EVERYONE'S A CRITIC

What I like about this sweet, clean seaside postcard is that the couple are not necessarily dismissive of the sculpture, they just don't know what they're looking at or how to engage with it. This may eventually make them angry but, for now, it leaves them perplexed and slightly embarrassed, a not uncommon reaction to the unfamiliar - and one that is infinitely preferable to some of the too cool for school pseudery that can pass for reaction when it comes to art.  

It's my birthday today. I'm fifty six, which seems ridiculously, farcically old. I can no longer tell the front from the backside.

RELIGION CAN BE A PROBLEM

 

God Told Me To, d. Larry Cohen (1976)

Without wishing to give too much away about the mesmerising God Told Me To, here are five images of Richard Lynch as a glowing, golden haired hermaphroditic hippy will-o’-the-wisp star child who lives in a squalid underground furnace room and uses mind control to direct a cabal of fanatical followers. 

Filmed in the old, scuzzy, dangerous New York - often without permission - Cohen's movie starts out as a tense thriller. as a wave of bizarre murders sweeps the city, each one committed by a seemingly normal member of the public who suddenly feels compelled to kill everyone around them. Their explanation to the authorities afterwards? 'God Told Me To'.

The second half of the film goes nuts, and so do all of the characters.

THREE (MORE) SHOTS

 

A brief (final) press of the Return button for Ghost In The Machine. Yes, that's Karen Allen.

PC GONE MAD

Ghost In The Machine, d. Rachel Talalay (1993) 

Have you ever wondered what might happen if, at the point of his own death, a serial killer was absorbed into a powerful computer network and then continued his murderous career using microwave ovens, hand driers, dish washers and ATM machines? No, me neither, or no yo tampoco, as they say in Spanish. 

The main issue with this film is that it is just so creaky and stilted, with the actors clearly being unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the 'state of the art' (see above) effects they were supposed to be reacting and responding to*. Nowadays, of course, movies use CGI for even mundane things, so actors have got much  better at this sort of pretending. 

Ghost In The Machine cost $12m, made less than half of its budget back and would have been pretty much completely out of date before the credits finished rolling. Oh, well, mas que nada, as they say in Portugese.

* The dialogue is also awful, and the lead kid is annoying.

RINGS FROM AN EMPTY ROOM

Beam Weapons · Secret Ceremony

Last year, at Easter, I found myself alone in the house for a day. Before I set to my assigned task - decorating the spare room - I took advantage of the empty space to hold an impromptu recording session using some metal kitchenware, some wooden utensils, two desk lamps, and some old electronic devices.

I haven’t quite known what to do with the results, so I’m going to share some of them here. I know.

Secret Ceremony, which, I'm afraid, is ten minutes long, consists of me trying (and eventually succeeding) to get some nice sounding clangs out of a set of suspended steel bowls. The title references both the 1968 Joseph Losey film I re-watched the night before, and how it felt to be in an empty room in an empty house, banging stuff with a spoon and recording the reverberations.

Towards the end, it starts to rain, which was unplanned, but completes the ritual.

THE TIME TO DIE

         

Le Temps De Mourir, d. Andre Farwagi (1970)

This is a film all about time, but which, unlike most other films and TV shows, manages to respect it and use it in a responsible, adult manner. Here time is not plastic, mouldable, malleable, flexible, but inexorable, inevitable, inescapable. Time is a bastard, ladies and gentlemen, cross it at your peril.  

A time-warped whodunnit, the film begins with a collision between a horse, a beautiful girl and a metal tree which leads to a reel of futuristic video tape rolling down a hill and into the path of a sleeping man. The man and his colleague watch the film, only to find it is surveilance camera footage of their Boss being shot to death by an unknown, but (crucially) not unseen, assailant.

The Boss, however, is not dead: he is alive, well, and bullet hole free. He rapidly becomes obsessed with finding out what it all means: is it a fake, a prank, a collective hallucination, or a vision of the future? Is it already written, or can it be revised? Will intervention stop it, or hasten it? 

Everything about this film is cool: it reminds me of hip, controlled jazz - no squawking sax or atonal key pounding (I'm not averse to that, by the way, but this film is a masterpiece of restraint) - just a smooth, irresistible, intelligent groove - a head nodder, a finger clicker. It's all beautifully enigmatic, and just about makes sense if you mentally squint really hard.