Hi! You are Currently Being Recorded (2023) [Chattanooga Film Festival 2024]

Dangerous Visions Shorts Block

We traded our privacy for security. And when we lost the privacy and kept the security and realized it didn’t make much of a difference it was too late to get our privacy back. We live in a world where there are cameras everywhere, and everything is taking footage of something going on in the background and foreground. More than ever we’re being viewed through some kind of robotic lens.

And we’ve yet to really prepare ourselves to know how far that rabbit hole goes.

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Blue Velvet (1986): The Criterion Collection [4K UHD/Blu-Ray]

Now Available from Criterion Collection.

My first experience with David Lynch was with “Mulholland Dr.,” a film that is far and away breath taking but also difficult to decode. After trying to find an explanation for it someone told me that it was only one of his easiest to access. But I like to think that it’s “Blue Velvet.” Lynch’s 1986 Neo Noir is a nightmarish fever dream in to the American dream. Lynch paints a portrait of two mirror worlds, one with the perfect Norman Rockwellian picket fences and women with babies on their shoulders. The other America is a bleak and violent Wonderland where deviants and criminals lurk in every corner waiting to prey on the weak.

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Bedroom People (2022) [Film Maudit 2.0]

The new standard for horror entertainment has become the lo-fi, filmed on VCR fodder that had lent something of a realism to even the more outlandish premises. The aesthetic has been used in a lot of facets of horror in the last eight years, including horror movies. The classic ARG aesthetic just works and it works well for the short from skilled animator and concept artist Vivien Forsans entitled “Bedroom People.”

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no more room in hell (2023) [Film Maudit 2.0]

“no more room in hell” is a masterclass in how to make a horror documentary without skimming copyright and licensing fees. Rebecca Shapass directs a de-construction of the Romero movie series by taking a deeper more abstract look at how environmental and ecological elements contributes to the rush of the dead, and the downfall of society. Shapass includes snippets of dialogue from the various scripts and spends a lot of the documentary’s time peeking in to various industries including excavation, as well as the rule of capitalism.

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Nu (2022) [Film Maudit 2.0]

I imagine Olivier Labonté Lemoyne’s is going to lend itself to all kinds of interpretations. Maybe it’s just abstract for the sake of being abstract? Who knows? In either case, “Nu” succeeds in being as oddly creepy as it does in being kind of silly, exploring the idea of fear vulnerability. The whole concept of beings that look like nudists plays on the whole nature of voyeurism and the reluctance by many to engage in it.

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