Malfeasance

Stacy Makishi once again strides into uncharted, snowbound and doughnut-shaped territory, in search of something that sounds like identity, but thankfully turns out not to be. Her performance of "Bull: The True Story" at the Chelsea Theatre delights in flooding the pre-show audience with the performance, and contaminating the performance with the audience.

Two guests from the audience are blindfolded, and stood in front of a doughnut suspended by string from the ceiling; they lick and prod with their noses, hesitantly. Stacy is possessed by the spirit of characters within "Fargo", weirdly re-enacting responses and motor functions from the movie and pre-empting her audience's relationship with the doughnut.

This chilling symptom-esque physical projection is a parallel of the disturbing story of a (real?) Japanese woman searching for the fictional (?) money buried in the snow in the film "Fargo"; Stacy embeds vanishings and noisy fictions into the performance without so much as a missed missing persons poster. If this wasn't already enough, there's a tour de force of a self-re-morphing with a pair of tights pulled grotesquely over her head. Winning stuff.

Brain Bugged

Paul Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers" surprisingly turned up among the 25 best science fiction films of all time recently, and being a sucker for a convincing space opera, I had to check it out.

Reading some responses and commentaries online, there seemed to be some house-room for the idea that this movie is a clever commentary on fascism, militarism, the mediatised advertorial recruitment docudrama.

This is monstrous tosh of course. To create the anger necessary for this attack on an actual political course and working-through, Verhoeven would need actual characters who we care about enough to identify ourselves as the audience in opposition to that militarism. However, he seems to also want to make an homage to the square jawed camaraderie and paraphernalia of the first wave of technically pornographic cliffhanger sci fi on television.

However, this simply depoliticises his entire enterprise and leaves the wafer thin plot being prodded forward on a listless parade of barked orders, white toothed Americans, aliens disintegrating under a hail of bullets, and shiny spaceship interiors.