Flux Gourmet

"Weird" at the service of a higher cause I can roll with. "Weird" as a stand alone aesthetic usually leaves me cold.

"Flux Gourmet" is a gross and -- for me at least -- an even somewhat incomprehensible film about performance artists. I don't even know -- is "food sound art" even a thing, or was it meant to be a joke? Somewhere in this film is a satire about pretentious people, but it's buried under an off-putting preoccupation with the workings of human bowel systems. I've had a colonoscopy. I don't need to relive someone else's.

This is the kind of movie whose advertising features pull quotes from critics using words like "uproarious" and calling it equal parts brilliant horror and scathing comedy. I must have been watching an entirely different movie.

The best I can say about "Flux Gourmet" is that it has a bold and confident vision, and the director is clearly committed to it. But that's really part of the problem.

Grade: C-

Is Flux Gourmet a very dry straight faced joke about pretentious modern art?

Or is it a perfect example of pretentious modern art?

I'm tending towards the latter.

Recommended if you want a movie that takes the idea behind the baked beans scene in Blazing Saddles and stretches it to feature length. Otherwise, if you really must watch a Peter Strickland movie, find The Duke of Burgundy instead.

A spoof of performance art and foodies (crossed up) and totally hilarious. The actors play it straight which, unlike Christopher Short's films, made it even more funny to me. There were so many little things that made me giggle...their obsession with a flanger, the OTHER collective (and their name) and the way they stealth around, the patron's head wear, their confessions and dialogues with a flatulent writer and the silly French names for odd foods (that I don't know if they are real or not). Clearly the other reviewers who rated the film didn't get it or were expecting something else but I thought it was just grand.

This is perhaps the craziest and most incoherent piece of cinema I have ever watched. My first instinct is to recommend watching this movie on some kind or narcotic or psychedelic, but in forethought this movie almost convinced me I was already on one.

At first I thought it was just me, and that as a Canadian I didn't understand the humor. That maybe it was taylored for a British audience or something? But I've watched faulty towers, Mr. Bean, The Office and so forth... and that's not it.

The longer you watch, the less funny it gets. I can endure and even find some toilet humor funny, but this film was obsessed with repeating the same mindless jokes over and over again... and I must confess I couldn't make it to the very end. I had to turn it off before I developed a serious headache.

If you want to go on the wildest confusing and messed up ride of your life, skip the Iowaska and magic mushrooms and watch this.

And this film comes down on the wrong side.

I'm OK with weird. I loved Strickland's In Fabric, and was hoping for something equally interesting. Unfortunately, he seems to have thought "I've already turned it up to eleven; what if I turn it up to thirteen?"

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a group of performance artists who indulge in sonic cookery, and who are granted a residence by someone who is as unhinged as they are (in case we miss this, her deranged nature is hammered home by her bizarre headwear. Especially in bed). There's also a sub-plot about flatulence (these may be the most sophisticated fart-gags ever committed to film, but they're still fart-gags) and a rectal examination that also turns into performance art.

Terrapins, a box with knobs on, a rather icky seduction, pretentious references to ancient Greek literature, latex cat-suits (everyone always travels with these, in case they need to indulge in a little burglary, don't they?)

The resultant mish-mash leaves one confused and deeply unsatisfied.

And I would've throttled the doctor MUCH earlier.