In their first movie Unclear Holocaust, the anonymous crew of remix provocateurs who call themselves the Anti-Banality Union sliced up decades-worth of Hollywood disaster movies to create a troubling and frequently hilarious critique of the post-9/11 security state and Hollywood's own civilizational deathwish. You can watch Unclear Holocaust and read our interview with its creators here.

Now the Anti-Banality Union is back with a new film, Police Mortality, which is at least as likely as its predecessor to offend, infuriate, delight, and disturb. You can watch the movie in its entirety below. The Voice sat down with the filmmakers recently to talk about what they learned by watching 180 police movies, their belief that movies accurately predict our future, Christopher Dorner, and their plans to build a participatory apocalypse.

Here's that interview, condensed and edited for clarity:

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Oh wow: If you read our interview with the Anti-Bananality Union last fall, you know that the anonymous trio constitutes our very favorite situationist remix-cinema prankster collective currently active in Brooklyn. Their previous work, Unclear Holocaust, is not only the funniest 9/11 movie ever, but also a thorough and nuanced dissection of the vivid fantasies of New York's destruction that Hollywood has nursed for decades.

Now the team's next project, Police Mortality, is almost complete. There are scheduled screenings at the Spectacle Theater February 26th, and today they dropped their first official preview, embedded above.

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The only elf in Elves.

The video store. Alongside pre-caller ID prank phone calls and episodes of Boy Meets World where Cory was still a boy, it's become for most of us just another glimmering remnant of Friday nights passed.

When Videology made the conversion to a screening room and bar last month, the city lost one of its last true-form rental stores. But unlike the somewhat bizarre fate of the collection at the late Kim's, here the staff was determined to keep the store's materials in Brooklyn, and give the neighborhood a space that was equally conducive to fostering a love of film.

On the occasion of the Williamsburg institution's ninth anniversary, we sat down with owner Wendy Chamberlain and local director/series curator Zach Clark. They discussed the fate of the video store, the importance of alt-theaters, and Christmas cult movies that will wierd the everloving holiday spirit out of you.

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Seriously, almost an hour passes before he exits that door.

With the release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Peter Jackson has given the world 174 minutes of imaginative visions never before realized on a movie screen, save for those in Jackson's previous 12 hours of Middle Earth adventures. It's not bad; it's just stubbornly pokey and almost never grand.

As Voice film critic Scott Foundas puts it, during the long first third you "can feel the hair on your feet growing longer." Or as Frodo might moan, it feels like too little butter spread over too much bread.

That said, there's no denying that the last hour captures some of the spirit of The Lord of the Rings films, and there is at least one thing new here: Never before in a movie have I seen the cast offered a video-game style side quest. (Gandalf doesn't yet take up Radagast the Brown's mission to defeat a necromancer, but maybe he will in movie three, once he's done some leveling up.)

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Last year, as the 10th anniversary of 9/11 was approaching and the rest of America seemed to be preparing for a memorialization in keeping with the previous decade of jingoism and revenge, three young filmmakers were hard at work on a different sort of commemoration.

Calling themselves the Anti-Banality Union, they cut together scenes from 50 different Hollywood disaster movies, using them to retell a version of of the events of 9/11 and lay bare with encyclopedic thoroughness the bloody fantasy of the destruction of New York that Hollywood has nursed since long before the planes hit the towers.

The result, which you can watch in its entirety above, was Unclear Holocaust, a feature-length orgy of annihilation that is both strangely askew and deeply familiar. It is disturbing, hilarious, and, depending on your sensibilities, quite possibly profoundly offensive.

It's also smart. More than just a supercut of CGI explosions, Unclear Holocaust uses deft Situationist slight-of-hand to interrogate the stories we tell ourselves about our place in the world.

We spoke with the members of the Anti-Banality Union recently about Unclear Holocaust and their next project, Police Mortality. Here's that conversation, condensed and edited for clarity:

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John G. Avildsen at the Oscars

In last week's print issue of the Village Voice, we spent time with Lloyd Kaufman, the Troma Entertainment president and splatter-comedy director who's currently remaking his early '80s original, Class of Nuke 'Em High this summer. Kaufman's known for his prolific career in the independent underground, but one of his earliest mentors was future Academy Award Winner John G. Avildsen, who met Lloyd in the editing room of shoestring studio Cannon Films and brought him on for Joe (1970), which introduced actors Susan Sarandon and Peter Boyle, and then Rocky, which shows Kaufman briefly onscreen as a drunken bum and in the credits as pre-production manager. "A title I had never heard and never have since," offers Avildsen, who invented credits for nonunion Lloyd, including "executive in charge of locations" on Saturday Night Fever, which the Academy Award winner was slated to direct. Avildsen spoke with us on the phone recently about his old friend.

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via Hill's eBay account

Henry Hill with Ray Liotta

Henry Hill was best known by Ray Liotta's face. An East New York native famously mentored by the Lucchese crime family, Hill was the Lufthansa-heisting mobster whose 1986 memoir, the Nicholas-Pileggi-shaped Wiseguy, served as the inspiration for Martin Scorsese's modern classic Goodfellas. As TMZ reported last night, Hill died yesterday in Los Angeles at the age of 69.

Hill's life consisted of well-documented involvements with the dirty businesses of narcotics, extortion, robbery, and one major point-shaving college-basketball scandal. Eventually he became an FBI informant and entered the Witness Protection Program until he was expelled for, in his words, "being a Goodfella." He then lived openly under his real name, relocating to Topanga County, becoming a recurring guest on Howard Stern, and hawking his paintings through an eBay store. In 2007, the enterprising ex-con opened a mob-themed restaurant in West Haven, Connecticut called Wiseguys. (An attic fire mysteriously broke out shortly after the establishment opened.)

That same year, the Voice spoke with the self-described "bullshit artist" about spaghetti sauce, his artistic muse ("whatever goes through my sick, fuckin' mind"), his Witness Protection Program dismissal, and "learning to fuck again" after his late-life circumcision. Reprinted below is an edited version of Michael Clancy's Runnin' Scared dialogue with the legendary gangster.

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via

Last night, after much anticipation, we finally saw The Hunger Games. We're assuming that you are aware of this dystopic young-adult novel turned blockbuster film about a noble and bad-ass girl fighting in a government-mandated death match with other teens and children. If not, you have likely not been on the Internet or walked by a movie theater as of late. The film is doing insanely well box office-wise. Those of you that are familiar with the story know that it's actually quite emotional. The obvious and spoiler-free fact is that this is a story about death. Some of those deaths -- the deaths of the "good guys" -- are the type of scenes that are hard to render in such a way that fails to produce tears from even those that are less prone than others to wet eyes. (Full disclaimer: we are known to cry easily and frequently. Basically, we cried through this entire movie.) Even the deaths of the cruel characters, the ones that buy into the horrific violence encouraged by the totalitarian Capitol, are sad in their own way because the children have no agency in the face of an oppressive regime. But! And there is a but! The movie and its source material is not without lack of humor. That said, in the screening we saw, deeply serious moments were peppered with nervous laughing from the audience. So, here's our -- very subjective, mind you -- guide to wrangling your Hunger Games emotions. We've tried to keep it relatively spoiler free, but that's hard.

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Love in the Buff, directed by Pang Ho-cheung, opens in the US on March 30

Back in the 80s and early 90s, when Hong Kong cinema,--running on the kinetic energy of action and slapstick comedy films by the likes of John Woo, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Stephen Chow--was the second largest film industry in the world (behind Hollywood, obviously), fans of these quirky alternative films in the US--whether they be Asian immigrants or aspiring filmmakers like Quentin Taratino--had two options for getting their fix: They could go to Chinatown in various parts of the country and catch the films--undubbed in its original format and released months after Hong Kong--in Chinese cinemas, or they could rent bad VHS copies at certain video stores--at an even later date.

With the decline of Hong Kong's film industry (film output has dropped from 300 plus per year in the 90s to less than 50 in recent years) by the late 90s and the emergence of internet piracy, these Chinese theaters were forced out of business one by one.

And when The Music Palace , the last remaining Chinese theater in New York, shut down in 2000, that left New York fans of the genre no big screen to enjoy Hong Kong films.

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Tonight, we'll be covering the 84th Annual Academy Awards, live from a computer. Stay here on Runnin' Scared for exclusive insight and commentary from a Hollywood insider who has seen THREE movies this year (not including a two-part episode of The Mentalist that looked pretty big-budget). Who's going to win? Who's going to get snubbed? Who's going to die in the middle of the ceremony and get frantically edited into the 'In Memoriam' segment? Stay tuned to find out!

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