first moment introducing the dank, hyper violent world of the Manila slums. Even if Alipato has a deliberately provocative tone, it is explicit as a exaggeration of poverty, crime and general chaos. Not that you won't baulk at the taboos mind anyway - in its first of three segments you begin with an all-pubescent criminal gang led by the Boss, given title cards for even one shot characters which emphases various transgressive details, like killing one's father to the youngest member being a baby girl who learnt to smoke before she could walk. Alongside child actors smoking on camera and brandishing guns, it's a very shocking juxtapositions. Adding this is that Khavn uses the "throw in the kitchen sink" approach to its fullest. Juxtaposing hip hop beats with classical music, alongside songs he composed and sings himself of various genres, as eclectic in the music as the material on camera. A scene of the police chasing the gang that has them completely motionless whilst the camera pans around them all, a three dimensional moving statue a la The Hypothesis of a Stolen Painting (1978) and its staged tableaus. Elaborate one-takes such as with the kids rampaging around a supermarket where they've already slaughtered all the adults. All with a manic energy but too precise to be messy technically, Khavn in a music genre comparison an avant-garde punk rocker.

Very soon into Alipato, you are met with the most reoccurring technique, which is the one emotional thread in this hyperactive content - that for every character when they die, even the most minor of ones, it always cuts to their grave stones at the end of each scene in another time briefly listing those who've died by their graves. Considering many characters are killed, so much so whilst there is a sick humour to it, it becomes also unnerving. It causes one to realise that that Filipino director Khavn is a fellow countryman to Lav Diaz. Both are radically different from each other, but its pertinent both have dealt with the Philippines being riddled in a despaired atmosphere, of poverty and death between them. Especially in the second segment this stands out - where a character's prison sentence, including being raped by a fellow prisoner and then killing them,  is depicting in stop motion entirely in a prison cell, with plastic lizards coming out of a corpse's mouth and an improvised gory use of a Spiderman mask. Drastically different in aesthetic and style to Diaz, but both from a colonised nation which has felt centuries of history and trauma throughout its existence, both exorcising them in different ways for the same goal.

From http://i101.fastpic.ru/big/2018/0822/61/
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Whether Khavn's film is able to hold a serious emotional effect on a viewer is entirely to debate. I cannot lie, however, that it's a compelling experience. Arguably a unique style entirely of the director's own. Alipato is a film elaborate in production value - one sadly suspects a lot of the slum locations the adult version of the Boss returns to are real as much as its dressed up, the sight of American pop culture like Ben 10 or a Pixar's Car duvet in the world of lowlifes being systematically bumped off profane. Colourful yet dirty, bizarre (such as having a character Mario-like mushroom swaying off his crotch) yet also like Harmony Korine with a willingness to have idiosyncratic faces and scenes that are humanising. Khavn like Korine could be seen as parading a freak show to some, but is actually more empathetic than most socially conscious filmmakers in their ability to show the piss and shit of life and allow actors/non-actors of all shapes and size, disabled or dwarf, to be equal in the worse of these characters' lives as much as their best alongside everyone else. In such not only do you see a man with no actual legs, in a major role, manage to keep up with a car on the street just by walking on his arms, but also a very sensual and explicit sex scene, scored to an old Filipino love song, that just happens to be inside a toilet with an actor in his forties and a (real) pregnant actress involved. Dressing everyone in deliberately garish and distinct costumes, everyone is on an equal playing field too.

Khavn is a dynamo of energy, able to pull out novel ideas and visibly, painstakingly yet then accomplished onscreen, someone who with Ruined Heart: Another Love Story Between A Criminal & A Whore (2014), that was all shot in one day, clearly plans his work out even if he's a punk. How else do you explain the "Goat-Cam"? A female character, part of a subplot of surviving members of Boss' gang being killed one-by-one as adults, whose corpse is left in a sexually demeaning place atop a mascot for an American burger franchise, on top of a very real dump for plastic that spans a great deal of land, all shot on a camera that has been strapped on a small black goat, who the production managed to coordinate to trundle around the actress, to have an establishing shot and detail of the scene fully, whilst seeing its head from the back and with the cameraman still a goat who wanders like an actual animal. Its moments like this, even in films you despise, that nonetheless burn themselves into your memory, and Alipato has many such scenes that do so.

From http://www.tidf.org.tw/sites/www.tidf.org.tw/files/styles/node_films
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Even as an overload of material, a base crassness that could be off-putting in its rainbow colours, it's a film that surprises. Young Boss cursing all adults in a fire lit night in an industrial waste land. The surprisingly poignant final scene involving a spirit of a character leading the newly deceased away. The prologue musical number, a literal carnival of dancers, disabled performers and Khavn himself performing with a song about the pointlessness of life yet with a celebratory tone. The sticky end of a pair of corrupt cops, a karaoke group session that is bizarrely in a slaughterhouse for pigs, turning sour to someone's singing being criticised, the camera wandering to and from as cop, singer and nude female staff are shot off-camera.

The result, full of moments like this, is a delirious and profane spectacle that deals with everything from infant death to police brutality of an old woman. Does it register at all with an emotional connection though? Entirely dependent on each viewer, though as Boss curses the adults who spawn children like him, leaving them on the streets like dogs to fend for themselves, there is a sense, no matter how exaggerated, of a very bleak view of modern Filipino culture as depicted in this film set in the future. That it can still be triumphant is due to the moments of life that struggle and scrape to survive, but entirely on the side of the lowlifes, Khavn views everything else as nasty and prone to death around them as a result.

From http://www.offscreen.be/sites/default/files/images/movie/alipato_06.jpg

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Delirious/Grotesque/Transgressive

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

Personal Opinion:

Obviously the obscurity of most of Khavn's work is a detriment for me, finding Alipato an all-consuming experience, one which is difficult and crude but with a potency and violent energy that is awe-inspiring. View with caution but those who want to see a film which is truly unique, this is it.

Night is Short, Walk On Girl (2017)

From https://media.senscritique.com/media/000017621874/
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Director: Masaaki Yuasa

Screenplay: Makoto Ueda

Based on a novel by Tomihiko Morimi

(Voice) Cast: Kana Hanazawa as The Girl with Black Hair; Gen Hoshino as Senpai; Hiroshi Kamiya as The School Festival Executive Head; Ryuji Akiyama as The Underpants Leader; Kazuya Nakai as Seitarō Higuchi; Yūko Kaida as Hanuki-san; Hiroyuki Yoshino as The God of the Old Books Market

A 1000 Anime Crossover

Synopsis: The Girl with Black Hair (Kana Hanazawa), on her night of finally becoming an adult as a university student, goes on a drinking spree across the town on night. Senpai (Gen Hoshino), a fellow university student in love with her and knows her well, decides to also finally make this night the one where he woos her. Their night will be one including a rich tyrant who steals men's underwear, the God of Second Hand Books, the war between the School Festival Executive Head (Hiroshi Kamiya) and guerrilla musical performances that he's trying to suppress across the campus, and an ever increasing case of colds spread amongst the populous.

The trajectory of Masaaki Yuasa is a glorious victory for the right man. Once he was a secret among anime fans, acclaimed for works like his debut Mind Game (2004) but with none of his work available in the West. A fan like me confesses to having been provided bit torrent links to some of his work after, like the series Kaiba (2008), from a wonderful benefactor for the simple reason that, inexplicably, that work wasn't available and in some spots in his filmography still isn't. The Tatami Galaxy (2010) was for a long while the only work available, which I'll get to later as its important in this particular tale. Than within the time afterwards Yuasa finally got some recognition. He got to direct an episode of Adventure Time, and slowly to the current time we're getting his work even in the UK. In one of the strangest success stories, which will hopefully lead to a new chapter in his career, he's helming Devilman Crybaby (2018), an acquisition for Netflix which, whatever your opinion on the streaming site, did the world a big favour in presenting Yuasa to a wider public, aptly in another resurrection tale at the same time as, of all things, it was an obscure Go Nagai character that, barring a 70s children series, starred in ultraviolent and grotesque material.

From https://i.imgur.com/cU41JxE.png

If that feels like an odd turn for some, in context Yuasa's always had an experimental bone in his body even in his choice of genres. He's dabbled in horror before in Kemonozume (2006), had in Mind Game existential drama play out in a throw-in-the-kitchen-sink mentality with a recreation of the Jonah and the Whale story, even made a TV series about ping pong. Somehow the man who once needed fan donations through a Kickstarter campaign to create projects managed to now have three directorial features made within this year or so - Devilman Crybaby itself, his family film about a mermaid, Lu Over the Wall (2017), and Night Is Short, Walk On Girl, effectively a sequel of the eleven episode long The Tatami Galaxy. This doesn't following the same main characters but set in the same world of author Tomihiko Morimi's story of before about university students and their lives. Side characters I loved from The Tatami Galaxy make an appearance again like old friends - Seitarō Higuchi (Kazuya Nakai) a modern day vagabond dressed like a period ronin and with a Robert Z'Dar approved chin, and his alcohol loving, big sister-like friend Hanuki-san (Yūko Kaida), who play major parts here as in The Tatami Galaxy. Even the "libido cowboy", who I forgot from the series, once a running gag with obvious connotations, returns in style and with a posse at the end, and a major voice actor from the series, Hiroyuki Yoshino, also makes an appearance as a character strangely similar in appearance to one from the show.

The leads, whilst looking the same as those in The Tatami Galaxy, are different figures however. A young woman with an iron stomach for alcohol and only the desire to be nice to all people whilst enjoying her night as much as possible in youthful, determined enthusiasm. The male, merely "Senpai", could pose a problematic figure for some viewers as he gets up to some shady means to win her heart, including when the School Festival Executive Head offers him access to their illegal files on her, but as in The Tatami Galaxy the male protagonists in Tomihiko Morimi and Yuasa's combined world are not perfect people. They take the entire narrative paths to be anywhere near close to redeeming themselves. In The Tatami Galaxy said character had to endure a Groundhog's Day scenario, and even then the ending suggested his self improvement included become more devilish in personality, whilst Senpai here gets dragged (literally by a sentient book at one point) through his doomed attempts to woo the Girl with Black Hair throughout. In the end, including the hilarious sight of thousands of himself at a conference in his mind arguing about love not existing, Yuasa's takes on author Morimi's work really rubs the nose in for anime (and even film) viewers perceptions about male characters being perfect, noble individuals. They get up to some dumb, even sleazy goals to win over the opposite sex, and its telling that the Girl with Black Hair at one point, in an attempt to overcome his flaws and begin their romance, has to sedate and flee thousands of his libidinous duplicates. Youthful, full of too much spunk and dumber than bricks at times, very much a type of male lead in these stories which won't win some fans of Night Is Short... but is more honest.

From https://i0.wp.com/www.heyuguys.com/images/2017
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It helps that this is as much the Girl's film, where even if it might seem problematic that they eventually fall in love, it's with her not really changing herself, really sympathetic and lovable from beginning to end, but Senpai having sides of himself bashed out instead. Yuasa, alongside fully undermining the boundaries of what is reality, metaphor and the surreal, utterly making the ability to differentiate them a joke, has always been obsessed with very unconventional but more realistic takes of how human beings are and interact. He's comparable to the late Satoshi Kon for his blurring of reality, but his style (alongside being compared to Superflat) has the one distinct trademark in that, despite how bizarre and incredible his imagery is, it's entirely for the sake of character pieces about people. (Even his horror story Kemonozume ultimately was about characters who felt like actual adults, merely in a gory action horror tale where the lead is the leader of a clan who kill monsters and the love interest being one of those aforementioned monsters.) Likewise here, on the longest and maddest night of pub crawling, improvised illegal musicals, and stints at even more illegal rare book tents, where copies of rare texts can only be won by eating more violently hot food than the other patrons, it's about a guy learning to start thinking more meekly, more affably, whilst the girl whose already well balanced merely realised he was attracted to her.

The noticeable difference in the age of the characters from most makes a breath of fresh air too. Anime suffers from the normalcy of "anime high school" where, due to a variety of factors such as a nostalgia for high school in contrast to modern Japanese society, a fantasised version of high school (or secondary school) is to be found in a lot of anime, hence why so many are about characters in their teens. Here, these are young adults who drink, read books, piss about and stage surprise musical performances in public, and the sense of change is rewarding. That and its liberal take on magical realism, Yuasa's trademarks matched by material which gleefully interconnects its segments with the utterly unnatural and strange gleefully. More so in this case as a tale of the exhilaration of life in the littlest of details. Far removed from any caution of drinking, it's a Bacchanalian parade where the young and the old intermingle. The love of books. Love in general, as a subplot reveals that the guerrilla musicals are all part of a scheme by a character who is in love with a girl he met one day, refusing to take the underwear he wore on said day off until then and using this illegal activity, which mocks the authority, as his stage to finally confess his love. (In fact the only real disappointment with Night Is Short... is that it nearly looks like it's going down into an unexpected gay romance at some point, and whilst its swerve from it is explained and never comes a cop-out, it would've been great if that tangent had gone fully to the hilt.)

From https://genkinahito.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/
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As with all of Yuasa's work, Night is Short looks incredible, even more surrealistic in a literal sense than someone like Satoshi Kon can be. It's fascinating how, when his clear themes over multiple genres is the important of human interaction and personality, its filtered through such sumptuous, unpredictable and openly weird stylistic choices. His tonal shifts over the years - sci-fi with Osamu Tezuka influence story and character designs in Kaiba, Kemonozume being adult horror in terms of its characters as well as sex and gore with even moments of Bill Plympton in the stylistic choices - have transformed stories like Night is Short into their own genres, a magical realist farce here where one can not only meet the God of Second Hand Books, a diminutive dwarf who pulls price tags of old books to liberate them, but can command them to fly like birds in the air when freed. There are moments of spectacle here more elaborate than in some action anime and, as with Yuasa's previous stories, even the fact the protagonists don't have proper names doesn't stop them and even a one scene character from having a personality or something strange about them, like one of the School Festival Executive Head's minions being a literal monkey riding a vacuum cleaner/Segway hybrid.

Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist/Magical Realism/Surreal/Weird

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

Personal Opinion:

Since he has tackled the work of Tomihiko Morimi twice, the return to Night is Short does bring a nice circular movement with eyes back to one of the more easily accessible works when he was a cult figure. The growing status of Yuasa is wonderful, but its poignant he effectively made a sequel to arguably the least conventional of all his work, a comedy-drama which nonetheless decides to tell its story through the deliberately strange, one where the sense of white and black morality for its protagonists is greyed but everyone is still part of a madcap farce, not serious and intense drama. Night is Short is a very odd love story, which boldly shows the worst aspects of people but also that they can still be good people deserving a happy ending. All in a film that has romance, fantasy, supernatural figures, gangsters, and even musical numbers about the School Festival Executive Head sneaking into the women's bathroom. A film that works more having seen The Tatami Galaxy, preparing you for it, but by itself is still glorious to witness.

From https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_MScbd3ptAo/WdDJkEYwLII/AAAAAAAAODg/
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Rise And Fall Of A Small Film Company (1986)

From https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w300_and_h450_
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Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard

Meant to be based on the novel The Soft Centre by James Hadley Chase

Cast: Jean-Pierre Léaud as Gaspard Bazin; Jean-Pierre Mocky as Jean Almereyda; Marie Valera as Eurydice

Synopsis: The state of cinema by way of an adaptation of a James Hadley Chase crime novel, originally produced for the crime story series Série noire in France. Where producer Jean Almereyda (Jean-Pierre Mocky), once a matinee idol and major producer, is now reduced to TV movies and dogged by a case of stolen money from his past. All whilst Gaspard Bazin (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a director who now, after acclaim, spends his time in an obsessive ritual for casting extras that eats up their budgets, finds Almereyda's wife Eurydice (Marie Valera) a potential creative source when she desires to be an actress.

It's strange we can uncover lost films by Jean-Luc Godard, one of the biggest names in all cinema, but we can forget that even after ten years obscurer films in a director's filmography can be neglected absentmindedly. There is, of course, when new blood in the fan base don't know common knowledge that the older members do, something which can happen be it for horror fans to art house aficionados, and in that case we need to provide that information or doom ourselves to obscuring works of the past. Retrospectives are thankfully more common too as are physical released, but there are cases, with a director like Godard who made so much outside of theatrical screenings, that once it was a lot more difficult to access this material and a lot of it hasn't even been gotten around to until now. That even a great American director can have material not available means that the Swiss director, even if he is a legend in cinema, can have probably more as both being a director who worked in a foreign language to English, made very difficult work that contrasts his famous early sixties works immensely, and has experiments in television and short work more rife than many other filmmakers which always tend to be neglected with any auteur. So, yes, you have the clues to why we trip over these obscurities like so.

Even in the theatrical corner of Godard's wing, where for many his debut Breathless (1960) is his most well known film, there are productions neglected especially in the late eighties when, returning with his second "debut" Every Man For Himself (1980) after his experimental era, which are not available. Now which his Dziga-Vertov Group films (mostly) available in high definition, even if many are some of the most painful failures of his career, the Holy Grail alongside films like the controversial Hail Mary (1985) is his television work. Experiments like Rise and Fall of A Small Film Company.  From a time where he was going to return back to experiments until the unforeseeable day and was in-between various projects, a year before his infamous Cannon Films production King Lear (1987). One very much not taking his assignment with Série noire as intended.

From https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/252/193/180732/
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Rise and Fall, rather than the adaptation of a crime novel as likely intended, is that meeting place between the return to narrative cinema in the eighties and the video experiments that would lead him to his career in the current day. The noticeable limitations - the TV screen ration, the limited aesthetic, the video sheen and digital text captions - are things that would undermine another director, but are like providing Godard with new tools to work with. He's someone, know to use VHS rips of old films on purpose still to this day, completely polymorphous when it comes to technology, already working on television productions in the seventies and, in the 2010s in his older statesman position, having his own 3D camera built by scratch and making a 3D feature in Goodbye to Language (2014). Here though he's still working with a plot, around one which contrary to his famous quote does have a beginning, middle and end in that order. The struggles of a TV movie company mid adaptation of James Hadley Chase's The Soft Centre, the novel Godard is meant to adapt, which he weaves his state of unrest cultural critiques in the midst of through the tired producer Jean-Pierre Mocky (Jean Almereyda), and the frankly deranged director Gaspard Bazin (Jean-Pierre Léaud).

Léaud, meeting back with Godard and thus evoking his many moments in the latter's work, could if you cheated a little be the exact character he would later play in Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep (1996). The same director hired to remake Les Vampires (1915-16) in that film, who decided to cast Maggie Cheung, once before with an entirely different name stuck in these wilderness years in the late eighties, his obsessive ritual with the extras of having them move through rooms in a  conveyor belt, quoting at one point the same passage contracted together between them, as much him attempting to find his creative sanity as a madness. He's less irritated by being stuck making television work, but as he confesses (and shows Godard biting the hand financing this feature) wishing he was adapting Dashiell Hammett instead. In a world where he and his producer sit in front of a television showing a fire, rather than a real one, to stay warm, the world has become stranger than the sixties they made their fames in. It's not an absurd comparison either between films as, whilst the ending of this suggests a happy ending for Léaud's character, the film making world is so different from France's before, where his arcane ritual with the casting is chewing up money for a company who can't even get a TV movie off the ground and shown.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/069Xaf__6nM/maxresdefault.jpg

Admittedly Godard's criticisms of the state of cinema and life, as he's been doing them since the sixties and hasn't stopped since, could dangerously fall into shouting into the wind, worse a man trying to joust windmills thinking they're dragons. (Even if that's the case for some now, I'd at least want to picture him as cinema's Prospero, in his magical tower in Switzerland creating his cinematic incantations, or like his character Professor Pluggy in King Lear with patch-cord dreadlocks in his hair). What doesn't allow this to be the case is that, generally, his philosophical concerns are not only enlightening but constantly evolving over time, the ones of yore still relevant to the current day or time capsules to new problems per era. Here, ironically when he was asked to make this TV film, he's practically spiting the producers by having the pair of Bazin and Almereyda as doomed figures of the past floundering even in commercial television. Their lives are small scale, the television budget and style of Rise and Fall... helping this. It is too rye to be an out-and-out comedy, but humour is to be found especially in characters like the accountant, who in deadpan just doing his job hands out paltry earnings to the extras discounting their social security. Or Léaud playing up his character's out-of-control behaviour, be it interrupting a phone call between a potential actress with acute abruptness, brought at what she suspiciously suspected to be erotic when asked to bring a bikini alongside her, or breaking into a Woody Woodpecker impression.

Godard's also one of the few directors able to get away with casting himself as the wise sage. Much of it, by this time, is because Godard was such an iconic name it was impossible to get around this, common in narrating his own films since the sixties and having a reputation as a figure outside of cinema, making his work (usually dialectic anyway) completely attached to him. Rise and Fall... offers him playing a character as himself, amusingly (as I want to picture it) living in Reykjavik in Iceland because he had to witness the greatest chess game being played there, here appearing to find a deal back in the left for him with a (fictional?) producer and Romy Schneider. Thus his scene also turns to an appropriate melancholic air about the period, when both said producer is dead and Schneider, in real life, passed in 1982. When that comes to pass it becomes one of the film's most meaningful scenes, more so because Godard is playing himself interacting with a fictional creation of his, two old pros lamenting their careers in cinema being affected by the change in tide and left adrift within it. Even if Godard would become more and more a legendary filmmaker who made films to the current day, he's eventually drift far from narrative cinema into experimental features entirely, all bolstered by the reputation he developed allowing him to leave mainstream cinema behind.

From http://media.flix.gr.s3.amazonaws.com/cache/
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His critiques are matched by a willingness to play with the form of film a way few would. The limitations, the flaws, of this television work are devices for him to exploit, superimposition to the hair-raising use of slow motion on a female extra's emotions mid-performance. He even deliberately has the sound abruptly halt as if the film's failed, followed by a technical difficulties screen, for a joke. Musically he picks interesting pieces like from Leonard Cohen to Janice Joplin, the latter's famous rendition of Mercedes Benz amusingly used on a moving computer square with the technical screen colourbars. The marriage between the two sides is like a very underrated theatrical feature Godard made within this era, Detective (1985) with Johnny Hallyday and Nathalie Baye, a small scale crime narrative confined to one hotel, perfect for Godard's experimentation as well as providing an actual story. Rise and Fall... still tells an interesting tale - for Jean-Pierre Léaud's Bazin, a spark of life is found in his producer's wife Eurydice (Marie Valera), who he compares to actress Dita Parlo known for films like Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937). Theirs is not a romantic or sexual relationship, instead Bazin finding artistic clarity as, testing her, she is one of the only people when giving an old painting will not point out all the figures within it but say the characters are actually the most important themes of said painting. Sadly, apt for a small scale crime drama about a little company, it's the producer's shady past with stolen money that does them in.  

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Diegetic

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

Personal Opinion:

Hopefully, restored and premiering at the 2017 Locarno Film Festival, the reappearance of Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company is not restricted from public access beyond being temporally streamable on MUBI. If Godard's Dziga Vertov years can be accessed, as difficult and un-cinematic in his career's work as you can get, an uncovered gem like this can have appeal. If anything it hopefully leads closer to the vast television and video work in his catalogue finally appearing in wider access.

From https://assets.mubi.com/images/notebook/post_
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