Survive Style 5+

A stuttering Japanese hitman outsources all his jobs to an existential British thug. An uber-square suburban dad is hypnotized into thinking he’s a bird. A quiet slacker kills his wife every night and buries her in the woods, only to find her waiting for him at home in his mansion, alive, unscathed and full of vengeance. These are just a few of the bizarre characters present in Gen Sekiguchi’s 2004 Japanese absurdist tour de force “Survive Style 5+”.

“Survive Style 5+” is part Quentin Tarantino, part Marcel Duchamp, and fully Japanese. The film is entirely self aware without ever breaking the fourth wall, lengthy shots with little action and awkward beats leave the audience gritting their teeth, completely at the mercy of Director Sekiguchi, who also edited the film. Sekiguchi rewards the viewer with stunning film compositions, utilizing the entire color pallet and filling the screen with more colors than the mind can often process. This subtle trickery and awareness completely prevents one from criticizing any of Sekiguchi’s decisions as an auteur, as all of it works in conjunction to create the art expressed on screen.

The film's story is created through the creative weaving of various subplots, all vaguely intersecting at various junctures, leaving the final message of the film ambiguous but strangely uplifting. Is this film about learning how many times you need to kill your wife until you learn to love her? Is it about leaving your desk job behind and learning to fly like a bird, no matter the odds? Is it about relearning the meaning of Christmas? Or is it about determining your function in life? I’d say it’s about all of the above, though the last one best sums everything up. The film’s title can serve as a guide for us, as we’re given 5 different subplots, each one pitting the protagonist into some sort of survival situation. In the end it comes down to determining why we’ve been put on this planet, and the euphoria that one feels when they finally find their purpose.

Sometimes hilarious, sometimes moving, but always visually stunning, “Survive Style 5+” is the sort of artistic statement rarely seen in mainstream Hollywood films today, often due to budget constraints or producer interference. The film is cool and stylized, with an uber-fun soundtrack, and just waiting for a hip American market to catch wind of it. Sadly, it’s pretty hard to get a DVD copy that runs on NTSC region DVD players (i.e. American ones), I found my copy on Ebay. If you don’t live in America, then look around and it shouldn’t be too hard to find a copy that will work on your DVD player. But, yeah, it’s totally worth buying.

Quest for Fire

If you're anything like me then you possibly suffer from a masochistic desire to read subtitles in movies all the time. There's just something about those little yellow letters that add an aesthetic flourish to the film screen; It's the reason I've been watching so many Japanese movies lately, it's the reason I can watch Godard's "Pierrot le Fou" a million times without getting bored, and it's probably the only real reason I enjoyed "Inglourious Basterds" so much. I've watched so many subtitles that I'm now post-reading words with my movies, I've moved on to find the next big thrill and I found it in the form of Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1981 film "Quest for Fire".

Imagine a movie not in English. Easy. Now imagine a movie in a foreign language without subtitles. Frustrating? Now imagine a movie without subtitles that takes place 80,000 years ago and the only languages spoken are non-existent caveman grunts created for the screen by none other than Anthony Burgess himself (author of “A Clockwork Orange”). Pure bliss.

The story is simple enough: A clan of Neanderthal cavemen has fire, probably found during a wildfire somewhere. After their ape-like cousins, Homo Erectus, raid the small cave community, the fire goes out. Three of the cavemen are given the task to find more fire before the winter hits and the community dies. And it is here that the quest begins.

After a scuffle with a more savage band of cannibalistic Neaderthals, the three heroes rescue and befriend two young Homo Sapien women. These Homo Sapiens are far more advanced than the Neanderthals and bring them to their village which has constructed shelters, tools, and FIRE! With the essential element in hand, the men begin the long journey back to their tribe.

The film was shot in a variety of locations, from the Badlands of Canada to the Highlands of Scotland. These stark and sweeping landscapes evoke a lo-fi "Lord of the Rings". However, unburdened by special effects, the film uses cleaver costume and makeup techniques to recreate some of the era's more famous wild beasts, from the Woolly Mammoth to the Saber-Toothed tiger; the mammoths come courtesy of real elephants covered in fur, while the saber-tooth is simply a lioness outfitted with prosthetic teeth.

Out of the three leading cavemen the most recognizable would have to be Ron Pearlman – the face behind prosthetics of Hellboy from well, “Hellboy”, and Vincent from the 1987 television series “Beauty and the Beast”, though he’s pretty beastly as a Neanderthal too. The relative obscurity of the actors, as well and the down to earth film making, gives the film a pseudo-documentary feel, as if you’re watching recorded accounts of live in the stone age. The film paints a vivid picture of where we came from in the past, and inspires us to look ahead at where we are going.

A New Refutation of Postmodern Thought in Paracinema

We three sat on a couch in a darkened room, the Jock stood awkwardly by the door. On the television screen a she-male wearing a crown and cape decapitated a doe-eyed gigolo dressed in nothing by a cheetah-skin man-thong. The Jock shifted his weight and announced: “this movie is too weird, I have to go”. We flashed annoyed glances at the door as slammed shut, and then returned back to the screen to re-immerse ourselves in the world of Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

* * *

The events of September 11th, 2001 gave us a new method of categorizing people: there are those who watch videos of the World trade Center collapsing with a hand over their gasping mouth and tears in their eyes, and those who watch the video with their eyes wide and their hands on the replay button, absolutely amazed by the morbid awesomeness of watching a Government institution being leveled to the ground. In the above mentioned dorm-room scenario, the couch potato trio are no doubt part of the latter categorization. And while it may seem like an easy task of identifying these cult cinemaphiles, it does not answer the question that has plagued critics and compulsive categorizers for decades: who are these cult fans, and why are they so unusual? Jeffrey Sconce attempts to answer this question in his essay ‘Trashing’ the Academy; he writes

“Despite such efforts at generating counter-distinction within the shared cultural project of attacking ‘high-brow’ cinema, the discourses characteristically employed by paracinematic culture in its valorization of ‘low-brow’ artifacts indicate that this audience, like the film elite…is particularly rich with ‘cultural’ capital and thus possesses a level of textual/critical sophistication similar to the cineastes they construct as their nemesis” (537).

Sconce points out the intrinsic irony of the cult fan’s rebellion against ‘high-brow’ cinema. however his conjecture that a ‘paracinema’ fan is of a specific ‘cultural pedigree’ simply limits the cult fan base to too small a size; for every trio of students sitting on a couch at a liberal arts college, there is most likely a similar trio sitting in a basement or garage in middle-America, watching the exact same movie. The cult cinema fan doesn’t descend from a cultural pedigree, but rather a countercultural mentality developed by exposure to a postmodern world.

Post-Structuralism doctrine dictates that ‘Truth’ and ‘Meaning’ are merely constructs whose interpretation depends wholly on perspective. The same doctrine criticizes the traditionally Western system of breaking down the world into binary oppositions (Class notes, AT-110). These two philosophies of post-structuralism and postmodern thought are dominantly present, though possibly unconscious, in the minds of the paracinemaphile. Just as Marcel Duchamp dared put a urinal on display and call it art, the paracinemaphile dares reject ‘art house’ cinema and a film school education, outraging the public and choosing to degrade ritualized bourgeois values. By embracing films such as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Meyer, 1970) and Bad Girls Go to Hell (Wishman, 1965), these cult fans are rejecting the ‘good movie / bad movie’ binary of the mainstream film society and silently announcing to the world that they will judge these films for themselves through their own perspectives.

The postmodern world is one of quick cuts, juxtapositions, self-reflexivity and an overflow of information. It’s no coincidence that the MTV generation of the 80’s and 90’s, raised on a constant influx of ‘Breaking News’, Care Bears and cereal mascots would readily embrace the avant-garde directing styles of the aforementioned cult directors, who’s work is both parody and pastiche, drama and camp, and most importantly, contains transgressive themes that work to break down cultural barriers. John Water’s camp creation Divine, along with the androgynous Z-Man of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls served to ignite a trend of transgender/queer discourse within the cult circuit that rapidly spread into the mainstream via the late 70’s, early 80’s Glam Rock movement, culminating together in Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto in which she describe the postmodern cyborg as:

“a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense” (Haraway, 150)

In a sense, cult films themselves are cyborgs – post-structural pastiches containing elements of every genre, horror, comedy, and romance; often containing a confusing mixture of counter-cultural leanings, subversive queer agendas, and Reagan era / ‘Leave it to Beaver’ optimism.

The directors of these films are often strange characters themselves, and among fans they have reached an auteur like status by creating unique films that tend to promote the director’s own personality or opinion. Doris Wishman is a female director of nudie and roughy flicks, yet her use of the camera as the viewer’s gaze serves to subvert the lewd and lustful intentions of the male spectator. A director like Edward D. Wood Jr., the ‘worst director ever’, imbues messages of change, acceptance and freedom of expression in his films as he was a transvestite in real life.

These directors become post-structuralist heroes in the eyes of their fans as they go against mainstream cinema, completely ignoring the standard conventions of cinematic discourse. Instead of focusing their talents on the rigid construction of a film, they instead highlight the films’ deconstruction, allowing the audience to see the strings. Gary Hentzi comments on this imbued self-awareness by the directors in relation to cult film titles in his essay Little Cinema of Horrors: “the studied goofiness of [these] titles…evidences a certain level of awareness on the part of the directors, who have accepted the unlikelihood of their making a good film and so are aiming for a campy one instead” (Hentzi, 24).

Some directors, such as Ed Wood, never intended to be ‘bad’ directors. The tragedy of Wood lies in the fact that his life long struggle was for acceptance, but it was only after his death that his work was embraced by cult fans. Like his loyal cinemaphiles, Wood observed the world as a place with possibilities more numerous than ones and zeroes; his own auteur style – a collage of stock footage, exploitation leanings, Atomic Age dialogue, and transgressive transvestism – can be seen as a direct influence of the ‘bad’ film directors to follow in his footsteps, his reach traveling as far as mainstream Hollywood with directors like Tim Burton.

The analogy can be made that Ed Wood is to paracinema as Nietzsche is to postmodern thought: Both heralded in a new age of reasoning straying away from a faith based school of thought (Wood strays away from Classic Hollywood Cinema, which is analogous to classic ‘faith’). In Plan 9 from Outer Space (Wood, 1959) the alien visitors criticize the vanity and stupidity of humanity (“All you of earth are idiots!” [Wood, 1959]), while promoting their own advanced alien race, much like Zarathustra criticizes the faults of humanity while promoting the Ubermensch in Also Sprach Zarathustra (Nietzsche, 1883): “What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the Ubermensch: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment” (Nietzsche, 9).

Wood, a transvestite, cast John Breckinridge, a transsexual, as the ruler of the alien planet in Plan 9. In the world of Ed Wood the Ubermensch is the androgynous cyborg - a post-gendered creation birthed from a postmodern world. The paracinemaphile, be they lounging around a liberal arts college or kicking back in a Kentucky garage, rejects popular cinema not because of ‘cultural capital’, but because of a shared identity with this cyborg mentality, and, possibly, on the grounds that popular cinema is stupid, stupid, stupid!
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A Few Citations:

Bibliography

Hentzi, Gary, “Little Cinema of Horrors”, Film Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3. (Spring, 1993), pp. 22-27

Sconce, Jeffrey, “’Trashing’ The Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style”, Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism, 6th Edition. (New York, Oxford University Press, 2004); 534-553

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Barnes and Noble Classics, New York (2005)

Plan 9 from Outer Space, Dir. Wood Jr., Edward D., Reynold Pictures, 1959

The Cartoons of Jim Trainor

Emerging from the recent explosion of alternative experimental animators entering Hipster domain, Jim Trainor has to be by far the most sophisticated of them. Inviting viewers to observe the animal kingdom - an area of animation thought to have long ago been conquered by Walt Disney, Trainor's films transcend Disney; his animals do not have cherubic eyes or happy voices, their anatomical proportions are constantly shifting and never seem quite right. It is these differences that make Trainor's films work so well. Rather than make his animals more recognizable in human terms, he draws the viewer into the world of the animal, focusing his drawing skills on the anatomical features (such as accurately drawn reproductive and sensory organs) that drive the animal's existence in real life. Trainor taps into the minds of his animals with the understanding of a biologist; his protagonists are driven by primal desires like reproduction and food. While the animation might seem 'crude' when compared to Disney, Trainor's style is simple and to the point, much like the lives of his animals.

Where the cartoons of Don Hertzfeldt can be categorized as "surreal", Jim Trainor's films fall into the "existential" cabinet. Both "Bats" and "Moschops", two of Trainor's most notable films, deal with the life span of their respective creature (For what exactly a moschop is, see this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moschops). The animals wish nothing more than to spend their days foraging and fornicating, but like all things on this planet, they must one day die. The films ask how our own lives will be remembered: through the people we sleep with, through the 'rainy seasons' we survive, or through the way we die. As narrator of 'Moschops' says: "Nothing on this world has a right to live, only a chance...a chance".

Trainor's films transport the viewer into a primal world that is nearly void of human influence - it is only his choice biology lingo that keeps us anchored in a human world. His animation is equally primal, simplified down to a black marker, white paper and a camera. Were Trainor to simply narrate his bizarre biological statements over actual nature footage, the concept would be lost. The animation serves as a human touch, a staple in western civilization that connects us to the animals on screen and provides the most discomfort that we might feel when listening to Trainor's blunt narration. Through this process the primal instincts of Trainor's animals are reflected back onto us, placing us back into the natural order of the animal kingdom of which we will always be a part of.

"Bats" can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDizcCTUGdw

"Moschops" can be viewed here (in two parts): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZE_dBxM9IE&feature=related, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVOlV8277Vk&feature=related

Moon

Sam Rockwell is probably one of the best and most underrated actors working in Hollywood today. The name may draw a blank to many, but if you were to wrack your brain back to 1990’s live action “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”, you may recognize a twenty-two year old Sam in a scene stealing performance as ‘Head Thug’ (“Regular or Menthol?”), or slightly more recently as the double crossing villain, Eric Knox, in “Charlie’s Angels”; He also plays the endearing Guy Fleegman, the television extra who gets dragged along for an intergalactic adventure in “Galaxy Quest”. Chances are you’ve seen him in something over the years, but Rockwell is so adept at playing the common man, and making that character his own, that you might not recognize him from role to role. “Moon”, hopefully, will change all that.

Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, the only man stationed on the Moon in the near future with the task of overseeing an energy harvesting facility. That’s right, the only man stationed on the moon. With the exception of 4 characters seen over a video monitor, Rockwell is the only human presence on screen for the entire duration of the film. Rockwell’s charisma and control over the audience is spellbinding.

With only two weeks to go in a three year contract with the company that stationed Bell, thing begin to fall apart. Bell becomes feverish and begins to hallucinate a young woman at strange moments. His computer and only companion, GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) does his best to console Bell, but things go from bad to worse when Bell suffers a concussion and wakes up to find a duplicate of himself on the Moon.

Has Sam Bell lost his mind? Is he not actually alone on the Moon? Is he a clone?

The final answer is simple and straightforward and raises a number of ethical questions concerning the preservation of the human race. Sam Rockwell, as I said, is spellbinding as he deftly plays two characters, both claiming to be Sam bell, on screen at the same time.

This is a huge recommendation for anyone who would find a small, low budget independent sci-fi film that follows the same vein as “2001: A Space Oddesy” a compelling Friday night movie.

Oh, did I mention it’s directed by David Bowie’s son? He goes by the name of Duncan Jones.