Love Me If You Dare

Jeux des Enfant - in French (Games of Children)- is my favorite film ever. Very much in the style of Jean Pierre Jeunet; you like him, you like this film.

Ghost in the Shell

Laputa, Castle in the Sky - Studio Ghibli

Utada Hikaru - Passion

All of the Lights

All of the Lights - Kanye West
This music video led me on to watch Gaspar Noe's 'Enter the Void' and is a visual stunner despite stealing most of the aesthetic ideas of our mentioned film.
Hype Williams adds his signature to the short with those circular lights behind our artists and as always makes our female figure of beauty - in this case Rihanna- absolutely stunning.
Shame Kid Kudi had no idea where the camera was and faces in the complete wrong direction in his 15second feature.

Enter the Void

'Enter the Void' is surely the hardest film to condense into a 3 minute trailer. So many visuals, sounds and ideas are put forward in 2 hours that there seems to be no simple way of understanding what Gaspar Noe wanted to communicate without just sitting down and watching the entire film. I did so last night and my word was it an experience.
Enter the Void follows the life of a drug dealer in Tokyo, or more accurately his death and how human existence changes in the after life. Disturbing, erotic and depressing the director creates a stunning piece of film that gives us an incredible experience of drugs - without us having to deal and take them.
This central theme runs the risk of alienating watchers and or distancing them from characters however at the heart of this work is sibling love - something that everyone to an extent can relate to.
Our two main characters are stuck in an impossible situation and victims of a pretty horrific childhood yet their strong relationship is our only consolation in the drug ring sex fueled world they exist in.
However overtones of incest pervade so many of the scenes that even viewing these episodes we are left feeling uncomfortable.

What's also quite interesting is the philosophical implications of the film. Noe's impressive camera work mean we nearly always see what the main character sees - a bit like in peep show but to produce the most inverse emotional effect you can imagine - however upon death the mind leaves the body to follow those closest to him still alive.
This implies the director subscribes to our good old Dualism theory: that the mind is separate from the body. After looking a bit at this philosophical area, I couldn't help but feel the piece was like a relic of Cartesian thought and not really keeping up with the times; the current most popular theory -physicalist theory- contends that consciousness is a product of material, atoms and structures that respond to changes in the environment. So mind and body must be one and inseparable.
Dualism certainly has much emotive power, as we glide detached over Oscar's sister working in a strip club to his lover estranged from her own family in a cupboard of a kitchen to his druggy friend trying to escape the police through the flashing light of Tokyo. Without this philosophy the film wouldn't have much of the beauty it offers. I just can't help but feel it isn't what death is like...