Bellflower: AK's Musings

Turgid wastoids, beleaguered louseabouts and a muscle car built for the end-times, an image of pubescent despondency awash in the cultural purgatory of its youth, castaway and wandering. Bellflower asserts in bro-banter and failed relationships, roiled in the unending, grasping churn, until the chain snaps, the belt loosens and the fire erupts.

"Our friends are a bunch of tools", a late night utterance amidst the drunken remnants of the perpetual party, a defining statement of life cast about a group of post-education slackers, splayed in disorder and vice. The description emerges from a disorienting fog, the hazy, dirt-stained pursuit of getting fucked-up, half-conscious in the gutter, stagnating with the larger creative goals of existence. Unguided and rutted the past's once fruitful objectives dissipate as fabricated, erecting a motivational chasm, whose trespass lies in the torments of the future; adulthood the ever-elusive, striving and deadening blur, the self-starting machine caught without spark.

Woodrow and Milly reside in the intoxicated modality, syphoning their time from barley and rye. Woodrow forecasts his life post-apocalypse while Milly rides shotgun, stabilizing from the in-dash tap. Woodrow and Milly are not compatible people, but alcohol is a skillful binder, facilitating an awkward, asymmetrical relationship of impulsion, whose premeditated demolition shuffles the barbiturate haze. Conjuring the automotive numen and gorgonian paramour, Medusa arrives wreathed in fire and immolate valence, wrought to usher the transgressive ignition.

The spark catches in a pit of depression, sunk in the afforded cellar of libation; the vertiginous, brain-damaged space uninterested in the past, its goals and constructs. The welling self-loathing spiraling out to infect those involved with blazoned conflagration. Assembling a tearing, screaming drone of exultant petulance. A cleansing, bloodstained, cathartic rage of progression; pressing out into the developmental unknown, unshackled from the past.

Bellflower marks the directorial debut of Evan Glodell, an impressive, quasi-autobiographical look at the violently creative power that arrises within, the self-imposed need to fulfill, and the obnoxious banality we allow ourselves to descend.