Quantum Cowboys

I was lucky enough to catch a screening of this film last night, and it is wonderous.

The film uses a mix of animation along with live action to create a surreal world that is always shifting and changing. This does take some getting used to, but by the end of the movie it works seamlessly. The story as well is incredibly confusing, but once you adapt the mentality of "I'm just gonna run with it," it manages to provoke deeper discussion that I love to see from films.

The animation in particular is something that I have never seen, and I doubt I will see again. The way it combines so many styles into one more or less coherent story is marvelous and incredibly impressive.

Now, is it a perfect movie? No, certainly not. Like all movies it has its flaws, but you can tell this is someone's (Geoff Marslett's, in this case) untethered vison of a film. Because of this it becomes something that is truly incredible to watch. I can't wait to watch this again.

Last night I got the opportunity to view this in muenzinger at CU. It was very well produced and it had great story telling! The soundtrack obviously was worked on a good amount of time and it matched the scenes very well! This was the cast and crews baby for the time spent producing and it grew up as a beautiful film piece! This was very well directed and it was very enjoyable for me and hopefully for many others who get to see it in the future! At the end of the viewing, Geoff talked about his experience creating this bad-boy and is an extremely passionate film creator and was very personally inspiring to me! I could have gotten down more complicated description of the animation, but I want to leave those reading my review, it was really great! There was a quantum physics aspect that made it deeper and led me to think a lot about what it was saying! *I'm still in a deep ponder in the state of wonder.

I saw this at the Hell's Half Mile film festival in Bay City, Michigan and was absolutely mesmerized by it. It's one of those movies you need to see several times to fully understand it (i really doubt that I did) but it's such a wonderful visual experience that it aches to be seen on a big screen. It feels loose and improvised, though I doubt that it was, and the cast is just so damn cool. I mean, Neko Case and John Doe?! Come on!!! Stylistically, it's all over the place, which could hurt but really serves the film and the entire experience. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie where every moment was a surprise and every image a work of art.

As an artist myself, a painter specifically, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie as a moving, literally and figuratively speaking, flowering of rich, unique, and varied animated imagery. I will include "Cosmic Cowboys" in my own personal curatorial list of works I find particularly insightful, entertaining, and strangely relevant in a world hellbent on violence and destruction. Regarding relevance or the question of why this movie is of our present time, the movie offers Hope, at least, a hint that we are not totally powerless and without agency, that we have the ability to peer beyond an authoritarian materialism, and that our mere observation, our particular focus, can indeed affect future events.

David Kwiecinski, Hatch,NM. 2023.

QUANTUM COWBOYS is a very challenging film yet so much fun to watch, talk about with your friends afterwards, speculate and theorize about. This movie takes such huge and ambitious swings intellectually and visually there is no way you can't applaud it. Director/writer Geoff Marslett is a true mad scientist of a filmmaker with a wild imagination.

The cast and performances are captivating. It's so easy to fall in love with the trio of Lily Gladstone, Kiowa Gordon and John Way. David Arquette and Frank Mosley as Colfax and DePew really daw you in and help bring even more scope and layers to the story. The rest of the supporting cast bring so much life, fun and intrigue. I cant believe French New Wave icon, ANNA KARINA is this movie!!!

I want all the sequels/spinoffs to QUANTUM COWBOYS so definitely tell your friends about this and check it out!