I'm not quite sure why David Kaplan's Year of the Fish doesn't work, but I think it might have something to do with a fundamentally tainted central concept: the Cinderella story retold with a Chinese girl being sold into slavery in New York's Chinatown district. Cinderella is Ye Xian (An Nguyen), which was Cinderella's real name in the original Chinese folktale published a good eight-hundred years before the better-known Perrault version. Xian must reimburse her benefactor for the cost of her room, board, and ticket by giving sensual massages at Mrs. Su's massage parlour. As Xian refuses, an enraged Su makes her do all the menial labour instead. Trapped and alone, Xian takes solace in a lucky goldfish bequeathed to her by ghostly crone Auntie Yaga and in the potential affections of the Chinese-American Johnny. (Virtually everybody besides Johnny and his immediate friends speak in heavily-accented English, and possibly to help mask the potential racial caricaturing, the entire film is rendered in rotoscoped animation.) On a broad level, Year of the Fish is about the co-existence of the modern and the ancient, as if a film made completely in and about Chinatown would be about anything else. I suppose the ugly reality of indentured servitude is meant to be a function of this, but it overwhelms rather than complements the fantasy elements; the film feels a little too sad. And I'm not sure that Kaplan has completely thought out the ramifications of this material. Mrs. Su and her massage parlour are seen as corrupting Chinese culture: she's packaging and marketing Chinese femininity and carving out her chunk of the American dream with it. But Johnny seems to fall in love with Xian because, unlike his unfaithful Anglo girlfriend, this Asian damsel looks like she'll know how to be loving and obedient. I don't believe he values her heritage because it makes him feel closer to his own--he lives in Chinatown! So how different is he, really, from the guys who solicit a happy ending from a pretty Oriental girl? Isn't he buying the same thing in less direct terms? That's the problem with depicting fairlytales in a real world setting: all the psychology.

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I absolutely despise Zack Godshall's Low and Behold. If there is a just and loving God governing the cosmos it will be the worst movie I see all year; there should be a provision in the Patriot Act ensuring that these people never receive the funding to make another film. Turner Stull (co-writer Barlow Jacobs) has arrived in post-Katrina New Orleans to take a job as an insurance claims adjuster that his crude Uncle "Stully" has set up for him. Turner is reluctantly learning the ropes when he meets factory worker Nixon (Eddie Rouse, the uncle in George Washington). Seeing that Turner needs help checking the roofs, Nixon offers to trade his services for a ride around town to look for his daughters' lost dog. Essentially, the film is a comedy--a really terrible one. Godshall scores lots of easy points against the uncle's crassness and avarice: Stully is giddy about the fact that he has so many claims to process post-Katrina, he sees it as a big payday. Nevertheless, Godshall strains to satirize the callousness of the claims adjustment industry, apparently believing them to be soulless because they don't visit people who haven't filed a claim and won't authorize payouts on houses with minimal damage. Obviously, if they could they would, as that would mean they would earn a higher commission--something Turner even points out for us. How could a film about Hurricane Katrina be this politically impotent? Turner's naïveté is the secondary source of laffs. There are several scenes where his salt-of-the-earth clients chew his head off and threaten him with physical violence for not paying out their claims, as well as a particularly bizarre monologue in which he explains to Nixon how he was afraid of going to the bathroom as a kid and mastered a technique of holding in his bowel movement for up to three days. I think Turner's experiences with Nixon are supposed to soften his hardened heart and force him to see his clients as human beings, yet the film views Turner as a babe-in-the-woods innocent. (On his first claim, he expresses feelings of remorse to his uncle for not paying out.) And so the character doesn't fulfill his intended arc, does he? At this point, Low and Behold would appear to be your run-of-the-mill piece of shit--but then Godshall sinks to a whole new low. He's shot the film on location in New Orleans and included interviews with actual disaster victims conducted by Jacobs in character. At the end of the picture we see Nixon's dilapidated house, and there is an unbelievable and disgustingly manipulative twist ending. The last couple of shots have a primitive power, but Godshall has not earned a right to them. He seems to be using Katrina as a means to flesh out his vapid material. I hesitate to call Godshall opportunistic; Low and Behold is so awful that it can only be borne out of ignorance. The filmmakers must not understand that documentary footage of a recent disaster area goes together with lowbrow satire like salmon and chocolate.

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Two columns of note recently circulated in the blogosphere. The first was Richard Corliss' "The Trouble with Sundance," in which Corliss complains that Sundance movies have become formulaic and predictable, effectively snuffing out the fresh, original voices the festival was supposed to be cultivating. The second article was a partial rebuttal by David Bordwell that sheds light on the phenomenon of what he calls "Indie Guignol": independent filmmakers trying to outdo one another in sensationalistic brutality. Compared to entries in the "Sundance genre," i.e. films typically involving dysfunctional families that strive to reconnect, oftentimes through road trips (the Oscar-nominated Little Miss Sunshine would be considered prototypical), these pictures are not mainstream, but they're considered by critics to have more artistic merit. And yet, particularly because we can easily recognize the phenomenon, it's losing its legitimacy as art. "Very often the predictable nonconformist is just as orthodox as the conformist," Bordwell writes. I thought about this while watching Martin Hynes' The Go-Getter, a film that subtly breaks away from Indie Guignol by embracing the possibly more passé Sundance genre. After Fido, Teeth, We Are The Strange, Hounddog, Strange Culture, and Low and Behold, all decidedly non-commercial films that take lots of chances and fail miserably, I have to admit I was happy to see something that gave me a few simple guiltless pleasures. Yes, Sundance films have become their own genre, but what the fuck is wrong with genre, anyway? Are you really a movie lover if you can't enjoy a solid but generic horror film, war film, noir, romantic comedy, western, and/or musical? Maybe if I were as sheltered as Corliss, I might rail against the Sundance genre as well, but I've seen the black abyss of bad committed art and the comparatively uncreative genre filmmaker is a valuable asset indeed. The Go-Getter is about a nineteen-year-old boy who missed a year of high school to take care of his dying mother. Feeling trapped and bored, he decides to steal a car and leave town, only later coming up with the mission to track down his estranged half-brother and tell him about Mom's passing. Meanwhile, he finds a cell phone in the car and remarkably begins to form a long-distance romantic relationship with the car's mysterious owner. The film has lots of simple little pleasures, like Byron Shah's sophisticated earth-tone cinematography and an impromptu re-enactment of the impromptu Madison bit from Godard's Bande à part. And though I've been known to buy into the whole "Indie Guignol" scene, I greatly appreciated a sequence set in a child pornography studio that rather hilariously satirizes the insufferable pretentiousness behind the movement. Meanwhile, the sex in the film is not quite explicit enough to be erotic, but it's fun: just a couple of fresh-faced kids getting under the covers and rolling around. No brutal rape, no humiliation, no degradation, nothing but good old-fashioned free love. The Go-Getter's weightless aestheticism is enough to shame even a hard-core Larry Clark devotee like myself.

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On May 11, 2004, artist and college professor Steve Kurtz called 911 to report the death of his wife Hope by heart failure. When medics arrived, they saw his art supplies and called the FBI: in preparing an installation that would let patrons test whether food had been genetically modified, Kurtz had ordered biological materials over the Internet. The feds detained Kurtz as a suspected terrorist and confiscated his equipment. After a grand jury rejected the charges of terrorism, Uncle Sam tried to nail him with "federal criminal mail and wire fraud." Those charges are still pending and Kurtz currently faces up to twenty years in prison. It's a chilling tale of injustice in the Patriot Act era, to be sure, but it's hard to feel much ire while seeing this story as realized by Lynn Hershman Leeson's Strange Culture. This is a film made for, by, and about smug liberal assholes; I can't imagine what it would be like to lose my wife and have bullshit federal charges pressed against me on the same day, but if it ever happens and I start referring to the event as "5/11," as Kurtz does here, please give me a nice swift punch in the nose. Leeson enlists Tilda Swinton, Thomas Jay Ryan, and Peter Coyote to re-enact key events in the story for the non-reason that Kurtz is unable to discuss the case for legal reasons. (He of course does exactly that and with great frequency during the film). Her real motives for blurring the line between "fiction" and "reality" are considerably more suspect, since the decision enables her to artificially inflate the significance of Kurtz's case (if all these actors are playing out Kurtz's persecution and breaking out of character to discuss it, this must be some major political issue), ennoble and lionize Kurtz himself (Ryan, who plays Kurtz, is considerably more photogenic than the real deal--even in washed-out digital video, the fictional aspects of the film bring out elements of a traditional Hollywood biopic), and best of all alienate the plebes who aren't quick enough to play along with the self-deconstruction. To his credit, Kurtz indirectly calls Leeson on her nonsense, saying that the prosecution is creating a version of him as a terrorist that is every bit as inaccurate as the "hyperreality" of Ryan's performance. At the end of the film, he says that his friends demanded he be played by Steve Buscemi, who bears a much greater resemblance to him than Ryan does. The only possible reason Leeson could have for leaving these statements in the finished film is to rub our noses in her smug sense of superiority. Don't be fooled by Strange Culture's claims to artistic significance: this is facile Bush-bashing at its most callow.

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There may very well be a Pauline Kael review for every occasion. For VHS-Kahloucha, it's her dismissal of Francois Truffaut's Day for Night: "[It's] a movie for the movie-struck, the essentially naïve--those who would rather see a movie, any movie (a bad one, a stupid one, or an evanescent, sweet-but-dry little wafer of a movie like this one), than do anything else." Ayup, that about covers it. This documentary portrait of amateur Tunisian filmmaker Moncef Kahloucha never makes the mistake of condescending to its subject, but it never quite elucidates why Kahloucha's films are worthy of study, either. I can't evaluate the man's work as I haven't seen it and the excerpts herein are not substantial enough to facilitate a reasonably accurate assessment, but the film seems to celebrate art for art's sake. Director Nejib Belkadhi doesn't appear to have any critical capacity whatsoever; if you make moving pictures, he sees you as a filmmaker worthy of celebration. VHS-Kahloucha does do some good in showing that Tunisians aren't idiots--they know that their country does not have a national or truly commercial cinema and they see Kahloucha's films for exactly what they are: gonzo Z-movies shot in their home country by a cinematic outlaw. One viewer ecstatically points out a scene filmed on a judge's back lawn, exhilarated both by the fact that he recognized it and by the fact that Kahloucha had the balls to shoot there. But it's all rather dramatically inert, the kind of evanescent, sweet-but-dry little wafer of a movie Kael described. Part of the problem is clearly that Kahloucha is a local celebrity in Tunisia and among Tunisian immigrants. His films are very popular, lots of people enjoy them, and so they have value on some level; VHS- Kahloucha doesn't survive comparison with Chris Smith's American Movie, where amateur filmmakers are pretty hopeless indeed but press on because they know that without a dream they wouldn't have much of anything. That's poignant and heartbreaking. With VHS-Kahloucha, it's hard to disguise our apathy.

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An unlikely figurehead of Salt Lake's independent film scene, Crispin Glover shot portions of his directorial debut What is It? in the city and cast local native Steven C. Stewart in the role of "Duelling Demi-God Auteur and the young man's inner ego" against his own "Duelling Demi-God Auteur and the young man's inner psyche." (A great deal of the affection the townies seem to harbour for Glover and his films apparently stems from foolish local pride.) Stewart, who suffered from severe cerebral palsy and died from a collapsed lung shortly before the release of What is It?, wrote and stars in It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE.. The script was dictated almost thirty years ago to scenic artist and production designer David Brothers, who worked on several Utah area productions such as The World's Fastest Indian. Brothers introduced Glover to Stewart's script and co-directed it with him; as with What is It?, It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. is a lot more interesting to hear about than it is to watch. The film is basically Stewart's sexual fantasies--which are certainly a bit on the sadistic/misogynistic side--realized onto celluloid. Women throw themselves at him, he has sex with them, and then he strangles them. Oftentimes they'll ask, as their dying wish, to be penetrated one last time. These fantasies come across as overcompensation for his disability, which has more than likely caused women to view him as asexual and unattractive. His idea of sex is to turn the tables on the gender that had rejected him; Glover and Brother's rationale for filming this material is to provide a voice to somebody who hasn't one, and, quite surprisingly, it's a sound justification. Seeing Stewart act out his sad fantasies reminds us on a very basic level that people with cerebral palsy have both sexual feelings and a working mind that interprets and recasts the world around them, and the "Make-a-Wish" backstory lends the film a peculiar pathos. Other than that, though, It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. is actually pretty useless, increasingly tedious, and even a little dull; Glover has traded off all the gonzo heat he generated with What is it? for something borderline conventional. Although he's become a director with a unique cinematic aesthetic, he was probably more interesting when he was a simple Hollywood eccentric jerking himself off. Without any screaming snails, soapbox puppets, or naked women in monkey masks, It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. is unable to sustain itself on Glover's childish, if ambitious, anti-art agenda. Maybe it's me who's changed, but this is the first time that the image of a woman performing fellatio on a man with cerebral palsy actually felt passé.

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Chapter 27 is creepy and possibly even unhealthy. I've been wondering for a couple of days now just how long writer-director Jarrett Schaefer stared into the Nietzsche abyss in researching and helming this aggressively subjective look into the mind of Beatle assassin Mark David Chapman. He purports to share Chapman's adoration of The Catcher in the Rye, The Beatles, and The Wizard of Oz and in person comes off as shy and somewhat withdrawn. What I find particularly disturbing is how he praised the Salt Lake screening I attended as being "where the real people are." When Hounddog auteur Deborah Kampmeier did the same, the compliment frankly dripped with condescension; from Schaefer's lips, especially in light of the Holden Caulfield-isms Chapman sprinkles throughout Chapter 27 concerning "phoniness," it seems to blur the distinction between filmmaker and subject. Maybe his hyping up of his similarities to Chapman is consciously designed to drum up publicity, but that only deepens the irony of a filmmaker coming virtually from nowhere to make his name with a film about a man who made his name by murdering a pop icon. Chapter 27 isn't smarmy or smartass in the least, but it's covered with meta layers and filled with post-modern games--in particular, it's heavily-structured around the J.D. Salinger novel, sort of making it the long-awaited, if unofficial, film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye. The picture brings up some of the same feelings I felt when I first began reading said novel at age 16: knowing that some apparently normal people (such as Chapman) read it and eventually went insane, it became less like a novel and more like a tab of potentially bad acid. It's necessary to mention Jared Leto's performance as Chapman. Leto gained sixty pounds for the role, but he doesn't use the weight as a prop--the weight is a means to accentuate certain aspects of his screen persona. Said persona is, of course, that of a cookie-cutter pretty boy metrosexual; looking at his bit parts in American Psycho and Fight Club, we can more easily see how he fruitfully exploited these apparent weaknesses. Leto brings his anonymity, prettiness, and latent homoeroticism to the Chapman character and succeeds in developing a genuine counterpoint to De Niro's Travis Bickle. But where the violence in Taxi Driver was expressive, cathartic, and bluntly orgasmic, when Leto's Chapman executes John Lennon, he is, to borrow a phrase from Tyler Durden, as calm as a Hindu cow. What's so disturbing about the film is that there isn't any moral dimension or purpose to the violence: it's a foregone conclusion, conducted by an overgrown man-child who simply pointed a gun at the idol he felt let him down and pulled the trigger.

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Deborah Kampmeier's Hounddog is even worse than its pre-emptive objectors assume it is. The film is offensive in precisely the way you think it's going to be but surprises you by becoming offensive on a whole new level. Everything in the film revolves around a scene where Dakota Fanning is raped, which, far from "gratuitous," is the film's entire raison d'être. Before The Rape, Hounddog plays like one big striptease leading up to it: in the very first scene, Fanning promises her playmate a kiss if he shows her his penis, and throughout the picture, Kampmeier has her prancing around in her panties, gyrating in her rendition of Elvis Presley's "Hounddog," and going swimming in an undershirt. Naysayers are calling the picture "a pedophile's dream," and though I maintain that you would have to be a pedophile of particularly low self-esteem to whack off to this, they do have a point. Up until The Rape, the film is just plain exploitive and cynical. It starts to seem like Kampmeier knows why we're here and is going to draw out our dread/anticipation past the breaking point before delivering "the goods." Then little Dakota gets popped. The scene is simultaneously cowardly, leering, and utterly tasteless: we see close-ups of her limbs flailing and her playmate staring on, fascinated and horrified. Her demonic rapist, who had been hiding in the shadows, grunts a couple of times, comes inside her, and very audibly zips up as she lies on the ground, bawling and defeated. The pre-rape portion of the film was sweating with sex, but all that heat dissipates out during and after the rape. As the film progresses, we begin to see--through a lot of heavy-handed and increasingly tedious phallic imagery involving snakes--that Kampmeier has been anti-sex and pro-rape all along. She dramatizes that age-old justification for sexual aggression: the bitch was asking for it. The bitch in this case, of course, being a twelve-year-old girl. Kampmeier sees rape as nothing short of baptismal--through her violation, Fanning learns to hate sex and regains her innocence; by the end of the film, she's cuddling a puppy while watching her family of Tennessee Williams rejects fool around with snakes and get bitten because they weren't raped as children. Fanning is counselled by a kindly Uncle Tom figure who tells her that snakes are animals to be respected and teaches her to sing "Hounddog" the way it was meant to be sung: like a spiritual without any of the sexual overtones that that damn white boy Elvis brought to it. Previously, she sang the song to unwittingly arouse her rapist into action; by the end of the film, she sings it to salve her torment. Kampmeier idealizes her black characters by making them completely asexual and suggests that rape provides a means by which women may experience the oppression that gives the Negroes their magical wisdom. Good gravy, have you had enough yet?! If only Sean Hannity and William Donahue were to actually watch and attempt to understand the film they are condemning, they would really have something to complain about.

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"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."-Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in Jurassic Park

While it is perfectly normal for a student filmmaker to be preoccupied with the "could" questions over the "should," the "should" questions need be asked and answered to at least some extent before one attempts to make something for display to a general audience. I suppose I could say that We Are the Strange is an exercise in style over substance, or that it breaks away from traditional forms of narrative, but that would imply that writer/producer/director/animator/composer M dot Strange had actually made choices with regards to substance, narrative, and the lack thereof. The film is an artistic failure on the most rudimentary level; it seems that Strange never got past the idea that it would be cool to make an animated feature. We Are the Strange has something to do with a beautiful woman named Blue who is kicked out of a brothel by her pimp for being "ugly." She then meets the living Buddy doll Emmm, who asks her out for ice cream. Soon they discover that the ice cream shop has been taken over by "evil forces." All of this is set in a video game or an alternate universe composed of video game graphics or something. Strange doesn't have a lot of regard for his storyline or characters--it's really all a means by which to try out his new style of animation, which he calls "Str8nime." His principal influences are 8-bit video games and anime, you see, and when you combine those two words with "strange" you get Str8nime. Strange betrays little grasp of either the anaesthetic cleanliness of computer-generated imagery or the abstract inexpressiveness of stop-motion animation; for all his purported love of video games, it's curious that his film has so much hatred for them. When he partially appropriates mythological archetypes for the film's battle between "good" and "evil," it feels like he's mocking the very idea of them through the aggressively artificial graphics and tinny soundtrack. I find it particularly odd that the film explicitly condemns the format in the beginning for standardizing ideals of feminine beauty and then later for socializing boys into an aggressive male gender role. Is he actually buying into this hokum or is he sarcastically bringing it up in order to rub the film's intellectual bankruptcy in our faces? We Are the Strange is so embarrassing that I would almost feel sorry for the guy if his movie didn't flaunt such a callow disregard for art. To compensate for the fact that he has nothing to say, Strange hides behind both festival audiences' tolerance for avant-garde (or, at least, their fear that they'll be exposed as unsophisticated for admitting they don't "get it") and glib cutesy-poo sarcasm. On that level, We Are the Strange is utterly reprehensible.

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I worry that this film was wasted on me. I usually walk out of the Q&A sessions after festival screenings because I can't bear to hear the stupid questions the audience asks or, as in the case of M dot Strange, the filmmaker's stupid answers. This time, however, the questions were intelligent and thoughtful, and, it almost goes without saying, so were the replies. Watching Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, I was reminded a bit of those critics who said that The Passion of the Christ was made for hardcore Christians and that nobody else is going to have any idea what's happening. I know fuck-all about Joe Strummer or The Clash, so I watched this film expecting to learn a little something. Good god, man, it was exhausting. Director Julien Temple never stops to let a point sink in and never organizes the material into actual scenes--it's just one thing after another. He folds in clips from Animal Farm and the out-of-print fifties version of 1984, tons of archival footage of The Clash, and fireside interviews with people who knew Strummer and celebrities who admired him (I admit I laughed when Johnny Depp showed up to sombrely reflect on Strummer's legacy in his Captain Jack costume). Punk music, some Strummer's and some not, is weaved in and out of the soundtrack, oftentimes at ear-splitting volumes. (When a segment of Israel Kamakiwo'ole's lyrical "Over the Rainbow" appears, it's a sweet relief.) There is a sense in which the film falls victim to a cardinal sin of documentaries: it doesn't want to say something about its subject or place it in a context in which it can be better understood, it simply wants to be its subject. That hardly matters, though, because Temple may have actually succeeded in finding a union between subject and form--Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten might very well be Joe Strummer. Indeed, it doesn't seem to be about the music; the music is one more element in the entire tapestry. Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten is two hours of pure energy, and perhaps it's possible to appreciate it on a purely experiential level if you already know virtually all there is to know about The Clash. I'm not sure I can say that it was a particularly enjoyable experience, but I think I can detect brilliance when I see it. There is something magical and otherworldly about the editing: not a frame is wasted and, combined with the narration and music, an image as innocuous as somebody looking directly into the camera or walking into a Baskin-Robbins inexplicably accrues an enormous visceral wallop. I'm not a hundred-percent sold on it, but I gotta confess: this is a film with momentum.

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Dan Klores' Crazy Love is essentially just another talking-head documentary, but my goodness what talking heads they are! At first it seems that Klores--to echo that oft-repeated charge against pop-doc filmmakers like Errol Morris, Michael Moore, and Chris Smith--is condescending to his subjects by laying their distinctly Jewish tackiness out to be skewered. But as the picture soldiers on, any emotional detachment dissolves away: these people aren't tactless so much as they're simply candid. They have absolutely nothing to hide and that openness makes it extremely difficult to categorize anybody in the film as a monster or a victim. Burt Pugach was a prominent negligence lawyer in the East Bronx; in the fall of 1957, he spotted secretary Linda Riss, fell in love with her, and successfully seduced her. When he couldn't divorce his wife, Riss left him and got engaged to somebody else. Enraged and deeply depressed, Pugach hired some goons to rough her up. They threw acid in her face, eventually blinding her. Pugach served a stint in prison, and when he got out he proposed to Riss. She accepted--the way she figures it, she's blind and nobody wants her or is willing to be with her except Pugach, who was the one who blinded her in the first place explicitly so that nobody else would want her. He "wins." The picture fruitfully questions your attitudes towards domestic abuse--the "right" choice isn't always the most pragmatic one: if Riss were to reject Pugach, she would still have her self-respect but would probably live out the rest of her days in solitude. Is that really preferable? I actually found it difficult to not feel bad for Pugach, precisely because he doesn't ask for or much expect our pity. He mentions that he was abused as a child by his overbearing mother and had extramarital affairs to rebuild his self-esteem, and I dunno, perhaps I'm a bleeding heart as far as these things go, but it comes off as more of an explanation than a justification. The guy just doesn't apologize. He's basically saying this is what it is. Klores is a very good filmmaker and one of the exciting things about Crazy Love is how he uses period music to reflect the mindset of his subjects; I don't think I will ever again hear Smokey Robinson's "You Really Got a Hold on Me," with its lines like "I don't like you/but I love you" and "I don't want you/but I need you," without thinking of Burt and Linda.

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I was very excited when I first stumbled upon the notion of the vagina dentata, as it provides for a distinctly female version of sexual aggression: unlike the male rape drive, it's not about power, it's about taking power away from men--cannibalism and castration. I should have known that Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth would not be the film to really explore this notion as soon as I learned that it's literally about a teenage girl who discovers she has teeth in her vaginal cavity. Lichtenstein isn't particularly interested in exploring the possibilities of this material as a horror film, instead using it as a comeuppance fantasy against male chauvinistic pigs, gaining easy points through cheap femi-Nazi misandry. (The credits actually joke that "No men were harmed during the making of this film.") The film underlines the symbolism, match-cutting a celibacy promise ring with a state-mandated sticker concealing a diagram of the female genitalia. At one point, the heroine even reads a description of the vagina dentata mythology on a website. This is condescending to the audience while glibly derisive of the mythology itself, which we learn represents the mysteries of femininity the male hero must inevitably conquer and destroy. Fine--except Lichtenstein never adequately thinks how this must work from the woman's point-of-view. He has her "conquer and destroy" the male hero and preserve the mystery of femininity. This isn't enough, as it only defines the sex act in male terms. You see, it doesn't bother me that every man she meets tries to rape her--but it bothers me that Lichtenstein has her castrate her rapists purely out of revenge and not out of her own selfish pleasure. She doesn't get off on cutting their dicks off; they're simply getting their just desserts. Already using very dangerous material for his very first feature, the openly gay Lichtenstein digs himself in further by refusing to show the female genitalia, teeth or not, outside of the aforementioned textbook--a move that confines the vagina to the unknown and prevents the character from ever developing her own sexual identity. Call me prejudiced, but this isn't a universal human story, it's a story that explicitly revolves around straight sex. Having a gay director tell it is kind of like having Spike Lee direct Ordinary People.

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The first five or ten minutes of Fido are pretty terrific. Therein, an educational film depicts the "zombie wars," a time during the forties in which space-dust turned our dead into zombies. The living won the ensuing conflict; and with the invention of the domestication collar by mega corporation Zomcom, the zombies could be made to serve man. This movie-within-the-movie is in Academy ratio and grainy black-and-white, and when it finishes a grade-school teacher turns on the lights and the image expands to a 'scope tableau of a classroom glowing with bright candy colours. The film is a triumph of cinematography and set design--every detail feels just right. But then another ten minutes go by and we realize that all that is supporting the film is a thin one-joke premise. Fido seems to be a satire of 1950s suburbia, but what is it saying? Are the zombies supposed to be Communists (they are taken as the spoils of war and the film gets a lot of mileage out of Cold War paranoia)? Blacks in a system of pseudo-slavery in the segregation-era South (the zombies are all menial labourers)? Dogs (the titular Fido is a zombie our hero, young Timmy Robinson, befriends, setting the stage for a lot of cheap and easy "Lassie" jokes)? The three things appear to have something in common, but Fido doesn't quite connect the dots to offer one clear satirical perspective. The film also lacks much in the way of internal logic. For instance, the zombies are very bad at their jobs; they stumble and shuffle, are easily distracted, and have difficulty figuring out simple tasks. Why would the nation be so adamant about keeping them alive to work in jobs they can barely perform? And how does it enjoy the affluence of the 1950s if most blue-collar positions are filled by unpaid zombie labourers? A great deal of the humour comes from the juxtaposition of suburban bliss with a blithe acceptance of death: most of the kids have had to kill their zombefied parents and their recess is for target practice. The gag never moves towards making a statement about America's love affair with firearms and violence, though, instead staying on the superficial level of light absurdity. Fido isn't a bad film, exactly--it's just excruciatingly vapid.

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