As Fantastic Fest gains in prominence as a must-attend spot on the festival calendar, the special events organized by Tim League and friends are becoming as notorious as the wide-ranging selection of international genre and exploitation films on the official lineup. From shooting lessons to field trips to far-flung barbeque joints, to multiple karaoke parties and totally unofficial after-after parties in the hotel suites of celebrity attendees, the only criticism of the festival that keeps coming up is that there’s actually too much fun to be had, too much to do. But this is not necessarily a Fantastic Fest-specific problem; with the Alamo Drafthouse chain itself, League has created a year-round home for Too Much Fun for not just cinema nerds, but anyone who likes to wash their pop culture down with copious amounts of beer. This became evident yesterday afternoon when, after a screening of the paraplegic serial killer film Late Bloomer (about which more, later), I snuck out of the Alamo South Lamar to head across town to the Alamo Ritz for Michael Jackson Thrill the World, a sing-a-long, dance-off and drinking contest set to the music video masterpieces of the King of Pop.
But contrary to appearances, the point of the evening, according to host Henri Mazza, was not to have fun. “I don’t care if you have a good time,” he said. “The most important thing tonight is that you learn how to do “Thriller.”
The Alamo is getting together a contingent to try to break the record for the “largest group synchronized “Thriller” Dance,” and they’re also hoping to attach “upwards of 2,000″ “Thriller”-dancing zombies to the back of next month’s Day of the Dead parade. After letting the crowd warm up with a one-minute dance contest (which the young lady above lost in spite of her sartorial dedication to the endeavor) and by singing and dancing along to videos like “Bad” and “Rock With You,” the Alamo brought out a dance teacher to train the wannabe zombies for their future engagements.
More photos, and thoughts on the videos themselves, after the jump.
Although each clip has its nice moments of intertexual collage (I especially like the way the same footage from Royal Wedding is recycled to different ends: in “Billy Jean,” set to the line, “The kid is not my son,” it’s a contemplation of paternity; in “Brings SexyBack,” it’s a placeholder for seduction) “Smooth Criminal” really draws attention to this way this method of mashup makes the entirety of filmed dance history seem less like a timeline than a series of arrows pointing back to the same point. For all of their ability to tap into and inspire the zeitgeist of their respective heydays, dancers like Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake resemble Astaire more than anything else in their contemporary cultures. For whatever reason, the iconography of the solo male dancer is always looking back, as if there’s nothing new do with the male body set to music that Fred Astaire hadn’t thought of.
This theory does give short shrift to Gene Kelly, who had a distinct style and presence that was not chiefly Astairean, but for whatever reason, the evidence suggests he’s been less influential on pop stars of the future. Maybe it’s because, compared to someone like Timberlake, he was built like a boxer, and with the exception of Singin’ in the Rain, his characters were often (gasp!) working class, or at least certainly not the blinged-out party crashers that Astaire tended to play, which make his images so compatible with lines like “VIP, drinks on me,” never mind lyrics that equate seduction to some kind of surreptitious crime. Does Gene Kelly have an analgous modern pop star? And if so, where’s that mashup?
“So I remember we– I had like two or three days or something and I rehearsed and choreographed and dressed my brothers. I choreographed them with the piece and picked the songs, picked the medley. And not only that. You have to work out all the camera angles and, oh, I direct and edit everything I do. Every shot you see, is my shot.” -Michael Jackson, on his preparation for an ’80s Jackson 5 performance. (Ebony Magazine, December, 2007).
Who doesn’t remember the worldwide shock and dismay when Michael Jackson announced his retirement from music in 1990, at the age of 32? But the real shocker was what came next. Mr. Jackson’s stellar career as a film director, now nearly 20 years on, seemed pure folly at the time. What magic could such a musical being possibly work with images? Surely, a performer who spoke so eloquently with his voice and feet would, with a movie camera, be all thumbs…?
Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, about a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who falls for a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) and follows her to a commune full of celebrity impersonators based out of a Scottish castle, would make an incredible double-feature paired with Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness. Both films deal with people who have fled to the Highlands in denial of real-world mundaneity and in exploration of an escapist fiction. Korine’s long-awaited comeback feature may be a bit more on the nose about the desperate things we do in the name of absolving our lonely fates, but like Build a Ship, it rides the line between pure shtick and genuine emotion to a degree of success that, when it works, can be truly thrilling. Both are patchworky and imperfect, but both are among my favorite films I’ve seen this year.
Korine has always been a filmmaker who plugs story in the gaps around visual one-liners, and while Mister Lonely is a more traditional shot-reverse shot narrative than anything he has done before, from the opening shot the director confirms that, in some sense, he’s up to his old tricks. Luna’s Michael Jackson, decked out in familiar sunglasses, black armband, and standard issue surgical face mask, rides through the streets of Paris on a kiddie motorcycle with a toy monkey tied to the rear. Shot in slow motion, set to Bobby Vinton’s rendition of the title song, this opening scene is both punchline and four-dimensional painting. Lonely is wall-to-wall full of comparable sequences which, though maybe only a step or two away or above the kinds of cultural regurgitations that litter YouTube––Marilyn Monroe, her hair in curlers, comes to Michael Jackson’s room and seduces him by feeding him a strawberry; Abe Lincoln, lit only by strobe light, recites the Gettysburg Address whilst spinning a basketball on his finger––together add up to surprisingly poignant portrait of the willful abandonment of reality in favor of pop cultural oblivion.
Rock musicals about rock stars are almost as tiring as independent films about independent filmmakers. They’re too self-involved and too self-satisfying, and they typically have nothing for an objective viewer to grab hold of. But at least with rock musicals, if the audience can dig the music, they can maybe dig the movie, too. This has been the case, for me at least, with such films as Velvet Goldmineand Hedwig and the Angry Inch, neither of which I would have been so into were it not for their excellent glam rock soundtracks. And now the same goes for Rainbow Around the Sun, a neat little low-budget musical fantasy, which interestingly enough also has a touch of glam in its songs, about a very cliché band leader and his very cliché drinking problem and his very cliché story of heartbreak.
Here, more than the songs, though, it’s the musical numbers, many of which work on their own as great music videos, that really kept me interested. That tired tale of the troubled, tortured artist/poet/rock star is merely a thin thread for Rainbow Around the Sun, which was adapted from an autobiographical album of the same name by Matthew Alvin Brown, who also stars in the film as singer-guitarist-drunk Zachary Blasto. The plot is like an afterthought, concocted only to connect the album tracks and their “videos”, and though the songs seem like they’re supposed to comment on the story, it’s really apparent that it came about the other way around, that the story is in fact meant only to put the songs into a context. I’d probably have enjoyed it as much, if not more, though, without the loose narrative and its underdeveloped scenes. The film could still have been what it actually is anyway: a cinematic concept album.
