WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971)

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Silly me I suppose. I had no idea what I was in for. I knew nothing about the movie and it caught me off guard.At first I though this was being one of those artistic documentary like movies, in which a whole bunch of people are having deep thoughts about life and happiness. It took me a while to realize that it were all characters in this movie and it wasn't being a documentary at all. It's more a sort of satire and if you take it that way this movie is being pretty bearable and good enough for what it is.Not that this movie is just for everybody though. It's the sort of cheaply made artistic movie, that's filled with metaphors and doesn't necessarily following a main plot line in it. Some people will hate it, while others shall absolutely love it. I was stuck in the middle somewhere.Thing I liked about this movie is that it's also being the sort of movie that makes you think. It makes you think about what you're seeing and what the characters in it are trying to tell you with their actions and pieces of dialog. It's probably true that you could keep watching this movie over and over again and get more- or completely different things out of it, each time you watch it.But it's still not my cup of tea. It's being a bit too vague and odd all at times and most of its themes don't even feel all that relevant anywhere in today's world and present morals and standards. Perhaps you should look at it more as a period piece, from a time when there still was sexual repression and communism and capitalism still seemed like a real threat to the world.Still a great watch for some people. Just not for me.6/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Not sure why I kept watching except maybe hoping it would get better.. but instead it couldn't find an ending for itself. There is no way the film had a shooting script to start with, merely lots of poor quality black & white film to splice together incoherently. To make it even more tedious there are white subtitles against white backgrounds in at least 90 per cent of the footage. The "comedy" is nonexistent but primal screaming, wailing, bogus techniques of healing are all there to make you squirm. Imagine that in 15 consecutive minutes you see: shock therapy, scream therapy, ice skating, Stalin, a mentally ill person banging his head against a wall, a plaster cast penis & a talking head without a body!! This film has to be a joke..if you took it seriously you must be on drugs while you watched it. Pretentious, amateurish, and trust me on this--a complete waste of approx 1.5 hrs that you could have been getting some sleep. By the way, did this director sleep with the director of Night Train to Venice?

This takes the form of seemingly everything from 1965 to 1975. It's a hippy-dippy, uncritical, anti-establishment goof on the work of Wilhelm Reich, with agit-prop sub-plot for good measure. 'What's New Pussycat?' meets 'Theremin.'Wilhelm Reich's tenuously connected work and pseudo-scientific gadgets (WTF does the accumulator do? How do orgasms change cloudscapes?) are more like something a flakey "inventor" would make than a serious analyst. Just because a previously intelligent person suddenly declares a correspondence between any two things (war and chocolate cake, or... orgasms and Marxist Utopia) doesn't make it so. Just because a quack found some drama queens to indulge him doesn't mean the work was valid. His ideas are as odd and harmless as his punishment was draconian overkill. Another testament to the usual misuse of government to keep Joe Average feeling unthreatened, regardless of how oversensitive Joe's threat mechanism is. Reich (to me) had firmly lost the path of knowledge, but he didn't seem to be harming anyone. No one involved (Reich, his patients, the authorities) apparently knew much about moderation. Thank God that period is over and we've said goodbye to both Orgonon and the Police State.The movie is amateurishly edited together with a side-narrative; a frigid wretch intones about sexual freedom, but can't actually make her way to a sexual event (with an ice skater) to save her life. Much better to talk and talk and talk about the state and it's repression of the perfect workers collective via sexual shame. Good times! This movie left me thinking that rank-and-file demagoguery (the preference of the individual to address society than another person) and the national urge to ramble on ad nauseum about half-understood political ideas, would have to be defeated before the Soviet chokehold could successfully be removed from the population. This half offers a few laughs but it fails to build.It's not easy to watch due to weirdness and annoyance, but at least this movie engages provocative ideas, something most movies flee from. I left early, having got the (very repetitive) point.

I have seen this film with my sister in law. She is 22 and studies Audio-visual Communication at the University. At the same time, she enrolled 2 years ago in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She wants to become a dramatist. I recognised that she's got a brilliant future as professional. Friends, family, teachers and I admire her talent, but I feel certain reluctance to her tendency to consider good films (or novels, or whatever)only those which are full of vacuous symbolism, outdated contra-cultural plots (when not completely plot less), without regarding the minimal care of the style, the elegance, a well pace,...All this you can find it in this horrible pastiche called W.R. - Misterije Organizma. The first part of the film is o.k. The director tried to make a documentary about W.R., but all of the sudden, changed his mind, and includes footage of another fictional film. The rest of the film is an endless irritable succession of naive sex scenes, dulled speeches, pretentious and clumsy dialogs,...: In just one word a completely absurdity. I wish I could be scandalised at least!!. But it doesn't provoke anything to me but a headache!! Directors like Luis Buñuel (La Edad de Oro), David Lynch (Lost Highway, etc.), Bergman, Dreyer, Lars von Trier, Jean Cocteau, Alain Resnais (The last year in Marienbad and Hiroshima mon amour)etc., show more cinema and more elegance and taste in just one photo-gram of their films than in all this distasteful film. A perfect torture, which lasted around 90 minutes, but fortunately they weren't enough to cause a collective suicide in the movie theatre.Finally, I could stand that my sister in law preferred this sort of films to Billy Wilder's films.Well, no comment...