Thursday, January
10 (8:30pm)
Friday, January 11 (10pm)
Tuesday, January 22 (10pm)
Friday, January 25 (11:30pm)
Saturday, January 26 (12:30am)
Admission: $5, $10 minimum reservations
are highly recommended
(If you're going to see Funky Forest, you should probably also
seeIshii's The
Taste of Tea on the 16th or 18th of January.)
Even if you watch just the first 43 seconds of the Trailer, you'll
be able to decide if you would like to attend a screening and how
many of your best
friends
you will need to invite:
"Setting out to review Funky Forest: The First Contact (AKA
Nice No Mori, AKA Naisu No Mori) in any sort of detail is setting
yourself
an impossible task. How to describe the indescribable? How to summarize
and categorize a film that so thoroughly rejects every rule of
conventional narrative? It isn’t that this is a film that
resists thought, it’s that it is a film that transcends it
utterly. It aims for something completely and totally other and
succeeds absolutely. This is film as pure experience, pure joy,
childlike wonder laced with just a trace of the disturbing other
that most of us are just too damn jaded to recognize in the world
around us any more."
"Funky Forest positively defies a critic's abilities to analyze,
categorize, or pigeonhole, leaving nothing to do but describe.
It is such a grab-bag, and the humor is so random and arcane, that
there are just naturally be a certain percentage of people on the
correct wavelength who love every minute of it, and a certain percentage
of people that should never ever watch it in a million years. I
absolutely loved it, and so did the crowd at the Festival."
Or this tepid endorsement from impatient Film
Threat:
"Funky Forest however, is far longer than thirty
minutes. It is two and a half hours long. That’s over 150
non-stop minutes of unrelenting, unyielding stream of consciousness
non-narrative
that assaults your senses on every front. It is a well made, well
shot, well acted, well directed, well scored, and well edited film.
However, it is way way way too long and its length transforms what
could have been a fun/weird movie into a test of patience. If you
like weird, I say go for it. I enjoyed myself for about an hour,
after that I was staring at my pen and wondering if jamming it
up my nose would make the time go by faster."
Not convinced. Read the original PRESS
RELEASE:
Katsuhito Ishii (TASTE OF TEA, Golden Maile winner, LVHIFF 04)
is back! This time he’s joined with two other hip directors
to create this extremely odd omnibus, which stitches together a
number of funny and/or weird short films with overlapping themes
and crossover characters into a wild quilt of trippy dreams, unrequited
desire, horny losers, odd aliens, awesome dancing, bodily functions,
cool music, and some really disgusting creatures straight out of
David Cronenberg’s fever dreams.
A talented cast led by Tad[a]nobu Asano provides a certain gravity
to such far-out sequences as the girl in the after school club
whose ’sport’ involves using a badminton racquet to
swat at the milk squirted towards her by a shy fellow with foot-long
nipples, after which he starts pulling bloodsucking creatures out
of his pants and tossing them at her.
FUNKY FOREST is not for everyone, but Ishii fans, VERMILLION PLEASURE
NIGHT lovers, and the curious or daring will find it a richly rewarding,
one-of-a-kind experience.
