Introducing the Finished in 5 film review!

The premise: a film review written and “edited” – if you can call it that – in less than 5 minutes. No ifs or buts. No coming back to fine tune the review later.
The rules: no notetaking allowed while watching the film. Simply typing up notes for five minutes afterwards or remembering what you’ve already written is cheating.
No editing once the time is up: well, almost no editing. The only editing permissible is strictly the correction of typos (including the spelling of a person’s name). Making any grammatical changes is prohibited. If you’re a grammar Nazi, reading Finished in 5 reviews is probably not for you.
The challenge: to write as much as possible as quickly as possible.
Why the hell am I doing this: because life is short, time is money (and so on and so forth) and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

So, without further adieu….

Finished in 5 film review: Enter the Void

Little light headed, little hung over, tired like a saggy sponge….roaring night at MIFF after party on Saturday then woke up on Sun to housemate squawking then chicken burger, bath, more beer – Squires – then one Valium, two, probably best medicine for what I was in store for: two and a half hour Tokyo set French directed mind fuck, or so they say, and Enter the Void spectacularly lived up to its reputation. OMG OMG it definitely did.

Film follows a junkie “I’m not a junkie” drug dealer with an affection for DMT, in Tokyo, and when he trips we see the visualization of the DMT – looks quite realistic tho I’m no DMT expert gotta say. Dark, techno city, fluorescent lights and dank aura to it – perfectly suits the film, backdrop comes alive, dir Gaspar Noé always panning and surfing the city.

Some wild innovations; top of the list is the vagina cam, never seen one of them before. Also the way the dir plays with first and third person perspectives is enthralling – camera often stays behind protag’s head or we see the film from his eyes, I was disappointed when that stopped.

Yeah the film is too long – maybe 20 mins too long – and the scene with vagina cam and the uber weird montage of said “VOID” that follows is brave, gutsy, slightly wanky but bold as all hell.

Atmospherically this is a corker movie, it moves and slides vibrates like a familiar but distant nightmare…hey that’s not a bad line almost out of time…not for all tastes but we knew that anyway.

Festival crowd seemed to like it but very divisive….Car crash scenes, WHOA, people squealed, and it’s got a very very intense bullet shot scene – I heard somebody scream loudly, very loudly, and that is the crux of it: this is a LOUD movie.