Discover Top Posts Tagged with #absurd cinema

Bugonia

Yorgos Lanthimos

So, I'm going to watch the latest Yorgos Lanthimos movie tonight at our arthouse theater with bestie.

To be honest, I am actually kind of scared. His movies are always so...so...something.

The ones I've watched so far:

The Favourite

This one was my first. A couple of years after its release. Bestie put me up to it (as with all of the later ones following...and I'm glad they did). I was late to the game. It's probably the most "normal" one. The story is only in parts absurd. The acting is absolutely brilliant. Olivia Colman and Emma Stone are a force of nature in that one. Also, it's a period piece. You never can do anything wrong with a period piece full of beautiful clothes and wigs.

Poor Things

My favorite so far. Emma Stone is adorable (but that's always the case in any other thing she did that I've watched). Mark Ruffalo is sooooo brilliantly whiny and this perfect asshole. Made me love him even more than I already did. Willem Dafoe is his usual weird. The story is absurd but full of whimsy and comedy. I loved it.

Kinds of Kindness

3 episodes of pure absurd weirdness. Emma Stone continues doing whatever she wants since she met Lanthimos on the set of The Favourite. Jesse Plemons fits perfectly into the weird characters (and seems to have found his calling just same as Emma since he'll be in Bugonia as well). Margaret Qualley and Mamoudou Athie complete the main cast and act as naturally in their weird roles, as if they'd done nothing else since Kindergarten. The stories are very absurd and left me partly amused and shocked.

The Lobster

It has an incredible cast. It is cleverly written. The characters and their actors are absolutely amazing. I absolutely fucking hate this movie. The story is so dark and got to me in a way hardly any movie ever did. I wouldn't watch it again, even at gunpoint. Still, I absolutely recommend it! As a movie nerd, I admit it is glorious art!

All of them have in common that they're absolutely unconventional and pieces of movie art. Peak writing, directing, shooting and acting. All, though, have their fair level of absurdity, which is absolutely Lanthimos' main thing. You either love it, or you don't.

I guess tonight will be a worthy addition to the list above. The trailer already felt awesome. Baldy Emma Stone will be something new and beautiful to behold.

The rest will be Yorgos Lanthimos at his best, I am sure.

#bugonia #yorgos lanthimos #the favourite #poor things #kinds of kindness #the lobster #emma stone #movies #movie #cinema #absurdism #absurd comedy #absurd cinema #Youtube

Réalité, Quentin Dupieux, 2014

#réalité #quentin dupieux #alain chabat #reality #french cinema #2010s cinema #absurd cinema #metacinema #élodie bouchez #jonathan lambert #kyla kenedy #mubi #film still #film stills #Cinéma francais

MELANIA: Diplomacy Was Never an Option

This Friday, theaters across America will debut the loudest whisper campaign in cinema history: Melania—the action thriller absolutely no one saw coming, mostly because no one was looking for subtlety. In the film, Melania Trump portrays herself (obviously) as a highly trained, impeccably tailored mercenary known only by her codename: MELANIA. Her mission, delivered via a burner phone wrapped in…

#absurd cinema #action movie parody #explosions #fictional film #friday release #geopolitics parody #guns blazing #hollywood satire #melania #over-the-top action #political humor #political satire #popcorn politics

reviews | absurd cinema | biopic | comic

𝐀𝐛𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐀𝐛𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠

An artist biopic unlike anything you have ever seen

.·:*¨༺ __________________

Judith (Anaïs Demoustier) trying to conduct an interview with Salvador Dalí (Gilles Lellouche) on the beach.

How many Dalís is one too many? You might ask yourself this while watching Quentin Dupieux’s latest work. Daaaaaalí! (2023) is, as the screaming title already suggests, a film about the Spanish artist – but not like you have ever seen before. In the opening scene, mustache-twirling and cane-bearing Dalí (Gilles Lellouche) strides down a hotel corridor. Only for Dalí (Édouard Baer) to walk its length once more. And then, who would have guessed, Dalí (Jonathan Cohen) does it all over again. In this comic prelude, the ever-body-changing character is late for an interview but never seems to arrive at his destination as the distance of the hallway stretches into infinity.

Daaaaaalí! is full of such amusing instances. Dupieux’s film depicts a young pharmacist-turned-journalist, Judith (Anaïs Demoustier), who attempts to start off her new career path by meeting one of the biggest artist names of the 20th century. What begins as a simple interview with the surrealist ends up being a headlong plunge into his whimsical world. Judith soon realizes that Dalí has his own ideas about her project. And while the interview turns into a documentary film that never gets off the ground, reality is turned upside down. Characters wake up from dreams that never end, dead dogs rain down from a cloudless sky, and gun-slinging cowboys terrorize art auctions.

Sounds a little absurd? Well, that’s exactly the point. The film successfully manages to break out of the never-ending stream of solemn self-assertive biopics by being less concerned with an accurate portrayal of reality and more with crafting a tone that honors the ethos of the historical figure. What makes the work so cleverly charming is that Dupieux has encapsulated the bygone spirit of Surrealism in contemporary form. Daaaaaalí! is a delicious accumulation of absurdity, much like the movement itself.

Two of Dalí’s models posing for the artist’s painting.

In an early scene in the film, a highly-focused Dalí is seen sitting in the midst of a desolate landscape. With close precision, he is applying brush strokes to his easel. “Sir! Can we take a break?” comes a shout off-screen. The camera whips around to reveal a baffling setting. The two men acting as the painter’s models possess strangely disfigured proportions, one of them propping up his grotesquely elongated head with a wooden pitchfork. The scene pays a delightful homage to Dalí’s 1932 The Fine and Average Invisible Harp by transforming his vision into cinematic reality. And even beyond such clear referentialities, the film’s visual themes closely evoke the artist’s comically-constructed compositions. Dupieux has reached deep into Dalí’s palette, painting a Surrealist masterpiece of his own.

Daaaaaalí! certainly is a testimonial to the persistence of the bizarre. At the same time, the film works so well because it does not try to infuse the scenes with a layer of sober significance. It departs from a purely rational treatment of the narrative it creates. Instead, the events on-screen rely on ridiculousness. The audience is expected to laugh, to get lost in the endless comedic repetitions and the silly oddities of the characters. When Dalí is involved nothing makes sense, nor does it have to. Consequently, watching the film is a lot like contemplating one of the painter’s works: initially confusing, undoubtedly absurd, yet highly entertaining for eyes and mind.

With that, Dupieux's work tells more about Surrealist ideas than many previous documentaries out there could. Daaaaaalí! has manifested itself as a monument to the movement, a rollercoaster of funkiness and madness that the painter himself would have certainly appreciated.