"Mock Up On Mu is an overwhelming experience, an allegorical cyclone of images and ideas haunted by sardonic humor and gnostic longing..." Erik Davis, techgnosis.com
Two of California’s most notorious underground filmmakers unleash a pair of deliriously subversive visions of Los Angeles culture — past and present — as poverty-row sci-fi thrillers. Bricolage wizard Craig Baldwin, of Tribulation 99 (1991) fame, takes his culture-jamming to a new orbit with Mock Up On Mu (2008, 109 min., color and b/w). This new work is a frenzied collage narrative following the far-flung exploits of L. Ron Hubbard, master of the Empire of Mu (aka the moon) in the year 2019, as he schemes with and against Marjorie Cameron, Jack Parsons and Aleister Crowley to make havoc on the terrestrial homeland. Baldwin’s twisting plot uses B-movies, self-help infomercials, pulp serials, aerospace promo films and otherworldly footage shot by Baldwin to spin an allegorical yarn of subterranean cults, government secrecy, and the co-opting of utopian visions by the military. Mock Up on Mu is preceded by Damon Packard’s SpaceDisco One (2007, 42 min.). The director, writer and star of the paranoid freakout Reflections of Evil (2002), Packard (who also plays L. Ron Hubbard in Baldwin’s film) gives a frightening and hilarious depiction of Los Angeles as an Orwellian land of split realities: placid suburban routines under invisible but inextricable mind control.
In person: Craig Baldwin, Damon Packard
Mock Up On Mu will also screen on Sunday September 28, 7:00 pm at Los Angeles Filmforum at the Egyptian Theatre 6712 Hollywood Blvd. at Las Palmas
$10 general, $6 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members
631 West 2nd Street
Los Angeles Ca 90012
No comments:
Post a Comment