The Worst Idea Of All Time - Review: Pass Thru

Episode Date: May 14, 2018

This was originally recorded and released for our Patreon supporters in December 2017.Neil Breen's 2016 assault on the mind is Pass Thru; An alien Artificial Intelligence attempts to correct humanity's ill-fated plight by committing mass genocide while hanging out with babes and living in a van in the desert. This film is equal parts confusing, surprising and whatever the opposite of uplifting is. Truly, one for the books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I am not of this earth. I am artificial intelligence from far into the future. I have taken on this human body in order to communicate with the humans, I can move from one time plane to another. I can't go. Many things are going to change now. I'm going to eliminate hundreds of millions of the human species. And those causing the wars have vanished. You're not going anywhere The primitive humans must continue the cleanse In order to survive as a species

Hello and welcome to this very special Patreon Worst Idea podcast. Tim and I just watched Pass Through. Neil Breen's Pass Through. And I don't know whichever one of you guys somehow stumbled into this corner of the internet, but that was one of the strangest, most wasteful 90 minutes of my life. It was incredible in the truest sense of the word. Like nothing was credible in the movie whatsoever. It was so...

Okay, let's do this. What was this movie about? The movie is about... I suppose ultimately the movie is about i suppose ultimately the movie is about uh corruption yeah amongst humans and our need to cleanse the world of those who are corrupt uh not necessarily by picking up arms and you know waging war on one another but hopefully through a benevolent artificial intelligence who travels 1,000 light years back in time to live in a camper van in the desert. Using the following things. Black holes.

String theory. Quantum mechanics. And bending pipe. Yeah. Which is not a euphemism for sex. There is no sex in this movie i will say that no there's a prolonged scene where uh benevolent time-traveling artificial intelligence and the woman who he saves do sort of uh quite literally finger fuck each other with their

pinkies oh did you see this bit at the start yeah they never return to it so they've got a we've just got the movie on in the background, by the way, but on mute just as a bit of a prompt. The film opens with this... I guess it's a hand of what is sort of alluding to Neanderthal man doing some cave paintings, but they kind of never return to it. It feels to me like an homage to 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Oh, true. Oh, oh yeah that's right and there's a tiger on top of the cave who is never necessarily explained this thing is fucking hog wild man this goddamn movie so we've so let's you know name names he calls himself uh till uh which is light spelt backwards a name he literally creates by looking at an empty yogurt container that says light and fit and the lady who who's called uh amanda no kim is her niece which she establishes very early in the movie by saying i have to save you you are my sister's daughter you are my niece i have to save you it is a triumph of script writing and performance um i i just it's so hard to gather your thoughts there are so many characters i said at one point in time that

this is one of the most even-handed directorial displays in living memory because about 30 people who presumably have no acting experience are all given a chance to shine across the first 45 minutes of the film. I want to describe the movie in usual film terms, but it's kind of hard. But it's sort of at the end of usual film terms, but it's kind of hard. But it's sort of at the end of the first act, I guess. There's a scene where, oh boy, it's a little bit hard to determine exactly what's going on. But basically, there's a lot of immigrants who I think are trying to sneak across the border.

And they have an interaction with basically like the border patrol officers. Are they the people who had the big guns? I thought they looked like they were running some sort of maybe either drug or human trafficking cartel. Anyway, they were definitely cast as villains. They were baddies. It was hard to discern why they didn't want these, you know, these immigrants to cross the border, but they were certainly upset by it.

This guy is a fucking maniac. Neil Breen wrote, directed, produced and starred in this film which is always a pretty intense red flag when you got a double up of those rows let alone a quad while i kind of said that this movie is about you know benevolent time travel trying to you know stamp out corruption beautiful americans what is what do you think neil breen's intentions were like neil breen is a visionary and it's very important that we all understand this because his realizations on the general human population and how we've corrupted the species by giving into political corruption and our biases, which he frequently brings up. You know, the man is basically a messiah walking among us and he's got a real intense look on his face.

I did a quick Google of him before the movie kicked off. He used to be an architect and a real estate agent, which boggles my fucking mind. We watched part of his Kickstarter for his upcoming fifth feature film. Tentatively titled Twisted. Which he starts by saying, thank you so much for the support of my previous four theatrical films. I personally have been theatrically profitable,

so it's going very well in that regard. It is hard to see, apart from the fact he's obviously getting free money from maniacs online, how this is in any way profitable. The comments on his most recent attempt at garnering funds from All In Sundry

was fucking hilarious as well. There was a guy who wrote, I feel as happy as an investor in the Hindenburg. Yeah. I was going to say Titanic either or pick your disaster because this movie is special

and this is his fifth go around the block fourth no this one's his fifth the next one's his sixth no no this is his fourth this is his fifth this screams of a fourth attempt for me this is not his fifth film we can verify that later but he um

he shoots up that's right he shoots up heroin and dies at the start but then that's kind of not ever mentioned because he exists in the rest of the film his spirit comes out of his body but also he's a time traveling artificial intelligence this is by the way we should emphasize a one location film so he obviously found a small area of mountainous desert yeah it looks like we're in arizona if i had to guess and nearly all of the action is set there save for a fantastic cluster of scenes and my personal highlight of the film which is when he uh goes down that ladder the ladder that's within the caves that's okay no it's when he they get in front of the they go inside of the beautiful mansion oh my virtue of

some i don't know how i don't know what how you pay for that but he paid for like the facade of a big mansion yeah it's like stock footage that you can get that he's applied to a green screen so he's got himself and a couple of other actors to stand in front of a green screen and just like well maybe purchase maybe obtained through other means um yeah just like interiors of so there's yeah there's one establishing shot outside a mansion and there's about three rooms within it and about seven people who all you know cluster in different configurations and combinations and they all detail and you know very clearly the ways in which they are committing sin or evil by using their political bias to you know sway the the media or uh by using their own personal bias to sway politicians there's never really any articulation beyond that it is hard to overstate and i i don't mean to be awful to anyone involved in the film

maybe this is a direct direction note but the acting is criminal it's kind of it boggles the mind it's hard to overemphasize how little sense the acting choices make but it's so true to the world of the film don't you think well i mean. I mean, can you imagine how bad good acting would look in this movie? It would jump off the page. Yeah, that's true. Fuck, it was confusing. It's so hard to discuss and review because there's so many moving parts

and none of them fit together at all. It's like if you bought a jigsaw puzzle and you pulled out all the pieces and there were different misshapen pieces from 10 different jigsaw puzzle and you pulled out all the pieces and there were like, you know, different misshapen pieces from 10 different jigsaw puzzles and then you tried to do it and then afterwards you tried... This is like writing a review for that puzzle. It's like all you can say is it didn't work.

It's amazing to me based on the script writing that sort of is evident in the film that Neil Breen can put his pants on in the morning. And that's why I'm so confused that this film exists for us to be able to enjoy. Like, it's, you know, a 90-minute film, which has both visual and audio components that work in tandem. It blows my mind. And special effects, we might add.

Amazing special effects. We've just witnessed a bit going on behind us where um a blowtorch gets lit up inextricably as well i don't think we return to that um any reason why he's got a blowtorch someone's got a blowtorch and it's like an ms paint picture of a flame has been superimposed on top of the nozzle it's so good and if you if you like that and only and we're afraid that you only see it once within the film, you need not worry because the exact same MS Paint flame is rendered for any time a gun is used, which is at multiple stops throughout the film.

It goes so heavy on gunplay, which is amazing considering how he can't do special effects. This film is very hard to review very hard to think about okay if we think about it the case so the film is neil's uh his efforts to communicate the ways in which he feels the world has gone to shit yes and so everything around that is the casing yeah so like it's got a the first third essentially is establishing what, you know, thin plot he has written down, which is there's immigration.

Oh, okay. Right. The problems of the world are yeah. Immigration, which he deals with in a very confusing way politically because he tells everyone later to go home. But then also like the other elements of plot that he has,

he sort of you know throws up in the air is there's an old sickly professor who has believed for a long time and you know the possibility of time travelers i think or maybe just far traveling aliens yeah and then there are some young three young kids who all are somehow in touch with the professor and also believe they're almost disciples of the professor yeah and they're very into astronomy and uh writing songs yeah although we never get to that's i think that's more just to establish their young and cool social people who are friends with one another there's a bit of patter in a phone call where we learn that

have you written any songs lately yeah yeah three Yeah, three. And I'm very proud of them. Me too. You should play the songs next time. End phone call. Oh, this is a good scene. This is when... So what's happening on screen right now is a crazy shot where we're seeing a lot of nipples down, nipples to legs,

and like a wooden impromptu table that's made in a bunch of packages of what i guess is it's meant to be heroin or cocaine and they take about a minute for the guy in the middle to pass the packages to other people going this one is for the politicians this one is for the ceo this one is for the bankers this one is for the international bankers this one is for the boardroom this one is for the corrupt cops this one is for the corrupt judges and it's you just it goes on and on and these people are called out multiple times throughout the film after we spend some time jumping around the green screen interior of this mansion, we wind up spending about 15 minutes in a newsroom where the news presenters are relaying the mysterious disappearances

taking place around the world, which are all due to this benevolent time trip. Till. Till, as his name is. Yes. Till kind of evaporates people and it sort of um makes it seem like it's the rapture because he he has a big diatribe about how he's only going to knock off the baddies in the world the people who are causing humans harm. He is the arbitrar of good and bad. It is truly staggering that he had the follow through. I mean,

it is worrying that he got the movie finished because that tells me he believed he was making something either good or. I'm fine with that. I'm fine with him not abandoning the project and just saying it through the end. I'm just confused that he had the capability to do so. Like, it is true. It doesn't match up much in the same way

that this movie, nothing really matches up. The mere fact that the script writing that we saw and the acting and all the decisions that got made that we saw came from the same man and he managed to finish producing this film. That's why it makes me uneasy there's something not quite it does yeah okay so sorry so anyway look back to the moving parts in here so we've got the professor we have the kids we've got um

the immigrants trying to cross the border the evil the people who who capture and that scene just reminded me that the immigrants were carrying a lot of them were carrying small amounts of drugs narcotics yes and so they're stopped by either border patrol or a competing drug cartel and taken away the woman are taken to a bedroom and someone in one of neil's friends houses i presume and the men are taken to an abandoned bus. And there are two mirror scenes where the women all say the mistakes they've made and how they would like to be strong now. And then all the men,

I think, are given exactly the same lines to deliver but told to put their own spin on it. And then they all parrot back exactly what's been said in the previous scene. Which makes you feel like you're going insane because you're like, we've just had this exact sequence of lines, but they were delivered by other people.

And then, so I feel like those are the main groups. So then there's the two of the immigrants break away, which is Amanda and her niece, Kim, and they come across our hero, Till, and fluctuate between sort of trusting and relying on him and being very scared and abusive towards him and they oscillate wildly between those two attitudes towards them like and within one scene we could see both within one shot we might see beyond uh you know the the emotional oscillation i would also like to emphasize that they move around

the various limited locations just at random between frames between shots between scenes like one what is one scene could take place with you know 10 different shot compositions and like 10 different 10 again separate locations within the wherever the scene is set. Now, I just want to sort of put a line under some special features within the film. There are interstitials featuring a tiger, which most of the time, Neil has sort of edited a close-up profile picture of his own face next to this tiger,

which he's just sort of bought from a stock footage website or something. it is the most hog wild way of getting out of the scene because neil is in all of the scenes so you're going here's some neil and then here's an interstitial of neil with a tiger and now we're back to a different yeah the interstitial is presumably meant to show to us uh neil or till reflecting on his work and what he must do going forwards the other staggering part about them is that every time we ordinarily see the tiger it is surrounded by the desert where most of the film is shot but the stock footage of the tiger obviously it must have come in front of a mountain setting like a a snow-capped mountain setting so like all the close-ups uh in front of an entirely different environ

from where the movie is otherwise set. But they're establishing shots of the tiger in the original setting. Neil's also got a drone involved in this film, which I love. The other thing is the location he's picked is actually quite picturesque. He's got a good zone to shoot in, and he's just kind of up to no good within that film location but it is naturally very beautiful you know there's a desolate beauty about that desert and moreover i don't know there was a car in this movie neither did i uh moreover i i do enjoy some

of the special effects that he uses uh like when he does leave his body after shooting up at the start of the movie which just honestly the more i think about the less i understand the motivation for that being in the movie uh it's really good he gets him walks away the shots framed up on like it's like 10 degrees off which is infuriating because everything else about it is right uh but the way he leaves his body is well done when he plays back footage in reverse of him dropping rubbish yes to prove that he can levitate he can levitate matter i like that like i like the green screen mansion scenes because i i like the i like the production elements and techniques used. Yeah. I mean... Someone's given it a crack, aren't they? Yes.

Probably the newsroom is the biggest thing that sticks out for me. I don't know if I love it or hate it. This is why it's hard to attribute normal kind of... I didn't know whether or not I loved or hated it until the qualifying sentence was spoken by him when he takes over the entire broadcast, where he says, I am broadcasting this from this international media centre.

And it is so clearly established the way he envisioned the newsroom to play, which is just like this one stop, you know, like, I guess. There's banks of script. So first of all, this is obviously a stock background that he's gotten from somewhere. And it's just a lot of banks of static TV screens. And then in particular, there's four that form a bit of a column in the middle above his head.

And they've all just got the same globe, but different sort of segments of rotation of the globe also the way we're introduced to the international media center where they're broadcasting the news is we hear an off-camera voice go five four so there's just two news presenters a lady and a man sitting in complete silence we hear five four three two one commercial which means at the end of that part of the broadcast was the producer counting down to commercial we then see the presenters in the commercial with the lady saying man i don't like that politician his biases and corruption is so obvious and then five four three two one you're live silence for three seconds action the same presenter saying thank you senator x for this even-handed no but that's

the beauty of neil's writing as well they didn't even bother to give that senator a name thank you senator thank you senator for that thoughtful uh was it like thoughtful and sensitive comment yes fuck man crazy so many people are in this movie you guys you can't imagine how many people are in this movie, you guys. You can't imagine how many people must have seen this film because there's probably 80 cast members in here. Or is there actually 10 and they're in different clothing than I've been had by the genius filmmaking brain of one Neil Breen? Well, this sort of trickery and playing around with numbers is actually a good trigger for one of my other favourite special effects,

which is at the very end of the film, after he has impacted his cowl on those who are corrupt and evil, their bodies temporarily manifest in the desert. Yes. And he walks, him and his sort of, by this point, love interest, Amanda, walk past the bodies

and this is a cluster of eight people lying down that in post-production they have taken. Stacked the photos. Flipped and stacked. So it's like. So you look, so it's just, you're greeted with the scene of what looks to be 300 bodies piled up on this desert scene with a little pathway in between all the bodies that

they walk down and then and then you start to look around a little more closely and you're like oh that plaid shirt that plaid shirt of man appears 15 different times in slightly different positions fuck man i know what you mean though about these effects it's kind of cool to reverse engineer and think about the process that they went through. Someone thought about that and they laid it out and they did it.

And they kind of did a good job on it. The other thing that I'm just thinking now is because this scene struck me as very funny. So at one point when he's building a connection with Amanda and her niece Kim,

who sort of represent hope for humanity, I guess, the more I think about it. There's a scene where he offers them their camper van to sleep in, which is needed because the niece, Kim, is very afraid to sleep outside for whatever reason. We know this because she says, I'm very afraid to sleep outside.

Exactly. You cannot accuse him of not keeping us up to speed with the feelings of the characters but he says i'll uh and even though he's this incredible artificial intelligence who has the ability to travel through time and space when he is living in the human world he lives in absolute squalor it is a disgusting abandoned camper van littered with like a rotten mattress and garbage and he says you can stay here i'll sleep in the car up front i'll clean it out for you and there's a scene of him just throwing various different bits of rubbish from his mattress out of the caravan and the movie is so tonally confusing because i'm sure he has a sense of

humor there are little playful bits where i'm like you're trying to have fun with us but because there's no clarity as to when or why this is happening like i think that scene might have been meant to be funny ah i mean that scene might have been meant to be funny oh i mean do you think there are meant to be funny scenes in this film no i don't think so but it is so hard to tell it's kind of it is funny that moment but intentions are important the reason it's funny is because it goes on for about a minute and it's just him throwing cans out of his caravan. And the two shots that they sort of cut between is him throwing the cans,

which is just picture a guy throwing cans out. There, you've got it. And then a shot of them kind of firing out. So we're looking at Amanda front on, and it's just the doors on its side. And so these cans just kind of whiz past you in and out of shot. And she's just getting progressively on its side and so these cans just kind of whiz past you in and out of shot and she's just getting progressively more how would i describe it confused and angry

yes about what's happening and just keeps going what are you doing what is this oh what's going on i don't understand and it's just like he's cleaning out man and then don't have to think god but and they she they take in spite of their initial reluctance, Amanda and Kim do take up his offer of accommodation. They do sleep in the camper van, which also leads to another one of my favorite scenes, which I don't think this one was meant to be as funny as it was, where she's folding up an old bit of towel

or some other similar material. It's a blanket, because I think it's the morning after they sleep a blanket and there's footage of her folding it and they used the same shot of her folding it twice consecutively in between a shot of him folding also a blanket with a big hole in it and it's the same as earlier when they mirror they parrot the same scene twice with the woman and the men, where it's like, are you deliberately trying to scramble my brains right now, dude? Look at all these people who are in the movie. There's so many of them. This guy's about to get killed.

We're up to the great bit now where everyone gets to have a line. We're cutting between the boys and the women's respective housing situations. And also there's a lot of infighting because they're in such a desolate situation. Obviously these people, as anyone would in an apocalypse, and it's not an apocalypse, but it's akin to temper's flair. Let's take a step back. How does a man like Neil Breen exist?

back how does a man like neil brain exist man i think that there are so many people out there who have these ideas and who and just like unfailing self-belief that they are prophetic and that what they have to say is good and valid and important and you know if you're lucky and not that impressionable, you'll get to meet some of them and enjoy the experience that is sort of coming across these verified lunatics. And then a smaller sample size still have the dedication, commitment, and means, this does not look like an expensive movie. No, I'd say not.

To actually create a manifestation of what their message is. And get to the finish line, to be able to have a product that you can share around and everyone can enjoy it. But what did you tell me? How did we get this copy of the film? Because this is not... Well...

This is not available. These movies are not available for... They're not on any video-on-demand services. No, they're not. This movie, I think, came out last year. And it's, unfortunately, I had to go through some dubious means to get it online. Because the only way you can obtain this film is through DVD. Which Neil will post to you after you buy it.

It's amazing that this movie was made last year. Because it is truly, and I say this as a great compliment, it is timeless. That's true, actually. That's why the car kind of breaks it at the start. And the car doesn't date it that much. The only real technology we see are Acer laptops, but the sort of computers that you have seen in use for the last 15 years. That's true.

And it wouldn't be surprising to me if this was made last year and they're still using the computers just because that's what was available to them. I just find it so depressing, the idea that all of these adults... I tried to make a movie like this with friends when I was about 11. And even then I remember being like,

this isn't how making a movie's meant to feel like or look like. And at some point you see what you're making and you're like, oh. And we just bail out. We stop. But Neil didn't stop. Neil Breen doesn't stop neil breen's unstoppable but like you say there were up to 80 adults in this movie so they got 80 people around to some person's like depressing house but this is actually quite an interesting case study and what it is to be an

actor because you are so incredibly at the behest of other professionals. You kind of trust, even if you don't fully get a script, you just sort of have to trust that it's good and that the person has the vision to know what it's all about and the big picture. And you've got to trust that the director knows what they're doing and how to assemble all these parts of the jigsaw puzzle. But then sometimes, I mean, there is a natural filtering process that happens

where generally because films are so collaborative and so expensive you actually do need to be quite a smart and dynamic person to get the means to be able to enact your vision but sometimes neil breen gets through the screen yeah and then we wind up with this and that's why it's so incredible that this exists. Because I'll tell you one thing about Neil Breen. He is unique. This movie is special. Parts of it exist in a similar world to The Room. Yeah, but it's actually punching below The Room in terms of...

So far below. Acting, writing, and I would say a cohesive narrative. I could tell you kind of what The Room's about. Do you want to attempt to give me the wikipedia synopsis so just the briefest overview of this movie like if you can get it if you can get it to a paragraph that would be incredible an ai from the future travels to our time on earth to teach humans about the wickedness that they have enacted upon the planet and each other that's what i would say it's pretty good there's so many other things that he's messing around with in this film though real real big ideas i love that's kind of what i love

about this this movie as well is that the ideas are so goddamn ambitious that the story he's trying to tell or the themes that he's trying to allude to about like the big global problems of the financial system and the legal system and the education system and all these things that get named nothing is off limits nothing he it's like he's he's locked himself in his room for a week and just gone on youtube and the first thing he watched was loose change the 9-11 documentary and then took his hands off the wheel and let youtube just take him through the next suggested video and he was in there for seven days and then when he uh arose from that he he penned this masterpiece and then proceeded to make it because he name checks all of these things which is just such like internet self-made documentary

fodder about um dark matter at one point he's talking about and quantum physics and uh and like the world banking system yeah but political corruption this is this is why it's good though because he seeds those ideas through the 80 characters he introduces us to and this is the first sort of third of the movie where he's establishing what is loosely going to serve as the plot and then the middle third is the second act is more or less him at one point when he so he is going around taking out all of the corrupt people and eventually he lands himself in the newsroom and he takes out the newsreaders because they are also corrupt. They are wicked too.

Then he delivers his diatribe and it's like him re-articulating the point that he has raised through all of these other agents in the film but just in one chunk of text and that is what I think he wrote first. That's what he wrote when he came out of that YouTube hole. And then he built the artifice in which he could ferry that message around it. Like, I think the movie started as that speech.

Right. Because when I was watching that, and he's just barreling the camera telling you exactly what he thinks. I was like, this is why this exists. This is what you want to do. It's his manifesto Yes That he delivers to camera

Fuck it is wild That's the thing though Because it does have such a cultish feel Yeah They really smashed that drone shot Yeah man The drone use in this I'll give full points to

Although as you said All of the footage looks slightly wonky Because Yeah I think they've used There's like an effect That you can use called warp stabilizer Where if the footage has come out a little bit shaky looks slightly wonky because yeah i think they've used there's there's um like an effect that you can use called warp stabilizer where if the footage has come out a little bit shaky you can and the editing process apply some software to it that kind of evens it out but if you apply it

very liberally you get a lot of like visual it's quite distorted and uncomfortable and i think that's what's happened here i think what he's's done is Neil's taken that warp stabilizer slider, chucked it onto a hundred and then hoped for the best. Yes. And rendered out. But to come back to the manifesto thing, what is slightly unnerving about the whole movie is that it feels so cultish. Everyone's involvement feels as though it came because they in some way

revered or respected Neil beyond what is sort of, you know, normal to an almost religious level. And that's what worries me is whether, like what is his following? What do we know about this guy when he's off screen? Well, that's why I got very uncomfortable whenever he was touching the woman who sort of serves as the de facto romantic lead.

You're the one whose pinkies are touching for about two minutes. It grossed me out so much. That one was just gross. It was like this shot is nauseating. There was also another nauseating shot where she lifts up the back of her t-shirt to reveal a lower back tattoo of a tiger. Yes.

And that is the entirety of the shot. Yeah. But the bit that creeped me out was whenever he sort of lays hands on her and he does a couple scenes where he does it in a pretty hammy kind of a way she passes out and he picks her up actually she dies and he brings it back to life and just whenever he had his hands on her body i was like i'd feel deeply uncomfortable with this because this is this this guy's a maniac and i don't know what would have happened during the making of this film. Yeah, it's all...

It feels very unsafe. The whole film, you at no point have any reason to trust the filmmaker. So you're constantly on edge and nothing fits together. So when the mind wanders back to the production process, you're like, I don't know, did he actually maybe kill a couple people? That's why it's so confusing. Did he actually maybe kill a couple people? That's why it's so confusing.

Because it's just so... It's so much work to get a movie this long done. And he did it. And there's dialogue. It's like... He wrote it too. You know? Yeah. I mean, I guess...

I know that sounds dumb to say, but he sat down and wrote this thing. And people delivered it very poorly as well. Let me say that. The acting in this, and the way that the lines are delivered is it beggars belief and the old brain is actually kind of cool i sort of like how he talks he's got a cool voice and you sort of he's a madman but he is a convincing madman and that it feels like he believes in himself and what he's doing would you like to have a beer with this man absolutely not you could not pay me enough money to sit in the same room as this gentleman

what would you like if you did get to talk to him i would leave i would say could you please show me the exit say somehow in a circumstance neither of you have your phones yeah it's the two of you and you're waiting you're just in a room well actually he came across as um somewhat sane in the uh money drive video his go fund me page hey he seemed somewhat relatable yeah he seemed that guy and you know what this is art this is his art that he's making so he shouldn't have to limit himself to normal social niceties and social cues definitely is art this is art i'll you, I don't know much more about what this is, but it is art. Here's the blanket scene.

It looks like he's trying to wear his blanket with a hole in it, but then he goes back to folding it. And it is, look, he's smiling. They're kind of joking around a little bit, but they're folding one piece of fabric each for so long that it doesn't make any sense the fabric has both respective pieces of fabric has such a massive hole in it that folding it is the most redundant yeah which is part of why i think it's meant to be funny it is uh this is the thing is if you took some of the show if

you muted this movie in fact you could almost play it in an art museum all right and people would sit down on that weird backless chair they put about 20 meters from the screen and sort of watch it for five minutes and they'd be like ah i really understand that and keep walking and you could do that with this and it would kind of hold up yeah because of how offbeat and uncomfortable it is so here's here's how i would like us to proceed i think we should watch the whole back catalog of neil breen's films for the next few you're like you want more of this i want content you know as the movie was sort of 70 minutes in tim said i miss we are your friends so to say this is such an uncomfortable and uh you know arduous viewing it was tired we sound exhausted, it's because I am emotionally

or more mentally worn out by this film. Because you're constantly trying to make sense of what's around you and none of the parts make sense. You want a reason to keep watching. I do not know who's responsible for choosing this, but they... Multiple people are

because this got voted. This got voted on. Fucking hell. And it's been floated a few times. Really? In the past yeah This is up there with I can't remember that movie we watched That

Sherry O'Terry was in It was something tale Was it called It wasn't called Southland Tales Southland Tales Yeah I thought that was confounding

That was a That was a different That was a different breed yeah But even And even and even that was like even that one with hercules in it one with hercules where he was a religious professor and he like he was all by that christian movie that we watched and he challenges the atheist god's not dead yeah yeah it was a pearler wasn't it i mean those those pale in comparison with regard to just whatever the fuck, man. I'll watch more of these with you, though.

Yeah, I think it's important that we do. I want to understand Neil Breen's oeuvre more. What about this? Because what about we donate some, you and I, put some of our own cold, hard-earned into his next film? Yeah, that feels right. That feels right to me. Also, this was a great scene.

One of my favorites. He's organized several rock circles going, you know, like a ripple effect from the smallest in the middle where he stands outwards inside of some mountains or some peaks in the desert. And there's like a good three minutes of him with his arms out in a Christ-like pose, just rotating. And the shot varies from a medium close-up on his face and arms to a wider shot where you see him amongst the circles. And it just goes and goes and goes. Can I just say on that mid-shot as well,

the camera lens is visibly dirty. That's why there's so much um flare on can you see that you can see the dirt on that is a dirty lens is what we're looking at there yeah but you know they were it was a gorilla skeleton crew you know they're working on a tight budget both time wise and money wise i would money-wise. I would love to have a chat to the person who is the camera operator or director of photography on this film. They have to worship at the church of... Well, that's what I mean. They would be interesting because I think they would be a good bridge between the insanity that is this finished product of a film and the real world.

Because the camera work isn't terrible. It's pretty terrible tim yeah tim is noticeably poor well only because you're comparing it against actual films that exist in our world this is like another another realm you know this looks and feels like something an 11 year old made in the same way that the story just kind of keeps opening and going wider and it doesn't quite make sense and they never know what to nail into. Like, everything about this, which is, yeah, again, which is why I find it uncomfortable that it got finished.

Because there's so much opportunity for so many people to be like, can we all just agree to bury this and never speak of it again? Do you think that this film is a testament to that phenomenon um which is sort of commonly associated with nazi germany of following orders and no one kind of wanting to break ranks they did that experiment in um was it harvard or something one of the ivy league i thought it was stanford i think i know yeah the stanford experiment the prisoners and the yeah uh prison keepers or whatever a little bit like that wardens i guess it's a slightly different phenomenon but that thing of just bowing down

to oh no i'm sorry i'm conflating that with their other experiment which was the one where um they had to shock someone oh with the increasing voltages and if someone so they they got a participant off the street and just said hey come and do this scientific experiment we'll give you you know 100 bucks for your time and they came in and their job was to flick a switch and they thought that they were electrocuting someone at increasingly high voltages but it turns out the person in the other room who was screaming when they got quote-unquote shocked was an actor and the whole thing was make-believe but in the mind of the participant that voltage kept going up and all it required was the scientist standing next to them in the

lab coat to say the experiment must continue and the participant kept increasing the voltage so anyway back to this it feels like all the people who were going into making this was just like hey dude this is crazy and neil breen being like the the project must continue yeah i think i mean someone had to have such a commitment of idea that they they've had to see this thing through because if if the person in charge faltered for even one second this house of cards would have come tumbling down this was also a highlight a scene where he described they come across an abandoned piano in the middle of the desert and he describes music as timeless and then they just bang out

what is meant to represent music. It's an approximation of piano noises. It is not music. It is four sets of untrained hands on a piano. No, just four hands. Two sets of untrained hands on a piano. Now, the funny thing about that scene as well is the fact that um they've over

dubbed sound onto that and it still sucks yeah it's still not good that's why it's good but that's the music he likes i'm so gutted he didn't call himself light and fit yeah that's what it says on the yogurt pottle when he first names himself um light and fit like that's genuine comedy that would have been too close to a real something a real moment of something we both were When he first names himself. Light and Fit, that's genuine comedy. That would have been too close to a real something. A real moment of something. We both were willing him to say it. We really were.

Because he sets it up like that's what exactly is going to happen. Instead, this genius time traveler who has not yet given himself a name just reverses one of the words. Oh, fuck, man. I'm going to turn it off. many uh thumbs up do you give this movie i give this movie two thumbs down yeah so do i no i don't i give it actually do you know what i give it zero thumbs in either direction because the ambition that is visible on screen really appeals to me. It highly appeals to me. There are some bad ideas.

I am impressed he got it done, but I am angry he got it done. I'm shocked he got it done. I'm confused that he got it done. I am also, yeah. I mean, I would be curious to know those people who voted or wanted this film to be discussed, whether or not they've actually seen it. I mean, I would be curious to know those people who voted or wanted this film to be discussed, whether or not they've actually seen it. I mean, I would, you know, without...

It's very hard to get. Without the fact that we had to have this conversation, I cannot imagine beyond how hard it is to get, actually making myself sit through that. I have never, my body has never wanted to get... My phone is charging upstairs. Yeah. The entire time I was watching it, my brain and body was screaming out for sweet release like some stimulus that wasn't this picture

i got nothing left well then we'll call it a day thank you so much for uh voting on that little gem that was our our wrap-up our post-watch discussion of pass-through neil brain's i'm gonna piece de resistance I'm going to get online and research the shit out of this dude starting right now I think we all should see you on the internet everyone and I think we're going to call off voting for a little while and just

hammer through some of these the Breenverse, catch you there folks bye bye