Continuing with this year's film festival week, we have Amazing Nuts. Which I assume is going to be rare footage of me without trousers. No? That's good, wouldn't have been interesting to most people any way. It's a Studio 4°C production from 2006. It's an anthology film containing four different stories set to music. It's been a while since I reviewed an anthology. Story: The anthology has four stories. Basically, they're designed like a pair of music videos with a small segment in between that gives some dialogue and story details. In that regard, the only one that kind of works for me is the second, GlassEye. Which is about moving on after an addiction-related tragedy. Global Astroliner Gou is a dull piece about a primate looking space cop running around with a wild lady, who cares? Kung-Fu Love is about a girl who randomly gets declared the enemy of the world and scapegoated for a bunch of ridiculous shit and has to fight a bunch of random people. Again, who cares? Joe and Marilyn is about a singer who falls in love with a guy and then he accidentally pisses off some people with power. Who cares?

You could make the case that obviously the narratives are going to be very simple. Each one has less than ten minutes to work with. Which is a fair point to make but even just judging them as music videos, they don't really hold up. In general, the problem with these segments is that you have these overblown visuals that don't really mesh with the songs all that well. It feels like those music videos that are either being deliberately bizarre and random or that are downright pretentious because the singer fancies themselves far more artistic than they actually are.

Characters:

The characters are non-entities. Due in part to the length and in part to the musical nature of the anthology, they rely on archetypes and never get much in terms of development or depth.

Art:

Each short uses a different art style. Gou looks almost like a Gorillaz music video. Which does work aesthetically. Glass Eye may be the best in terms of actual substance, but it uses an ugly rotoscope style. Kung Fu Love looks a bit like that stupid anime I watched about the guy who thinks he's a sword. And that anime was ugly. Marilyn has the type of shameful CG that you would see in a really rubbish film like Food Fight. It's definitely the worst of the lot visually.

Sound:

Normally, I focus more on the acting than the music but, as this is a music-based anthology, we're going to focus on it. Gou uses the m-flo & Doping Panda song "She Loves the Cream" and it's terrible. I'm not exaggerating when I say I wanted to turn it off after ten seconds and had to force myself to keep listening. Glass Eye uses the Ram Rider song "Smile Again." Which isn't as bad but it's definitely a sub-par song at best. Kung-Fu Love uses the Kumi Koda song "Twinkle" which is the only song I would actually listen to outside of this. Our final song is mink's "Here by my side." It's another one that's sub-par at best with the addition of being very Engrishy.

Ho-yay:

There isn't any. All the videos have hetero-normative arcs.

Areas of Improvement:

1. Pick better music. Out of the three videos, only one of them uses a decent song. And since that's a big draw for the film, it's kind of a huge problem.

2. Better quality art. The only video that looks decent visually is Gou with the Gorillaz like style.

3. Stronger matching of visuals to music. I've already said it, but for most of these there's not much of a connection between the two.

Final Thoughts:

This isn't an anthology film I'd recommend. There's only one with visuals that look decent, that's Gou. There's only one where it has a decent narrative, that's Glass Eye. There's only one that has a good song, that's Kung-fu Love. And there's one that doesn't do anything right, that's Marilyn. And it's hard to recommend something that's basically a collection of music videos where every single one fails in some critical area of music videos. As such, I have to give Amazing Nuts a 4/10.