As promised: Harmony Korine’s new short film, Act Da Fool, featuring Provenza Schouler’s new collection. Fashion label with imagination meets filmmaker with imagination. It makes me happy when Korine chooses to remind us that there’s a whole big incredible world out there, decaying and thriving and reinventing itself everyday. This is beautiful.

Satoshi Kon was not just an incredible director, he was a man who understood the inner workings of our collective fantasies. Dreams, no matter how strange or wonderful, aren’t just magically conjured from the ether—they are built very carefully, sometimes deliberately from the people, objects, and ideas we encounter every day. Even our most intimate, personal desires which seem to stem from a deep-seated, primal urge can only reveal themselves to the mind’s eye in the guise of things we have found in the world around us: love appears as a celebrity’s face, truth sounds like an advertising slogan, happiness feels weirdly similar to your old Power Rangers pajamas. Whatever mundane symbolic vocabulary you might need to converse with your subconscious, Satoshi Kon knew it and he was fucking fluent.

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It’s about girls who sleep in abandoned cars and set things on fire. It’s about the great things in life. The stars in the sky and lots of malt liquor.

Harmony Korine on Act Da Fool, his soon to be released short film for rad fashion label Provenza Schouler.
Consider us stoked. Peek at some behind the scenes photos and the film’s gorgeous poster after the jump, and read more about the collaboration at Nowness.

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When Wu Tsang and Ashland Mines started Wildness— surely the most glorious of all L.A. club nights in recent memory— at The Silver Platter, they placed a huge spotlight on that small and obscure gay bar tucked away in MacArthur Park. The Silver Platter has for decades catered to a split clientele of discretely dressed macho Latino men and fabulous transgendered women, two factions once at odds that have slowly coalesced into an organic community. Wildness, through its unique mixture of contemporary art, drag, performance and hip DJs, attracted a brand new audience of artsy young queers spanning class and race boundaries to The Silver Platter.

Damelo Todo (Give Me Everything) is Wu’s bracingly intelligent and beautifully shot film that delves deep into the world of The Silver Platter, the hard social realities of transgender life, and the politics of partying. This innovative documentary/narrative hybrid has been in production for nearly two years, fueled by hard-won grants, small donations, and the tireless efforts of a devoted crew. Now Wu needs your help to finish the film. The Kickstarter finish line is less than $500 away, so every dollar invested in these final 4 days will make an enormous difference! Does the world need Damelo Todo in it? Yes, it does. And it’s up to you to make it happen.

+ Don’t miss Wu’s blog, Class.

Ladysmith Black Mambazo x M.J. What is perfection but a blissful marriage of image and sound, song and dance?

Ted Danson dancing on a moonlit pier in Florida. I love the world. A sublime scene from Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 Body Heat, a neo-noir erotic thriller also starring William Hurt, Kathleen Turner and a virtually unrecognizable Mickey Rourke.

Bait me with promises of ventriloquy and you’ll ensure my attendance to any event. That was the strategy employed by Mya, my trusty Mastodon Mesa co-curator, to lure me to the screening of cuckoo 1981 Z-movie Carnival Magic this weekend. The film is about a magician, his talking chimp, and their friends in a travelling carnival— but the only problem is that everyone in the movie is beyond creepy, especially the chimpanzee, who repeatedly requests (in gravely, growling tones) to be scratched by teenage girls.

The film was hilarious and mind-blowing, but the icing on the cake was the presence of magician Dave Markham, warming up the crowd in front of Cinefamily with his wisecracking sidekick Squeaker, a psychic wisenheimer who bears an eerie resemblance to Davy Jones. I had my new camera with me, so I captured the wary movie buffs as they responded to Squeaker’s sassy inquiries.

Don’t miss the rest of Cinefamily’s “Fucked Up Kids’ Movies” series, running each Saturday in May. Coming up: a night of E.T. rip-offs featuring Mac and Me, the sadistic South African kids movie Lost in the Desert, and misguided Bugsy Malone wannabe Hawk Jones.

Postcards to The Mystery Man from Lost Highway by Dieter Van der Ougstraete and Ellen Ripley from Alien by Annie Higgie.

Part of what makes our favorite movies so precious is their finite nature. We’re thrust into instant relationships with a series of enticing celluloid strangers, and by the time we feel like old friends with the characters, we’re pulled away form their world forever. Barring an adequate sequel, we’re bound to those two piddly hours to dwell upon. We savor our friendship with repeated views, wistfully attempting to extrapolate from their actions what we think our old pals have gone on to do in their later lives. Often times it’s a good thing that films end when they do— no one needed to find out what happened to Sharon Stone’s character after the first Basic Instinct, for instance.

We appreciate the mystery, but the urge to reconnect lingers in our minds. That’s what makes Postcards to Alphaville, Paul Paper’s project prompting artists to draw postcards to their favorite film characters, so brilliant: rather than foolishly trying to solve the riddle behind these characters’ post-celluloid destinies, we’re simply given an outlet to express our longing, our friendship and our loss by revelling in these loving homages.

Annie Wilkes from Misery by Audrey Malo and Allen from Happiness by Jack Teagle.

Juror #4 from 12 Angry Men by Gediminas Šiaulys and Ben from Night of the Living Dead by Drew Beckmeyer.

Issac from Manhattan by Jose Cardoso and Suzy Brannon from Suspiria by Maaike Verwijs.

Blacky from Underground by Tom Edwards and Samuel J. Bicke from The Assassination of Richard Nixon by Linnéa Puranen.

[ Note: This is Future Shipwreck’s first post by the puckishly erudite and altogether rad writer Dan Rosplock. I’m excited to welcome him as a contributor, and what better way to kick things off than with a post about a brilliant cinematic clusterfuck that we both hold dear to our hearts? Without further ado… ]

It may come as no surprise to anyone who sees Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribably awesome experimental horror/comedy Hausu that the director got his first big break doing commercials for things like cars and men’s deodorant. Now, I realize that might not come off as a ringing endorsement since the phrase “commercial aesthetic” in reference to cinema tends to conjure nightmares of Michael Bay explosions and endless shots of Kristen Stewart staring pensively into the distance doing her concerned lip-bite face, but in this case think of it terms of the considerable talent it takes to craft a truly striking, almost uncannily idealized image.

What if the apple-cheeked youths of a Norman Rockwell illustration (or their Japanese equivalents— a slew of giggling schoolgirls) went on Spring Break to an isolated mansion in the countryside? And what if said youths were trapped in a room with a demon-possessed portrait of a cat projectile vomiting torrents of blood? Hausu tackles these tough questions and oh so many more.

Each of Obayashi’s seven bubbly female protagonists is a character in the most self-consciously one-dimensional sense, right down to their flatly descriptive names. “Fantasy” has a vaguely unsettling romantic obsession with her older male teacher while “Kung Fu” integrates martial arts into every mundane or supernatural situation she is confronted with. These lovable caricatures gallivant carelessly around a world of fluffy kittens and rural splendor until things abruptly go bat-shit insane and they all inevitably succumb to the cartoonish horrors of that titular domicile.

Hausu’s pleasures are too numerable to mention, let alone analyze. Certainly, part of its appeal stems from the perverse joy one feels upon witnessing the destruction of the false idols of youth and beauty which popular culture presents to us every day. Nearly every shot resembles a too-meticulously arranged tableau, and yet Obayashi himself casually uses every available cheesy special effect in existence to break up his own stunning yet highly “commercial” imagery.

However, beyond merely showing off his iconoclastic abilities the director does something even more intriguing: he presents the possibility of building something completely new and utterly indefinable out of the rubble of those oppressive cultural stereotypes and aesthetic conventions. Ultimately, Hausu is more about rebirth, breathing new if somewhat freaky and unnatural life into dead imagery. At least according to Obayashi’s logic, “Old cats can open doors, but only ghost cats can close them.”

Hausu is currently screening in limited engagements throughout North America, and rumored to be getting a deluxe video release by Criterion later this year. Animated GIF via the always-amazing FourFour.

0s & 1s is a movie written and directed by my bud Eugene Kotlyarenko, starring Morgan Krantz (who I was in that Zune commercial with) and Jeremy Blackman from Magnolia. As Eugene puts it, “it uses the language of a computer operating system (from beginning to end) to tell the story of a young ruffian who must find his stolen computer.” The film is still in post-production but the brief trailer alone has got me hella jazzed to watch this cyberdelic mind-trip! Also, part of it was shot in my old living room. Watch out for 0s & 1s at festivals this winter!

I’ve been leading a secret double life! For the past couple of months, I’ve been writing for Spike Jonze’s We Love You So, a brand new blog that launches today! The blog is designed to give a glimpse at some of the influences and behind the scenes forces at work in Spike’s upcoming epic masterpiece, Where the Wild Things Are, as well as to share rad art and ephemera outside of the Wild Things orbit. I’ve been creating content alongside three of my all-time favorite bloggers: Dallas Clayton, Molly Young and Matt Rubin. I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve put together, and there’s plenty of material to look at in the archives already— so go dig in!

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Even though he won the fancy Turner Prize in 1999 and the Caméra d’Or at Cannes earlier this year, I’d never heard of Steve McQueen until I found myself flipping through the photos from Yohji Yamamoto’s latest men’s collection runway show. Perhaps the venerable Japanese designer was following the fashion world’s recent shift towards self-congratulatory open-mindedness (i.e. Vivienne Westwood’s creepy muscle-bear runway model, or Italian Vogue’s much-lauded all-black issue— which was promptly followed by a return to the vanilla status quo), or perhaps Yamamoto simply decided that at the age of 65 he can pretty much do whatever the hell he wants, but in any case, the runway was strutted by a hodgepodge of highly unusual models. Amongst the de facto mop-topped pixies and intimidatingly high-cheekboned youngsters, the audience was treated to a handful of grandfatherly models (including one with a gimp leg) and— in the words of style.com writer Tim Blanks— the “defiantly chunky” British artist Steve McQueen.

I can’t help but think that Yamamoto had some irony in mind when he chose the handsomely robust McQueen as his proxy for a statement on the politics of body size: after all, McQueen’s much-acclaimed debut feature, Hunger, is all about using the human body as a political weapon. Centering on the final weeks in the life of of imprisoned IRA member Bobby Sands, McQueen’s film examines the passion and struggle that fueled the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike. The film has been ruffling a few feathers in the UK over its seemingly sympathetic portrayal of Sands, but McQueen himself refuses to take sides. Confronted by a reporter who baits, “I would argue, [Sands] comes out looking heroic,” McQueen responds, “Not for me … If he’s in a movie, people walk around thinking he’s heroic. It doesn’t matter what he’s doing in the movie, he will be thought of as heroic. That’s the movies. You put anyone in a movie, and people think that person’s heroic.”

In fact, Steve McQueen has built a reputation for not taking a position on his own work. 1993’s Bear, the silent short film that put him on the map, depicts a naked wrestling match between two black men (one of whom is McQueen). “Narrative and visual contexts, however, are absent,” wrote David Frankel in ArtForum, “this nude wrestling match has neither origin nor outcome, and happens in seeming darkness. What remains is the play of the men’s feelings - there is smiling and laughter, but also challenge, caution, tension, alarm, and a certain erotic buzz as the sparring goes through its phases.” Pulling the viewer into the film’s all-around ambiguity by forcing them to watch it in a completely darkened gallery room, McQueen doesn’t clarify any of the questions he raises, leaving his audience to construct their own point of view.

McQueen’s unyielding distance from his own work has always stood in stark contrast to the indulgent autobiography of his “Young British Artist” contemporaries like Tracey Emin, who became a press darling when she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize with her hopelessly self-absorbed work “My Bed” in 1999, the year McQueen won. “His victory was greeted by the London Evening Standard with a cover photo of Tracey Emin ‘not winning the Turner Prize.’ McQueen was tucked away on page five,” wrote Iain Aitch on GettingIt.com.

McQueen finally found himself in the public spotlight in 2007 with a work which, like Hunger, raises questions about the problematic position of the human body in modern politics. Selected by the semi-governmental Imperial War Museum to act as the nation’s official “War Artist,” McQueen’s resulting piece, Queen and Country, is simply a series of postage stamps depicting 98 armed service members who have died in Iraq. In a time in which images of the war dead have been banned in the media, when governments choose to sweep the idea of these unwanted corpses from an unpopular war under the rug, the UK’s Royal Mail service has quietly refused to turn McQueen’s work into real commemorative stamps— even after an outpouring of public support for the project.

That McQueen has been able to cause such controversy by doing something so benign— something that isn’t explicitly pro-war or anti-war, and might actually honor these casualties— demonstrates the beauty of McQueen’s detached perspective. Placing himself in opposition to the self-centered delusion fostered by micro-blogging, reality television and tabloid minutiae, McQueen steps away from himself and acts as an apolitical provocateur, presenting uncomfortable questions and allowing the audience to take their own positions.

Also, he’s adorable! Let’s hope he continues to pursue a career in modeling— I can definitely picture him as the new face of Dior Homme.