You will probably never be able to see it. All I can say is that the movie sure as hell delivers. Often wrongheaded but sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, it has been rejected by film distributors worldwide. The Human Centipede director tops himself with a story of rich Los Angeles women who gather together to masturbate while watching news footage of the world’s misery. OK, I’m really going out on a limb here, replacing Pedro Almodóvar’s exquisite Parallel Mothers, a film everybody should love, with this loathsome unreleased feature everybody will probably hate. Catholic, sexy, and oh so deviantly devout. Think Vali the Witch of Positano meets twin Joe Dallesandros. The Canadian punk queer director’s most successfully realized movie, elegantly shot and seamlessly put together. Kathryn Hunter as all three of the witches has to be seen to be believed. If Ingmar Bergman came back from beyond the grave today to direct Shakespeare on film, this is what it would look like. Finally, fuckin’, fightin’, and frontal nudity are back on the art-house screen, where they belong.
For the lovers of shounen-ai, the characters are pretty important, sometimes more than the plot. Shocking? Refreshing? The male gaze comes out of today’s PC closet in an incredibly well-cast tale of a washed-up hetero male porn star who goes back to his meth-head ex-wife and mother-in-law in Texas to start a new dysfunctional life. Kono Danshi, Mahou ga Oshigoto Desu (2016) One of the main reasons why ‘Kono Danshi, Mahou ga Oshigoto Desu.’ is on this list is because the anime has got potential. Quentin Dupieux, Mandibles, 2021, 4K video, color, sound, 78 minutes.
