(1990)
Dir - Jörg Buttgereit
Overall: MEH
In between his two most known/infamous movies Nekromantik and Nekromantik 2, primitive, experimental filmmaker Jörg Buttgereit dropped Der Todesking, (The Death King), another deliberately unpleasant work that continues his fascination with death. A non-narrative anthology film broken up into seven segments, (one for each day of the week), they all feature various musings on suicide and a type of voyeuristic appeal to immortalizing oneself through life-ending means. There is a guy who quits his job and then calmly poisons himself in a tub, another acts out his admiration for violent exploitation cinema by shooting his girlfriend in the head and framing the blood splatter, another rambles on a park bench before a woman offers him a pistol to blow his brains out, a montage of a suicide bridge with the names and occupations of its participants superimposed over it, a woman eats chocolates and dreams of her parents having sex, another woman goes on a spree killing while filming it, then a guy freaks out on his bed for several minutes in his underwear. Each scene is intercut with a stop-motion, decaying male body and it all certainly has a consistently calm, dour tone which is typical of Buttgereit's cinematic output. A few of the images get pretty squeamish and the pacing is unapologetically challenging, but it has a curious charm to it that is not altogether without merit.
Dir - Jörg Buttgereit
Overall: MEH
In between his two most known/infamous movies Nekromantik and Nekromantik 2, primitive, experimental filmmaker Jörg Buttgereit dropped Der Todesking, (The Death King), another deliberately unpleasant work that continues his fascination with death. A non-narrative anthology film broken up into seven segments, (one for each day of the week), they all feature various musings on suicide and a type of voyeuristic appeal to immortalizing oneself through life-ending means. There is a guy who quits his job and then calmly poisons himself in a tub, another acts out his admiration for violent exploitation cinema by shooting his girlfriend in the head and framing the blood splatter, another rambles on a park bench before a woman offers him a pistol to blow his brains out, a montage of a suicide bridge with the names and occupations of its participants superimposed over it, a woman eats chocolates and dreams of her parents having sex, another woman goes on a spree killing while filming it, then a guy freaks out on his bed for several minutes in his underwear. Each scene is intercut with a stop-motion, decaying male body and it all certainly has a consistently calm, dour tone which is typical of Buttgereit's cinematic output. A few of the images get pretty squeamish and the pacing is unapologetically challenging, but it has a curious charm to it that is not altogether without merit.
(1997)
Dir - Erik Skjoldbjærg
Overall: GOOD
A very collective, atmospherically low-key police procedural thriller from Norway, Insomnia mostly gets by on its deliberate style. The full-length debut from co-writer/director Erik Skjoldbjærg, every plot element that moves the story along is underplayed to such an extent as to almost be imperceptible and for a story where such minute details prove vitally important, this is an interesting and somewhat bold decision to make on Skjoldbjærg's part. It is also fitting though since Stellan Skarsgård's veteran, Swedish detective spends the bulk of the movie either concealing or manipulating such pivotal specifics to suite his own means. The central character is certainly not without a moral compass, but his unethical tactics of the ends justifying the means put him in an oddly similar vein as Bjørn Floberg's regretful, passion-killing antagonist. This makes for a disturbing correlation between the two and both actors deliver appropriately non-showy performances. As the title would suggest, various sleep-deprived hallucination sequences occur that are likewise played so subtly as to almost linger in a subconscious dream state, as if Skarsgård's character is experiencing them just as he seems perpetually on the cusp of total, guilt-ridden exhaustion.
(1999)
Dir - David Cronenberg
Overall: GREAT
David Cronenberg's fifteenth feature eXistenZ acts as a fitting culmination of over two decades of a firmly established cinematic aesthetic. In this regard, it makes sense that he would step back from tripped-out body-horror for the next two decades in his filmmaking career since further, immediate endeavors in such well-explored subject matter could have easily become redundant. This is a hallmark heavy work for Cronenberg, full of his usual penchant for squishy, organic technology, gore, and mind-melting plot development, exemplifying a persistent fascination with the evolution of the human body and how we as a species psychologically adhere to it. Naked Lunch and especially Videodrome are the most direct cousins to eXistenZ, but the story has so many consistent twists and inventive concepts that all of the similarities to earlier properties simply act as a warm, fuzzy blanket that eases us into what makes Cronenberg's film output so fascinating in the first place. Even with some foreboding moments in tow, the tone is more fun that serious as we are certainly intended to chuckle at things like a back alley, (or in this case a back gas station), spinal video game port procedure, as well as a tooth-shooting pistol made out of mutated amphibians served at a grimy Chinese restaurant.
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