Treasure Island

[Richard Romeo]

from the village voice:  an interesting view on ww2-era flims

                                                             beguiling, 
navel-focused                                      freakazoid as original 
and mysterious

as Sundance award winners are ever

likely to get, Scott King's Treasure

Island pretends to WW II-era

hypernostalgia, but it's actually a

vision of all-American movie culture

as alternative psychohistory. Though

it apes the noir visual palette

hilariously, it's also eccentric, sexually anxious, and happy to be picking 
from the

fields Guy Maddin and David Lynch have sowed. Far from merely doing an Ulmer 
or

Ted Tetzlaff cover, King has created his own little cosmos, going so far as 
to

preface his mock-feature with "King Movietone" newsreels and a fragmented

episode of John Q. Nazi, a faux spy serial that reveals an understanding of 
the form

George Lucas never had. Still, climaxing with images shanghaied from Ugetsu 
and
                  Dr. Strangelove, Treasure Island can be thin and 
underrealized—Maddin's balmy
                  conceptual assaults dwarf it.

                  The titular locale is actually a Frisco naval base used 
during wartime as a mail filter
                  and code-breaking think tank; Treasure Island is thus a 
litter ground of secrets and
                  unreadable messages. Depicted mostly as a single 
institutional room covered with
                  scraps of paper, the central office houses Frank (Lance 
Baker), a reedy, Buster
                  Keaton-eyed agent who has two problematic wives and one 
fiancée he cannot bring
                  himself to fuck, and Samuel (Nick Offerman), a Borgninian 
man's man who
                  spackles in his dead marital sex life by recruiting men 
for lifeless, tense
                  threesomes with his wife. The two of them hatch a plan 
(lifted by King from an old
                  pulp novel) to dump a John Doe corpse full of misleading 
tactical information in the
                  Pacific, steering the Japanese wrong in the war's final 
months. They keep the
                  freshly dead body right in the office—in a metal casket, 
abstrusely hooked up to a
                  generator.

                  As the two men fabricate The Body's ultra-straight 
identity with stories that mirror
                  their own lives, the stiff (a fey Jonah Blechman) 
manifests himself as a kind of gay
                  phantom that begins to invade their dreams and then their 
reality. A haunted
                  absurdity, Treasure Island reaches its most hypnotically 
harebrained when The
                  Body shows up to double-team Samuel's wife, or takes the 
witness stand—in
                  blackface—during a military hearing. Park City hoopla or 
no, King still had to
                  self-release this changeling—such is the cachet of even 
the nerviest Sundance
                  laurel.

Rich




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