Size | Seeds | Peers | Completed |
---|---|---|---|
1.37 GiB | 0 | 0 | 0 |
From Amazon:
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Director Philippe Mora has one of the most unusual careers in the history of cinema, ranging from critically praised documentaries on the 1930s to schlock horror like Howling III: The Marsupials to the respectful movie made from Whitley Strieber's book about alien abduction, Communion. But According to Occam's Razor has to be the oddest of the lot. It's part home movie, part wide-eyed speculation about the presence of alien visitors, and part meditation on the influence of the media over vulnerable minds. This strange patchwork begins when Mora's children claim to have seen a UFO. When Mora begins to investigate other such claims, he interviews a Spanish woman who says she was impregnated by aliens; a lawyer who discusses the legal options of abductees who've been anally probed; and an Australian abductee who suggests that Jews and aliens have been interconnected for centuries (he's Jewish himself). The movie's point of view is unstable--sometimes it seems bizarrely gullible (Mora shows a picture of Hitler on the phone and proclaims it's a picture of Hitler talking with an alien) and sometimes almost satirically skeptical (after a woman abductee says an alien brain-wave-reading device looked like a colander, there's a montage of the woman wearing a variety of colanders on her head). Some portions of the movie are obviously fictionalized; others are just too peculiar to call fake or real. In the end, According to Occam's Razor is a strange, surreal trip through Mora's mind.
From DVD Verdict:
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His movie continues, with home movies on Super-8 film shot by Mora years earlier, clips of Ronald Reagan apparently talking about an interstellar threat, clips of Orson Welles discussing the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938, herky-jerky footage of apparent sightings, and people discussing alien sightings and abductions.
As Mora points out, you won't know which people talking are real, and which ones are actors. With the actors, you won't even know which ones are actors who've seen UFOs and which ones are pulling your leg. Still, it's a pretty good bet that the man identified as Sandy Gutman (Austen Tayshus, Sliver) is a leg puller, since Tayshus is a well-known Aussie comic. When he talks about his alien abduction and being probed, it definitely takes on the feel of a comedy sketch. You might wonder exactly what's going on in the sequence in which a foreign object, allegedly otherworldly in origin, is removed from under a man's skin. Or you might just feel squeamish. (That's the only bloody scene, although there's profanity, mostly from Tayshus.)
One favorite scene uses disjointed images of a real-life accident scene (or something; Mora says in the commentary that he doesn't even know) to suggest real menace, but eventually shows us the only menace he can find—a cockroach on his patio. As Mora explains, it shows how taking away a piece of the puzzle can make something routine seem more dangerous.
Mora's movie is a blend of (mostly) fast-moving images, full of the intonations of seriousness that have become cliché in the wake of TV's In Search Of. The video quality is, in a word, terrible, since Mora intentionally made it a hodgepodge of digital work, Super-8, and old bits and pieces. One of his favorite techniques is the negative image, which obscures the actors, or even makes a point here and there. The picture has lots of spots, flecks, and lines, and the camera work often looks like Mora might have been holding the thing himself while he's on camera. The sound quality is also erratic. By the end of the film, though, you'll realize that Mora wouldn't have it any other way. The jumps leave his audience disoriented enough that even hardened skeptics will be toying with the idea of alien invasions, if just for a moment.