Watched Bad Trip and ngl it was really fun. I like the way they weaved together constructed narrative and prank bits more than Borat stuff, it felt less exploitative and better serving the drama (as ironic and silly as it may be) and the “Look, you’re on Candid Camera” bit over the credits was a nice touch. I had to rewind certain parts and rewatch (the restaurant scene) because it was so fun to see people being people in public. I didn’t even check to see when this was filmed…no masks. This would be a good film to see during the Great Week of Mass Unquarantinisation whenever that might be (or would it? Maybe it’s just the perfect thing for pre-Unquarantinisation hmmm).
imo, considering drug scenes as accurate to irl is like comparing sex scenes to irl, like sometimes a film will capture a certain essence but it’s still a flattened symbol of something beyond the medium’s capabilities re: sensorial evocation. That said, I have been high enough to swat at scribbly winged apparitions and perceive fellow homo sapiens as lizard-like demons so.
I kinda wrote this out without thinking about it much lol but films can be ok at depicting drug trips, the supermarket scene in Bad Trip was pretty good but the last bit of media that made me think “I feel like I’m tripping” was the farm level in Balan fucking Wonderworld.
I love the drug scenes in Eastbound & Down and Six Feet Under, particularly
Kenny and Clegg rolling into the high school dance on molly
Nate and Ruth taking molly on accident after David leaves it in the aspirin bottle
Nate getting too stoned and freaking out at Brenda’s party is painfully true to life.
I even like the drug scenes in True Blood, particularly Jason when he’s first on the blood + Tara’s peyote ritual. Alan Ball does good drug scenes apparently
watched Godzilla vs Hedorah, have always been meaning to see this one in particular for the goofy pop psychedelica aspects and because hedorah looks cool. at multiple points it just turns into an organic ufo with huge eyes and flies around!
there are some good outfits in the club sequences and at one point the hippies devise an unintelligible, to me, possibly patriotic scheme to assemble a million people at mount fuji for a concert to… maybe protest ??? the existence of hedorah. it does not go well and they are all skeletonised by sulphuric gas.
there’s another subplot about a little boy who has a telepathic link with godzilla and also plays with a big shed full of godzilla action figures. i was going to say it’s funny that people still make children’s toys of godzilla in this universe where he’s real and has killed thousands of people but i guess there are people irl who sell, like, cutesy dolls of boris johnson or whoever so maybe it’s some similar kind of political signalling thing.
the end fight between godzilla and hedorah is good and satisfying but i also always find the fights in godzilla movies to be a bit more intense than i’m expecting, maybe because they get more gruesome than the pro wrestling moves and poses leading into them initially suggest (godzilla gets acid sprayed into his eye, seems to strip off the flesh from his hands from punching into hedorah’s corrosive body, chokes on gas etc), or maybe because godzilla being basically a large unspeaking animal puts a different edge on what would otherwise be typical action star damages. there’s a part in this where he’s stuck writhing in a pit filling with acidy sludge and it’s pretty distressing, deliberately evoking images of birds stuck in oil spills etc, but i guess the constant background undertow of horror is just part of being a monster movie. and in fairness godzilla gets his own back when he punches into hedorah’s skull, removes two large white balls, incinerates them, and stomps the rest into rubble. also i am just now realising that the balls are meant to be the alien metal the professor looked at under the microscope earlier in the film!! i’m dumber than godzilla.
not particularly in my experience. maybe if you were terry gilliam and on drugs?
still incredibly surreal to me that those qanon weirdos probably got the whole “adrenochrome drained from live humans” thing from a writer/professional shitposter who openly admitted to making up half of what he wrote about
Chiming in to say that the Balan Wonderworld farm level really is weirdly spot-on accurate in terms of acid tripping, much more than Fear and Loathing. The bright colors, the air rippling to the music, the disorientation of the dancing animals fading in and out of existence, and the intense fixation on one really specific kind of imagery that just got stuck in your head for no apparent reason (in this case, farming).
It’s been years since I last watched it, and I doubt it was really trying to do this, but I also found that The Double Life of Veronique captured the psychedelic experience pretty well, particularly the ones I’ve had with 2CE. The optical illusion / distortion visual motif, the beautiful green/brown color palette, and the muddled, dark-edged dream logic and metaphysical-but-emotionally-true connections made throughout the story.
I think the whole protest element in Hedorah (and really the entire premise) is in reference to the mass environmental protests that were going on in 1970 in Japan
people on twitter were gushing about brendan fraser so i rewatched The Mummy and while he is indeed good, holy shit that movie is very racist. like it takes all of the “problematic” aspects of aladdin/indiana jones/etc. and just cranks it up to 11.
my hot take is that i never liked Brendan Fraser and hated looking at his face in any movie he was in HOWEVER hearing how dirty Hollywood did him has made me sympathetic to him
Really don’t understand all this Brendan Fraser love, except for Encino Man and Airheads. I had a friend who sincerely loved The Mummy and made me watch it twice when we were teenagers. He’s buying all that Mummy Merch now, oh no$talgia
