Mind Blowing Movies: Funny Bones, by Bill Barol

[Video Link] 1995’s Funny Bones, by the British writer/director Peter Chelsom, is either a comedy about dark things, like betrayal and manslaughter, or a drama about funny people, like a pair of retired vaudevillians who are winding down their days scaring children in the spook house on the Blackpool amusement pier. I’ve seen the movie, conservatively, two dozen times and I still don’t quite know how to describe it. I’ve never shown it to anybody who didn’t turn to me at least once with an incredulous look in their eyes, a look that says: “What the hell is this?”

This is exactly what I love about Funny Bones -- it is sui generis, and impossible to boil down. I can tell you the broad outlines: Failed standup Tommy Fawkes, the son of revered funnyman George Fawkes, flees Las Vegas and returns to the tattered seaside town of Blackpool where he grew up, in search of the indefinable substance that makes people funny. Once there he discovers that he has a half-brother he never knew, and that this odd, shy sibling is the unwilling recipient of the comedy genes, the funny bones, that Tommy so desperately desires. But those few quick strokes really -- you have to believe me -- they really don’t do justice to this odd, dark, deeply funny and witheringly sad story, or to the faded netherworld of fringe show business in which Tommy finds himself, casting frantically about for something to keep him from going under. Nor does it prepare you for an ending in which (I won’t spoil it) Tommy’s life literally dangles from his half-brother’s hands as a rapt, horrified audience looks on. Or for the lump in your throat when the story’s threads of desire, comedy, tragedy, love and hate interlock in one breathtaking final shot.

The Cliff’s Notes version of Funny Bones also does nothing to prepare you for the performances of Oliver Platt as Tommy, the great and eccentric British comic Lee Evans as his half-brother, and -- I know, I know -- Jerry Lewis as the semi-retired but still-formidable George Fawkes. (“George Fawkes,” a Blackpuddlian murmurs when Tommy drops the name. “I thought he died in Las Vegas.” Nope, Tommy tells him: “Idied in Las Vegas.”) People who talk about how great Lewis was in Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy” have almost invariably not seen him top that dramatic turn in Funny Bones, playing a father whose pain at having to tell his son the worst, most hurtful truth he can imagine -- that he’s just not funny -- almost tears him apart. Later, having been proved wrong, the look of fatherly pride in Lewis’s eyes is incandescent. It’s a fabulous star turn.

The DVD packaging for Funny Bones burbles about how it’s a “zany look at two comedians who’ll do anything for a laugh!” You have to feel for the poor schlub who got the draw to write the copy. Like pretty much everybody who sees it, he probably didn’t know how to encompass its polar extremes in one sentence. My recollection is that both critics and audiences were more or less baffled when the film had a brief run in theaters back in the mid-Nineties. This is a totally appropriate reaction, of course, because in addition to everything above Funny Bones includes Raymond Scott music, a severed foot, some French fishermen playing spy, a few venerable old burlesque sketches and Leslie Caron as Cleopatra. That it hangs together at all is amazing. That it ends up tackling some very big things, and doing it with wit and grace and huge laughs, is absolutely unbelievable. But it does. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. You really should see it.

[video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE1wCo3N6As]

Andy Griffith: Before Mayberry, A Movie Monster, by Bill Barol

[Video Link] If for any reason you doubt the power of television, consider the long career of Andy Griffith, who died this week at 86. Griffith had one TV role that was merely successful and one that was almost archetypical. That’s a pretty good run for any actor. But TV didn’t just give to Griffith. It also took away, and it’s here that the medium shows its muscle in a really astounding way. Griffith’s long TV career effectively effaced a film debut that, fifty years later, is so vivid and visceral that it startles with every viewing. The facts that Griffith played a bad guy in his first film role, and that both the performance and the movie, Elia Kazan’s 1957 A Face In The Crowd, are largely overlooked today -- these are testaments to TV’s power to swamp any cultural phenomena that have the poor judgment to get in its way.

Hang on, there’s more. What’s doubly delicious about this is, A Face In The Crowd is a cautionary tale about the power of -- Anyone? Anyone? Yes: Television. Griffith, who came from nightclubs and the stage and had no resume as a dramatic actor in 1957, plays Lonesome Rhodes, a drifter who stumbles into national prominence thanks to the demagogic power of the then-young medium. A grifter and a charmer, Rhodes is sleeping off a hangover in a rural jail when a local radio producer (Patricia Neal, doing that hard-but-vulnerable thing she did so well) sticks a microphone in his face. He has no ambition to be a radio star or anything else, but once he grasps that a guy with a friendly demeanor can wield mass media like a club, and he grasps it very quickly indeed, there’s no stopping him. Rhodes shoots like a star from tiny Pickett, Arkansas to Memphis to New York, from radio to TV, from a singer and storyteller to “a force... a force,” he says with megalomaniac intensity. And from there it’s just a quick hop to politics, with a presidential candidate sucking around for his magic touch, and a madman’s dreams of power behind the throne.

It all unravels, of course, because that’s what happens in cautionary tales. But until it does Rhodes is a villain of Shakespearean scope and depth, and Griffith -- this is TV’s Andy Griffith, remember -- Griffith tears into the part with both hands. When Griffith as Rhodes laughs -- “I put my whole self into everything I do,” he tells the Neal character early on, equal parts seduction and threat -- the sound explodes off the screen like gunfire, and Griffith’s eyes widen and shine, and sweat dots his forehead like stars, and the tendons stand out in his neck. Understand: Rhodes is a monster, all appetite and ambition, and Griffith makes every second of his rise and fall queasily believable. That doesn't just apply to the operatic moments, though. There’s a great scene early on where Rhodes uses the power of his radio pulpit to turn the populace against the local sheriff, and Neal asks him how it feels to “say anything that comes into your head and have it sway people.” At first Rhodes is too busy enjoying the moment to grasp what she’s saying -- “I guess I can,” he says offhandedly, tears of laughter streaming down his face -- but then the weight of the insight settles on him and the laughter stops and his eyes go cool and appraising. “I guess I can,” he says again, and this time it’s all business. You can practically see the connections being mapped in his hustler’s brain. Later, leaving Arkansas to go to Memphis for his first TV job, Kazan has Griffith stand in the steps of a departing train, and as he turns away from the cheering crowds who’ve come to see him off and sets his gaze down the track toward his future, his face is a mask of hunger and calculation.

There are good actors in A Face In The Crowd -- Neal, Walter Matthau as a well-meaning good guy, and the underrated Tony Franciosa as a conniving office boy-turned-theatrical agent. (Franciosa has a hilarious moment when Rhodes improvises a commercial jingle for some prospective national sponsors, and the office boy/agent wings some backing doo wops to help close the deal.) But for all the starpower the film has, and that includes Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg working at the tops of their very considerable games, it’s Griffith’s film to make or break. And in much the same way that Rhodes seized his opportunity when it happened along, Griffith did too. In every frame his Rhodes is violently alive, for good or (much more often) for ill. Griffith never again duplicated the jet-propelled power of that first performance, and within three years he was a TV star, and he stayed one until Tuesday, when he died. Ask any ten people who know him from either of his long-running TV successes if he ever played a heavy and eight of them will look at you like you’re nuts. But the other two? The other two will nod in appreciation of what Griffith did 55 years ago, before a new medium set his nice-guy image in stone and wiped away the memory of Lonesome Rhodes’ grinning, voracious face.

(RIP, Andy Griffith)

Mind Blowing Movies: What's New Pussycat?, by Richard Metzger

When Mark sent out the invite to contribute, I confess that I immediately drew a cinematic blank, but there was one film that that didn't necessarily "blow my mind," per se, in the same way that the other participants here have expressed it in their posts, but it did fundamentally alter my mind, or at least it did something to immediately change my perception of the world around me, in the sense that there was a before & after aspect when I watched it. Accordingly my anecdote will be short and sweet.

When I was a 7-year-old kid in 1973, What's New Pussycat? the quintessential sexy 60s comedy "romp," aired on ABC's Movie of the Week and I watched it in the basement of my parent's house on a cheap black and white TV set with a rabbit-ears antenna with balls of tin foil crunched at the tip of each branch. The picture quality was comparable to a security camera. Why I was watching What's New Pussycat? sitting alone in a damp, crappy basement or even interested in this particular film in the first place at that age, I couldn't tell you, but I am guessing I wanted to watch it because I liked the theme song, sung by Tom Jones (I owned the 45rpm on Parrot Records) or else simply because Peter Sellers was in it.

In any case, the pivotal moment for me happens at about 120 minutes into the film when Swiss bombshell Ursula Andress suddenly drops from the sky and parachutes into Peter O'Tootle's convertible. I can vividly recall my eyes growing wider and wider and feeling what you might call a "stirring" in my loins as I stared in utter amazement at the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen in my short life. I was completely astonished and transfixed by how beautiful she was. I had never before seen a woman who looked quite like that and the sight of this blonde goddess strongly implied to me that there was something that I might be missing out on...

It was at that precise moment the proverbial light-bulb went on over my head about what the whole "big deal" with girls must be all about. That such a creature as Ursula Andress existed indicated that there were more of them out there. Suddenly there was meaning in my life and something to aspire to. I made a mental note to move to Switzerland as soon as I grew up.

By the end of the film -- which being a comedy made in 1965 only hinted at the things that were going on offscreen -- the mechanics of procreation seemed rather obvious to me.

After that brief "Aha!" moment, the world around me started to make a whole lot more sense...

In the clip, Ursula Andress drops from the sky to tempt soon-to-be-married Peter O'Toole in What's New Pussycat?

[Video Link] When you think about movies that blew your mind, you often think about flicks you saw when you were an adolescent or even a kid, when there was so much room for the explosion to occur. For me, it was movies like Alien, Nick Roeg’s Performance and Walkabout, Repo Man (“plate a shrimp”), Silent Running, 2001, Apocalypse Now, and, yes, the original Star Wars, which I lined up for on opening weekend. Getting older, your worldly and cultural map inevitably gets filled in, and a certain knowing jadedness settles over your responses. Films refer to other films; they make their extraordinary moves in the shadow of other extraordinary moves. It becomes harder for the films you see to fuel the proper escape velocity of amazement, fear, and bent cognition that make for the authentically blown mind. 

I am happy to report, however, that it still happens, at least to this sublimity-seeking mind. Just last week, I saw a film that I had never heard about until a month or so ago: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s two-part 1973 TV SciFi drama World on a Wire. Now Fassbinder is no obscurity, and the true film buffs will have already notched their belts with this one, which was restored and bumped up to 35 mm from its original 16mm Kodachrome stock a couple of years ago but only recently released on DVD. Fassbinder, of course, was the most harrowing and brilliant of the New German Cinema maestros in the 1970s, and his gritty, disturbing, and fabulously over-the-top melodramas—like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and The Year of Thirteen Moons—were staples of the art house cinema circuit within which I was schooled as a young man coming of age during the autumn of celluloid. World on a Wire was Fassbinder’s only science fiction, and he made it a few years after swerving from his bracingly avant-garde early anti-movies towards a more engaging and sophisticated appropriation of Hollywood forms. In 1973, Fassbinder was still the enfant terrible of German cinema, renown for prolific genius and personal hedonic depravity, but for whatever reason the TV station WDR gave him a lot of money to make a two-part, three-hour TV movie out of the American SF writer Daniel Galouye’s 1964 book Simulacron-3. 

Staying reasonably faithful to Galouye’s book, Fassbinder and his tele-play collaborator Fritz Müller-Scherz present a fast-moving mindfuck cyber-thriller that is eerily prophetic of Blade Runner, The Matrix, and any number of posthuman nightmares and clammy cybernetic conundrums. 

As in Ridley Scott’s PKD remix, the protagonist here—a computer scientist played by Klaus Löwitch—is modeled on a hapless noir anti-hero, one of those earnest and alcoholic detectives who get lured into a paranoid Chapel Perilous and go crazy at exactly the same rate at which they discover what’s really going on. There is no need to rehearse the plot or its big ideas, whose concerns with corporate shenanigans and self-conscious algorithms will seem at once unsurprising and incredibly satisfying to folks who ply the waters of the digital simulacrum. Indeed what blows the mind about this movie is not so much its novelty, but the prophetic thoroughness and satiric bite with which it lays out some of the more dystopian, capitalist, and ontological possibilities of virtual worlds. The Matrix was smart, but The Matrix did not meditate on Xeno’s paradox. Despite its age, World on a Wire seems almost ahead of the game: a gnostic glitch track stripped of all transcendence, a black iron prison with a wan light at the end of the tunnel. I could say more, but why spoil it? Instead I’ll just pass on one of the film’s more resonant lines: “What would a glitch be like?” 

Concept alone will only get you so far, however—Galouye’s book was also remade in 1999 as The Thirteenth Floor, a decent film that did not so much blow your mind as toot on it like a penny whistle. The authentically blown mind requires the multiple dimensions of film’s gesamptkuntswerk to move towards brilliance. World on a Wire has it all: extraordinary sets, props, costumes, actors, soundtrack, camerawork. Like David Lynch, Fassbinder used a lot of famous or sentimental actors who for various reasons had become has-beens; like Lynch, he wanted to invoke an uncanny sense of unreal familiarity. Most of us won’t recognize these folks, of course (I didn’t for the most part), but we will recognize the different film genres that Fassbinder is playing with—post-Kubrick science fiction, expressionist European horror, the police thriller, the noir—all of which contribute to the film’s eerie air of artifice. The movie was shot in Paris, whose designers were clearly getting good and loopy at the time, and the space-age bachelor pads and bleak construction sites open a portal into the chilly 1970s analog of the Gernsback continuum. The early 70s was a great era for garish and melancholic pop futurism, and in Fassbinder’s frame, quotidian objects—bubble-gum orange rotary phones, blinking punch-card computers, blobtastic Corvettes—take on the tacky and fantastic nostalgia reserved for futures now irretrievably past. The sound track moves from ironic schmaltz to eerie and sometimes aggressively grating analog synths that themselves seem to intervene in the narrative, while the movie’s concern with constructed identity is mirrored in the camera’s obsession with mirrors and glass, some of whose reflections are brilliantly orchestrated in a number of memorable tracking shots. Even goofy sweaters and floor designs mimic abstract, recursive patterns, as if the film were being algorithmically generated before our eyes. We must remember another of the film’s koans: “the real cigarettes are elsewhere.”

Mind Blowing Movies: Inserts (1974)

[Video Link] Inserts could never be made today. It's too politically incorrect, and it would be difficult to find talented actors and actresses to essay its mentally and (in a sense) physically demanding roles. However, I've just finished watching Inserts for what must be the 30th time, and I'm as big a fan of this movie today as I was when I first discovered it in 1979. I'm only hoping that this review inspires you to go out and rent this R-rated classic so you can form your own opinions, rather than relying on either mine… or Leonard Maltin's ("Pretentious, unending nonsense… Dreadful") or Mick Martin's ("Dreary").

Inserts is the story of two afternoon hours in the life of The Boy Wonder (hereafter "The BW") (Dreyfuss), a former mainstream silent film director who's lost his nerve, and who, as the film opens (in the early 1930s), is reduced to making porno movies in his mansion. The Boy Wonder's "set" is in the corner of his spacious living room … but it may not be there for long. His neighborhood is undergoing urban renewal, as Los Angeles begins to build the first of its maze of freeways, and the roar of giant earth-moving machines can be heard continually from outside. It's obvious from his constant swigging of cognac that The BW has completely lost respect for himself, but his porn career provides a manageable balance between his fear of working in "the real movies" and his need to be behind the camera, directing something. 

His star is Harlene (Cartwright), an ex-mainstream actress who used to "pork [Von Stroheim] plenty when he was straight." Now, she's a waitress by day and a cocaine addict in her off-hours… and The BW's sort-of girlfriend, even though, we soon find out, he's psychically impotent.

The Boy Wonder's backer is Big Mac (Hoskins), an obvious parody of the Louis B. Mayer/Jack Warner cliché. Mac is a stereotypical Hollywood producer with fingers in many pies. He already has plans to build a series of identical gas stations and hamburger joints along the new "fastways," expecting motorists to be so confused, they'll just drive up and throw their money out, not knowing whether they'll receive food or fuel. (Yes, I know you're groaning at the obvious McDonald's reference, but the characters themselves are oblivious to it. The milieu is the early '30s, and "fast food" is not yet a cultural icon.)

Next to arrive is Steven Davies as Rex "The Wonder Dog," a gravedigger by profession who picks up a few extra bucks as a porn stud once the digging's done. He's the lowbrow type who never quite understands what's asked of him, either on or off camera. For instance, when The Boy Wonder tries to set up a scene using Rex's ascot as a murder weapon, he instructs, "Why deliver a crude blow to her face when the means are at hand for you to render your vengeance through the very instrument of your anguish … the very vehicle of her ridicule?" -- and he’s met with Rex's blank expression, till The BW finally explodes with, "The ascot, Rex; strangle her with the fucking ascot, you orangutan." 

In the midst of filming Big Mac shows up with his girlfriend, Cathy Cake (Harper) -- and the problems begin. For one thing, Mac's the paymaster, so he gives Rex his salary -- and Harlene a good-sized bag of cocaine, which she hurries upstairs to use. (As she's leaving, after failing to find her "lucky necktie," The Boy Wonder says, "You know, Harlene, you don't need that stuff." "You don't need it," she replies. "I do. I ain't got your 'magination.")

Almost needless to say, Harlene dies of an overdose -- this isn't a comedy -- but after a short pause (BW: "Will you let me think!"), The Boy Wonder decides he can use her anyway. Rex refuses (Rex: "You want me to do it with a stiff?!"), and Mac talks Rex into helping him bury the body in an unmarked grave. Mac's a little hesitant about leaving The Boy Wonder and Cathy alone, but then he laughs and tells Rex, "Don't you know about this guy? He couldn't get his rope to rise with a magic flute." 

Exit Mac, Rex and the corpse, leaving The Boy Wonder noodling at the piano, and Cathy looking not-exactly-innocent on the couch. She looks at him, he looks at her … and here's where the story really begins; a sort of drama which has been played out in the entertainment industry (and not just the adult part) since its beginnings. Their dialogue goes as follows:

Cathy: What did he mean by 'getting your rope to rise'? Do you do magic tricks?

BW: All but that one, Miss Cake.…

Cathy: Did you really want that boy Rex to do it with her when she was dead?

BW: Listen, Miss Cake…

Cathy: I think you meant it, all right. I bet you're not afraid of anything. Like what you were doing when we came in here. I never saw anything so intense in all my life. You didn't even know we were here. I bet you didn't even know what time it was. I bet you never think about things like that. I remember once when I was in college, I stayed up all night to write an essay. I didn't worry about what time it was once.

BW: Miss Cake, I'm going to have to ask you for silence now.…

Cathy: You're upset. She was a good friend of yours, wasn't she?

BW: Miss Cake…

Cathy: Why don't you call me Cathy?

Look, I know she was a good friend of yours and that you're upset. But I think maybe what's really bothering you is that you've got half a movie done and your leading lady is in the trunk of Big Mac's car. Isn't that really it? I mean, look, you can tell me, because I for one don't think you're out of your noodle particularly.

BW: That's a very kind thing for you to say.

Cathy: I don't know so much about your rope not rising and such either, because I've seen you work. I saw you when we came in. You may still be just a ghost story to this Clark Gable [who, though never seen, is periodically heard knocking on the mansion’s door], but I've seen you work. And while I was watching you, I thought about what he said about 'being good, but you could make him great.' Because, you know, I'm going to be in the movies. Big Mac's gonna put me in the movies.

BW: That's what he said.

Cathy: So he said. And he's going to, too; don't you worry about that.

BW: Do I look worried to you, Miss Cake?

Cathy: Don't get mad. I'm just trying to tell you, I think you're a genius. I've seen every movie you've ever made... like everybody else. And I want to be in the movies... like everybody else. Only I'm really going to be, because Big Mac thinks I'd be pretty hot stuff up there.

BW: So he said.

Cathy: So he said. Yeah, but the guy's a hamburger; you know it and I know it, so why should we kid ourselves?

BW: Why indeed?

Cathy: But he's not so dumb that he didn't offer you a six-picture contract when everybody else thought you were a ghost story. And you're not so dumb that you didn't take it — and I'm not so dumb as you think. So let's talk freely like two mature adults.

BW: By all means, let's. What's on your mind, toots?

Cathy: Well, I want you to make me great. I want you to teach me what are inserts…

BW: Watch your step, Miss Cake.

Cathy: Why?

BW: Because you're making me like you a little bit too fast.

Cathy: Why don't you call me Cathy?

BW: Why don't you take off your blouse?

[She does.]

BW: Okay. Okay, Miss Cake. Let's see exactly how far down into it we can get.

Cathy: Into what?

BW: Into the valley of indecency.

Cathy: Well, that's a pretty crummy way of looking at it.

BW: The trick, Miss Cake, is not to look at it at all, but simply limp to the edge of patience and watch yourself fall.

Look up here, please. [He adjusts some lights.] Hot, Miss Cake. Hot work.

Cathy: I can take it.

BW: I'm sure you can. But the day will come, Miss Cake, when you can't.

Cathy: Not for me.

BW: Perhaps not. But if you're any good, it will. And then, Miss Cake, you will be faced with the penultimate decision: Do you do the intelligent thing and bow out gracefully, or do you continue, against all that is holy, and make up your mind to vanish once and for all into the mists of self?

Cathy: I'll go on, no matter what. I want to be in the movies. I want to be a star.

BW: Oh -- you mean, you want to be both? Well, then, you'll be faced with the ultimate choice, won't you? You're going to have to pick someone to abuse. The person closest to you generally fits the bill, which, by then, Miss Cake, will be you…

Cathy: Do you mind my asking, what happened to you? I mean, what made you like this? You had a brilliant future.

BW: I fulfilled it, Miss Cake, at an early age. I'm The Boy Wonder; that's all that happened to me…

No, no, no -- unwrap the meat.

Cathy: "The meat"?

 [The BW tilts the camera down to her chest.]

Cathy: You're trying to offend me.

BW: On the contrary, Miss Cake, I never have to try this early in the game. Now, come on -- get the goods out; declassé les décolleté.

Cathy: Well, first, tell me what are inserts?

BW: Inserts, Miss Cake, are close-ups; garish interludes in the progress of the whole. Now, unwrap the meat.

Cathy: If these inserts are so garish, why do you bother?

BW: Because keeping the whole in perspective is quite a taxing little horror, Miss Cake. Unwrap the meat.

Cathy: You unwrap it.

BW: Let's not play games, Miss Cake; what do you say?

Cathy: I say you ought to take some pictures of my face first. After all, that's what they'll be photographing in the real movies.

BW: Perhaps so. Perhaps so -- but it's your meat they're going to be thinking about.…

Now, Miss Cake, here's the scene: You are being raped -- raped and strangled with a silken ascot. I'd like you to think about that; think about that, and act accordingly. It's that simple.

Cathy: What do you mean, 'act'? The camera isn't even on my face.

BW: Miss Cake, anybody could do this part with the camera on their face; anybody. That's where the challenge comes in, you see. You are being asked to express yourself through your tits, you see.

The above dialogue is merely a taste of some of the fine interaction between Dreyfuss and Harper as she alternates coy innocence with seduction, and he finds himself drawn deeper into her game -- and his "rope" regains the ability to "rise." Tough. Tender. Cynical. Insightful. Gritty. Inserts is all of these, plus it has a heavy undercurrent of social commentary, plus it gets further inside at least one unexplored corner of Hollywood -- the early porn "industry" -- than anyone has ever dared, before or since. How many actors and actresses, no matter what the genre, have already "picked someone to abuse"? And how many have made it obvious in the media that that person is themselves? Robert Downey, Jr. comes immediately to mind, as does John Belushi. How many actresses in the "real movies" must know, deep down inside, that what the audience is really interested in is their "meat"? Couldn't you name a dozen off the top of your head? 

And speaking of acting, consider this later exchange, which occurs after The Boy Wonder has shot some insert footage of Cathy with her blouse off, but she balks at going further:

BW: Oh, look; you said you want to be brilliant.

Cathy: You said I hadn't reached my peak.

BW: You hadn't.

Cathy: I was good. I was damn good and you know it.

BW: But you said you wanted to be great.

Cathy: They would have said I was great in the real movies.

BW: But you and I know that you aren't, don't we? Don't we?

Cathy: Yes.

BW: And you and I know you didn't even know what tits were till I told you what they were, don't we?

Cathy: Yes.

BW: And we know it's not a very mature, adult way, for you to go all resentful now, before we know what else you've got, don't we?

Cathy: Yes.

BW: Sure. Now lay back down on the bed. [pause] And you'll know when to go resentful on me, because it will be the first idea that you get that I don't give you -- and then you're going to hog it all for yourself.

Do you mind if I ask you a question, Miss Cake? This essay you stayed up all night to write, was it your own work?

Cathy: What are you talking about? Of course it was.

BW: You, Miss Cake, spent all night slaving over a composition of your own device? [laughs] Come on, Miss Cake --

Cathy: You don't believe me.

BW: Spending all of anything, Miss Cake, requires a bit of self-confidence.

Cathy: Okay; so maybe I did copy it out of a book. You think that makes me stupid or something?

BW: Not at all; merely a thief. Hey, look, the ability to steal from the thoughts of others is merely an indication of industry, Miss Cake. What passes for genius is when you have the ability to steal from your own.

Cathy: So --

BW: So if you want to reach your peak, you better be prepared to rob yourself blind…

Now, are you ready?

Cathy: Yup.

BW: Really? What are you going to do?

Cathy: Lie back on the bed.

BW: And do what?

Cathy: What I did before.

BW: Why?

Cathy: Because the [camera] wind ran out.

BW: No.

Cathy: Because I did it well?

BW: No.

Cathy: Why then?

BW: Because I would have told you if I wanted you to do something different -- and women, contrary to popular opinion, never know when to open their mouths, even to ask.

Inserts, despite its brushes with misogyny, is about filmmaking, about fear, about porn, about love, about art -- and there are so many life lessons to be learned from this film that it should be required viewing in any college media course... and maybe a few Human Sexuality courses as well. True, in some ways, the film is too realistic for some tender psyches, and there are short stretches where the only purpose is mood-setting, that some would call "boring." Few movies, however, have engendered such strong emotions in their viewers; they either love it or hate it -- but I have to wonder how much of the disparagement and defamation from which this film has suffered is due to its having succeeded in mirroring the real world… which, as most of us know, can be quite a taxing little horror.

[Video Link]To date, the most mind-blowing film I've ever seen was 1980's The Stunt Man, directed by Richard Rush. This movie truly had exactly that sort of effect on me, through scene after scene, until the very end.

And by "the very end" I don't mean "the end of the movie." I mean "the very end of the VHS cassette I first saw it on." I sat there in my chair, staring blankly at the screen with this fixed, open-mouth grin on my face after the credits rolled and the screen went to black. There was some blinking. No drooling as far as I can recall, but otherwise, I spent those several minutes staring at a black screen and trying to process what I'd just seen. What blew my mind wasn't the story itself so much as how it'd been told. As I reviewed the experience, I started to appreciate that The Stunt Man is possibly the finest magic trick I'd ever seen. The trick is over, it gratefully releases its grip on your sense of free will and independent observation, and you start to appreciate just how skilled the magician was.

This happy mental state was only broken by the THUNK of the tape stopping at the end of the leader and then auto-rewinding in the VHS deck.

But I'm precluded from choosing and discussing The Stunt Man for a couple of reasons.

First, while it's a movie I love to recommend to people, I adamantly believe that you should watch The Stunt Man knowing only two things in advance:

1) Peter O'Toole is in it;

2) Peter O'Toole is good in anything.

(Before you skip down to the bottom of the page to click a button and post a snarky reply: yes, I have seen Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage, as a matter of fact. And yes, Peter O'Toole was good in that, as well.)

When I sat down to see the movie for the first time, I didn't know anything about The Stunt Man other than it was a Peter O'Toole film that I had never seen. Two hours and ten minutes later, while the film was rewinding and just before I gave it an immediate second viewing, I intuitively understood that if I'd known that it was a comedy (or a drama) (or an action movie) (or a thriller with a twist ending) (or no twist ending), or that Peter O'Toole was the focus of the whole story (or that his role was barely of any consequence)... no, it wouldn't have been the same experience.

You have to watch it as a blank slate. It's a mind blowing movie. You have to allow "The Stunt Man" to pursue its own agenda with you, on its own timetable. It's ruined if you're two thirds of the way through and suddenly think of a scene from the trailer that you hasn't appeared yet. And the effect is certainly going to be ruined if I explain in advance why I think it's a mind-blowing movie.

The second reason I shouldn't talk about The Stunt Man is because it wasn't, in fact, the first thing that came to mind when I started thinking about "Mind blowing movies (or TV shows or whatever)."

It's actually a little bit embarrassing.

It was The Curse Of Mr. Bean.

(And now you're tabbing back into your Netflix queue and deleting The Stunt Man from your list. I know. But I please reconsider.)

In the second sketch of that episode, Mr. Bean is in his Mini trying to figure out how to leave a commercial parking garage without either smashing through a barrier or, worse, paying the £16 parking fee. He's stymied at every turn. Cars enter and leave, and his clear shot to the street is always closed off at the last frustrating second.

Finally... the blue Reliant Robin makes an appearance.

All fans of "Mr. Bean" smile and settle in for the joke that's coming. We all know that however Mr. Bean solves the puzzle and gets out of the parking garage, it's going to involve him doing something reckless and making the three-wheeled car tip over. That's what always happens to the Reliant in episodes of "Mr. Bean."

But this episode was different:

Mr. Bean knew it, too. There was an extra gleam of excitement in his eyes when he spotted the car and he was energized with a new sense of purpose. He clearly understood the rules of the fictional world he lived in: successfully exiting the garage (and the comedy sketch) must somehow involve capsizing this ridiculous blue car.

It was like that moment at the end of A Shot In The Dark -- surely improvised on the spot by Peter Sellers -- in which Inspector Clouseau's dramatic interrogation of a roomful of suspects has gone wretchedly awry. Instead of the unknown culprit cracking under the pressure and confessing to the murder, every one of the suspects got into a heated argument and start levying new, incriminating testimony and accusations at each other. Clouseau, physically shoved outside the escalating rhubarb for the third time, wheels around, glares into the camera as if to say "Can you believe any of this?!?" and then returns to the scene.

Movie watching is, at its core, the only kind of eavesdropping where there's no chance of getting caught. Which is why you drop your guard and enjoy. These little moments of self-awareness in movie or television characters always get me, even for just a fraction of a second. For that brief moment, I'm worried that they're going to hold me accountable for everything this movie or TV show put them through for the sake of my entertainment.

[Video Link] "The film you are about to see and hear is based on the life experiences of William Douglas Street, Jr. and Erik Dupin. Many of the characters appear as themselves, while others assume fictional personae."

Chameleon Street is a movie that blew my mind even before I saw it, and then once more when finally, after nearly a decade without a theatrical run, it was finally released on video.

What do I mean by that? In the early '90s, I was a teenager making a VHS tape of a short-lived news magazine TV show called Edge one evening, which happened to feature a curious story about a Sundance Jury Prizewinning film which, oddly, could not get a distributor to release it. There was no graphic content. It wasn't inaccessibly "arty," indeed it was very plainspoken. The root of the problem, the show explained, was that the plain speaking -- even if elegantly-worded -- was delivered by a very sharp-witted black guy. Wendell B. Harris Jr. not only wrote and directed, but he actually spoke every nuanced piece of dialog into the camera as the lead actor portraying Doug Street; who, more incredibly, was a real guy. From Wikipedia:

Chameleon Street is a 1989 independent film written, directed by and starring Wendell B. Harris, Jr.. It tells the story of a social chameleon who impersonates reporters, doctors and lawyers in order to make money.

The film is a satire based on the life of Detroit con artist and high school drop-out William Douglas Street, Jr., who successfully impersonated professional reporters, lawyers, athletes, extortionists, and surgeons, going so far as to perform more than 36 successful hysterectomies. A Sundance Film Festival press release in 2008 described it as "one of the first films to examine how mellifluously race, class, and role-playing morph into the social fabric of America." Chameleon Street won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival.

The show went on to interview fellow prizewinner Steven Soderbergh, who said "I'd never seen a film like it," and Harris himself, who explained that in order to get it picked up, a company wanted to re-make the whole thing starring budding actor Will Smith; which, if they had gone through with it would have made Chameleon Street the first movie to be re-made in its native language in order to receive distribution. The show's interviews were interspersed with many clips including this one,which, frankly, blew my mind.

I soon went off to college where I served on my school's film committee for two years, where I pored through every distribution catalog and made calls looking for Chameleon Street, to no avail. Around that time, in 1994, I showed some friends the VHS tape in my dorm room. And that, I assumed, was that. Three or four years later, I got an excited phone call from my homie Camille: the video store on Chapman Highway had a copy! She was trying to convey the rush of ideas she'd just seen into a jumble of quotations and comments on editing techniques, particularly the pot dealer whose line "do you want to make some money!" was looped several times. At the time of it's 1989 release, this would have been an early example of what we would probably now consider a "hip-hop" type of an edit, but which was then either a first of an "early-adopter" type of thing. It was still fucking fresh as hell when I finally rushed over to the shop, rented and absorbed this film nearly a decade after its completion.

The Other Side: Brazil, by Tiffany Lee Brown

Warning: Spoiler alert!

[Video Link] When I told Boing Boing a few weeks back that I'd write this piece, I hadn't yet sat by my husband's side in the Trauma ICU, wondering whether his mind would stay in the far-off realms of the Other Side, like Sam in the movie Brazil, or whether he would come back to me. Josh was here in this world when I first saw him after his bicycle accident, a duct-like breathing tube emerging from his mouth. His right eye could just barely open, and through it he saw me and our son Gusty. I could tell he knew we were here. I knew he was here. I just knew.

At the end of Brazil, Michael Palin tortures Sam (Jonathan Pryce) from behind a spectacularly disturbing mask until Robert DeNiro's inimitable terrorist plumber, Tuttle, swoops in with his fellow revolutionaries and rescues Sam. Strange shenanigans follow, and Sam even gets to blow up the hideous, Kafkaesque Ministry of Information buildings. He's then swept away by the object of his romantic obsession, a truck drivin' tough gal, to live in the country in a caravan, complete with goats.

Except that Sam's living all these rescues in his mind. The final scene shows him staring out from his far-off mind while an evil overlord remarks, "Jack, I think he got away from us." Sam is gone. He hums the familiar tune: "Braziiiiiil, dah dah du du da da du daaaah..." and we cut back to our own realities, shaken and stirred.

Later on the day of the accident, Josh went away. I knew he wasn't here. I just knew. Then came the CT scan results: as his brain swelled inside his skull, it was bleeding more. I didn't know if he was ever coming back. I whispered in his ear that he was actually in a hammock at the remote beach in Oaxaca where we like to go. Maybe I appeared to Josh the way the truck driver appears to Sam in his dreams: sexy and feminine, calling "Saaam! Saaam!" from behind a rippling veil that separates realities. Only, yeah, I wouldn't be calling him Sam. That would be confusing. Jooosh, Jooosh, you're sleeping, you can hear the ocean, the sand is radiating heat up toward your skin. We have no goats, but a cool breeze floats by and a palapa keeps the sun off your skin. You're sleeping like you never get to sleep, like you always want to. Come back when you're ready. But make sure you come back.

Within days he was squeezing our hands to communicate and at some point engaged his brother in a thumb-wrestling match, complete with the cheater move he always used to pull when they were kids. He was definitely back. Unable to eat or talk or walk or stay conscious for very long, but back.

Meanwhile, I dropped into a zone of retrofuturistic, paperwork-laden, yes indeed Kafkaesque nonsense, the hospitals' and insurance companies' own scattered Ministries of Information. Time stops, then weasels, then shimmies, then stops again, when you're sitting in a hospital. The big cement buildings are bewildering to navigate, like poorly designed airports. There is no time or place. There is just waiting.

As he emerges from some Other Side, Josh goes through realms and experiences that can't be corroborated by consensus reality. Memory and time are malleable, spotty, chaotic -- just like everyone experiences, only since our frontal lobes aren't injured, we have mechanisms in place to reassure us that it all makes sense (whether or not it does). Fantasy and reality dive in and out of each other's peripheries like darting swallows in flight. In everyday life, we attempt to separate the two. Sam Lowry lets them play off each other. Now my husband does, too.

The final scene of Brazil always leaves me stunned and dry-mouthed, no matter how many times I've watched it. I am Sam. I lunge at the Powers That Be, ridiculous incompetent Powers that nevertheless hold my life in their grip; I imagine a better way of living and surviving, not just for me but for all of us; I fail. When I met my husband twelve years ago he inspired me to think that maybe one could be a semi-adult and still be pretty damned cool. Accept some given circumstances, dance with the Powers That Be, pull a Robin Hood on 'em. Become competent in their irritating reality and use that competence to make tiny, subversive, incremental changes in the world while building yourself a better life.

That's what I'm gonna do now, man up and be the competent grownup who can keep my family going. Maybe we'll all end up in a trailer with a goat and a big truck. Maybe I'll push papers at the Ministry of Information until finally they swirl around, plaster themselves to my grey flannel suit, and consume my body. The only thing I know for sure: someday we will cross to the Other Side and never come back.

(My awesome husband, incidentally, is Joshua Berger of PLAZM magazine, known to many of you over the years. Keep up with Josh, help out, post a photo of him, whatever, at Get Well Josh.)

Mind Blowing Movies: Fantasia (1940) and Eraserhead (1977), by Jay Kinney

[Video Link] I've never been much of a movie buff, to put it mildly. Movies have always affected me so strongly -- I've likened it at times to an acid trip, though that is an exaggeration -- that I've done well in a given year if I've made it to a theater even twice. My intake via TV and Netflix is slightly better, but hardly robust. In light of this, most movies I've seen still stand out in my memory as singular events.

There was a brief period, during my art school years in New York at the dawn of the '70s, when I discovered the pleasures of silent German films (particularly those of Lang, Murnau, and Pabst), which were being regularly screened at a repertory house in the West Village. Certainly some of my happiest movie moments were seeing films for the first time like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, M, Dr. Mabuse, Nosferatu, Pandora's Box, and Diary of a Lost Girl.

But if I had to whittle things down to the most mild-blowing movie, it would have to be a toss-up between two films, neither of them silent or German.

The first would be Disney's Fantasia, which was responsible for my first remembered nightmare. The sequence with Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice who practices magic while his Master is away and gets in way over his head really impressed me. I was probably just 5 or so at the time (and probably watching this on TV). Hoo boy! That night I dreamt that I was Mickey, surrounded by animated mops and rising water, and I woke up yelling. Sensitive lad that I was, that may have made me movie-shy ever since.

The second mind-blower may come as no surprise: David Lynch's Eraserhead. I think I first encountered this at the Roxie Theatre in S.F. soon after it was released. I distinctly recall thinking to myself about half way through the film: "My God! I'm going insane!" I did make it through intact, and in fact soon after dragged my girlfriend to see it, perhaps inoculating myself against letting Mr. Lynch drive me over the edge.

Looking back, Eraserhead had a lot in common with those German silent films. I guess I'm just a sucker for black and white movies with few words and many shadows.

[Video Link] It starts out with an absolutely unforgettable and insane music video of an East Indian dance number from a 1965 Bollywood production (Gumnaam). A young teenager named Enid rocks out wickedly in front of a television set, wearing a cap and gown in a bedroom crammed with clothes and familiar-looking junk.

I knew it was going to be good, but I had no idea that the movie Ghost World (2001) would bathe me in such an uncanny sense of deja vu from start to finish. The characters are so real and familiar that they could have been based on my friends and me.

Director Terry Zwigoff had previously spent almost a decade making a documentary about his friend R. Crumb, the legendary comic artist. Crumb (1994) had been a grueling project, but the film made a big splash when it came out and he was rewarded with new opportunities.

In 2001, his first full-length fictional film was released and I was curious to see it. It is based on an earlier Daniel Clowes' comic called Ghost World, which features two teenage girl characters, Enid and Rebecca. The collaboration between Zwigoff and Clowes for the movie proved to be immensely fruitful with each adding his own personal nuances to the adapted screenplay.

Enid is played by Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson is Becky, her sidekick. The two best friends bounce deadpan observations off each other like a classic comedy team, constantly mocking the people and situations around them. Enid is the flamboyant, anti-establishment, artistic one. Becky is the quieter, more conservative friend with a hoarse voice whom the boys seemed to prefer. They sport the same funky clothes and youthful bravado that I shared with my friends and the same hidden unease about what the future might hold.

Steve Buscemi plays a nerdy, middle-age, obsessive collector of 78 records named Seymour who crosses paths with the girls. They find his number on a lonely hearts personal ad. Just for kicks, when they are bored, they call him up. The girls spy on him after they lure him to a new '50s diner. Seymour has such a perfect, worn-out, real-life quality. Apparently, this character is based on Terry Zwigoff himself.

In the late 1970s, Terry Zwigoff had played cello and mandolin in a band featuring R. Crumb called The Cheap Suit Serenaders. Collecting old music on 78s from the '20s and '30s and playing authentic old instruments is their passion.

I can relate to that. My friends and I subscribed to a magazine called 78 Quarterly, collected vintage National and Gibson guitar-family instruments and banjos, played '20s and '30s ragtime blues music in a hokum band. We bought underground comic books and even published our own comic book. We collected R Crumb's trading cards of country blues and early Jazz performers.

In fact, one of my favorite parts of the documentary Crumb was when R. Crumb pulled out Geeshie Wiley's plaintive "Last Kind Words Blues" (1930) from his shelves of 78s and put it on the record player. Ghost World proved to be just as satisfying to me when I saw Seymour's room full of vintage stuff. Zwigoff brought his own collection of 78s, antiques, blues posters and ephemera to the set. When Enid played Skip James' "Devil Got My Woman" for the first time, a record she got at Seymour's yard sale, it practically made me cry. She declared Seymour's room to be her dream room. It is mine, too. I noticed an art deco mandolin hanging on the wall.

We follow these two girls as they while away the summer after their high school graduation ceremony. Enid has to repeat art class in summer school to get her diploma. The art class is just like my own class in art school, complete with the hippie teacher played to perfection by Illeana Douglas who desperately wants her students' art to have meaning. I hung out in many a diner with friends and drew in sketchbooks just like Enid.

As Enid becomes closer to Seymour to escape her dysfunctional home life and uncertain future, Becky gets a job and looks for an apartment. At one point, Enid spies a giant vintage logo from the '30s in Seymour's room for a chicken restaurant franchise called "The Coon Chicken Inn". I was in Portland when I saw this movie for the first time and I knew that there had been a Coon Chicken Inn in Portland. As depicted on old postcards, the building had a huge head of a black man with a giant open mouth for the entrance to the restaurant. Zwigoff seamlessly weaves the ending to his film around this real-life piece of black ephemera.

Seymour admits to Enid that he has worked at Cook's Chicken Inn for the last 19 years, previously known as the Coon Chicken Inn. He shows Enid examples of the old logo and its transition to the new fictitious one (drawn by Daniel Clowes). Enid grabs the earlier logo for her art class and calls it a found object that challenges us to think about racism. Her teacher loves it, but the image ends up in an art show and creates a scandal.

Zwigoff and Clowes came up with lots of other fun details that ring true: a porno shop where Enid buys a catwoman mask, a nunchucks guy that hangs in the parking lot of the convenience store, an obnoxious honky "blues" band that performs after an authentic ragtime blues player in a bar, a surreal man who sits on a bench waiting for a bus that never seems to come.

This movie is perfectly constructed, beautifully shot and impeccably cast. It is one of the few films that I own a DVD of and can watch over and over again. Hey, who would have ever predicted that young Scarlett Johansson would become the glamorous movie star she is today? Thora Birch, however, is the real star here. Her Enid is unforgettable.

Mind Blowing Movies: Invaders from Mars (1953), by Douglas Rushkoff

[Video Link] The first film that blew my mind was Invaders from Mars -- the 1953 version. I was 6 when I saw it, in a motel in Phoenix (my first motel stay) with my family on the way to the Grand Canyon. There was a metal box on the nightstand, and if you put a quarter in, the bed would vibrate for ten minutes.

And on that vibrating bed, with my brother and father, I watched this movie about a kid whose dad changes into this other guy who looks the same but is actually a bad man. And no one believes the kid. And I totally knew what the kid felt like. And he does everything right -- even going to police when the stakes get high enough, but by then the chief of police has been turned into one of these alien people, too.

It ended with the kid seeing the head alien octopus creature in a glass bubble, but even though that was supposed to be scary I saw it as vindication. There really was an alien invasion, and it was captured on film. (My sense of reality watching TV hadn't been fully formed, yet.)

And from then on, whenever my dad was mean I'd check the back of his neck to see if he had been changed.

Mind Blowing Movies: Popee the Performer (circa 2000), by Lars Martinson

[Video Link]

[Video Link]

Middle Men (2009), by Paul Krassner

[Video Link] Speaking of his recent movie about the early years of the Internet porn industry, Middle Men, producer Christopher Mallick admits, "I think that it's based on a true story, but that doesn't mean it's all true." He should know. The main character -- Jack Harris, portrayed by the ever grimacing Luke Wilson -- is based on him.

Mallick in real life and Harris on screen both founded Paycom Billing Services, an Internet company that processes payments for porn sites. Money used to grow on trees, then it popped out of banks' brick walls, and now it's busy floating around in cyberspace. Until 1995, you weren't able to purchase anything online. But, thanks to a software code enabling secure transactions, Harris brags, "We could take a credit card from anywhere in the world and deliver a product to anywhere in the world. We can make a profit on every transaction. We're just the middle men." And now it's been estimated that porn is featured on nearly 40 percent of all Web sites.

In his cameo role as a powerful politician, Kelsey Grammer confronts Harris: "You peddle porn over the Internet."

"Well, Senator," he replies, holding up a sheet of paper, "this is your billing record: Naughty Secretary..."

The senator smirks and Harris continue to read other titles, then says, "You realize you've just attempted to blackmail a publicly elected state official -- and it worked. Can I count on your vote next year?"

"You got it."

That scene is not so far fetched, either. In his book, Family of Secrets, investigative journalist Russ Baker writes that there are powers behind the elected or selected that call a lot of the shots, and that presidents have much less power and independence than he had assumed: "Initiating reforms or standing up to powerful interests can invite retribution of a kind I had not imagined. Presidents are subject not only to pressure but also to entrapment, blackmail, and even, in one way or another, removal."

Standup comic Kevin Pollak plays the part of an agent for the FBI's Organized Crime Task Force. He persuades Harris to cooperate in the war on terror. It seems that, among the millions of consumers logging in to those porn sites for which Harris is a middle man, many happen to be Arab terrorists. Simply because, in the words of that FBI agent, "They're men." Technology makes it possible to exploit their horniness, so the moment they click on to one of those sites, the United States military can pinpoint and terminate them.

Back in real life, immediately after 9/11, CNN ran a list of the hijackers and people who had tickets and were suspected of being hijackers. "Back then," says Mallick, "we recorded it and I took it in to one of my partners and said, 'Let's run these names through our database.' He said, 'You're crazy.' 'Let's just see what happens.' We had a hit and it was a guy that subsequently was arrested. One of the hijackers who went down with the plane had bought a membership to a site with an online check.

"We traced the check to a bank in San Diego, called the FBI, who was down the hall from us, and said, 'We have a hit.' These guys are apparently sitting in an apartment, ordering pizza and porn on their way to meet Allah. Anyhow, they found the check, went the apartment, found the phone record, found the cell phone number that one of these guys was using. One of the would-be bombers in Chicago was holed up in the Hyatt in downtown Chicago and the FBI raided it, on CNN, and arrested this guy."

In Middle Men, there was an incident that was deleted from the big orgy party scene. It was removed because of concerns that the MPAA would give the flick an NC-17 rating instead of an R rating. In a scene which lasts for two minutes, Harris wanders around a huge mansion, passing by naked men and women drinking and dancing, but what would be omitted was when he opens a door, only to find a couple of women performing oral sex on a man. It was posted on a Web site, but soon taken down. Ironically, remaining on that clip is a commercial for the film itself.

Ultimately, then, Middle Men was intended for the eyes of Middle America. Mallick points out that "The same guy who's going to Toy Story 3 is also going to come to Middle Men." Well, at least there's one thing that those two films have in common. The moving force in each one is a Woody.

Like Tears in the Rain, by Gareth Branwyn

[Video Link] In 1982, my wife and I had just moved from a rural commune in Virginia to Washington, DC. We moved to the city so that she could pursue her music career (among other reasons). We were still country mice, easily awoken in the morning by street traffic, bothered by the air quality, and longing for the open skies of the country -- where, at night, you could see the stardust of the Milky Way clear as day.

Every year my wife would go to Nantucket to perform at a restaurant called The Brotherhood of Thieves -- a place that wouldn't look at all out of place in Treasure Island. It was dark, brick-walled, candle and lantern-lit, with big oak-slab tables and wooden ass-numbing chairs. In 1982, she was performing a duo act with well-known New England folkie Linda Worster, with whom she frequently played on the island.

Seeing them perform every night was a joy, but some nights I'd want to drift onto the streets of Nantucket, get swept up into the tide of pink and Nantucket-red golf clothes and flouncy summer dresses, and see where the night might wash me up.

On this night, a somewhat cold and cloudy one, I ended up under the marquee of Nantucket's Dreamland Theater, a giant, creaking, wooden ship of a building that smelled of mold, popcorn grease, and sunscreen.

Blade Runner, it read. I knew nothing about the film, but it was sci-fi and had Harrison Ford in it, so I figured it'd at least be the perfect way to kill a couple of hours before the ladies' last set. Little did I know that I was stepping into a portal and would emerge a different person, on a different life trajectory than the person who was stumbling down the shabby carpet in the dark, looking for a seat.

I can't really say what made such a fundamental impact on me. The dark noir mood of the film, certainly, and the questions it raises about the nature of life, memory, what constitutes humanity, and whether "androids dream of electric sheep..." What I didn't know I was looking at was a cyberpunk aesthetic that I would soon become completely immersed in, through the work of William Gibson, John Shirley, and others -- dystopian worlds, fifteen minutes into the future, where mega-corporations run the show, where personal and planetary technologies permeate society, and where the street finds its own uses for things.

I found the brutality of the film, the violence of the film's rogue replicants towards humans, and their "retirement" at the hands of police special agent Rick Deckard (Ford) shocking to my country hippie sensibilities. But all of those shocks only made the final scene of replicant Roy Batty's (perfectly cast in Rutger Hauer) "natural" death all the more effective and moving. At the time, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and ate up Hauer's (allegedly ad libbed) Tannhaeuser Gate/tears in the rain soliloquy.

It was in that moment that the mood of the film throughly soaked into me. I felt as though I were in it. It ended and I unceremoniously swam back out into the boisterous, drunken nightlife of downtown Nantucket, which didn't feel at all like Nantucket anymore. Fittingly, it had started to drizzle and a fog had crept up Broad Street from Straight Wharf -- Blade Runner's perpetual rain had descended upon Nantucket.

I made my way back to The Brotherhood. I stood outside the window right next to where Pammy and Linda performed and peered in. I don't know what song it was, but they were in the middle of some energetic, smilie-faced, folk number. As I stood in the chilly rain, now getting seriously wet, Pam sensed I was there and turned to me as she sang. Her face dropped as she saw the faraway look on mine. I faked a smile back. She smiled, satisfied, and turned back into the music. I was a universe away. I was peering into that antique-glass window from the future.

I didn't go into the restaurant that night, one of the rare occasions I didn't at least catch one set. I went upstairs to the "Ent Room" (Entertainer's Room) where we stayed and I cried. I cried a lot. Again, I'm not really sure why. It is one of my few "molting moments" (as Cocteau called them) where I can't tell you what gears got turned, what wires in my nervous system got spliced. But I had changed, and I cried for the loss of something. Humanity, perhaps. I knew, without knowing it, that post-humanity had just dawned on me. Long live the new flesh. I would quickly travel from this moment into cyberpunk sci-fi, industrial/electronic music, bOING bOING, Mondo 2000, Beyond Cyberpunk!, and Wired. I cried for the death of the country hippie. And like Batty, in that moment, I could feel the full weight of my life, the amazing adventures I'd already been on, full of "things you people wouldn't believe," and somehow, sense wondrous adventures to come, And like Batty, I was sad to think that all of this, all of this accumulation of experience and knowledge, all of my memories, would vanish when I died.

Pammy is gone, eight years now, by her own hand, and I think of that "scene" from our life together frequently, that frozen moment at the window. It has become a scene in Blade Runner itself. I can't think of one without the other. I hold these and other memories in a precious kind of stasis 'cause I know that "all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

Mind Blowing Movies: Poltergeist (1982), by Kirk Demarais

[Video Link] It's a shame that movie laughs and thrills don't have the staying power that terror has. It makes sense though, laughter and excitement aren't as crucial to survival as fear-based cinematic life lessons such as: never sleep with a clown at the foot of your bed.

As enticing as the trailer was, I never even considered asking my folks to let me watch Poltergeist (1982). The closest thing to a horror flick that I'd seen was The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966) starring Don Knotts, a film that firmly stamped my brain with an image of garden shears stuck in the neck of a lady's portrait that leaked real blood.

"Coming up next...Poltergeist." announced my friend Eric's television set. His TV wasn't like mine, it had a new, plastic box on top that unlocked a pricey service called Home Box Office. After the metallic HBO soared through space I found myself watching the opening credits. A rush of guilt prompted me to run to the kitchen phone where I called my mom. Back then I'd rather ask for permission than forgiveness.

I briefly stated my case, which concluded with, "It's rated PG so it can't be that bad." Unbelievably, she allowed me to proceed. It really is rated PG, I know because I double checked the TV guide right after I watched a man peel off his own face. But the gore alone wasn't the mind blower, what eventually got to me was the relatability of it all.

The specters weren't picking on lustful teenagers or Don Knotts, they were terrorizing a normal American family, specifically the kids! The on-screen details confirmed that this could happen to me. The victims were consumers of Chee-Tos, Pizza Hut, and Star Wars action figures, all things that would have charted on my personal list of life's little joys. I too had a younger, blonde, pajama-wearing sister, but not only that, my sister had the very same wicker headboard that Carol Anne clings to as the evil spirits attempt to suck her into the closet. The ghosts might as well have been haunting my house.

This realism was so convincing that for months my brain conducted nightly mental drills in an effort to prepare me for living tree attacks, and tumbles into corpse-filled swimming pools. When my parents stopped letting me invade their bed, I slept with the overhead light on. Eventually I was able to shake the paranoia by simply embracing the fact that ghosts aren't real. That was right about the time I saw The Day After, the made-for-TV movie that first introduced me to the concept of nuclear warfare. How I long for my ghost-fearing days.

Mind Blowing Movies: El Topo (1970), by Antero Alli

[Video Link] The first film to truly blow my mind was Jodorowsky's El Topo, which I saw soon after its release in the early '70s. Up until then I assumed that all films were made for entertainment purposes only. However, as a twenty-something, former acidhead living in Berkeley, California, my young mind was freshly imprinted to remain open to the symbolic levels of existence. Whether the "meaning" behind things whispered cosmic secrets to me or whether I made it all up mattered very little; what mattered to me was the freedom to not take everything so literally.

In the first ten minutes of this movie, I saw right away that if I viewed El Topo in any literalist way, I would experience it as a mediocre spaghetti western, softcore quasi-snuff film. But after I shifted into a more symbolist way of seeing, the film unfolded before my eyes like an animated magical Kaballah.

The main character was now The Ego on a spiritual journey to encounter and defeat four "masters," which revealed themselves to me as Body, Heart, Intellect, and Spirit. In this story, the Ego defeats the first three masters but is unexpected and indirectly defeated by Spirit. The Ego undergoes a death and awakens underground inside a hollow mountain filled with deformed humans that I saw as the Subconscious filled with distorted repressions of our human condition. Here, the Ego undergoes a series of initiatic encounters that leave him humbled and transformed. That's not the end of the movie but really, the beginning -- it just got better and better after that.

I was utterly astonished, no, gobsmacked, by how the filmmaker seemed to be using cinema as a tool or device for altering perception and expanding consciousness and doing that without being preachy or timid. This was some hard-hitting, metaphysical voodoo visionary shit disguised as a mediocre spaghetti western, softcore quasi-snuff film! Was it Jodorowsy's brilliance or my own brilliance for seeing his film this way? Impossible to say -- unless I asked Alexjandro Jodorowsky himself.

In the many interviews I've read of Jodorowsy discussing El Topo, I've never come across anything about him mentioning these interpretations haunting my psyche yet he speaks freely about his cinema acting as a drug and as a means for transforming consciousness. What really blew my mind about El Topo was not all the mysticism and the stunningly original cinematography but how the film left me with a new way of seeing which, for me, was synonymous with "changing my life." Twenty years after seeing El Topo, I began my own filmmaking trajectory inspired by this same vision of using cinema as a means of transmission for initiating audiences into new ways of seeing -- a direction informing my filmmaking processes ever since.

Watch PIG by Adam Mason on Vimeo

Pig (2010), by Rev. Ivan Stang

I don't take mind-blowing lightly, and there are several very different ways in which movies have blown my particular mind, such as it is.

Movies seen by a very young child and therefore making an inappropriately huge impression are one type of blowage. In that respect, more than 50 years later I still vividly remember seeing Mighty Joe Young (1949) on my grandfather's TV when I was about four years old, in 1957. Cowboys in Africa (?!?) capture a giant gorilla who ends up performing on stage -- like Kong, but much more professionally. While, in front of an agog nightclub audience, his beautiful human keeper sings "Beautiful Dreamer" while Mighty Joe effortlessly holds her aloft, along with her grand piano and a solid platform. That sequence stuck with me, and to this day I often feel like a trained giant ape helping a pretty girl (or sometimes just an enlarged and life-imbued piece of clip art) make an impression on a bunch of drunks in a bar just to earn a few bananas. *

Probably the second monster movie I remember seeing was The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), fourth in the Universal classic series. It opens with torch-wielding redneck villagers harassing a poor handicapped man, Igor, who fends off their attacks by hurling huge chunks of the decaying Frankenstein castle wall down on them. He then finds his old friend the "monster" buried in a sulfur pit (having been pushed into it when it was still molten, in the previous movie). He frees the monster, and exploits its innocent mindlessness to get revenge on the Normals and Pinks who persecuted him.

I feel that my whole life has been a reliving of that sequence of events. Like Igor's borrowed monster, mine, named "Bob," is still pretending to do my bidding, but will no doubt turn on me in the end, as is the way of man-made monsters. The movie itself is one of the worst of the Universal monster classics, tainted by the meddling of studio execs, although the score is wonderful.

My father took me to see George Pal's The Time Machine in a theater in 1960, when I was about 7. By the age of ten I had read all of the best-known novels by H.G. Wells. What blew my mind was not so much the concept of time travel, which to me remains strictly a handy sci-fi conceit, but the stupefying relativity of time-spans within known history and presumed future history: from "normal," as we humans experience things, to mountains forming and eroding in seeming minutes. Even more striking was its stark depiction of a possible end result of class division, one that I see gradually coming more true decade-by-decade. At age 7 I vowed never to be one of the Eloi, the degenerate childlike future-humans farmed like cattle by the ugly and cannibalistic but vastly more organized Morlocks. I like to think of myself as a Morlock ahead of his time.

But then there are movies that blow one's mind *AS A FILMMAKER,* which is the career path I initially chose for my reanimating of monsters. As much as I hate to admit it, Frank Zappa's rather terrible movie 200 Motels (1971) had an enormous influence on me both stylistically and technically; it was the first feature film shot on video, and relentlessly over-used the atrocious, garish "psychedelic" video effects of the 1970s. I sat awash in it at "Midnight Movie" showings at least fifteen times when I was in college (briefly). When I watched it again a few years ago, I soberly pondered how very seriously drugs can affect a young person's judgment. Still, flawed as it is, it was extremely influential on possibly more levels than I am aware of.

MOVIE MASH-UPS

In college I stumbled upon a little-known indie called The Projectionist (1971), made by Harry Hurwitz and starring the same Chuck McCann later seen in crappy kids' shows like Far Out Space Nuts. The fantasy scenes in this otherwise clumsy movie were my first exposure to the clever manipulation of "found footage," that is, juxtaposing and narrating recombined shots from unrelated old public-domain low-budget movie serials in such a way as to shape the borrowed old-timey footage into a completely different movie. (Not unlike Dr. Frankenstein assembling a "perfect new man" from selected pieces of the dead!) Craig Baldwin made a career out of doing this for a while, and the only feature-length SubGenius movie, ARISE! (1989 and ongoing), directed by me and Rev. Cordt Holland, is at least 50% collaged "found footage." Even earlier, Jay Ward of Bullwinkle fame also had a short-lived TV series called Fractured Flickers in which editors rebuilt new movies (and added new voices) to silent movie classics. Those were cute and as clever as other Jay Ward productions of the time. But a few sequences from The Projectionist remain some of the most inspiring examples I've seen.

Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963) and a pseudo-documentary he directed called "Fellini's Roma" (1972) freed my ass in such a way that my brain followed. I still watch "8 1/2" annually because (I like to think) it is uncannily close to my own experiences as an artist, a husband and a weirdo. Reassuring. However, Fellini's Roma was the first "fake documentary" I ever saw, a reality show way ahead of its time, and almost all of the few movies I myself have made and seen distributed widely fit that description. My underground film from 1973, Let's Visit the World of the Future, owes much to Roma, The Projectionist, and also Orson Welles' adaptation of Kafka's The Trial. Incidentally, Robert Anton Wilson told me that The Trial was his single favorite movie. I could justifiably include R. Crumb and The Firesign Theatre in this paragraph, but that's for a different article.

The Tree of Life (2011) blew my mind recently partly because it was just so damned GOOD, period, and because the protagonists -- a slightly weird family in Texas in the late 1950s -- look and talk almost exactly as my family did. The director, Terrence Malick, is a North Texan contemporary of mine, so this figures. Also it visually recreates everything from the Big Bang to the first eukaryotic life, to dinosaurs, to the heat death of the sun, utilizing special effects by Douglas Trumbull (of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame) and photography worthy of Koyaanisqatsi (1982) -- another mind-blower, eyeball-peeler, or ass-freeer, come to think of it.

But my most mind-blowing in a PUZZLING way is an obscure 2010 movie called Pig that, as far as I know, is distributed ONLY via file-trading. It is very professionally made and acted to look like… well, "a documentary version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" might best describe it. A sadistic meth head and his developmentally disabled "wife" kidnap and torture strangers at random, in between cooking meals and polishing the glass eyeball of the main actor. Up until a twist ending which, believe it or not, justifies all the preceding repulsiveness, it would SEEM to be just an unusually crafted "slasher film," a genre I generally don't follow closely. Like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, it has that "home movie of real events" look. What blew my mind about it is that, unless I missed a swish-pan cheat or two, 70 minutes of this 90-minute film is honestly and truly comprised of ONE CONTINUOUS HAND-HELD SHOT. It's an obviously sweltering outdoor location, and whichever improv actors and hand-held camera operator did this *BLEW MY MIND* from consideration of the sheer physical exertion it must have required, and the concentration displayed in the acting. Did two camera operators swap off? Was there any actual script, or was it all improvised from a one-paragraph hand-written note? What makes Pig's production hard to believe is that the cinematography is excellent and the presumably improv actors never miss a beat. 70 minutes of handheld camera and unshakeable improv, plus presumably fake blood effects and a REAL glass eye removal!

My friend Dr. Legume found it online. I would never have bothered with a film of this description, but he sat me down in his house and started it up on his laptop at a random middle point, knowing that the one-shot improv approach would draw me in. Since then, out of dozens invited, I have only been able to convince two people (Dr. and Mrs. Philo Drummond) to watch the whole thing with me.

Making it even more "mind-blowing" is that the version I saw is basically creditless. The quick opening credits read, "METH-od Films" (sic) and the title, "Pig," over a background graphic that I'm guessing is the chemical formula for methamphetamine. And that's it. No end credits after the twist ending. I could find nothing about it on the web until today, when I found this article explaining its actual source, one Adam Mason.

In closing I must say that my mind has much more consistently been blown by novels, and history or science books, than it has been by movies or even pornography. The one movie that I think improves upon a novel is Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. (The novel's author is said to agree.) That and Nolan's Memento really took me by surprise. Shane Carruth's extremely low-budget time-travel movie Primer (2004), made in Dallas of all places, has such a mind-blowing screenplay that it deserves its own feature article. It has the deepest, richest, most baffling but internally consistent multiple-timeframe-realities screenplay of any movie OR book that I know of. Compared to that, Nolan's Inception is like a coloring-book. Its fans have excavated fully nineteen levels of alternate time-streams out of it. It does not so much blow the viewer's mind as permanently cripple it.

* This film was Ray Harryhausen's first feature-film job as a stop-motion animator, working under Willis O'Brien, and arguably Harryhausen's most subtle animation. When I was in my 30s I actually got in a verbal fight with Harryhausen at an sf con by trying a little too hard to get him to record a promo for my SubGenius radio show. In restrospect Ray's instincts were uncannily right.

Mind Blowing Movies: Bimbo's Initiation (1931), by Jim Woodring

[Video Link] I might have come to grips with the overwhelming mystery of life in a rational, organic manner if it weren't for a cartoon I saw on my family's old black and white TV in the mid '50s when I was three or four years old. This cartoon rang a bell so loud that I can still feel its reverberations.

It was "Bimbo's Initiation," produced by the Fleischer Brother Studios in 1931. I won't attempt to describe it; you can see it online. It's an ingenious piece of work, made by men who I now realize were well aware of its metaphysical content, as evidenced in part by the use of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld in the soundtrack. Perhaps its creators were trying to amuse themselves by making a cartoon that combined madcap whimsy with philosophical depth. Or maybe they were just high. Whatever their motivation and intent, "Bimbo's Initiation" became my prime symbolic interpreter, the foundation of my life's path and endlessly exploding bomb at the core of my creative output.

The reason that cartoon affected me as strongly as it did was that I thought it was real, that it depicted events that were happening in my neighborhood. I set out to find those rooms, those implements, that bicycle, that pool. I got a reputation as the little boy who looked into everything. Whenever I went into someone else's home the first thing I would do, if I could, was look behind their drapes.

Consequently I missed a lot of things that were actually going on, which caused me a lot of grief, one way and another. The pleasurable intensity of the delusion was well worth any trouble that resulted from it, though... and as I say, it gave me a livelihood.

Village of the Giants (1965), by Peter Bebergal

[Video Link] My parents were pretty good about indulging my obsession with monster movies. My father would pick me up Famous Monsters Of Filmland when he saw it at the drugstore. Across the street from his clothing shop in Waltham was Mr. Big's, a toy store that stocked all the Aurora models. Being a business neighbor my father got to know "Mr. Big" pretty well, and a few times he sold us the window display version of one of the models, a perfectly painted and glued version given to him by the distributor. Monsters movies were my life. Every Sunday morning I woke early, got the newspaper from the front stoop, opened it up to the middle and dug through the flyers and other loose inserts to where the television guide was nestled. Then I flipped to end to see what the following Saturday's Creature Feature would run. The mid to late 70s was a golden age when the rights to old monster movies must have been dirt-cheap. In the span of a year or so I saw every great Universal, Toho, and Hammer film. But every so often there was a movie that didn't appear in the index of my movie books, whose stills never showed up in the pages of Famous Monsters.

One of these was Village of the Giants, released in 1965 from the weird imagination of director/producer Bert I. Gordon, and starring a very young Beau Bridges. Gordon had an obsession with normal sized things becoming unnaturally large: The Amazing Colossal Man, War of the Colossal Beast, Earth vs. the Spider, and the weird and creepy Food of the Gods. (To be fair, he did have one movie about normal sized things becoming unnaturally small, Attack of the Puppet People.)

I had become used to monster movies pretty quickly. I was rarely spooked, and often rooted for the shambling undead creation or the giant radioactive lizard. The only storylines that got under my skin were those that involved pre-adolescents or teenagers where the kids were the threat, controlled in some way, or kidnapped. The Star Trek episode "Miri" has the crew beam down to an alternate Earth where the children rule and where a terrible disease strikes the moment you hit puberty would fill me with pre-sexual dread. Even in Gamera vs. Viras, where two boys are kidnapped and their heads are shaved by nefarious female aliens, made me feel anxious, no matter that the cosmic spinning turtle was on his way to save them.

In Village of the Giants, a gaggle of rebellious teenagers eat a strange substance that causes them to grow to a great height. I watched in terrible wonder as their clothes tear, the buttons of sweaters pop, and their arms cover their exposed "parts." They set about tormenting the town, and a group of unaffected teens fight back. There's even a scene where hot rods are used to pull one of the giants down like in a rodeo.

I never picked up that vampires were about sex, but I got right away that when the teenagers tormented the smaller residents of the town, they were lustfully sadistic. And the scene that blew my mind is the giant dance party shot in slow motion to psychedelic surf music. I was completely hypnotized. Everything that moved, even when not shown next to a normal sized person, just seemed bigger. The camera shoots them close up, taking time to focus in on bare bellies, swaying hips, and a tiny resident clings helplessly to the bikini top of one of the giant girls. I felt pity and envy, my poor pre-pubescent mind exploding. The teenagers have a look of ecstasy about them, as if the slime they ate also did something to their minds as well as their bodies.

I was about to become one of those teens bursting out of their childhood but I would never feel quite as empowered as the giants. I was afraid of them, and was pleased when the one kid with glasses is the only smart enough to come up the formula for the antidote to their largeness. But part of me, the part that always rooted for the monster, wanted them to crush that silly little town and walk on towards their next conquest, never afraid.

Dunne and Raby, "Technological Dream Series No. 1: Robots," 2007, By Bruce Sterling

[Video Link] I first witnessed this strange Dunne and Raby video.... well, I feel sure that it was more than five years ago, but I don't see how that's possible.Some experiences squeeze the past into a different shape.

This video seems pretty opaque, at first encounter. It has no credits. The heroine is mute, nameless, rather elegant, very worried and dressed in black. The soundtrack is wordless electronic gabbling, warbling and scratching. The set is pure gallery white-space, devoid of doors, walls, sinks, beds, stoves or toilets. Odd, meaningless objects are strewn across the floor.

There are some jarring, horror-film jump-cuts, but they lack an apparent purpose. The nonexistent plot never advances. No conflict is settled. No problem is solved. No conclusion is reached. There's no moral to this story. There's no story.

"Technological Dream Series" is not even a "series," because there was only one of them. "Technological Dream Series" is a demo.

This demo looks something like science fiction -- that's why it captured my attention right away, and has held it for years now -- but "Technological Dream Series" is not science fiction. It's a different thing, because it's "design fiction."

"Technological Dream Series No. 1: Robots" is a demo, and the subject being demonstrated is interaction. These products on display, the objects, the "robots" --they're as abstract as chess-pieces. They're not like the designed products that star in commercial ads, they're not glossed-up, they don't have branding, they're not for sale. The heroine isn't the star, either. The star is the interaction.

Once you can grasp the intention of the creators -- they want you to think about user interaction, they're trying to show you how it works, how it might work -- then, the film's quite straightforward. The user -- she's very London, all black-clad, spooky, alterna-rock and high heels -- is tending to the urgent needs of her devices.

Her possessions are not today's dysfunctional, needy mobiles and/or laptops, but tomorrow's dysfunctional, needy "robots" (or, well, whatever those entities are). Like our own rather messed-up tech devices, her robots are pretty far from optimal. Even though she probably can't live without them, and is obviously very concerned about them, these things she owns are not exactly on her side. It's a tense, fraught relationship.

Any aware person nowadays, who is logging-on to Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple or Microsoft, must surely sense that they are intimately kissing-up to vast, cool, HGWellsian, Martianly unsympathetic entities that are slowly and surely drawing up their own plans. You know that's true, right? That's not sci-fi, that's just how life is now. Now imagine that these vast, quasi-intelligent corporate entities were boiled down to red circles that oozed nervously around your living room.

For our user-protagonist here, that's life. She's co-existing, every day, with "robots" that are glitchy, itchy and so problem-ridden as to manifest emotional neurosis. They are her pets, her spies, her commensal entities, but their inner workings are as remote as the control rooms of Martian tripods.

All this user can do is attempt to humanely empathize with these stricken creatures of her household. They are her darlings: the red ring, the black rolling cone, the pull-toy and the crooked security scanner. She's like an overtaxed new mother. Her love for these quadruplets come at a steep cost to her own sanity.

Science fiction stories have explored this line of thought before. The written sci-fi equivalent of "Technological Dream Series No. 1" would be a rather similar British work of the imagination, "The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista" by J. G. Ballard. Written way back in 1962, this science fiction tale is about the luckless inhabitant of a computerized "psychotropic" house. Since it's by Ballard, it's a pretty good story.

This house, "Stellavista," goes murderously nuts in the typical Ballardian atmosphere of artsy anomie and implacable obsession -- but despite Ballard's fine verbiage, we're never really shown that house, "Stellavista." Stellavista is described, but never demonstrated. We don't get hands-on with it. A written science fiction story is and must remain a verbal composition.

By contrast, "Technological Dream" conveys its "cognitive estrangement" in a quieter, gentler fashion. That's because designers are not authors. An author of fiction is an entertainer, he's deceiving, beguiling and head-tripping the reader -- he's commonly locked in a private, intimate, psychic single-combat with the reader. Written fiction is all about thrills, twists, surprising revelations, page-turning hooks, and similar bulky, time-consuming forms of ideational overhead.

Designers don't have readers, designers have users. So "Technological Dream" doesn't stretch for a dramatic climax, nor does it hammer any point home. A written story must offer a summary ending, but design lacks any written narrative that ends. Science fiction commonly ends in lessons, warnings, pep-talks or evocations, but a design fiction is an intervention, a provocation, an invitation to join an ongoing debate.

What if our machines were too mysterious to understand, but also intimates that we saw every day? What if we couldn't live with them, and they couldn't function without us? What if, what if....

There's never been a "Technological Dream Series No. 2." Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby never extended this "series." Their imaginary-robot models were swiftly inducted into the Museum of Modern Art in New York, along with the video itself.

I'd surmise that Tony and Fiona, like most designers, were adapting themselves to the explicit needs of their user-base. If some client had demanded "Series No. 2" from them, they would have obligingly built and filmed that, but they're designers, so it's not like they feel some gabby, writerly compulsion to churn these things out. They do write some books -- Hertzian Tales is particularly startling -- but they don't write fiction, and those "tales" aren't really tales at all -- they're design documentations, descriptions of design approaches, elucidations of design thinking.

"Design Fiction" is not a form of fiction written about design. Design fiction is a form of design -- it's the design of objects and services that are imaginary. It's design that uses cheap, fast, viral media to spread itself around -- to provoke speculation, to extrapolate, and to criticize. "Design fictions" exist outside the stifling limits of the retail box-store. They are designs, but they are metaphysical, theoretical, technical, cultural, artistic, seductive, fertile and consolatory.

"Design fiction" does important work in spaces where fiction is clumsy, and where science has little to say: the user-centricity, the creative passion for the shapes of things, the engagement with the grain of the material.

This modest little video made me realize that a new approach, a new creative force, had appeared within the domain of the imagination. It's a different way to do "what if." Design fiction expanded my worldview, and gave me a new set of tools with which to engage with the world around me.

It's common to say that your life should be improved by design, but my life was improved by Dunne and Raby "critical design." The shape of things will never be the same.

Mind Blowing Movies: Groundhog Day (1993), by Ruben Bolling

[Video Link] When I think of "Mind Blowing Movies," I instantly think of the great science fiction films with twists and tricks that I've loved, like The Matrix, Starship Troopers, and Blade Runner.

But there's a movie that blew my mind with a very different kind of twist.

Groundhog Day is a high-concept movie that, although it's squarely a comedy, could also be considered science fiction or fantasy. In it, Time is playing a cruel and elaborate trick on TV weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray), repeating the same day over and over as a metaphor for the angry rut he's in at the start of the movie.

Murray's performance, as always, is transcendent. And the screenplay is just about perfect, as it continually peels inventive comedic riffs off this premise. Yet these riffs also always work on the other, metaphorical, level for a man stuck in his life.

Phil reacts to his trap in turns with anger, boredom, recreational sex, felonies and desperation. But he keeps on waking up at 6:00 a.m. to the increasingly surreal sound of Sonny and Cher.

Eventually, he turns to the woman for whom he has actual romantic feelings, his producer Rita (Andie MacDowell), and tries to seduce her, using information he gains from constantly reliving this day. But no matter how he presses these advantages, he can't consummate the new relationship in a single day.

Finally, he levels with Rita, and spends His Day explaining what's happened to him, eventually convincing her it's true.

This is where, when I watched the movie on a chilly day in February of 1993 when it came out, I was sufficiently jaded in the conventions of mainstream movies, to be certain how the movie would end.

Phil would learn that being honest with this wonderful woman was the way out of the rut. He let her into his heart, not in a cynical attempt to bed her, but in order to make a real emotional connection with her. She would finally stay the night with him, and he would find himself out of his literal and metaphorical trap.

She does go to his hotel room, and they have a heart-to-heart while sweetly flipping cards. At this point in the movie, I felt that my contract with the film was more than fulfilled. I'd seen Bill Murray (stop right there: that's usually enough right there) in many funny scenes that fit in perfectly with a comedic premise that worked on multiple levels. Now it was time for the Hollywood ending and the moral that Love Conquers All, and I'd go home satisfied. I reached for my coat.

Phil reads poetry to Rita, then falls asleep, with a genuinely connected Rita right by his side... but then wakes up alone in bed the next (or: same) morning on February 2 again, Sonny and Cher still chirping out of his clock radio.

This couldn't have been a more shocking twist to me than if Phil woke up in a pod next to a naked, bald, slimy Keanu Reeves.

How will this movie end if not with the moral of Redemption Through Romantic Love?

Not necessarily trying to win Rita's love, but trying to become a better person who would deserve her love, he resolves to improve himself and help others. He learns piano and ice sculpture. He does good deeds, saving people he knows are about to suffer mishaps, or worse. He talks to townspeople not out of desperate, aloof boredom, but because he genuinely likes them.

And of course we get the side pleasure of watching Bill Murray in his best Meatballs/Stripes element: good-naturedly kidding around with everyone for the sheer fun of it.

FINALLY, now that he's become a kind, socially engaged person, with the attitude and skills that make him fun, interesting, entertaining and useful to those around him, he truly wins Rita's heart. They spend the night in his room, and they wake up together on February 3. He's broken free.

That a commercial movie like this could somehow flirt with and then explicitly reject the idea that romantic love alone is all you need -- instead using its metaphor to show that a connection to community and service are critical components to a fulfilling life -- was beyond a Twilight-Zone level shock for me.

Defying internal narrative expectations with a surprising plot twist is great fun. But defying meta-expectations of movie conventions with a plot that veers suddenly off to make a great metaphor even more resonant, truthful, and even spiritual -- that's mind blowing.