Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé)
All the camera tricks in the world can't save this ponderous bloated nothing of a film from its own putrescence. Aside from the actually quite good opening section, this is how the film goes: the camera swirls around a room for a bit, someone says something, the camera zooms into a light source or something else, there's a trippy light show, then we're in another scene in which the exact same thing happens. After a while the formula gets boring, and Noé realises this, so he throws a bunch of sex scenes in there as if to say "look, I know, and I'm sorry, here's something else" and then that goes on for way too long instead.
Occasionally, the picture goes to black, no sound or anything. Every time that happened I was thinking surely I have been sat here for 160 minutes already, there can't be more? and the numbness of my buttocks seemed to confirm this. No sooner has the thought occurred than the camera starts swirling about again, showing me more people I don't care about doing things that aren't interesting. Maybe if it had been better acted I could have tolerated the rest, but this is ostensibly a bunch of "street" characters played by people who have apparently never even been near a street. It's dreadful, the dialogue frequently lapses into "hey man, you got the stuff, yeah? Hardcore!"
It's a shame, the basic premise of seeing through the eyes of the dead as possibly imagined in Bardo Thodol is interesting enough, and the camera style, while it stops being impressive after about the second or third time it does its little swirl and zoom routine, and stops being interesting around the same time, would have been fine if the content lived up to the idea. Unfortunately it was impossible for me to care about 90% of what was presented to me on the screen, and the 10% I was interested in was swept away in the tidal wave of fancy camera tricks and CGI and neon lights and naked people. This is an exhausting film not because it is intense but because it cannot stop throwing stuff at you: here's some stuff, look at that stuff, do you want more stuff? here's some more stuff LOOK AT ALL THIS FUCKING STUFF!!! Apart from all that it's a really straightforward film that probably could have been told more effectively without the ghost camera swirly zoomy stuff-throwing sex-having nonsense that is this two and a half hours of my life I'll never get back.
Early on in the film, one character tells another that his drug dealer is a pervert who smears his own excrement on the back of his sex partners' heads. I would rather have seen a film about that guy than this.