CHIMP's Debut Video: "The Living End"

From our debut CD "Thundercrack!". Rob MacDonald, the other 50% of Chimp, has posted a suscint history of this video at his website: http://annekenstein.typepad.com. Thanks, Rob. Your pal, Dave S.

P.S. And thanks to Jason Rogerson (co-producing and editing), Laura O'Brien (graphic design), David Moses and Moses Media, everyone in the video (for obvious reasons; Glen, Osama, Nick, Chris, Matt, Rob, Marc, Nancy, Kelly, Ed, Philip, Charlottetown, etc.), Baba's Lounge (Steve, Ryan, et al), and to all the perfomers covering Chimp tunes on November 15.

Chimp CD Launch

MY BAND IS RELEASING A CD

That’s right, I’m in a band. Sort of. My friend Rob MacDonald (visit him at my Annekenstein link) and I started a duo called Chimp (visit us on my Chimp link) about 10 years ago. Rob plays guitar, I play bass, we both share vocal duties, and a drumbot (basically an old keyboard) provides the drum tracks.

Rob and I have known each other since the early 80’s. We’ve been involved in lots of projects together – theatre, short films – and when “And Yet I Blame Hollywood”, a movie review in a cartoon strip I draw for a local arts and entertainment paper called The Buzz, was turned into an animated series of shorts for CBC television, Rob provided one of the character voices.

Shortly after deciding to become Chimp, Rob and I wrote a few songs, rented a 4-track system and recorded them. Then we didn’t know what to do with them, so we did nothing.

Cut to 2008. Technology has changed, allowing Rob to put the songs onto his home computer. That means that we were able to de-hiss them a bit, cut and paste sections of songs, drop out certain tracks, etc. What we ended up with is very much in the lo-fi, DIY category, but that pleases us since a lot of the people whose music we like share the same aural esthetic. I’m talking The Velvet Underground, Hüsker Dü, The Breeders, The Cramps, X, Nirvana, etc.

In the polish department, we got our friend, Jason Rogerson, to go through the songs with us to help get them ready for CD on the production end, and another friend, Laura O’Brien, did the graphic design for the CD, making it look like the real deal. We told Laura to listen to the music and create any design she wanted that she thought looked like the music sounded. Her visual equivalent of our music is at the head of this post. Laura used a Chimp logo that my father, Russell, designed for us based on the font used on Jonathan Demme’s “Caged Heat” movie poster.

Our CD is called “Thundercrack!”, after the great Curt McDowell/George Kuchar flick. We chose the title because it seemed to sum up the 12 songs on the CD: short, naked, and speedy. Our CD is out November 18, and we’re having a big launch at the best bar in town, Baba’s Lounge, on November 15. We won’t be playing, but 8 other local artists are going to be covering our songs from the CD at the event. If you’re in the area on that date, stop by.

In Defense of M. Night Shyamalan

Recently, a friend and I went to see “The Happening”. It had opened a few days previous, and the incredibly negative reviews were pouring out of everywhere. Another friend went to a screening elsewhere and walked out part way through. All signs indicated an exquisite experience for fans of bad movies (i.e. sometimes me) à la “The Wicker Man” remake.

What I experienced when watching “The Happening” was a movie that didn’t work; a movie that had some awful moments, but a movie that had a point of view: that of its creator M. Night Shyamalan.

I like Shyamalan’s work okay, but I’m not a huge fan… I liked “The Sixth Sense” despite the fact that its hook is lifted from “Carnival of Souls” and later “Jacob’s Ladder”, as well as Ambrose Bierce’s much earlier short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", and from sources probably a lot older than that. Bottom line, this didn’t affect the fact that I found “The Sixth Sense” creepy and entertaining, though not as original as many claimed. I liked “Unbreakable”, but found the ending unintentionally funny. I missed “Signs”, but saw “The Village”. It was disliked by a lot of critics and moviegoers, but I enjoyed it for the most part. Chalk it up to nostalgia, but it reminded me of Hammer films like “Demons of the Mind”, and other British horror films of the 70’s like “Blood on Satan’s Claw”. I didn’t mind that its ending was ludicrous. I think I appreciated the fact that it dared to be as out there as a Lars Von Trier art flick. Shyamalan followed “The Village” with “The Lady in the Water”, a movie based on a bedtime story he made up for his girls. Despite the fact that the movie is a mess, I found that it too had the stamp of a single filmmaker rather than that of a committee on it. Then comes “The Happening”, probably garnering Shyamalan the worst reviews of his career to date.

Beyond the idea of something causing people to commit suicide en masse (Hello “God Told Me To” and, God forbid, “Starship Invasions”), most of the rest of the plot of “The Happening” is silly. Some of the acting is either bad, or its intent isn’t clear, or some of the actors are miscast. The dialogue is alternately lousy, obvious, and per functionary (I seriously think “The Happening” would work better as a silent movie). Characters behave improbably (i.e. the kids’ outburst, swearing and kicking the door of the survivalists’ house, and getting them what they deserve). As the suicide methods get “creative” beyond the point of competing with “The Omen” series, they become funny. A mood ring is not a good prop to use as a symbol! Unless it’s in a 70’s period piece like “Dazed and Confused” (especially when the aforementioned mood ring doesn’t even have a decent pay off in the movie). And fatally, the movie runs out of steam during the last 15 minutes of its appropriately short 92-minute running time.

So what’s right with “The Happening”? The opening credits and the music throughout the film set an eerie tone. The suicides at the beginning of the movie are creepy and effective (even some later scenes featuring small town citizens dangling from wires and trees are creepy --- Think Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit"). The sense of dread and mystery is there at the beginning (but not much later). I seriously wish more filmmakers would work within the 90-minute running time structure like Shyamalan does here; is there a problem with being concise? And, most importantly, “The Happening” represents Shyamalan as a filmmaker.

I appreciate moviemakers like Doris Wishman, Ed Wood, Andy Milligan, John Waters, Herschell Gordon Lewis, et al. People who make movies to get them made. Regardless of intention (to shock, to entertain, for therapy, to challenge, for artistic expression, to make money, to titillate, to develop, to learn how to make movies, to get it out of their systems), these people persist(ed) in making their films and getting them out there. Some became better filmmakers, some saw their films cut by censors, some moved on to other things, some were later reevaluated and given a touch of respectability, but all them received rotten reviews.

Maybe due to circumstance, to budget, to access to cast and crew, and through studio backing, Shyamalan is a technically more proficient filmmaker than the others I’ve named. What he does share with them is that they all put their personal stamp on each of their films. Watching “The Happening”, I didn’t get the sense that this movie was audience-tested up the ass. It’s audacious in its ridiculousness and in its choices. It’s a single flawed vision that reached the screen of my local multiplex, and that’s something that should be appreciated in contemporary movie going, not belittled.

Gaspar Noé

I’d heard about French filmmaker Gaspar Noé for a quite a while. His film “Irreversible” made a big splash when it was released in 2002 due in no small part to a controversial and infamous scene. I’d put off seeing “Irreversible” because of that publicity… Not because I didn’t want to have my boundaries pushed, but because, sometimes, there’s nothing like hype to kill my desire to see a movie: Familiarity breeds contempt; There’s no way “Irreversible” can live up to its reputation; Some of the talk around the film made it sound pretentious; Its North American marketing made it look like a generic, boring erotic thriller (yawn). So finally, 6 years later, I got around to watching “Irreversible”.

To paraphrase a movie I hate, “Shut up. You had me at bonjour.”

I load the disc into the DVD player, and the credits roll, but these aren’t your typical credits. They’re like something Godard would do. Bold. Out of sync. The movie proper begins with a buzzing camera gliding around a tiny apartment/hotel room accompanied by the most irritating background tone since “Eraserhead”. The camera movement and the tone are a little nauseating, as is the green fluorescent hue that saturates everything we’re looking at. Philip Nahon from “High Tension” (maybe repeating his role from Noé’s feature debut “I Stand Alone”) tells a friend that “time destroys everything”, stating for the first time something the film will go out of its way to prove.

The camera moves outside as people are carried on stretchers out of a bar called Le Rectum. And that’s all I’m going to say about plot. From this point on, we discover that the film is being told backwards. That is, the order that we’re watching the scenes is the opposite order in which they occurred, much like “Memento”, but with a different and thoroughly justified purpose. The film begins with ugly and ends with beautiful. This gives extra weight and meaning to the scenes viewed last in “Irreversible”, because instead of being “sweet”, they’re “bittersweet”, driving home the movie’s message.

As for the infamous scene, it’s disturbing, brutal, and wholly believable. It’s an unflinching presentation of a major plot point. Due to the press about this scene, I was, on some level, prepared for it. I was not prepared, however, for a scene that, for me, came entirely put of the blue, and was one of the most upsetting things I’ve seen in a movie. It was an act of violence that I didn’t expect, and that was so realistically rendered that my brain couldn’t separate fantasy from reality. With the formerly mentioned scene, I could rationalize that actors were going through the motions of mimicking a brutal act of violence aided by a bit of CGI. With the latter scene, it looked like the filmmakers were actually committing this act of violence. My impulse was to stop the people from doing what they were doing on screen; to literally reach in and break up the confrontation. The same scene might not affect you the same way, but that was my experience of it. For a filmmaker to craft a scenario that has that kind of effect on me says something, personally, of his depth of ability. I’ve seen plenty of onscreen gore, violence and brutality, but this reached me on a different level. Outside of filmed incidents of real cruelty and death, I can’t think of a film-viewing experience that was more immediately disturbing. This scene too, however, is also a major plot point, necessary to the telling of the story and the presentation of what the movie’s about.

I followed up “Irreversible”, Noé’s second feature film, with his feature debut “I Stand Alone”. I wish I had seen them in chronological order. It seems that “Irreversible” builds on the groundwork laid by “I Stand Alone”.

“I Stand Alone” features Philip Nahon as a man who has just been released from prison for killing a man he thought had raped his daughter (in reality, she has had her first period). Bitter, racist, homophobic and sociopathic, Nahon’s character wanders around a Paris that no longer exists as he knew it before he was incarcerated. His tension and confusion build like the sick-making camera moves, green-infused images and droning tone in “Irreversible”. It can’t lead any where good…

“I Stand Alone” reads as an exploration of modern-day France and the cultural tension that lies beneath the touristy Eiffel Tower and baguette-baking surface of the country. Nahon is a terrific actor who’s in every scene, creating a bridge between both films by appearing in the opening scene of “Irreversible”. His director, Noé, has been called a combination of Godard and William Castle, and this, oddly enough, fits perfectly. “I Stand Alone” and “Irreversible” should be seen, in that order, without reading too much about them beforehand. Part of their effectiveness lies in the unexpectedness of whatever pops up on the screen next. “Irreversible”, in particular, should be viewed with the knowledge that you’re going to experience something disturbing, but also something bigger than that. Love it or hate it, you’re going to see something that you’re going to think about afterwards, and something you’re probably going to want to talk about with others who’ve seen it too.

Stay tuned for Noé’s next announced project “Into the Void”.

The Amazing Transplant

"The Amazing Transplant" (1970) 

Directed by Doris Wishman (as Louis Silverman)

Written by Doris Wishman (as Dawn Whitman

Produced by Doris Wishman (as Louis Silverman)

Starring Juan Fernandez, Linda Southern, Larry Hunter

“Holy fuck!” 

…I said to no one in particular after watching "The Amazing Transplant", my first Doris Wishman-directed film.

I'd had the pleasure of discovering Wishman around the same time that I discovered Andy Milligan ("The Body Beneath", "The Ghastly Ones"). These two filmmakers share some commonalities, and both photograph sex and nudity in the most sexless manner possible, cold, disconnected bodies, cellulite and pimples emphasized by harsh lighting. 

Where Milligan had ambitions toward dysfunctional family costume melodrama, though, Wishman abandoned all pretence to create absurd, eye-popping trash cinema. Her films appear so unencumbered by all but the most basic filmmaking skills that they approach the level of high art.

I love the opening of "The Amazing Transplant". I'd go so far to say that it's one of my favourite opening scenes in film history. I guess what it did for me, really, since it was my first taste of Wishman, is that it introduced me to an entirely unique point of view in filmmaking. It looks different, it feels different, it sounds different than most movies I've seen. If a Wishman film were an orange, I'm sure it would taste like a banana. 

I didn't care if this was because of lack of traditional talent or lack of resources. What mattered to me was that the opening scene was something unique, something that made me react, and something that made me want to see more.

Here's how "The Amazing Transplant " begins: A nude woman reclines on a bed playing some sort of stringed instrument, a harpsichord, maybe, until she's interrupted by a phone call. 

This bears consideration. Wishman wants to get some nudity in, so why not have the character take a shower? Masturbate? Walk around naked? No, Wishman decides that she should be playing some sort of obscure stringed instrument while lying nude on her bed. I guess the instrument must have been lying around Wishman’s apartment, an address that served as multiple sets for many of her films, and you know, I guess it adds production value, of a sort. But wait, there’s more. 

The nude musician answers the phone to discover it's her boyfriend calling. He wants to see her even though it's Saturday and she goes shopping on Saturdays. After a conversation that honestly feels like it was written by someone with no real idea of what human interaction sounds like, the boyfriend comes over and kills the harpsichordist. Then he decides to get a penis transplant. Unfortunately, his new penis turns him into a rapist, sort of like "The Cock of Orloc".

If that slice of completely improper plot isn't enticing enough, and I understand if it’s not, Wishman's style cinches the deal. Inanimate objects are edited into the film at odd times to cover transitions or (I'm guessing) missing footage. The dialogue is clearly haphazardly added later. Lighting seems incidental. It's like Wishman was driven to get these things on film and she didn't have time to worry about junk like sync sound and story structure. It's amazing that she slowed down long enough to have film loaded into the camera.

Doris Wishman, who died in 2002, represents an aspect of movie making that I love: The filmmaker who just needs to get a movie made regardless of ability, using whatever equipment she can get her hands on, telling the most ludicrous stories that can be duct taped together. Intentional or not, Wishman's movies have a point of view, and that's something that's missing from far too many movies.

Other notable Wishman flicks include "Bad Girls Go to Hell", "Another Day, Another Man", "Deadly Weapons" (starring Chesty Morgan), "Let Me Die a Woman", and "A Night to Dismember".