Brill Building

David highlights some of the problems of BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW. I still think it has a lot of strength as a visual experience, before it even jettisons that in the last fifteen minutes or so.

iamdavidbrothers:

Beyond The Black Rainbow Trailer (by tribecafilm)

Trailer’s ill, right? Oppressive ’80s paranoia crossed with Kubrick’s 2001 set design crossed with vague psychedelia crossed with murder? Yeah, I’ll go see that.

In fact, I did go see it. I saw it today. And it’s mush. It’s over-directed, vague, abstract, mushy mush. Set design was good, what you could see of it. (Half the movie was out of focus or focused on one thing in the foreground.) The sound design was interesting, though the score sat on top of the dialogue in a way I didn’t like, and half the audio was mixed so as to be very hard to hear. It took maybe 90 minutes to become an actual movie, like with characters and a narrative and all. There are a number of tonal breaks, both in terms of set/sound design and plot-related, that shatter whatever mood the mush instills in you. And the last page of the script was clearly the sort of thing where someone should have told someone else “No, that’s stupid, we cannot end our movie like this, we’ll be laughed out of the theater, this is the stupidest way to resolve this problem ever.”