He's an artist! He's a jock! He's Björk's boyfriend! He's got a bit of a thing about Vaseline!
Now you, too, can pretend to have seen all five films in Matthew Barney's epic, loony Cremaster Cycle without having to actually sit through them, like I did. Nonplus fellow guests at dinner parties who have never heard of the guy either with this at-a-glance guide.
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Cremaster 1 |
Cremaster 2 |
Cremaster 3 |
Cremaster 4 |
Cremaster 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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What it's about |
Girl bits, grapes |
Gary Gilmore, Mormons, death, bees |
Irish Freemasons, the Chrysler Building, Art |
Symmetry, the Isle of Man, goats |
Death, Hungary, opera |
|
Vaseline sculpture |
Fallopian-tube-ish thing on table in airships |
Blob inside linked Ford Mustangs |
Bar in Cloud Café, models of skyscrapers |
Endless gooey tunnels under the Isle of Man |
Harry Houdini's shackles and weights |
|
Does Mr Barney appear in the film? |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Does Mr Barney get naked in the film? |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
|
Do we see up Mr Barney's bum? |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
No |
|
Are there topless girls? |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Best guest star |
Marti Domination as Goodyear |
Norman Mailer as Harry Houdini |
Richard Serra as himself |
None |
Ursula Andress as the Queen of Chain |
|
Annoying soundtrack noise |
Industrial humming |
Bees |
Theremin |
Motorbike engines |
Ursula Andress singing in Hungarian |
|
Really gross sequence |
None |
Creepy bee sex |
Mr Barney's colon prolapsing after horrible dental procedure |
Close-ups of Mr Barney's scrotum with clamps attached |
Mr Barney's genital prosthesis |
|
Highlights |
Marti Domination dancing gleefully with chorus line |
The drummer from Slayer ferociously accompanying an amplified swarm of bees; fantastic country and western line-dancing |
Demolition derby in the Chrysler Building lift lobby; intro sequence to 'The Order' section, where the Entered Apprentice's adversaries are paraded through the Guggenheim Museum by topless chorines |
The first five minutes or so of the motorbike race |
Water sprites cavorting in the baths |
|
Sequence that goes on way too long |
Hostesses smoking Sobranies and looking bored |
Swooping crane shot in a church with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on the soundtrack |
Cloud Cafe maitre d' fiddling with lift cables |
Mr Barney, as a satyr, crawing through Vaseline tunnels under the Isle of Man |
Mr Barney, in Harlequin outfit, climbing all the way up, across and down the opera house's proscenium arch |
|
Ravishing imagery |
Closeups of Marti Domination as she writhes around under a table |
Jaw-dropping helicopter shots of glaciers in Canada and salt lakes in Utah |
Aimee Mullins as a leopard-woman; topless chorines; the Chrysler Building used as a maypole |
None |
Baroque interiors of opera house and baths; pearls floating on water behind end credits |
|
What sitting through it feels like |
Flying David Lynch Airlines with Gold Diggers of 1933 as the in-flight movie |
Going to a Mormon summer camp where there are lots of bees, and wondering if your creepy counsellor is a serial killer |
Playing Donkey Kong and reading a book about architecture in an Irish pub in New York while cars crash out in the street |
Watching mediocre video art at a motorbike race |
Sitting through a one-woman performance of The Magic Flute, translated into Hungarian |
|
Is it any good, really? |
Yes, surprisingly. Even the boring bits are still kind of cool. |
Definitely. The most disturbing and confusing film of the cycle, but also the most stunningly beautiful. Johnathan Bepler's soundtrack is worth the price of admission by itself. |
Yes. It has more dull patches than 2, but is much more fun, and not quite as icky. If you see only one of the series, it should be either this or 2. |
No. It's mind-numbingly dull. For completists only. |
Yes. Not as out-there as 1, 2 or 3, but it's an above-average art film with amazing costumes and locations, and the soundtrack (also by Bepler) is lovely. |