Squid Wreck @ Puppets Up!

Call it a set piece, a puppet, an installation, a sculpture, whatever you like, but our beloved Squid Wreck will be in the public eye once again from now until September 28th in North Vancouver at the Cafe for Contemporary Art‘s PUPPET’S UP EXHIBITION! The hybrid cafe/gallery space is just a three minute walk from Lonsdale Quay and boasts an impressive year-round curation of local and global art.

Squid Wreck (also known by the affectionate monicker “Septopus” by its makers) was created for my short film The Anachronism by a team of artists spearheaded by my close collaborators Dusty Hagerud, Miyuki Mori, and my father Gordon Long.

The mammoth undertaking, which involved the crew working around the clock in the final weeks of preparation, was completed on July 7th, 2008, literally seconds before the camera started rolling on it.

Since fulfilling its first life as a set piece for the film (winning a Leo Award for Production Design for its trouble) Squid Wreck has found new homes in several gallery spaces throughout Vancouver. The Septopus held court with other “audacious and improbable large-scale kinetic, robotic, and mechanized sculptures” at the eatART Laboratory during the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games,and squatted in the Dowtown Eastside Chapel Arts Gallery in April of the same year.

More on the Puppets Up show from CAFCA’s website:

“CAFCA140 is known for its unusual exhibitions, but this time is almost unheard of: a show of puppets, instruments of puppetry and actual puppet shows. The exhibition is the brain-child and product of hard-work by organizer, Dusty Hagerud. Dusty has gathered some of Vancouver’s excellent puppeteers and their favourite puppets for the show. It’s been a long time coming, and its really worth a look at these remarkable exhibition.

Dusty points out that puppets is an overlooked if not derided art form, not only today but also throughout history. Christian institutions in medieval England labelled puppetry the work of the devil. Puppetry fell from royalty into the realm of travelling entertainers and gypsies. Ironically, the church utilized puppetry and its evocative and narrative characteristics to influence the general public. Nowadays, puppets rank up there with ceramics, textiles, blanket weaving and other so-called crafts. It’s exactly the controversy that attracts Dusty to this bonafide form of artistic expression. We agree with Dusty. The line between arts and crafts is not only a fine one but also a foolish one. We see the attitude expressed in puppetry as decidedly anti-academic and Do-It-Yourself. That’s just a healthy outlook. Nevertheless, performance arts is the closest form of fine arts that include the multi-dimensional aspects of puppetry, should you need to know.

The crude construction methods and materials — bent cane, grass, real hair and even dried fruit — of some of the puppets are remarkably telling. It easy to think oftramp-art created by Depression-era travellers when viewing the works. Interesting, some of these crudely formed puppets come from Japan, suggesting a vagabond culture in that country. Or perhaps just an interest and respect for ready-mades.”

If you haven’t already, I invite you to check out the Squid Wreck in its most cinematic incarnation:

 

Janelle Monáe’s Cold War

The Wanderlust Design blog recently snapped some charisma-oozing shots of Janelle Monáe‘s concert in Hartford Conneticut, confirming my suspicion that we are witnessing the emergence of a powerful, authentic star.  This young lady is the REAL DEAL and her sci-fi “afrofuturist” concept album The ArchAndroid might well end up ranking first among my 2010 favourites. The unedited closeup video for her single COLD WAR gives me shivers.

Inception: Less talk, more lanterns please

*No real plot spoilers in here, but you should see Inception before reading about it.

With Inception audiences get to taste the fruit of Hollywood’s rarest labour: an intelligent, ambitious A-list director working with his own original spec script, from the pinnacle of his access to money and resources.

In the wake of achieving a box office wet dream, Christopher Nolan was positioned to test the fickle faith of Warner Bros. with something fresh. Really, we should only be thankful that Nolan chose to gamble his ascendancy on a true dream project. We get to witness big-budget indulgence doled out with taste by a cool, elegant hand. We get a ceiling laced with a hundred lanterns where one would suffice. We get location shooting in Paris, Tangiers, and the Canadian Rockies, beefed up with top notch studio work in LA and London. Architecture porn abounds.

(Baron Haussmann is long overdue for an oscar.)

But all of this wealth is mere window dressing for the central style conceit of Inception: its exposition. You see, Christopher Nolan also has suspense and a fist-sized dollop of momentum mixed into his palette. But sustaining tension in the free-for-all of a dream state is nearly impossible, so Nolan’s solution is to construct byzantine, arbitrary rules around his fictional brand of shared-dreaming in order to lure as many viewers as possible through a plot-maze with invented consequences. The exposition creates narrative traction in the dream space, so that the suspense and action register with weight and dramatic impact.

But, like the resilient thought virus Leo seeks to incept, exposition takes hold and grows in the film like a parasite. It overwhelms the dream set pieces. The film ends up being more about head-games than dreams. It’s a waltz between Nolan and his audience. He pushes us backward through clever explanations as quickly as possible, spinning around plot holes that only exist in the film’s dream within a dream a within dream logic because of rules that were introduced earlier in the infinite regress of exposition. Nolan’s screenplay is constantly distracting us from the ample pleasures of his mise-en-scene with a tiresome insistance that it has a patch for every plot hole we might think of next.

The evasion and, I think, the failure of the film is that it sets up this logic pursuit game with the audience only to block our  chance to make meaning via several proposed exits. Critically, it declines to elaborate on the central science fiction conceit of the story: the very device that makes it all possible. Nolan emphasizes exposition, but witholds the satisfaction of a full explanation of his core premise. It’s just a tease, a maze, a dream.

So the trouble is, I spent the whole thing speculating about the plausability of the premise, because the film frequently reminded me to question it. Consequently I never suspended my disbelief. I never accepted the central premise of the story. I never achieved a sensory state that reminded me of dreaming (except for that one moment when the first dream collapsed.) I was too focused on explanations. I recognized my assigned role in Nolan’s experiment, and the final shot arrived with a foregone thud.

For me this confluence of budget, talent and visual carte blanche comes out bittersweet. It’s fabulous, but suffers by missing an opportunity to go with the flow and luxuriate in the known pleasures and paradoxes of dreaming, free from real world explanations.

Presented with a once-in-a-moviegoing-liftime view of Haussman’s boulevards convoluting into an Escheresque infinity, all the blather about dream timezones felt like clutter. I wish Inception allowed us more time to relish the vistas of of its blank-cheque dream, rather than prodding us through a hyper-accelerated mind maze.

I definitely like The Dark Knight more.

The Anachronism @ 60k

Since it’s online release in April, my short film The Anachronism has been viewed by 60,000 viewers in 100 countries around the world. Even without subtitles, the film has inspired blog posts in a number of languages, including Japanese, Russian, Polish, French and German. Which blows my mind! Thanks for all the love, intertron.

Here are some choice reactions from the (english-language) blogosphere:

“A Beautiful Steampunk Vision comes to life” - QUIET EARTH

“The Anachronism is more than worth the 15 minutes you need to set aside to watch it.” - GIZMODO

“We want to live in this Robot Squid Submarine” - IO9 (Also check out the I09 gallery of stills from The Anachronism.)

“As haunting as it is beautiful.” - THE DAILY GUMBOOT

“Very wonderfully designed.” - MAKING THE MOVIE

“The latest full-blooded Scientific Romance in a long line. That it stars children leads one to implicate it favourably with other children’s films of emotional, philosophical and aesthetic heft, such as The Adventures of Mark Twain and the works of Karel Zeman and Hayao Miyazaki.” -VOYAGES EXTRAORDINAIRE

“The only thing wrong with it is that it isn’t longer. … I’ll just give you one warning: this is a filmmaker who, unlike many others, knows how to let a mystery rest undisturbed. Yes, the film leaves you curious as heck, but in the end, I think that’s a much better place to be than stuck with an ultimately disappointing/implausible overexplanation that drains the film of its atmosphere. So I’m torn. I’m love to see this expanded into a full-length feature film. …and yet I think it’s perfect as it is. Let’s hope that either way, we see a lot more from Long.” -BIOEPHEMERA

“A well told little tale, with a surprisingly sinister ending. What it really comes down to is this: mechanical squid. Like you’re going to pass that by.” - COILHOUSE

On the Verge: TRANS-NEPTUNE

My 2007 camp extravaganza Trans-Neptune (or The Fall of Pandora, Drag Queen Cosmonaut) joins a host of other queer transgressions on the verge, Frameline Distribution’s new cult shorts DVD collection.  You can ORDER ONLINE if you’re into drugged-cross-dressing-sci-fi-melodrama.

(Carmel Amit in the Gas Den)

I’m so fond of this short, the first project I tackled after film school. We shot in the fall of 2005, mostly in the basement of a house I had rented with some friends, many of whom appear in the film. We got the footage in the can for less than 2k in cash. The BC Arts Council provided postproduction funding to help us finish it.

(Drag in Space: Ryan Steele, Dusty Hagerüd, Patti Wotherspoon, Nelson Wong)

The film was called “a Rocky Horror opium dream” (Frameline 31 Guide) and picked up the Gerry Brunet Memorial Award for Best Short by a BC Filmmaker at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival in 2007. The jury cited the film for its “interplanetary ambition and imagination.”

(Carmel Amit, Rodrigo Gonzalez as The Scientists)

Even though I think you can still catch a shortened  version of Trans-Neptune on Logo Channel from time to time in their “alien bootcamp” shorts package, I can’t help but recommend the unedited DVD version.

(All photography by Santiago Yanez – 2005. Property of Anachronism Pictures.)

Fall 2010: Gilded Prisons

Cloistered youth is shaping up as a major trend for fall film festivals and the awards season.

In Focus Features’ Somewhere, tipped for Venice and Toronto, Sofia Coppola adds LA’s Chateau Marmont to her catalogue of pampered panopticons, refreshing and/or cementing the evident tropes that identify her filmography. The musical contributions from Phoenix sound cute.

Meanwhile Mark Romanek makes a sinister return to feature filmmaking with high-pedigree contender Never Let Me Go. Adaptated from Kazuo Ishiguro‘s novel, this subtle sci-fier explores the angst of young students at a “special” boarding school.  The overly groomed quality of the trailer smells a bit of old-school Oscar tactics, but it does capture the tone of  Sunshine scribe Alex Garland‘s brief-yet-muscular screenplay.

But what I really want is a sneak peek of Julie Taymor’s The Tempest, featuring Helen Mirren’s much-anticipated take on Prospero and Felicity Jones in the role of island-locked princess Miranda. Will and Julie make such a great pair.

(Djimon Hounsou as Caliban in The Tempest, Touchstone Pictures.)