Bought another 7 DVDs.

The Atrocity Exhibition

As I've said before, just to see what can be done with an essentially unfilmable novel. This one is liberating only in the sense that there's no narrative to focus on, so your mind is free to just enjoy the stream of images and the zen-like haikus of J.G. Ballard's dialogue, which are lifted entirely from the book. A lot of the descriptions are missing, especially the Liz Taylor bits. Also the description of sex in the novel which has a marvellous aesthetic kinesthesia, is painfully reduced to shots of a penis entering a vagina (what's so great about that?). At 1 minute I was already bored, at 11 minutes even more so and at 23 minutes - I was looking at the time display on the player to see how much film is left. The audio-video sync is also atrocious - thee's a gap of over half a minute in some scenes. Jim Thirlwell's (Foetus) score is fantastic though.

(Square root of) 964 Pinocchio

A Japanese cyberpunk movie in colour. Dunno what to make of this. The colours are nicely picturesque. I thought it would be another "Organ" which was crap but no, there are quite interesting visuals to keep anybody interested. Not much of a plot to speak of, just a lobotomised sex slave on the rampage. There is a very long vomiting sequence and eating back the vomit for anybody who is interested in that kinda thing. For me, I found the slowed-down short "Caterpillar" in the bonus features to be more engaging than the main feature.

Scarlet Street

Generally noir at its pinnacle. A quite complicated story which is highly unpredictable and you're not quite sure where it will go. There's also a subtext of the ambiguation of art and artists much in the same way as Woody Allen's Bullets over Broadway. Its complex overtones might put some people off, if they're expecting some direct story as "Double Indemnity". But I enjoyed this thoroughly.

Renaissance

Visually arresting although the plot is cliched. Some researcher gets kidnapped and it's the nefarious plan of a sinister mega-corporation as she discovered something important. That aside, the motion capture (digitalised movements of actors) is great to look at and rendered in monochrome, making it look like a French sci-fi comic. Could do without the obvious Blade Runner references (huge video ads, concepts of humanity) and the architecture which is lifted from the first Batman. Not too bad if you can stand a cliched plot.