Strawberry Letter

Welcome to 2024! I'll have a recap of 2023 in a few days, but first I've got to catch up on the last few movies we saw. We visited with my sister over the holiday, and watched a number of ridiculous movies. I'll give them a few words, also in a few days. But we also saw a ridiculous, awesome movie that I want to give a whole post to: Strawberry Mansion (2021).

It starts with a man (director Kentucker Audley) in an all pink kitchen. He seems to be dying - possibly from heart problems (clutching pink pill bottles) or hunger (searching in his pink empty refrigerator). Then a friendly looking guy comes in to save the day with a bucket of fried chicken and a liter of Red Rocket soda. Then Audley wakes up. He pays his dream tax on a tablet and sets about his day.

His first stop is to get a bucket of chicken, and he even tries their Chicken Shake, chicken and gravy in a blender. He drives a Corvair and wears a hat. The whole movie has a retro vibe like that. He also sees a man in the parking lot covered in grass and plants, like a bipedal piece of meadow. But that disappears, so it was probably a hallucination. 

He is going to a large pink mansion, to do a dream audit on an eccentric old woman, Penny Fuller (who played Mrs. Drysdale on Beverly Hillbillies, among other roles). Her mansion is decorated wildly, and is full of dream tapes, that look like VHS tapes (Audley does say that this style is obsolete). Audley notes that the audit is going to take longer than he expected so she insists that he stay with her, in her pet turtle's room.

When he audits her dreams, he is shown as a faint video image, with his hat and a notepad. The system circles some items and displays the tax on them ("hawk: $0.30"). But the dream shows Fuller as a young woman (Grace Glowicki) playing a violin in the graveyard, while her father plays a post horn, and reaches into a dead buffalo to pull out a flower, telling her "Nothing dies". In fact, she's the young Glowicki in all her dreams. He also sees the plant man, and many men covered in dream tape, like ghillie suits made of mag tape. 

I will stop with the exposition, and just let you know the movie is full of dreams, both hers and his. There is an odd romance, and a dastardly plot - to put ads into dreams. OK, you figured that out. The part about taxing dreams seems not to be a problem. 

It's all done with a charming, low budget, lo-fi retro feel. The dream tapes are VHS tapes, and they are played on old VHS machine. The user views them by putting on a helmet that is probably a plastic wastebasket with cans, tupperware, and some hoses glued on and all painted black. You get the idea. 

This didn't seem to be all that deep - the conspiracies and crimes, the dream logic, the chicken, the weird suits, I don't think you'll find much under the surface. But that's fine. It's fun and beautiful (in a lo-fi way). 

I'm sure I've heard about Kentcker Audley somewhere - can't forget a name like that. Don't know where I heard it - maybe I read a review of this once, and that's all I got. 

Pointless note: The other movie my brother-in-law was thinking of watching was The Adjustment Bureau. These two movies might have made a good double bill, because of the hats.