Zombie Lapdance

Seventeen screenings at the Austin Film Festival, and I’m still going strong. It’s the cinematic equivalent of eating a one-pound bag of M&Ms. Although I’m not pushing myself as hard as I usually do at these things. I’ve been getting sleep and everthing! Here’s the four films I saw since last posting about this.

Kabluey

This is probably the most sophisticated movie about a guy in a plushie suit that I’ve ever seen. The premise is this kinda shlubby loser guy moves in with his brother’s family to help take care of the kids while the brother is away in Iraq. In his bumbling struggle to win the respect of his sister-in-law and his nephews he takes a job wearing the creepy blobject mascot suit of a failing austin dot-com website (NexEion: Your gateway to Nectivity). Kabluey takes its humor from the futility of emptiness: the emptiness where the National Guard serving father ought to be, the emptiness inside the head of a corporate trademark suit, the emptiness where the dot-com bubble used to be, and the simple emptiness of a thermos bottle. Also, it’s damn funny to watch a grown man try and do things in a costume that has no hands or face. Scott Prendergast wrote, directed and starred in this film. And when he did the Q&A and the screening, did he use a moderator? Hell no! It’s the Scott Prendergast show! He can moderate his own damn self. Word on the street is that you’ll get a chance to see this movie, I’m guessing next summer as the fun alternative-film family-comedy of the month, the same ecological niche that "little miss sunshine" occupied last year. And don’t worry, the war will still be going on, so it won’t have lost its cultural resonance.

A Bloody Aria

Sometime when none of us were looking, South Korea became the world nexus of cool film. Anime, Hong Kong, and those moody Europeans are all old news, and Bollywood has another ten years to complete its development. It’s odd, because Korea has always been the Michigan of Asia, a place with some industry and occasional riots that nobody really notices. A Bloody Aria is an exceptionally well-plotted film, dealing in issues of violence, social corruption, and authority. Every character is established with nuance and power, and then blossoms in unexpected directions. In the beginning of A Bloody Aria a music instructor takes his hot asian schoolgirl student to a secluded bend in a river. Inappropriate advances are made. And then the locals show up. Reminiscent of Attack the Gas Station in terms of its ensemble-based humor.

The Ungodly

Throughout the course of my life, I have only walked out on two movies. Last night, this became number two. So, here’s the complete failure of imagination premise: A documentary filmmaker follows a serial killer and comes to embrace the darkness within blah fuckin blah blah blah. How many times have we seen this premise? A zillion times? Two zillion? Is it physically possible to make a more un-original film? If you actually photocopied somebody else’s script and put your name at the top in ballpoint pen, could that be as lazy as this? And oh my god, the sheer overblown melodrama of it all. He stabs women and takes their eyes (how many times has that been done?) yet he’s a sensitive and sophisticated dude who takes care of cancer kids. That’s not a fascinating duality. That’s just silly. I had to leave shortly after the "killer" said "If only the seeds of darkness hadn’t been planted before I lost the innocence I never had." A parody of this genre would have the exact same lines as this screenplay. At this point there are more movies about serial killers than there have ever actually been serial killers. And what the screenwriters want them to be has absolutely no bearing on historical reality. Jeffrey Dahmer fucked corpses up the butt, while wearing a condom. He didn’t stand around mouthing philosophy and using the word "darkness" in every sentence like a high-school goth. He was a seriously broken individual and every aspect of his life reflected that. There was no goddamn paradox of character. I’m glad that the writer/star of this film, Mark Borkowski, didn’t show up for a Q&A, I might have booed him to his face.

The Rebel

Dear Dustin Nguyen:

Dustin, I just wanted to take a little time to let you know just how awesome I think you are. If the whole world appreciated your awesomeness as much as I do, you would be the president of the United Nations. You would be the first UN president to bring peace to the world through sheer kick-ass kung-fuing excellence.

Dustin, I just saw your Vietnamese production "The Rebel". I don’t think there’s anyone else who grew up in St.Louis who could play the toughest character in a martial-arts period piece, speaking both Vietnamese and French. You are indeed a renaissance man. Some people might think that you’re the villain of this movie, just because you play the part of the secret service chief who helps the French maintain colonial rule. But I know better. I like how the so-called heroine has the kung-fu chops to cut through collaborator henchmen like they’re pho noodles. She can break colonial French necks with her thighs. But when she attacks you, you barely stoop to blocking her puny attacks. Fists and blades bounce off your three-piece suit. Even blades can’t mar your perfect Hollywood skin! I suspect that’s just your impenetrable shield of awesomeness. Thanks to your character, Vietnam slaved under colonial oppression for another fifty years. The low international cost of bauxite is your legacy to us all.

Dustin, please continue being this awesome in the international film industry. Say hi to Val for me.

Love:
Matthew Bey

an example of the only time in history that a Fox news reporter stayed on topic in the face of a Republican politician pulling the religion card.

well, it’s not as fun as fantastic fest, or as relevant to this site, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper. i’ve been telling myself that i would take a week out for one of the local festivals for a couple of years now. i used to do it all the time. i would drive myself to exhaustion and sickness in order to catch every single showing that was humanly possible. so i decided to re-live my old glories and my old passions. i put down $35 bucks and gave myself a week of only worrying about biking to the next screening of the AUSTIN FILM FESTIVAL.

i’m not going to bore you with a synopsis of everything i’ve seen, because quite honestly, i don’t think a lot of this is really worth watching outside of the festival context. in past years there’s only been a couple of films out of the twenty-some screenings i’ve attended that were really awesome.

here are a few of the mentionables after muscling through half the fest:

STREET TEAM MASSACRE

what an incredibly stupid film. i should have known how bad it would get when the synopsis mentioned a cameo by lloyd kaufman, a man who is the very badge of trash cinema (which he insists on calling ‘alternative film’, because he totally misses the point of what that term means). this is a zombie movie that’s so cheaply made that they couldn’t even afford zombie makeup. when the zombie transformation occurs (from drinking bad sports drinks) the unfortunate victims simply grow a unibrow.

but this is so stupid, so intentionally stupid, that it’s hilarious. one of the few times that strategy works. there’s a constant stupid reparte’ between the members of the ‘gophercum’ street team, as they pretend that they’re cool and that they have an important and difficult job to do: handing out sports drink samples to people on the street. here’s a sample of the stupid dialogue that somehow manages to be hilarious.

hippie: you should come out to my jam band festival. it’s going to be totally amazing.
street team member: really? that sounds cool.
hippie: yeah, everyone’s going to be there. here, take a flyer. it’s my only one.

it’s like an episode of strawberry shortcake acted out by adults. catch it as a DVD at the dollar store five years from now.

The Living Wake

the living wake follows the last day of K.Roth Binew. he is a brilliant and mis-understood artist and author living in a sleepy new england town. he knows he’s going to die at nine-oclock in the evening because he’s suffering from a "grave and vague disease." he goes about, inviting people to his own wake, and wrapping up his affairs. the character is amazing, and it had better be, because the movie is all about him, and you’ve never seen a more self-absorbed character in your life. he’s like don quixote re-incarnated as truman capote. you may never get a chance to see this movie, but don’t miss it if you do. imagine a less insipid wes anderson flick.

The Zombie Diaries

the filmmakers swear that they had no idea that george romero was making almost exactly the same movie with almost exactly the same title. but no matter. anyone renting this movie instead of the romero one will have nothing to whine about. this was terrifying. imagine blair witch meets night of the living dead. everything is shot from the point of view of the documentary filmmaker. the scariest part was the slow buildup from the first news reports and man-on-the-street interviews about the viral outbreak, to the midnight search of the darkened farmhouse as the documentarians try and find what’s making that bumping sound. i swear i had to cover my mouth and my ears to keep from screaming.

Blood Car

here’s the premise. it’s "ten minutes into the future" and gasoline casts $32.49 per gallon. a kindergarten teacher and avid vegan thinks he has the answer: a car that runs on wheatgrass. only, after an accident in his bedroom laboratory, he finds that what it really takes to run the car is blood. human blood. hmmmm. is that supposed to be some sort of political message?

this movie had several things going for it. one, there’s few things as funny as someone sobbing "but, i’m a vegan!" as they toss old ladies into a trunk-mounted meat grinder. two, it highlights the sad hypocrisy of al-gore-style liberalism. and three, it has boobs in the very first shot!

expect more movie prattle from me soon.

Sarina Brewer of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists is holding another email auction to capitalize on this holiday season.

The auction item titled REAL MUMMIFIED MYSTERY HAND EARRINGS / zombie costume caught my eye.

were these hands really all that mysterious for the last raccoon who owned them?

((Don’t forget, TONIGHT is the sorta kinda Austin premier of "Dead Things" at Nueva Onda!))

so i spent last weekend suffering through the damn UT/OU game just so i could go to the texas state fair and eat deep-fried foods.

i must have spent $35 on fried carny food, but these two were easily the best. on the left is a deep-fried latte. wait! it’s not as weird as you think. on the bottom is somesort of deep-fried hushpuppy thing, maybe deepfried tortillas or something, i’m not sure. and on top is espresso icescream with whipped cream. it actually all came together in a delightfully light and delicious symphony of carnyocity.

to the right is a cosmopolitan, which is a cheesecake wrapped in a tortilla and deep-fried. with whipped cream and jelly. finally, i got to taste the deep-fried cheesecake experience and i was hardly disappointed. the tortilla w/batter was nicely crisp and light, the cheesecake a rich and steaming goo. definately two fair thumbs up.

the stand that sold both these fried products is kinda near the swine barn. check it out if you’re in dallas over the next week or so.

then we get to the cheap trick carny food. deep-fried cookie dough and deep-fried coke.

to the left is the deep-fried cookie dough, placed in a chintzy cardboard chevy to make you think it’s fancy. the sopping greasy batter hides an over-whelming wad of suger-tar and fat. it’s like being kicked in the face by the keebler elves.

to the right is the so-called deep-fried coke. in reality this is a cup of hush puppies that are slightly wet with coke fountain drink — apparently applied post-fry. the coke adds nothing to the deep-fried experience other than to leave a disgusting syrup on the bottom of the cup and leave the hush-puppies lightly soggy.

not pictured, an adequate corny dog and an adequate frozen cheesecake on a stick.

((Don’t forget, only on day until the sorta kinda Austin premier of "Dead Things" at Nueva Onda!))

remember a while ago, when i won the contest run in conjunction with Pinkwater’s "The Neddiad" by coming up with a snazzy slogan for Wentworthstein’s Shoelaces? Well, they have already sent me my prize of original artwork from the book, which I would like to show you now:

it’s a dinosaur. pretty spiffy, no?

i put it in a $1.49 frame that i got down at the Dollar Deals store, and hung it in a position of honor in my living room.

the artist is Calef Brown, an author and illustrator who has collaborated with daniel pinkwater in the past, and according to the information i have gleened from google, is actually a blue elephant. brown did seventy-one such drawings as chapter headings for the neddiad novel, but i can only presume that he chose the best one for me. because i’m a winner.

i friend of mine saw this picture and told me a story about how when she was in a bicycle circus that travelled throughout the northeast, they wrote daniel pinkwater and invited him to join the troop. pinkwater wrote back, declining on the grounds that he is a particularly large and un-athletic author.

everybody has got their pinkwater story.

((Don’t forget, only two days before the sorta kinda Austin premier of "Dead Things" at Nueva Onda!))

Did you know that you could buy a hundred bright white LEDs on ebay for about $10 (including shipping)?

So for the past week or so, I’ve been assembling exactly 80 of those LEDs into a chandelier for my breakfast nook.

My girlfriend had no faith in me. She thought it would be a horrific eyesore, but the actual finished product won her over.

It has an amazing light quality. It’s an eerie cold glow, very diffuse and almost impossibly soft. You put your hand underneath the light and you think that you might break the illumination itself. It’s the sort of light that you would find in the land of the dead. Or Iceland. Which practically amounts to the same thing.

I was sick at home with a cold last week, so I had the time to solder 164 wires together. The LEDs are sunk into 5mm holes drilled into a sheet of lexan polycarbonate (the pricier plastic sheet one can buy from home depot). Two parallel arrays of 40 LEDs are arranged in series and powered by a one dollar goodwill DC power source. The DC converter says it’s 6v 2.1amps, but it actually clocks in at 10volts. Which is good, because even at 10v the LEDs are still a little underpowered from their factory recommended .025ma operating current. I figure that with the lexan and the glue holding them in operating as effective heatsinks they could probably survive overclocking a little, but I would just as soon underdo the current and see how many years they will last before an LED blows.

I’ve also put together a little bedside lamp from the spare pieces from the chandelier.


Not as serviceable, but cool enough.

DEAD THINGS
— Screening Thursday October 11, at Nueva Onda Mexican Restaurant, 8:00ish. 2218 College Ave.

For anyone who hasn’t had a chance to witness the Nueva Onda movie nights, now’s your chance to catch the LAST SHOWING OF THE SEASON and a question and answer session with YOURS TRULY!

It’s not quite an Austin premier (I played "Dead Things" in the courtyard of my old co-op) but this is the first time that most people in Austin will have a chance to watch my senior film project from the University of Wisconsin Communication Arts Department.

"Dead Things" is a heavily Jan Svankmajer, Brother’s Quay influenced mixing of stop-motion animation and slow-motion live-action. Like much of the art that I’ve created, I made the mistake of making something that I would think was really cool, as opposed to something that would actually make sense. There’s a man chasing some sort of land-calimari through his house and encountering various creatures culled from the meat aisle at the local asian grocery. there’s a chicken/fish, a climbing pig-stomach, and headless smelt.

I shot this film on 16mm film, way back in 1997, about fifteen minutes before everybody in the world turned to digital video. It’s an insanely expensive medium and cumbersome. Just to do something simple like make titles with flaming letters involved shooting five different lengths of film. One length of film was footage of burning newspaper, another was the black mask of lettering, another was the blank filling of the lettering, another was the double-exposure of lettering and flame footage, and then a final composite projection of black masking and flaming lettering. The titles probably cost me a day of work and fifty bucks, but were no more than 15 seconds of actual film footage.

At the time, "Dead Things" was probably the second most ambitious film made in Madison, Wisconsin for all its 12min length (I’m always a distant second to Scott Rice). During the premier screening of "Dead Things" in my communication arts film production class it blew everyone away. Instead of picking the film apart, my classmates greeted it with awestruck silence. Jim Kreul, the TA, phrasing himself very carefully said, "The technical sophistication of this film makes it difficult to critique." Which was his way of saying, yes it’s really cool, but it doesn’t make any sense.

"Dead Things" was supposed to be my ticket to the big time. I got the "Dead Things" rough cut transferred to an actual 16mm print, which UW communication arts students almost never did. Have you ever tried to get an industrial film laboratory to work with an ignorant student from Wisconsin? It’s not fun. And it’s not cheap.

With the print, I was able to submit "Dead Things" to film festivals. All the major festivals at the time rejected it. But it did get accepted to "The Wilmington Exchange Festival". I talked to the programmer on the phone for an hour, because the festival was just that cool. Unfortunately I was too poor and lame to visit the festival. It also got into the "Athens International Film Festival." No, not that Athens. The Athens that’s in Ohio.

My second round of failure came in the following couple of years with the rise of internet film. By this time I had transferred the "Dead Things" film print to a halfway decent video format. Have you ever tried to get an industrial film-to-video transfer house to work with an ignorant graduate from Wisconsin? It’s not fun. And it’s not cheap.

Back in the day it was actually difficult to get your film online. You had to physically mail them a copy of your film that you would never get back. You had to fill out legal documents and contracts. And then, when it was actually online, it would take people ten minutes to download it into a crappy-resolution format. I got onto ifilm this way, and a couple of others. I doubt if more than a couple of dozen people actually bothered to watch it all the way through.

The most interesting of the these online film experiences was the spectacular burnout of anteye.com. Their six-month rise and fall and their zany dot-com business plan is cogently detailed here. From my perspective, it seemed like anteye was offering me vast wealth and fame, and all I had to do was have the most popular film in Madison. I don’t know how close "Dead Things" came, but I went to their premier party in the Barrymore Theater. Anteye was flush with imaginary internet money, so they rented this huge movie palace and hired SPAM sculptors and local fusion music groups to make themselves look cool. Because I had a film on the site, I had this anteye membership card with a computer-chip looking thing in it that got me as much free beer as I could drink. Which you can bet I did.

Then came the height of the festivities. The movie-screen lit up with a digital-satellite link-up with the other anteye parties in the other anteye.com creative hotspot communities around the country: Portland, Austin, and Modine, Iowa or some other inane-ass town. The CEO of anteye came on, the fast-talker who conned honest capital investors out of their money in the first place. He was bald and he wore a pink feather boa. He looked like a gay Jesse Ventura.

Then they announced the winners. I stood in the Barrymore balcony, trying to hide my excitement, and the blossoming hope that a magic carpet of dot-com money would carry me away and make me free of that provincial dirthole.

Scott Rice won.

I hate him so much.

At least anteye.com was a huge wasteful conjob.

But if you want to see "Dead Things", the film to which I pinned all the hopes and dreams of my misspent youth, then you should head down to the Nueva Onda Mexican Restaurant this Thursday, October 11. It’s near the HEB on Oltorf on that weird shortcut street that branches off South Congress. I’ll probably show up a bit early because there’s a happy hour with $2 beer (but I seem to recall that it ends at 7).

Also, there’s other stuff playing that will probably even make sense.

In the interests of personal aggrandizement, here’s the cut and paste publicity email for the anthology which was foolish enough to publish my zombie cabdriver goes on a killing spree story. Now available!:

Satisfy your hunger for the living dead in the third installment of the popular Undead series, The Undead: Flesh Feast. A new recruit must face the grotesque realities behind the zombie war. An ancient, tentacled horror commands the walking dead. A green mold creeps across an uncharted island, driving its mysterious inhabitants insane. A lone survivor of the zombie apocalypse wants only one thing… to be bitten. The Grim Reaper struggles to claim the souls of the deceased that won’t stay dead. And in the featured novella, "The Legend of Black Betty," a small town in the Old West rots with a plague wreaked by an evil prostitute. These stories and more from Tim Curran, Andre Duza, Ryan C. Thomas, and many others.

Available for purchase now from many stores including:

* Permuted Press – Free shipping if you buy any 2 books!
* Amazon US
* Amazon UK
* Amazon Canada
* Amazon.de
* Barnes & Noble
* Many Others

"Fantastic stories! The zombies are fresh… well, er, they’re actually moldy, festering wrecks… but these stories are great takes on the zombie genre. You’re gonna like The Undead: Flesh Feast… just make sure you have a toothpick handy."
—Joe McKinney, author of Dead City

Includes an introduction by Walter Greatshell (author of Xombies) and tales from:
Tim Curran • Andre Duza • Ryan C. Thomas • David Dunwoody • Steven Cavanagh • Matthew Masucci • Michael Stone • Rick Moore • Matthew Bey • A.C. Wise • David Bain • Eric Turowski • Kevin Boon • Scott Standridge • Kriscinda Meadows

Recently, the Sonic near where I lived had a two-for-one foot-long Coneydog coupon. The coupon would draw me in with the enticing promise of bright-pink processed pig flesh drowned in chunky processed gravy wrapped in grease-sogged bread, and then my coneydog purchase would come with yet another two-for-one coneydog coupon, thus repeating the horrific cycle.

For those of you living in climates that discourage drive-in burger joints and are thus unfamiliar with the Sonic experience, let’s just say that it’s exactly like the culinary hybrid of junior highschool cafeterias and carnie food. At Sonic you can buy tater-tots covered in chili and liquid cheese. And you can buy a foot-long hotdog of the saltiest, greasiest, cheapest grade of pig-based processed flesh (sorry, I forgot to measure if it was actually a foot long). I learned that a full twenty-four inches of coneydog combined with a cup of icecream swirled with peanutbutter cup candies is actually more than my otherwise hardy constitution can pleasantly metabolize.

But there’s something compelling about the siren-song of coneydog hedonism. I don’t know if it’s the grease, the way the limp bun hangs wetly in your hand, or the way that a liberal slathering of both chili and liquid cheese product make this one of the few hotdogs in town that you have to eat with the provided plastic fork. It’s the Las Vegas whore of hotdogs and you have to respect it for being, if not the best at what it does, than for being the most of what it is.

Sonic Foot-Long Coneydog
Grade: B minus

Before I ever went out to the IKEA up in Roundrock, I knew only two things about it. One: everyone in town goes there to get super-cheap swedish meatballs. And two: they have fifty cent hotdogs.

Let’s consider for a moment the sort of pretention it takes for a furniture store in Texas to list the descriptions of all their products in both English and Swedish. If the store was in Minneapolis, I could maybe see that. But as it is, it’s a huge bilingual "screw you" to all the native Spanish speakers in Texas. And why keep the Swedish names for products that customers will have to remember for the 45minutes it takes to extract the product from the warehouse? How many of the Ikea Roundrock employees actually know the subtle differences in meaning between "ingo" and "malm"?

And in the face of all this Swedish chauvinism, they sell hotdogs. I have a friend in Germany who confirms that they sell hotdogs at the end of the furniture-design gauntlet there as well. Hotdogs are an intrinsically American invention. They sell sausages in northern Europe it’s true, but it took American’s to make a bun appropriately sized to the meat inside.

Like their plasterboard cabinets with the weird waxy cardboard windows, these hoddogs are cheap, tasteless and uninspired. One can only presume that they sell these as part of some obscure philosophy of scandinavian corporate responsibility that aims at providing the cheapest, most compactly packaged food, using only recycled and renewable material.

Do yourself a favor and save your money for the squeezable tubes of spiced herring.

IKEA dog: Grade D minus