Independent films are the life blood of the film industry, they have the wildest ideas and set the trends. The auteurs; independent because they cannot stand to make the films they truly want within a system they despise. They live by their own vision and are stubborn, driven, talented, crafty, observant and tender all at the same time. Taking risks and inventing new characters that are from the margins of society has never been Hollywood's main cultural demographic. Budget limitations mean nothing to filmmakers like Fabrizio Federico, hoodwinking is part of the game, and they are driven to tell their negative pick-up fables, ''I was stabbed with a fork while filming but I was so in the zone that I didnt feel a thing''. Fabrizio has a desirable decadence mixed with an artistic atmosphere. His hippie, freaky teenage upbringing of moving countries, which impacted his gift of the gab and a sense of adventurousness. ''When I was a kid I would get all my village friends to pretend to be the Ex-President bank robbers from the movie Point Break, I was Ronald Reagan. That's when I became a filmmaker''. Federico appears to have two quite distinct personalities co-existing (the dysfunctional filmmaker and the blissed-out stoner) his bohemian lifestyle puts him at odd's with authority figures ''I watched a lot of surfer movies and street films as a teenager like Midnight Cowboy, Panic In Needle Nose Park, Another Day in Paradise and I always rooted for the bad guys''.
Some big themes come up in Federico's work such as injustice, soul sacrifice, addiction and strangelove. He see's underground and experimental cinema as a force to be appreciated by a bigger international mainstream audience. ''I like the idea of treating the audience to a chaotic, compelling aesthetic, to scramble their brains. I want to show them an uncomfortable time, I feel they can take it. They are not as innocent as they look''. Loon has a random mix of stoned, catatonic moments, mixed with subliminal Kubrick messages, which then switch to troubled intimate teenage situations in bedrooms, somewhere their parents cant hear them. Most importantly the film is fun and trashy but intriguing in a deeper way, full of nonlinear narlyness. At the centre lies the films Dismaland pop-culture, main character Charlie Sheen is a petty thief, tied in a folie a deux relationship with his sinister older cousin Georgia. Suddenly his chaotic life style reaches a climax. Authenticity of expression is a non-actors main virtuosity, meaning they are in the NOW. They dont care about pretending to be someone else, there's no strings attached and they definitely dont give a fuck about the directors vision. But they are self-serving to express themselves, knowing that this is the only movie they will ever be in. Sometimes they use real drugs on camera to get in touch with their anxieties and phobias,and the effect is so voyeuristic it's uncomfortable viewing. Loon is his 3rd feature film in a body of work that is strangely cohesive and definite for such a new artist. His identity is so embossed boldly onto each film that it feels less like something he created and more like an extension of himself. In art-house films, ambiguity and uneasiness is much more involved on a personal level, The big plus from the filmmakers point of view is that he has completed the movie he dreamed of and since it was zero-budgetif the film bombs financially it doesn't matter. It's a long list of filmmakers living the cinema dream this way, film outlaws such as Jim Jarmusch, Larry Clark, John Cassevetes, Todd Haynes, Abel Ferrara, Alex Holdridge and all the way to the present day. An irrational movie like Federico's newest film Loon is an extension to this cannon of cinema making.
Independent films are the life blood of the film industry, they have the wildest ideas and set the trends. The auteurs; independent because they cannot stand to make the films they truly want within a system they despise. They live by their own vision and are stubborn, driven, talented, crafty, observant and tender all at the same time. Taking risks and inventing new characters that are from the margins of society has never been Hollywood's main cultural demographic. Budget limitations mean nothing to filmmakers like Fabrizio Federico, hoodwinking is part of the game, and they are driven to tell their negative pick-up's fables, ''I was stabbed with a fork while filming but I was so in the zone that I didnt feel it''. Fabrizio has a desirable decadence mixed with an artistic atmosphere. His hippie, freaky teenage upbringing of moving countries, which impacted his gift of the gab and a sense of adventurousness. ''When I was little I would get all my village friends to pretend to be the ex-president bank robbers from the movie Point Break, I was Ronald Regan. That was the start of me as a filmmaker''. Federico appears to have two quite distinct personalities co-existing (the dysfunctional filmmaker and the blissed-out stoner) his bohemian lifestyle puts him at odd's with authority figures ''I watched a lot of surfer movies and street films as a teenager like Midnight Cowboy, Panic In Needle Nose Park, Another Day in Paradise and I always rooted for the bad guys''. Some big themes come up in Federico's work such as injustice, soul sacrifice, addiction and strangelove. He see's underground and experimental cinema as a force to be appreciated by a bigger international mainstream audience. ''I like the idea of treating the audience to a chaotic, compelling aesthetic, to scramble their brains. I want to show them an uncomfortable time, I feel they can take it. They are not as innocent as they look''. Loon has a random mix of stoned, catatonic moments, which then switch to wild troubled intimate teenage situations in bedrooms, so their parents cant hear them. Most importantly the film is fun and trashy but intriguing in a deeper way, full of nonlinear narlyness. At the centre lies the films Dismaland pop-culture, main character Charlie Sheen is a petty thief, tied in a folie a deux relationship with his sinister older cousin Georgia. Suddenly his chaotic life style reaches a climax.
Authenticity of expression is a non-actors main virtuosity, meaning they are in the NOW. They dont care about pretending to be someone else, there's no strings attached and they definitely dont give a fuck about the directors vision. But they are self-serving to express themselves, knowing that this is the only movie they will ever be in. Sometimes they use real drugs on camera to get in touch with their anxieties and phobias,and the effect is so voyeuristic it's uncomfortable viewing. In art-house films, ambiguity and uneasiness is much more involved on a personal level, The big plus from the filmmakers point of view is that he has completed the movie he dreamed of and since it was zero-budgetif the film bombs financially it doesn't matter. It's a long list of filmmakers living the cinema dream this way, film outlaws such as Jim Jarmusch, Larry Clark, John Cassevetes, Todd Haynes, Abel Ferrara, Alex Holdridge and all the way to the present day. An irrational movie like Federico's newest film Loon is an extension to this cannon of cinema making.
According to the filmmaker, Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, the film “just happened…. It is an unselfconscious film. It was not planned.” Of the ’66 footage, shot by his wife Jenny, he writes on the film’s IMDB page:
''I shot this film of Syd on a visit from film school in London to my hometown, Cambridge. We were on the Gog Magog hills with a bunch of friends. David Gale is there along with Andrew Rawlinson, Russell Page, Lucy Pryor and my wife, Jenny. She's the one in the yellow mac talking to the tree. The mushroom images are iconic and will last forever. It is an unselfconscious film. It was not planned. It just happened. The guy on the balcony is me at 101 Cormwell Road, London SW7. This footage was shot by Jenny. When David Gale wrote about 101 in The Independent he recalled: As the 60s began to generate heat, I found myself running with a fast crowd. I had moved into a flat near the Royal College of Art. I shared the flat with some close friends from Cambridge, including Syd Barrett, who was busy becoming a rock star with Pink Floyd. A few hundred yards down the street at 101 Cromwell Road, our preternaturally cool friend Nigel was running the hipster equivalent of an arty salon. Between our place and his, there passed the cream of London alternative society - poets, painters, film-makers, charlatans, activists, bores and self-styled visionaries. It was a good time for name-dropping: how could I forget the time at Nigels when I came across Allen Ginsberg asleep on a divan with a tiny white kitten on his bare chest? And wasn't that Mick Jagger visible through the fumes? Look, there's Nigel's postcard from William Burroughs, who looks forward to meeting him when next he visits London! The other material is of the band outside EMI after their contract signing. It's raw, unedited footage and stunning even so. It is silent but many people have subsequently put music to it on their youtube an google postings. Good luck to them.''
It was the late summer of 1966 when Syd first tripped on magic mushrooms while film student friend Nigel Gordon captured the moment on standard 8mm film. Even before his days in Pink Floyd, Syd had that star quality. It's fair to say that life would never be the same after that day out at the Gog Magog Hills outside Cambridge.
These are the characters in Syd’s entourage in this “raw, unedited footage,” which was originally silent, though many people have added music such as the new age-y ambient soundscape in the version above. I happen to think it’s a nice complement, but if you find it intrusive, turn the volume off. The images, as the filmmaker admits, are still “stunning.” The films style has also influenced modern psychedelic filmmakers such as British underground filmmaker Fabrizio Federico and his cult movie Black Biscuit.
Every musical era has its cautionary tales, and its visionaries. The sixties produced its share of them all, but also a handful of brilliant misfits who were inseparably both, all of them psychedelic pioneers. Skip Spence, for example—the brilliant founding member of Jefferson Airplane, then Moby Grape, who effectively ended his career attacking his bandmates with a fire axe. Then of course, there’s the founding singer/songwriter of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, whose decline found him onstage, almost catatonic, with a can of Brylcreem and a crushed bottle of pills called Mandrax dripping down his face. When Barrett passed away in 2006, most of the reaction—after the shock of learning he’d still been alive—centered on the sequence of psychotic breakdowns during 1967 that would leave Barrett changed forever. Spence and several other, more obscure figures, had similarly dramatic, and permanent, shifts in consciousness, and of all of them the same question gets asked: was it the drugs?
Of course we’re asking if the drugs created the mental illnesses or just exacerbated the inevitable, but we’re also asking if the drugs created the music. It’s a worthwhile, if somewhat uncomfortable, inquiry that’s probably impossible to answer. But I must admit, it’s difficult to imagine the first incarnation of Pink Floyd without Barrett’s heavy experimentation. The short film above implies a direct connection and takes us to Syd’s psychedelic inception. Simply titled Syd Barrett’s First Trip, the first part of the film, “Gog Magog Hills,” follows a clean-cut Barrett and several companions as they frolic in a field on LSD. As you probably gathered, it’s his first time. Then the film cuts abruptly to “Abbey Road Studios,” to footage documenting Pink Floyd in London after having just signed their first contract with EMI in 1967. It’s the beginning of the end for Barrett’s career and mental health, but the inauguration of the band as mass-market phenomenon.
When the director decides to use as the soundtrack to his new film an album recorded at the cursed Boleskine house, previously owned by the notorious magician Aleister Crowley and then Led Zeppelin's virtuoso guitarist Jimmy Page, you know that the sweet sinful life is on the horizon. We'll have to wait and see how the film Loon divides audiences, and what intellectual debates will materialise over the films topics on family, obsession, abuse, racism, homophobia and Brexit. But what this experimental chaotic tale is really designed to show is a sick twisted family saga that could be happening right next door to you - they could even be your very own neighbour. Ladies and gentlemen meet the Sheen family. A spectacle machine is never a good neighbour. Their teenage son Charlie is both goofy and violent, but his racist/homophobic perspective is driven by his twin obsession of becoming a superstar drummer like his idol Keith Moon, which is matched by his uncontrolled passion for his batshit crazy but sensuous older cousin, Georgia. The director Fabrizio Federico is very quiet but also very funny and slightly unusual, the whole nutcase thing came from him smoking pot because he didnt really have a temper before that. ''I just say how things make me feel, I hate being let down and I lose it sometimes, other then that Im happy to chill and see what happens.'' He's a very ambitious person and see's underground & experimental cinema being appreciated by a much younger international audience. ''Im giving the audience the benefit of the doubt, Im guessing if you're into my films your a bit wild to begin with'', ''a family can be like a war zone, only these characters dont care about landing on a mine.''
Getting that buzz-film reputation, Fabrizio is as much an intriguing character as his films, with a dark depth to them concerning shamanism, reincarnation, sex and addiction, they also have that pop-culture pulse beat that early Tarantino and Korine bring to cinema. That vivid film geek quality, except instead of being into genre films he's into cinematic anarchy. Folie à deux (/fɒˈli ə ˈdu) French for "madness of two"
Bonnie & Clyde
Ian Brady & Myra Hindley
Sid & Nancy
Kurt & Courtney
Charles Starkweather & Carol Ann Fugate
History is littered with similar couples, egging the other partner on to see how far the other will go.
I wish I could say no persons were harmed in the
making of this film, but that would be a lie.
The director was stabbed with a fork. Then, in addition to sustaining
some scrapes and bruises from a particularly physical scene, the lead actor was
admitted into a mental institution shortly after filming.
Now, make no mistake, I say this not with
derision, but with understanding. I myself have stayed at so many mental
institutions in my adult life, I could probably rate their menus for Zagat’s.
(By the way, don’t ever order the macaroni and cheese at Rush in Chicago.
Sometimes they make it with decent shell noodles, and sometimes they just make that powdered-cheese shit from the
box. You won’t know until you get it, and by then it’ll be too late.)
It’s kind of an interesting story how I was given
an advance viewing of Loon to begin with, and I suppose we have the
late-and-great Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd to thank for that. It was through a
Facebook group dedicated to the music of Syd that I first began talking to the
film’s creator and director, Fabrizio Federico. I’m not sure exactly why he
decided to accept a friend request from a weird American blonde girl on the
internet who wears too much eyeliner in her profile pictures, but for some
reason he did – and here we are.
At first I didn’t even think that was his real
name. I thought it resembled that of Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini so
closely, it had to be pseudonym. But no, to the best of my knowledge, Fabrizio
is indeed a real person. If anything he’s the Anti-Fellini, about as far away
from the chic and scintillating high-society classics as a filmmaker could
possibly be.
When I viewed his previous works, I got the
impression that – and I mean this in a good way – they were filmed on an acid
trip (which is no surprise, considering how I found him on a Syd Barrett page.)
It didn’t take me long to find out that Fabrizio abhors any kind of imposed
structure. He won’t even use scripts, which to me (with my stringent,
classically-trained literary sensibilities) was unthinkable. Quite honestly, I
never would have thought a completely improvised film could possibly be as good
as Loon is.
The opening credits feature a jarring, discordant
instrumental theme by the band Mao. Actually, the band recorded the entire
musical score at Aleister Crowley’s allegedly-haunted Boleskine House on the
shores of Loch Ness, wherein Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin also resided for some
time. Even if you’re not the kind of person who believes in ‘vibes’ or
‘energy’, the otherworldly background themes will seem to echo from whichever
spirit realm you may or may not believe in.
From the first scene – which turns out to be an
idle teenager’s experiment with autoerotic asphyxiation – you will be
uncomfortable, even disturbed. And you should be. That’s the whole point. Then,
after the first few nightmarish images, you’ll be introduced to an 18-year-old
English kid named Charlie.
The interesting thing about Charlie is that he
is, with no disrespect, psychologically afflicted in real life as well as the
film; but he plays a fictionalized version of himself as he goes about his normal(ish)
routine. Actually, none of the characters were professional actors. They were
just people in Charlie’s everyday life who consented to being filmed in their
natural habitat, you could say.
But then isn’t it just reality TV? Or a
documentary? Well, no. I believe (and correct me if I’m wrong) that reality TV
is often carefully scripted, rehearsed, and molded unto what the intended
viewers supposedly want to see.
For that same reason, most documentaries are
meticulously edited to make some thesis statement, usually in order to appeal
to an audience of a certain ideology, usually political.
No, Loon has no target audience. It has no point
to prove, no statement to make, and no didactic school of thought to promote.
The film exists only to offer a glimpse into one man’s troubled mind, so that
his screams don’t die unheard. It recognizes no politics except for maybe
Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature.
Still, the background track resounds with
newscasts from the recent terrorist attacks on British soil, grounding the film
solidly in the present. Doom-saying news anchors, as they calmly describe acts
of violence and disorder, merely echo the pandemonium raging in the confines of
Charlie’s mind. The macrocosm is marginalized, and the microcosm is brought to
the forefront. To put it simply, compared to Charlie’s drawn-out mental
breakdown, global terrorism is merely an afterthought.
In contrast, the film has its lighter moments. It
features the comical Dismaland, an amusement park parody of Disneyland that is
actually a large-scale art installation. It features frowning personnel, bleak
scenery, and underwhelming rides such as a spinning mobile home. And yes, this
is a real-world place that actually exists. It also concretely illustrates how
even the happy-ish moments in Charlie’s life are laden with despair.
Still, Charlie proves himself to be endearing,
even adorably charismatic. You may laugh and shake your head at his antics or
deride his immaturity; but you might also secretly hope that he’ll succeed in
his naïvely unrealistic pursuits.
At first, it might seem like the antagonist is life itself - until it takes
the form of Charlie's psychopathic nineteen-year-old cousin. I'm told she's also a psychopath in real life, which even further blurs
the distinction between the film's characters and the real people involved. In
the story, Character-Charlie's feelings for her are anything but appropriate.
Unfortunately, she is too preoccupied with dildos of a certain ethnicity (also
a true-to-life detail) to reciprocate the attraction, leaving Charlie
frustrated and unfulfilled in nearly every aspect of his life. Still, his
youthful enthusiasm is undeterred. Perhaps it's a fortunate coincidence that
the entire film is shot in black-and-white, and therefore uncannily reminiscent
of another monochromatic character named Charlie. There's something sadly
Chaplin-esque about our Charlie's doomed optimism, oblivious to the cruel joke
that the universe itself seems to be playing on him.
Unfortunately, the real Charlie's misfortune didn't just end when they
finished shooting. I don't know the exact details of his real-life condition
(into which Fabrizio never inquired, in order to remain impartial and
unprejudiced while filming). Even if I did, I wouldn't disclose the nature of
his illness out of respect for Real-Charlie's privacy and that of his family.
If you're an especially sensitive person, I suppose you could argue that the
entire film is unethical and exploitative of mental illness. Yet, speaking as a
mentally ill person myself, I don't think that's the case. All who participated
in this project did so of their own free will, and knowingly consented to be
filmed. (Except for the guy who stabbed Fabrizio with a fork; he was left out
as per his own forcefully-expressed wishes.)
That being said, I'm going to break my own taboo on emotional
involvement to say that I really am concerned for Real-Charlie's well-being.
I'll say what people are supposed to say; that I wish Charlie the best in his
treatment and recovery, and extend my sympathy to him and his family; and I do.
But anyone who's really been through hell knows those words don't mean shit. No
amount of encouragement and well-wishing will ever be enough to free someone
who's being held captive by their own mind. I doubt Charlie will ever read this
in real life, and even if he does, I'd be the worst possible person to offer
any kind of advice on dealing with demons I can barely deal with in my own
life. All I could tell him is the same thing I tell myself: Never stop fighting.
When life kicks you down, get up and kick it right back. (Of course, I haven't
lived long enough to tell if that actually works, but I suppose I'll find out
eventually).
All subjectivity aside, however, I do believe this is a film of
considerable merit. It's as brilliant as it is dark and melancholy. I don't
believe anyone's made a better film on a budget of £100, which translates
roughly to $200. Yes, two-hundred dollars, you read that correctly.
"Perks of working with real people," the filmmaker told me.
"I just paid for the food and they were happy."
Other than that, he wouldn't reveal much about the film itself. When I
asked him if my interpretation of the Ouija Board scenes was correct, his
cryptic reply was, "It's multi-layered, so anything goes."
I still think my theory is the best possible one, and anyone who thinks
otherwise can fight me with the nearest kitchen utensil. (No, I'm just being
facetious; don't actually do that.)
Regardless of my personal interpretation of the story, it took me a while
to characterize the nature of the film as a whole. It exists as neither
completely real nor as a work of pure fiction. So far, I've observed similar
habits only in other Millennial writers who insist on throwing time-honored
conventions in the garbage and setting them on fire, for better or worse. The
most fitting term I could give it is Oblique Realism, for the way it rides a
thin, crooked line between reality and fiction.
And no, that's not actually a thing. But maybe it should be.
That being said, I’m not sure who would be more qualified to give Loon (as in, British slang for a crazy person, not the bird) a proper analysis: a professional film critic, or a licensed clinical psychiatrist. Instead, you’ll have to settle for the perspective of a twenty-something female writer of horror-fantasy fiction, so I hope that won’t be a problem. (But if it is, I don’t apologise.)
Step into the fun house where music, cinema and the occult finally mix. The music itself is wonderfully perverse: a languid but steadily building Middle Eastern-sounding drone, festooned with evil chanting, tabla, screaming mellotron, a sonically shifting low frequency foreboding ambience and shimmering 12-string guitar work. It’s a mad, diabolical symphony of beautiful evil; a fascinating piece of unconventional aggressively avant-garde music from one of the rock era’s most mysterious living legends, so intertwined in mysticism that he even sent an assistant out to Egypt to buy the 'Stele of Ankh-ef-en-khonsu'. The stele is also known as the "Stele of Revealing" and is a central element of the religious philosophy Thelema founded by Aleister Crowley. In Rolling Stone’s December 2012 cover story “Jimmy Page Looks Back,” Page said “...there was a request, suggesting that Lucifer Rising should come out again with my music on. I ignored it.”
Guitar World: There was always a certain amount of speculation about your occult studies. It may have been subtle, but you weren’t really hiding it.
Page: I was living it. That’s all there is to it. It was my life – that fusion of magick and music.
Guitar World: Your use of symbols was very advanced. The sigil on Led Zeppelin IV and the embroidery on your stage clothes from that time period are good examples on how you left your mark on popular culture. It’s something that major corporations are aggressively pursuing these days: using symbols as a form of branding.
Page: You mean talismanic magick? Yes, I knew what I was doing. There’s no point in saying much about it, because the more you discuss it, the more eccentric you appear to be. But the fact is – as far as I was concerned – it was working, so I used it. But it’s really no different than people who wear ribbons around their wrists: it’s a talismanic approach to something.
Young filmmaker Fabrizio Federico says the music and Lucifer Risings feel have been a big influence on his new film Loon, ''I think the vibe that they came across is phenomenal, it's eerie and exotically fascinating in that it feels evil. It's a very heavy creation, it's a beast. One day when I get a chance I'm going to replace Bobby Beausoleil's soundtrack and replace it with Jimmy's, he'd like that, him and Kenneth should make peace before it's too late.''
Being able to picture Jimmy in the dark at Aleister Crowley's haunted Boleskine House creating this music has always fascinated in that it feels so dark and hypnotic like a cobra. Where was this different music coming from, in 1972-73 with the speed of Zeppelin's ascent the adrenaline of success mixed with Jimmy's 'Do what though wilt'' evocation on the groove-out to Led Zeppelin III seems to have done the trick. But this music was different to what Page was recording with Led Zeppelin.
Page's soundtrack was finally released in 2012 after decades of it being a sought after prize and one of Led Zeppelin's biggest bootleg's to own. It's the type of album you put on before an Eyes Wide Shut naked virgin scene as she lies down on the alter and the ceremony begins.
At 31 minutes the soundtrack is a short and sweet spell, entrancing the listener mere seconds into it's first peculiar Moroccan drone, similar to some of Brian Jones's experiments in 1967 on The Rolling Stones 'Satanic Majesties Request' album inspired by the Master Musicians of Joujouka in Morocco and their pipes of pan goat sacrifice.
Page in his home studio
The band Mao on Federico's soundtrack for Loon taps into this pagan/kashmir atmosphere. ''I recorded the guitar parts at Boleskine House, I had my walkman on with the backing tracks playing along and brought my portable guitar amp into the house and recorded in the burnt bedroom with the pentagram mattress on the floor, which was used as an ouji board by local kids. Then I recorded in the hallway which is still sublime. At one point the toilet flushed by it's self, you can hear it on the mix. I recorded the guitar into my mobile phone, smoked some weed and it's some of the most supernatural music I've ever played.''
Director Fabrizio Federico
Eventually Page’s music escaped in 1981—probably sourced from the magnetic track from an early 23-minute-long “to be continued” print of Lucifer Risingthat Anger showed potential investors (I’ve seen this, it’s pretty incredible)—when it hit the bootleg market as “Solo Performances by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant,” a limited edition LP with a green wax seal. Another blue vinyl version was released in a Kabbalistically numbered limited edition.Better quality digital versions started making the rounds on torrent trackers around 2005 and last year Jimmy Page released the music he’d composed for Anger’s film via his website on very limited edition red vinyl that sold out instantly.
Be weary of how your children grow up. The psychology that goes into the making of a serial killer will always be complicated but what happens when two people whom should never meet cross paths? 17-year-old Charlie and his cousin Georgia lead a desolate life in a small town in the UK.
Even at a young age, life does not offer any prospects for the young people in LOON and we witness the transformation of two emotional, disillusioned, soulless characters become another case of 'folie a deaux'. History is littered with such cases, most famously:
Bonnie & Clyde
Ian Brady & Myra Hindley
Sid & Nancy
Kurt & Courtney
Charles Starkweather & Carol Ann Fugate
Films such as Natural Born Killersand We Need To Talk About Kevinhave addressed the issue that goes into the making of a murderer. The beauty of Loon is that it takes the primal experimental side Natural Born Killers and the poetic stillness of We Need To Talk About Kevin and transfuses them together.
In LOON you witness the family environment, even by how the NHS is responsible for encouraging the parents to judge their children and label them under the umbrella of a medical condition. But mix it with delusions of grandeur, unrequited love and a lunatic streak, what you get is a ticking time bomb.
The backdrop of the movie is the state of the nation's minefield that is Brexit, and you feel the seething racism, homophobia and hate of the British working class towards the EU. The film is nonlinear and multilayered by an improvised Cinema Verite style, it is an excellent example of what can be accomplished by an obscure film company (in this case Ants Productions) working with a micro-budget, but using enormous flair and imagination by filming with non-actors and amongst crowds, such as the settings of Dismaland and the unsettling paranormal investigation and Oija board games in a haunted elementary school. Charlie brings to mind lone killers who one day snap and go on an uncontrollable rampage such as Charles Whitman, Mark Chapman and Jodie Foster's stalker John Hinckley Jr. A person can change his home, religion and passion but not his family. What this film understands is the root of what creates a serial killer. The invisible puppet master from your past trauma, pulling the strings that creates new tragedy. LOON will be release on Halloween, October 31th internationally. http://fabriziofederico.co.uk/
Considering Syd Barrett's relatively slight musical output, the absence of "Vegetable Man" leaves a sizeable hole in his canon, thankfully both songs have finally been released. The former was penned in 1967 as a spontaneous response to manager Peter Jenner's request for a follow up to Pink Floyd's then-recent single, "See Emily Play." Though often interpreted as a self-portrait of his own mental disintegration, it actually vents his contempt for the vapid nature of fame and his own role as a pop star. Delivered with a sarcastic sneer, it's disturbingly direct in its anger.
The name of the song, Vegetable Man, is based on a 1572 painting called Summer by an Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo who created imaginative portraits made entirely of vegetables, fruits, flowers, fish, tree roots and books. Summer featured a composite man made from intricate painted vegetables; a vegetable man, if you will. Syd even appeared in a promotional photo with spring onions tied to his head. The song has also proved inspirational to British underground filmmaker Fabrizio Federico. ''LOON's main character is based on Vegetable Man, he's pilled to the gills on med's and his world isn't real. He doesn't want to think or feel, it's a life choice that many people make.''
According to Peter Jenner, the song was written in his apartment moments before leaving for the recording session. "On 'Vegetable Man,' the description of the person in there is him," he told author Rob Chapman. "What he was wearing, what he was becoming. I was with him in the room when he was writing it. He was in one corner and I was in the other. Then he read it out and it was a description of him and what was going on in his head."
The track was recorded in the second week of October 1967 and earmarked as the band's third single, backed by another Barrett composition, "Scream Thy Last Scream." Promotional videos were recorded for both songs, but their release was cancelled at the last minute for fear that they were too dark.
Uncomfortable with the pointed lyrics and troubling imagery, the band also decided to leave both songs off their second album, 1968'sA Saurcerful of Secrets.
Though Jenner admits that the songs expose Barrett's fragile psyche "It's like psychological flashing," he's quick to argue in favour of their artistic merit. "I always thought they should be put out, so I let my copies be heard," he said in 2005. "I knew that Roger [Waters] would never let them out, or Dave [Gilmour]. They somehow felt they were a bit indecent, like putting out nude pictures of a famous actress. ... But I thought they were good songs and great pieces of art. They're disturbing, and not a lot of fun, but they're some of Syd's finest work – though God knows, I wouldn't wish anyone to go through what he's gone through to get to those songs."
