Pinprick

What originally piqued my interest in Pinprick was how cleverly matched the plot seemed to be with L'immoralita, a film I had recently discussed. The closest interpretation on Daniel Young's Pinprick could lend hints of Breillat's À ma sœur! but only after digging well underneath the feminine tissue. One thing that really struck a chord with me was our young star Laura Greenwood's performance. In Pinprick, Greenwood plays a radically rebellious teenager, aged 15, who festers an unbearable relationship with her mother. In a fit of retaliation, unknown to us or the camera, she decides to foster a criminal in her closet, feeding him scraps and entertaining his presence by wearing revealing clothing. In many scenes, Daniel Young incorporates visible signs of reality, not just script-writing, but an experience all together in realism. Pinprick is not a window into fictitious psychopathy but a careful portrait of, quite literally, the dangers of innocence. 

Greenwood's character, Charlotte, is quickly introduced in her bedroom talking to a shadow in her closet. Not bumbling about with origins or needless explanation and sifting through scenes, Pinprick begins before we even realize it. Ervin Nagy plays Reyer, our enigmatic prisoner of this sterile domicile. Reyer is a character who possesses immense presence with his Hungarian features. He's certainly an intimidating character and the games he has in store for this unwitting family only add to his curious and repressed behavior. Daniel Young doesn't waste any time establishing the strange, almost teasingly pedophilic, relationship between the brutish Reyer and the budding flower Charlotte. I'd call Pinprick jailbait terrorism as scenes are juxtaposed to both titillate and warn you. In a certainly complex nature, Charlotte's character bounces around in panties, expressing her flourishing curves in a manner that is all too beguiling and impossible to resist. Pinprick then gives you a slap on the hand for eying the lovely dame as such a meat. What lies within this relapsing of lust is a strong point of Pinprick. The name of the game is passive fetishism and Laura Greenwood makes damn sure that every viewer is paying attention.

The battle soon switches targets as Reyer begins scoping out Charlotte's homely mother, Miriam, portrayed by Rachael Blake. I suppose the tedious girl-games wore thin for Reyer as he sets into motion a plan to assimilate himself within the household, allowing complete and total freedom, including the sexual kind. Charlotte, noticing Reyer has been intimate with her mother, begins to grow a sizable fear and jealously. There's much more to the plot of Pinprick, which is delicately delivered at the very end of the film. A "twist" so mellow and radical that I should have seen it coming, but never did. Reyer, the Hungarian opportunist, is shed upon as a brooding character with a strange fascination for the toys of the bourgeois. Pinprick is the first "independent" feature I've seen in quite some time that I can solemnly swear to seep substance. Not only does the film play all fronts of battle but impales the typical daughter as well. Pinprick attests to the terror of angsty girlhood. While Charlotte suffers from susceptible and impressionistic behavior, one might argue she's not as rotten as her friends; one being a young Latino whore who receives a tattoo at an all-too young age. Charlotte expresses her distaste at the decision, all while realizing she too is irrational.

 To return once more to the inextricable relation to L'immoralita, both Pinprick and the aforementioned Italian psychodrama share common similarities. Both films involve little girls hiding criminals away from their parents and share interest in mature mothers seducing or being seduced by said criminal. This leads to the familial meltdown in both pictures. Also shared is a scene of listening in on consummation which leads to the young ladies either sobbing or being noticeably distressed. Laura Greenwood's defining curves tackle the topic of ageless sex head on. Just as Simona proved in L'immoralita, these young fledging doves with dreams of big love know the sinister game they're playing and in some way, mesh seamlessly with the future of the false rape epidemic. With Pinprick, Daniel Young surprised me, intrigued me, and patronized me. Not just with the shameless sexuality of young Charlotte but with his effective storytelling. Pinprick is easily one of the better and engaging dramas floating around these days and it's a damn shame that it's not more accessible to wandering hands. To better solidify your own opinion, I suggest purchasing it here.

-mAQ

Control

On the eve of his band's first American tour, Joy Division singer Ian Curtis hung himself shortly after watching Werner Herzog's classic German film Stroszek. Maybe the film made Curtis feel even more pessimistic about life, with the possibility of failure in America (just as the protagonists of Stroszek ultimately failed) looming closely over his haunted head. Of course, any serious Joy Division fans knows that Ian Curtis's suicide was a longtime in the making. The lyrics Curtis wrote for his innovating band are truly an expressions of a "dead soul (also the name of a popular JD song)." With each new Joy Division album, the sound and lyrics of the band would parallel Ian Curtis's further psychological escape into introversion and all-around reclusive behavior, eventually resulting in his own self-prophesized suicide. When I found out that Hollywood completed a film entitled Control (2007) about Joy Division and the brief life of poetic singer Ian Curtis, I could not help but cringe. After all, the director of Control, Anton Corbijn, is best known for directing music videos, not to mention the fact that the film was distributed by The Weinstein Company. After reluctantly watching Control, I can report that the film was not nearly as bad as it could have been, but it is no masterpiece either.

The first thing I noticed about Control is that it was pretentiously shot in black-and-white. Joy Division certainly was not a 'colorful' group, so I assume that the director was going for a gloomy aesthetic. Virtually all (if not all) of the artwork featured on Joy Division album covers are also in black-and-white (with shades of gray), certainly complimenting the group's somber music and mournful lyrics.  During his early grammar school years, Ian Curtis was recognized for his talent in poetry, even earning a scholarship at the age of 11 for the prestigious The King's School in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England. Although a talented wordsmith, Ian Curtis was not a serious student and never went onto a university. In Control, the film begins during the end of Curtis's high school days, showing a young man that could never successfully adapt to adulthood. It also becomes apparent in the film that the root of Ian Curtis's creative talents were also intertwined with the deterioration of his psyche. Not only did Ian Curtis suffer from crippling depression and overall psychological misery; he also suffered from epileptic seizures. In fact, as exhibited in Control, Ian Curtis would sometimes have an epileptic seizures during Joy Division performances, in which many people would mistake for his unconventional dance routines. Ian Curtis even wrote a song, She's Lost Control, about a girl that he knew (he was a civil servant that helped handicapped people acquire jobs) that had epilepsy. Curtis later called the girl to find out how her new job was going and was horrified when he heard that she died. Contrary to how it is chronologically portrayed in Control, Ian Curtis did find out that he had epilepsy until after he wrote the lyrics to the song She's Lost Control. For a man that constantly saw death surrounding him, it must have been a nightmarish experience for Ian Curtis when he was diagnosed with epilepsy, only shortly after finding out a young girl he knew unexpectedly died from it. 

Joy Division named themselves after a fictional Nazi-run brothel of Jewish sex slaves featured in the 1955 novella The House of Dolls written by Israeli author Yehiel De-Nur. In fact, the first Joy Division EP An Ideal for Living featured a drawing of a Hitler Youth member on the cover. Due to the band's name and Nazi imagery, people were speculative about Joy Division's dubious political affiliations. Jewish psychoanalyst Eric Fromm described fascists as people that were consumed by the death-drive and "in love with corpses." Although the quack propagandist theory that Nazi's were driven by the desire to die and once again become inanimate is preposterous (to say the least), there is no doubt in my mind that Ian Curtis was driven by the urge to die. As depicted in Control, the better his personal and financial life got, the more worse off Ian Curtis became both mentally and physically. Despite having a wife and beautiful child, Curtis could no live up to being a family man, eventually starting another relationship with a woman from Belgium. Ian Curtis also could not deal with the success of Joy Division, killing himself on the eve of his first American tour and before the album Closer (1980) and the single "Love Will Tears Us Apart" were released, the groups highest charting releases.

Control is not the first film to characterize the rise and demise of Joy Division.  The hyper-cynical film 24 Hour Party People (2002) portrays the death of Ian Curtis as some type of bad English comedy skit. Although Control does a better job interpreting the history of Joy Division and the life of Ian Curtis, it still left me with the feeling that I was cheated out of the definitive Joy Division film. Control is comparable to Oliver Stone's The Doors, as both films are essentially like feature-length music videos that only manage to pay musical tribute to the subjects they portray, but are lacking in depth and substance when it comes to telling the 'real' story behind band. Although he praised the film, Joy Division drummer Stephen Morris remarked regarding Control, "None of it's true really" but somewhat justified the films inaccuracies by stating, "The truth is boring." After re-watching Control a second time last night, I found it much more boring when comparing it to my initial viewing of the film.  Still, the film has some intrinsic value in that offers a good introduction for Joy Divisions novices and forthcoming generations of fans.

-Ty E

Gantz

If I could list one archetype I'm never pleased to commune with it, it would be an avid Anime fan. Rather, anyone so obsessed with Eastern culture that they feel this profound itching to venture to a Sanrio store to pick up Pocky or a bottle of Ramune. These rabid fans cling to their manga and 25 dollars-a-volume-disc containing three episodes of their recent Japanese animated obsession. For me, this was a niche I spent most of high school struggling to avoid. It seemed no matter where I ran off to, cat ears or skunk tails twitched atop heads and derrières.  I finally settled on a specific series as an introduction, however. When a friend boasting tastes I knew not to be poisonous summed up Hiroya Oku's Gantz in a nutshell, I had become smitten with the general outline. What about an afterlife spent slaving over the corpses of aliens with advanced weaponry and lavish nudity/violence doesn't appeal to your palate? Regardless, the tale of Gantz that was serialized with hand-drawings was something unique and addictive. This live-action abomination does nothing in place of what the original Gantz had strewn about with precision.

For any of you out of the loop, Gantz (2011) is a film you wouldn't want to happen upon without prior knowledge to the more intricate mechanics of the series. The basis of Gantz involves two old friends reunited in death, obliterated by a subway train after saving a drunken vagrant who stumbled onto the tracks. Upon death, they are warped into an empty apartment high above the city, overlooking the Tokyo Tower. Among Kei and Kato are other recently deceased patrons and a obsidian sphere. This sphere is known as Gantz and is outfitted with a hostile and cynical conscious towards its participants. Not much else is known about the game, other than they have a time limit to execute aliens scattered around the city in an alternate realm. Taking something so wrapped up in childish fantasies of senseless brutality and sneering sexual overtones should be very easy to replicate within film, that is, before the plot really kicks into gear. The fact that the two lead characters are students should lend to their blossoming and whiny characteristics. However, in the live-action Gantz interpretation, our characters are very passive, only to flex hints of inspiration accordingly to the scene of combat. Which brings up the atrocity committed to our lead character, Kei.

At the very beginning of the show, Kei was animated as an insolent pervert who often fantasized about his teacher and classmates in the nude. The thesis of Gantz was built around his rite of passage; losing his virginity. So already Gantz has one over the average animated science fiction actioner. It caters to both adults and those experiencing puberty which leaves it effortlessly accessible to any demographic. Kei eventually becomes desensitized to the plight of the expendable "refills" Gantz accordingly drops into the room. As the mysterious character Nishi before him, Kei will not be bothered to explain repeatedly that they're trapped within an alien purgatory. After all, who would believe him or anything of the other babbling contestants limited to hysterics? Naturally, Gantz (2011) fits the bill bestowed upon most all other live action films based on anime. These characters were created solely as cartoons, therefore inheriting outlandish features and personality traits that should not, in any case, ever be replicated onto film. For example, take L's character in either Death Note film. The "wacky", untamed eccentricity can only go so far before being limited by flesh. This very same logic applies to every character within Gantz (2011). The director Shinsuke Sato cared enough to cast several characters that were obviously modeled after the drawings. This was all in vain though for the prominently white features of the persons within the series/manga do not translate to the Yellowkin within the film.

Reprising my statement towards the emptiness of Kei's character, in the film, we're only given two instances of a possible sexual side to our hero. No longer bellicose, Kei glances at a subway advertisement depicting a woman in the nude and in a scene with Kishimoto, he grabs a condom. A character included in the series, Sakuraoka, whom Kei has sex with in spite of Kishimoto's willingness to childhood friend, Kato, does not exist in this canon. This in turn renders Kei just as flaccid an attribute to Gantz (2011) as is the disappearance of rules and limitation to their game; mainly, the boundaries of the fight and the strange realm they exist in. The realm in which your actions affect the surroundings on both planes as well as your incarnation being invisible to the human eye. These elements are largely ignored by Shinsuke Sato, who must have been whistling a tune while approving the screenplay. It is also my firm belief that the Japanese are without an acting pool, so to speak. Most every Japanese film features unbearable facial gestures and Gantz (2011) is no stranger to this. The enigmatic Nishi contorts his jaw in a sarcastic manner as if to belittle his opponent. Absent in the show, the only thing this addition provides is a bit of irritating culture shock to even the most jaded Eastern film connoisseur.

Gantz (2011) is a complete, all around failure. It has absolutely no redeeming qualities save for the brief and disconnected scenes of alien mayhem. The absence of many characters could easily be overlooked on my part but I find myself so perturbed at the general embodiment of flesh within Gantz. For being a fan of the animated show, the release of this film marks a sad day for fans of Gantz worldwide, even if they are sniveling parasites wearing eyeliner and hair extensions. The strange lack of sexuality and even nudity strips Gantz (2011) of the very things that made up its grandiose package of teenage masturbatory fantasies including attempted rape, weaponry that triggers a delayed implosion effect, and attitude. Gantz (2011) is a lifeless being, devoid of any substantial traits as its predecessor boasted lovingly and I am not looking forward to its sequel. This is something that cannot be realized within the confines of reality. Something as seamless and open-ended as animation is exactly why the more ludicrous ideas are transposed on paper and not celluloid. Leave this one to the artists.

-mAQ

A Fire in My Belly

Lately, I find myself revisiting short films more often than feature-length works. I can say without hesitation that the phantasmagorical occult sinema of Kenneth Anger has swayed most of my more recent cinematic attention. Whether it be a film or an album of music, I find myself most attracted to artistic works that lack filler material. I find that short films generally lack filler material as the filmmaker is often more careful and disciplined when it comes to directing and assembling a film that is less than 10 minutes in length. Over the past couple of years, my taste in cinema has become more refined, resulting in a stricter personal criteria for films that I find to be worthy of artistic praise. Fire in My Belly directed by David Wojnarowicz, despite being around 4 minutes in length (a 20 minute version of the film also exists), is certainly not the kind of ideal short film that I find perfectly palatable, as it lacks fluidity and hypnotic majesty; two rare cinematic attributes that I find imperative when conclusively deciding whether or not a certain a flick is an authentic work of art. After reading up on director David Wojnarowicz and watching Fire in My Belly (the filmmaker's most notorious work), it is apparent to me that the postmodern polymath artist (working within many artistic mediums) never fully developed a cohesive and original cinematic/artistic voice. 

In 1985, Wojnarowicz successfully sued United Methodist minister Donald Wildmon and The American Family Associate (a conservative Christian organization) for copying and distorting (protected under the New York Artists' Authorship Rights Act) his art. Although dying from AIDS-related complications in the early 1990s, Christians would later have their revenge against Wojnarowicz in 2010 by having his short Fire in My Belly removed from the National Portrait Gallery. The Catholic League and intelligent design advocate John Boehner merely complained to the National Portrait Gallery and the short was ousted. Christians demanded that Fire in My Belly should be removed from the gallery because of a vacuous scene in the short featuring ants walking over a cross. Surprisingly, Mr. Boehner was not as offended to see the gratuitous boner featured in the film. My main problem with Fire in My Belly is that it lacks originality and artistic cohesiveness; undoubtedly a pastiche mess that personifies the cultural bankruptcy of most 'postmodern' art. After watching the short, it was obvious to me that the director was especially influenced by Scorpio Rising, almost making Fire in My Belly in certain parts feel like a gross parody of Anger's sadomasochistic masterpiece. I guess David Wojnarowicz felt that by showing an erect cock for a couple seconds (the male members featured in Scorpio Rising are quickly inter-cut randomly in the film, making them seem like subliminal homo-occult messages), he was making a huge leap in artistic progress.

At best, Fire in My Belly is an alright way to waste 4 minutes (do not even bother watching the 20 minute version). At worst, the short is a testament to the lack of evolution in the way of cinematic artistry. You are better off watching the 1929 surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou created by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. After all, David Wojnarowicz seems to have lifted his interest in creepy insects and blasphemous imagery from Un Chien Andalou. It is a sad day when anti-Christian sentiment has become so trendy and hip that it manages to bore the viewer. Fire in My Belly is comparable to the 'scandalous' 1987 Piss Christ photograph (which was partially funded by the United States Government via the National Endowment for Art). To be an artist in the modern world, you do not need talent and skill, only banal iconoclasm and borderline pornography. French decadent poet Arthur Rimbaud (a major influence on David Wojnarowicz) may have been a libertine but he was also a purveyor of beauty, something that Wojnarowicz was never able to accomplish. I am not surprised that Wojnarowicz contracted a fire in his belly, as it was probably the result of consuming too many hot pieces of past art (he could never compete with) over the years.  By creating A Fire in My Belly, Wojnarowicz was able to release his confused incendiary influences, creating a postmodern work of visual farts.

-Ty E

Take an Easy Ride

I had viewed Take an Easy Ride several days prior to this review. Upon finishing it, I was stirred but not shaken. The idea of combing the experience for particular nuggets of truth seemed not worth the effort, that is, until I had a very similar experience the same night that touched base. Coming out of the liquor store, I was accosted by a ogre-like feminine creature that had the finesse of a cricket suffocating in semen. Begging for a ride and not taking no for an answer, I simply had to walk away while she scurried from car to car in the background. This is but an example of the odd little things that come your way during any given period and after watching Take an Easy Ride, I not only feel uneasy about the situation but I feel inclined to finally put to rest these hitchhiking demons vibrating in my skull.

Take an Easy Ride was originally programmed to be a public information film, the sort of which have made rounds about the Internet as we poke fun as its terribly dated and contrived material. This dream of educational celluloid squalor went sour though as Rowles was approached by legendary producer and peddler of smut, David Grant. Taking the ideas of public interest and intertwining this with vintage smut seemed innocent enough but the end result is a strange one. Take an Easy Ride begins with several interviewers on the street conducting short Q&As with the young English gents asking for thoughts on hitch-hiking. Of course, to thin the context of the future events, they speak of spooky happenstance, the connection of rape, murder, and hitching rides. After this segment, the triptych tale of feminine motorway terror begins. The first instance of young girls hitchhiking finds two females "taking an easy ride" off a trucker. After some time though, the blonde hikes up her skirt as if to situate her supple figure, but her veil is wafer thin. This is a classic example of an instinctual act of manipulation, if the woman realizes it or not. On several sites regarding this film, I've witnessed reviewers and "genre fans" writing off this trucker character for being "perverted" or "sleazy", which infuriates me to no end.

Another of the side-plots involves two girls hitchhiking to a rock and roll concert. Despite one receiving fare from her father, the elder hippie decides for whatever reason, whether to save money for drugs or plot progression, to hitch a ride. The fellow who picks them up was previously outlined in a short sketch showing the dashboard of his car and disembodied hands digging through the glove-box in order to flip through a crusty nudie mag; ergo, this man is a devilish victim of persuasion. All comparisons between Take an Easy Ride and Last House on the Left are sourced from this subplot in particular as these young girls are violated, raped, and murdered in the woods. The parents are the victims here, same as the laughable peers in Craven's Last House on the Left. Leave it to daddy's little girl to bring more trouble than their pitiful existence wrapped around boys is already worth. Intertwined with these scenes is two more "examples" of the dangers hitchers face. A staged street introduction leads to an impromptu interview that begins with a cherry disposition that then turns its ugly head on the carelessness of women, especially when inebriated off of wine. A young girl is presumably sheltered from the hazardous asphalt from the kindness of a strange couple. Later relaxing in a bath, the hitcher is surprised in the bathtub by the "girlfriend" and is led into acting out her suppressed desires on the bed. During this foreplay feigned rape, the chubby male snaps shots of the lesbian interaction. Immediately preceding the warm-up exercise, the male removes his clothes and climbs atop the wriggling mass of lady flesh; yet, we're led to believe the hitcher is the victim in this story. A victim of her own carnal ineptitude, perhaps.

The shortest, and in my opinion, weakest of the short interactions between victim and prey swap sides to present the driver as the victim. In this scenario, a gentleman offers a ride to two women who, unbeknownst to him, rob a gas station while his back is turned. This later escalates in him getting stabbed repeatedly by the vixens. This ends the short saga of Take an Easy Ride; a wonderfully distorted campaign of safety. Rowles' determination to take on public safety is repeatedly undermined by the perversity of David Grant. While the assertion that Take an Easy Ride is similar to that of Last House on the Left is credible there's not much else besides the single skit that could lead to this conclusion. Sure, Take an Easy Ride features a scene of rape and murder. This, in turn, draws sympathy from the reaction of the parents. But no other strand of evidence exists to suggest this claim other than the "gentle" scene of rape within Take an Easy Ride. Nevertheless, Rowles' cinematic contribution excels in the art of sleaze and under the ever watchful eye of David Grant, Take an Easy Ride becomes something so strange, esoteric, yet, utterly creative. It's my guess that these abrasive forms of public interest are making a comeback with the inclusion of "shocking" accident commercials, obviously led by forerunners Take an Easy Ride and Forklift Driver Klaus. It seems the media mavens have finally realized brute force is the most effective method of persuasion.

-mAQ

Massage the History

Nowadays, with access to affordable (or easily stolen) non-linear video-editing programs and fathomless access to download-able video footage on the internet, pretty much everyone has the resources needed to make art films. Of course, most people are not artists and lack the unique sensitivity/sensibility that is imperative when producing notable works of art. I have seen my fair share of disposable art films (the majority fit in this category), so when I saw the short video collage Massage the History directed by Cameron Jamie, I was more than a little bit pleasantly surprised. Tennessee Israelite auteur Harmony Korine has given high artistic praise to the film, eloquently stating, "This shit is fucking mind-blowing." Like Harmony Korine's recent effort Trash Humpers, Massage the History features a group of dubious individuals from the deep South molesting inanimate objects. Both films also manage to capture the peculiar zeitgeist of our deranged and backwards times; Trash Humpers presenting a cult of elderly white trash humanoids and Massage the History featuring a group of bourgeois blacks busting out mad, ambiguously homoerotic (often grinding into each other) tribal dance attacks. 

The lone song featured in Massage the History, which is of the same name as the film, was written by Sonic Youth. In 1998, Harmony Korine directed a Sonic Youth video for the song "Sunday," starring Macaulay Culkin and his then wife, Rachel Minor. Although Korine's Sonic Youth video is undoubtedly one of my favorite music videos, the audio/visual combination featured in Massage the History, in my opinion, is even more cinematically refined and inspiring. In fact, despite only being around 10 minutes in length, I felt that Massage the History was a much more profound work than Korine's most recent feature-length film Trash Humpers. Harmony Korine has described Cameron Jamie as a truly American artist and an "artist's artist," two compliments that I have always paid to Korine. Another reason I have always admired Harmony Korine is due to his rare ability to find beauty in the most unappealing and repellent of American cultural sewers. Cameron Jamie also indubitably has the rare ability to create aesthetic ecstasy through his own perceptive and personal trash-Americana-admiring artistic lens. Before watching Massage the History, I would have never expected to find elegance in the form of possessed bourgeois Negroes gently humping Ikea furniture.

Director Cameron Jamie originally got the idea for Massage the History after randomly stumbling upon dancing videos featuring the dancing confederate Negroes that would star in the film. In fact, Massage the History features various unrelated clips that the director found on YouTube. I can only assume that the bodacious black boyz of Massage the History dance in celebration as the white world is engulfed in perpetual flames (in the form of a scorching Christmas tree and flaming skateboarder). The film also features an elder Negress absurdly walking her pet cat on a leash. Whilst the glue sniffing white boys of Harmony Korine's Gummo kill cats for fun and profit (to support their glue habit), the black woman featured in Massage the History allows her aristo-cat to eat at the dinner table like a human. Without the massage and revision of history by the New Left in the late 1960s, in favor of the American Negro as the noble savage victim, it is highly doubtful that the chair raping Southern brothas featured in Massage the History would be living such lavish lives (a result of affirmative action and America's commitment to "diversity").  A sagely redneck once told me, "If blacks can't eat it or fuck it, they break it."  The bourgie blacks featured in Massage the History would certainly have a hard time eating their furniture, so I guess they opted for preserving it by fucking it. Thankfully, pioneering American filmmaker D.W. Griffith is not alive to see the film, as the prophetic racialist message that he warned of regarding black-white integration in his groundbreaking 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation has become nightmarishly true. The Birth of a Nation may have featured savage Negro legislators lounging with their bare-feet on the table whilst eating fried chicken in governmental chambers, but that pales (no black-face intended) in comparison to the jiving jigaboo juveniles featured in Massage the History. Harmony Korine once remarked that American cinema had not advanced far past (as far as storytelling goes) the work of D.W. Griffith. Massage the History certainly is a new form of abstract, non-linear storytelling, that induces a trance on the audience comparable to the spell guiding the Jazzy chair humpers featured in the film. If you're an inspiring filmmaker and/or serious patron of cinematic art, Massage the History will have you enamored from the start. Never in my life have I sniggered so hard after watching a film featuring furniture fornicators. Praise Cameron Jamie, for Massage the History is a religious experience concocted by an auteur priest.

-Ty E

Natural Enemies

Getting a fair amount of praise from a friend, I made excellent time in tracking down a copy of Natural Enemies for my visual consumption. Starring Hal Holbrook and directed by Jeff Kanew of Revenge of the Nerds fame, Natural Enemies takes its fleeting philosophy on the poisonous effects of marriage and applies the title quite aptly to suit the needs of the cynical Paul Stewart. A man of science and intellectualism, Paul Stewart decides to soon take the life of his three children, his wife, as well as his own, in an effort to keep the family intact while ending their domestic misery. Fear not, I haven't divulged any more information than what Kanew would have himself given. After all, Natural Enemies, more in fact, captures the presumably last day of a man whose belief in love and family has faltered to the point to allow cynicism total control. It's an act of criminal negligence that Natural Enemies isn't released on a later video format other than mildewing big box VHS tapes.

Paul Stewart is a character I find myself sympathizing with the longer the film goes on. Throughout his dreary and routine day, he encounters strange examples of human life, people as detached as he is and wish for some flicker of hope entailing what was once known as life. Stewart purchased a secluded cabin in the countryside as he had hoped the wooden beams supporting the wooden domain would collect and capture a tenderness between his family. Arguably, you could say that Paul Stewart has what is commonly referred to as the "American dream" and Natural Enemies just makes a point to show how miserable the good magazine editor is because of it. Taking a two hour train ride to work nearly every day has exhausted the already delirious housewife, Miriam (Louise Fletcher, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest) to the point of total reclusion from her husband. This wasn't the reason for their emotional separation anymore than Miriam's previous overdosing on Ritalin was. Natural Enemies makes a clear point in sympathizing and humanizing the needs of both man and wife, until death do they part. As Paul continues about his day at the office of his scientific publication, he absently stares at his beautiful assistant Anne and questions why he's never taken her to bed. Paul and Miriam's marriage is continuously trivialized throughout Natural Enemies, neither character can give a reason for shunning the idea of divorce other than softly quipping "maybe we're old-fashioned."

The children featured in Natural Enemies aren't so much children as they are dining room parasites. Shown only in brief scenes, the children, Tony, Sheila, and Alex, make up much of Paul's festering hatred as they are shown humorously as detached as the parents are, taking time from the day to absorb cartoons, eat frozen waffles, and gorge upon junk food. Miriam is no different from the lot. She is a marginalized woman who was terrified of maturity which led to her overdosing on Ritalin, a scene I am very privy to as my own uncle overdosed off of my very same medication at a tender age. It's no coincidence that Miriam attempted suicide and was of a tortured artist archetype. It appears that most films glorify this very same ideal as the connection of women, acoustic guitars, watercolors, and prescription medication seem as in tune with media as the sexualized usage of cocaine by divas and celebrities in modern culture. The frequent bashing of marital norms and Paul Stewart's gloomy narration adds thick a layer of matrimonial destitution that never fails to keep the pacing intricate and flawless. Through Paul's malaise a door is opened into a subjective view on the phenomena of familial murder/suicides, one that doesn't blister a previously opened wound but, rather, shows the sick charm of confusion held by these men and women. I can recall the ending of Natural Enemies as an illustration of hopelessness and the insatiable spirit of depression but I can also state that the finale was quite akin to a punch in the gut. Bleak in every sense of the word and venomous to the touch, Natural Enemies makes no attempt to vilify any character, any means of release, or any reason of escape - Pure brilliance in storytelling and a film to be reckoned with.

-mAQ