States of Control (1998) from Tuna

States of Control (1998) is arty and pretentious, very talky, has no real plot, and no clear point that I could see, and is a terrible transfer with nearly no color. Interestingly, the trailer looks ok. Jennifer Van Dyck is the focus of the film. As the film opens, she is experimenting with sleep deprivation, and says that she fills in what she doesn't like about her life with fantasy. I gathered that nothing that followed was necessarily true. The rest of the film has her doing one strange thing after another. She is not happy with her snobbish and impotent husband, she is fascinated by the director and the author of a play that the theater she works in is doing, spends time saying profound but nonsensical things to her girlfriends, leaves her husband, has an affair, then builds a bomb, blows up a New York Porn shop, and escapes into the woods.

Personally, I would hate to make a film and have the critics compare it to Antonioni. What does that mean, exactly? It's incomprehensible? It's vacuous? It's filled with fuzzy, muddled thinking? It's pretentious? It lacks focus? Antonioni was the perfect candidate for "short attention span theater", and Tuna's first sentence above could apply to many of his films, except that Antonioni's films are beautifully photographed. (Although this director, Zach Winestine, once worked a camera for Kubrick, so he must know something!)

The New York Times gave this film a strange, left-handed compliment: "The symphonic score by Richard Termini is impressive, and adds all kinds of cosmic significance to Mr Winestine's frequent, unmotivated cuts to clouds scudding across a blue sky"

I wonder why they made a trailer.