Futz

"All the world's a stage and its people actors in it"--or something like that. Who the hell said that theatre stopped at the orchestra pit--or even at the theatre door? Why is not the audience participants in the theatrical experience, including the story itself?

This film was a grand experiment that said: "Hey! the story is you and it needs more than your attention, it needs your active participation". "Sometimes we bring the story to you, sometimes you have to go to the story."

Alas no one listened, but that does not mean it should not have been said.

Seen as an uncertified film in 1969 it was of its period featuring hillbilly love affairs (including an attractive pig) and very artistic writhing bodies in the desert sands. Of its time and worth old hippies watching for nostalgia.

What is this? A bunch of idiots, a field, a little stage and (too bad for us) a camera. A grand experiment all right, a grand experiment in lousiness. It goes on just like a very bad dream. It's totally unwatchable. I had to watch it in 3 or 4 segments so not to get carried away and throw the tape by the window. It's like watching a 10 hours movie about the life of a cereal or something like that. Just one question pops out: what where they thinking, or smoking when they made that one! And the music, it's so annoying.

Out of 100, I gave it 47. That's good for 0 star out of ****.

Seen at home, in Toronto, on January 2nd, 2003.

FUTZ is the only show preserved from the experimental theatre movement in New York in the 1960s (the origins of Off Off Broadway). Though it's not for everyone, it is a genuinely brilliant, darkly funny, even more often deeply disturbing tale about love, sex, personal liberty, and revenge, a serious morality tale even more relevant now in a time when Congress wants to outlaw gay marriage by trashing our Constitution. The story is not about being gay, though -- it's about love and sex that don't conform to social norms and therefore must be removed through violence and hate. On the surface, it tells the story of a man who falls in love with a pig, but like any great fable, it's not really about animals, it's about something bigger -- stifling conformity in America.

The stage version won international acclaim in its original production, it toured the U.S. and Europe, and with others of its kind, influenced almost all theatre that came after it. Luckily, we have preserved here the show pretty much as it was originally conceived, with the original cast and original director, Tom O'Horgan (who also directed HAIR and Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway).

This is not a mainstream, easy-to-take, studio film -- this is an aggressive, unsettling, glorious, deeply emotional, wildly imaginative piece of storytelling that you'll never forget. And it just might change the way you see the world...

This impossibly overboard counterculture spectacle denotes a man's deep romantic feelings for a pig...a love so taboo that even his hillbilly kinfolk are arms-up in horror over it.

It's a musical of sorts, sourced from an Off-Off-Broadway stage piece which apparently generated some degree of enthusiasm in its time. FUTZ is also aggressively pushy with its strangely illustrated, cryptoglyphic sociopolitical commentary, touching mostly on issues of autonomy and sufferance. So, it is what it is...AN EXPERIMENTAL, METAPHORICAL, ZOOPHELIA HILLBILLY MUSICAL. While it's generally immersed in derisive absurdist humor, it alternately crosses some serious, even discomforting junctures along the way.

Sounds too exquisitely nonconformist to pass up, doesn't it?

Well...this raging avalanche of officiously arty grandeur might succeed as a fascinating rumination on creative onanism...it definitely has the requisite freak appeal for a very select entente of outsider types. Mainstreamers, however, won't surrender gently to this megalomaniacal, dope-fueled celluloid spitball.

4/10