Mock Up on Mu

It’s 2019. From his Empire of Mu on the moon, L. Ron Hubbard dispatches sexy Agent C. to Earth on a secret mission of espionage and seduction ... The giddy, scary Mock Up On Mu is the latest obsessive exercise in audio-visual overload and pop-culture collage from San Francisco underground legend Craig Baldwin, who perfected rapid-fire found-footage assemblage mashed with bizarro subterranean revisionist history in 1991’s amazing pseudo-doc sci-fi conspiracy opus Tribulations 99: Alien Anomalies Under America. (Baldwin’s also the director of 1995’s Sonic Outlaws, a documentary on copyright, fair use, and the culture jamming band Negativland). “From an undisclosed location and the teeming mind/editing suite of collage master Craig Baldwin emerges this masterfully subversive counter-history of contemporary California, i.e. the postmodern world.  Intertwining biographical err... speculation, re-enactment, found footage and a light touch of smut, Mock Up on Mu bravely wades, scissors flying, into the interlocking lives and careers of Jack Parsons, founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Marjorie Cameron, pioneer of the New Age Movement, sci-fi hack/religious leader L. Ron Hubbard and notorious warlock Aleister Crowley. Alternately (and simultaneously!) disturbing, funny and just plain slap-your-forehead weird . . . Mock Up on Mu will send its dazzled, slightly befuddled viewers blinking into the bright sunlight of a subtly altered world . . . No one chops and cuts the viscera of our schizoid culture with quite the glee and gusto of Baldwin” (Peter Culley, Vancouver I.F.F.). Colour and B&W, DigiBeta. 114 mins.