Mindflesh

A cab driver obsessively records his sightings of a hallucinatory woman, who he ends up having sex with, and who turns out to be his own mind, the (truly) inexplicable result of his mother having drunken sex with him and then killing herself. This (the sex with the woman, that is, his own mind) pisses off the guardians of the galaxy (or dimension or plane or whatnot), ostensibly because he is not facing his trauma (but is instead shagging it?), so they start killing off his friends/acquaintances/former employers in order to make him "face his trauma" (this is the only clear part, as it is repeated ad nauseum towards the end), which he does at the end (by remembering his mom having sex with him) just in time to save his ex-girlfriend, patch up his relationship with her, and mail off his manuscript (which is undoubtedly the screenplay for the film).

That about sums it up. The film starts off well, good psychosexual-thriller or whatever it calls itself, but unravels horribly when it attempts to explain what is going on. Everything but the kitchen sink gets thrown in by the end, in an apparent attempt to impress the viewer with the sheer number of concepts introduced. Tough to imagine the chemical cocktail that drove this screenplay, though the tendency of each scene to ignore the entire rest of the movie argues against anything they give the kids for ADD.

* * * R A T I N G * * *

Mindflesh (IMDB)

Wince : [*****]
Flinch : [***__]
Retch : [***__]
Gape : [*****]

Beerequisite : [********...there's not enough beer in the world.
Pornability : [****_]
Obscurity : [****_]
Explicability : [**___]

Notable visuals: Maggot crotch.

Death of Virgil

It would be remiss not to devote an entire post to a book that took nearly a year to finish.

The work in question is Herman Broch's The Death of Virgil, which is much less a novel than it is a weapon of last resort developed in concentration camps for use against the Nazis.

The book is written in stream of consciousness fashion -- think Finnegan's Wake with half the cleverness and twice the pretension. Bosch attempts to capture the complexity of a classical symphony in language: recurring themes, exaggeration of tempo, and so forth. What this boils down to are highly repetitive sentences of amazing length -- some so many pages long that they have to be broken up arbitrarily into paragraphs, probably due to some publisher's equivalent of the Geneva Conventions.

It is this grandiose goal which proves the downfall of the novel, for it has quite good things to say about the nature of art, the duty of the artist, and the philosophy of death, as it were. Barring the exceedingly distracting hallucinatory episodes, there is a compelling portrait of Virgil and his times. With some restraint, either limiting the too-clever-by-half use of language, or leaving it to another (hopefully shorter) work, this could have been quite a powerful novel.

In the end, it is a prime candidate for the Emersonian technique: skim the book lightly and quickly, letting your eyes discover for themselves what they may, rather than attempting any deep or thorough immersion in the text.

Bab'Aziz

A blind dervish and his (naturally precocious) grand-daughter set out into the desert to attend a dervish reunion that occurs every 30 years. Being dervishes, they naturally have no map and no plan; each sets out in a different direction to find his own path to the reunion. To keep the story moving, Bab'Aziz and his grand-daughter encounter a number of characters in their journey, including a brother bent on revenge, a man who jumps into wells seeking the kingdom of his dreams, and a musician searching for the woman who stole his passport (and, of course, his heart).

The heart of the film is its "the journey is the destination" theme, though it is beautifully-shot and has an excellent soundtrack. The Sufi mysticism is watered-down to an almost Arabian Nights-level fantasy, which serves to make the film a bit more palatable to Westerners and irreligious types than might normally be the case.

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Bab'Aziz (IMDB)

Wince : [_____]
Flinch : [*____]
Retch : [_____]
Gape : [**___]

Beerequisite : [*____]
Pornability : [*____]
Obscurity : [***__]
Explicability : [**___]

Long Dream

A patient at a rather run-down hospital is troubled by dreams of increasingly longer length: in a single night, the patient will live hours, days, years. As the duration of the dreams increases, the doctors begin to wonder what will happen when his dreams become infinitely long.

Basically a well-thought out Outer Limits episode, with about the same quality of acting and effects. Fun though.

* * * R A T I N G * * *

Nagai yume (IMDB)

Wince : [***__]
Flinch : [*____]
Retch : [*____]
Gape : [**___]

Beerequisite : [***__]
Pornability : [_____]
Obscurity : [****_]
Explicability : [***__]