All Flowers in Time

Pretentious, boring, and pointless. I saw this at the CFC World Film Festival and left learning nothing, feeling nothing, and slightly annoyed.

The programmers at Cannes, Melbourne, and Sundance should be ashamed of themselves for programming such a terrible film. Audiences attend film festivals to be entertained, not to bored to tears. "Indie" cinema has hit rock bottom.

Technically, it was shoddy and relied on a random mishmash of images to create some sort of experimental backdrop. The story was convoluted and practically nonexistent. The actors had really nothing to work with, so I hardly blame them. I have nothing but contempt for this film and everything it stands for.

This short has some catchy surrealist and absurd scenes but it doesn't make anything out of it. Small pieces of the premise are truly intriguin Horror, but not performed and/or produced in a way which works. So watchable because of the one-time picture-storm, forgettable because there's nothing real to remember.

I do not know the director of this film Jonathan Caouette, nor am I David Lynch; but if both of these situations were the case then I would be very quick to slap Caouette to get his attention before then explaining to him that although I, David Lynch, make it look easy, it really is not. The reason for this would be that All Flowers in Time so earnestly aches to have the unsettling content of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and many other such films but yet all it does here is spray on the weirdness while also doing Lynch a disservice by not really understanding what makes this type of stuff work so well.

The content has no anchor here and instead the film just throws weirdness at the viewer in the hope that some of it will stick. In fairness some of it does and I thought Caouette did a decent job with the atmosphere running throughout, but too much of it is just too deliberately odd and too constructed of itself and nothing more. It is a shame because I wanted to get sucked into its oddity but it just seemed so absurd and insincere that I couldn't go with it.

I caught this movie at at CFC screening last night and I can't believe it was chosen for official selection. It was just a random mishmash of blurry, unrelated imagery. There was a real clue when the title cards took 5 minutes to go past with crappy digital blurry faces danced in the background and still were more coherent than the movie proper. It felt like the writer picked all of their favourite bits of David Lynch movies, took all the context out, did a crappy job of ripping them off, ordered them into a list, removed every other line, then shuffled the pages and made the shooting script out of it. The production value was all other the place, the audio was hard to hear and the really low quality video effects added an extra level of frustrating in an already grating experience. I can't articulate how much I hate this movie, don't see it.

I saw this short film last night along with a screening of "Walk Away Renee", which is a sort of follow-up film to director Jonathan Caouette's brilliant low-budget documentary "Tarnation". Maybe it's because I am from Texas and grew up on the Butthole Surfers and their psychedelic antics, but I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed "All Flowers in Time" partly for reasons other IMDb reviewers here seemed to dislike it. The disjointed imagery and plot help achieve a rich psychedelic effect. This is an *experimental* short, folks. It's meant to be open-ended as well as abrasive, shocking. I was heavily reminded (in a good way) of fellow Texan Ryan Trecartin's colorful, abstract, and slightly horrific video art while watching this film. In fact I'd LOVE to see what a collaboration between Trecartin and Caouette might produce. Recommended for fans of high weirdness.