I ran into this “independent film” on Amazon Prime. Well, in the time you had “B-movies” (perhaps still), but “Sharker” would be more of a “C-movie”. Bad acting, hardly a story, cheap special effects, an attempt to shock by use of sex, drugs and violence. “Sharkers” looks like a group of people having a laugh making a movie.
And so we follow Harry, who gets replaced by his girlfriend for the colleague he invited for a threesome. Snorting his pain away in a club, he meets a drug dealing couple and goes to their house. From then all everything goes wrong and Harry finds the whole drug scene after him.
The film goes from corny humour, drug abuse and violence to splatter horror. Add some psychedelic drug infused scenes and you have got an idea of “Sharkers”.
Not a particular good film, more of a fun-watch so to say.
I did not like Aster’s “Midsommar” and (so) I never watched “Hereditary”. I heard “Beau Is Afraid” is something completely different. It sure is! “Beau Is Afraid” is weird. It is so weird that I wonder why it plays in cinemas. How many people can stand something as odd as this?
Joaqin Phoenix plays Beau, a man with massive anxiety disorders. There are monsters lurking under every rock. The viewer sees the world through Beau’s eyes. He lives in a rotten city where people stab each other, where monsters crawl out of cellars and in which everything that can possibly go wrong, goes horribly wrong. Even crossing the street for a bottle of water, is a massive challenge for Beau.
He was going to visit his mother remembering his father on the day that he died, but a drug infused mob trashed his appartement. On top of things, his mother dies in a very unfortunate accident. Beau is expected at the funeral, but he gets hit by a camper truck. That is about the easy part of the film.
From his nursing address Beau wanders into a community living in the forest and performing plays which -incidentally- tell the story of Beau’s life. The film switches to surrealistic animation to make a circle back to the present where Beau finds himself in a situation which could never have occurred. Perhaps his life is not as miserable as he always thought? The shimmering optimism is soon gone when Beau arrives at his mother’s place.
“Beau Is Afraid” is mostly a very strange drama. The viewer goes from strange scenes with strange humour to completely different even stranger scenes and the story gets as blurry as Beau’s mind.
Indeed, not a film for people who want a clear cut horror film with scare moments. There is an incidental scene with some gore, but mostly the film is a peek into the mind of person who has lost his wits at birth.
Amusing, certainly. Not a brilliant film though, but I do not get to watch a film as odd as this one, so I have to give Aster some bonus points for that.
Minimalist, slow, weird. Often descriptions of films that I like. I am afraid I cannot say the same for “Paris Window”.
Julian and Sunny are a brother and sister who share a tiny apartment and are a wee bit closer than is ‘healthy’ for siblings. Also they are a little weird. Sunny appears to have to come across and a low IQ girl, but Sophie Kargman does not really manage to get that across. It looks more like somebody making funny faces.
This is quite contrary to Noel Taylor playing Julian. Julian is a way too intelligent, but extremely awkward and paranoid person who never leaves the house. He is obsessed by some sort of self-help hypnosis TV show which forms the constant soundtrack of the film.
“Paris Window” is surrealistic, does not have much of a story and we mostly follow two strange persons. The harmony is disturbed when Sunny meets another person and she grows apart from her brother.
As I said, the film is minimalist, slow and weird, but not in a way that I like. I actually found the film pretty boring and unconvincing. The risk of experimental film I guess.
The international title is already weird, but in Croatian it sounds even stranger. I saw “Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus” though the streaming service of the International Film Festival Rotterdam. It is an extremely experimental Croatian film.
Throwing in many different techniques, Barić created a kaleidoscopic film with low contrast, bright colours and a if there was a storyline, it eluded me. You get different types of animation, but also ‘normal film’, but with so man filters that it still looks like animation. Picture in picture, picturesin picture, perhaps the result reminds a bit of the cut-up style that William Burroughs came up with. What also reminds a bit of Burroughs are the lengthy surrealistic, intellectualistic monologues that can be found in many parts of the film. Other elements remind me a bit of Jodorowski. Unfortunately the subtitles were sometimes hard to read, so I missed quite a lot of these monologues.
The film has “noir” elements in the sense of a (or an apparent) murder investigation and the way certain scenes were shot. Like I said, everything is so much cut-up, that it did not really come across to me a a story (or stories).
Filmographically there are several amazing elements. The way the director lets one element go over in another amazed me on several occasions. The film is mostly interesting for reasons of visuals and montage. It is surprising, confusing and fascinating. I hope I can watch it again some time to see if I can make more of it.
When you are up for something really really weird you wil have to find another way than the IFFR as the screenings have stopped by the time I write this.
I saw “Fat Chance” through the streaming service of the International Film Festival Rotterdam. I have no idea if before Covid-19 IFFR also had online screenings, but if not, at least this positive thing came from the pandemic.
“Fat Chance” is a very difficult film. Is it actually a film?
Laird Cregar (1914–1944) was a filmstar in his days, but being of giant size and homosxual, things were not always too easy for him. Broomer took it upon himself to compile clippings from films that featured Cregar. When all that had been montaged, Broomer threw the reel into an acid bath. The result is an extremely vague, very high contrast, flickering, silent film with cracking classical music for score.
“Fat Chance” is a tough watch. There is not a story. Sometimes the images are hardly recognisable. It is epileptic attack inducing and that for a little over an hour.
If you feel like watching something experimental, maybe this (and as I understand also other) Broomer film could be an option. The question is, where to see it though, as the IFFR only screened it for a few days. Until 7 June that is!
I thought it was about time for a strange film. Well, this is a strange film, even more so than I expected.
“The Strange Color Of Your Body’s Tears” is an extremely experimental film with caleidoscopic scenes, picture-in-picture montage, weird scenes, not much of a story, S&M, … Actually, it reminds of the previous full-length of Cattet/Forzani Amer!
A man comes home to find out that is wife is lost. He starts to wander through his appartment building looking for his life. He meets strange neighbours in his hallucinating journey, hearing their dark stories and the disturbing past of the builing.
This film sure is not an easy watch. It is a film to watch when you are in the mood for something completely different. I have better memories about Amer though.
A Dutch director made an Australian film. It was not easy to see “Bad Boy Bubby”, I guess it is not a very famous film. It is not a very easy film either. It starts with Bubby living in some cellar under a factory with his mother. It looks like Bubby has not been out of this cellar since he was born, while he has reached the age of 35. This first part is a bit of a mix between Scandinavian absurdity and an “Eraserhead” bleak atmosphere (but not that industrial). When Bubby gets out of the cellar, he sets out to discover the world. As strange as Bubby is, as strange the world is to him. Still he mostly runs into people who are friendly to him, but not always.
“Bad Boy Bubby” is slow, minimalistic and weird and may therefor not be for everybody. If you like this type of film and you have not yet seen it, “Bad Boy Bubby” maybe an oldie to look out for.
At the DVD rental my eye fell on another Grandrieux. Strange that they do not have “La Vie Nouvelle“, the (I think) better (known) film of Grandrieux. “Un Lac” is by far no “La Vie Nouvelle” or “Sombre“. It is a very minimalistic and slow film, but not dark or disturbing. “Un Lac” reminds more of “Winterstilte” or perhaps of some scenes of “Calvaire“.
A family lives in a remote house in a wintery mountain landscape, near a lake and a forest. The only occupation of Alexi (the ‘main character’) seems to be cutting trees. Alexi suffers a rising number of epileptic seizures. Slowly we get to know other family members. There are hardly any conversations, the filming is of the shaky handheld kind, nothing much happens and Grandrieux uses very long shots. When a stranger arrives, something of a story unfolds.
Yep, this is one of those films only for people who enjoy slow, experimental dramas without much of a story. The atmosphere is alright, but I personally prefer Grandrieux’ darker films.
This film has been on my wishlist for a while, but I did not know (or realise) that it is of the same director as “La Vie Nouvelle”. Knowing that, I can say that the films are quite similar. Dark, shaky handheld filming, underlighted and out-of-focus images, sex and violence. Yep, also “Sombre” is a dark, filmographic experience, my kind of film. It might not be brilliant, but there are not a whole lot of such films available (perhaps for the better too), so it is alway nice to run into one. We follow Jean, a puppeteer (the film opens with an extremely dark Lynchian scene with children watching his show) who follows the route of the Tour de France during which he picks up hitchhikers, but more often prostitutes, to live out his weird sexual preferences. The women usually end up dead. Then Jean meets the sisters Claire (an introvert virgin) and Christine (quite the opposite) and for a while Jean’s good side seems to take over. A roadtrip starts that can only end in one way, or not?
Another very strange, Jodorowsky film in which he again seems to do his utmost to shock/provoke. The film is presented as a spiritual journey with a mishmash of alchemical, Kabbalistic, Eastern (Tantric?) and astrological symbolism, sexuality and taboos and with a relatively large role for Gurdjieff’s enneagram (the film appears to be based on a book of a student of Gurdjieff). Jodorowsky created some elaborate stages with rotating rooms with surrealistic, spiritual imaginary. The constant referral to yet another spiritual system tends to become weary after a while, but especially the Kabbalah part looks nice. In the beginning of the film, we are presented with Christ-like figure. Later he appears to be one of nine persons (the others are introduced in a shorter way) who are recruited by “the alchemist” (played by Jodorowsky himself) for a journey to the holy mountain where the nine immortals live. Again there is a massive amount of scenes that do or do not seem to have much to do with eachother and one scene is even weirder than the next. “The Holy Mountain” is another weird trip, interesting, especially for its time, and more enjoyable than “Sante Sangre” in my opinion.
