Austin screening review
Source
Just got back from witnessing the great big grab bag of B-grade awesome that is SEX MACHINE. About a month ago I posted all gushy about a preview, a preview, for an indie film of promise glimpsed during an open-screen night at the Alamo. It is the story of Frank, an amnesiac who comes to in a room full of bodies with a smoking gun in his hand. He discovers that someone has turned him into some Frankenstein hackjob, with one black arm and another bearing the titular tattoo: SEX MACHINE. Frank tries to rebuild his life with former girlfriend Claire, and manage a bowling alley with his buddy Owen, when he's not trying to piece together his past or busy waxing the legions of mutant freaks sent by a mad scientist. SEX MACHINE is like Pulp Fiction that goes to eleven.
Aside from providing a rather somber barometer for the state of mainstream film (seeing as I was getting giddy over seeing a good trailer), SEX MACHINE was a ray of hope, an dose of inspiration, and also the confirmation of my own worst fears.
I'll do what my former team leader at work used to do instead of chew me out-- the oh-so-transparent "compliment sandwich." That's where you bookend a piece of negative feedback between two positive pieces of feedback, so that you're fooled into thinking your meeting with the boss went better than it actually did. No such charlatanism is at play here, rest assured, but I just have three major points to make and they all fit so nicely into those roles, so this is more about packaging than chastising.
The cinescape continues to darken every year kids. Films continue to reach new levels inversely proportional to the depths of the pockets furiously feeding quarters into what has become a massive machine. $200 million dollar super studio stallons are put out to pasture in the three-dollar baragain-bins weeks after their release, and the industry's most prestigious award becomes more menopausal by the year.
But in his success, Christopher Sharpe (the writer/director/etc.) confirmed what I had feared most about the filmmaker gig, which is that I'll remain a starving artist for quite some time, even when success finally makes it to the party. Mr. Sharpe has spent the better part of two years filming a full-length feature entirely on spec, using nothing but blood, sweat and volunteers. Two years not including all the time he must have spent thinking about it, agonizing over the story while trapped at work, and now, even as his labors bear fruit, he has still done nothing but spend, and earned nothing back but our sincerest applause.
But the presence of fear should never be construed as the dereliction of hope. Like Rumsfeld says, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Me, I think he's just bitter about being a better rhetorician than tactician, but the idea's not without merit. The wisdom applies, albeit in a less two-faced scumsucking deceptionist way that Gin Rummy originally intended. Watching SEX MACHINE, and then hearing the creators and the cast gush to us so honestly about the experience and the high that the work gives them, it was kind of a relief, and an inspiration to try harder. It was like fate (and SEX MACHINE) were assuring me that if I worked hard enough I would find my rewards, even if they were not the rewards I seek. SEX MACHINE told a fresh noir/monster/pulp story (termed "artsploitation" by the creator) with a relentless sense of humor and visceral visual style populated with engrossing, and at times even endearing, characters. The only problems the film had could be solved by throwing money at them, for they had enough passion, fire, grit and guts for the whole Dobie theater-- I walked out of the screening and immediately fired off an e-mail to Asphalt Planet Productions pledging my allegiance to a film-making process that's about making movies rather than money. Although money wouldn't hurt...
Whenever, wherever SEX MACHINE ends up, given the chance, you should give it a glance. It's refreshing to realize that "art" and "product" are not as interchangeable as the Hollywood machine would have us believe. Thanks, Frank.