I loved Bellflower, in a weird sort of way. It’s difficult thing to describe the experience of seeing it, though I did my best, and it seems to me that different people take very different things away from their personal viewings. Since Sundance and up through now, the real-life existence of Medusa (a prop in the movie) and filmmaker Evan Glodell’s travels with the car have been a part of the story of Bellflower and, oddly enough, while the crew was at SXSW, P Diddy of all people managed to figure in.

This video seems newly published (it was sent to me with no views on YouTube) so it should be fresh, and it’s definitely adorable. For those that have seen the film, or those that see it soon when it hits theaters, you’ll realize how bizarre it is to see P Diddy arbitrarily show up and sponsor it. At the very least, it’s fun to see an interesting (and broke) filmmaker get a nice little surprise that will genuinely help him out.

 

I mentioned it vaguely in my review, but the aforementioned real-life existence of the Medusa vehicle and the home-brew nature of the film itself that ties everything together- the filmmakers, the story, the film itself, the film’s real-world path through festivals and toward theaters… It all bleeds into one another in a way that is difficult to explain unless you’re keeping up with the filmmakers and their journeys involved with Bellflower. How I put it in the review linked above…

“Finally, the fact that the car, the flamethrower, the performances, and even the means by which the film was captured are all clearly legitimate customized creations of the people we’re watching gives Bellflower that aforementioned metatextual edge that fully pushes it into a thematic uncanny valley. Something about so many elements of the movie being genuine makes one fear that emotional horror may escape the confines of the movie and spill into the real world.”

…which ultimately doesn’t matter to someone who never gets to see the car or has no interest in the film outside of just watching it. That said, some of the most interest and enduring movies are interesting and endure precisely because of their real-world context- nothing we watch exists in a vacuum.

To help out, I also have a little video of my own that I shot at SXSW and haven’t uploaded. To be frank, it was very late at night when I took it and by the morning I’d forgotten it was even there. Now is a perfect time to debut it, and it involves FIRE- which is cool. That starts about 1:00 in if you’re impatient or the living embodiment of a Metallica song.

Interested in Bellflower? Every have a celebrity show up and hand over a grand to you for no good reason? Let us know in the comments or on the boards.

DISCUSS THIS on the CHUD Message Board
&
Like / Share it on Facebook (above or below) if you think it’s great!