Blood of a Poet / Glass Lips

Director: Lech Majewski
Year Released: 2007
Rating: 0.5

Cut-rate 'surrealism' - influenced, apparently, by Jean Cocteau (feel free to groan loudly) - that takes place in the mind of a mental patient: the images he conjures include a man who eats dog food out of a can, a baby left (with its umbilical cord attached) in the middle of a valley (odd place to lose a baby, I might add), a fire truck on fire and, of course, parental abuse (always a good source of inspiration!) and half-baked religious iconography (a ram that gets slaughtered, multiple people get nailed to objects, Jesus bleeds). Majewski's 'style' - if I can even call it 'his' - might be fine for 4-5 minute looping pieces as a museum-based work of video art for people to peek at and then quickly shuffle past - like the work of Sam Taylor-Wood - but the attempt to make this a 90-minute 'movie' in any sense is foolhardy: the only thing Lech excels at is remembering what objects appear in past scenes (the blow-up doll, milk, a poor dog) and making sure they reappear throughout the picture to give the illusion of interconnectedness and harmony. This is amateurish in the worst possible way.