Wavelength (1967)
Premise: Avant-garde, experimental film. AKA: Zooming in on an empty room for 45 minutes with horrible screeching noise and blinking light filters.
Rating: Total indulgent, parody-inducing, self-important, pretentious bullshit.
I want to be open-minded about weird stuff like this and recognize that even though I might not see the value in it, that its place in history is important, if only for technique or for completely breaking rules so that later, more traditional films would feel more comfortable bending them.
But I just can't with this.
This is weird-for-the-sake-of-weird bullshit. Calling this one of the greatest films ever made feels like a punk.
It's literally a room of windows with a picture on the wall. The movie zooms for 45 minutes, so slowly, you can barely tell, towards the picture.
Things that happen:
A woman walks into frame with two men and she tells them where to put a couch.
8 minutes of empty room with weird filters and shrieking noise.
2 women enter the room and drink from cups while Strawberry Fields plays on their radio. No dialogue.
8 more minutes of further higher-pitched shrieking.
A man walks barely into frame and seems to fall dead half-into frame.
8 additional minutes or wailing high-frequency and empty room.
The original woman returns and nonchalantly reports the dead body over the phone.
8 minutes of empty room and noise to round things out, ending on a picture of waves in the ocean.
After watching a movie like this and writing a review about it. Do you ever take time to consider the wrong turn your life has taken that this is what's become of it?
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