Day 4: Masters of horror- Cigarette Burns

Sorry about being behind two days, my internet was down. Todays movie was pretty scary/freaky! John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns is foremost a story about allowing oneself to be consumed by obsession. There's a lot of obsessive behavior in this film, and at the root of it all is the obsession with film itself. Being that the reigning obsession that unites these characters is cinephilia, there's a self-reflexive quality to the film- a movie about movie-watching, but it's not in a cutesy or insistent way like the Scream films. It is a film that understands the peculiar obsessions of the cinephile. Jean-Luc Godard once said, "The cinema is life, and I would really love to live life as I do cinema." If cinema is life, as it is for the characters in this film, is it then also death?
Questions like these are far from the mind of Kirby Sweetman (Norman Reedus) when he travels to the house of one Mr. Ballinger (Udo Kier) at the outset of this story. Kirby owns a failing revival house and is deeply in debt to his late girlfriend's father; to supplement his income, he has become a rare-film finder, a celluloid detective. Ballinger, who collects rare films and related paraphernalia, isn't long for this world by his admission, and he has one last thing he wants before he dies: a print of Le Fin Absolue du Monde. Kirby thinks that impossibility - the premiere of Monde saw the audience riot and burn down the theater, taking the print with it. Ballinger says he can prove that there's still an extant print of Monde somewhere in the world, which he does in a creepy and funny scene, and Kirby agrees to take the job. As he searches for Monde, he is forced to confront demons from his past. But as it turns out, the rumored psychological effects of the cursed film may be true! As Kirby goes from place to place and person to person,  Kirby learns something new about Monde from everyone he meets.

Its really hard to blog about this movie because its really hard to explain, kind of like Inception... but even worse haha. The title for instance, comes from the little circles in the right-hand corner of a celluloid print that signal to the projectionist that it's time to change reels. As Kirby gets closer to the mysterious film he begins to hallucinate these cigarette burns, telling him that Monde is changing his subjective reality.

I thought this movie was really weird! I wouldn't watch it again, but if you havent seen it its kind of a movie that you want to see just because its so weird. But if your not into seeing gory scenes I dont suggest watching this movie! The characters in Cigarette Burns, because of their obsessive natures, cannot resist seeking death, and for seeing the unseeable, they are each brought to their own demise. It's the end of the world as they know it. If your still interested, here is a tralier. Thanks for reading!