The Cameraman's Revenge

Why yes, the blog has been neglected for a couple of weeks, thanks for noticing. Unfortunately there’s been another ludicrously time-consuming project demanding I work at it properly rather than just do it in bits every now and then, so film-watching’s fallen by the wayside as a result… until last night. Frankly I wasn’t actually in a film-watching mood, I was at a friend’s place to do other stuff and I had this thing foisted upon me much against my will; and when I was told it was a comedy about vampires featuring Malcolm McDowell, Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop that had more or less gone straight to video, my expectations were not high. Suck had an uphill battle on its hands with me, and it’s much to the film’s credit that by the end I was totally won over by it. It’s the story of a rather hapless indie rock band ironically named The Winners, who are pretty much dying on their feet, abandoned by their manager and struggling to make inroads… until the female bass player becomes a vampire and the band’s profile suddenly lifts, despite the attendant complications of having to dispose of the bodies. The advertising obviously highlights all the big name guest stars rather than the lesser lights in the actual lead roles, which is understandable but a bit sad cos they’re all quite good at what they do (particularly Chris Ratz’ unfortunate roadie/Renfield); but it is the bigger names that’ll draw people. McDowell is good as Eddie van Helsing (ha!), the vampire hunter who fears the dark; Alice Cooper is, well, Alice Cooper; Iggy is strangely menacing and menacingly strange; I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t recognise Henry Rollins as the loathsome DJ (amazing what difference a wig makes); and casting *Moby* of all people as Beef, the lead singer of a band whose schtick involves the audience pelting them with raw bloody meat, was genuinely inspired. Suck is a small film with enough sense not to get ambitious beyond its means; while the parallel it wants to draw between vampirism and drug addiction is a bit obvious and occasionally laboured, on the whole the film has a well-done easy charm that made it a winner for me. If it hadn’t been foisted on me like that, I likely would’ve bypassed it and missed something good. Needless to say it shouldn’t be confused with Vampires Suck…

Hockey politics, a Nazi invasion of Canada, sleepwalking, strange municipal laws, seances, B-grade melodrama reenactments of childhood events that may not have happened performed by actors including one who the narrator claims is really his mother, frozen horses, a daily soap opera whose action over the 50 years  it’s been on has consisted entirely of a man threatening to jump off a building ledge… it’s Guy Maddin’s “docufantasia” My Winnipeg, and it could be described as strange to say the least. My experience of Maddin has hitherto been limited to seeing The Saddest Music in the World (which I recall being kind of befuddled by) and reading more about his fascination with silent cinema and his attempts to try and recreate that style in his own films, fondness for what his IMDB bio calls “lo-fi” techniques like Super 8, that sort of thing, and I knew he had some sort of reputation as an interesting artist among your hardcore cinephile crowd. As such, though I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed by the other film, when I found My Winnipeg at the library I thought I should check it out, maybe see if I liked it better, which I probably didn’t. The narrative thread, if you can call it that, concerns “Maddin” trying to escape Winnipeg, the town he’s spent his whole life in, while trying to erect a somewhat absurdist myth about the place. This is done in somewhat fussy style, involving an assortment of period newsreel footage, reenactments, backprojected slides, and Maddin’s own narration (which he sometimes performs live at showings of the film), itself a curious mix of portentous semi-poetry, seemingly genuine anger, and so forth. It’s not uninteresting but something about it never entirely clicked with me so that it never seemed more than mildly amusing, the surrealism felt forced, and even at just 80 minutes it seemed to wear out its welcome well before the end.

This was an interesting Canadian documentary on the noble art of film editing. Personally I’ve always felt that editing—in terms of selectivity of material—was the real secret to documentary, and to that extent this film is decidedly problematic. Perhaps ironically, the film is arguably over-edited, and its tendency to get the captions identifying its film excerpts wrong (misdating, misspelling people’s names, even getting at least one title wrong), but the speed with which it moves across its material makes it a bit hard to fully absorb. It’s not really a film for neophytes; if you don’t already have some idea of what editing involves, this won’t exactly teach you the basics (does it even fully explain the principles of continuity editing? I don’t think it did). But it’s still interesting, the excerpts are wide-ranging and often unexpected (I was delighted to see the mythical Kuleshov experiment with the Ivan Mozzhukin close-up, which I thought was lost if it had ever existed to begin with), and it finds room for an unfortunately brief consideration of some ideological implications of the art. Showed on ABC2 tonight which means it will likely show on ABC1 next Sunday afternoon; if so, I may watch it again then.