Dreams That Money Can Buy(1947)
Directed By Hans Ricther
Painter and film theorist Hans Richter and some of his friends in the old time surreal avant-garde gang; Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Max Ernst, decide to get together and direct a surprisingly accessible (for these guys this is "Oceans 11"), film about a man who sets up a business selling dreams to people, who cant have any of their own.
After all, as our narrator Joe informs us, "If you can look inside yourself, other people shouldn't be any problem".
Assorted characters come into the Dream shop, a gangster, a repressed banker, an overzealous pamphleteer, a blind man, a bored housewife, etc, and all are given dreams, each one directed by a different surrealist; Ernst, Duchamp, Ray, etc.
Which alternately, delight, offend, disturb, and annoy there patrons.
In that respect it's a little like an anthology film, with each dream, a story in the story, the best of which is a satire of conventional 1940's relationships, staring two mannequins who fall in love and get married.
It's a surprisingly charming and funny little feminist music video (I want the song from this sequence!).
Though the rest of the music is handled by experimental composer John Cage, who gives the film both a traditional comedic tone and one of ambiguous minimal drones and squeaks.
The narrative of the framing tale, that is the story of Joe, owner and dream weaver of the business, is also distinct in that, none of the characters mouths move, and when dialog does take place on screen it comes as voice over, usually with one characters monologues followed by the others.
Most of these are spoken in a kind of Beat style rhyming (this is also a decade before any of the big Beat writers Keroac, Ginsberg, etc, start publishing.).
Though this rhyming can take a minute to adjust to, it gives the film a much needed sense of rhythm and continuity, as a good framing story should.
If you like early avant-garde films or the artists involved, this is an absolute must see, but if your also just interested in early comic fantasy, stories about dreams, poetry, or just watching something visually different, that doesn't just dismiss narrative as a nuisance, it's worth the price of admission.
Few films see the relationship of dream, cinema, and audience this clearly or eerily, but don't take my word for it...
Directed By Katsuhito Ishii, Hajime Ishimine, and Shinichiro Miki 
I hear the phrase “weirdest movie I’
After all what is strange to one, may become dull as dishwater to another. 
Few times have I understood or cared to understand what I was watching less than during Funky Forest: The First Contact. 
I looked into this movie after having had my heart warmed by The Taste of Tea, and its blend of the quirky and surreal images with saccharine sentimentality. 
Funky Forest has no sentiments, it is a series of free associative episodes, the flow like the sketches in Monty Python’s And Now for Something Completely Different, and only where the Pythons were compiling a best of FF is creating a TV show from another universe far beyond ours. 
Some of the episodes are deadpan and some just awkward, a few last only a matter of seconds while others seem like repeat characters you would find on 
Then there’s the equally dull if less annoying “Unpopular With Women Brothers” also known as Guitar Brother, where a man with long hair sings to a fat little white boy of around 10 (referred to as his brother) and asks him what he thinks to which he’s usually insulted. 
The film does pick up at about the 35 minute mark when we are introduced all too briefly to The Babbling Health Spa Vixens, three women at a health spa discussing topics like UFO’s and shy men, giggling, and enjoying a hot tub. 
The other highlights include two teenage platonic friends fantasizing of each other in elaborate dream sequences that combine some of the strangest electronic sound collage music to ever be emitted from a car covered in seaweed on a beach by alien children with some dance numbers that brought the theatricality of 
The film is divided into an A side and a B side, with a three minute intermission and later a ten second intermission dividing them like a mix tape you might play in your own sea weed car. 
Side B is much stronger than side A because it introduced “Homeroom” (perhaps my favorite segment), as well as several more involving alien creatures straight off the set from some David 
Alien creatures used as musical props, used as training in some kind of lactating tennis game, or to generate miniature parasitical blood sucking men for purposes the rational mind was not meant to fathom.
I could tell you why but as we see in one scene when a young girl meets a man in a furry yellow suit with a long tail protruding from his crotch, it would take 3 hours and 10 minutes to fully explain what was going on, and even then we might still be lost. 
Broken into pieces I could see this film scattered across some kind of “Adult Swim” like Japanese late night show, or making the viral rounds as artful YouTube clips. 
Altogether as one entity it’s a chimera of sketches half-clever, half-hilarious, half-repulsive, half-dull, and half-refreshing. 
I know that’s 5 half’s but a film like Funky Forrest, can pull a five 
Frustrating but ultimately worthwhile viewing (if your in the right mood), this might have made it into my immediate favorites if not for the lackluster gags in “The Mole Brothers” and “Guitar Brother’s” segments. 
Intergalactic Girl DJ Group of the Dream-world known as “The Volume” were almost enough to save the poorer parts, as they collectively hold the power over all sounds of living beings, sounds of nature, and sounds of human technology, and use them to lay down what else, but a funky beat in the forest. 
Similar to vignette driven films by Roy Anderson and Luis Bunuel, Funky Forest distinguishes itself from being neither lyrical and poetic as the former nor as 
The fault still remains here, in the fragmented and emotionally vacant episodes (with the exception of the first dance number which is as close to sentiment and logic as the film is willing to flirt with). 
Directed by 
If you like strange sci-
Funky Forrest is like watching a late night surrealist (completely illogical) Japanese variety made in a future when aliens (
