"Mock Up on Mu"

By David Hudson on 01/14/2009

"By turns absorbing, confounding, exhausting and altogether stranger and more rib-ticklingly funny than most fiction, Craig Baldwin's infelicitously titled and cacophonous provocation, 'Mock Up on Mu,' comes close to defying categorization," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Much like Mr Baldwin's previous cut-and-paste works - including the film 'Tribulation 99,' his self-professed 'pseudo-pseudo-documentary' about American interventions in Latin America - this new work 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."

"Baldwin's politics seem to have migrated from the paranoid Third Worldist New Leftism of 'Tribulations 99' to an oddly hopeful anti-globalism," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "His aesthetic remains the same. This mocking 'mock-up' is a mixture of conscious and unconscious primitivism - as though Ed Wood Jr had attempted to film a script by Thomas Pynchon about a script Pynchon secretly wrote to be adapted by Wood."

Updated through 1/16.

"Not halfway through January and Craig Baldwin's 'Mock Up on Mu' already boasts what will likely be this year's most untoppable character lineup," notes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine: "Scientology founder and stress test pioneer L Ron Hubbard (Damon Packard); rocket scientist and Aleister Crowley acolyte Jack Parsons (Kal Spelletich); Parsons's wife, Kenneth Anger actress and 'mother of the New Age movement' Marjorie Cameron (Michelle Silva); and a personification of defense systems juggernaut Lockheed Martin (Stoney Burke)."

For Bill Weber, writing in Slant, "the archival grab bag eventually hits the diminishing-returns point, drowning out the political themes (e.g., Cameron's excoriation of the modern 'sick culture of extraction') and competing with the daunting laundry list of Hubbard's connections to the CIA, Disney, Werner von Braun, and sex-magick rituals in Pasadena."

"Although there's so much that Baldwin is trying to reference and riff off of, it's amazing how straight and focused he manages to keep it all," notes Mike Everleth. "Working as a collage narrativist, Baldwin knows how important it is to stay on the narrative."

At Anthology Film Archives from today through Tuesday.

Update, 1/16: Baldwin's "punky, underground aesthetic, appropriating protected footage and shaping it into anticorporate raspberries, isn't quite as inflammatory as it used to be, mainly because everybody's doing it (or did it in the 90s)," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. "But it's nice to see Baldwin's still got fire."

Tags: Craig Baldwin