Three Films Make A Post: BUDDY HAS AN AXE TO GRIND. A BIG AXE.

The Black Room (2016): Softcore veteran director Rolfe Kanefsky here turns his gaze to the seldom effective genre of the softcore sex horror comedy, delivering nothing to write home about. Nudity-wise, the film is surprisingly restrained, probably because it managed to catch Natasha Henstridge for the protagonist role but clearly can’t afford for her to take her kit off, leaving the bit of sleaze it does offer in the hands of the other actresses and Lukas Hassel. It doesn’t much matter anyhow, for the supposedly sexy bits – apart from some pretty damn embarrassing stuff like Henstridge having her way with a washing machine or the other way round – usually go hand in hand with the gory bits, keeping The Black Room away from possible titillation for anyone but the most specialized audience. Which  of course would be perfectly okay if the film had much else to offer. Alas, the plot is a bit boring, the comedy unfunny, and while the effects are actually fine, there’s still nothing going on here to keep one awake.

The Frighteners (1996): Of course, I just might have no sense of humour at all, for I never did find myself terribly amused by the very slapstick-y first hour or so of Peter Jackson’s final horror comedy, apart from Jeffrey Combs’s hilarious FBI agent. To me, the film’s first part is a bit of a slog, with a plot that doesn’t get going because it is permanently put on hold for funny bits that aren’t. Once the film actually does get going, and the jokes and the actually rather dark story begin to seem to belong in the same film, it’s a different matter, the film turning funny and exciting and even a bit scary.

Exotica (1994): If you look at it from a certain angle, Atom Egoyan’s film could very well be your standard erotic thriller. Of course, it’s not a thriller at all but a meditation on loss, guilt, the search for closure, degrees of obsession, the lies we tell ourselves to survive, as well as the human capacity for compassion. It is shaped – quite typical of the director – like a puzzle box or a mystery, not because Egoyan seems much interested in suspense but because understanding the film’s characters and the ways their lives intersect is not meant to be a dry movement from plot point A to point B. There are complex and complicated undercurrents to these peoples’ lives we can better understand when we don’t experience them too linearly.


Apart from letting the viewer do this rather brilliantly, Exotica is also one of Egoyan’s most beautiful films, coming by poetry and beauty and sadness without feeling to strain for them, and certainly never showing any of the tendencies to artsy bombast that have marred parts of Egoyan’s films in the last fifteen years or so.

In short: Forgotten Silver (1995)

So, what do you do after you have created some of the core texts of the splatter comedy sub-genre out of next to no money and a lot of passion and have finished directing your first film with something of an actual budget? Peter Jackson (and his partner in crime Costa Botes) decided to make a fake documentary about the very fictitious filmmaking pioneer Colin McKenzie (Thomas Robins), a luckless genius if ever there was one.

New Zealander McKenzie invented every basic element of modern filmmaking before everyone else did, from sound film to colour film to the tracking shot to the close-up, but was hindered in his artistic endeavours by one disaster after the next, not even able to finish his magnum opus, a decades-in-the-making version of "Salome".

Forgotten Silver is often seen as an inventive parody of documentary films, but to me, it functions more as a Tall Tale about the early days of filmmaking, the early history of the last century interfering with the life of people, and people on the margins staying marginalized. Sure, Jackson and Botes also make fun of the absurd assumption that something told in the tone of a documentary must be true, even if the tale it tells is patently absurd, but this doesn't seem to be the film's main gist to me (and really, if something is as self-evident as the untrustworthiness of documentary films, there's no need to spend an hour-long movie demonstrating it).

Jackson and Botes dive into the fabulist aspect of their film with wild abandon, starting out with absurd ideas like a steam-driven film projector and don't seem willing or able to stop themselves from getting stranger from there. Even though some of the ideas or jokes by necessity fall a little flat, there's no arguing with the enthusiasm with which the directors tell their story, or moments of utter genius where love for film and filmmaking seem to give the film a warm glow. The film's final ten minutes, which consist of a condensed version of McKenzie's unfinished "Salome", the imaginary film (besides "The King in Yellow") I'd most like to see, are especially lovely in this respect.

Love seems to be Forgotten Silver's central emotion to me: it is there in the tragic love story (of course there is one) between McKenzie and his Salome May Belle (Sarah McLeod), the obvious affection for the visionaries and intellectual outlaws that were the early filmmakers (the anti-thesis to the passionless canon-building self-important middle-aged white men of today's professional film criticism), love for New Zealand, and the love for telling an outrageous made-up story for other people to fall in love with.

 

Technorati-Tags: new zealandish movies,in short,peter jackson,costa botes,fake documentary