WAX, OR THE DISCOVERY OF TELEVISION AMONG THE BEES
A film review by Caleb J. Howard
Copyright 1992 Caleb J. Howard
Hi there. I just thought I'd share a small thing. Last night I saw a movie by the above title at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto as a part of the Festival of Grand Illusions. The film is 85 minutes, produced by Independent Electronic Cinema, and consists of a powerful mixture of computer imagery, military footage of weapons guidance systems, state of the art video post-production techniques, and a *lot* of Babylonian subterranean bees.
I'll use the terms I'm familiar with to describe the movie as it appealed to me, because that's my option.
The plot of the film traced the karmic journey of the protagonist, a designer of targeting sights on flight simulators and beekeeper, through his links backward through time to his grandfather, and forward through time to his destiny. The concept of time was illustrated as fluid and malleable at the spiritual level. The use of video processing and computer techniques to smoothly move the viewer from the spiritual perspective of the protagonist to the perspective of a huge hive of bees to the perspective of the dead souls held on reels of magnetic tape that contain the landscape data of the flight simulators. This is intended to convey the flavour of the film rather than as an in-depth review, so I will leave it as such.
Concepts of interest to me especially well illustrated in the movie include the state of consciousness of the hive of bees taken as a whole and how this state of mind reflects the global state of mind of humanity and all life taken as a whole. Also well illustrated are the interactions of mind, television, reality and virtual reality. Especially neat was the exploration of the state of mind of a semi-intelligent guidance computer in the nose of a tank-killer missile in the Gulf War.
As far as I'm concerned, the movie is absolutely inspired, and is a precursor to the future of media events. I was consumed by the imagery and enlightened by the vision of the film and the mastery with which it was executed. I also felt at the end of the film that perhaps a half a dozen others in the theatre were similarly enthusiastic, and that the majority were left completely cold. Several people left the theatre during the film (one man was really angry at having wasted his money on the film). At the end, there were only about six or seven of us applauding, and the rest were looking at us, puzzled.
I thought it was great, but would only recommend it to people with an appetite for the surreal and the symbolic.
Has anyone else seen it?
-caleb
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews