Mock Up
On Mu
by Craig Baldwin
Color, 2008, 1:50
$24.95
http://www.othercinemadvd.com/mu.html
A radical hybrid of spy, sci-fi, Western, and even horror genres, Craig Baldwin's Mock Up On Mu cobbles together a feature-length "collage-narrative" based on (mostly) true stories of California's post-War sub-cultures of rocket pioneers, alternative religions, and Beat lifestyles. Pulp-serial snippets, industrial-film imagery, and B- (and Z-) fiction clips are intercut with newly shot live-action material, powering a playful, allegorical trajectory through the now-mythic occult matrix of Jack Parsons (Crowleyite founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab), L.Ron Hubbard (sci-fi author turned cult-leader), and Marjorie Cameron (bohemian artist and "mother of the New Age movement"). Their intertwined tales spin out into a speculative farce on the militarization of space, and the corporate take-over of spiritual fulfillment and leisure-time.
"...an allegorical cyclone of images and ideas haunted by sardonic humor and gnostic longing"--Erik Davis, Techgnosis
"...hits your synapses like a cluster bomb, assailing your tremulous gray matter with a barrage of cinematic fragments (most recycled,
some newly shot), miscellaneous rants and ruminations"--Manohla Dargis, New York Times
"...Mock Up On Mu is a modern American myth fashioned from all manner of cultural detritus."--Jim Hoberman,Village Voice
"...Nuclear waste, floating space weapons, cocktail-bar seductions: All blur anarchically with footage and sound from sources ranging
from The Brain That Wouldn't Die to Capricorn One."--Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York
"...Featuring everything from badass Spaghetti Westerns to seedy Vegas crime thrillers to papier-mâché Z-movie sci-fi extravaganzas,
the lifted material forms an alternative U.S. history in which a plot by Hubbard and Martin to colonize space (and employ energy
technologies in the service of militarization) is resisted by Parsons and Cameron, who enlist occult magick to fight the power."
--Michael Joshua Rowin, L Mag
"...an often hilarious, sometimes inscrutable, always original film that's part pop-cultural fantasia, part capitalist critique"
--New York Magazine
"No one chops and cuts the viscera of our schizoid culture with quite the glee and gusto of Baldwin, and Mock Up On Mu will send
its dazzled, slightly befuddled viewers blinking into the bright sunlight of a subtly altered world."--Peter Culley
This DVD is NTSC, Region 0 (playable worldwide).
