CINEMA16: AMERICAN SHORT FILMS
www.cinema16.co.uk. Double DVD £19.99
I thoroughly enjoyed the Cinema 16 Short Film compilations to
date (prior to this we’ve had British and 
European
Short Films). It’s a simple but effective formula. The DVDs
collect together short films, often by directors who are better
known for their full length features. This roll call of names
will definitely make you sit up and take notice: this particular
DVD includes shorts by George Lucas, Tim Burton, Gus Van Sant,
Todd Solondz, Andy Warhol and many more.
As with any compilation of films it’s a mixed bag and the
films vary so wildly from each other that I’d recommend
that you don’t try to take it all in in one sitting. I found
that nice chunks of about 4 or 5 films at a time worked best.
The standard is unremittingly high. A highlight for me was Alexander
Payne’s ‘Carmen’ which I couldn’t believe
when I read the sleeve notes afterwards was his UCLA graduation
short. While it was rough and ready,
it was an ambitious undertaking. I hope they gave him a good mark
for it! Gus Van Sant’s 1982 adaptation of the William Burroughs
short story ‘The Discipline of DE’ is one of the more
peculiar shorts that I’ve seen recently, but it was fascinating
stuff and while he’s certainly a film maker these days who’s
prepared to take risks, this film demonstrates that he was way
out there on his own personal limb way back when. All in all this
DVD is perfect for film buffs to be able to trace their favourite
directors work back to their early days. And for the great unwashed
public too to watch some bite-sized chunks of great cinema.
Annie Bowles
Wonderwall
Prism Leisure
Cert tbc (UK, 1968)
A curiosity from the late Sixties, largely notable for its soundtrack
by George Harrison, Wonderwall is a period piece of featherweight
lightness. Its sketchy plot surrounds a scatterbrained scientist
who discovers a hole in the wall, through which he can spy on
the photographic model Penny (Jane Birkin) vamping it up in the
flat next door. After he accidentally munches on an LSD-laced
apple, we are subjected to a series of extended dream sequences,
naïve animation and psychedelic passages, all thrumming along
to the strains of Harrison’s raga-influenced score.
Ironically, its pedigree is as solid as they come – it was
written by French screenwriter and sometime Polanski collaborator,
Gerard Brach (Jean De Florette, Tess). Perhaps he was having an
off day though, because its gentle humour – read ‘feeble’
– hasn’t aged well, mostly relying on pitching the
Establishment against the groovy Counter Culture kids. Still,
if watching scantily clad bints rolling around under coloured
lamps is your bag, this is a must. Certainly, it might make more
sense under the influence. For Sixties enthusiasts, fashion historians,
hardcore stoners and Beatles completists only then, which includes
a fair amount of my friends. Otherwise; turn on, tune in, drop
off.
Alasdair Bouch
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Party Monster
Prism Leisure
18 (US, 2003)
Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato have built a reputation for
themselves by slinking around the seedy side of town. The pair
responsible for the porn documentary Inside Deep Throat wrote
and directed this biopic based on James St. James’s book
Disco Bloodbath. It is ostensibly the true story of Michael Alig,
a wannabe whose dreams come true when he engineers the rise (and
fall) of the Club Kid culture in 1980’s New York, but it
owes as much to fantasy as the book on which it is based.
Fortunately, while it glamorises the hedonistic drug-crazed antics
of vacuous celebrity (sounds familiar?), it also gleefully presents
the flipside to all this. The twisted diamante knife in its back
- the dark comedown and ultimately, the price that is paid in
overdoses, murder and prison – is all too quickly glossed
over in favour of ‘fabulousness’ and histrionic surrealism.
Seth Green and Macaulay Culkin camp it up gloriously as St. James
and Alig, while Marilyn Manson enjoys a crash course cameo as
Christina - an Andy Warhol-style superstar - but Chloë Sevigny
is sadly underused as Alig’s plaything Gitsie. Nevertheless,
despite a hollow centre, it looks authentically divine - which,
as St. James might say, is the point anyway.
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Tattoo
Prism Leisure
18 (Ger, 2002)
The cast of Robert (Flightplan) Schwentke’s gruesome thriller
Tattoo have good reason to look dour. Pasty-faced August Diehl
is Marc, a drug-dealing police officer blackmailed into joining
the homicide squad. His superior, Detective Minks (Christian Redl),
resembles the quintessential East End nightclub bouncer, dead
of eye and bald of pate. He is still licking his wounds after
the disappearance of his daughter, following the death of his
wife in a hit and run accident. Flayed bodies are turning up at
the local morgue. This isn’t The Magic Roundabout.
In fact, there are the grimy fingerprints of Se7en all over Tattoo,
but while Diehl may be a poor man’s Brad Pitt, he makes
for a convincingly reluctant hero. An imaginative premise gives
way to a well paced, competently executed finale, if a not-entirely
surprising one. What impresses though, is the film’s downbeat
tone, relying less on hysterical theatrics than good old-fashioned
tension. No surprise then, that Hollywood took note of Schwentke.
In redefining the word ‘skinflick’, Tattoo may be
the mark of him.
