Editorial Board leaves writings up for the record in four frames
Included in This Frame:
First Materials: A Pseudo Film Review of an Unidentified Director’s Work over Half a Century
The secret editorial board of Kyiv Unedited knows the following unsigned materials were not written by Manny Face, nor is there any way they could have been written by John Smith or Steve Kowalski, nor by The so-called Half Guinea or The greatly troubling Hunched Cornish.
We have also eliminated the possibility that any two of our published writers working together were involved.
For example, The Hunched Cornish and The Half Guinea wouldn’t bother with this kind of thing, and while The Hunched Cornish might work with John Smith, together they would be incapable of scheming to produce the type of material printed below. Steve Kowalski would be willing to work with John Smith on something like this, but John Smith, while willing to work with Kowalski, would never consent. The only possible combination here would be Manny Face and John Smith, but for completely different reasons those two would never actually do it. That covers the duos.
Thus, if it is impossible for any two of our writers to have pulled off this caper, then any three doing the same is completely out of the question; why, the mere suggestion is simply outlandish.
For example, Manny Face might work with John Smith, but if Kowalski got involved, Face would opt out. The Half Guinea would work with Kowalski, but not if Smith joined them, although for reasons we don’t quite understand, Smith probably wouldn’t mind. As we said, The Hunched Cornish might work with Smith, and under more strained and unusual circumstances, he might work with The Half Guinea as well, but he’d never work with the both of them together, nor, as we’ve shown, would The Guinea work with Smith. The Guinea’d work with Kowalski, but The Cornish would never join them. It’s obvious Face and The Cornish would never work together, while The Guinea would see no sense in working with Face, although it’s not as clear to us whether Face would mind. This point being highly theoretical and inconclusive, there is no sense then in trying to add anyone else to that particular picture. It’s possible that if Kowalski and Smith were already working together The Half Guinea might join them, but then Smith would probably drop out. Again, if Smith were working with Kowalski, Smith probably wouldn’t mind The Cornish joining them, but The Cornish never would. Kowalski wouldn’t mind working with The Cornish, but The Cornish simply doesn’t want to work with Kowalski. Neither does Manny Face. Oddly, while there is palpable enmity between The Hunched Cornish and Manny Face, we feel that if Kowalski got between them, even though neither of the other two would ever work with Kowalski separately, all three of them might somehow work together – but only for a very brief moment.
And yet, we know this could never happen.
We have therefore concluded that the materials were posted by unidentified strangers yearning to be writers comprising at least three unknowns, and possibly a fourth, who broke into our Checkout offices between the hours of midnight and six in the morning sometime recently and wrote the writings and did the deeds. Nobodies; losers, really; complete and utter failures. Our conclusions as to their motives are only hypothetical; we simply don’t know why they did what they did and have decided it would be better not to speculate.
Attributing the passages to Writers 1, 2, or 3 was guesswork on our part, based on long and intense editorial debate leading to a 7-5 consensus of the board. Those in the minority presented a strong argument for the possible involvement of a Writer No. 4, and so we also indicate this in brackets, like this, [or 4], in the places where some of our board members think such a writer had had a hand.
Kyiv Unedited Editorial Board
First Materials
Writer 1: The camera pans the inside of an upper middle-class apartment somewhere in New York City, walls lined with shelves full of books, floor to ceiling. A tense drama of petty proportions, punctuated by the whiny strains of spoiled grievances, unfolds inside. The characters are writers, professors, architects, an occasional investment banker. Understated sophisticates. They struggle to dress well, the effort, if it needs to be made for the obligatory formal occasion, seems painful. Instead, they slouch about in sweaters, frump-casual. They have money but try not to show it – too much. They drink wine and drop the names of prominent cultural and intellectual figures, pseudo intellectually, as if they know what they’re talking about, but really, they always just come off as phonies, using their pretensions to mask their inner emptiness. Because in all the years in all these movies, not one character ever talks about any of the great cultural and intellectual figures or any of their works in any depth – only the mere illusion of profound comprehension is given.
The director, who also stars in most of his films, maybe wants to use the artistic achievements of others as background for his own artistic statement, and it would probably work if that statement were made in two or three, okay, four or five of his films, with him then moving on to new terrain. Instead, we get treated to a rehash of the same obsessions, film after film, year after year, over dozens of films over dozens of years.
Sometimes the films are in black and white, to give it the feel of memory rising fuzzily out of some unanchored past, and that artistic edge. Always, there are the woozy clarinets, the frenetic, swaying, bouncing vintage jazz and swing. Manhattan lovingly evoked in its lights and epic greatness with sweeping sky panoramas and interior street-level cut-to’s.
Year after year the same film comes out, attended by the same delighted coterie accompanying these films to cinemas in their limited releases over the last four decades, happy to forget the films have stayed the same while they’ve gotten old.
Are these movies all different in the same way? Or are they all the same in a different way?
Out of this debris of perennial art-house pretension, the hero, or anti-hero, as the case may be, always comes tripping forward, awkward, lost, neurotic, full of one-liners and disingenuous babble aimed at women increasingly significantly younger than himself about how they impress him. The women, or girls, always fall for it. We smile, too charmed by his fumbling lovability to wonder how someone who has remarkably preserved himself over the last 40-50 years in the form of a fish face, a snail, a newt, or a microorganism under high magnification, with that one bald patch in the middle of his head miraculously never getting any bigger, can not only talk about the phenomenal sex with the most intriguing women of his past, but convince the current objects of his degenerate desires to give and take from him big sloppy kisses. We are submitted to the on-screen agitation of the ugly.
Sometimes the young, or very young, chiquita is the one who initiates the contact, practically begging the greasy, thin stringy-haired repulsive old coat-hanger-bodied lech in oversized plastic black-framed glasses to lay the big slobber right on her lips and in her mouth. He hesitates, debating the moral implications of the request, and then reluctantly, but goatishly mauls her pretty young mouth with his corpse lips. You see, these young women find all that really attractive. Yeah, that’s believable.
Continued in next frame, April 29, 2014