Directed by Gela Babluani
Starring Georges Babluani This vicious little French/Georgian thriller, which won a few prestigious festival awards last year for best debut feature for its first-time director, hits screens this month and if you’re anything like me, you’ll watch most of it with your hands covering your eyes, that’s how brutally tense and nervy it is. Shot in austere black and white with minimal music and dialogue, 13 follows young Georgian immigrant Sebastien (Georges Babluani, the director’s brother) as he naively embarks on a wild goose chase around the outskirts of Paris on some sketchy get-rich-quick scheme and ends up plunging deeper and deeper into one of the worst situations imaginable from which there appears to be no escape. Babluani, the director, skilfully and slowly escalates the tension throughout 13—the scene where the ring of desperate, broken men play a terrible group game of Russian roulette will remain indelibly imprinted on your mind. Is it too soon to call this the best film of 2006? Yes it is. KEITH WARREN
Vanhellion.com
Wow. Integrity has been going for seventeen years now. Maybe it was the constant line-up changes, the fights, the label disputes and the ‘scene’ gossip that’s dogged them their whole career, but this band / Dwid havee never got the props they deserve. If there was justice, they’d be recognised alongside Led Zeppelin, Misfits, Love, The Beatles, The Byrds, The Beach Boys and Whitehouse as one of the greatest bands of all time. For some reason though they’re still a mildy famous hardcore band from Cleveland. What gives? The beauty of Integrity was that they acknowledged and capitalised on all that failure and contradictory rhetoric of straight edge hardcore circa early 90s and made it exciting and palatable again by restoring some genuine violence, showbiz, rock ‘n’ roll and, most importantly, offensive PUNK aspects of it all. EG all the SXE yrics were based on ‘truth’ and ‘never ever giving up’ when the whole scene was run by weird gossipy rich kids with no morals whatsoever. One of the more famous ones, a guy called Dan O’Mahoney, who was in a band called No For An Answer used to sell $30 t-shirts in the punk weekly Maximum Rock N’ Roll baring slogans like ‘Castrate Rapists’. He now owns a bar and poses with strippers to get punters in. At the same time, Integrity were playing concerts to the same PC idiots who were buying those shirts but Dwid’d be singing lyrics about torturing and killing humanity. As Nathan Barley would say: “fucking with your head yeah?”. Most importantly, Integ’s music stood out from the rest. It was dark, gothic, nihilistic, hardcore, mixing Slayer and Celtic Frost riffs with Cro Mags, SSD and Siege but with Francis Bacon artwork. The album For Those Who Fear Tomorrow, which features extensively on here, is a solid gold ten out of ten record, the title track of which is perhaps the most perfect thug hardcore song ever written. This DVD has clips from shows spanning from day one skinny Dwid, through to evil goth rock Dwid, through to fat Dwid with a Peter Sotos beard, through to present day. For some reason Dwid left out the gigs circa Integrity 2000 where he was wearing PVC pants and had a fat chick with devil horns on keyboards. But nae bother, we all make mistakes. Did we mention that Integrity is great and everybody with even a passing interest in hardcore should go to vanhelllion.com and buy this? There’s an interview with them in this issue as well. I think we’ve overdone it. I sound like a groupie. ANITA CRAPPER
Sam Jordisan
Robson Books Sam Jordisan, the author of that Crap Towns book, should clean up with this because everyone’s secretly fascinated by religious cults—who hasn’t wondered what those zoned-out Hare Krishna folk do when they’re not chanting around town and cooking vegetarian curry?—and you can see Channel 4 picking up the rights for a light-hearted 50 Craziest Cults Ever countdown show presented by Jimmy Carr. From Scientology and The Manson Family to the Nation of Islam, the Moonies and Breatharianism (the one where you “live” on light alone; not so popular), most cults are accounted for and gently satirised. Except, that is, the biggies, Christianity and Islam, which are just better established and wealthier than minnows like Matrixism, based on the Matrix film trilogy believe it or not, and Tasmania’s nutty Hermes Far Eastern Shining. This is fun bathroom literature but it leaves you saddened thinking about how desperate and confused tens of thousands of people must be to allow themselves to be brainwashed into believing that someone or something can provide all the answers to their problems, especially if they first hand over a stack of cash and their 14-year-old daughter. PATRICIA SIRK