Tony award

The unapologetically regressive Flackett

Think back to your childhood, to some tedious auto trip with your parents: you and your brother/sister are caught in the sweaty back seat, and you don't give a damn about the scenery or the greenery, so you pass the time by getting sillier and sillier, by making goony faces and crossing your eyes and sticking out your tongues like spastics, and you talk together in animal sounds, oinks and squeaks, and you giggle and guffaw and turn happily into two-year-olds, until your freaked-out mom and dad shout STOP!!!!

That's the essence of the wonderfully comical, unapologetically regressive world view of Tony Flackett, an Allston-based video artist. He's showing his work and doing a short live performance at 7:30 p.m. this Wednesday (October 14) at Mass College of Art (621 Huntington Avenue, East Hall Screening Room 1). His videos are revels in infantilism, displays of an advanced aesthetic of arrested development. Flackett is the rubber-faced, stupid-acting star of his own videos, and, my, is he funny! He's part of a boyish, childish, classic comic tradition: Stan Laurel, Harpo Marx, Harry Langdon, Lou Costello, Jerry Lewis, sometimes Robin Williams, all stay-after-elementary-school cut-ups.

What will you see of Flackett's at Mass Art? Here are three samples:

"Sound Bites" (1994-'96; 18 minutes). These are exuberant sight-and-sound montages of syncopated nitwit gags, kids leaping about and stomping their feet, also Tony kicking up his heels in one-second Gene Kelly moves, also Tony mugging, his simpleton's face squashed against the camera. For both the soundtrack and the editing of visuals, the influences here are rap, hip-hop, and sampling.

"Rebel Edges" (1992; 18 minutes). Tony on a journey, starting with a rhythmic rise-and-shine collage (frying eggs, whistling teapot, sizzling bacon, brushing of teeth, etc.), then going somewhere (for a job interview? a mental test?), running away into the woods, meeting a strange man there who has shut himself up in a (Plato's?) cave. They have a philosophical dialogue worthy of Canadian absurdist filmmaker Guy Maddin. Some funny moments, some pensive moments, but this piece seems a bit unresolved.

"Tony in London" (1991; 30 minutes). An in-camera edited diary video of Flackett's five-month stay in England at the beginning of the Gulf War. This one's a lovely mix of the intimate and the political, of goofy sight gags and touching, subtle humor. Outside, Tony's video camera catches quintessential Hyde Park crazies, also quixotic peace marchers singing "Kumbaya" and brandishing candles. Inside, lying in bed with a fever, Tony dreams a hilarious discourse with a Spanish-accented Buddha figure, also himself crawling across the floor as a US Army infantryman in an undesignated war.

There's infantilism, of course: he and his London-based sister, Rachel, babbling at each other in increasingly incoherent, stiff-jawed Jeeves talk.

Jolly good stuff! What I think is that Tony Flackett is a bit of a genius, spewing out creativity like a happy baby dribbling everywhere his Gerber's lunch.

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Who would have guessed that the refurbished Touch of Evil, the fixed-up version of Orson Welles's 1958 film, would be the major art-house hit of September? I was there in the long, long line at the Brattle, lucky to secure a ticket for a sold-out performance. In front of me, a married couple were arguing in earnest about which of them knew the definition of "film noir." The husband: "I understand noir because I watched a PBS special about it, while you went to bed." In back of me, a guy was explaining to his friend why Fellini must be seen: "He's funny and sad, and sad and funny."

Inside, it became obvious that many in the audience had no idea what they were watching. About a dozen people got up from their seats for the toilet, or to buy a Pepsi, during the several-minute opening shot, not realizing that this virtuosic beginning is among the most dazzling in the history of cinema.

Only a Wellesian expert can catch most of the tiny changes in this print from previous versions. Not I. But I agree with those who find that the new Touch of Evil makes so much more sense, and that a major reason is the cleaned-up soundtrack. You can discern the dialogue, which previously had been a mumbling muddle. (I talked to a woman who saw version one when she arrived from Turkey, and she decided, sadly, that she could never understand English.)

I still prefer the earlier opening, which sported a jaunty, Latino Henry Mancini tune, with horns and bongos, and credits over the legendary shot. In 1958, it was radical to run titles simultaneously with a scene of suspense, something taken up on the cool TV show (with Mancini jazz) Peter Gunn. That's not what Welles wanted: ambient sounds have replaced the great Mancini song. Credits have been moved to the end of the film; the tune, alas, has disappeared.

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Christie's in London held a September auction of James Bond memorabilia. The tarantula prop from Dr. No sold for the pounds equivalent of $4900; a nightclub club owner paid $53,000 for the right to use "007" as his Bentley's license plate. The biggest sale was to an anonymous telephoner who let go of $102,000 for Oddjob's lethal black bowler hat from Goldfinger.