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Inside: Cultural Sausage. ~ Ludic Lists. ~ Skullbucket. Outside: "Supergirl body paint" "silicon implants for dicks" "the truth about Dick Cheney" "Ronald Reagan sucks" "remove cat hair furniture" "naked kitty dopey" "transformed into a centaur" "Billy Koch hate" |
06.09.2004
Today would have been the 100th birthday of legendary British filmmaker Reginald Sir Coptic Mange. On this momentous occasion I can think of nothing more appropriate than to look back on some of the films that made him one of the titans of the screen. Without further ado, to the corpus go we. Mange's Follies of 1931. The very first feature-length motion picture from the then 27-year-old wunderkind (following short films such as Oblivious Penetration of the Madonna, comedy miniatures like What the Butler Drowned and his celebrated documentary Love and Boak in Wardour Street) found him still developing his style, but hardly lacking in ambition. Launching a Goldwyn-style musical review would have been challenge enough for any director, but doing so with an all-lobotomized cast, and further naming the highly electroshocked production after himself when his name was hardly well-known enough to be a draw on its own, were the marks of the aspiring and challenging filmmaker he would become. Ultimately, the musical's reach exceeded its grasp, but it is nonetheless memorable for the Twitching Ballet sequence and the surprise hit song "Has Anybody Seen My Baby's Arm?". Reginald Sir Coptic Mange: A Life in Film. This 1935 documentary struck many as daring, if not downright presumptuous -- how could a man with but a single feature film credit on his c.v. presume to launch a self-hagiography of his own work? Upon seeing the movie, though, all objections are answered: the documentary is not about his creative output, but rather his longtime obsession with cling-film. Artfully avoiding the talking-heads approach that so often mars documentary work, the movie consists largely of silent sequences of Mange coating himself with various liquids, solids and semi-solids and then trapping them against his flesh with layers and layers of shrink-wrap. A Life in Film is also notable as the motion picture debut of his wife, film star Vaginal Sir Coptic Mange, who stars here as a bucket of strawberry-flavored lard. (Incidentally, Reginald Mange had not yet been knighted as of the making of this film; his claim to the knighthood of Comas & Coptic was simply a remarkably prescient guess.) Diddleus. Begun in 1937 and completed in 1941 with financial assistance from the Imperial Japanese Not Earmarked For Any Theoretical Future Sneak Attack On An American Naval Base Foundation, Diddleus is Mange's first great film. A brilliant re-imagining of James Joyce's masterful A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the film takes the metaphoric similarity of the name of the hero and the ancient Greek legend and makes it literal. We follow the torment and tragedy of young Stephen Diddleus (Mange was a notoriously bad speller and had the novel read to him phoentically by his longtime assistant Harry "The Bolshoi Bolshie" Schmendrikov) as he attains an engineering degree at Dublin's Trinity college and attempts to construct a working flying machine with which to sail as high as the sun, then firebomb the Catholic church in which he was raised. The film, through a series of unfortunate coincidences (the somewhat shadowy funding of the project, the fact that Diddleus' completed flying machine was a Mitsubishi Zero, and Mange's decision to include a number of hardcore pornographic scenes), had the tragic effect of slowing down his career for the next several decades, however, and the only movie industry work he would get until 1964 was at a ticket-taker at a silent movie revival house at Scapa Flow. Basehart. Reginald Sir Coptic Mange's triumphant return to the world of cinema was a rip-roaring espionage epic that served as his answer to, and expansion upon, the then-hugely-popular James Bond films. Accompanied by a throbbing and memorable score by monotonalist composer Julian Cylinder, it told the story of Crackerton Baseheart, a senior operative for M.I.6 who was suave, debonair, sophisticated, cunning and sexually adventurous. Unfortunately, American and British movie audience alike failed to respond to the story due to its lack of action. While praised by a handful of critics and experts as extremely accurate, Cylinder's job as the agent in charge of translating obscure southeast Asian dialects into English may not have been the best choice for the character. However, the movie will always be remembered for its (literally) heart-stopping score, daring use of the upward-facing floor-mounded "groincam", and remarkably prodigious use of the word "cockswinger". |
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| TODAY'S DRIFTWOOD: "Culture is a little like dropping an Alka-Seltzer into a glass -- you don't see it, but somehow it does something." (Hans Magnus Enzenberger) |