Despite 25 years of dismissal and mockery, Johnny Mnemonic remains a visionary forecast of the networked society. No pre-millennium Hollywood production captured the anxieties and exhaustion of living online so well, despite studio butchery that deprived audiences of writer William Gibson and director Robert Longo’s ambitious vision. Now Longo triumphantly returns to the film that began and ended his career in Hollywood by unveiling a black-and-white version that effectively defaces the original release’s expensive veneer.
The Return Of Martin Guerre is a celebrated complicated French film about a historical medieval peasant imposter who deceives his wife and village for 3 years.
TEN YEARS AGO, I got thrown through a wall in a shopping cart at an artist-run space in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a histrionic (and injurious) opener to a half-hour set wherein I restaged stunts from Jackass the slapstick media franchise that debuted in 2000 as a television series on MTV alongside visually similar works of early performance art by Yoko Ono, Chris Burden, Marina Abramović, and Vito Acconci. Between such actions as permitting alarmingly zealous attendees to wax my chest and getting shot with a toy gun, I quoted from Julia Kristeva’s foundational 1980 treatise on grossness,