3 Mulligans

Okay…I have a fresh cocktail in hand(like thats a rare occurrence) and am ready to be part of this cool project the 3 of us came up with.
I feel that before I post anything of a general relevance, I must first get caught up on our movie reviews.

Brand upon the Brain

Good Lord!
This is quite the twisted MoFo of a movie!

First the good.
Black and white.
Love the way they shot this. Black and white seems to be shot in black and white just to make a cheap statement but here it was the only way I saw the story told. If you are into photography at all you will remember infrared B/W film. This was so close to that it was scary. The D/P was really on his game with this. And I did see the VERY few frames where they had color in a single aspect of the shot…very cool.
I thought the actors they got to play this did the material justice and I have to believe this was not an easy shoot.
I have to say, in a world full of Hollywood remakes and reboots, it was an original story.
Have to give a thumbs up to anything original anymore.
And there was something for everyone here… burgeoning lesbian love, incest, immortality experiments, chemistry, remodeling…(see painting…and lots of it) pineal gland expriments…all the things that make a movie great!

Oh…and the credits…when they finally came.

The bad

Okay…this is a unique (read strange) movie.
The quick cuts were my biggest issue here.
It was like the entire film stuttered.

Apologies to those that stutter.

It was kind of like being on the verge of being seasick for 90 minutes.
Not a big fan of the quick cut.
Don’t like the Tony Scott/ Michael Bay versions and it was even worse here.
However, it did add to the strangeness of the movie.
I found the movie exploring all kinds of areas.
Not a bad thing in itself but Holy Cow!
Orphanage on an island with a light house that has owners that experiment on the kids for harvest of special fluid that mimics immortality that the wife is addicted to and a husband who invents GPS before its even known we needed to keep tabs on her son and daughter whose awakening sexual desires are just showing themselves as well as horrible cooking (which you learn in future posts I will NOT tolerate( and a possible imaginary friend shown in flash backs. Oh…and I forgot…the resurrection of the dehydrated father.
What movie isn’t complete without one of those.!

I love movies.
just wanted to say that.
Bad, good, and everything in between.

I did enjoy watching this and would recommend this if you want to see something totally weird and unique.
Just a lot to talk about after.
And it ain’t for everyone.

One last thing.

And this was a biggy!

If the main guy was promted to paint the entire lighthouse, inside and and out, with 2 coats of paint…where did all the paint come from?

Just askin’.

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I had very little information about this film before adding it to my Netflix queue, but I did know it was part of The Criterion Collection, shot in black & white, silent, and recently filmed in 2006.  Those descriptions didn’t add up to much, but after reading about its storyline I couldn’t pass it up.  That alone made the decision easy.

When a man visits the island lighthouse where he grew up, which also doubled as an orphanage, he is confronted by secrets kept from him by his parents.  While his mother keeps a close watch on the orphans, his father occupies himself with basement experiments.  When it is discovered that all the orphans have similar marks on their heads, a pair of famous kid detectives show up to investigate.

Brand Upon The Brain! was everything I was looking for in a movie, mainly because I’ve never seen anything like it.  My attention was glued to the screen until it ended and I watched it without a single interruption, no small feat since my two young teens watched it, too.  There’s additional fun with getting to choose from six narrator voices, but after hearing Crispin Glover’s (Simeon insisted) I wished I had chosen Isabella Rossellini’s.

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The opening shots of Brand Upon the Brain! made me think that I was in for another surreal, B/W collage of images that would likely prove to be dull — probably the kind of movie that years ago I would have liked only as a diversion and not on its own merits. However, just a few minutes into the movie — right when Isabella Rossellini starts her narration — I was hooked. The movie is goofy, funny, sad, and scary and even made me a little jealous of the director’s creative vision and how he evokes childhood memories. I don’t want to say too much about all the elements of the plot and the odd environment of the film, but it immediately brought to mind two artists I love: Timothy Winkler, who does gorgeous retro-futuristic drawings, and Glen Baxter, who draws very odd and funny — and often homoerotic — versions of familiar genres. There were so many other things this movie referenced, either directly or indirectly. Most obvious was the silent movie genre. But it also incorporated child detectives à la Nancy Drew, a great scene that reminded me of Lord of the Flies and a vampiric mother that seemed taken right out of the legend of Countess Bathory. All this while the director claims that 97% of the story was taken from his own childhood. I’m sure it was, emotionally, even if not absolutely factually.

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