***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.***

Autobiographical, poetic, analytical, cathartic, honest and masterfully uneven. Terayama is highly influenced by Fellini's take on the disturbed mind of earthly circumstances and addresses it with Jodorowskian surreal elements. This strange hybrid, though, deepens quite enough into the realm of the psyche; it is a never-ending spinning wheel of philosophy, epiphanies and forbidden passions, an inevitable and prolonged soliloquy to come to terms with oneself's existence which, in the end, provokes nothing more than accepting the surrounding reality, a concept geniously represented by the torn-down walls in the end.

100/100

there's no escaping it, we're condemned to die in the country; the specter of adolescence, fathers and mothers, changing shape as the years pass until the memories move on with you. we never leave our hometowns. a pathetic, inescapable fate.

Terayama's avant garde biographical tale is a beautiful, surreal, colorful experience. It wanders through his childhood, allowing him to face himself 20 years before both literally and figuratively, and fills the spaces with strange characters, odd asides, and bright colors. It's hard to completely encompass this film here; there's so much to unpack.

There's so much symbolism, to begin with. From the color palettes and filters to the more direct Oedipal moments, from the discussions on memory to the circus full of weirdos and freaks, it's all intense and dense but not unfathomably so. This is a truly amazing film that I will have to revisit soon.

December count: 17/100.

A dream within a dream
A vision within a vision
A poem within a poem
A painting within a painting
A past that can never be changed

"Come back, Mom, and give birth to me a second time. Without you, I can never change."

Watercolor memories are all we have left of childhood. The looming reality of adult relationships, dynamics and sexuality seem like an ominous sleight of hand devised to confound and even terrify. Or so it seems to the main character. Age has cast a new light on the situations he floated through as a boy. It's time to fashion a new masquerade for all the people in his memory, now characters. Maybe then disgust might transmute into acceptance. But probably not. 

How do you come to terms with the unspeakable? You write a story.

A rich tapestry of a film that deftly mixes abstract fantasy with realism. Up there with Valerie's Week of Wonders in expressing the pure, unadulterated horror of growing up.

Ethereal, poetic
Theatre of dreams
Children transformed
Lilac light, eternal fright
Internal music of life
Hopes
Dreams
Futures

Naked, delicious
Yearning
Older, I watch
I see life
I am life
Lost, in a dream

Me, 2021

Stunningly gorgeous and absolutely bonkers, this mid 70's twisted piece of Japanese chaos and purist art is just what I needed today.

45 years before Nolan... don't try to understand - just feel it.

El Topo meets Salvador Dali at a Japanese Game Show in the wildest and weirdest coming-of-age, autobiographical story you will probably find out there. Its by no means a film for everyone, and a film that must be in the right mindset.

The characters, each one standing for a moment or a side of the director, are wildly entertaining and beautifully encapsulates their respective meanings and emotional undertones. The cinematography is simply incredible. Seriously, this has to be one of the most inventive and most indescribable pictures out there.

All in all, again, not a film for everyone, but out of all the bizarre and crazy experimental movies I've seen, this one actually seems to have a point and a meaning, even though the lack of any traditional narrative structure might give some audiences a big headache.