soccergoon13

If you're a fan of Daft Punk you aren't automatically going to like this movie. And if you're not a fan of Daft Punk you aren't automatically going to dislike it. No music by Daft Punk. No dialog or flashing helmet text. Ambient sound. And Curtis Mayfield.

Electroma plays like a festival art film, yet it's more accessible to the audience than the "Cremaster" movies and more thoughtful and varied than "Zidane". In essence, the movie comprises five set pieces. It opens with a drive through the desert, then a town. The second set involves becoming human. They then re-enter the robot world in a Frankenstein-esquire reversal, playing off of Icarus. The fourth part brings the sad realization of returning to robotic roots. Fifth, they walk through a desert, which comprises the longest part of the film.

I recommend it for the art-house/festival crowd. No dialog, an atypical plot-line, and lengthy sweeping pans will certainly turn away some fans. It is pretentious to a degree, I won't deny it, but compared to Cremaster (an unfair comparison, yes, but it's the most widely seen), Electroma doesn't require pre-emptive knowledge for the deciphering of the symbols, which tells you what you're watching. You can absorb it without extreme cerebral input.

It's slow. Like Tarkovsky or Herzog. Don't expect hyperactive techno robots.

You'll be hard-pressed to find this film, as Daft Punk does not intend to ever release this film on DVD. See it at a festival or snag a bootleg. It's worth the time.

So this movie is one of my favorites, along with City Lights, Vertigo, and Little Dieter Needs to Fly. It's a perverse amalgam of a rumored Hungarian porn film, set up by Troma to act as an inane and confusing trifle regarding nurses in a random clinic finding random people on random abandoned roads and then randomly torturing them. Of course the acting is non-existent; the movie has no real linear direction; the music is from a low budget box; the dialogue insane and murky.

Yet through the narrator's non-stop ramblings, the viewer can find a sense of amusement resulting from what they experience. Troma didn't alter this in order to add it to their own library as a mounted and highlighting piece. Rather, the studio took Woody Allen's "What's New Tiger Lily?" and played around with the concept, experimenting the same way teenagers would after receiving editing and dubbing equipment.

The aforementioned narrator tries to connect and explain what we see on screen. The problem is, he's watching a different movie. He claims these nurses are sick and twisted, beyond reproach. But in that dour sense, he's wrong. Nurses, /people/, who reach this level of absurdity are going to be kept in an abandoned, desolate "clinic". They're not sick, twisted white trash. They're hyperbolic heroines who are stuck with a bad plot.

For whatever reason, the gardener sees the nurses as bizarre, yet works at the clinic in the middle of nowhere. The true purpose of the gardener in the movie is beyond the scope of this exploratory exercise. Overall he isn't a non-sequitor. His role isn't as philosophical as the Plate O'Shrimp from Repo Man, but it isn't just a reason to cut to randomness. The gardener doesn't provide a moral view, he's in this just as much as the nurses. At least the narrator is an intentional ruse who tries to solemnly explain to the viewer what isn't explained on screen.

As for the post-editing touches such as the swirl, the flashing names, and the score card, Troma includes this only to further push the outlandishness of the movie. Afterall, Sabrina stands in her room with a gun and shoots in a 180 arc, making soft gun noises. The movie was already mind-boggling. As with Terror Firmer: if you're going to try something, why not go all out?

The point is: there is no point. It's a nihilistic take on film, not on "sex-u-ality". Troma steps up to the plate, looks at the critics who say their feature films have no substance, and then swings for the fences with this movie. But it turns out to be a foul ball on a full count. It accounts for nothing in the long run while managing to anabolically load Troma's other films by allowing them to say "Hey, at least it isn't Maniac Nurses"

See this movie. You'll have to get it through an online rental place. Watch it with at least two other people. Only then will you realize that it's a joke by Troma. It's an attempt to show that we all live in a meta-narrative, and the post-modern approach of satirizing film with film exemplifies the point of no return which our modern collective has reached.

Many here are saying that this is his best. Crimes and Misdemeanors is his best, and the love it or hate it Stardust Memories. This is one of his top 5, though. An unconventional device of a movie within a movie, with parallels to real life, philosophy regarding what happens in movies, and what can't happen in the characters' real life, because "this isn't the movies". If that last sentence was confusing enough, that's how deep this one can go. You can vortexionally drive yourself into oblivion thinking about it. There's always an extra layer to the film.

Enjoyable, yes. "Classic", yes. Flawless? Yes. His best? Would be, but I like the other two aforementioned more.