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Albert Birney
A gently surrealistic film-maker from Baltimore USA that loves to create detailed imagery based on low-fi effects, many little practical props, stop-motion animations, and so on. There's something very charming about his movies that combine a childish imagination with more sophisticated surrealism and fuzzy, simple, rose-tinted messaging, sometimes reminiscent of Gondry but less dark and sophisticated. His films are usually a labor of love, and charming to watch. Not included here is the overly silly movie 'Sylvio' about a gorilla struggling to fit in with humans who becomes famous for breaking things but who only wants to share his gentle puppet show. Taking it's cue from Eraserhead, this very low-budget hand-made goofy surreal movie is a marvel of home-made inventive props and imagination. It's a movie of two halves: The first superb half sets up a character living a terrible life in a tiny bed with a soul-sucking job. Abraham's home is overwhelmed by a room-sized 'gadget' that is part multi-media TV, internet, commercial-factory, vacuum-cleaner, AI robot, and also a machine that can create and deliver any commodity needed by Abraham like fish and shoes, as long as he watches a really silly commercial for it first and asks for it. It is a room-sized heap of wires, boxes, circuit-boards and appendages, with two people living in the machine, a bearded man for the commercials, and a sexy AI girl to sing platitudes to him out of tune. Fluffy stop-motion creatures crawl out of the walls, his nights are occupied by surreal nightmares haunted by the scary Watermelon Man who's face is covered in seeds and who keeps trying to sell him hammers, his food seems to be only fish, and his bizarre job involving fish mouths is something straight out of a Gilliam movie, except much more hand-made. The second half of the movie, unfortunately, sinks into cliches, albeit fun and goofy surreal ones, as his belly tumor grows into a singing cowboy, and he escapes into nature, encountering various bizarre dancing beasts of nature, trees, rocks, a naked river nymph, a happy tiny naked couple, a huge breast that gives birth, etc, leading to a mystical death-rebirth favoring nature over consumerism. In short, a much goofier and more cliched Eraserhead with a tree-hugging moral message, but it's a labor of love, features inventive surrealism, and it is fun. Random animation about two blobs, that combines anything-goes absurd adventures with gentle childish drama that can suddenly veer towards philosophical musings about things like nature and death, and then wander off into a surreal dream or hallucination. The many adventures can involve anything, including ants eating peanut butter along with all the flesh of one the blobs, a chicken living inside a blob skin-suit, a blob living inside a computer, switching between realities that switch to multiple animation styles and live-action blob humans, a ladybird in the brain that can help with altered conscious states, potatoes used to power a computer game, a friendly ghost, and much more. Also included in this film is a very surreal dream sequence involving floating brain-houses turning into eyeballs against a Dali-esque landscape with a politician that has piano-key teeth. Actually this is a sequel to 'Tux and Fanny' which was a collection of 1-2 minute youtube shorts and never cohered as a movie and which is therefore unreviewable. This film has a similar approach, moving from one adventure to another without an overall plot, but the adventures are much longer and details in previous stories connect in surprising ways. One more detail: For no reason whatsoever, the dialogue is in computer-generated Russian. At the surface, this isn't Albert Birney's typical surrealism and is just simple fantasy-sci-fi with a wonderful nostalgic computer-game theme. But the surrealism is there nevertheless. A loner tries to make a living in 1987 by drawing ASCII-art on his Apple computer while playing with his dog and computer games all day long. When he finds an ad for a new type of immersive computer game, he applies immediately. What then happens is a seamless blend between blocky, simple 1980s computer graphics, old quest-game rules, and elements from his daily boring life, merged together using dream-logic. TVs themselves become walking NPCs, cicadas become monsters, and a computer game character invades his real life, like a child-friendly version of Videodrome as he goes on a quest to save his dog. But then things get weirder with naked people that literally unravel, and some confusion inspired by the Nightmare on Elm Street film (which he just watched). It works both as a nostalgic fantasy, and as gentle surrealism about secluded life of a geek. Fun and charming. Fun but limited, little low-budget movie that merges sci-fi with dream-logic, depicting a dystopia where dreams are taxed and invaded by big business. A dream-auditor is sent to an isolated mansion in the country inhabited by an eccentric old lady with a huge collection of dreams. As he audits her dreams, he discovers that dreams nowadays are not what they are supposed to be. The character is reminiscent of the bureaucrats-that-could from a Gilliam movie, and the use of dreams is slightly reminiscent of Gondry, but this is on a much smaller and low-budget scale, with a poor-man's version of retro-steampunk technology. Actually, the dreams feel like they came from the imagination of a child, as in how a child would film dreams, rather then being oneiric. But the use of dream-logic improves gradually as the movie progresses with some nicely done scenes towards the end, and even with its childish visuals it is still fun and involving in its own quirky way. The title of the movie is appropriate. |
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