Fateful Findings .. or Finding Perfectness.

What is it about?

It’s Neil Breen being Neil Breen doing Neil Breen things.

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What is it really about?

When I suck on film tapes in broad daylight and in the dark of the evening, it either tickles my tongue so bitterly that a wrinkle-throwing grimace cuts across my face or so sweetly that I disappear into the candy-colored land of milk and honey.

And then there are unique film tapes, cut somewhere beyond heaven and hell, there tickles not only the flesh-colored mouth lobe, nope, pff, there it explodes in the whole mouth area, as if a big-bang, light, all-scorching fireworks go off, whistling all the way to the nasal cavities and from there, hissing all the way to the nerve-housing cauliflower called the brain apparatus, settling in there and waiting to be tickled daily. It shakes and twitches, and suddenly – if you don’t pay attention for a second and the moon smooches the sun in a moment of tireless lust – the ceiling of the room rises to the floor and the floor blocks the front door, from which the mind still quickly escapes never to be seen again.

Fateful Findings is just such a spectacular marvel, peeled from the one true world egg after being hatched under the armpits of a common house sparrow, to be captured on the precious plastic skin layers of a film tape over 2,000 long. A work of art, a child, the brood conceived by God in drunkenness with Yog-Sothoth himself. So unimaginably brilliant that it splits the spectators like a hatchet splits the heads of those very spectators. A cursory glance between two half-opened windows reveals to the left and right eye: 31% of the letterboxd locos are pure, creampuffed, cheese-headed cinema heretics with their 0.5 star “ratings”, while at least 28% stand by good taste: upright and steely, with proudly smoldering chest, with adorable salute to the rising sun instead of the end of the world behind the curtain.

I’ll provocatively step into the wrestling ring (you’ll recognize me by the cardboard box on my niche and the red rose pinned to my lapel) and proclaim: Only those who really deal with films extensively can properly classify, process and appreciate Fateful Findings. Whoever has a different opinion (pah!) should get into the ring and compete against me. But mind you: I have Neil Breen on my side. Your victory is hopeless.

Neil Breen. Director of Fateful Findings. Producer of Fateful Findings. Screenwriter of Fateful Findings. Lead actor. Editor. Production Designer. Set Decorator. Make-Up Department. Sound Department. Casting Department. Costume and Wardrobe Department. Location Department. It is the omnipresent film grain that lights up the audience here in 24 frames per second. Each frame pulses in sync with Neil Breen’s heartbeat. The film reel wears the same bird’s nest hairdo (and therefore rattles as it circulates in the projector). The sound buzzes in the same mouthful.

For the life of me, it’s impossible to fathom what the one remaining demigod Neil Breen is unleashing on humanity here. This is the cinematographically manifested inner life of a highly stubborn man who is deadly serious about everything in Fateful Findings, and for that reason alone leaves the audience drunk as the credits roll. With a story so diffuse and incoherent that in the middle of it I didn’t even know what my name actually was or what the 2nd derivative of the function f(x) = sin(x – 5)^2 is. It’s a story that avoids those well-worn and worn paths of sweaty Hollywood boots, preferring to trudge through the wild jungle that no one else dares to trudge through, for good reasons. With unique dialogues that shred past each other, always repeated as if characters were demented or five years old. With dialogues that repeat themselves and are therefore repeated all the time. As dialogues. A film that is not only about magical days (“It’s a magical day!”), but presents one magical moment after the next. Really, every scene is magical. Every scene! From the very beginning, you sit there with your mouth open to give air to the fireworks, of course, but also from pure amazement and – – – horror.

The greatest astonishment and – – – horror emanates from Neil Breen’s steely earnestness, which makes even tempering steel melt with delight. His films stand apart from (intentionally) badly made garbage can fare á la Sharknado and Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus precisely because Breen’s films are never ironic, never tongue-in-cheek. If a Scorsese film is a masterfully decorated, flavorfully tweaked pastry, while Asylum films are the frozen version of a Coppenrath & Wiese discount, Neil Breen films are a wax crayon drawing of a cheesecake, scribbled blindfolded and with a candy cane chewing mouth, which Neil Breen would tirelessly claim is, of course, a delicious cake.

It’s simply incredible that Neil Breen doesn’t notice in the slightest that his films aren’t treats of award-winning patisserie. This idiosyncratic unreality, however, lures a fascination of unimagined proportions from the blockbuster-accustomed brain areas. Shy but encouraged, this fascination fights its way along the dusty brain pathways to rise in perfection of form as a star on the horizon of the film mind. One’s own world view is shattered thanks to the memorable film images of Fateful Finding, compressed into a lump, further sliced with the scalping knife, impaled with the pitchfork, to finally be heated on a silver spoon on hot bulb light of the projectors and consumed in the ramble of paradigmatic starvation. To feast on this bizarre experience while otherwise redigested is chewed over and over again is to discover the love of film.

And I promise, as I’m still standing here in the wrestling ring (careful not to get strangled by my billowing cape), after seeing this movie, you won’t see movies the same way again.

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Conclusion

It’s Neil Breen being Neil Breen doing Neil Breen things.

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Facts

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What is Stranger’s Gaze?

The Stranger’s Gaze is a literary fever dream that is sensualized through various media — primarily cinema, which I hold in high esteem. Based on the distinctions between male and female gaze, the focus is shifted through a crack in a destroyed lens, in the hope of obtaining an unaccustomed, a strange gaze.