The Congress

Director: Ari Folman
Year of Release: 1984

Writers: Stanislaw Lem (novel), Ari Folman (adaptation)
Cast highlights: Robin Wright, Harvey Keitel, Jon Hamm, Paul Giamatti, Danny Huston

Element of wonder ***
Level of Bizarreness *****
Visual Beauty ****(non animated) **(animated)
Counterculture Appeal ***
Story ***

I don't think she should be driving...

Best Quote...
Dylan Truliner: Robin? Can you see my dreams?
Robin Wright: Four cockroaches playing poker on your lap, is that a dream?
Dylan Truliner: Yes. But it's not mine.

Usually I talk about older films, but since this one is fairly recent, I have provided this short review to avoid spoilers...

It was pretty good! A bit slow at first but gets very weird, and if you like weird you might dig it. The story wandered a bit and I felt it might have been better if they had simplified.

OK here is the whole thing in case you really don't give a crap about spoilers....

Well, I have to say that when I first started watching this, I did not expect to be posting about it here. It just seemed like your run of the mill speculative fiction soft sci-fi romp. A nice little "what if" tale about the future of the movie business and what that will mean to actors with the added twist of having Robin Wright play a fictionalized version of herself. It is a subject that I myself have often wondered about as we get closer and closer to films acted entirely by Andy Serkis in every role. Harvey Keitel and Paul Giamatti popped up on my screen and I started taking this all a bit more seriously. Perhaps this was a very personal project for these people, it seemed like they were giving good performances and I could see how it could be an inditement of the industry that they had grown disillusioned with... Harvey Keitel certainly delivers some powerful words about the movie biz and how it treats actors, especially women

But then something very odd happened at about 45min in... someone slipped this film some acid and suddenly there were higher planes of existence to deal with, penis/vagina fish, fascist imagery, and more pop culture icons than you could shake a stick at! I mean quite abruptly, I was inside a Fleischer Studios/Ralph Bakshi influenced animated mind trip that could not make up its mind between being part of the animated sequences of Pink Floyd The Wall, or My Little Pony. OK... OK... I have trained for this. I mean, I started a blog about bizarre films for gods sake! I can take it!

Is that a gratuitous penis fish? or is this movie just happy to see me?

I watched it, I enjoyed it, but I do find myself wishing for a few things...

The animated parts were fine, but I was relieved when it left the animated realm. It wasn't that it was too weird for me, I think we have established that I LIKE weird. It was that it was too normal. I kept thinking who the hell is imagining themselves as a 40s style 2d cartoon version of this or that famous person. I understand that it could have just been her way of seeing the "other side", but really that Cool World vibe felt very played.

I want to read the novel it is based on... I strongly get the felling it should have been broken up into two films... one that dealt with the digitized actor plot, and a second film that continued the her story into the future and focused on the chemical revolution. As it was I felt it was trying to serve too many stories.