It's a ridiculous five years since we last celebrated the appearance of the Donald Pleasence in a cinematic role, so let's get straight to it.
Arthur? Arthur! (1969) gives the Worksop Wonder two rare opportunities: 1. the lead, and 2. the chance to overtly exercise his considerable gift for comedy. Donald plays Arthur, a bald Wallace-like inventor who, fed up with his tedious life and lack of success, reinvents himself as a switched on hirsute swinger who is, naturally, irresistible to the ladies.
I know it sounds promising but, sadly, it's a flat, muddled, silly film that was never released theatrically. Nevertheless, Donald's does quite a lot with what he's given, including providing some groovy go go dancing and, on a couple of occasions, stripping down to just his underpants. He is surprisingly and unnervingly buff.
My close-knit network of family
and friends has expanded to include Joe Pera, a man I’ve never met who lives over 3,600 miles away, yet who I feel
a very warm affinity to.
Joe lives in Michigan, and is a choir teacher,
although he can’t sing. Brought up by his grandparents, he appears old before
his time: he moves slowly and tentatively, like someone afraid of slipping on
ice (Michigan is very cold). His voice is low, hesitant and cracked, like
someone recounting a deathbed memoir. A single man with mainly elderly friends,
Joe is both part of and apart from the community. Quietly eccentric in almost
every regard, he is also sweet and kind and trusted, although he has a tendency
to focus much too hard on his singular obsessions (the perfect Christmas tree;
Canadian rats; The Who song ‘Baba O’Riley’). Small town mid-western life suits
him perfectly. Indeed, it is hard to imagine him surviving in any other
environment. He likes trees and barns and rocks, and he fantasises about sharing
these enthusiasms with a wife and family.
Each episode of Joe Pera Speaks
With You is just over ten minutes long, and centres around a specific topic
that Joe wants to tell us about. Life fills the gaps in the monologue, and we get
to meet Joe’s friends and his Basset Hound, Gus, see some amazing scenery and
follow his delicately poised romance with a survivalist band teacher called Sarah
Conner. It’s a warm, wonderful and often moving programme, in which little
things mean a lot. Small gestures and moments have a resonance that would be
lost in most dramas, but then this seems like life rather than art, despite the
fact that Joe Pera is really a comedian from Buffalo, New York.
The second series is winding to a
close, and has included some major events, but these are handled gently and
sensitively. Joe the choir teacher is a disconnected person whose life has been
shaped by loss, but saved by love, and he grows with every episode, taking
slow, measured steps towards becoming the community elder he already resembles
in looks, manner and voice.
I wish they’d make an episode
every day for the rest of my days: each ten minute visit is like an hour of transcendental
meditation.
Alan Resnick is an American
comedian, performance artist, film maker and consciously terrible mime. He
first came to prominence with his Alantutorials, sixty six short films posted
to YouTube that both parodied and celebrated the modern phenomenon of people
making films of how to do stuff,
including simply opening boxes and showing you what’s inside. Resnick plays
Alan, a ‘little kid’ (with massive feet and hands) who uses his phone camera to
make short films in which, for example, he tells us how to put dirt in a box,
crush a can with a piece of wood, spin a salad with an electric drill, or to
glue spray painted coins to an external hard drive. Most of the films are only
two or three minutes long. The tutorials encapsulate the hollow nature of
YouTube: the obsession with gathering likes and subscribers, the impossible yet
oddly achievable dream of becoming an online star via a compulsion to create
content that is neither necessary nor needed. In some of the films, despite
being ostensibly in control of the process, Alan clearly doesn’t have anything
set up, and has to improvise, falling back on staples like lengths of wood,
dirt and ‘water’ that actually resembles antifreeze.
Resnick nails the nascent YouTube
style perfectly: ‘Hi Guys’ or, later, ‘Hi Tutorialheads’ in a soft, high
pitched voice. The films are not badly done, but they are clumsy and unprofessional.
Later on, they will descend into chaos. We never see Alan in person, just bits
of him. He makes the majority of his films on his phone camera, which causes
him problems as many of his tutorials require at least two hands, leading to a
great deal of tragicomic fumbling and his favourite expletive: ‘shoot!’.
The Alantutorials are not simply
clever parodies, they contain a narrative arc. After watching half a dozen or
so, it becomes clear that Alan is not an excitable child, he is an adult with
mental health issues, desperately trying to find some online validation. He
seems lost and alone, and although he sometimes achieves a kind of gleeful
hysteria (usually while being destructive), he is most often unfulfilled or
confused by his own films, prone to accidents and mistakes. Far from being an
expert, he is a rank amateur, not even skilled in the bogus activities he wants
to show us.
The turning point in the series
is when Alan teaches us how to expose the slats of the ceiling and rub the ensuing
dirt onto a bed. This act of destruction has serious consequences. The next
time we see him he is locked out of his room: cold, snivelling and waiting for
someone to come and help him. No-one comes, and Alan is forced to live in the
woods, scavenging for food and water and shelter. Despite these desperate
circumstances, Alan continues with his tutorials, although they now have a
feral, psychotic edge, full of blood and mud and the inexplicable actions of a deranged man in an altered state.
After an uncomfortable period of
mayhem, Alan is next seen locked in the back of a truck and then in what is
first assumed to be a hospital or asylum. But why are there Stanley knives on
the table, why is he allowed to collect his own urine in bottles, and who is
sliding a dollar bill under the door each time he makes a film?
The room becomes dirtier and
dirtier, and Alan becomes more and more unhinged. In the longest episode of the
series, Alan stomps about the piss bottle filled room in a filthy gown, talking
indistinctly to himself and his ‘best friend’, a figure he has fashioned out of
scuzzy looking dollar bills. We can’t hear what he is saying, and we can’t work
out what is happening other than that this perhaps represents Alan’s offscreen
reality: the way he spends his time when he isn’t thinking of his audience. In
the next film, his room is dark and more chaotic than ever. Whatever this
facility is, it has clearly now been abandoned.
A straightforward reading of the
Alantutorials is that they are challenging the evolution of YouTube from an
online platform for individual expression to a corporation owned site that
exploits raw talent in return for relatively small amounts of cash. Is Alan
kidnapped by a company who wish to use his tutorials to direct his audience
towards their own ends, their own products? And is his abandonment the result
of falling figures, or a drive towards a different demographic? Or is all of
this irrelevant, as what we are actually seeing is the inside of Alan’s head,
an elaborate and disturbing fantasy played out online on perhaps the darkest of
all social media channels, the place where irrational people feel most at home,
amongst conspiracy theories, convoluted commentaries, dubious political rants,
strange fetishism and compilations of cleavage shots from ‘Friends’. What
happens here defies interpretation: it’s insanity in all its grubby, self-harming,
self-soiling horror.
To further reinforce the nightmare, and if you can face it, read the comments on Resnick’s YouTube channel, an Escher-esque tumble of opinion
in which people express sympathy for Alan and are then lambasted by others for
not knowing that Alan is not a real person. But is this symptomatic of a
growing split in society? Those who care are criticised for not getting it,
those who do get it are superior and condescending. Just because Alan Resnick
is not Alan Tutorial, does this make the madness any less real? Is it art, or
is it artifice, and what does the fake Alan
say about the real Alan?
I am always fascinated and delighted by Bollywood films, they do things so differently there. Jangal Mein Mangal is a strange film, a light romantic comedy punctuated by murders committed by an unstoppable zombie. Here, some cheeky girls use their hair, hips, lips and chests to terrorise a bunch of scared old men, sorry, eligible bachelors.
The title of the film is, apparently, somewhat ambiguous, even in Hindi. It is literally translated as 'in the jungle, auspicious', but is actually more like a proverb about good things coming out of chaos. In keeping with the slightly risque themes highlighted in the above clip, it can also mean 'a vacuum can be filled', perhaps the closest Bollywood gets to smut.
At first glance, there’s
something quite comical about this picture. And at second, third and fourth
glances. I think it’s the facial expressions. That said, it’s quite a tense
situation. God turns up, on a cloud, wearing a shorty dressing gown, with
his retinue of putti (the chubby babies who are often mistakenly called
cherubim. Cherubim are much more powerful and sinister entities), and angrily asks
what the heck is happening, apple wise. Adam shrugs and gestures to Eve, Eve points to the serpent, the serpent
says ‘who me?’, while a gammy looking lamb and a misshapen lion look on with ‘ohhh
shit’ expressions. It may be slightly daft, but I think it sums up the
circumstances and emotions of The Fall perfectly.
