On this week’s podcast Gareth and I talk about the beautiful and heartfelt new film by Clint Eastwood HEREAFTER, the overlooked satire WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS, and our guest is Nathaniel Brown, star of the extraordinary ENTER THE VOID

Running time: 1 Hour and 10 seconds – 29mb mp3

HEREAFTER / WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS / Our Earlier Review of ENTER THE VOID

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On this week’s podcast Gareth and Jett discuss in-depth the film THE SOCIAL NETWORK and the extraordinary new work ENTER THE VOID as well as interview David Nadelberg of MORTIFIED

Running time: 55 minutes – 26.5mb mp3

THE SOCIAL NETWORK / ENTER THE VOID / David Nadelberg Interviewed on MORTIFIED / MORTFIED on Kickstarter / MORTIFIED previously on TFT: Get Mortified – Or How You Too Can Tell People You’re a Film Producer

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Maybe I misunderstood Joaquin Phoenix’s I’m Still Here when I called it an over-privileged aping of Andy Kaufman and Borat. (See my The Film Talk review here.) As I watched the 1971 documentary The American Dreamer — about Dennis Hopper and the making of his ill-fated The Last Movie – I had an epiphany. Phoenix was aping 1971 Dennis Hopper. It’s all there. The scraggly beard, the idiosyncratic OCD beard-stroking, the lashing out, the fawning groupies, and the pretentious droplets of wisdom espoused to anyone who will listen (in fame’s bubble, apparently everyone).

I saw The American Dreamer double-featured with The Last Movie last week at the Belcourt. Harmony Korine and the critic Jim Ridley were in the audience. And, oh boy, what a ball we had! I don’t mean the films were particularly good — The Last Movie was a jumbled mess and The American Dreamer’s only inspiration was its subject matter. Rather, the rarely-screened films were beautiful artifacts of a time gone by, profiles in excessiveness, and a two-sided morality tale on what happens when no one ever tells you no.

Hopper made The Last Movie right after his breakout hit Easy Rider. Universal Pictures had no idea about this crazy new “youth market,” but they figured Hopper did. They gave him carte blanche and a million dollars to make his epic. Complete artistic and financial freedom can actually be a recipe for doom, even for a director of extraordinary talent like Henri-Georges Clouzot. (By any means necessary, see the haunting documentary Inferno about Clouzot’s abandoned epic L’enfer.) For Hopper, a former child actor with little directing experience, carte blanch was a death sentence. The Last Movie is a sprawling, disjointed, misogynistic,  muddled, excessive, and belabored mess. (Good soundtrack though.) I got the sense that Hopper adored Alejandro Jodorowski’s El Topo and wanted to make a film like it. And indeed, it turns out the two were friends and that Jodorowski goaded Hopper into a non-linear re-cutting. While that may have been an innovative choice for the time, it just makes the movie even more befuddling. The Last Movie is indeed a “passionate personal vision” as a friend of mine quipped in the film’s defense, but passion isn’t enough. The ideas, metaphors, and “scathing critiques of the Hollywood system” have to actually make sense onscreen and not just in the director’s head (which is another reason why I find the Hopper double-feature and I’m Still Here so similar).

L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller‘s The American Dreamer is an all-access profile of Dennis Hopper during The Last Movie‘s post-production. Did you find it hard to swallow that Joaquin Phoenix would snort cocaine and solicit prostitutes while being recorded? Wait till you see what Hopper does! On-camera, he boozes, drugs, womanizes, and engages in at least one bathtub menage au trois. It is a sad record of an artist shielded from all criticism by success and fame. Playboy bunnies find eloquence in his pretentious babblings. He casually tells the directors his fantasy would be “three woman and hot springs,” and they magically produce a dozen fawning females in the strangest sexual powwow ever recorded. Dennis Hopper loves to hear himself talk, and his audience of adoring women are pure uncut heroin. I sat in awe of the words escaping his mouth; but I couldn’t turn away, similar to how I’ve watched the Christine O’Donnell 1st Amendment clip about a dozen times.

At this point you probably think I’ve got something in for Dennis Hopper. That’s not the case at all. He was one of the best actors of his generation and his 1980 film Out of the Blue is one of my favorite movies. An artist’s personal life matters little to me when it doesn’t reach the screen. But The Last Movie and American Dreamer ARE Dennis Hopper embodied — and sadly, at a time in his life when he was addicted to drugs, alcohol, women, and himself. Watching them is like watching Tom Cruise’s Epic Scientology Masterpiece ™ followed by the million dollar making-of.

Tony Youngblood is the current Foursquare Mayor of the Belcourt Theatre, a film and music snob, and producer of the experimental improv music blog and podcast Theatre Intangible. His favorite films include Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray, Abbass Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician, Lee Chang Dong’s Oasis, and Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap.

When I’m not carving topical jack-o-lanterns and funding my dentist’s third home, I treat Halloween as an opportunity to catch up with the horror greats I spent my adolescence cowering from (thanks to vividly traumatic childhood experiences with The Shining and The Exorcist that may or may not have involved pants-peeing). No longer new to these parts, my map says scaremeisters Bava and Fulci are in the fog up ahead as I run screaming and unarmed from the well acquainted monsters of Argento and Romero. But my most recent detour brought me to the doorstep of the mindless butcher Leatherface in one of the scariest horror films I’ve ever seen.  Somehow I survived the breathtaking nihilism of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 slasher template The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Like Night of the Living Dead (but perhaps more schlockily evocative of Russ Meyer or Monte Hellman), the first thing you notice about TCSM is the lo-fi creative beauty: camera flashes illuminate the black as we hear shoveling and the knock of wood, sumptuous colors and oblique angles invite us to Leatherface’s house for dinner, and quick cuts and zooms augment the terror of the attacks. In the opening, the radio blares reports of widespread grave-robbing and dismembering as we see two corpses artfully tied to a monument. This does not bode well for the vacuous children of Vietnam that pick up a creepy hitchhiker in their Mystery Machine just outside the cemetery. Sure enough, they’re soon marching single-file right into Leatherface’s lumbering arms, no students of history, these heroic happy dead.

But it’s wrong to say The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is nihilistic, because it ferociously reveals its amoral monster for what he is; he can’t be wrong if there is no right. Leatherface, not the film, is nihilistic. Industrialization, institutional power, the draft—that’s nihilistic. In 1974, Nixon resigned from the highest office in America in order to escape brutal impeachment—peace with honor, eh?—and America continued funding a war it had just signed peace accords to end. To Leatherface, we the people are mere bodies for sustenance, the micro version of a global politics fueled by violence. You’re darn right the third act is disgustingly exploitative (and I found it literally nauseating). How else do you describe a violent superpower?

That’s why I found the final, sudden cut-to-black somewhat puzzling—on the one hand, I question the ending’s thematic plausibility, but on the other, the future is very much uncertain. Whatever happens to anyone else, Leatherface rages on, dancing with his chainsaw while the sheriff lies incapacitated and the citizens offer the head cheese. No wonder the remake came in 2003.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said.  His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

TFT 131 – PRINCE OF PERSIA / F FOR FAKE / CAT PEOPLE – CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE / [Member Bonus: The Essential Dennis Hopper]

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TFT 131 running time: 58 minutes 51 seconds – 27mb mp3

PRINCE OF PERSIA starts at 3 minutes

F FOR FAKE starts at 32 minutes 50 seconds

CAT PEOPLE – CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE starts at 45 minutes 50 seconds

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Also Mentioned: TALES FROM THE SCRIPT / STAR WARS – THE PHANTOM EDIT / Theatre Intangible / Criterion Cast

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The Essential Dennis Hopper running time: 47 minutes 45 seconds – 23mb mp3

Films Discussed: “The Twilight Zone” / Easy Rider / The Last Movie / Der amerikanische Freund / Apocalypse Now / River’s Edge / Blue Velvet / Hoosiers / Flashback / Super Mario Bros. / Speed / Basquiat / True Romance / “24″

There’s an infinite amount of content out there Dear Reader – too many movies to possibly see – so how do ya find the good ones?

Your gut feeling, your friends, reviewers you trust – these folks can steer you.  But sometimes your gut is wrong, your friends wouldn’t know a Ti West film from a Western and the reviewer you’ve been consulting is Ben Lyons.

So – to help you out – I present here films you may have not seen due to the bad ‘word on the street’ – well, the ‘word’ was wrong my friends – here are the 10 Most Underrated Films of the Decade:

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Number 10:  RIGHTEOUS KILL
Sleaze is spread over this B-Movie detective story with a thick trowel, and I love it for that.  It’s the only film in the history of The Film Talk which I convinced Gareth not to see on the basis that it wouldn’t be worth watching.  I was wrong.  My ‘movie spidey sense’ deserted me on this one folks.

It’s the kind of film, that if it had been made in the 50′s in black and white, connoisseurs of cinema would be falling over to watch – they’d have framed original posters of Righteous Kill on their walls and it would have starred Robert Ryan and Ralph Meeker.

Also in its plus column:  I guarantee this will the only film in which Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and 50 Cent share a scene – so savour it.

Bottom line:  watch it when you’re in the mood for a short, sharp and seedy crime flick.

RIGHTEOUS KILL on ‘THE FILM TALK’ PODCAST

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Number 9:  GANGS OF NEW YORK

Yeah this film was nominated for 10 Oscars and a lot of people saw it.  But when it was released there was a general sense that, sure – you have to nominate it ’cause it’s made by Marty Scorsese and cost a lot of money and has stars and and and and…it’s not really any good is it?

Oh yes it is.

When I saw it originally it didn’t make an impact.  Sometimes you can see but not observe as Sherlock Holmes once said, (really, Guy Ritchie, really?).  This famously happened with Blade Runner – which, although it’s a pretty silly film, has had a massive impact on consumer product design which critics and audiences couldn’t see or predict at the time.  This happened with Gangs of New York, (and Australia which gets a nod later in this post).

At the time the press was caught up in stories of the film’s huge budget and gossip about Leonardo and Diaz; but this won’t matter when we’re dead, (same thing happened with Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai – people were aghast that Rita Hayworth’s hair was dyed blond for the role – yet how many people on the street today could identify Hayworth by name if you showed them her picture, 5 in a hundred?).  It’s the film that matters.  Not the story surrounding it.

Now, when I saw it I thought at the time that Gangs should have been the story of Liam Neeson and Daniel Day ‘Look at me ACT!’ Lewis, not Di Caprio and Carmen and all the rest who I didn’t care about one fig.

But I see now that that’s part of the point of the film.

It’s not about individuals – it’s about the sweep of history – of collections of individuals – whose separate choices, in retrospect are inevitable; the mob, the collective we, who, being on the ground level, don’t have the perspective to see what’s really going on.

It’s a magnificent, vital, full-bodied f**k of a film – now that I’m sold on Bluray I can’t wait to see it again in that format – you should see it too – if you’re old enough, and wise enough to see just what’s really in front of your face.

(Also, I’d like one the hats pictured above – just sayin’)

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Number 8:  A.I.
The downbeat reaction to A.I. was clearly due to the odd fact that people aren’t used to thinking while watching a Steven Spielberg film.  They not conditioned to look for recurring themes, motifs and complexity*, and so they missed what was going on just under the surface, (like an itch you’re not sure is there and definitely can’t find), in this strange, strange film.

Strange, because it’s a tribute film.

You don’t get many of those – Birth is another.  Oddly they’re both Kubrick tribute films.  A.I., like Birth which I’ll discuss another time, is filled with compositional nods to Stanley Kubrick pics and this synthesis of Spielberg, the director of films for children and young-adults, and Kubrick, a director, like Tarkovsky, in which the more experienced you are the better the films get, leads to a unsettling feeling while you watch.  You’re like a child who, after the most terrible dream you’ve ever had, wakes up, looks in the mirror, and sees an old person staring back.

That doesn’t sound like a fun viewing experience-date night-bring the gang over kind of film, and it’s not.  Doesn’t mean it isn’t underrated and you shouldn’t see it though.

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(*Though they should be – Spielberg is solid as a director:  such grasp of cinema grammar in Jaws! I say that even though I’m not a huge fan:  I wish he made films for adults, not for kids).

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Number 7:  QUANTUM OF SOLACE
James Bond actioner Casino Royale was a huge success both critically and commercially.  So expectations were high for its sequel Quantum of Solace.  Once it was released, disappointment was palpable.  Viewers found the camera too shaky and the plot, (was there one?), nonsensical.

But, as Gareth said to me after recently re-watching Casino Royale, Quantum makes Casino seem old fashioned.  He’s right.  I loved Casino Royale – but positioned next to Quantum of Solace it’s practically creaky.

Quantum is the shortest James Bond pic ever made.  Also the grittiest.  And the most urgent.  There are lingering shots of poor people in the film.  Let me type that again:  there are lingering shots of poor people in the film.

Why?

Because that’s what the film is about – the massive inequality between wealth and poverty in our world.  It’s a Bond pic in which the ‘bad guys’, (the World’s Most Evil Hedge Fund?), are surreptitiously trying to acquire Bolivia’s water supply.  In this film it’s not enough anymore for the powerful to just make money off the backs of the poor – that’s not evil enough for these people – they have to strip the exploited of their human rights as well.  This is hard stuff.

Also, Bond and the Girl, exhausted and dejected, have to wait in line to take a bus.

As to the shaky cam element of the pic – once I saw it in Bluray it all became clear, literally.  Films today are being shot by people reviewing the footage in real time on a monitor on the set.  Subsequently, sequences in movies today are being designed, (whether consciously or not), for people to watch at home where they can see the whole frame in their field of view, (the anti-iMax).  If you’re in a theatre watching Quantum then the screen is too big for you to catch the action unless you sit in the back row – this pic is better at home, (and the Bluray version is so much clearer than a theatrical print that it’s practically a different film).

(QOS also has the greatest ‘assembling of villains at a meeting’ scene ever in a Bond film – its use of music, of silence, of silence with violence, makes this probably the best sequence in the Bond Series).

QUANTUM OF SOLACE on ‘THE FILM TALK’ PODCAST

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Number 6:  TAKEN
No one took this film seriously – it’s just an ugly, brutal revenge thriller, right?  Wrong.

It’s one of the films of the decade and tells a story that, well, it may be the first story ever told.  I go into detail on the why Taken is one of the vital pictures of the 2000′s here:

‘Taken’ aka “We used to outsource these things”

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TAKEN on ‘THE FILM TALK’ PODCAST

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Number 5:  THE HAPPENING
M. Night Shyamalan’s terrifying eco-thriller was laughed out of the theatre by audiences and critics.

Well, not on the night I saw it.  On the night I saw it the audience was scared out of their friggin’ minds.  Reading the reviews it was clear that The Happening was caught up in the M. Night backlash – for whatever reason people really dislike the guy, (I could care less, we landed on the Moon using Newtonian physics, and Newton was a world-class as***le – so who cares about the personality of the artist?  To rework Hitchcock’s phrase:  “it’s only the movie”).

With this in mind – if The Happening had been Night’s first film it would have been praised to the sky.

This is a film in which, (pardon the spoilerish pun), people couldn’t see the forest for the trees:  they complained that Marky Mark’s character was an idiot – but,  that. was. the. point.  We’re all idiots.  Don’t we see what we’re doing?  I’m not saying we’re destroying the planet, cause that kind of anthropic centrism is laughable*, but we are making it a worse place for us to live in.

In addition to the vital themes of the pic, in concrete, visceral ways the film is packed with thrilling, terrifying moments – and it has the greatest billboard scene in movies, (after the Warren Oates cameo in Badlands of course).

But, alas, there’s so much bad juju surrounding M. that the film will be better served if you wait a while before seeing it.  So set your Google Calendar or iCal or whatever mechanical counting device you use with a reminder to watch the film in 20 years.

If we’re still here that is.

THE HAPPENING on ‘THE FILM TALK’ PODCAST

(*Hey folks – guess what? The earth doesn’t ‘care’ about us – it was here billions of year before we got here and it’ll be around billions of years after – we’re just a tiny film of life on this globe here for an instant).

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Number 4:  MIAMI VICE
Ok.  Now.  Miami Vice.  The Michael Mann film from 2006.

Is amazing.

It contains some of the most astonishing moving pictures ever made.

If you know what you’re looking at than this film will astound you.  To help out in that regard I’d suggest you take college level courses on the architecture of the 1930′s, contemporary aeronautics, criminal investigation as it pertains to inter-agency field work, the Law of the Sea, the history of the narcotics trade in the Americas and practical bar-tending.

It is, in sum, a visual catalog of where we are now.  In every scene we see that which we’ve seen before – but presented with more clarity, precision and accuracy than could possibly be expected in commercial cinema, (but not so surprising though when you learn that the production cost of MV exceeded that of the annual budget of the Miami Police Department).

My wife, who is, among many other things, a pilot, punched her fist in the air during the scene in which Jamie Foxx takes off from an absurdly short runaway.  She’s not the fist punching type.  Or the going to movies with guns, violence and blood type.  Yet she punched her fist in the air.

Why?

Because in Miami Vice we see flight as it has never been depicted – you get some real sense of what it’s like to be up in the air – piloting a man-made machine that lets you fly.  That’s just one example out of hundreds – in this way Vice is an extraordinary film.

It speaks to the decline in our film-going culture, as all the selections in this post do actually, that it’s not recognized for what it achieves.

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Number 3:  THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, (henceforth referred to in this post as TAOJJBTCRF), is a clear and simple illustration of an interesting phenomenon that effects all of us.

What do I mean?

Well – I first saw this film in the States – it had been out for a few weeks and was already disappearing in theaters due to dismal reviews and tepid audience reaction.  I was just as stunned at this as I was by the film – a movie with the most courageous, innovative cinematography a commercial picture has had in a decade – with performances, direction and script to match.  Yet it was still commercial in the contemporary corporate style.

In past decades a pic like this that exuded quality, seriousness, star power and breathtaking craftsmanship, all within the framework of what is deemed commercially acceptable would be the Best Picture winner of the year, hands down.

But here in the States?  Pffttt.  Nobody wanted to know.

The day after I saw TAOJJBTCRF I flew to London for a photoshoot.  And was stunned on my arrival at Gatwick to see posters for TAOJJBTCRF laden with critics’ praise – TAOJJBTCRF was clearly seen by reviewers in the UK as a masterpiece.

What does this mean?

Nobody knows anything.

Which leads me to:

Number 2:  NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS

Ok, this one is a bit of a cheat.

It’s not that National Treasure:  Book of Secrets is underrated – meaning it’s not a good film that people misunderstood as bad – it’s special in that it isn’t rated at all.

And because of that people didn’t realize that they were watching what may be the most important film of the decade – in that with National Treasure: Book of Secrets the concepts of originality, wit, humor, in short – of humanity, (meaning that which is written by a human hand), are dead.

What am I talking about?  I’ll tell you.  You know how, if you were typing a script’s first draft, you might write in the margins ‘insert action sequence here’, or ‘maguffin needed to drive plot spring – some sort of secret book – figure out by Tuesday’; that kind of thing.

Well.

In National Treasure: BOS it appears that they actually went ahead and shot this first draft, or more accurately, they shot what seems to be a computer generated outline for the film.  BOS doesn’t appear to have been written with any human involvement – so the ‘maguffin’, the secret book that US Presidents have been hoarding since the birth of the Republic is called…

…wait for it…

The President’s Secret Book.

I have not once sliver of doubt in my mind Dear Reader that in years to come it will be revealed that BOS was the first large budget film written wholly by a computer program - and for that reason National Treasure: Book of Secrets is the most underrated film of the decade.

Or it would have been if not for the travesty of misunderstanding that greeted the movie below.

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Number 1:  AUSTRALIA
What the hell?

I try to stay away from reviews, previews, capsule synopsis, posters, purloined internet images, intentionally leaked purloined internet images – anything that will give me some clue as to what a film is about before I see it.

Why?

Because I’ve screened so many films that even seeing one frame of a flick will cause it to unfold and spill its mysteries to me.  Don’t believe it?  Ask Gareth sometime – I’ve stopped telling him which films not to see after the Righteous Kill misstep, but before that all it took was a couple of seconds of some trailer on iTunes for me to inform my dear co-host that, correctly, a film was a stinker, even though he was convinced of the opposite.

I say this so you’ll know that before I screened Australia I had no idea as to its subject matter, who was in it, how much it cost, etc. etc.  All I knew was that it was directed by Baz Luhrmann.  I recall that I may have been expecting a 90 minute musical.

What I saw instead was the greatest 1940′s epic Hollywood never made.

In 500 years, when movies are merely a curio to our replacements, (I imagine they’ll be vat-grown bio-synthetic descendants of the computer algorithm that wrote National Treasure: Book of Secrets), Australia will be held up as one of the great ‘Big Pictures’.  It’s better than Gone With the Wind.

Full of love and lust, treachery and villainy; scenes of great beauty and despair, it really is the great barnstormer of the studio system that was never produced, (and of course in 500 years time whoever is around won’t know the difference – Hugh Jackman and Clark Gable will be contemporaries in their minds).

It’s also the kind of film that, as with with Gangs of New York and Miami Vice, will soon never be made again.  Not only not made, but unable to be made.

People or synthoids will look back at these films just as we now look back at Medieval Cathedrals*, marvel and exclaim “just how did they pull that off?”

AUSTRALIA on ‘THE FILM TALK’ PODCAST

(*I’m sure I’ve heard this thought somewhere before – but I can’t find the source – if anybody knows please tell me and I’ll update the post – thanks).

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Ok Dear Reader -  that’s my Underrated list for the 2000′s.  Next week: the 10 Most Overrated Movies of the Decade.   Prepare yourselves.

Jul 24, 1999 – CNET News Story – Pixar and Disney Collaborating on a new Tron film:

Pixar Studios to remake Disney’s Tron?

It set the scene for a generation of hi-tech sci-fi movies and, arguably, inspired some of the best films of the genre. Tron, the legendary Disney movie loved by the thirty-something generation, is rumored to be in the re-make room with some very serious backers, including Steve Jobs.

Jobs, on stage this week with the iBook, also has another day job, running Pixar Animation Studios (Nasdaq:PIXR), maker of “Toy Story” and “A Bug’s Life.” According to one source, Pixar may be working on a remake of the classic ’80s sci-fi film.

The source, who asked not to be identified, said Pixar is trying to decide whether to remake the original or create a sequel. It will begin work on the project once Toy Story II hits the theaters November 24. John Lasseter, Toy Story’s director, will head the production.

November 1st, 2009 – The ‘Tron’ sequel never sees the light of day – we don’t know why.  But now comes word that work on the film was far further along than anyone suspected.  A soundtrack was commissioned.  Now, 10 years after conception, that soundtrack has been released, free for all in multiple formats:

Tron Rise of the Virals

In late 1998, I was commissioned to compile and produce the soundtrack for a sequel to the film “Tron”. A draft of the story had already been written and early filming had begun (as reported by ZDNet on July 27, 1999). As I understand it, the film was kept in great confidence with the producers as Pixar was still in negotiations with Disney about the responsibilities of the production teams.

“Rise Of The Virals” was a fantastic, but much darker storyline from the original — different from the “Into The Machine” pitch made to Disney by another party. It involved updating the ENCOM universe to a networked system (thanks to the Internet), but also created a darker world — full of programs abandoned as buggy systems (or “mutants”) and abused by corrupt users as viral systems. Furthermore, the story included the death of Flynn and presented questions about the digital life of programs lasting beyond the mortality of their creators — the users.

My task was to compile great underground artists to create a new soundtrack for this darker world of Tron. After the completion of the initial tracklist and first production draft of the soundtrack, it seemed as if negotiations between Pixar and Disney had broken down. Funding for the project was eventually pulled.

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I don’t know how much, if any, of the above quote is true.  But what does it matter?  What is meaningful here is the music.  It’s being pitched as the soundtrack for a lost film – and as such while listening one cannot separate oneself from the sense of the elegiac; from a sense of nostalgia for a future that never was.  A world of the future from 1999 – in which we’d strap in/plug in to a virtual reality that promised…what?  Now, instead of escaping into a virtual world, the virtual world has seeped into real life.  We’re beginning to craft a virtual world around us using the hive mind technologies of Twitterbook and the like.

So are we, in fact, moving into the ‘inverse future’ of what would have been promised by ‘Rise of the Virals’?  And, if it had been made, how would it have changed how we use and view technology today?  We can’t know – but listen to the music.  You can just about feel it – as if you had a fleeting, hazy glimpse of a some parallel universe that just might be around us, all the time.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter if we can’t reach that parallel world – maybe in memory an unfinished film can become more present to us than it ever would have been if it had been completed.  If ‘Rise of the Virals’ had been made we’d have digital copies of it in whatever format we wanted at any time we wanted.  But how can digital be something real, real to us as analog creatures; how could it be something remembered?  Digital copies are exact – there is no change in the information, 1 is always 1, forever – this isn’t memory – memory degrades – digital is something else.

Memory is analog – memory moves and resculpts and disappears.

Strange ramblings I know on a late Sunday night this November 1st – but that’s what the ‘Viral’s’ soundtrack stirs in me.  It’s the future we never had.

In this week’s action-packed, adrenaline-fueled thrill-ride of an episode Gareth and I review what I think is the Coen Brother’s best film: ‘A Serious Man’; ‘Amelia’ – a pic with the all the excitement of small town cattle auction, the Escapism Film Festival in Durham and the astonishing ‘The Room’; (special thanks to DJ Mark Barbagallo for his wonderful interpretation of an old classic):

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