WAX, or the Discovery of Television among the Bees -- David Blair (1991)

Script: David Blair
Camera: Mark Kaplan
Music: Beo Morales, Brooks Williams

Cast (in alphabetical order)
	Father Bessarion	... 	Himself
	David Blair		... 	Jacob Maker
	William S. Burroughs	... 	James \'Hive\' Maker
	Florence Ormezzano	... 	Allellee Zillah
	Meg Savlov		... 	Melissa Maker
	Dr. Clyde Tombaugh	... 	Himself

Original torrent from Greylodge

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COMMENTS (IMDB)

A Very Strange Film, 19 January 2001
Author: debtman from Columbus, OH

This is a very strange movie. I\'m not even sure that I can accurately
describe the plot, because it doesn\'t make any sense and I don\'t know
if it\'s really a plot anyway. But I\'ll give it a shot. I rented this
based on the quotes on the box, which described it as being like Total
Recall, only with 10 times the weirdness. After seeing the movie, I
don\'t know what they were talking about... The whole movie is narrated
by David Blair in a very monotone voice, and has no similarities to
Total Recall that I see...

The movie starts out with James Maker, who is a member of something
called the Supernormal Film Society whos goal is to film the spirits
of the dead walking among the living. There\'s some background on this
which seems largely irrelevant. Then we meet his grandson, Jacob Maker
who is the main character of this story. Jacob is a programmer who
works on aircraft simulation programs. He\'s also a beekeeper of
Mesopotamian bees he inherited from his grandfather.

So, after a bit the bees drill a hole in his head and put in a
television, which the bees use to start showing him things. About this
time, a statue of Kane outside his house kills the statue of Able, and
Kane is marked with the X symbol. Then at work, Jacob wonders why his
co-workers never wonder what happens to the missiles they launch that
don\'t come back (never mind that a programmer probably doesn\'t deal
with missile launches), and he realizes that they turn into flying
saucers which fly to the moon where the dead live.

About this time, the bees start showing him things on the television
and he makes a big pilgrimage to the Garden of Eden Cave which the
bees tell him is the entrance to the world of the dead. Jacob then
realizes that the bees are actually the dead of the future, and goes
to the cave. Although it is a 40 miles walk through the desert, he
makes the journey a bit easier by becoming a bomb part of the way. He
then learns that he has to kill someone to fulfill his destiny, which
is to be reborn in a wax body that the bees make in the cave.

When arriving at the cave, Jacob learns that the cave is actually the
entrance to a planet inside of our planet where the bees live. There,
he dies and goes to join the world of the dead. For a while, he
becomes the X symbol. Then he becomes a poem in the language of
Kane. Then he travels to some other planets, including the Planet of
Television. Next he becomes a rival beekeeper of his grandfather. Then
he decides it\'s time to fulfill his destiny, which is to kill
someone. So, he becomes a bomb and blows up two Iraqi soldiers in a
tank. Then he becomes the X symbol with himself, his grandfather\'s
arch enemy, and the two soldiers he blew up.

And that\'s pretty much it... Make sense? No, I didn\'t think
so... David Blair calls this Independent Electronic Cinema. I don\'t
know what to call it. I can\'t figure out if this movie is bad because
the weirdness of it all is hard to get over. And the filming is
worse... One could today make this movie on a home PC fairly
easy. There are 3 distinct types of footage in the movie. First, there
is a lot of stock footage of bees, bombs, and other scenes. Second,
there is footage that was shot with an amateur camera I\'m
guessing. Third, there were digital renderings. Nothing fancy, these
were things like 3D letters and symbols, and renderings of the cave
ceiling and floor just on the screen with a black background.

And it\'s heavily edited. I hesitate to refer to this as special
effects, as I think it\'s overly abused. There is not a point where
more than 1 minute goes by without further senseless video
effects. Things like the image warping, folding, unraveling into a
string, blurring, etc. Basically all the stuff you could do to a movie
with a piece of $100 modern software and a video capture card. And it
took six years to make. Personally, I don\'t see what makes this a
great art film, as I\'ve seen some reviews and essays claim it is. I
think it falls into the trap of being so different and bizarre that
people figure it must be artistic. I don\'t know what the hell it is,
and I don\'t think I ever will. I keep thinking that there must be some
meaning in this movie, but I haven\'t the slightest idea what...

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SPECS

File Name .............: WAX.avi
File Size (in bytes) ..: 733,443,076 bytes
Runtime (# of frames) .: 1:28:26 (127199 frames)

Video Codec ...........: XviD 1.1.0 Final
Frame Size ............: 640x480 [=1.333]
FPS ...................: 23.976
Video Bitrate .........: 965 kb/s
Bits per Pixel ........: 0.131 bpp
B-VOP, N-VOP, QPel, GMC ......: []...[]...[]...[]

Audio Codec ...........: 0x0055 MPEG-1 Layer 3
Sample Rate ...........: 44100 Hz
Audio bitrate .........: 128 kb/s [2 channel(s)] CBR audio
Interleave ............: 42 ms
No. of audio streams ..: 1

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