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Maybe the film festival experience of watching 4-5 movies a day on no sleep finally took its toll, or maybe it really was just the movie itself, but kind of had my brain broken by this one and will need to come back at a later date. At once filled with beautiful, surreal, and experimental formal choices that could've only come from one man's wonderful egotistical brain, as well as gargantuanly ambitious thematic reaching worthy of a lost H.G. Wells adaptation, Shakespearean tragedy, fall of the Roman Empire study, retro-futurist sci-fi fable and NYC political crime conspiracy/wealthy family opera movie all in one... But for every truly astonishing, overwhelming, deliberately artificially production designed image that will have you thinking about Metropolis or Citizen Kane, or gorgeous uncanny editing dissolve/split screen/montage, there are also a dozen or more insanely baffling narrative/world-building details and performances (that could be generously described as... "stylized" pretty much across the board) playing around in images that look like Francis Ford Coppola's has put The Fountainhead through a Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow or a Star Wars prequel filter.

Which are all in service of a very broad, earnest melodrama about how everyone needs to stop what they're doing and respect the coolest, most swagged-out, sexy artist/architect ever, who pretends to be a bad boy but is actually a sweetie and doesn't want people to know that because he's so humble, and could change the world and build us a perfect utopia we've never even imagined if only we stopped trying to politically assassinate him in the tabloid media and gave him all of the resources and money. For better or worse, the film of a completely sincerely free and ionate independent visionary the likes of which we will likely never see again. Will be thinking about Jon Voight doing THAT [redacted] boner scene from Black Book on my deathbed (hardest I've laughed during a movie this year), alongside every ridiculously horny scene featuring Aubrey Plaza's "Wow Platinum". Excited to sees the precise shape of the immediate battle lines that will no doubt be drawn between the boring hack critics declaring it a comically misguided disaster by a dinosaur (or maybe the reverse, a Neil Breen "so-bad-it's-good" type deal) and the late-style auteurist backlash/pre-emptive masterpiece reclamation ("the new Southland Tales/Showgirls"!); the truth is probably closer to somewhere in the middle.

Anyway, hopefully more to come later when I can't shake some of these beamed images from my mind and can watch it again under circumstances where I can actually digest it properly.

Further discussion on ep 347 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS, as part of our TIFF24 coverage.