portrait of the young artist as a dipshit

whoever made reefer madness obviously had never smoked weed in his life. he ended up being mostly right, anyway.

insaniac is a good teachable lesson, in the sense that it shows us just how much we take for granted in even low budget films. this movie illustrates definitively why you should never put the cart before the horse. the lesson you need to take away from this movie, even if you’re someone who’s only ever picked up a camera to film a kitten yawning, is that your overblown vanity project needs to have the barest modicum of effort put into it. that driving urge is the difference between fulfilling your need for self-expression while looking like an egomaniac and just looking like an incompetent egomaniac.

there’s a scene in this film where the lead character, autumn, sits bolt upright from a dead sleep and immediately drinks out of a liquor bottle. that’s the kind of film insaniac is. everything in it is uncommitted as the nonsensical title and that’s what i can’t stand about cheaply made films. money is hardly ever the problem; if you’ve got an idea, you can’t quarter-ass it. this is a movie made by someone with a future in medical billing. this is a movie made by a person who dropped out of community college to become a dog groomer.

i’m totally okay with a movie having zero budget. admittedly, it’s completely intellectually dishonest of me to compare the writer/producer/director of this shithouse with the late eric fournier or david lynch, two guys who are genuinely just wellsprings of ideas. however, the entire shaye st. john saga is at least as long as two features and was made on negative budget. the huge difference between this film and those youtube “triggers” is an element of craft; given that both this film and the shaye shorts are beholden to the commonly held notion of dream logic, you might as well discuss lynch as the exemplar.

INLAND EMPIRE is as cheap looking as a feature film could possibly be, but you’re not aware of it at all because it clearly doesn’t matter to david lynch what kind of budget he has to work with. his vision is so singular that you readily allow yourself to invest in the technical imperfection and stilted, inconsistent acting in his films.  you never find yourself talking about the technical details of his films, except to mention how he sees the camera as a vehicle; a conveyance. his concern as a director is disorienting and unnerving you, not impressing you.

i’m okay with people casting themselves and their dowdy friends as characters you’re meant to invest in. i didn’t sit through His Master’s Voice for nothing, in fact, what i most enjoyed about it was the amateurish scenery chewing from drama students using the stanislausky method to inhabit characters slightly different from their actual selves. hmv is unquestionably wretched in a way only a student made serial drama about college students getting superpowers can be. the whole affair is a misguided melange of nerd universe influences, a little power rangers here, a little teary eyed k-drama there, a pinch of insipid anime cliches, a dash of LARP. it’s defiantly unoriginal and banal in an oddly celebratory way.

watching invokes a familiar feeling, a feeling which anyone who questions his own aptitude at any artistic endeavor feels. it’s an embarassing twinge of recognition when he sees something that is so self-evidently terrible, a real life depiction of a creative nightmare. i do, however, admire the exuberance on display in hmv – the kind of overweening earnestness you get from someone trying to make something from nothing. there’s something to be said for believing your own bullshit to serve as motivation to create. the fact that the subject matter is just so facile and uninteresting is what kicks the crutch from under hmv. to find out your striving is less than promethean is devastating.

i’m even okay with irritating, elliptical in-jokes. one of my favorite shows as a middle schooler was a local access show called egg tv, in many ways the essence of bizarre anti-humor that formed my comedic sensibility. egg tv has zero production values. it’s shot entirely in the woods, in alleys, in the various living rooms and dens of the circle of friends that make the show.  the wigs are atrocious, the sound mix is terrible, nobody can act, and worst of all, 9 times out of 10, they don’t even bother out editing out themselves laughing at their own terrible jokes. much like the musical acts featured on the show from time to time, you can tell none of it was rehearsed ahead of time. and yet, if it were produced, directed or written any better, it would be practically unwatchable. as it is, it’s perfect.

insaniac possesses none of these qualities. it isn’t funny, it isn’t charming and it assumes you give a crap about any of the stoned idiots wandering in and out of the film. the most entertaining thing about it is that the movie was obviously shot in some sort of abandoned building as nearly every scene is shot in unfurnished rooms. even the scene set in a “psychiatrist’s office” looks like it’s in a squat. a plastic ficus is what passes for set dressing. a broom closet passes for an apartment. actually, i take that back, a squat would actually be better because it would appear to be lived in. everything in this film just looks like an unrented room in a suburban office campus.

that’s it, really, there is literally nothing else to latch onto in this film. you’d think people who get high all the time could come up with dream sequences that weren’t lame and obvious. i can’t even praise the filmmakers gumption for making a film because it’s so stillborn. the only thing they followed through on was releasing the damn thing. if you have a camera and no ideas, sell the camera. no stars.