MindFLUX Filmmakers During The Q&A At The Enzian
“Number one son here”. Here’s the problem: We do not own a time machine and therefore we cannot see all the films at the festival (or kill Hitler.) Today we had a choice between a documentary and some sort of surreal psychosexual thriller. We chose the documentary and, of course, the entire time I’m thinking gyah! Boring! What are we doing here? the other film sounded awesome! I think next year we should just watch films at random so there’s no regrets.
Anyway the documentary in question: MindFLUX. It’s about Richard Foreman, an avant-garde New York theater director, and it’s got interviews with, among others, F. Murray Abraham, James Cromwell, and Wallace Shawn!
Not a very good film though. It’s one of those documentaries for people with no attention span. It plays a soundbite from one person, then it cuts to another soundbite from another person, then it shows like four seconds from one of the plays. I wanted to scream: stop skipping around! I want to hear people talk! I want to see the play! Also whenever someone is talking it does this awful thing where it switches angles every second and also (ugg) switches back and forth between black and white and color. The movie tries so hard to be not boring that it winds up boring.
And then there’s the animation. At one point someone is telling an audition story. And it’s a great story. And he’s a great storyteller. But instead of letting you see the person who is talking, the movie cuts to a really lousy flash-animated dramatization of what happened. Why do this? The animation doesn’t add any information, or any humor. It doesn’t add anything. And in fact it takes away something: I bet the interviewee would be even more entertaining if you could see him.
I dunno I’m probably being too hard on this. It occurs to me that I saw an infomercial for a blender the other night, and it didn’t really make me want to buy the blender. But today I saw a movie that made me want to buy a ticket to a Richard Foreman play! The plays looked good! It’s hard to say for sure because the movie only shows tiny snippets, but they definitely looked like my kind of thing. I am a fan of surreal dreamlogic type stuff, and the sets looked beautiful. Anyway I guess what I’m saying is MindFLUX is probably better than the infomercial I saw the other night.
Oh man what if the filmmaker reads this review and gets disheartened and decides to quit filmmaking and become a banker? Aww don’t do that Mr. film director! Actually I’m glad I saw the film! It was interesting! It just, you know, wasn’t very good.
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