There are certain movies that are both best and worst seen on the big screen (Pink Flamingos, Matthew Barney's Opus and Gilliam's "Baron Munchausen" come promptly to mind) but the king of artful movie excess is indubitably, Peter Greenaway. Trained as an artist and film editor, Greenaway has always found a way to make movies so extremely odd and perverse conceptual that they certainly aren't for every taste. And he has been at it for several decades now.
Today (it being your lucky day and all), the Library of Congress (bless their hearts) is screening his second feature ever A zed & Two Noughts (1985), made hot on the heels of his critically acclaimed debut A Draughtsman's Contract but before he made his more well known and widely seen pieces like The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover, Baby of Macon and Pillow Book.
Only partially a narrative film, it is almost impossible to retell but I am going to quote Channel 4's review as I myself could not be able to put it any more coherently:
The plot is wild.
The wives of two brothers (Oliver and Oswald, played by Eric and Brian Deacon) are killed in a car crash. "Cause of death: a swan" is the official verdict. The white bird flew into the window while the car was outside the zoo where the two brothers work, on a road called Swan's Way, in a Buick car driven by a woman called Alba Bewick.
Coincidences?
The brothers, who we gradually come to understand are twins (separated conjoined twins, it's revealed) aren't sure. They immerse themselves in evolutionary theory and create time-lapse films of animals decaying to try and understand their grief. Meanwhile, they both fall in love with Alba, who has survived the crash - but has lost a leg. Soon she gets rid of the other leg, seemingly just for kicks (or lack of them). And so it goes on.
This elegant puzzle of a movie makes up for what it lacks in narration in stunning (and shocking) visuals (Sacha Vierny’s cinematography is to die and/or lose a limb for) and characters featuring among other things: a tale-telling seamstress-cum-prostitute named Venus de Milo interested in coupling with a zebra, a rhino wandering free in a Rotterdam square, sex without legs attached, reconstructions of various Vermeer paintings, armies of snails, vast amounts of vegetable and animal putrescence and a nerve-wracking score by composer Michael Nyman.
Yum.
All that and more for free.
Today at Library of Congress' Mary Pickford Theatre
God loves a cheerful giver.
I went to a friend's house last night to watch 'This is England' which is suppossed (I can't spell that word, or restaurant, or some other one, but every single other word in the world I can spell correctly) to be a very most excellent movie about, uh, England (that's where the Queen poops) except it wasn't released to On Demand until midnight so instead we watched this other movie:
Primeval.
Primeval is about a 25 foot Crocodile in Burundi that grew up eating the bloated bodies of people killed in the numerous wars they have and now hunts people. It is also a true story. I looked it up.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/news/gustave-primeval/article.html
So in this movie is a 20+ foot Crocodile that has killed hundreds of people and they mix the story in with a minor warlord.
I am not saying it's all arty like the film you want us to see, I'm just saying it's a movie about a real-live crocodile that has eaten hundreds of people.
Best line:
"Jojo if I have to stuff you up my ass to get get you through customs, I am getting you to the US."
How does it tie in to your movie? The Crocodile bites the legs off some people.
if you're gonna go legless, you may as well go legless due to an exotic animal related incident.
I guess.
Or by like jumping a BMX bike off a wicked berm and then losing control of it in mid-air as you go for a 720 and flying off and landing feet first in your neighbor's wood-chipper just as he's about to stuff some pruned branches into it.
I have seen a zed and two noughts (1985). It was all right, but not his best work.
I found Prospero's Books (1991) to be more visually memorable, 8½ Women (1999) to be more subversively erotic, and The Cook, etc., (1989) to be much more clever.
The one I really want to see is Drowning by Numbers (1988). Let me know when I get to see that for free.