I get I may not be the intended audience for this. Thom Yorke was a name I had to look up and still don't know if I like his stuff. And Paul Thomas Anderson, while a critical darling, has always left me kind of underwhelmed. But ok. I like experimental stuff and the teaser released on youtube did at least promise it would be a short experiment. Going so fas as to spell out what a one reeler used to be... Which I guess would have been fun to hear Quentin Tarantino spout out during a brief interlude.
But within seconds of pressing play (it's released by netflix now in 2019 though acvording to IMDb it's a 2018 thing. Maybe it was in festivals back then?). Within seconds, I got a reeling case of oh, crap... It's one of THOSE...
In short. It's a simple man meets woman courtship story told without dialog and set to... Modern dance and some music that felt kind of bland. The humans move around like puppets imitating various poses of normal life in rapid succession while the male protagonist alternates between joining them in their routine and being confused by them. And in the midfle they are on a slanting floor filmed so it looks like they are leaning imposdible angles. Gosh, Batman, I haven't seen that one before.
And that's the main gripe I have here. The story is simple and open for new angles but apart from the floor being askew for a bit the whole thing again left me cold. The dancing, instead of revealing or illustrating where mainly obfuscating and off-putting and distracting. So instead of it being an awesome experience I just kept asking the 15 min runtime to get on with it.
I think the credits mentioned VistaVision, but other than that I couldn't say anything here was worth remembering.
I hesitate to call works pretentious... But when it so clearly wants to be analyzed and studied and at the same time not rewarding any effort with any insight... I would call it pretentious... Because, man... PTA at least used to be able to choise a story and tell it adequately even if I wasn't wowed by his previous works...
