CHELSEA (2014) is an indie film in which a twentysomething must variously cope with her best friend moving out and getting married, a succession of unsuitable substitute roommates, a reunion with a former buddy, lots of bad dates and an increasingly unsatisfying job, with her dog the only point of constancy. While the back of the DVD copy makes it sound like she’s approaching a turning point in all this, I don’t see it.
Instead it’s a slice-of-life film, a brief period with the protagonist in which we watch her live her life, then we say goodbye with her still living it. No conclusions, no lessons learned, just life. Which can be a tough sell but in this case it worked — though I did spend most of the movie convinced her dog would die or run away which would either be the big turning point or mark her hitting rock bottom (I was wrong). “I want to pull the love down from the universe and shoot it into both your bodies.”
ALTERNATIVE 3 (1977) was a British mockumentary presented as an episode of a non-existent science news show, with David Ambrose — former TV pundit, soon member of Parliament — as the host. It mock-reveals that a string of mysterious disappearance in the scientific community are the tip of a glacier. The unseen 90 percent:s a joint US/Soviet plan to colonize Mars before climate change creates a Malthusian crisis. That acknowledges that the other two alternatives ain’t going to happen, to wit reducing our carbon footprint or finding the determination to go Thanos and mass-murder much of the human race.
This was nicely done, and would double bill well with the conspiracy-minded mockumentary Tribulation 99. Unfortunately it generated fallout that as Ambrose later said, nobody would have anticipated at the time: a novelization of the episode, published in the US, became fodder for real conspiracy theories such as those in the book Behold a Pale Horse (details here). It’s kept spreading from there. That’s no fault of Ambrose’s. You can find this online but be wary of a same-name mockumentary from years later; as it lists itself on Amazon as a 1977 film, I’m guessing it’s a deliberate attempt to rip off people looking for the original (it got $3 out of me). . “At the very highest levels of East-West diplomacy, there is a factor operating of which we know nothing.”
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