"Wolstencroft's Odyssey" is the first
description I would reach for to describe his THE SECOND COMING ––
VOLUME 1, a feature-length rumination, fueled by the essence of W.B.
Yeats, on power, the occult, mysticism, politics, religion, and the
inevitability of self-destruction.
This loosely directed, but smartly
curated work, fell on my eyes initially like a welcome acid rain with
its rainbow-like mixture of images and characters. Although mostly
non-actors fill its roster, these are rarely ordinary folk –– on
the contrary, they are predominantly anti-Establishment figures,
alternative press writers, infamous record producers, documentary
figures, and formidable, card-carrying troublemakers who naturally
tend to toward being potent metaphors of their own intellectual
positions.
Richard Wolstencroft, as is his fetish, has
assembled these rogues from the four corners of the globe and forced
a narrative for them that provides a skeleton on which to hang broad
contemplations and sharp slips of the tongue.
Although his previous films such as PEARLS BEFORE SWINE and THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED took detours into the type of material presented here, these digressions were sometimes heavy-handed because they felt divorced from the imposed narrative. There's no problem with that here because the narrative, while novel, is deliberate nonsense that has us hungering for the detours. Ultimately, the film is permanent detours, and that is its strength.
Although his previous films such as PEARLS BEFORE SWINE and THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED took detours into the type of material presented here, these digressions were sometimes heavy-handed because they felt divorced from the imposed narrative. There's no problem with that here because the narrative, while novel, is deliberate nonsense that has us hungering for the detours. Ultimately, the film is permanent detours, and that is its strength.
Ex-porn actor
Michael Tierney, who was the subject of a prior documentary by
Wolstencroft, is this film's unofficial narrator as he wanders, quite
literally, through landscapes that both starve and feed his troubled
psyche. Along the way he engages with author Gene Gregoritis, and
points us towards bouts of insanity with record producer Kim Fowley
(now deceased), an encounter with the passionate literary poison of
the indefatigable Boyd Rice, fragments of the luminous Kristen
Condon, whose role is considerably larger in the sequel, and a
shadowy liaison with Pete Doherty and his cohorts.
The film sticks to ya. Technically it's what you would expect from a one-take doco because it is one-take (it's recording the heart and the head), but the pleasure of this film, Wolstencroft's best, and the first to truly reflect his own truth, is the smeared, crazy, drunk, stoned, uninhibited journey. Surely that is a type of cinema to be encouraged.
The film sticks to ya. Technically it's what you would expect from a one-take doco because it is one-take (it's recording the heart and the head), but the pleasure of this film, Wolstencroft's best, and the first to truly reflect his own truth, is the smeared, crazy, drunk, stoned, uninhibited journey. Surely that is a type of cinema to be encouraged.
