The Vice Guide to Narco Cinema

Reading Vice magazine, you get the impression of intelligent writers having to use their skills for an audience to which they do not necessarily belong, sort of like a Daily Mail or Sun for pretentious hipsters (at least, this reviewer does). With shabby-but-articulate Vice co-founder Shane Smith’s casual profession of a love of drugs just a few seconds into The Vice Guide to Film: Mexican Narco Cinema, it seems like Vice’s new web series is going to be more of the same, which is why it’s such a pleasant surprise when it quickly turns into a well-made, entertaining and easily consumed piece of film journalism.

Smith travels from Texas to Tijuana, on the way doing a great job of putting Mexico’s ultra-violent Narco Cinema of drug runners, fetishised cars and bad cops in context. He outlines the importance of Mexico’s drug industry to its economy and then interviews a film commissioner, who reveals that only 18% of the population can afford to go to the cinema. It’s no wonder then that these straight-to-DVD (the genre is also known as ‘Videohome’), low-budget action movies about poor Mexicans who use drug-running as a way to lift themselves out of poverty and give back to the community have become so popular, both in Mexico and with immigrants in the US. Think Scarface, but without the tragic fall. Or at least, if the characters do get shot at the end, there’s always a family member to take revenge in the sequel.

Each film is based on a ballad (corrido) about a famous criminal, which makes the whole genre reminiscent of the way the Robin Hood legend got started with the troubadours of Europe. However, in this instance both song and movie are almost always commissioned by the narco in question, with serious consequences for not sticking to the agreed script. So of course everyone Smith interviews speaks of the narcos in heroic terms and the genre singularly fails to hold a mirror up to Mexican society. To his credit, Smith has a go at highlighting this irony, interspersing clips of Narco Cinema with shots of real-world victims caught in the crossfire between the narcos and the government forces trying to crack down on them.

The overall message though is that these innovative, $40,000-50,000 films, which are shot on location, with the script written on the fly, where more often than not each character type is played by their real-world counterpart (the prostitute is a an actual prostitute, etc.), are a lot of fun and it doesn’t really matter which of them you watch, so long as there’s a car in the title. On this point The Vice Guide to Film: Mexican Narco Cinema is pretty convincing, although one criticism would be that as there are thousands of these films in existence surely there must be some canonical highlights for newcomers interested in exploring the genre?

Alexander Pashby

Girl Number 9

Before watching Girl Number 9, the only online serialised moving images I’d watched were TV spin-offs such as Battlestar Galactica, where additional short episodes of the series were made available over the internet while the parent show was on hiatus between seasons. This is both a strange and familiar experience; it feels like you’re watching an episode of your favourite show, albeit in five-minute chunks a day or a week apart, with actors playing their usual characters. However, these ‘webisodes’ rarely have much of an impact on the ‘canon’ of the show itself, which is particularly frustrating when they often, ironically, give some characters greater depth than when they appear in the series ‘proper’.

The writer of Girl Number 9, James Moran, is obviously aware of this new format. Moran has written film scripts – Severance and the forthcoming Curfew – as well as TV shows – Torchwood and Doctor Who – and the latter has also had webisodes made available over the internet. Rather than penning a spin-off for a franchise though, Moran is tapping into his existing fanbase – I discovered the serial by following him on Twitter, which, appropriately, is a vaguely voyeuristic internet site – and he’s cast actors from Torchwood and Doctor Who while returning to the horror/slasher genre with which he first made his name.

Girl Number 9 doesn’t tread particularly unfamiliar ground: it concerns a killer who leaves victims in death traps viewable on monitors with clues designed to help free them in a way that also endangers the person trying to help – so far so Saw – and it also features this footage being broadcast over the internet, something tackled in such moribund fare as Halloween: Resurrection and FeardotCom. However, Moran turns our familiarity with the subject matter to his advantage – a small cast and tiny instalments mean the audience can fill in the gaps, while the taut script gives the actors a chance to tackle meaty exchanges that bring to mind films such as Swimming with Sharks and Tape, where a claustrophobic room and verbal duelling overcome the budgetary limitations. In addition, while a few risible horror films have dealt with death traps and ‘snuff’ movie footage broadcast over the internet, this is a project that involves the viewer in a similar way to the characters in the plot: you have to visit a website – www.canyousaveher.com – to watch the voyeuristic footage and you only get a small amount to take in before your access is removed.

Although America also has a great tradition of short genre TV entertainment in such series as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, many of these one-off dramas were very reliant on alien encounters and an SF twist. In the UK we have the well-remembered legacy of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected and the occasional Ghost Story at Christmas by MR James and others. These shows relied more on psychological terrors than special effects and even though Girl Number 9 may toy with the iconography of Saw, Moran is very much continuing the tradition of Dahl and James, particularly when the serial is watched as a whole 30-minute episode rather than the six daily instalments. The two actors, Gareth David-Lloyd and Tracy-Ann Oberman, familiar from BBC Wales’ space-faring series – are pretty good as the two cops dealing with the serial killer who has murdered, you guessed it, eight girls before the final instalment. But while less wooden than when confronted with Cyberman on TV, they don’t quite have the necessary gravitas or range when dealing with a more human killer on an even smaller screen. Joe Absolom, on the other hand, is a revelation and the creepiest British serial killer I’ve seen on any screen since the first two Hannibal Lecter films. Having recently caught him in an episode of Ashes to Ashes also playing a disturbed nutter, I fully intend to track down more of his back catalogue.

Girl Number 9 is a brave experiment and one I hope has reaped rewards for everyone involved. While I’m sure writer/co-director Moran will continue to do well on TV and in cinema, I hope this is a format he returns to. Other filmmakers, such as Sally Potter with Rage, and TV creators – Joss Whedon with Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog – have produced innovative entertainment designed for internet dissemination and mobile consumption, and there need to be more practitioners with a good track record in the format.

Alex Fitch

Stingray Sam

I discovered The American Astronaut (2001) while channel-hopping late at night, and the broken space, skewed songs and weird world-building suited the dark. For months I’d floundered for descriptions, eventually settling on ‘It’s Blade Runner meets Rocky Horror via Clerks’. But in the strictest sense I hadn’t actually been channel-hopping. I started coming across 10-minute fragments of the film on that online grindhouse YouTube, alongside the usual slew of dogs on skateboards and music videos: the universal guilty pleasures of the internet.

American Astronaut‘s writer-director Cory McAbee seems to appreciate that. Approached by the Sundance Institute to create a film that could be viewed on mobile phones as easily as in cinemas, McAbee put together a six-part singing and dancing space-Western: Stingray Sam (2008). According to the theme song (oh yes, it has a theme song), Stingray Sam is not a hero: he (played by McAbee) is, in fact, a lounge singer on Mars, which now resembles a washed-up Vegas-in-space. One night, old friend The Quasar Kid (Crugie) arrives at his saloon, looking for Sam’s help to rescue a little girl. And so their adventures begin!

(The exclamation mark is important. Stingray Sam is narrated like a classic serial, each chapter closing with a stirring request to ‘Tune in to the next episode!’, an instant call-back to the matinée era. David Hyde Pierce provides that voice, authoritative while entirely gentle, helping to colour the universe around our monochrome heroes.)

(Parentheses are important too: so much of Stingray Sam‘s texture comes from the comic diversions and interludes that pepper each episode. When you reach the end of each 15-minute chapter you realise you’ve watched very little plot; instead you’ve seen a stream of ideas pour from the screen, each suggesting the possibility of another tangential story that would be just as entertaining, just as strange. It’s YouTube again, or wikipedia, where education and misinformation bleed together on the whims of the hyperlink.)

Despite the fragmented narrative, the heart of the film is a flushed whole, a story about fatherhood amid chaos that’s truly warming. In episode five, as the girl (played by the charming Willa Vy McAbee) drifts off to sleep, Sam and The Kid sing her ‘a lullaby song’ that skitters along the same path of patchwork verses and awkward rhymes that, I hope, everyone will recognise. It isn’t a stretch to see the McAbee family assuming such roles, with Cory building his crazy world of B-movies and dance routines while struggling to find the space to be the father he wants to be.

I watched chapters on a mobile, a laptop and a television, and it would be disingenuous to suggest there isn’t a difference: the depth of field really suits a large screen while the soundtrack never sounds better than when it bounces around headphones. But the infectious narrative and cast of misfits suit every platform, and for the first time in a long time I find myself idly clicking through videos and blogs, knowing I could be in danger of stumbling over art somewhere in the jumble.

Matthew Sheret

Watch episode 1:

In Prison My Whole Life

At the London Film Festival last year, actor Colin Firth launched a new site, Brightwide, which bills itself as a ‘YouTube for Social and Political Cinema’ and whose stated mission is to ‘watch, think, link, act’. On the Brightwide website, writer and poet Fatima Bhutto quotes Milan Kundera: ‘The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ The internet, perhaps the greatest public archive ever created, must surely count as one of the most powerful weapons in the fight for social justice and seems a natural home for activist cinema.

Although it started as a US military-backed scientific research project, the internet became a hotbed of counter-cultural activity almost as soon as it went public. As a child in the 80s, I remember my older brother’s Magic Modem which could connect us to a whole hyperlinked world of anarchic bulletin boards and cracked software. Years later, Indymedia, launched in 1999 to report on the Seattle WTO protests, became not just one of the first major wiki-style projects on the internet, but was among the first major online news sources, framing the internet as a space of possibility for marginal and oppositional voices against the dominance of corporate interests in older forms of media.

If networks for distributing news and photographs of political actions had existed since, at the very least, the underground press boom of the 60s and 70s, the internet provided the possibility for something more – film and video of and about all manner of political events and issues available to stream online or download in an instant. The sense of immediate live presence afforded by globally networked digital technologies became a major catalyst in the spread of the anti-corporate globalisation protests of the late 90s and early 21st century, and continues to play a part today in, for instance, the backlash following the death of Ian Tomlinson at the hands of riot police during last year’s G20 protests in the City of London.

In America, Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films assumed signal importance in the run-up to the presidential election of 2008 with speedily produced documentaries about the inconsistencies in John McCain’s policies and biases in Fox News reporting, which became top-rated videos on YouTube and made a lasting impression on voters. Elsewhere, Michael Moore’s website provides a steady stream of supplements and footnotes to his theatrically released documentaries along with shorter films showcasing alternative viewpoints on major news stories and events.

While critics have condemned the spread of web-based activism as ‘cyberbalkanisation’, and the tortured history of Google in China has proved that the net is far from immune to censorship and government control, technology journalist Evgeny Morozov has argued that it is at least as useful to repressive states as it is to their dissidents. Issues arise when, as in the denouement to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s MICMACs, tactics of resistance remain parasitical on corporately owned portals such as YouTube, and behind the cosily presumed consensualism of iPod liberals there is always the danger of serious issues being reduced to the level of the latest Facebook fad.

In this light, Brightwide may provide a welcome alternative. Less a politicised YouTube than a new outlet for the exhibition of high-quality political documentaries, it features work by high-profile directors like Michael Winterbottom. With each film linked (both figuratively and literally) to ‘real world’ campaigns, Brightwide clearly has ambitions to make an impact beyond the list of Twitter trending topics, even if it lacks some of the anarchic freewheeling spirit that first made the net attractive to marginal voices.

Robert Barry

Dumbland

Perhaps it will come as little surprise to anyone who attended David Lynch’s 2007 exhibition, The Air Is on Fire, at the Cartier Centre in Paris, which saw him engaging with a diverse array of materials from digital video and large-scale installation to post-it notes, matchboxes and biros, but Lynch seems to have taken to that most zeitgeisty of artistic media, the world-wide web, with, at the very least, a game enthusiasm. From his daily Twitter-synched So-Cal weather report to his sprawling trans-American ‘Interview Project’, Lynch has to no small degree made the internet his own, and the centrepiece of his online world is the subscription-based member site at davidlynch.com.

Navigating through a maze of cryptograms and circuit diagrams accompanied by Alan Splet-inspired sounds of heavy industry and heavy metal, one finds oneself at a portal, an opening to a gateway, which leads into a kind of secret garden, a world both strange and unsettling, but curiously familiar. Lynch’s films have always seemed to spill over the edges of their beginnings and ends, his recurring motifs and circular, unresolvable narratives suggesting less a discrete story than a brief peek into an alien landscape. The website only serves to enhance this feeling, with its implied invitation into the lift from Eraserhead, its short films referencing and fleshing out the fractured narrative of Inland Empire.

One of the most popular features of davidlynch.com is the crudely drawn animated series Dumbland. With its entry-level drawing skills and fondness for ultra-violence and fart gags, it initially appears close to South Park. But the director’s signature is present throughout Dumbland – less in the white picket fences and eccentric characters that have become associated with the epithet ‘Lynchian’ in the culture of the last two decades; more in its occasional eerie stillness, and its excoriating industrial sound design. In a sense, what characterises all of Lynch’s work is the horror of the noise of industry invading the domestic space. In all its simplicity and apparent stupidity, Dumbland may be his most overtly political statement. The title implies that these characters are not rare, isolated freaks, more the symptoms of a malaise that is at least national.

At present, a great deal of the material on davidlynch.com is due to come off the site, possibly so that Lynch can concentrate on promoting transcendental meditation through the David Lynch Foundation. There are worrying rumours that his next film is to be a biopic of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru to the Beatles. But in the meantime, ‘The Interview Project’, which consists of a small camera crew taking a big road trip across the United States, asking the ordinary small town folk they pass about their hopes and dreams, provides a welcome reminder of another Lynch – the humanist director who made The Straight Story and The Elephant Man and talks in interviews of his love for Fellini’s I Vitelloni and La Strada. Lynch’s path is strange and unusual; he is a complex artist with three distinct sides: there is Lynch the spiritualist, Lynch the humanist and Lynch the surrealist, and his website reveals their closeness and complementarity.

Robert Barry