Good evening 😴

Hi, friends! I’m a couple days late but I still wanted to see your smiling faces this week. So here we are.

A trailer for a new movie called “Moon Garden” recently hit the Net that — though I can’t vouch for the film’s actual quality — sure looks purty. I’ve seen some compare it to Phil Tippett’s “Mad God,” the experimental stop-motion film I wrote about last year, but I’d rather liken it to “What if Terry Gilliam made ‘The Wizard of Oz?’”

Here’s the plot synopsis:

Following a terrible family accident, a young girl slips into a coma, finding herself thrust into a dark and surreal industrial wonderland. Haunted by a chattering nightmare that feeds off her tears, the little girl must follow her mother’s voice on a transistor radio to find her way back to consciousness.

Nothing too original, right? We’ve all seen this before. And yet “Moon Garden” specifically seems to have an enchanting, handmade feel, with creepy character designs and beautiful sets. Part of the dreamlike imagery is also thanks to the filmmakers using “expired 35mm film stock with vintage rehoused lenses.” There’s no release date yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing the final project.

Now watch this 👀

Two characters wander a different kind of dreamland in “Before Sunrise,” which premiered at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival. Directed by Richard Linklater (“Dazed and Confused,” “School of Rock”), it’s a simple story about American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and French Céline (Julie Delpy), two twentysomethings who meet on a train in Europe and spark an instant connection. Jesse convinces Céline to spontaneously get off the train with him in Vienna and they spend the rest of the day wandering the city together until he has to board his flight home the next morning. The entire film is their ongoing conversations, punctuated by moments of silence and connection. It’s supremely romantic.

The plot was inspired by a woman Linklater met years before in Philadelphia, with whom he subsequently wandered the city for the rest of the day. In 2013, Linklater revealed that the woman he met had died in a motorcycle crash before the film was released. Whether coincidental or not, death plays a significant role in the film alongside debates on the meaning of life, fate, religion, and relationships. When they wander through the Cemetery of the No-Name, Céline explains how she’d been there before as a child and that there’s one grave that stood out to her: “She was only thirteen when she died. That meant something to me, you know. I was that age when I first saw this. Now I’m ten years older and she’s still thirteen, I guess. That’s funny.”

Time has played an important role throughout all of Linklater’s career. One of his films, 2014’s “Boyhood,” was shot once a year for twelve years, documenting the growth of the main protagonist. And he currently has an adaptation of “Merrily We Roll Along” in the works, which will be filmed over the course of the next twenty years. “Before Sunrise” is no exception, itself having two sequels, each shot nine years apart. In this film, as soon as Jesse and Céline leave the train, the two slowly enter a time vortex, you could say, where nothing matters beyond this newfound connection, even though it has a definitive expiration date. In that brief span, they transcend death and anonymity. They pass through the cemetery into what else but an amusement park, full of life and wonder.

As the film progresses, the delirium of a long night sets in and finally exhaustion. Contentment. Sorrow for the finite, but hope for a sort of reincarnation in the future, a topic that’s brought up early in their conversations. And finally we’re presented with shots of different places they visited throughout the film, now empty and devoid of the couple’s context. For what is time and space without the other? What is an object without its void and the space between, something we previously tackled in “Mass,” a film that’s also about people thrust together in an alien situation and forced to do nothing but talk and find some sort of connection and understanding. “Before Sunrise” is a beautiful film, a favorite of mine since I was a kid, and it’s still just as interesting and charming as I remember.

Until next time! 👋