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Reviews
The Judy Spots (1995)
great riot grrrl aesthetics
In my opinion, this is one of Sadie Benning's best, primarily because it epitomized her place within the riot grrrl culture that emerged in the early 1990s.
Comprised of five short vignettes about Judy, a troubled teenager made of paper-maché, "The Judy Spots", were originally brief video 'spots' shown on MTV in 1998. When Judy (voiced by Benning) gets depressed she cries, and the sky rains tears, sharing her brief outburst. Judy's alienation is further experienced at her drive-thru fast food job where she convinces herself she really is a 'people person'. If she's such a 'people person', why is her fragile psychic state threatening to eclipse her cardboard cut-out milieu? When Judy later has a nightmare, a series of surreal images pass through her head, spill out into her bedroom and eventually seem to pre-empt an argument she has later with her band mate (voiced by Kathleen Hanna best known from the grunge grrrl band Bikini Kill). They fight on the phone and Judy quits the band. In the next 'spot' Judy returns to band practice and sings her new song. The band is joined by Barbie groupies who thrash their synthetic hair around. Judy, it seems, triumphs on stage and screen.
A wow of a short film that is up there with Todd Haynes' outlaw classic "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story".
Can I Be Your Bratwurst, Please? (1999)
Stiff acting makes for strangely compelling viewing
I saw this on TV and was drawn to it only because of the obvious: a chance to see whether porn 'actor' Jeff Stryker can actually 'act'. And, oh yeah, I was also hoping his best asset - his famous penis - would get a chance to act too!
Well, this short film desperately wants to be a John Waters-styled comedy and it fails. Yet at the same time it is strangely compelling; probably because of how bad it actually is. Unfortunately Stryker's acting is 'stiff':
Larger Than Life (1997)
'Larger than Life' is a tribute to the type of cheezy Z-grade horror films that Ed Wood would have made.
'Larger than Life' is one of the special features on the Australian edition of the 'Eight Legged Freaks' DVD. This short film, directed by NZ filmmaker Ellory Elkayem, inspired the feature 'Eight Legged Freaks' (also directed by Elkayem).
'Larger than Life' is a tribute to the type of cheezy Z-grade horror films that Ed Wood would have made. Filmed in black & white, Elkayem's film concerns a young woman caught up in the specificities of everyday domestic life: cleaning the bath, using a malfunctioning gas stove, calling the exterminator because of the not-so-usual-proliferation-of-larger-than-life-arachnoids! Cue the dramatic orchestrated music and corny spider sound effects and you have classic cheese horror that ironically recalls early exploitation horror flicks without being overly postmodern - or is that postmortem? It's hard to tell the difference these days...
'Larger than Life' is a great short that ranks alongside fellow NZ-filmmaker Alison Maclean's dark, menacing black & white short 'Kitchen Sink' (1989).
Harvey (2002)
evocative...
Harvey is an evocative short, probably not as scary as it could have been, but certainly dark, atmospheric.
Harvey (Nicholas Hope; who once played Bubby, from Bad Boy Bubby) plays the eponymous character, a neurotic mess of a man, huddled in his apartment, for no apparent reason. Caressing the keyhole, his eye is drawn to a neighbor. They meet and eventually merge. It's Dead Ringers without a scalpel. Chang and Eng sans brotherly love.
Harvey isn't at all about Siamese Twins, I digress. It's a short about the merging of two dissimilar bodies; a mirror-image accident of fate well-versed in digital effects. What can I say, without giving away the ten minute narrative?
Keep your needle and thread at home.
Backyard Movie (1991)
Watching this film was a scopic treat!
I saw Backyard Movie on a late night Australian TV show devoted to short films ("Eat Carpet") in the early 1990s. It was an astonishing experience because I had never seen such explicit homoerotic content on TV before. I was a 17 year old latent homo, so it was a totally welcomed experience.
Directed by photographer / film-maker Bruce Weber, Backyard Movie blends Super 8 home movie footage, music, on-screen text describing formative sexual experiences of the director, and black and white footage of a gorgeous nude model jumping up and down on a trampoline. It all sounds arty, perhaps pretentious. Weber captured a similar homoerotic surface appeal in the music clip he directed for the Pet Shop Boy, "Being Boring".
I haven't seen Backyard Movie in years so my memory of it has been transformed into a somewhat romantic memory, much like the ones described by Weber in the on-screen text. All I really remember was how the experience was a scopic treat; visual pleasure for a 17 year old, um, latent homo.
The Night, the Prowler (1978)
One of the best Australian films to come out of Australia in the 1970s.
The Night, The Prowler is one of the best Australian films to come out of Australia in the 1970s. Set in Centennial Park (where the film's writer Patrick White lived at the time) The Night, The Prowler concerns a young girl, Felicity Bannister (Kerry Walker), and her journey from sexual repression to liberation. Early in the film, a prowler breaks into Felicity's room. Felicity claims to have been raped, though it remains ambiguous as to what really happened.
The experience opens Felicity's eyes to her rebellious side, and she too begins prowling the streets and park at night, garbed in a black leather jacket. The bizarre contents of the night include stoned party goers, homeless bums and other like-minded night prowlers. Felicity's behaviour stuns her bourgeoise parents (Ruth Cracknell and John Frawley) mostly because they fear they will be embarrassed within their affluent social set.
Walker and Cracknell turn in career-defining performances and director Jim Sharman (who had previously made The Rocky Horror Picture Show) cleverly balances a camp sensibility with social critique. In my opinion, the bizarre atmosphere evoked in The Night, The Prowler was way ahead of its time and remained unmatched in Australian film until Jane Campion's Sweetie (1989).
Why don't films like this ever get a DVD release?
Flat Is Beautiful (1998)
The dream-like aesthetic and kitschy mise-en-scene of Flat is Beautiful abets a sense of awkward childhood reverie...
Sadie Benning is to New Queer Cinema what Andy Warhol was to Pop Art. Warhol's work traded identity for repetition, while Benning's cinema empties identity, replacing it with fragmented narratives of desire. When Benning acquired a Fisher-Price toy camera - the PXL 2000 - in the early 1990s, she created a body of work that made film-makers envious as the PXL 2000 is now extinct. Flat is Beautiful is comprised of strangely monochromatic images, like Michael Almereyda's pixilated vampire flick Nadja (1995). The images float across the screen like crudely enlarged photocopies. On an aesthetic level, pixelvision irons out the kaleidoscopic image, while on a narrative level, pixelvision conveys an alarming sense of psychological intimacy. Flat is Beautiful charts the anxieties of adolescent Taylor (Sammy Steel) who, like her friends and family, has a cartoonish mask for a face. Taylor is starting to realize she can't be a tomboy forever, it just doesn't gel with menstruation. Taylor's relationship with her absent dad is played out over the phone. Her mother is addicted to televised therapy and says to their gay flat-mate Quiggy, "How am I supposed to deal with my inner child? I have my own child to deal with." Quiggy thinks he'll never get laid, until one day a postman delivers more than just the 'male'. Family interaction is feigned, providing a space for Taylor's Sapphic sexuality to emerge. While this scenario smacks of Freudian slippages, Benning's dream-like aesthetic gives it credence. The kitschy mise-en-scene abets a sense of awkward childhood reverie, overriding psychosexual cliche. It is Taylor's fantasy world of rock stars and Atari computer games that dominates. But it is the one toy that we don't see that really steals the show: the Fisher Price PXL 2000.