A Psychoanalytic Look at Organizm (2008)

Originally a made-for-TV movie that got new life on DVD and Netflix, Organizm is a beautifully perverse film that flew under the radar for that reason. The lot of made-for-TV movies is to fly under radars, because so much has to be flown under the radars of the producers and censors. With Organizm, writer-director Richard Jeffries gets away with a lot. This is a film in which the ‘obligatory sex scene’ is the protagonist coating a newly-widowed woman’s naked body with his own blood, and in which the climax is basically a death-by-fisting. If we’re to see all this film has to offer, however, we shall have to go through it carefully, and, I think, with the aid of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is not always the ideal tool for approaching a film, but this film in particular is structured around it and the perverse treasures it has to offer are best found using it.

The plot is deceptively simple, even hackneyed. A high school teacher warns military officials that they must not disturb the old base they’re destroying, because his mother told him so the night she killed herself. The army takes him seriously and investigates, causing a cancerous mass to explode from a body into a sea of tendrils that spread over the base and begin growing at an exponential rate. The teacher and a female soldier discover the developer of the tentacular organism is his father, a Russian scientist who defected to the USA. The shared genes gives the teacher an in-built vaccine for the organism. He realizes he must plunge his blood into the organism’s source, his father’s body, in order to kill it. He does so and it dies.

What is interesting in this plot is its gradual progression deeper into the subconscious. We begin with the pure, conscious facticity of the present: tendrils swarming military artillery and invading a bowling alley, where a soldier tries to flee and fails. This is the diseased, apocalyptic present, a present in extreme conflict. We then rewind thirty-three years to a boy being terrified by his disturbed mother. She warns him to remember “sublevel 3, vault 12” at all costs, carves it into his hands, and sashays out to kill his father. If the present is the consciousness in conflict, then the flashback we’re given is to the source of the trauma that would eventually erupt into the diseased state we see thirty-three years later. We’re given the two extremities of consciousness that matter; in between is the period of festering in the subconscious, metaphorically ‘sublevel 3, vault 12’.

We then join the high school teacher (Jonathan Schaech) on his way to the army base. We realize that he is the little boy we saw. Therefore, this film is to be his psychodrama. He has heard that the base is to be destroyed, so he comes to warn the Colonel that there is something that should not be disturbed. When he busts in, he’s captured, but by the intelligent records experts who decide his story is worth hearing, despite the Colonel’s objections. They are going to plumb the depths of sublevel 3, vault 12. It is this exploratory action that releases the disease into consciousness, that causes the eruption of the tendrils into the light of day. What they discover in the vault is a man’s pickled body with a horrendous, spreading growth on his chest. From this body the tendrils spring.

What’s interesting thus far is the teacher’s relationships to father figures. We know that when he was a child he witnessed the death of the man he thought was his father. When he arrives in the town where the army base is located, he tries to get the attention of an old man, who simply walks away without answering. The Colonel in charge of the army base is difficult to get in touch with, and, when he is reached, doesn’t want to deal with the teacher. He tries to reach out to older men instinctively, and finds it impossible to have a meaningful connection with them.

The teacher’s difficulty with father figures is important to note because of the next major plot point. As the teacher escapes with a female solder who just lost her husband to the rampaging tentacles, they speak to the old man who shunned the teacher earlier. They discover through him that the body at the source of the tendrils is a Russian scientist and that this scientist is the teacher’s real father. The source of the eruption of the diseased consciousness and the reason for the childhood trauma, then, is the teacher’s biological father. The repressed horror at the heart of his subconscious is the father.

The teacher and soldier run from the growing tendrils to a school where they watch an old film reel. The reel shows the Russian scientist discussing his work, explaining that his quest for the ultimate biological weapon ended in his own body. His own tissues were growing at a phenomenal rate, consuming any energy at all, from fire to nuclear radiation. At the same time, the teacher is infected and successfully fights off the tendrils, turning his blood into an instant tendril-cide. However, we’ve just learned that the tendrils are, literally, his father’s body, meaning that tendril-cide is a sort of patricide.

Now the teacher and soldier realize they have to go to the body at the source of the tendrils and kill it. To protect the soldier, the teacher coats her in his own blood, but the imagery is that of a newborn covered in birth-blood. They then fly a helicopter to the base, landing in a disturbing terrain of all tendrils. They are plunging into the subconscious, to the repressed monstrosity of an absent father. In a stroke of excellent set design, the tendrils swarm the closer they come to the center.

As they do this, the threat of bombing looms. The military plans to drop nuclear bombs in hopes of destroying the tendrils. Curiously, the Russian scientist described the US military as his new father, enriching the interplay between patricide and infanticide already at play in the film.

Finally the teacher confronts the body of his biological father, simultaneously alive and dead, present and absent. In the center of his father’s chest is what is unmistakably a throbbing, pulsing anus out of which all the tendrils grow. As perverse as any Greek myth, the teacher thrusts and knife into his father’s heart-anus and digs, metaphorically fucking his father. He then slices at his hands, drawing blood, and thrusts both hands into the orifice, in an act that can be best described as fisting his father to death.

Meanwhile, the soldier is sidetracked by the discovery of his husband in some sort of amniotic sack. Clawing with her hands, she digs the sack open, giving birth to her own husband in a way, but washing the protective blood off her own body in the process, leaving herself vulnerable. Fortunately, the father dies from the fisting just in time. The trauma has been overcome in facing the repressed, subconscious absent father that the disturbed mother so desperately tried to repress in sublevel 3, vault 12.

Not everything in Organizm makes sense to me. I don’t even mean the chronology, which would make the obviously late-thirties teacher in his fifties. I mean it’s not really clear how the tendrils form an amniotic sack and what the interplay of birthing imagery in this film really amounts to. I don’t think the psychoanalytic structure of the film means it’s a film filled with great depth: what good is reiterating Freud, really? This is a film made more with the subconscious than with the conscious. Its beauty is in how perverse it all is in representing diseased consciousness. From the reproductive imagery of the tendrils, through the birthing imagery, and the anal father-son fisting imagery of the conclusion and the anti-oedipal implications of such, the film is just perverse in the story its images tell, whatever the cheesy plot may be.

Behind the Wall (2008) - 2/4

The ghost-story horror film nearly always has at its root the notion of trauma. Despite there being no credited scientific evidence for the existence of ghosts, there has always been a consensus among spiritualists and paranormal investigators that a ghost is present only at the site of trauma. Some event must have precipitated the lingering spiritual energies. This is especially true in the case of malevolent spiritual energies. This bias is a Platonic one. Because Plato thought reality is structured by the realization of intellectual forms in a physical world, he thought all similar structures are the product of a single form. So for Plato the right order of the mind, the right order of society, and the right order of the material world are all a product of a single form. Plato's holism suggests that whatever is capable of causing disorder on a psychological level is thus capable of causing disorder on other levels. As a psychological trauma is capable of causing disorder of the mind, a sufficiently traumatic incident is thus capable of causing metaphysical disorder. This metaphysical disorder, the imbalance in physical reality, is manifested as or perhaps just is the ghost. The solution of many ghost movies is thus to uncover the source of the trauma. Psychoanalysis prescribes the uncovering of a trauma's source in order to restore psychological balance. So the Platonic bias extends this psycholanalytic hypothesis to the metaphysical order. The ghost, which is the metaphysical disorder, can only be eliminated by uncovering the trauma's source. Either the uncovering of the trauma's source is itself the solution or it is co-extensive with the solution. In The Legend of Hell House, for instance, the discovery of the true source of the trauma behind the haunting and the solution to the haunting occur at the same time. Opening the lead door and discovering the short body of Belasco occur together. They had to occur at the same time. They are thus co-extensive. This is the way narrative can distinguish the tasks of discovery and solution, though they are formally the same task of restoring balance.

Behind the Wall is a classical ghost movie. It has the malevolent ghost; it has the trauma that caused the ghost; it has the unerring flow toward the discovery of the trauma and with that the elimination of the ghost. There is in fact more than one trauma in Behind the Wall. The first trauma is the cause of the ghost and the second is caused by the ghost when it murders a woman. The first trauma causes the metaphysical disorder of the haunting and psychological imbalance in retired priest Father Hendry (Lawrence Dane). The second trauma causes social disorder and psychological imbalance in the murdered woman's daughter Katelyn (Lindy Booth). Katelyn lived with her parents in the town lighthouse. One night her mother was brutally murdered and her father convicted of the murder. After years away, she is summoned back to the town by Father Hendry. The town's deputy mayor (James Thomas) and a banker (Brad HOdder) from New York are turning the long-abandoned lighthouse into a tourist attraction to earn money for the economically challenged town. Fearing that probing the lighthouse will aggitate the site of trauma, Hendry requests the help of Katelyn to stop the work. As Hendry's fears are confirmed and the ghost begins killing again, Hendry and Katelyn are both led on the painful path toward uncovering the source of both traumata.

As is often the case with a ghost movie, the uncovering of the trauma is both anticlimactic and fascinating. In Hell House, for instance, the trauma could be summed up as an extreme case of 'Little Man Syndrome.' On the one hand, it's silly that so much horror could be the product of one man's insecurity about his short legs. On the other hand, it's revealing of human psychology. Both the cause and the effects of the trauma are revealing. That we are able to accept that a man's shortness can lead to malevolent spiritual activity suggests that we credit to men such narcissism, megalomania, and insecurity at the deficiencies of the body. That much of the spirit's malevolence is sexual in nature suggests much about repression, inhibition, and guilt. It suggests, for instance, the way guilt and shame can transform love to sadism in sexual relationships.

In Behind the Wall the traumata are the result of female curiosity. The first trauma is brought about through jealous rage over a wife's unfaithful sexual curiosity. The second trauma is brought about by a woman's investigation of the walled-up site of the first trauma. It is as though the first trauma causes the second by its need to punish its own cause, by the compulsion for repetition. There are two other women in the film, Katelyn and the banker's marketing guru, Monica (Suzie Pollard). Where Katelyn is a meek, pale waif, Monica is a sophisticated and independent woman. She knows what she wants and tries to get it. The film presents her as predatory. The handsome deputy mayor is attracted to Katelyn, but preyed upon by the sexually-interested Monica. Monica must therefore by punished by the ghost. Katelyn on the other hand never seems to be in any real danger. Female passivity is rewarded, female curiosity dangerous and punishable in Behind the Wall.

Monica and the banker are also targeted on account of the ideology for which they stand. They are capitalists who see the traumatic history of the lighthouse as exploitable. The film does seem to be making a plea for preserving historical buildings. However, it doesn't make this point very well. For one, capitalism is the social order that is disrupted by the trauma. So uncovering the trauma and restoring order should ultimately restore the capitalist order. Moreover, it is the activity of the capitalists that ultimately leads to the uncovering of the hidden trauma and with it the restoration of order metaphysically and psychologically. Hendry's initial goal was to leave the trauma hidden. The capitalist imperative to exploitation is also an impetus for the growth of knowledge. Hence some analyses that consider science a capitalistic manifestation. In the ghost movie, since trauma is co-extensively solved by knowledge of the trauma the value of capitalism and science is often affirmed.

That is what I found most interesting in Behind the Wall. But in execution it has more in common with The House by the Cemetery than with The Legend of Hell House. Just like House by the Cemetery, Behind the Wall comes across as a series of arbitrary supernatural events. The ghost is supposed to be bound in the walled-up room, yet once free it is as liberated from physics as any ghost. It is clearly shown to be non-physical, yet it seems to have physical bounds. For instance, the characters seem able to time its progress as it chases them and to lock it behind doors. Yet other times it seems almost omnipotent as it transports from one character to another and induces hallucinations. During assaults it is usually an invisible force or a hand attached to an offscreen body. The assaults are always weapon-less violence: pushes, pulls, and lacerations. If one is going to use violence in a horror film, one should at least strive for creativity. This is what elevates The House by the Cemetery. It too has senseless violence, but a senseless violence rescued by Fulci's perverse creativity. In Behind the Wall there is neither creativity nor consistency in the ghost's activities.

It's also unclear why the spirit is attacking anyone at all. Hell House offers an explanation and a tone to the violence consonant with that explanation. Behind the Wall offers no real explanation other than the fact of the trauma and the fact that the film is in the horror genre. This is a film that would have profited by withholding violence and focusing on the investigation. The ghostly sound effects are quite eerie. They are much more effective than the anticlimactic assaults. The film's adherence to formula prevents it take any such narrative risks.

Behind the Wall is the case of a potentially interesting story marred by a lack of cinematic imagination. The ghost story structure, the attractive actors, the ethereal screen presence of Lindy Booth, the Newfoundland location and the spooky lighthouse setting all offered many opportunities for crafting a superior ghost film.

House of Usher (2008) - 3/4

David DeCoteau's House of Usher falls in a long tradition of "The Fall of the House of Usher"-adaptations. Jean Epstein's La chute de la maison Usher and Watson and Webber's The Fall of the House of Usher are both avant-garde classics that take advantage of the non-narrative aspects in Poe's writing. Roger Corman's House of Usher is a classic of horror cinema that follows Poe's narrative to mine its symbols for their psychoanalytic connotations. DeCoteau's Usher, written by Simon Savory, falls somewhere in between Corman's and Epstein's visions. DeCoteau's Usher is a deliberate attempt to put the potentially therapeutic nightmare of a psychologically damaged mind on screen, making narrative superficial and subordinate to the psychological symbolism.

It's worth looking at how DeCoteau's Usher is distinguished from previous adaptations. In Epstein's Usher, the visitor to the house of Usher is an elderly acquaintance of Roderick's who is not even named. He is merely a witness to the events surrounding the fall of the house. Complementing his role as witness is the variety of sensory malfunctions Epstein gives him: he uses an ear trumpet to hear and suffers presbyopia. He's not only a witness, but a bad witness to a distinctly Usher world. None of the visitor's personality enters that world, but his flaws of perception alter how we receive it. In Corman's Usher, the visitor is named and while he too is a witness to the Usher world, he's too indignant to witness it passively. He is not a friend of Roderick and in fact only meets him in the first act. It is rather with Madeline that he has a relationship, a romantic one as it happens. To save Madeline, he actively effects change in that world. In DeCoteau's Usher, the visitor, Victor Reynolds (Michael Cardelle), takes priority over the Ushers themselves. The world he enters is distinctly his nightmare and not a nightmare he has entered by accident. Not only are his senses sharp, but the Ushers tell one another that he has the power of "sight," a sort of psychic vision into the house's otherworldly aspects. His power of sight is not that of a detached observer, but of a creator. The house of Usher is a Reynolds world populated by Ushers.

So, where Corman was able to leave the supernaturalism of the house ambiguous and merely a manifestation of Roderick's troubled mind, DeCoteau doesn't have that recourse. There is no objective witness. If the house is a manifestation of a troubled mind, it is Reynolds's mind. However, it is also through Reynolds's mind that the whole film is seen. The house of DeCoteau's Usher really is a vampiric entity in symbiotic relationship with the Ushers. They and the house grow weaker until the house is able to consume victims. Thus is Reynolds summoned to the house in capacity as both saviour and victim of the Ushers. It is by Roderick (Frank Mentier) that Reynolds is invited, not merely an old friend but his former lover in a relationship that ended when he enlisted in the military. Both Roderick and Madeline (Jaimyse Haft) tell Reynolds in private how much he's needed, making his importance very clear; yet it is nebulous just why exactly he is important. While it initially seems he is there to liberate the Ushers from the house, they eventually decide he must be sacrificed. Their decision doesn't proceed so much from any narrative or character developments as much as by the dream logic at work.

The nightmare Reynolds finds himself in is interesting for being more sexual than violent. I referred to DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum, made a year later, as a psychosexual horror. House of Usher, while not as pure, falls in the same category. On Reynolds's first night in the house, Roderick wastes no time stripping and making out with him for a few minutes. Reynolds ends the session when the moment of penetration comes dangerously near. He is molested by the hands of ghosts in a bathtub. He has visions of ghostly muscular men in underwear warning him to flee. Each of them were victims of the house, yes, but also of Roderick's camera. It is as if Roderick's look of sexual desire captured their souls. Madeline also attempts to seduce Reynolds with some ferocity, but falls into a cataleptic state before she can get his pants down to fellate him. It is as though Reynolds is forever approaching sexual moments, but being prevented or preventing himself from fulfilling them. Or rather he is being both tantalized and reproved with fruitless sexual relationships. Madeline is given a speech about a ghost child she believes haunts the house. It's not the ghost of a child that died, but the ghost of the potential child her barren womb can never realize, "For every woman there is a child waiting to be born," she says. This is an expression of conventional sexuality: the idea that we must "be fruitful and multiply." She adds, "I fear the unborn far more than I fear the dead." So both Roderick and Madeline are viewed as haunted, Roderick by male sexual conquests he's sacrificed to the house and Madeline by her infertility. Both are haunted, then, by their fruitlessness. Reynolds's importance to the Usher's therefore seems to be the possibility of fruitfulness, but ultimately the vampiric barrenness of Usher means he can only be a saviour through sacrifice.

Reynolds's sexual reticence and his status as sacrificial victim has mystical connotations. From early in the film he can be seen wearing a cross. Roderick draws explicit attention to it. His role as both saviour and victim makes him Christ-like. The Ushers, however, have a distinctly pagan quality. They must continue to sacrifice victims to the house. The relationship of Roderick and Madeline to the house is an interesting one. Despite their concern for Reynolds, they compulsively perform the sacrificial ritual. They have no fruitfulness outside of the destruction of others. Where Corman deliberately shot the exteriors for his Usher where there had recently been a forest fire, the grounds of DeCoteau's Usher contain a lovely garden. Madeline explains the garden is over the family burial grounds. There is no growth without death for the Ushers. But the house is insatiable. Their sacrifices must be endlessly repeated. They are held captive to it, but it's not clear why. Freud considered compulsive repetition to be a particularly destruction reaction to feelings of guilt. In this case, it is Reynolds's own feelings of guilt about his fruitless sexuality. One is reminded of how Pope John Paul II referred to birth control and pro-choice as a "culture of death." Reynolds is able to deny his own sexuality and project it onto the pagan, parasitic Ushers while he remains a Christ-like victim.

A distracting aspect of the film is that it's just a little too precious and fresh. The house itself is a newly-built modern manor. One would expect a grotesque and delapidated old mansion. It is implausible that this house is in the process of falling to pieces. The actors are also too young for the roles they are asked to portray, with the exception of Madeline's Jaimyse Haft, who gives the film's best performance. Roderick looks like he would still get carded at a pub. They are also all extraordinarily attractive. Even the butler and the ghosts are studly young men. I can't deny the pleasure of looking at these faces and bodies. It is an enjoyable part of the film, of course. But in DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum there is a good reason for having only attractive people and the pleasure of looking at them integrates with the content of the film. In House of Usher, there is no internal reason for the attractive cast. Nor does the enjoyment of these bodies integrate with the film's content.

House of Usher is the second of DeCoteau's Poe films I've seen, though it was made before The Pit and the Pendulum. He also adapted The Raven in 2007, which I have yet to see. In the two I have seen, I've been impressed by DeCoteau's and Savory's experiments in sexualizing Poe's narratives. From the expressionistic and symbol-rich material of Poe's stories, they've created nightmares with which to explore psychosexual depths. The narrative-light content of Poe's stories allow the space to make such explorations. The Pit and the Pendulum is something of a masterpiece. House of Usher is not as sure-footed, but is still a fascinating psychosexual nightmare from which we might experience a little catharsis. In following its own unique path with the many permutations Poe's story permits, House of Usher proves a worthy entry in the grand tradition of House of Usher films.

November Son (2008) - 2.5/4

What filmmakers and writers often forget is the full implications of what they do when they tell any story. The reason a film like Once Upon a Time in the West has the epic power it has is because of the unique properties of storytelling, which creates a whole universe out of a very exclusive collection of people, places, and things. Just try to imagine the events of Once Upon a Time in the West as having taken place in this world. What does Harmonica's fate really matter? Or Frank's, for that matter? In the grand scheme of things, these people would not even register as blips on history's radar. The story, though, carves out a universe where these two people attain mythic proportions. They are mythologized. They are not so much actively mythologized as necessarily mythologized as a consequence of creating a universe that is viewed almost exclusively under the significance of the actions of these characters. There is nothing inherently important about Harmonica; but the film's universe is carved out in such a way that he is a central player in the rightful order of that whole universe. His killing Frank is the triumph of right, progress, justice, freedom over chaotic opportunism, or evil, if you will. In real life, we never individually have that sort of significance in the universe. Except perhaps for Caesar, Napoleon, or, alas, Hitler, almost nobody has ever had that level of significance in the real world. Yet even our mundane lives, carved out by a skilled filmmaker, could become somehow epic and our actions could appear to hold grand significance for the fate of the universe. If you don't believe me, read James Joyce's Ulysses or Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

I brought up this issue of the power of storytelling, especially cinematic storytelling has in order to address what I find so strange about November Son. The universe as it is represented in November Son revolves entirely around the implications of homosexual men. They are the Chosen Ones, the demigods upon whom the fate of all things rests, as construed by writer-director Jason Paul Collum. The film's characters include a young gay man, Eli (Sacha Sacket), who moves into the apartment of a woman, Marti (Tina Ona Paukstelis), who only rents her apartment out to gay men, because she's a 'fruitfly', which I believe is a woman who is attracted to gay men. The previous tenant, naturally, was also gay; he dies in the first few minutes of the film. Eli's homophobic father may or may not be gay and begins dating the previous tenant's mother (Brinke Stevens), who also claims to be attracted to gay men and admits her previous 'boyfriend' was gay. Eli gets a job as a photographer for a Christian lifestyle magazine, where the boss, Emily (Night of the Living Dead's Judith O'Dea), takes a shine to him as he reminds her of her deceased son, who was gay. Also, her husband was gay. There are a few other characters and, as you might imagine, all of their lives revolved around gay men.

Now were this film an erotic drama set in a gay community of some sort, then the fact that male homosexuality is the center of this universe wouldn't be so remarkable. However, this film is a thriller set in a normal community amongst Christian families. Yet every male seems to be gay, every female obsessed with gay males. The whole town is obsessed with homosexuals, as the passengers in random cars driving by Eli on bicycle, people who could not possibly know he is homosexual, throw cans at him. There are anti-gay signs around. This has a very peculiar effect. For one, it's ridiculous. Every time a new character mentions another gay person in his or her life, it became increasingly difficult to stifle a chuckle. But it also has a nightmarish aspect that undercuts what I believe to be the attempt at an anti-homophobia statement. There are even some cracks at George W. Bush. But rather than showing homophobia is a harmful attitude, it almost justifies homophobia in the face of a world that is torn asunder by the overwhelming majority of gay males and gay-obsessed straights. Despite that, it is fascinating and I must say rather entertaining. Internet Movie Database lists November Son as a comedy as well as a horror, so perhaps the everybody-is-gay mentalty is intended to be slyly humourous. If so, well done Collum.

So how does November Son work as a thriller? Well, the dynamic I've described above occupies the first hour and nine minutes of the hour and forty-four minute film. It consists of these various characters having one-on-one conversations about their lives and, most of all, about gayness and gay people. Emily in particular keeps confiding things in Eli and one wonders, "Why?" He doesn't need to know anything about her to work at her magazine. A character-driven thriller is great, but this is more of character-leisurely-strolled thriller. One doesn't even get any trace of a plot until that hour-and-nine-minute mark, when someone receives a hammer blow to the head at last. Moreover, the character motivations are often quite vague.

It all does ultimately tie up neatly and the build-up is to some extent justified and indeed explained by the finale. Once that thriller plot kicks in, there is one beautiful scene the horror fan can enjoy. Legendary scream queen Brinke Stevens, after an attempted assault, takes a stroll by a lake to wind down and spots a coffin beached on the shore. I won't spoil the scene, but it's a flicker of nightmare flavour in an otherwise plain but sometimes-touching gay melodrama.

On a trivial point, the interior decorators out there may enjoy the real houses in which the film is shot. They stood out for me, for whatever reason. Most films are shot on sets that are much larger than the rooms in real houses in order to accommodate film crews. Not November Son.

The Box Collector (2008) - 3/4

The Box Collector tells an eccentric, melodramatic story about small town people. I think this is supposed to mount up to some statement about jealousy. The basic plot concerns the very sheltered but handsome young Harry (Noah Segen), who likes to paint pictures of boxes. He is falling in love with a sexually provocative and exotic new neighbour, Marie (Lyne Renee). Working against this love is all the men in town who also seem to be falling for Marie and, most importantly, Harry's eccentric and potentially-dangerous mother Beth (Margot Kidder). As the story plays out in this peculiar small town, though, it goes far beyond a statement about jealousy. It becomes a grand expression of a perverse worldview I find deeply fascinating.

It only takes five minutes for this worldview to begin to show itself. As Harry enters the pharmacy to collect medication for himself and his mother, he's immediately set upon by the slutty cashier. She leans forward to flash as much of her ample cleavage as possible, asks Harry why he doesn't come around more often, and drops several subtlety-free clues that she wants him. On his way out of the pharmacy, Harry's friend Burt invites him for a drink at the bar, where it's made clear the slutty, sexy female bartender is into the virginal Harry. When Harry gets home, the beautiful and provocatively-dressed Marie, possibly a slut, is moving in next door and immediately takes a shine to Harry, making a show of her assets.

You may be wondering why I keep using the word 'slutty.' Surely I'm being a chauvinist scumbag? No, I'm just interpreting what is given on-screen. Burt makes clear the bartender will put out for anyone who pays. Similarly, the pharmacy cashier later wastes no time going for a ride with Burt. Even Marie is a 'massage therapist' by night, working in her own home. She's also perpetually flirting with all the town's men.

To be frank, the worldview being put forward here is that all attractive, young women are sluts. It gets better, though. You can't have sluts without slut-hungry men. And sure enough, all men who aren't Harry fall into the category. They are mostly represented in the character of Burt, however. Men are looked upon as incapable of fidelity; and due to the overwhelming number of sexy sluts in town, it's easy for them to cheat. Burt's wife Luz is both menacing and comic relief as his fiercely shrewish shadow, following his every move, just knowing he's adulterous. Beth, it turns out, is Luz's best friend. They spend all day reading tarot cards and bitching about how men can't keep 'it' in their pants. Beth herself was the victim of infidelity and despises all men who aren't her son.

The plot thickens further. Marie is on the run from her ex-husband with her daughter. She keeps complaining about how jealous he was because she was constantly giving massages to other men and flirting. She makes clear jealousy is something she can't stand. Of course, there's a difference between jealousy and not wanting to be humiliated. In this perverse world the filmmaker has set up, one can hardly blame her ex-husband for having been worried. But I digress.

The point of fact is that this bizarre worldview is very fascinating. It basically compartmentalizes all men into two categories: virginal mama's boys and horndogs. And it compartmentalizes all women into two categories: man-hating harpies and shameless, sexy sluts. It's not entirely clear which side the film stands on. It seems to regard with amused condemnation all of these categories. Marie and Harry alone offer some possibility for being a normal, happy, faithful couple in this twisted universe.

The worldview here is the polar opposite of what one finds in Russ Meyer's films. The ultimate expression of Russ Meyer's philosophy, Ultravixens, boils down to one oft-repeated line from the film, "Always look a good fuck in the face." The Box Collector is not appreciative of that philosophy.

So much for worldview. There are other things to enjoy in the film. The grotesque characters who embody the odd worldview are certainly fascinating and amusing to spend time with. They feel like real people. I grew up with people like this. However odd or caricatured they may seem to some, they're real. The most potent of the characters is Beth. Not only is she a complex woman with strong and frightening feelings, but Margot Kidder gives a totally uninhibited performance as this grotesque character. It is truly incredible. One would expect Kidder to be interested in preserving some glimmer of her sexpot image. She let's it all go. She wears huge glasses, hair so dry it might as well be seaweed, frumpy fortune teller clothes, and hobbles with a cane. Close-ups emphasize the wrinkles around her mouth as she delivers frightfully-impassioned lines or cold lines hiding the fire within. Apart from Beth, Luz (Adriana O'Neil) is a scene-stealer as the bitter, jealous harpy. The past-their-prime ladies definitely take control of this movie and show the men and sexy young women a thing or two.

As I mentioned, there is a problematic final three minutes. It calls into question most of the rest of the movie. There is something to figure out there, but I'm not convinced it's worth puzzling out. There is scarcely enough information given and even once one does puzzle it out, it won't reveal anything more about what the film has to impart: the strange worldview remains pretty much what it is. All it might do is serve to distance the worldview from the filmmaker, well-known British producer John Daly, who the end credits tell us wrote and directed the film. Daly passed away in 2008, before The Box Collector had a chance to get out. I wonder if the ending was his decision? At any rate, the film remains an emotionally powerful, fascinating picture that will offer plenty of entertainment for lovers of peculiar characters.

Who Is KK Downey? (2008) 2.5/4

The thing about hipster-dom is that any attempt to out-hipster the hipsters still leaves one a hipster. Rebelling against hipster trends is precisely what a hipster would do. Indulging in hipster trends is also precisely what a hipster would do. It's a perverse trap. A trap Who Is KK Downey? both satirizes and is caught in.

Who Is KK Downey? is about two upper-middle class young slackers who are trying to become artists. The drug-using and hard-partying Terry wants to be a punk rock star; Theo Huxtable (no, not that Theo Huxtable; this one is a chubby, blond, white guy) wants to write a brutal, sex-filled, neorealist novel. They combine their talents, creating a hard-lived fictional author of Theo's book, the enigmatic KK Downey. KK is the ultimate hipster, appealing to all the 'scenesters', launching the book to A Million Little Pieces-style fame, except with underground credibility. (Think Harmony Korine with Oprah Book Club support.) The new fame and fortune naturally has adverse affects on our protagonists.

There's a subplot involving Terry's archnemesis, the cultural elite hipster Connor......... Rooney. He's so pretentious he insists on the pause. His profession is rock critic and possibly douchebag, although he's so extreme a douchebag he becomes a sympathetic character: this is a guy who masturbates to pictures of Enlightenment authors. Not only that, but despite being a douchebag, he's the only guy to correctly realize KK Downey is a phony. He may be an envious, narcissistic hipster, but he's right. And if there's anything to be learned from the existence of people like Dale Peck, it's that even tenth-rate human beings can sometimes be right.

The writers, Darren Curtis, Matt Silver, and Pat Kiely, (who incidentally also play Terry, Theo, and Rooney respectively--plus Kiely and Curtis direct) have a few targets for their satire. Hipsters and the publishing industry are the main targets. As a satire of the publishing industry, it's a bit contrived. I think they overestimate the influence and power of the literary world. They get the notion of the author as commodity right, but that's not really new. The commodity is for the hipsters and that's where the satires works best. These young authors clearly know their scenes well, because they have some stingingly clever scenes at hipster expense. These moments of high-brow humour were the most successful in the film and got the most laughs out of me. There are occasional minor targets as well. Downey's appearance is, oddly enough, nearly identical to Karen Black's disguise in Family Plot. This feminine appearance allows the writers to pick on gender theorists too.

Most of the lower-brow humour falls flat. Not because it's low-brow, but rather through a lack of ambition. If you're going to do low-brow, go over-the-top. Sometimes they did and then it was very funny. But for the most part they seemed to think a fellatio reference would be sufficient. It's not.

There are also many scenes where it appears the writer-directors weren't sure whether they wanted serious or humourous. The result is that I couldn't take these scenes seriously, but they didn't make me laugh either. There are even humourous scenes that should be taken seriously to work, but the implausibly artificial characters (Rooney sports a pompadour and speaks like Ian Buchanan) detract from the needed reality. Satire requires an anchor, or it loses conviction; this film needed more anchorage.

There's a moment when the Theo character interrupts an opera to discuss a business deal with his agent and introduces KK Downey. This is really what the film is all about: the commodification of art interrupting the enjoyment of art. On another level, it's about the enjoyment of art interrupting the enjoyment of life, normal, mundane life. A hipster comedy that offers a triumphant affirmation of bourgeois humanism? That's hitting the right Marx. So quit Stallin and go rent Who Is KK Downey? It's far from perfect, but it's a truly independent anglophone picture from Quebec that is witty, stylish, and offers a charmingly human story.

A Film with Me in It (2008) - 3/4

A Film with Me in It is pitched as the story of two men who write themselves into a screenplay in response to a series of unlikely tragic accidents. That's not really correct. A Film with Me in It is rather a slacker's wish fulfillment fantasy. But things have to get worse before they can get better.

A man named Mark (Mark Doherty, who also wrote the screenplay) lives in an apartment in desperate need of repairs. His best friend Pierce (Dylan Moran) lives upstairs. They're both slackers and they're writing a screenplay together. They bet on horses, get drinks, and generally don't get a whole lot done. Now Mark's girlfriend is moving out, his landlord is threatening him with eviction if he doesn't pay his rent, and he's left to take care of his paralyzed brother and dog on his own. Lucky for him the death-trap of an apartment begins dispatching the whole lot of them. It's like Repulsion as an Irish slacker comedy.

The first twenty minutes are familiar to any slacker: the people to whom responsibilities are owed become increasingly dismayed with the slacker's irresponsibility and eventually give up on him. Wouldn't it be great if there were a reset button on life? The Fates basically push that button for Mark as sheer accident intervenes to wipe out every responsibility in his life. The end, which I won't reveal, is perfect: Mark has become the ultimate slacker, and he's finally happy.

A Film with Me in It is certainly a black comedy, albeit a hit and miss one. I found myself laughing at a good many of the places I was supposed to laugh, but not all of them. Some of the humour just doesn't work. That's unfortunate. Dylan Moran is easily one of the ten greatest living standup comedians and a talented actor; there is enough of the Dylan Moran persona in Pierce to keep fans like me happy, but he's not used to his fullest here.

The angle of the screenplay does come up occasionally, but more as a crutch for the brainstorming. The accidents are, of course, preposterous: no-one would believe such a thing! So a cover-up story is necessary. These men just happen to be aspiring filmmakers. That writer Mark Doherty plays a man named Mark who writes a screenplay about a man named Mark adds an amusing layer to the film-in-a-film motif. One wonders if anything like this happened to the real Mark Doherty. I'll be keen on viewing any future Mark Doherty-written films. Hopefully he won't have to resort to murder to get it done.

The Disappeared (2008) - 3.5/4

It is difficult to write about The Disappeared without revealing too much. It works hard at keeping a delicate ambiguity, particularly regarding whether protagonist Matthew is insane or whether he sees ghosts or whether there's some other conspiracy at work. It is a psychological mystery-thriller with supernatural overtones.

Matthew (Harry Treadaway) has just returned home from a psychiatric hospital. The relationship between he and his father (Greg Wise) is tense: he won't look his father in the face and his father tries his best to show concern without really feeling it. The reason is that Matthew's little brother disappeared from the playground while Matthew was supposed to be watching him and has never been found. Now Matthew is beginning to hallucinate that his brother is trying to tell him something. He's having dreams of being buried alive. His dad is convinced he's losing his mind again. And his best friend's little sister has now disappeared.

I can't claim The Disappeared makes a lot of sense, because in the final analysis it doesn't. It makes about as much sense as Mullholland Dr. or, to stay in-genre, Suspiria. A film of this sort doesn't have to make a lot of sense. It just has to be effective. And the hermetic arrangement of the film's plot is effective, sometimes creepy, sometimes chilling, and even moving. Some credit for this goes to Harry Treadaway for a subtle interpretation of a character that could have been very annoying in the wrong hands.

While The Disappeared has an awkward and slow beginning, those who stick with it will be rewarded. It is slow for a reason: it takes its time setting up the pieces in just the right spots and developing a disarming mood. What could have been a totally routine picture ends up containing a good many surprises, as well as, admittedly, a few predictable plot twists.

The Disappeared is a very difficult sort of film to make, a sort of film where it must be very tempting to cheat in order to manipulate the audience. Most films of this sort are trite failures. For every Don't Look Now there are dozens of forgotten imitators. The Disappeared is not a masterpiece like Don't Look Now, but it is a skillful and haunting picture that never insults the intelligence of its audience. First-time director Johnny Kevorkian should be proud.

Flick (2008) - 3/4

While the plot is thin and nearly disposable in Flick, what comes across most is heart. Strange for a comic horror picture, Flick has a lot of heart in its love of its characters, its fetishized rockabilly music and its nostalgia for the '50s. This, more than anything, is what makes Flick a truly charming film.

Flick concerns a young man in Wales named Johnny, nicknamed 'Flick' for his switchblade, known as a 'flick knife' in the UK. While trying to get a dance from a crush he's attacked, fights back, and ends up driving over a bridge in his car. Over fifty years later his car is found with him in it and the power of rockabilly music playing over pirate radio brings him back to life, now thirsty for revenge on those who wouldn't let him dance with his lady crush. All of 'those' are now senior citizens, incidentally. Meanwhile, a detective from Scotland Yard (I imagine) gets a new partner all the way from Memphis (Faye Dunaway!), who comes equipped with chainmail and illegal weaponry.

The style is dripping from the frames in Flick. Bridging the live action scenes are pages from a comic book showing parts of the scenes that apparently were either too boring or expensive to act out. I suspect the former. I'm not certain if Flick was a comic first or if they made those pages for the film; either way, while the idea has been used before in Tank Girl (1995), it is put to good use here. Moreover, whenever rockabilly music is heard, red notes can be seen floating out of the radio. Johnny always sees things as they were in the past, in the '50s. Blood is always splashes of ink printed directly to the frame or coloured like Playdough. And, my favourite, most of the transitions are good old fashioned irises. As a whole, the cinematography, gelled lighting, and stylistic tricks give Flick the feel of a comic book. The one major difference is that the camera is quite agile. A bit ostentatious at first, the style grew on me as I watched and I soon came to enjoy it. It gives the film a fluidity while yet giving each scene a hermetic quality, like the squares in a comic book or the shots of an early silent film.

The odd array of characters are very entertaining. The most standout of them all is Faye Dunaway's Lt. McKenzie, who despite being in her sixties with a robotic arm is the most energetic force in the film. She is the perfect contrast to the nearly lifeless Johnny. Moreover, despite Dunaway herself being over sixty-five at the time of shooting, she is amazingly sexy as Lt. McKenzie. Sometimes facelifts do work wonders, ladies and gentlemen: Ms. Dunaway is still a beauty. But I digress. The other really standout character is Johnny's mother, a dotty old lady, who, like Johnny, is stuck in the past. She is so oblivious Johnny is a zombie that she invites the parish priest over to pay her little Johnny a visit. The comedy in this film is based more on these odd characters and the situations their personalities entail rather than any contrived comic situations.

The exception, unfortunately, is the character of Johnny himself, the titular 'Flick'. Johnny is little more than a revenge-obsessed zombie, whose motivation for murder is weak at best. His monomaniacal tendencies can be annoying. But I suppose that's a trait he shares with all zombies. At best, he's an uninteresting character, very much overshadowed by those around him, although his old crush and her daughter are rather bland as well. The filmmaker perhaps sensed this, giving Lt. McKenzie much more screentime than anyone else.

Where Flick fails most is in its weak plotting. The whole story is the height of contrivance and has its fair share of holes. The weak plot makes it difficult for Flick to sustain an effective structure and pace, making the film drag somewhat after the first hour, once Johnny begins pursuing his old crush herself. It picks up in the end for a finale that isn't wholly satisfying.

Flick's greatest success is in capturing the spirit of nostalgia for the age it is fetishizing. Nostalgia is not an easy feeling to capture--Down with Love is one of the few recent films that does it really well--but Flick succeeds. It makes a good case for the love of the old. While I didn't need a zombie to convince me, I'm sold. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to listen to some Ron Haydock & the Boppers while I fantasize about the sexy sexagenarian Faye Dunaway.

Coming Soon (2008) - 1/4

Long-haired Asian ghost hags and jump scares are old, tired, worn out, right? Right! Which is why Coming Soon is at times embarrassing to watch; it's doing the same old tricks, tricks that kids are doing on their own youtube videos these days. If a film can't outdo a twelve-year-old's youtube video, it's got big problems.

Coming Soon has an utterly predictable story. The first five minutes are so free of subtlety I had guessed the "shocking" twist right there at the beginning. It was just a matter of waiting for its main characters to figure out. Chen, the protagonist, is a cinema employee getting into the bootlegging industry. It just so happens the one film he chooses is haunted by the ghost of the film's eye-plucking hag villain. Whoever sees a certain scene in the film ends up dead and inside the movie.

The film plays out exactly as you might expect, with Chen and his girlfriend launching an investigation, eventually finding the truth, and then realizing they must stop the film from being distributed before it's too late. There are some inventive moments in the last twenty minutes, involving a deja vu scene of sorts. I was fairly impressed and entertained by that, but it's too little too late.

While I wouldn't dare give the film credit for having a theme, because it doesn't, it unwittingly explores an issue that's very fascinating to me. That's the difference between watching theatrical gore and violence and watching real gore and violence (which some people on this board do). I don't believe there is any relationship between these activities, other than that some horror fans are confused into thinking there is. Theatrical gore is a game you play with the filmmaker: 'try your best to horrify me.' Real gore is making a spectacle of someone really being hurt and/or killed.

Unless you can't get enough of Asian oh-so-creepy ghost women jumpcutting right in front of the camera with a sudden loud noise on the soundtrack, miss Coming Soon. It is a decent idea that was in need of a good screenplay to make it work and it didn't get it.

The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce (2008) - 3/4

There aren't many surprises in The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce. We begin knowing the outcome and, being based on a true story, we have some idea of what goes on. The pleasure is in seeing how the events came about--or at least how Pearce represents them as having come about.

A frame narrative is set up in which Irishman Alexander Pearce, a murderer and cannibal, is making his pre-execution confession to a priest in an English prison camp is Tasmania. We then get the account, in a few chunks, of how Pearce and his fellow prison camp escapees ended up eating each other until only Pearce was left. For a confession it's strangely lacking in confessing. He tends to represent himself as the one innocent one who ultimately had to kill to save himself from being killed. The one thing we don't get in confession is what we learn from the governor of the prison camp. He gives an account of Pearce being caught, returned to prison, escaping again, and eating his single fellow escapee when he had plenty of provisions.

What's strange about the film is that it takes pains to absolve Alexander Pearce of all his crimes. His killing and eating his companions is explained by the overwhelming drive of hunger and the kill-or-be-killed mentality. His killing his later fellow escapee is explained by his being driven mad from his experiences. Pearce, as far as the film is concerned, is not to blame for anything, but rather nature itself for making hunger and society itself for its inept penal systems are to blame.

The struggle through the Tasmanian wilderness is well-done survivalist storytelling and the story is a plausible reenactment, with good acting, of what might have happened. The sections with the priest and various colonists are alternately serious and satirical. Since they seem more satirical of society at the time than of now it's not really important to get the satire.

At a scant one-hour runtime, Last Confession never overstays its welcome. It does precisely what it sets out to do without much meandering. It presents a well-made account of Pearce's crimes and tries its best to exonerate him of the charge, "monster."

3/4

Love Exposure (2008) - 4/4

Love Exposure is the cinematic equivalent of post-post-modern novels like Infinite Jest and White Teeth, or the novels of Murakami: big, ambitious, sprawling, yet with an emotional core and focus. To some extent, Love Exposure is even more successful than its literary correlates. It is an epic four hour romantic tragicomedy on the themes of love and perversion told with such a sure hand and masterful pacing that it manages to mostly redeem itself of its shortcomings.

Those shortcomings develop in the first act, within which the influence of post-modern literature is most evident. During the first hour of the film, I couldn't help but think of James Wood's criticism of White Teeth and similar novels of the style he labels 'hysterical realism.' As he put it, "An excess of storytelling has become the contemporary way of shrouding, in majesty, a lack; it is the Sun King principle. That lack is the human." Within the first hour, Sono has a quasi-religious School of Upskirt Photography with its own sacred writings and martial arts techniques; a teenage boy who sins to please his dad, a Catholic priest, in confession, and can only get an erection if he finds a girl who reminds him of the Virgin Mary; this boy becomes the King of the Upskirt Photographers and gains his own disciples. This is very entertaining, but too zany, too eager to please with "showy liveliness" that hangs off the characters "like jewelry." It is not the lack of plausibility that is difficult to handle, but the lack of human emotion and relationship in these conceptual rather than emotional connections.

With the second hour, Sono begins to truly redeem his narrative. With all the elements in place from the first hour, with the characters and their histories established, he begins to delve into real human emotion. The story is surprisingly simple in its outline: a Catholic priest and his son, Yu, are both 'perverts,' the priest for having had relations with a woman while a priest and Yu for being an upskirt photographer. Koike, a female regional director for a fast-growing cult, the Church of Zero, is a puritanical sociopath who becomes obsessed with Yu and so concocts a plan to convert Yu's Catholic family as an example to others that the Church of Zero is the religion to join. The love of Yu's life, Yoko, who is the adopted daughter of the woman Yu's father is marrying, becomes the means by which Koike will dominate the family. While the damage has been done, to an extent, by the first hour, by making the connections between many of the characters so fragile, based on the mere use of the phrase 'original sin,' or on one character accidentally appearing like the Virgin Mary, the remaining three hours focus entirely on the emotions and relationships of these characters. Yu's unrequited love for Yoko and the machinations of Koike, as well as a subplot involving the Catholich Church's refusal to allow a priest to marry, give Love Exposure a very solid emotional core.

Despite the shortcomings I point out above, Sono is overwhelmingly successful with Love Exposure. Every human is different, has a distinct psychology that comes from a unique upbringing and set of experiences; how the quest for love and how love itself are expressed in each person will differ. Somewhere along the way, ideologies like Christianity restricted the ways in which love could be sought or expressed and all alternatives are labeled 'perverse.' Sono examines the category of the 'perverse,' but doesn't try to argue with the label. Rather he argues for its being embraced. What Sono contrasts to love is not perversion, but guilt; and guilt is what homogenization imposes on those deemed 'perverts.' Yu is unabashedly a pervert, embracing the category explicitly. But he's a pervert out of love: love for his mother who tells him to find a girl like the Virgin Mary; love for his father who is only fatherly when Yu confesses obscene sins; love for Yoko who prefers him in drag. So is Yu's father, a priest who wants to get married, a pervert out of love. The enemies are those who want to abolish perversion with guilt: Koike and the Church of Zero who want to crush Yu, the Catholic Church that won't allow Yu's father to marry.

Having only seen Sono's one earlier work Suicide Club, I am astonished by how much he has grown as an artist. While he was very good to begin with, Love Exposure is an outstanding achievement as both entertainment and art. Any who watch it will be engrossed and the four hours will just flitter away; and any who watch it will come away wiser, as I believe I have. It's a film that won't leave my mind for a very long while.

Endnotes
1. James Wood, "Human, All Too Inhuman," The New Republic Online (August 30, 2001). http://www.powells.com/review/2001_08_30.html

Darkness Surrounds Roberta (2008) - 1/4

Darkness Surrounds Roberta is a giallo/homage to the gialli of the '70s and '80s, but drawing as its main influence Argento's oeuvre from Stendhal Syndrome onward. As such, it embraces a lot of what's wrong with Argento's latest films: unlikable characters, totally unlikable troubled women who manage to be both ice queens and sluts, a stodgy plot based around the troubled bitch no-one does or should care about, and Italian actors speaking heavily accented English.

The titular Roberta is a woman who married a rich social climber, has an obsession with drawing some odd drawings, whores herself out in order to steal jewelry on the side (for the thrill, I guess), and was once raped by two men she was using as models for her drawings. She's not an interesting, good, or likable person, but we're supposed to care that she's in trouble and someone's messing with her mind, someone who has photos of her after a theft, someone who has been committing murders all over town.

This film is supposed to be an homage to gialli of a bygone age and in some ways it is, insofar as 'homage' is inept attempt to copy. Sort of like a Star Wars fan film bears resemblance to the original. The labyrinthine plotting and cracked psychology of the killer is done well, but the filmmaker doesn't know gialli well enough: we need amateur detectives, not proper homicide detectives; and we need setpieces, not repetitive stabbing of a pillow filled with blood capsules (yep, that's the brilliant work of make-up effects artist Timo Rose--the same thing Nick Millard does in his movies). What's taken the place of setpieces are actually some softcore sex scenes. Very softcore. I don't even remember seeing a nipple. However, there are a lot of sex scenes, most of them doggy style.

Out of the repugnant characters, I supposed the blind homicide detective is the closest to likable. He starts off annoying, because every other line references his blindness--it's a belabored point, to put it lightly--but he seems like a decent person, like Kyle MacLachlan in Twin Peaks. Roberta is probably the worst of the characters, along with her husband. She's supposed to earn most of our interest, but she's irritating, shallow, and unpleasant.

The terrible dialogue and it's even worse delivery adds another layer to an already difficult-to-enjoy film. The terrible dialogue never ceases, either. The big, giallo climax, where the killer reveals her/himself and her/his motives is usually a bit chatty, but in Roberta it's a real talk-fest, with the killer explaining everything in meticulous detail, all the while posing for the camera, knife in hand. Maybe that's intention? At one point Roberta looks in to the camera and says 'Shh!' Maybe the film is working at levels way beyond me.

Or maybe it's as bad as I think it is. Darkness Surrounds Roberta is for giallo die-hards only, because it doesn't have a lot to offer. The filmmaker is trying too hard to imitate a genre he doesn't quite comprehend and the result is pretty much what you'd expect: a big miss.

Bonus points:
To the blind guy for saying, "Sandro, poke around in the trash!"
Nose-stabbing action