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Shock tactics

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Harmony Korine’s short film Umshini Wam (Bring Me My Machine Gun) has been picked up exclusively by Vice magazine. Ninja and Yo Landi of South African rap oddities Die Antwoord star as wheelchair bound gangsters who roll around, swear a lot in what sounds like a Jersey accent (as in Channel Islands Jersey), and well… you’ll find out.

How you feel about this will depend on your feelings about Korine (writer of Kids, director of Gummo and last year’s inexplicable You’ve Been Framed-meets-Dante’s Inferno carnage Trash Humpers).  Whether you hail him as a cutting-edge provocateur or dismiss him as an overhyped bore there is absolutely nothing on show here that will change your mind. Umshini Wam is deadpan, disjointed, self-consciously odd, nicely shot and worth a watch.

Anyway, if you really want to be shocked, you could do a lot worse than get into The Gerogerigegege, a Japanese music project, which started in 1985, and shambled on until the disappearance of lead creative mind Juntaro Yamanouchi a few years ago.

Notable for onstage masturbation (sometimes via vacuum – NSFW), and album titles like ‘Tokyo Anal Dynamite’, ‘Recollections of Primary Masturbation’ and ‘Saturday Night Big Cock Salaryman’, you’ll need to be prepared. In the words of Yamanouchi:

Fuck compose, Fuck melody, Dedicated to no one, Thanks to no one, ART IS OVER
Here is a selection of cover versions by the inimitable Gerogerigegege:

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Dean Learner meets Michelangelo Antonioni

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Richard Ayoade, perhaps best known for his role as uber-nerd Moss in Channel 4’s comedy The I.T. Crowd, has made his directorial debut with Submarine, an adaptation of Joe Dunthorne’s coming-of-age novel about a 15 year old boy with two objectives; to lose his virginity and to stop his mother falling in love with a new age mystic.

Anyone who’s seen Ayoade’s prior ventures in a directorial capacity (like this for Vampire Weekend, for example, or this for Arctic Monkeys) will know that he possesses a keen, elegant visual style (definite hints of the compositional precision of Michaelangelo Antonioni, and latterly Wes Anderson) and an enviable ability to harness his deadpan flair in front of the camera and filter it through the lens.

Submarine was one of the hot tickets at last year’s BFI London Film Festival.  You can watch the trailer here, and I’m very much looking forward to catching it.

My first exposure to Ayoade was the staggeringly underrated Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, a six-part horror docu-spoof which first aired on Channel 4 in 2004. Taking cues from spooky 80s medical drama St. Elsewhere, as well as almost every dreadful horror movie ever made, …Darkplace starred Ayoade as fey publisher Dean Learner, who in the show was horribly miscast as no-nonsense hospital boss Thornton Reed. The whole thing was a work of genius, and to celebrate, here’s the best of Dean Learner (credit to YouTuber fingerscoyle).“He didn’t want an act. He wanted the truth”.