MicroCinema Scene

If you visit this site, you are probably a moviemaker and chances are in grade school you were a bit of an artistic type. Or maybe you just knew one or two artistic types. Regardless, did you ever notice in school that artistic types would doodle or sketch in their notebooks during class? I used to draw the prositron gliders from Ghostbusters in the margins of all of my notebooks, but sometimes when I was really bored, I would sketch something a little more impressive and maybe show it to a couple of friends. After that, I wouldn’t even save it, never mind attempt to get it into a gallery and show the world my doodling. Alas, this is what Joseph F. Alexandre appears to be doing with his latest picture God Save the Queen. Essentially a cinematic “doodle” haphazardly shot on Super 8mm film, Alexandre wants you to believe this is a “ lyrical, meditative appreciation of California’s central coast that quickly shifts into an explosive polemic charged with political overtones.” In reality, it’s nothing more than absently drawn doodling material – something someone bored would throw together on a Sunday afternoon if one had a handful of raw footage, a classical music piece, and a punk rock diatribe from the Sex Pistols.

Tailor made for the festival circuit with an easy to swallow under-five-minute running time and packing a liberal agenda that condemns the Bush Administration by juxtaposing shots of oil rigs off the California coast with shots of W. on the television, God Save the Queen gains all of its energy from the Sex Pistols song of the same name. And by that rationale, it’s not so much a doodle as it is a “trace” of someone else’s work. Without the Sex Pistols, the meaning of Alexandre’s “polemic” would be ‘nil. With it, there’s at least some context for the sloppily shot and strung together raw footage.

Do you want to see some pasted together raw footage that’s well-shot, well-cut, festival ready, politically charged, emotionally gripping and not dependent on others’ artistic expression? Check out Bobby Miller’s NYC Loves George Bush, an ultra-short documentary from Rigged Productions that carries more weight in its last five seconds than God Save the Queen carries in dozens of repeated viewings. That’s gallery work, not this.

One Star

(Apologies to Mr. Alexandre for the tardiness of this review which comes out a good six months after he mailed his screener in to MicrocinemaScene.)

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