I misspelled Chantal Akerman’s name in the graphic above. Kill me.
There are bad ideas and then there is this: my dueling film-by-film look at the entire careers of B-movie legend Albert Pyun and feminist/avant-garde master Chantal Akerman. I had been meaning to do a DIRECTOR FOCUS on both of these individuals when I noticed that each filmmaker had an even 50 directorial credits listed on IMDb, AKA synergy, a spark.
Pyun was born in Hawaii, three years after the Belgian Akerman, in 1953. He passed away in Las Vegas from complications of multiple sclerosis and dementia in 2022, seven years after she took her own life in Paris. Here are two bodies of work — even in number, parallel in time — that could not be any more different. One sought to entertain while the other looked to enlighten. On the landscape of cinema they operated in spaces a million miles apart, but — perhaps — somewhere in this great divide, this contrast + continuum, there’s a connection? Is Albert the yin to Akerman’s yang? I’m not sure I’ll even be able to find all 50 of the works to critique, let alone answer that question. But I've never let that stop me before.
Watching movies is a waste of time: the ultimate passive medium is designed to suck away your minutes (be that 12, 87 or 201). They add up and you can’t get them back. However, the great Jeffrey Lewis once sang, “Time is gonna take so much away, but there's a way that time can offer you a trade.” And so with that I present, "Albert & Akerman"…
Ed. Note: I recommend reading the individual film reviews first, Akerman then Pyun (or, from left to right, e.g. Blow Up My Town then The Sword and the Sorcerer for Movie #1) and then the content below each graphic...
February 15, 2024 I haven't seen a speck of either of these artists' work, even in passing, which was another major impetus for unleashing this exercise that nobody asked for onto the world. I didn't even realize Pyun was an American and was certain that Chantal was from France. When we speak of cinematic blindspots, this was a black hole for me, albeit one on the radar for a long time: a blinking red light, some kind of beacon. This'll be the thing that makes things make sense. Where is my shoehorn?
Ah, yes. This is what it feels like now...
But in the end it will look like this...
This was a successful beginning to the project, as I enjoyed both films. Sure, The Sword runs a little long and could have easily been cut down to an even 90 minutes or less, but that's a minor complaint. Speaking of run-time, one hurdle that I initially considered was the wide disparity in lengths over these continuums. About half of Ackerman’s output are either short films, TV movies, episodic work or anthology segments. Whereas Pyun worked almost exclusively in the world of features. I wasn’t sure this would be ripe for a 1:1 comparison at each stop on the journey. And while I still have a long way to go, I feel confident that this won’t be an issue. These are the 50 things that each auteur left us with before departing this mortal coil. There’s probably been 100x more written about Ackerman’s debut despite it being nearly an hour and a half shorter than Pyun’s. The body of work will stand for itself in the end.
VERDICT: TIE (0-0-1)
March 14, 2024 Radioactive Dreams paints the portrait of a motherless world. It’s no wonder everything has gone to shit. Even in the pre-nukes prologue, Philip and Marlowe are the products of male supervision. And while you can’t ask for better dads or dad-like figures (or role models in general) in the form of George Kennedy and Don Murray, this absence is felt on both the personal and collective levels. Pyun will never be the first name you hear rattled off when listing “auteurs who set out to dismantle the patriarchy” but he makes a case, however subtle, for that here. When the boys are unleashed onto the hellish landscape, they exclaim, “real life babes, real life mutants!” This satirical dig at the two genders (the female as the ideal, the male as the monster) is the first of many indicators that this film has a lot more to say than what’s on the surface.
While the film is a multifaceted affair that seems to (however unintentionally) comment on a number of ideas, including “the end of history,” The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman seems to be mainly about the end of personhood for women who enter into domesticity, a theme she would of course expand upon with the ultimate film on the matter: Jeanne Dielman (not to get ahead of myself). Chantal never speaks in the picture, existing solely as a sounding board for her friend Claire. There is a great, almost cosmic conflict at play: the need for mothers — we see how in a motherless world, society is leveled, reduced to a chaos — vs. the push against that, the desire to abandon one’s ‘biological duty’ and the unavoidable baggage it foists upon the woman in society. This crushing lack of identity is paralleled in Radioactive Dreams’ quest for familial closure. These are two vastly different films that nevertheless land on the same answer for the question of the family unit: it’s mysterious, opaque and, possibly, forever broken.
I’m not here to argue that Dreams is some kind of feminist text, and especially not one on the level of The Beloved Child or any of Akerman’s work. But there are multiple allusions beyond the broad framing of the post-nukes motherless world, both practically (the soundtrack is made up of fourteen poppy tracks in the soft hair metal vein, all by female-fronted bands) and metaphorically. The two central female leads are both villains (on opposite ends of the evil spectrum) with stereotypically male names, Rusty and Miles. They are the polar opposites of your standard 80s action ‘eye candy' who often lack any agency whatsoever. They're badass and layered characters who are also allowed to be wicked in atypical ways for this genre and era.
It’s turning into spring here right now. I saw my first mosquito and the reemergence of turtle life at the lake. Change is in the air. We are in the infancy of this project (film 2 of 50), but I’m already seeing a huge difference in how things are working out. I thought this would be, above all else, a funny concept (see: the previous shoehorn metaphor) that I could expand into a meandering book-length odyssey. But what I’m finding already is how effortless it’s been to locate common ground, and how truthful and serious (and plainly unfunny) this space really is. The plan is for this to take two years or more to fully realize and, like with the changes of the seasons, I am ready to let it happen, to wash over me: to see threads reveal themselves and then disappear completely.
VERDICT: ALBERT WINS (1-0-1)
March 28, 2024 If Albert Pyun’s third film, Dangerously Close, is his showcase for being able to play it straight, then Chantal Akerman’s silent third is her boisterous cry that she will be doing anything but. Here we see one artist willing to do whatever it takes to appeal to the mainstream, and another eschewing all of those conventions in pursuit of Art. Narrative? Forget it. SOUND? Don’t even need it.
I shouldn’t even attempt to make a side-by-side comparison here, but I’m gonna (because that’s the gimmick, folks!). Carey Lowell as Julie is such an unknowable character as the female lead in Dangerously Close that she's practically a non-entity even by the era and the genre’s standards. But in a way she’s more mysterious because of this rendering. Like Chantal herself in The Room, she’s essentially a foreign object, just part of the scenery. Le chambre is often described via the oxymoron “a moving still life” which is both apt, thematically, and inaccurate in practice. The camera actually never STOPS moving. But like the bowl of fruit sitting idly on the table, our brain makes these connections.
In Pyun’s film we see an undoing of connections, or our preconceived notions therein. Lowell is not your typical actress for this role. She’s pretty but not the stereotypical blonde bombshell. She wears mom jeans for crying out loud…
The setup for Dangerously Close vaguely suggests a question that is never really answered (or answered well). Whereas in The Room, we’re presented with a solution for a question we either don’t want answered or wouldn’t dare ask. Both films are stepping stones for greater work, but also emblematic of each auteur’s process and approach on the whole. I also like the simple reading that this Akerman is literally eating a man's balls?
(Sorry.)
VERDICT: AKERMAN WINS (1-1-1)
April 11, 2024 In Justin Decloux's essential text, Radioactive Dreams: The Cinema of Albert Pyun, he writes, "I hated Vicious Lips the first time I saw it, but on this viewing, it revealed itself as an Antonioni-esque tale of stasis." This is true to a degree: the entire middle of the movie (and most of the end) is such a big, mindless nothing that there's almost something interesting in the void. And this directly parallels the central focus of Akerman's work during this time of her filmography. Vicious Lips is as far from the world of experimental film as you can get, but you're probably better off squinting like mad and trying to see it as such (it was the only way my eyes wouldn't glaze over from boredom). But The Room and Hotel Monterey are clearly entries in the genre and both films didn't get a proper release until many years later.
While this was clearly a detour — from the milestone 100th issue of Camera Obscura ("On Chantal Akerman"): "She didn't want to keep on making films like Hotel Monterey or be the next Michael Snow. She definitely wanted to go back to narrative film." — there's something beautifully synchronous with this period aligning with what might be Pyun's most meandering movie. Both films are really about the spark of an idea and little else: Akerman obsessed with living spaces and passage of time, and then literally trying to capture that sparse feeling in a soundless vacuum, and then Pyun inadvertently rendering that notion on-screen when his impetus (all-female future-space new-wave band can't get their spaceship to the gig on time) falls plainly flat.
Vicious Lips ends even more jarringly than Dangerously Close...
We are so comically far-removed from the wonderful and creative miniatures and spacey atmosphere that it's mind-boggling. By contrast, in Akerman's polar opposite affair, she has only one place to go: up (or out)...
This is a fairly average shot of the streets of New York City streets, but it implies something so much larger. There is another world outside of the walls of this hotel, countless buildings and people with their own stories to tell. Perhaps they're incredibly similar — perhaps, like this very project, we'd have to strain to find the comparisons — but there's no way of knowing. We only have our own tales to tell, and most of the time, there's not much there.
VERDICT: AKERMAN WINS (2-1-1)
April 25, 2024 On this, the fifth installment of fifty, we have reached the point where I couldn’t possibly begin to stretch myself to make a connection between these two films. 26 minutes of an unfinished documentary about teenage recovering addicts in 70s NYC that's missing sound and a sorta action, sorta crime-thriller, mostly lowkey effort that had to be padded with close to 15 minutes of fluff and credits to stretch out to an already meager 88 minute run-time. Nope. Not happening. Some would look at this as a failing: proof that this project is nonsensical and/or unworthy. But not me.
I choose to see this as a mulligan in the early rounds of a more-competitive-than-you-think round of miniature golf. I might WANT to do this again — hell, I might want to do it right around the corner: how am I gonna connect Jeanne Dielman with Journey to the Center of the Earth, a film not even credited to Pyun but rather the pseudonym-sounding Rusty Lemorande. Pyun was brought onto finish the film and would go uncredited because…
The Kathy Ireland vehicle Alien from L.A. would actually be released theatrically before Journey, and for that we have the lovely Akerman pairing of I, You, He, She, which features the first graphic lesbian sex scene in mainstream cinema, and one of the longest lesbian sex scenes in film history. Now that should be a fun one!
But for now, please except this mulligan, not with a wink or any caveat but as a plea for mercy from one human being to another. Mea culpa, mi amor: we’re in this together?
VERDICT: ALBERT WINS (2-2-1)
May 9, 2024 The number six is significant. From the religious blog “Steppes of Faith”...
The number six refers to many things in the Bible, but it’s first mentioned in Genesis 1:31 when God created man on the sixth day. According to Bible scholars, just as the number 7 typically signifies completion or perfection especially of God, the number 6 is one shy of that, which means it signifies imperfection. More specifically, it refers to the imperfection of man and the sin and weakness he has.So we’ve reached the sixth installment of this journey and it’s clear that the best work yet by Albert & Akerman is still riddled with imperfections. But it’s in these imperfections — their inclinations and whims — where so much beauty is to be found, what makes them who they are as auteurs. And as a study of contrast, their vast divide between the minimalist and the maximalist has never been wider. With I, You, He, She’s unadorned monochrome set against Alien from L.A.’s absurdist, hazy technicolor, this makes for the most delightful, if unorthodox double feature.
Both films explore isolation, but in different ways. I, You, He, She is a slow-burning character study that depicts the emotional isolation and pain of romantic relationships. Akerman uses long, fixed shots and with almost no dialogue to convey a sense of ennui and detachment: how one might feel like an ALIEN in the aftermath of a broken relationship. In Alien from L.A., isolation is a plot device. The protagonist is a stilted, infantilized beauty with no self-confidence stranded in a dystopian land. The film emphasizes literal physical isolation in a hostile world: Wanda is an actual ALIEN, a foreigner among humanoid inhabitants of Atlantis who nevertheless don’t seem to share the same DNA.
It’s easy to feel isolated in this modern world and sometimes it’s inevitable. But it’s how we deal with these feelings that count: we can lounge on the floor and only eat powdered sugar out of a paper bag for an entire month straight or we can fly to Africa and jump down a bottomless pit in search of a missing family member. It’s locked into the genre stipulations to a point, but Pyun is interested in what can be done with action whereas Akerman is solely focused on the byproducts of inaction. Inertia vs. stasis. Akerman’s Julie ultimately finds her way out of this depression, but the resulting behaviors aren’t necessarily better: give a trucker a handjob and briefly rekindle the spark (or try to) with your ex.
The focus on sex and complete lack thereof is also a fascinating contrast. Kathy Ireland’s Wanda is stunted and babyish to a comedic degree. Despite being one of the most famous pin-up models of all-time, she’s reduced to little more than a child, completely void of any sexual agency or urgency other than a firmly PG desire to be loved/have a boyfriend who loves her. But this works in the sense of it being a Wizard of Oz homage (pure fantasy/fairytale), just like Akerman’s version of herself is extension of her own persona if not soul (reality/autofiction personified): we have never been on more opposites sides of the spectrum and the view across the divide is spectacular.
VERDICT: TIE (2-2-2)
May 23, 2024
Lost Women: A Feminist Exploration of Crystina the Nanny and Jeanne Dielman
At first glance, Crystina, the nanny from the fantastical 1989 film Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Jeanne Dielman, the protagonist of the slow-burning 1975 drama Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, appear to inhabit entirely different worlds. Crystina, a young woman thrust into adventure, journeys to a lost civilization. Jeanne Dielman, a widowed mother, navigates the routines of sex work to support her son. However, a deeper look reveals that both films, through their contrasting narratives, offer compelling explorations of female identity and societal pressures within a 20th-century feminist context.Crystina embodies the trope of the liberated woman. Unbound by domesticity, she readily embraces the unexpected adventure – a stark contrast to the traditional nanny role. Her journey to the Earth's core becomes a metaphor for breaking free from societal constraints. Yet, her purpose remains tethered to childcare – albeit for a dog. This playful subversion highlights the limitations placed on women's aspirations, even within an unconventional narrative.
Jeanne Dielman, on the other hand, is trapped within the domestic sphere. Her regimented life revolves around housework and transactional sex work. Director Chantal Akerman's deliberate pacing emphasizes the monotony and emotional detachment inherent in Jeanne's routine. This portrayal indicts a patriarchal society that offers women limited economic options, forcing them to exploit their bodies for survival.
Despite their contrasting settings, both films grapple with themes of female agency and objectification. Crystina, though seemingly free, is ultimately defined by her caregiving role. Her seemingly happy ending with the Atlantean prince, Hakur, presents a different kind of constraint. While she escapes the limitations of her old life, her future becomes tied to a new set of societal expectations within a patriarchal monarchy. This twist highlights the complexities of female agency. Can a woman ever truly escape societal pressures? Jeanne, confined by circumstance, reclaims a semblance of control through calculated interactions with her clients. Both characters navigate a world where their value is often tied to their ability to serve others.
Journey to the Center of the Earth offers a more optimistic perspective. Crystina's resourcefulness and resilience suggest a potential for women to carve their own paths. However, the film's fantastical elements and her ultimate marriage introduce a layer of complication.
Jeanne Dielman presents a bleaker reality. The film's ending, shrouded in ambiguity, offers no easy answers. It compels viewers to confront the harsh realities faced by women struggling within a system that offers them little autonomy.
In conclusion, Crystina and Jeanne Dielman, though separated by genre and circumstance, offer a nuanced exploration of the feminist struggles of the 20th century. Crystina embodies the yearning for liberation, while Jeanne represents the harsh realities of societal constraints. Together, they paint a complex picture of womanhood, highlighting the limitations placed upon women and the challenges they face in carving out their own identities.
VERDICT: AKERMAN WINS (3-2-2)
June 6, 2024 Finnish expat Chris Myllykoski, the protagonist of Le 15/8, is a lot like a cyborg if you think about it. Sure, she doesn’t look like this…
…but who does nowadays? When Pearl Prophet volunteers for the dangerous courier mission to save the world and is made into a cyborg through surgical augmentation in the 1988 film Cyborg, she is a lot like every woman on earth: taking on an impossible task while Jean-Claude van Damme gets all the credit. While Dayle Haddon gets to play the titular role, she’s not the hero of the film. This is Pyun commenting on society. The future is female and the future is now. I bet half the world’s population thinks that JCVD is the dang cyborg in the 1988 film Cyborg!
Time and place play a big part in both movies, as well. If Myllykoski had been born in America during a future apocalypse perhaps she would have also volunteered to become a robot to transport important data to Atlanta? But instead she just has to chill in her flat all day, alone with her thoughts… In black and white no less!...
Female directors were not legally allowed to make sci-fi or martial-arts cyberpunk films in the 1970s and that is a shame because Akerman could have made a classic, in my opinion.
VERDICT: ALBERT WINS (3-3-2)
News from Home vs. Deceit
June 20, 2024 I won’t try to undermine your intelligence by making the case for Albert Pyun as some unsung feminist hero. And I wish — for symbolic purposes, anyhow — that his masterful Deceit had aligned with a more similarly focused Akerman picture. But given the era and genres in which he worked, Pyun clearly was ahead of the game at least in terms of creating fully-formed female characters who take control of situations that a patriarchal world has foisted them into (most of the time, anyway).
Samantha Phillips’s Eve is his best yet and her performance is every bit the equal of Albert’s stable players Norbert Weisser and Scott Paulin. (As it turns out, when you’re working with next to know money to make a film, just having your actors yell a lot goes a long way.)
There was a nice yin and yang to this double feature: Akerman’s News from Home is meditative and tranquil, while Deceit is manic and stifling. In the former we see the expanse of the big city, in all its gritty, raw 1970s glory. While in the latter we’re trapped in a manufactured world, essentially a single room that seems to exist outside of any real time or place. Both films are attempting to do something more than what they initially present. Akerman is focused on the juxtaposition of her two core elements as Pyun has crafted what at first glance appears to be the shell of a cheap B-movie shlock, but in actuality is a vessel for much bigger ideas.
VERDICT: ALBERT WINS (4-3-2)
July 4, 2024 I’m writing this towards the end of June and I just watched the final two periods of game 7 of the Stanley Cup tonight and talked with my wife about how I would play hookie a lot as a kid when I was around the age our daughter is now. I would do it simply so I could stay home and watch TV, all the mysterious TV that happened when I was at school. Maybe my odd need to categorize EVERYTHING began here: little Me with my TV Guide and highlighter pen, mapping out the shows I was going to watch for the day. It was all fleeting then. If you weren’t home to watch that rerun of Green Acres or that episode of The Price is Right, then it was gone forever. I think part of my brain still feels this and automatically puts an ephemeral note onto every piece of media I ingest, a phantom flavor that clearly isn’t necessary.
While I idly watched the hockey matchup — a sport I’ll never truly understand (a metaphor on top of a metaphor right there, perhaps) — I got caught up in a phone wormhole of looking at current movie screenings at the Cinemark near me to see how many people bought tickets in advance to what shows (Garfield at 10:45 on Monday night? A group of four: presumably stoner teen weirdos. Kalki 2898 AD? A new Telugu-language, 2.5-hour sci-fi epic opening later this week? Several nearly sold-out screenings at an increased ticket price of $25!). The point being, people love movies, I guess. I love movies. That’s true.
(let’s get a double feature trending, #Kalkifield? #Garfalki???)
I’ve adopted an insane approach to watching them, though. This is my July (dates are when reviews post online, not when I view them), which is par for the course for 2024…
And so here we are, July 4th: My Independence Day (a movie I reviewed two years ago to this day and I actually liked my critique having just reread it — I am going to review ALL the movies, you know). It’s fitting that Captain America just happened to fall on this date. I can get into deep obsessions very easily when it comes to the calendar and so when I stumble upon occurrences like that accidentally, however meaningless it is in the long (or short) run, I feel good. The word synergy makes sense to me. It gives me a little push to keep going. Watching movies should never be a chore. But when you do something you love, anything, for so long and so hard, it inevitably starts to feel that way. It’s not so much about recreating the magic yourself, but finding different ways to open up so that magic finds you. This is a passive medium afterall. That’s what people say. I guess with this project and this whole website in general, I’m trying to challenge that notion. I’m trying.
The Panthers of Florida survived blowing a 3-0 lead to win game 7 by a score of 2-1. It was the first championship in their franchise history and by all accounts a classic. They were rewarded with the neat Google graphic above. Just forcing a game 7 when down 3-0 in a series is extremely rare in all sports. It’s only happened a handful of times in general, and even fewer in the finals round. The Oilers’ defeat in 2023-2024 now extends Canada’s Stanley Cup drought to a third decade, which is really amazing when you think about it. They love hockey up there. Sometimes you can love something with all your heart even if it feels like you never, ever win.
We are exactly ⅕ of the way through this thing, folks.
VERDICT: AKERMAN WINS (4-4-2)
July 18, 2024 Because I penned an extensive bonus chapter for this segment, my contract stipulates that I don't need to provide any additional content in this section. See my review of the original Kickboxer, if you haven't already.
VERDICT: TIE (4-4-3)
August 1, 2024 Well, this is really something: pairing perhaps Akerman’s best film with Pyun’s worst is like chasing down a five-star dinner with warm, flat Mountain Dew Code Rode, or eating uncooked hot dogs right out of the package with a really expensive wine. The juxtaposition isn’t enjoyable but it’s interesting, as it allows one really see the depths that the cinematic medium can traverse (I mean “depth” twofold here: A Whole Night is beautifully deep, while Bloodmatch is boring and, at times, hellacious).
Seeing how this was the first Pyun film (or Akerman, for that matter) that I outright didn’t like (my score of 4/10 is frankly generous), I’m somewhat at a loss for words. I really didn’t — naively, perhaps — expect to hate any of these movies. In a nutshell, the twist ending of Bloodmatch is so incredibly dumb it is sort of the perfect antithesis to the high art Akerman has achieved with A Whole Night (interestingly enough, I didn’t expect to love that as much as I did going in).
This double feature provided a lesson in filmgoing expectations as much as anything else. Nearing 2,000 critiqued entries in my greater cinematic journey, this is still something I don't have a handle on. My dogmatic movie-watching and insane schedule sometimes leaves me feeling blank. I often forget that every film is an opportunity to learn something new, see something different, feel an emotion in a different way. In theory, one should go into the experience with a clean canvas but I’m starting to figure out that’s a misnomer, if not an impossibility. The only thing I know to be true is that you never stop learning HOW to watch movies (and I do think it is a learned endeavor). And everybody’s process is different. I’m still honing my own.
VERDICT: AKERMAN WINS (5-4-3)
The Eighties vs. Dollman
September 12, 2024 The one thing these two pictures have in common is that they are both almost exactly 80 minutes long. Thanks for reading and goodnight!
After more than a month off to recharge the batteries, this series returns for two pairings in September before dipping aside again for my extremely ambitious Spooky Month 2024 block of programming. If you’re keeping score at home, that means this won’t wrap up until late 2026 at the very earliest. How the hell am I only 25% of the way through?!
It’s a marathon not a sprint, folks. Here is a Chantal Akerman's face crudely photoshopped onto the floating head of Sprug from Dollman (1991)...
VERDICT: ALBERT WINS (5-5-3)
September 26, 2024 I can’t help but think of the ubiquitous John Peel quote about Mark E. Smith and The Fall when I consider the collective work of Albert & Akerman up to this point: “They are always different; they are always the same.” That really feels apt. If I held any reservations of either director qualifying as a true auteur, both bodies of work have obliterated all hesitation in my mind. You never quite know what you’re gonna get but you can be certain that it will have their unique stamps (and, more likely than not, it’s gonna be pretty great or, at the very least, interesting).
I will be hitting pause on this project for now as I prepare for my extremely ambitious “100 Horror Movies in 31 Days” Spooky Month programming. I’m also switching gears on this website overall, pivoting back to a podcast-only outfit. But, rest assured, I’m gonna see this ridiculous project out to its conclusion. I’ve really enjoyed this dueling look at two totally unique and vastly different filmmakers. I haven’t written much about ‘the battle’ aspect of it, but that’s been neck-and-neck thus far. I’m giving these films honest grades (based on my own taste, duh) and I’m a bit surprised it’s been so close. Pyun has pulled ahead with this W, but it was a much closer matchup this week than I would have expected.
VERDICT: ALBERT WINS (6-5-3)
November 21st, 2024 A lot has changed over the past almost two months since I’ve checked in on the work of Albert & Akerman: my movie review site has transitioned back into a podcast-only format. I’m really seeing if I can do what I did for the written word (i.e., mangling it) with the off-the-cuff spoken variety (and it’s going — unsurprisingly! — very well). Even though I’m still in the infancy of this project (Film #15 out of 50), I am going to see it through in the same fashion. Meaning: you will never hear my voice chime in on the work of these two auteurs. I’ll be letting my wonderful (read: severely lacking and at times — many times — nonsensical) prose to do the talking. So let’s talk about love, shall we?
I’ve already posited that I’m Hungry, I’m Cold isn’t really about being hungry and/or cold. What it’s really about is connection. So this paired nicely with Pyun’s “love story” (it’s right there in the title!). Maria de Medeiros and Pascale Salkin are two young women in a new city. They have no issues fulfilling their fundamental needs (it’s actually comical how much food de Medeiros consumes — talk about pot bellies!), but their emotional ones are much more complicated. They share a lesbian encounter in an alley when they compare and contrast the kissing styles of previous male suitors before the climax of the short (pun intended)...
The gender politics of this scene are clear as day and very much in line with what Akerman has already stated in so many of her films. But I think there is a nihilist reading here as well: that love can’t supersede those base needs — it’s just another “big sandwich” to slam down the gullet, or bed to share for warmth and warmth alone.
To contrast these delicate, high-minded and intricate ideas with Brain Smasher… A Love Story (on the title’s use of an ellipse, briefly: why not a colon? I would connect the dots here to food, etc. [re: colon {sorry!}] if I had the time and was a TRUE sicko, but won’t subject you, dear reader, to further nonsense) is futile and incredibly stupid, yes, but as I mentioned before, it’s also an accidental one that, in turn, wound up being fairly serendipitous. It is Pyun’s only romcom in his extensive filmography, after all. Love is in the air?
While you could fill a book on what I’m Hungry, I’m Cold’s twelve minutes has to say about the subject, I’m not sure that Teri Hatcher and Andrew Dice Clay’s NINETY are worth a single breath of air. It’s not that they don’t have any chemistry (that's passable), it’s that the whole enterprise is one giant cliché. While Brain Smasher is not a great movie overall (and really one of Pyun’s weaker ones to date), it’s still interesting in that he seems to be self-aware about the kind of film he’s made. Take Hatcher’s sister character (Deborah Van Valkenburgh), a Diet Indiana Jones botanist in search of a very rare lotus flower…
Love in the universe of an Albert Pyun movie is distilled down to its extreme, simple essence: it is rendered blank like his purposefully stereotypical characters… and he knows this. So this simple commentary on the matter speaks volumes. In many ways, his entire oeuvre is about love (a love of movie-making) and despite the comically disjointed framework and goofy (sometimes comical) narrative, this notion still shines through in an otherwise middling effort.
Pyun isn’t frightened of clichés (when Van Valkenburgh states that it’s tough being one, that seems autobiographical), but Akerman seems scared to death of them. That, perhaps, they're all life really has to offer.
VERDICT: AKERMAN WINS (6-6-3)