THE IRON TOWER (Victor Lazarus,1926)

Strident Informations Abound! Default On Life!... and so on; Victor Lazarus' beautifully tinted silent vistas are punctuated by various sloganeering texts that never quite explain themselves; Silent movie great Donald Dunston Dunderville gives an iconic performance as a Roman Centurion who is determined to prove himself; and then there is the great Iron Tower itself, the biggest construction ever on a Hollywood lot, a towering monolith that in the movie appears one morning in the centre of Rome, tall and vulgar, begging to be challenged, and in real life unleashed a thousand poisons upon the Warner Brothers lot during its six-month stay. Avoid Diffusion! Disrupt Arts! the intercutting lines suggest and demand, prompting confusion from the pictures before us. An extistential journey? A surrealist wonder? A visual beanfeast? A symbolic afterlife query? A homosexual inquest? Pseudo-nonsense? The last pure leap of the silent age? The Iron Tower may well be all of these things, and more. Steadfast! Steadfast! Steadfast!

A ripe concoction indeed.

The crackling hollow images of early in the film set up what looks like being a standard romantic plot- Tyrus (Dunderville) is a Centurion of no great reputation, and his dreams of ways to prove himself to his mentor, Lexus (Roberto Strong) include bog-standard run-and-rescue scenarios and heroic pronouncements from the blond wonder (Breathe Maestro! Your Savior Explicits! Defence Is Dust!). Dunderville's broody insecurity invests these sequences with much pathos; but it is when the iron tower appears that he sees his true chance. No explanation is given for the appearance of the tower, which reaches beyond the clouds. The Romans see it at first as military assault, then as a blessing from the Gods; but as brave warrior after brave warrior attempts to ride his horse up the side of the construction, only to fall, the city's fathers begin to feel that the Gods are shunning them. They see this as a message that Rome is doomed. Alas! The Wolf-Brothers Forgotten, Accursed!

Tyrus, to the merriment of all, decides to attempt to climb the tower with the aid of only four arrows, which he drives into holes in the side of the tower and uses as steps, moving one at a time to make progress. The city gathers to laugh at the folly of the cherubic innocent whose climb is painfully slow. In some of the most dramatic sections of the film, Dunderville's hopeful and scared face is besieged by rotten fruit, thrown from below, and occasionally a failed hero, falling from above, hatred in his throat. Ponderus! I Will Resurrect! cries one burning victim. It increasingly seems like failure is the glorious option, that when he falls, Rome will nurse him to her rose breast and love him; but Tyrus continues, and makes it to the Supposed Volcano In The Clouds. The climax, set in lava skies, offers one thundering metaphor after another, as Tyrus, nonreligious and curious, argues with the heavenly voices and their brazen systems.

Freud, Sigmund called it 'the greatest sexual metaphor in the canon'1. Freud, Jimmy of the LA Chronicle called it 'barbaric witchery, fraudulent film-making, juvenile symbolism.'2 In light of the problems Warner had during shooting (one carpenter died falling from the construction, and two horses were injured in seperate incidents; costs escalated three-hundred-fold), Froyd, Beau of Snapshot christened the Iron Tower 'Mr Warner's Limping Member' before adding, after a disastrous opening few weeks, that 'America's chastity is clearly immune to such grand drizzle. Our belts are tight against such pornographic abundance' 3

Even so, the movie in time found a following, not least for its absurdist reckoning of heroism, the desperate performance of Dunderville, and the timeless images that pervade, ripping through the nightmares of a bustling century: The tower, the climb, the success of death.

The movie's title was changed to The Black Tower in Canada, where the terrorist group tour en fer (Iron Tower) had been causing political problems. The group changed their name to la tour noire as a riposte. Authorities thus banned the movie for years there, and it wasn't until a popular new version of the movie (with a soundtrack by German band Harmonia, added neon colouring and rediscovered lost sequences) was released in 1975 that Canadians could see The Iron Tower in full proud glory.

Dunderville? Alas his career struggled, like many of his peers, with the advent of sound. His shyly dashing appearance was undone by an ungodly flat vocal, but even so his fame (and that of co-star Tyrone Symple) was enough to bring success to Little People Are People A Little (Alan Smithee, 1933), RKO's response to MGM's Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932), the movie that started a domino effect of increasingly exploitative outsider flicks about those members of society with physical abnormalities. The success of Dunderville's sound endeavour warranted a quick sequel, but Little People Are People A Little Too (Reckless Adams, 1933) was boycotted by the midget union of Hollywood (Small Person's Association of Movie-Actors, or SPAM) who decided to offer none of their actors to the studio, on account of the first movie's 'unaccountable patronising of fellas under five feet'4. The Folly of Dunston Dunderville (John Turturro, 1998) a movie about the period, was a sympathetic look at Dunderville's naivety, but still drew lawsuits from his estate, such is the sensitivity about the politics of those movies that reside in RKO's vaults, unseen for years.

Oh Dunderville. As one of the captions from The Iron Tower put it: He Burns The Stars With His Poise! Can They Love Him? The answer was that they could, but all too briefly.

The Iron Tower Directed by Victor Lazarus Produced by David Warner, Adam Warner Written by Rick Flynn Starring Donald Dunston Dunderville, Roberto Strong Warner Brothers Release Date US: September 1926 Running Time: 74 mins Tagline: 'Where Did It Come From? Where Does It Go? Beware, The Iron Tower!'

1.Juvenalia, 1933

2. Oct 17th, 1926

3. Jan 3rd, 1927

4. SPAM press release, printed in Variety, Jan 14th, 1933

DIJONNAISE (Walter Friend, 1941)

Underground legend Friend's influential concern with the minutae of existence began with this experimental masterpiece, shot in an afternoon in 1941. Dijonnaise simply shows an unnamed man eating a meal. Shot in the grainiest of black-and-white-and-grey, this absolutely quiet movie is strangely compelling and tense: When, the viewer wonders, will the man sit down to eat? What is he eating? Who is he? Why? What is this all about? What time is it? When? Now? Who are you? What are you doing with that bread-knife? Why do I feel hungry? What? Et cetera, Et cetera.

Friend was a student of the Diktat School, a collision of ex-pat Americans in Paris between the wars who idolised both Renoirs, Robert Bresson and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and saw in them a way to breathe humanity into American cinema. They returned home to stalk Hollywood en-masse, and using cameras borrowed from studio lots, set about making difficult shorts, albeit difficult shorts that contain a multitude of Hollywood paraphernalia- in Dijonnaise, the protagonist wears the same coat that Humphrey Bogart wore in The Maltese Falcon, Friend's cheeky admission to the fact that he 'borrowed' Warner Brothers equipment. Fellow Diktat members John Vigour and Herb Silence shot their respective shorts Arrows (about lost Native Americans) and Sebastien (about the legendary drag cabaret star) in the same week as Dijonnaise and with the same equipment, causing celebrated film historian Dizzy Bordell to call that manic period of filming as 'the shots heard around the world'.1

Dijonnaise is famously notable for having a place in culinary history too, as a movie that created a new condiment- remarkably, dijonnaise (a winning combination of dijon mustard and mayonnaise) wasn't seen on the kitchen table before Friend invented it for this short (Friend actually owned the copyright to the recipe, before selling it to Kellogg in 1951 for an undisclosed amount). He repeated this trick of collapsing words together to invent a new one with Brunch (1941), in which we see a woman eating a meal that is neither breakfast or dinner, but somewhere in-between, and with Ham-Fisted (1943), in which we see a man with a ham for a paw attempt, clumsily, to eat himself. Fans of alternative cinema would keenly await each Friend release, anticipating the far-sighted nomenclature on the posters as much as the cinematic brilliance within.

Friend's reputation as a prime contributer to the lexicon was not affected by the lesser known works that failed: Brynner (1944) was not a word that passed into common parlance (there was already a word for the meal between breakfast and dinner- it was known, to 1940's Americans at least, as lunch), but it did become the stage-name of upcoming young actor Yul Jones, later to star in The King And I (1956), The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Stone-Cold Leprosy Soundworld (1971).2

By the fifties Friend influenced a new generation with the lyrical Intern-net (1957) and Motorheed (1959), speculative fictions about trainee psychic fishermen and electric skull replacement surgery respectively. But perhaps Friend's most lastingly memorable piece was At The Drive-In (1959), a documentary recording of a screening of Rebel Without A Cause at a drive-in theater in California. After some shots of cars arriving and young couples buying popcorn, the camera finds a spot and doesn't move; it simply watches the screen for the duration of the film. The technicolor melodrama attains a stark truth when reduced to greys, and Friend's detached viewing of the excitable youths on camera (and on the screen on camera) articulates the confusion of the generation gap as well as Ray's masterpiece itself, but from the other side: By this point Friend was well into his sixties.

He retired shortly afterwards, and wrote a memoir about alternative American Cinema entitled A Bit Of The Other, in which he expressed regret at having never topped his first film. 'It was never bettered. I have played with the ingredients, jumbled my technique, started the whole thing from scratch, not measured anything at all, measured everything; but nothing in my career is as sweet as that simple, wonderful, Dijonnaise'3

Dijonnaise Directed by Walter Friend Produced by Walter Friend, Herb Silence Starring Samuel Hartley Diktat Pictures Release Date US:Winter 1941 Running Time: 24 mins.

1. At Them There Movies: The Collected Dizzy, Roger House Publishing, 1966.

2. Interestingly for Fictional Film Club fans, Yul Brynner died on the same day as Orson Welles (October 10th, 1985), his co-star in The Battle of Neretva (1969). Brynner also appeared in the Welles-directed Perseid (1967), which was part of a never-ending sequence of inter-locking narratives that Welles planned would 'pull together every arc of myth, philosophy and truth into a rainbow of religious noise'. The series was called NOTES, and contains six finished movies, an unfinished seventh, a stage-play, and a cryptic novel. There is a link back to Walter Friend here: Friend was approached by Welles to assist with the cinematography of several of the movies, but Friend resisted. 'I took my Mount Olympian bulk to the Zeus of underground cinema; but Zeus was hiding in the sewers' Welles said about Friend's rejection.4

3. Macmillan Publishing, 1980.

4. Well, Well, Welles: Reasons to Disbelieve Or: A Life Against Hollywood Penguin Putnam, 1982

SUPER MAGIC BOSS (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1982)

Katsuhiro Otomo created a landmark for Japanese cinema with his anime jaw-breaker Akira in 1988, but he debuted to little acclaim with this existential dream of a film six years earlier.

Boss, a lumbering man mountain living in the woods, comes under repeated attack from a small man dressed in bright colours. His attacks always follow a set pattern. At first, it is a mere annoyance; but the attacks become more frequent, and the assailant becomes stronger and faster each time. The man cannot remember a time when these attacks did not come. At first, the assailant was small and slow, and could be repelled easily; but soon, the attacker's reflexes improve, and he can beat Boss easily. Boss slides into trapped anguish, unable to escape the woods, and when becomes aware of his own horrific appearance after catching sight of himself in a magic pool, and becomes self-conscious about his golden colouring and extra limbs.

His sadness at becoming weaker is doubled by his inability to defend his friends, small birds that live in his hunchback. They fly out to help him whenever the assailant appears, but they vanish when hit, leaving numbers floating slowly heavenward, and sometimes burger-shaped treats or stars. Long sequences in the mid-section, some of the most thoughtful in the film, show Boss, a man who is used to being strong, contemplating his weaknesses, and cowering in fear whenever he hears a noise.

Boss' tragedy is that he never discovers the nature of his true place in life. This is revealed to us with an alarming shot near the end of the movie: Boss is shown to be an end-of-level baddie in an arcade game. The camera withdraws from his face, accelerates backwards into the sky, giving us an overview of the multi-faceted colour world in which he lives, which then dissolves into pixels and then becomes an image on a screen of an arcade machine in the corner of a canteen at an ice-skating rink in a small town in a large state in the middle of America. This delirious, epic reveal takes a full minute, and the dazzling melange of live footage from completely different locations, computer graphics and overlaid dialogue from the boys playing the game ("Remember when this boss seemed hard?" "Yeah! But now you just kill him so easy!") is stunning.

This neon requiem for the unnamed henchmen of violent arts provoked small controversy in Japan when the self-proclaimed Sad Cult, a group of teenagers in Osaka, drove their car into a river, leaving behind a note reading 'We Are Sorry, Boss'. The soft underbelly of the electronic future was exposed, leaving millennium-dreamers and candied ravers alike cold: who wants apocalyptic sadness when glitter-guns and jet-packs are loaded and ready? Thus the film limped to little success; but the failings bode well for it's longevity to wire-cynics and flagrant End-fearers.

Arase Sakiwake, a former Sumo wrestler (known as The Pepper-Shaker), played Boss in his only film role. He insisted on preparing for the role each day by changing into a kesho-mawashi, an ornate, embroidered silk 'apron', which he wore at all times on set before changing into his golden costume. It is believed that his payment for the role, at his own insistence, was the same amount that he would have received had he wrestled in a championship bout, and no more. Sakiwake later had his own chatshow on Japanese TV, called Sexy Baby, and was famous in Japan for a series of humorous cat-food commercials that referenced Super Magic Boss. Davis Tanahashi is gratingly perky as the ridiculously uniformed assailant (named in the end credits as Player One), whose initial enthusiasm soon turns to cocky and cruel showboating as he masters Boss' loud but limited movements.

The movie was remade for the American market in 1985 as Colorworld, and starred Andre The Giant as Boss. M Night Shyamalan took the plot of Super Magic Boss as the basis for 2007's critically panned Supernatural Echo Complex, starring Nicole Kidman as an evil valkyrie who knows not what she does.

An arcade unit based on the original movie was created by Namco in 1983, and spawned a series: Super Super Magic Boss 2:Extra Magic-Docious is considered one of the classics of the arcade era, and it's broody humour captivated young teens further when it made an appearance on the Nintendo Entertainment System in cartridge form in 1987 as Super Super Super Magic Boss X. To this day, many gamers in the West are in the dark as to the cinematic origins of this legendary title.

Super Magic Boss Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo Produced by Shunzo Kato Written by Katsuhiro Otomo Music by Shoji Yamashiro Starring Arase Sakiwake, Davis Tanahashi Toho Pictures (Japan) Orion Pictures/Bandai Entertainment (US) Manga Entertainment (UK) Release Date Japan: Oct 1982 UK/US: N/A Running Time: 98 mins Tagline: '1-Up Wins'

CARY GRANT GOES TO CAT HEAVEN (John Doanon,1990)

Cary Grant Goes To Cat Heaven holds a unique place in the faux-canon: It's legacy was a completely transformed industry, so much so that Gilbert Adair called it the 'Jean-Marc Bosman of film'.1

It was the movie that began the Great Footage Debate of the early nineties, which saw Humphrey Bogart posthumously advertising cleaning products('Here's Looking At You, Jif') and the work of Paul McCartney (who of course had died in a bicycle crash in 1967) being used without clearance to suggest that airlines were the safest way to travel (Wings' 'Jet' the so-literal-it-is-nonsensical choice). Paul's lover Linda, who survived Paul and spent years promoting vegetarianism and World Peace, sued Virgin Airlines (the offending company) saying that Paul 'would rather have died than have his music whored like this'. Virgin's lawyer, Rick McMinn, replied 'why not have both? Oh, and by the way, whores get paid.' Linda won the case, which caused devastation in the worlds of advertising and film (a period of disruption known to posterity as The Linda Effect or Linda-rance), as numerous productions were halted and companies sued. A series of sequels to Cary Grant Goes To Cat Heaven were canned (including Jimmy Cagney Contemplates the Elephant's Graveyard, Robert Ryan Witnesses The Neon Aviary Afterlife and Klaus Nomi on Pigeon Street), and the original was taken from the shelves of video stores for years.

The movie itself? Why, it is delightful. It is effectively a treatise on the virtues of wise sampling. Footage of Cary Grant from various Hollywood movies is cut together with footage of kittens and clouds to create a dreamy ambiance of loveliness. It is a miracle beyond the earlier Who Framed Roger Rabbit (, 1988), for no actors could be manouvred and no cartoons drawn; sure, the kitten stars are perfectly wonderful playing angels (in Cat Heaven all cats are kittens of course), and all deliver fine performances. But the real genius lies in the directorial discretion of which Grant clip to use at which point. This also results in a patchwork of famous and lesser Grant moments, and much fun is to be had from spotting the pilfered originals.

The delightful thing is that it is not just obvious candidate Bringing Up Baby that is pillaged:

Look! See the reaction shot of Grant as CK Dexter Haven in The Philadelphia Story looking at Hepburn, Katherine, contemplating a marriage proposal from Stewart, James. See it here used to suggest Grant's hopeful confusion as he enters the Gates of St Peter. We see, in effect, a Grant megamix, the mythical burden reconfigured in new contexts and found to be intact: Solid gold performance runs throughout, and the consistent selection means that say, a sentimental pairing of a beyond-cute kitten and maudlin strings is anchored by the tanned wonder himself goofing off delightfully.

Alex Cox called Cary Grant Goes To Cat Heaven it 'the hip-hop of film'2. 'Hollywood re-uses plots and cliches; why not footage? cried Salman Rushdie in a defence of 'sampling' in an essay entitled Everybody Calls Their Wife 'Baby', Why Can't I?3

Grant Goes To Cat Heaven Directed by John Doanon Prduced by Jeff Litbarsky Written by Doanon Starring Cary Grant Film Four Pictures Release Date UK: Jan 1990 US: N/A Running Time: 103 mins Tagline: 'In Our Dreams'

1. When The Downs Go Light Penguin Putnam, 1997

2. Sight and Sound interview, June 1991

3. Atlantic Monthly, August 1993

SEASONAL SELECTIONS (Various)

At this time of year, we indulge ourselves and watch movies that we wouldn't consider at any other time. With this in mind, I've pulled a top five of personal favourites from the archives for a special festive edition of Fictional Film Club. Here are the films you don't fall asleep to after Christmas dinner, but wish you could.

CHRISTMAS BOX (Joe List, 1972)
The original Christmas lesbian porn flick that incited America and caused The People vs Christmas (1975) court-case that set a precedent. Because New York Prosecutor Dick Fearless (itself an excellent skin-flick nom-de-plume, or nom-de-plum if you prefer, and the inspiration for the slogan seen everywhere outside the courts, 'Say No To Dick!', a dual-meaning line credited to S.L.A.G. (Sexy Lesbians of America Group)) couldn't prove that the work was without artistic merit, it was allowed to be shown in some mainstream cinemas, but with the new at the time NC-21 rating. Judge James Dodge at the time said 'the movie may not appeal to your sensibilities, Mr Fearless, and indeed, nor mine. But the interest in this case means I have to allow it to be seen. It may be flim-flam; it may be hogwash; but I'm no art critic, sir.' Star of Christmas Box Lesley Platinum- Blonde later won a bronze medal for the US at the 1984 Olympics in Archery and became a US Senator in Maine in 1989, before coming out as straight and marrying actor Tom Arnold upon his divorce from Roseanne Barr in 1994 (prompting Barr's career ending 'My ex-husband left me for a lesbian' rant at the Grammys that same year). Platinum-Blonde's marriage to Arnold lasted just two months. She now resides in Retirement, California, with her husband Susan, and recently vowed to 'never talk about that cursed movie again'.1

SILVER BELLES (Tom Berlinsky, 1989)
Misguided attempt to take successful TV show The Golden Girls to the big screen. Estelle Getty described it as 'a lovely little thing. We had such fun'2. Bea Arthur described it as 'a car-crash wrapped up in a tidal wave of leprosy. With glitter on top.'3

SO HERE IT IS, MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYBODY'S HAVING FUN (LOOK TO THE FUTURE NOW, IT'S ONLY JUST BEGUN) (Art Home, 1991) This seasonal indulgence involves a sewing together of homemade video clips of Christmas fun. We see kittens with wrapping paper on their heads, babies climbing into empty boxes, elderly relatives knocking the tree over. What makes the exercise interesting is that these mundanities are married with an original soundtrack by minimalist composer Philip Glass, lending the four-hour movie (much of which is in slow-motion) a surreal and terrible quality of sadness. Critic Barry Normal (sic) called it 'the most chilling event I've endured'.4

THE NATIVITY (Otto Preminger, 1959) Controversial re-telling of the birth of Jesus, with an all-star cast. Strangely, in a movie that starred African American actors (Harry Belafonte plays Joseph, Dorothy Dandridge plays Mary) the most cited reason for banning the movie in America was that the baby cast as Jesus was 'ugly.' Preminger, perversely, said 'Maybe I'm an optimist. But I see this as a sign that America is ready to look past color, and judge each face superficially on it's merits, or lack thereof'5.

BLOODY MARVELLOUS (Ike Cutey, 1945; see image, above) Seasonal favourite in which a man (Georgie Handsome, in his only major role) discovers that he loves the world, with the help of a gorgeous young girl. Curious fact: In the US, this film is known as Memory Hair, referencing the fact that the man is thrown into flashback reveries of memories of pre-war Britain (shown in dizzying Permacolor) whenever he smells the pigtails of the blonde child. 20th Century Fox realised that the curse in the British title was perhaps too strong for the delicate ears of that country. This title change has been repeatedly referred to by Evangelical Christians as an example of a Jewish conspiracy from within Hollywood against Christmas. Hate preacher Louis D. Smith would quote from the movie in a bid to 'remember the Christian spirit they tried to hide'6. despite this, Bloody Marvellous is as cheerful and saccharine as it gets.

1. Entertainment Weekly, Feb 6, 1999.

2. People Magazine, March 1992.

3. New York Times, April 3rd, 1997.

4. Film '91, Dec 9th, 1991.

5. Cahiers du Cinema, April 1962.

6. Song Of A Preacher Man, Controversy Press, 1985

FICTIONAL FILM CLUB (Michel Gondry, 2010)

Mark Savage (Owen Wilson) is a man who writes blogs about made-up films. One day, in his usual state, drifting through the internet, he finds that another blogger is doing exactly the same thing as him. He is largely unpeturbed, as his own writing style and number of readers is very high. It becomes a concern to him when the blogger begins writing about a movie that is exactly the same as Mark's real life; it is about a blogger who writes about movies and who discovers another blogger is doing exactly the same as him, but it isn't a problem until he discovers that this blogger is writing about a movie that is exactly the same as Mark's real life: it is about a blogger who writes about movies and who discovers another blogger doing exactly the same as him, which is only an issue when this blogger writes a movie that is exactly the same as Mark's life, about a blogger who wrote about movies and discovered another blogger did exactly the same which was only a point of concern when the blogger wrote about a film that was identical to Mark's life.

It is a film about repetition. I'll say that again; it is a film about repetition and originality; about how two things can never be identical. Mark aims to discover whether he is the truer original than the other blogger, but finds his every move countered by the nefarious idea-xeroxer. For plot reasons best left unexplained (because, truthfully, they are not apparent) Mark goes into the internet with the help of a neurotic science student (Kirsten Dunst). The movie then becomes a meta-fictional Tron, a graphic hell of neon id fancy. Mark discovers that from the inside, the internet is a live electric forest, and is run by The Sage (Judi Dench) who is concerned by the pollutants filling up the wiry treelungs with 'content'. The Sage speaks only in dialogue that is a patchwork of quotes from others, as this monologue shows:

'Heathcliff! It's me, I'm Carefree! 1 LOL!2. You humans just ride along the information superhighway, wind down your virtual windows and litter comments along the verges. Your regard for the unnatural world speaks poorly for the sake of your souls.'3

Mark is moved by such a forceful plea. As a prime contributor of such effluence, Mark struggles to justify his existence, and the existence of his race. 'When I was a child, I dreamed of such technology; who would have forseen that I would use it to write rubbish and contact schoolfriends who do not remember me?'

Wilson's portrayal of Mark as the grinning but melancholy everyman is predictably sound and allows for Gondry to raid the cupboard marked Existential Pyrotechnics (fourth drawer down, below Post-postmodernism and Ironic Post-mortems). But it is Mark's quest for truth, beauty and heart in the inner workings of the internet that allows the movie to work. He is struck by The Sage's final quote (uttered as she is slain by The Space, a violet void that sucks her up and away):

'We await the day with relish that somebody dares to make a dance record that consists of nothing more than an electronically programmed bass drum beat that continues playing 4/4 monotonously for eight minutes. Then, when somebody else brings one out using exactly the same bass drum sound and at the same beats per minute, we will all be able to tell which is the best, which inspires the dance floor to fill the fastest, which has the most sex and the most soul. There is no doubt, one will be better than the other'4

Mark realises that he must look inside himself and that he need not fear competition; he must only wrestle with the demons of langour and incompetence. In a new spirit of personal expressiveness, he fights the Dragon of Wicca-Pedia, a multi-armed monster that attempts to drown Mark in a sea of randomly generated quotes 5 and tries to sweep him with many footnotes 6,7,8; he is assisted by his minions, Copy and Paste.
He repels the monster with it's glorious informations, and goes on to throw himself into the eye of The Space, whereby he meets his dream and nightmare: A statistical print-out of everything he has ever done, on one long stretch of paper. He discovers that there is no other blogger copying him, merely a virtual mirror that confronts him with his own thoughts before he thinks them. Thus he comes to see the internet as a massive haemorrhage of sub-Freudian lust and fancies. He is horrified to discover how much time he has wasted with pointlessness like working and getting things done, and he vows to sleep and eat much much more when he re-enters the real world...


...and at that he does return; his lesson, whatever it was, learned, his white rabbit hunted down and interrogated. There is time for a love scene and amoral (sic), before the Flaming Lips tune specially penned for the movie, Desktop of My Heart, chimes in in all it's predictable wobbly indie loveliness, and there isn't a dry vest in the art-house.

Fictional Film Club Directed by Michel Gondry Prduced by Anthony Bregman Written by Michel Gondry and Marc Savidge Starring Owen Wilson, Kirsten Dunst, Judi Dench Music by Wayne Coyne Focus Pictures Release Date UK/US: April 2010 Running Time: 103 mins Tagline: 'Is Nothing Pointless?'

1. The first line the sage utters is actually a misheard lyric, another Gondry dig at the misinformation abounding in cyberspace. The line is from Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights, and should of course read as 'Heathcliff, It's me I'm Kathleen'

2. LOL: The earliest use of this popular internet shorthand meaning 'Laughing Out Loud' has been attributed to Ernest Hemingway, in his novel For Whom The Bell Tolls when an American soldier over a radio replies to an officer's order to mount a suicidal counter-offensive by saying 'Lima Oscar Lima, sir, the men sure think that's funny at this hour.' The exclamation 'WTF' meaning 'What The Fuck' is also used in the same conversation, when the radio operator is informed that he will be shot as a coward. As he is about to respond, artillery fire hits his position. 'Whisky Tango Foxtrot, sir! We're buried!' he shouts. This was not the first time the WTF shorthand was described in print however, and some attribute the first use to be as far back as John Bunyan in his Pilgrim's Progress, but this citation is disputed.
3. This is a direct lift from H.G Wells' Prince Kompooter, published in 1897 and believed to be the first modern reference to the internet.

4.Here the sage quotes from The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way by Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, otherwise known as the Kopyright Liberation Foundation, or KLF.

5 footnote; disambiguation. See 6

6 see 7

6 see 7

7. see 888

8. This footnote scene is a note-perfect pastiche of a scene in exploitation kung-fu action flick Crazy Office Kickbox (Dan Ten, 1972) in which the hero must summon the ninja might of ten limbs to defeat the haunted photocopied, collated and stapled demons at work. Gondry uses exactly the same dialogue in the Fictional Film Club scene as in Crazy Office Kickbox, creating a dual echoing narrative that drives minds round bends.9

888. These quotes include oft-repeated witticisms from Twain,Wilde and Churchill and wise sayings from King and Mandela that Mark has received so many times attached to emails as to have been relegated from 'great' in his mind to 'downright lethal', causing his digitised brain cells to almost overheat in insipid pointlessness.

9. Gondry does a similar thing later in the movie, substituting dialogue from the climactic love scene between Mark and the neurotic science student and replacing it with speech from Aristocats (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1970) and Robocop 3 (Fred Dekker, 1993). This reinforces The Sage's argument that the world is drowning in all manner of trivial pop ephemera. The romance is hidden behind irony, the irony behind trash. But Wilson and Dunst smile, and we are saved.

888. zzk LOL. goto line 10

10 If > go to 20

20 If <>

ELEPHANT GUN (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

Made back to back with The Man Who Fell To Earth, Elephant Gun shares similarities with its sister film. Both have musicians as leads: David Bowie as the titular alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth, and Elvis Presley as the washed-up actor travelling to Las Vegas to gamble his last money on a roulette wheel. What is astounding about Elephant Gun is that it manages to make Elvis, the most famous man on the planet, unknowable. Here he is a smudge, a sad hollow middle-aged man.

The ironies abound of course. And they are traps that Roeg avoids with his straight-faced delivery. We see inklings of Elvis impersonators in Vegas, but there is no face-off, no acknowledgement; Buddy (Presley) sadly heads for his table, ignoring the glitz around him, the glitz that in real-life he represented to it's fullest. It could be seen as Elvis' disavowal of his own present, that he plays a man burning out inside and gambling his life away in this city of hellish castles.

There is a dazzling sequence at the centre of the film, in which Buddy looks at a collection of photos of good times past, and we are treated to a flashback sequence of recreated stills that echo previous Presley films. We see him in Hawaii, in LA, and in poignantly happier times on a previous visit to Las Vegas with an unnamed blonde, who the Buddy keeps seeing around town, but cannot remember her name to call and get her attention. In Roeg's Don't Look Now, he manages to create a sickening sense of dread building up to the climax; here he creates a sense of loss and fear. Buddy sees suspicion everywhere. He wins money, only to find out he actually lost.

The narrative becomes eliptical and deliberately listless. What is apparent is the growing awareness that Buddy hasn't picked Las Vegas on a whim, or because it is the sin capital of the world. The presence of a double is somehow, made evident. Is Buddy haunted by a possible alternative path his life may have taken? Does Buddy know someone who has huge fame? The repeated allusions in background conversations to an unnamed successful actor who is in town irks Buddy; what is the story? We have more questions than answers. Buddy is weary, looking for answers and avoiding them. The film drifts into existential whodunnit territory, with no idea of what the crime might be, never mind the protagonist. Cynical exchanges with a bartender litter the narrative:

Bartender (Rip Torn):Hey are you..

Buddy (Presley): Thirsty. Yeah. Gimme another.

Bartender: No I mean, didn't you used to be... I mean, aren't you-

Buddy: No. I've never been no-one. Not ever.

Bartender: Hey. Everybody is someone. I'm someone. She's someone. You're someone.

Buddy: Well set the alarm for me. Maybe I'll wake up and find out who.

There are two Presley songs on an otherwise electronic and low-key jazz score: The haunting and lovely How Many Tears Can A Sad Man Cry?, a Hank Williams style confession, and the charging drunk-in-denial Loose Booze, Loose Blues, which shockingly for an Elvis song is largely instrumental except for his distinctive echoing grunts and desperate full-throated wails.

Contractual disputes over the exact details of Elvis' movie contract and fans' shock at this departure for the star caused a lot of press and a limited release for Elephant Gun. The film came out just four months before the death of Presley. His casting was seen as a folly at the time, as watching the most famous face on the planet distorted through cracked art lenses was absurd. But this absurdity is what makes the film work. Roeg explains his choice:

'I wanted to do a biopic of Superman; I wanted him trapped in an alternative universe living a life with no powers. He would be having dreams about Earth, which he had never been to. I liked the idea that Superman, a fictional character on Earth, actually exists in another world; and that in our stories, we are sending a message to him. I wanted this man to be haunted by a possible superhero alternative to his life that wasn't happening. Then Richard Donner announced he was making the Superman movie the world wanted; so I conceived of Elephant Gun. In real-life, Presley was Earth's fictional Superman; his tragedy was that he was also real.'1

Elephant Gun Directed by Nicolas Roeg Written by Nicolas Roeg Starring Elvis Presley Rip Torn Music by John Phillips/ Elvis Presley Columbia Pictures UK/US Release Date: April 1977 Running Time: 145 mins.

1 Sight and Sound, May 2003

BIERCE THE FIERCE (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)

Donald Sutherland stars as writer Ambrose Bierce, who famously walked into the Mexican civil war aged 71 and was never seen again. The film is by no means a biopic, and instead speculates on what might have happened after Bierce's last known sighting- in del Toro's hands, this speculative history is a peppery burrito filled with David Lynch, Ray Harryhausen, Apocalypse Now, spaghetti westerns and Lewis Carroll. del Toro gives us his dreamy nightmare, and his Day of the Dead vision of Mexico is a joy: families who turn into dancing skeletal swordsmen; pinatas that buck and spit fire, empty coffins that wander, looking for mates. Bierce sees visions of his twelve siblings, all whose names begin with the letter 'A'. He has flashbacks from his time in the US civil war, and is frequently under attack from memories of failed cavalry charges by mud-caked blue and gray zombies. The scene is an animated swirl of reflection, a technicolour counter to Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.

The film has an array of blink-and-you'll-miss'em cameos, including a heavily made-up John C Reilly and Mark Ruffalo as revolutionaries Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. The pair have one scene as a bickering Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee, including a bewildering exchange of wordplay and misunderstanding:

Villa (Reilly):'Is it a no?'

Zapata (Ruffalo): 'Yes; it is a No.'

'Yes?'

'No.'

'So you are saying no?'

'Yes.'

'Yes?'

'Yes. We are saying no.'

'You seem unsure. It seems like yes and no in your mind are inter-changable.'

'In my mind yes and no are a slither apart. This is how I like it.'

'Sounds like maybe to me.'

'No! Maybe is an uncertain word. Zapata is decisive'

Sutherland's Bierce takes in the madness with a weary lack of concern. As battles surround him, filled with heightened passions and disastrous desires, his blank expressions slowly reveal his own worries: What does it mean to die, or to live? His dialogue is filled with cynical lines taken from Bierce's own Devil's Dictionary, such as the time when a young revolutionary tells Bierce that he is a patient man. 'Patience is a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue,' Bierce responds, sullenly.

The huge array of fantastical happenings in del Toro's Mexico are unprecedented, outside of his own films. Ivana Baquero (star of del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth) plays a girl who may be a refugee of the fighting, an angel, or the ghost of Bierce's sister; Tilda Swinton is a three-armed rebel; del Toro mainstay Doug Jones plays a many-tentacled tree that weeps when traitors are hung from his branches, and unleashes a psychic magic, twisting the battle scenes into obtuse reckonings.

Donald Sutherland sang the title song, The Ballad of Ambrose Bierce, which was written originally by Nick Lowe for Johnny Cash, who did not record the song before he died. The song was originally titled Leaning Alone Against Mexican Stone, and was reshaped with the help of Rick Rubin. Sutherland does a winning impersonation of Cash, and his doomy baritone, descriptive lyrics1 coupled with an evocative video, caused the song to be a big success. A consequence of this was the widely believed internet hoax that the song was a suicide note from Sutherland, and that the actor had killed himself. Some news networks even reported this as fact, and it wasn't until Sutherland gave a press conference to announce his un-death that the hoax was outed.

'The lyrics aren't about giving up,' he said in an interview shortly afterwards. 'They reflect a concern that I think Guillermo had with the film as well. And that is, 'what is success? What is a legacy? What is fame? What is it worth?' These concerns are at the core of the Ambrose Bierce mystery. Why does a seventy something journalist and short story writer go on such a long and dangerous trip? What plan does he have? And Guillermo and I both agree, that while we cannot imagine what Bierce was thinking, we both find the complete disregard for a plan to be the most compelling thing about his case.'2

This controversy aside, the film won rave reviews for it's lavish design and for Sutherland's tired performance. It's meandering plot stopped it scooping major awards, and caused one critic to describe it as 'indulgent as a swimming pool full of cream-cakes; I forgot my rubber-ring of sanity, drowned and now my belly aches.'3

Bierce the Fierce Directed by: Guillermo del Toro Produced by Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron Starring Donald Sutherland, Ivana Baquero, Doug Jones, John C Reilly, Mark Ruffalo, Tilda Swinton Warner Bros/Optimum/Picturehouse UK/US Release date: Sept 2006 Running Time 137 mins Tagline:'Death is death when it is death'

1. The lyrics won a 'Best Lyrics To A Song From A Film' Grammy for Lowe Rubin and Sutherland in 2007. They also appeared in the Best American Poetry 2007 anthology (Ed Heather Stone) and as such deserve repeating here. Especially because some school boards in South Carolina removed this anthology from their library shelves precisely because of a perceived 'pro-failure, pro-suicide sentiment' in these particular words.

The Ballad of Ambrose Bierce

I'm Ambrose Bierce

I'm leaning alone against Mexican stone

I'm waiting for the guns that might shoot me

I am a gringo

But I'll beat old age

And disease

I'll never fall down cellar stairs

I am epiphany

I'm dreaming of all those that walk into the fire, rather than into the spotlight

Those that spend a decade in bed, Or have tea at their Mom's instead

Rather than grind out victories

Those that by design or accident will never be finished

I am Von Gogh's destroyed canvasses, Genet's burnt manuscripts

I'm Garbo walking away at forty-four

Forever more

2. Interview with The New York Times, January 20th, 2007.

3. Les Straight, The Times, 12th July 2006

DISRUPTIVE PATTERN MATERIAL (Werner Herzog, 1992)

Disruptive Pattern Material is another chapter in this director's book of hazardous shoots. Star Tim Roth was put through his paces by Herzog in many ways, resulting in what David Thomson described as 'the most complete systematic attempt at a dereliction of the actor as star in the history of cinema'1. On a gruelling shoot in Transylvania, Herzog attempted to create a version of H.G.Wells' The Invisible Man. Herzog had Roth film many scenes naked, as this is how the protagonist Griffin spends much of his time in the book. This created new problems, however, as many of the extras hired to play the villagers were untrained actors who repeatedly reacted to a nude Hollywood star. Herzog's reaction? To hire a blind cast. 'He must be naked. They cannot see him. This is the only solution,' he said.2

Roth caught hypothermia, but he gamely ploughed on, even when the director revealed to him that despite being the central character and the only star, his performance would be largely cut from the movie. Indeed, although we follow his story, and despite being in every scene, Roth only appears on screen for fifteen of the film's 263 minutes. Even so, he garnered an Oscar nomination for his performance, and describes Disruptive Pattern Material as 'probably the best film I haven't been in'3

'I realised as I went on, that Tim was too interesting,' said Herzog. What interested me about Wells' story was the moral blankness of the character. Tim, or for that matter no decent actor, could give me this blankness. The only thing that can be so absent is nothing.'4 And so we get slow scenes in which we watch villagers at work and at play, waiting for sly acts of subversion from someone we cannot see. The location shooting is beautiful, and the plot and events around Griffin become almost hidden in the background. One five minute segment of a woman washing clothes in a river seems mundane, until we realise that behind her back the clean clothes are moving slowly away from her. This form of negated drama creates a perverse kind of suspense, with the audience waiting for someone we cannot see to do something. When Griffin performs the climactic murders, the graphic release of blood is both horrifying and a relief.

MGM originally planned for the movie to be released on the same weekend in the US as risible Chevy Chase career-destroyer Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Herzog angrily objected, seeing this as a gimmicky attempt to stir up interest in two very different films on the same subject. 'It is childish and vain' said Herzog. 'I think it is a big shit on me'.5 He allegedly stole the master tapes of his film, and after being refused entry onto a plane at LA airport, he drove through the night to Mexico with the intention of putting the reels inside a pinata covered with gasoline and setting fire to the lot with a fiery club. (A fictionalised account of this story was filmed in 2005 as Hijack Monologue, a Sam Mendes production starring Bill Murray giving a supposedly spot-on performance as Herzog, but due to complicated legal tangles this uncompleted movie sits in the Warner Brothers' vaults with no release likely soon).

MGM relented on their release date, but instead pushed the movie back two years in the US, despite the film winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1992 and being received in Europe as one of Herzog's most audacious and beautiful works.

Disruptive Pattern Material Directed by Werner Herzog Produced by Lucky Stipetic Starring Tim Roth Werner Herzog Filmproduktion/MGM US Release Date: November 1994 UK Release Date May 1992 Running Time: 263 mins Tagline:'Only The Blind Can't See'

1. David Thomson At The Movies, Penguin, 2005

2,4,5. Herzog on Herzog, Chappell Film Books, 1996

3. Neon magazine, November 1996

PLAYBACK (Brian de Palma, 1982)

Based on Raymond Chandler's final novel, which was a flop in 1958, Playback stars Theresa Russell as a young woman who checks into the Roosevelt Hotel in New York with the intention of killing herself after a week of contemplation. In a series of flashbacks we see her reasons, which include an abusive relationship. During the seven days she finds that her misfortune is replayed in a multitude of small ways (the 'playback' of the title), leading us to conclude that her being is karmically afflicted, and that wherever she might have gone, her fate would have been identical. Chandler's famous detective Philip Marlowe (played wearily by a bloodshot Dennis Quaid), is tracking the woman, and it is through his eyes that we see the action unfold.

The slow-burning, moribund subject matter might have meant that the movie, never destined to be a blockbuster, would have been criticised; perhaps De Palma's whizz-bang pastiches (here stylistically references Polanski's Repulsion, but this only serves to show that Russell, despite her charms, is no Catherine Deneuve) would have ruined the movie anyway; but a curious creative decision by de Palma proved to be the film's main talking point and it's critical undoing. De Palma claimed that the movie was a 'direct translation' of the novel rather than an adaptation, and that each line of the book was reproduced visually. 'If it says 'she walks into the room, then Theresa walked into the room. If it says she sits down, then Theresa sat down. But more than that: I wanted to reproduce Chandler's grammar, and attempt to get to the root of his style. And so each period in the novel, each full-stop, is replicated by a cut on screen, each comma is replicated by a camera pan, and each paragraph had to be, if not a new scene, then a new tone; this is where music helped me.'1

This conceit was a bridge too far for most, with the editing (there are nearly ten thousand cuts in the two-hour movie) creating a visual barrage that renders the story largely redundant. The camera constantly twitches, causing Roger Ebert to refer to the film as 'pure seasick epilepsy'2. Playback is generally seen as a curio, filed in the same drawer as other exercises in cinematic self-indulgence as Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot remake of Psycho (1997) and Oliver Stone's real-time, 50-hour telling of the events between the deaths of JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald in Ruby (1998).

The explanation of the technique by de Palma led to the movie being popular on video in the late eighties, especially among students, who would organise 'Playback parties', which involved watching the movie with a copy of the novel, and following each of Chandler's lines as it appeared on the screen. 'Although you had to read very fast, and despite certain sections being a textual quagmire, it was entirely possible to see de Palma's effort,' said philosopher Slajov Zizek. He questioned the success of the effort however, and suggested the choice of the text was to blame. 'Why not The Big Sleep? Playback the novel failed not because Chandler had 'lost his magic', as was supposed at the time, but because the central discourse revolves around a pre-determined ethical position on the part of the protagonist. Chandler's success lay in his salient conversation within pertaining ambiguities... de Palma, further, reinforces this prefabrication with a further conceit of his own, filmic joke that undoes the gentle layering of denial that bewitches the medium'3

De Palma defended his experiment. 'I wanted to explore the supposed failure of the novel. It was originally conceived as a screenplay in 1947 or '48 before Chandler rewrote it as a novel, and I wondered if it was an error; if maybe it was supposed to be a movie; like a child who is forced into piano lessons when he has a natural talent for swinging a baseball bat.'4

As an aside, Todd Rundgren, rock music's grand conceptualist (who famously recorded near-exact covers of such baroque masterpieces as Brian Wilson's Good Vibrations) constructed a musical accompaniment for the movie using similar principles, using a drum beat to mark each cut. Todd Plays Playback, Sonically, was released and ignored in 1992. (Rundgren later repeated the trick for van Sant's Psycho).

Playback Directed by: Brian de Palma Produced by: Les Ashe Written by: Raymond Chandler Universal Studios Starring: Dennis Quaid, Theresa Russell Release Date US: March 1982 Release Date UK: June 1982 Running Time:122 mins Tagline: 'You Can't Escape Yourself'

1, 4. Sight and Sound, November 1986.

2.I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie by Roger Ebert, Andrews McMeel Publishing, April 2000.

3.Quantum Hokum by Slavoj Zizek, Verso, May 1999.