Packaged with the latest edition of McSweeney’s Quarterly was a wonderful surprise: The first issue of a new DVD magazine called Wholphin1.
As one would expect from the publishers of McSweeney’s and the Believer, Wholphin is full of quirky, inventive, and often (bizarrely) touching content. The short films included have not managed to find major distribution, and sometimes it is easy to tell why; despite the cleverness of the films, these are not all entirely marketable products.
J. Lisa Chang and Newton Thomas Siegel’s The Big Empty (an adaptation of "The Specialist," first published in McSweeney’s 11) is the story of a "little woman with [a] big empty." The titular mystery centers around a large, frozen wasteland contained within the body of a young woman named Alice (the surprisingly talented Selma Blair). I won't spoil the surprise gimmick that this premise hinges on, but I assure you that it's unlike anything you've ever seen before.
While some films, like the aforementioned The Big Empty, were produced on larger budgets by professional crews, other films like Scott Prendergast's hilariously strange The Delicious and Spike Jonze's remarkable documentary profile of Al Gore are presented in a much more of a guerrilla style. Yes, you did read that properly. There is a remarkable documentary profile of Al Gore, one which editor Brent Hoff suggests "might have wiped away […] Gore's reputation as a robot." Perhaps the film wouldn't have "changed the world" as Hoff goes on to say, but it certainly is a revealing bit of filmmaking.
Other highlights include excerpts from David O. Russell's Iraq documentary Soldier's Pay and conceptual artist Jeroen Offerman's mind-bending backwards-sung rendition of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" (Stairway at St. Rose). There are also animations (including a surreal 1970s Iranian production), an instructional video from the 1950s, and an episode of a Turkish sitcom complete with six different subtitle tracks (one original and five written especially for the DVD).
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