Tonight, volunteering for San Francisco's horror/sci fi/cult film festival, "Another Hole in the Head," I saw a fantastic, and fantastically strange, film: Hitoshi Matsumoto's 2009 cinematic mindfuck Symbol. (A few years back he made a splash with Big Man Japan, which I missed but will see soon.)
This was one of the weirdest and most unpredictable films I've seen in recent memory. And the only one I've ever seen whose main plot elements include sushi, a man trapped in a seemingly holographic room, a toilet plunger, a key, a rope, a Mexican pro wrestler named Escargot Man, and....baby penises.
LOTS of baby penises.
I said afterwards, "That movie is a work of genius." Warped, surely - but isn't that so often true of genius?
A Taiwanese kid, a fellow volunteer, said he thinks Matsumoto was indebted to Stanley Kubrick and that the finale was a sort of homage to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I can sort of see that, in the ending sequence.
Anyway, if you want your mind blown by something truly strange, I recommend checking out Symbol. If you're in San Francisco, it plays one more time - on Saturday the 24th, at Viz Cinema - as part of Another Hole in the Head!
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