MONOLOGUE

The story's the same, it's like this- you wake up before dawn and there's a piece missing someplace see? A piece which has gotta be big by the feeling in your gut and it's not because you've dipped your bill all night and your stomach's sour with it.

Let's slice through the baloney. Never quarrel with the business end of a heater, and some babes are built for trouble.

A lot of the time you can't be both right and a gentleman.

I am hired not because I fix things but because things are broken & despite what the Feds wants you to believe - they’re broken all over.

It's a Northwest town, there's lots of  punks around, chronic wanderers, and itinerant misfits, migrant workers, & the unemployed from way way back – lots of people living in the gutter with their daily spoon of sunshine, a piece of crack that they bought with what’s left of their self respect — they are not really much of a problem. It's the organized ones, the gangs, the groups with brains and the one's with international outlooks.  It's called globalization and every two-bit hungry jake off the plane is in on it.

Don't be a bunny, they all come from somewhere you know— somewhere they must have found no good no more, looking for something they can call their own.

But this isn't a frontier, there's no deer and antelope prancing about — it's the end of the road jack, Terminal City — the cliché — and guess what — it clinches it like a rain soaked suit.

Like a few other harbour towns,  plenty of smack arrives to make lazy and warm the pain of the biblical run of rainy days.  

That's not mentioned in the tourist pamphlet.

There's dealing in a hundred kinds of poison, there's the trafficking in human flesh and human cargo, there's insurance scams, and car rackets, there's common blackmail and intricate real estate payoffs, dumb blunt murders and tough luck kidnappings gone wrong.

Hey there are killings and rapes you'll never hear about  and then there's political and social corruption so entrenched, so god damn usual it might as well be listed in the phone book, if they made phonebooks anymore, which they don't.

This is the Vancouver bamboozle with enough venality and fraud, payola and bribery, graft and nepotism to keep the city editor busy – full time - if he wasn't already on the take — making it appear that,- citizen joe, you've never had it so good.

Lucky for me not everyone's willing to buy the con.  I'm employed full time,  like a few other ops in this town, and the main occupation is digging through the garbage - under the shadow of the Julie Andrews and Lederhosen mountains - by the cold Pacific constant.

It’s like those pleasant postcards that the chamber of commerce wants you to mail to relatives in Regina.  

It’s an image made for kodachrome, if they made kodachrome any more — which they don’t.

Understand this: Multi-million dollar sailboats aren't bought by nuns.

Andrew McEvoy / Oliver Hockenhull

 

incident

 9 minutes

a contemporary highly tuned colour reflection on the film noir genre.

incident is a sort of Raul Ruiz jigsaw of a short movie weaving down a too straight road, with a “bad woman” and a “knowing man”, a cell phone confession about a girl who loves bacon and sex (in that order & in Brazilian-Portuguese) and another section on the murderous attractiveness of Murnau’s Nosferatu — it’s all tightly bound by a hardboiled sadistic psychism burying another stiff into the cold, cold, earth of the cinematic mind.  

Speaking to you Vancouver

Sao Paulo International Film Festival, 2008 & International Media Arts Competition, The Netherlands, 2009