Watch Food For Free

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Did you people see the same film I saw?

best movie i've ever seen.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This is "Jidlo" or "Food" a 16-minute animated short film by Czech filmmaking legends Jan Svankmajer. It is one of his later works and he was close to 60 when he made it. Last year he turned 80. This one here has basically a couple men sitting at the table during different times of the day, but instead of normally eating like everybody else they cause exactly that kind of mayhem that you'd expect in a Svankmajer film. They make the weirdest movies, eat their own clothes, eat body parts and just interact in the strangest manner one could imagine. It is fairly gross, but the fact that this is animation makes it watchable I guess. Still, it's a great display of Svankmajer's style, but i always have the problem with his films that I am somewhat looking for a story or an interesting plot and they almost never have these. Svankmajer is very much style over substance in my opinion and certainly not for everybody. That includes me. Not recommended.

What strikes me about this movie it is how little I can give to make much sense of it. I guess it has some social comments on it, about our consumption and our consumerism society, on life and everything else. But most importantly, it doesn't really matter, you get to just experience, pay attention and to be in that state of not getting it. I think that might be the experience to have, unlearning things. Turning them upside down, to transform them. In a personal level it affected me, after seeing a sequence of his shorts and this one, to be more conscious on how we act and driven our desires, you know that feeling of salivating when you think about a bacon sandwich, it has stopped, and it was interesting to be that far apart, to change that programming to one that wasn't completely destructive and irrational. All this conversation, reminded me of that Elliott Smith song called, "A distorted reality is now a necessity to be free."

It's an apt title and solo-focus for Food to be a Jan Svankmajer short; he's obsessed with it, in case you couldn't tell from his other movies (it's used sometimes to ridiculous amounts in Little Otik), and in both playful and gleefully deranged ways. In this short we see his knack at mixing live-action and stop-motion as two gentlemen at a table have plates of food and eat them up... then they eat the forks, then the plates, then the table, then the chairs, not to mention their clothes, and we see how their mouths suddenly flip over to stop-motion for just that bit of mastication and then back to the real human forms. There's also the great bit with the man as a kind of cash-register of food as people sit down and at the flick of a button on his jacket get plastic forks and other things to munch down on their lot of good. Sometimes its disgusting, and at the end when actual body parts get in the mix of things (including, not too undeservedly, a penis and testicles, which actually are the dividing line that isn't crossed) it's downright crude, but it's downright raunchy and crazy and quintessentially Svankmajer. The icing on the cake, of course, is the Blue Danube used as the two naked men munch on their table.

This is an okay Svankmajer short that comes with Conspirators of Pleasure on the Kino DVD release.It's worth seeing for that movie but seems much longer than it actually it is.What's interesting is how each chapter seems to deliberately pare itself down in the level of detail given each chapter. The first segment, "Breakfast" is uniform in it's depiction of each actor's "meal". "Lunch" (the most obviously meaningful of the three) moves along a bit faster and "Dinner" just crams as many brief encounters into a couple minutes as possible.Svankmajer, it would seem, is pretty serious about breakfast and pretty lazy by dinnertime, but I like Dinner the best.7 out of 10