Flux Gourmet

Is Flux Gourmet a very dry straight faced joke about pretentious modern art?

Or is it a perfect example of pretentious modern art?

I'm tending towards the latter.

Recommended if you want a movie that takes the idea behind the baked beans scene in Blazing Saddles and stretches it to feature length. Otherwise, if you really must watch a Peter Strickland movie, find The Duke of Burgundy instead.

This is perhaps the craziest and most incoherent piece of cinema I have ever watched. My first instinct is to recommend watching this movie on some kind or narcotic or psychedelic, but in forethought this movie almost convinced me I was already on one.

At first I thought it was just me, and that as a Canadian I didn't understand the humor. That maybe it was taylored for a British audience or something? But I've watched faulty towers, Mr. Bean, The Office and so forth... and that's not it.

The longer you watch, the less funny it gets. I can endure and even find some toilet humor funny, but this film was obsessed with repeating the same mindless jokes over and over again... and I must confess I couldn't make it to the very end. I had to turn it off before I developed a serious headache.

If you want to go on the wildest confusing and messed up ride of your life, skip the Iowaska and magic mushrooms and watch this.

The oddity of the pace and concept wares off about an hour in and feels like it marches on forever without much of a progress or change. Too much repetition, gags go on far too long & at six cycles with little new to add it feels like a bad sketch that drug on too long.

A spoof of performance art and foodies (crossed up) and totally hilarious. The actors play it straight which, unlike Christopher Short's films, made it even more funny to me. There were so many little things that made me giggle...their obsession with a flanger, the OTHER collective (and their name) and the way they stealth around, the patron's head wear, their confessions and dialogues with a flatulent writer and the silly French names for odd foods (that I don't know if they are real or not). Clearly the other reviewers who rated the film didn't get it or were expecting something else but I thought it was just grand.

... but not in a predictable manner!

I've still not seen Berberian Sound Studio, but enjoyed Duke of Burgundy and In Fabric, so I was ready for this to be odd, and up there in the "quite like Greenaway" stakes.. As with him, the cinematography is good, and the actor commitment is mostly fine. I really could have done without the flatulent guy though... the sub-plot itself, the voiceover with matching hard-to-read subtitles (white on often-white scenes) and the actor himself were all irritating, IMHO.

Having said that, there's lots to like if you're into arthouse stuff and I'll look forward to whatever he does next...

Worth a look.