Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 341: Mon Dec 17

Reflections of Evil (Packard, 2002): Close-Up Cinema, 7pm


This film is part of the Sick Monday strand at Close-Up Cinema. Sick Monday is a film programme curated by artists, Dean Kenning, Vanessa Scully & Liam Scully, commissioning radical new moving image works by a range of visual artists. Reflections of Evil is curated by Liam Scully, the third in a trilogy of programmes by Sick Monday.

Chicago Reader review:
Underground filmmaker Damon Packard slouches toward Hollywood in this self-financed, self-distributed 2002 feature, which is framed as a TV movie from the early 70s but veers into all manner of nightmarish reverie. As the lumpish hero, Packard peddles wristwatches on the angry streets of downtown LA and nurses a feverish love-hate relationship with the fantasy factories of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. (One sequence, shot guerrilla style at the Universal Studios theme park, imagines an attraction called Schindler's List: The Ride.) Meanwhile a ghost in a billowing nightgown—the hero's sister, who's died of a PCP overdose—drifts down the fake streets of the Universal back lot. The movie is a shapeless melange of ideas, every one of them run into the ground, but Packard's vision of mass-media purgatory is defiantly personal.
J.R. Jones

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