NP, but w/mention

[Theresa]

Greetings from my "lurkdom",
 Just saw a really odd little film by Steven Soderbergh, "Schizopolis".
Whist searching for some sort of explanation ('tho I enjoyed the movie, was
concerned about the whereabouts of the "brother". I'm sure I missed
something and will watch the dvd again tomorrow. Thanks to the RNC, I have
the week off to do w/ what I choose...) I came across this site, w/the
Pynchon mention. 
  btw, late as usual, "A Boy and His Dog", followed by "Silent Running" are
my top 2 sci fi favorites.
 take care and stay safe,
Theresa

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/06.26.97/schizopolis-9726.html

 
Steven Soderbergh's 'Schizopolis' explores a world in which word and meaning
are absurdly divorced

By Richard von Busack

THIS FILM cannot be analyzed with the brain. And yet it may be (or not) what
the narrator calls it: "The most important picture you will ever see."
Schizopolis, Steven Soderbergh's sporadically slow but mostly exciting
temporary farewell to narrative, tells, in three parts, the story of a
slightly parallel world in which word, meaning and identity have packed up
and gone home. 

An average jerk-off named Munson (played by Soderbergh, who looks very much
like Woody Harrelson) works in a paranoid office where he's supposed to
write speeches for the founder of Eventualism, T. Azimuth Schwitters (Mike
Malone), a menacing figure who satirizes the leader of a certain touchy,
heavily advertised, pay-as-you-go religion. From an Eventualist
advertisement: "Do you love humanity but hate people? See page 111."

Schwitters' double-talk--"It [Eventualism] isn't designed to answer all the
questions; it's designed to question all the answers"--offers one clue to
Soderbergh's intentions. No doubt Schwitters is named in honor of Kurt, the
grand but obscure German avant-garde artist whose nonsense yelpings on his
Dada sound poem "The Ur Sonata" can be heard in the background of "Kurt's
Rejoinder" on Brian Eno's Before and After Science album.

Munson's obsession with his job is destroying his marriage. He and his wife
(Betsy Brantley) hardly speak the same language any more. This is literally
the case--sometimes Munson comes home speaking Japanese. To solace herself,
the wife has an affair with a dentist who is Munson's identical twin.

Soderbergh doesn't unite Munson and Jeffrey, but he does bring back a
peripheral character who has been raving his way through the sidelines: the
scary, half-crazed Elmo the Exterminator (David Jensen), who drives a
bug-zapping truck with feelers and a motto: "Let Me In and Let Me Leave My
Mark." 

The high quality of this absurdist tale will be no surprise to the handful
who saw Soderbergh's completely underrated Kafka or his exciting work in
Gray's Anatomy, where he adorned Spalding Gray's monologue with a dozen and
more cinematic techniques: found footage, sound effects, interviews, a
little computer toasting. Schizopolis isn't as technically flashy, but it's
mysterious, hilarious, very well acted and suffused with the comic mood of
doom you find in Pynchon--a happy film about disease and terror.

It was made on the run, and the effects are cartoony simple: a warning
klaxon (arrrrooogah!) over a chest X-ray revealing cancer, a pair of
welder's goggles strapped on Elmo to make him look crazy and a speeded-up
pantsless guy (like a refugee from one of Richard Lester's experimental
short films) being chased all over creation by the men in the white coats.
The pantsless maniac could well be a symbol of the low-budget director
crying "My ass is hanging out" (20th-century American vernacular for "I have
no money") while escaping the (Hollywood) men trying to round him up. I pray
they never catch him.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Schizopolis (Unrated; 96 min.), directed, written, photographed by and
starring Steven Soderbergh.
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