Neil Breen, filmmaker

Ahahahahah the two rubber mice by the hobo. They even move around from shot to shot. This man is a genius.

Ok no this is fucking psychotic

have you watched pass thru yet? probably his most genocidal film, which is really saying something.

no, that's the one I'm missing, but I will rectify that soon

all of his films are available in a zip file at archive.org, by the way. pretty easy to search for.

had to go to sleep so I've still got half of Twisted Pair left. if I know Breen it's gonna get even wilder than it already is.

one thing this movie really does remind me of is Decker, particularly the "high budget" episodes with a lot of green screen and special effects. the fact that he's learning new tricks gives him so many more opportunities to screw things up. the scene where he's blowing up an abandoned building with a SWAT team (??) is jaw dropping stuff

oh yeah, that first season of decker seems to be directly inspired by double down

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA-EqQhF_9o

could it be a coincidence? (I don't believe in coincidences)

Yo, we got Breen update!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVnrjVvIG1k

He’s worldwide, with festival screenings in the UK and Sweden!

Also, content warning: this is just Neil talking directly to camera for like 7+ minutes, so best viewed at 1.25x or more.

The quadracopter shots from Pass-Thru had the audience all going “whooaaaaaAAhHHHHH” when it would pull high

Also the tiger from Pass-Thru(named “Vlad the Tiger”) is second-billed

could it be a coincidence? (I don't believe in coincidences)

― (⊙_⊙?) (original bgm), Wednesday, May 3, 2023 10:08 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think I've actually heard that brought up before. I don't know if he's ever talked about him on Office Hours or something, but Tim has to know about Neil Breen. and yes looking back the first Decker series is clearly inspired by Double Down. I thought Decker: Mindwipe had to be influenced by Twisted Pair, but it turns out it actually came out a year prior. so I think the reality is more that Neil Breen is just a real life On Cinema character, part Tim and part Gregg. I mean in that retrospective he says something like "I've seen so many films and am inspired by them all", but it's not really clear at all what inspiration he's actually took from anything. if you watch Deck of Cards it's got one half directed by Gregg and one half Tim and somehow they BOTH resemble Breen films in very different ways.

Relevant to On Cinema, I laughed when Breen made sure to mention the running time of the new film (in either that or the last update).

hahaha

similarly, in his five film retro thing, he spends some time talking about if you make something that’s under 90 minutes, you don’t have a movie. and he makes sure that his films are all at least 90 minutes for that reason.

sorry lynch, bergman, cronenberg, ozu, etc. turns out you haven’t made real movies!

https://boxd.it/H7xe

It's strange to me to hear Breen talking like a somewhat normal person, because to me mentally he is about 8. when kids that age play they always imagine themselves as characters who are some combination of Goku, Spiderman, and Mario, they have every single super power they need, and they are the most well liked and righteous people on the planet. which is the sort of character who Breen plays in every film. secondary just in Breen's storytelling, the way all these things just happen with no context, I know it's all very Lynchian but maybe in Breen's mind it all does make sense?? He just tells stories the way kids do, where you kinda start from the middle and omit most of the important details in favor of long asides about how cool everyone thinks you are.

anyway, I finished Twisted Pair. it's fun to watch these before bed because you wake up and wonder if you just hallucinated the entire ending. It's simultaneously his best movie, his worst movie, and his best worst movie

something I really appreciate about Breen is how his movies are always just utterly unpredictable, despite them all being fairly similar. like in the first 25 minutes of Double Down you think you have a good idea of what he's gonna do and the exact ways he's gonna mess it up but no it goes so far off the rails that you actually forget he's a Super Secret Government Agent 15 minutes later. in fact all of his movies have a point where I go "okay, this has got to be the craziest one", it's usually always around the 50-55 minute mark too

i watched Pass Thru the other day, my second full breen feature. wow, it got extremely mass murder there. it wasn't even mass murderesque, it was just neil breen announcing that 300 million of the worst people were dead, and that after he was gone, the good people of the world should continue on the work of identifying the bad people and making sure they die. i believe he called it the Cleansing, as well.

but somehow, all of this was forgotten when he edited together 6 or 7 scenes with the elites of society - the ceos, the stock brokers, the politicians - all standing alone at various dinner parties bragging about how easy it was to cheat at life and win, while neil breen only answered with "isn't that corrupt?", which hung in the air in silence every time. then he left, and all of the elites said they didn't know who he was, neil breen, the guy who had been standing next to them at several different completely empty dinner parties. neil breen is brilliant

We watched Twisted Pair this weekend, and I didn’t enjoy it as much as FF. It felt more padded out, or maybe it was just because the reused footage was more noticeable. Or maybe my familiarity with Decker made it seem less fresh.

but maybe in Breen's mind it all does make sense??

I always wonder this. Like, with many MST3k films, you can tell the producers were just cranking out a cheapie and didn’t care. But Breen’s films are clearly labors of love. I mean, I figure Green knows the explosions and "stunts" look goofy but he has little control over that, for DIY/budget reasons. Does he really see the final cut of his films and believe he successfully communicated the plot in a clear way, though?

He just tells stories the way kids do, where you kinda start from the middle and omit most of the important details in favor of long asides about how cool everyone thinks you are.

This rings true in the way that all the details are so generic. There’s never any proper names or nouns. Characters will just check "the international database" rather than a specific one, the evildoers just work for "the banks", and I don’t think he even mentions what organization he works for in Twisted Pair.

As someone who's written/directed/edited/starred in a few short films myself I can understand how this happens. You envision a scene by scene breakdown that makes sense in your head but you also have to make a lot of decisions on the fly, especially if you have no budget and no time so you just kinda have to work with what you have. By the time you put it together the narrative still flows okay to you, but only because you've spent so much time thinking about it. You can't really put yourself in the headspace of someone who is just watching it from scratch. And I get the impression that Neil Breen does not exactly have a lot of people to bounce ideas off of.

So to me the best bits of his movies are usually the ones that feature other actors, because you get the sense that nobody in his movies really understands what kind of movie they're in or what the plot even is. I mean look at the variety of gangsters in I Am Here...Now - one is pretty convincing as a tough guy, one seems to think he's in a farce, another is actually trying hard but comes off like he's doing a high school play. The long-haired European gangster seems like he's ripped right from the set of Tim and Eric. And then the businessmen and senators, every single line read they do as if they just asked 15 seconds before "do you really want me to say that?". And because he frames and edits things so strangely, these scenes somehow come off even more bizarre than the ones where he's got circuit boards taped to himself. In some sense Twisted Pair is his wildest & most insane film, in another sense it's just way too much Neil Breen.

also it occurs to me that in the same way some people have speculated Double Down as an inspiration for Decker, I Am Here...Now might have been a big influence on Xavier: Renegade Angel

he follows me on Twitter

...

isn't that corrupt?

hahahaha

i think i need to watch pass through tonight, literally had a dream about the probable scene of neil breen delivering a speech condemning millions of people to death while he's posed in front of a badly done green screen with stock sfx of cheering

the posters all have kind of a “pamphlet a crazy person hands you” flair to em but pass thru really REALLY does

https://bingeddata.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/12/pass-thru.jpg

the posters all have kind of a “pamphlet a crazy person hands you” flair to em but pass thru really REALLY does

https://bingeddata.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/12/pass-thru.jpg

oops

well, it is the neil breen thread at least

Can’t wait to see the new one at the neighborhood theater later this summer

i think i need to watch pass through tonight, literally had a dream about the probable scene of neil breen delivering a speech condemning millions of people to death while he's posed in front of a badly done green screen with stock sfx of cheering

― global tetrahedron, Wednesday, May 17, 2023 2:38 PM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

good lord this movie rules. i am/ was (?) a big wiseauhead but now i think i’m becoming a full breenhead

while he's posed in front of a badly done green Breen screen

fixed it

oh by the way on second watch of I Am Here...Now I noticed a subtle goof - there's a scene where someone on the Vegas strip pushes over the wheelchair guy and Breen blinds him, causing him to run away. while he's running you can hear Breen (as director) in the background yell "slow down!". I am pretty sure there are episodes of Decker where the same thing happens.

also this time I stuck around for the credits just to see what Breen's character's name is supposed to be....and it's just "The Being". I almost wonder if it doesn't actually occur to Breen that his characters should have names. the only reason they do in Twisted Pair is so you can tell them apart, though this does not make sense since in the Breeniverse, someone with a fake beard is completely unrecognizable to everyone else.

Maybe its already been mentioned but did anyone feel certain parts of Twin Peaks The Return were Breenesque such as the clunky jarring CGI and the stilted dialogue

i was wondering if y'all have seen after last season. there is a thread about it but it's barely posted in. movie's on the internet archive and is for me the peak of this surreality-through-likely-ineptitude-but-who-can-tell-how-intentional-any-of-it-is kind of filmmaking

I have not but I've now watched the trailer and yeah it definitely fits the vibe. though it looks more like a student film, what with all the cardboard boxes and paper signs everywhere. amusingly IMDB lists the budget as $5,000,000, either they're committing tax fraud or someone on IMDB is trolling

after last season is great as far as this sort of thing goes yeah. the whole thing feels like an inscrutable dream.

the director has repeatedly claimed that the budget was 5 million yeah, but has clarified that the budget for the main shoot was only 30-40k, after which he was able to secure money from investors which was then used for the extremely primitive 3d animation which made up the vast majority of the supposed budget. none of that really makes any sense except that they didn't have any money for the main shoot. surely some sort of tax fraud was involved?

people thought that about The Room too, until the Disaster Artist book came out and detailed exactly how Tommy Wiseau blew $6m filming it. this movie does not appear to have the production qualities of The Room however.

the claim is $5 million was pretty much all spent on the extremely primitive 3d animation which is an order of magnitude weirder than the room's budget

oh no!!

https://people.com/tv/storage-wars-gunter-nezhoda-dead-67/

I had no idea that this guy became vaguely famous! of all the people in his movies, this was the one I assumed had to be a friend of his somehow...even by Breen's standards this was a strange, out of place, and pointless character, who nevertheless delivered one of the funniest lines in cinematic history

https://imgur.com/L4qBU8y

I am still baffled by the last 40 minutes of this movie. what does it mean when he finds Emily overdosed in her bed (whose last words before passing out were..."I'm sorry Dylan"?) and keeps saying "Emily...I knew it was you" ??? as usual he barely reacts to what should be a tragic moment, only to finally let out his emotions at the end of the scene, but he cranks up the music so you can't hear him yell what is clearly "OHHHH NOOOOO!"

― frogbs, Monday, May 1, 2023 6:29 AM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is the best scene in fateful findings that doesn’t occur in the shiny black garbage bag interzone

liminality made of loose black plastic…. neil breen’s fortress of solinude

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-dqkGB5GUg

isn't that corrupt?

Cade screening at 60 theaters. in typical Breen fashion he doesn't post a list, rather this 7 minute YouTube video in which he reads them off in random order. he gives no link to buy tickets just "keep checking the website and eventually they will come up".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuWXFm10624

one of them is in Milwaukee...you bet your ass I will be there

alright I think it's finally time to watch Pass Thru. I see someone just uploaded it to YouTube. just gotta wait for this edible to kick in.

Ok I was not ready for this

hell yeah

I kinda knew what was coming thanks to this thread but wow not really prepared for how fast things ramp up. every movie he does brings to mind the Garth Marenghi "I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards" clip but wow, this is next level

I thought the blonde lady from Fateful Findings was the worst actor to ever appear in a Breen film (Jim's wife/murderer, not Breen's long lost love), but the lady who takes refuge in Breen's bean van is somehow even worse. honorable mention to the cartel thugs whose only direction must've been "BE AS LOUD AND MEAN AS POSSIBLE!!!!"

follow up - I was not at the screening because I had somewhere I had to be that day, unfortunately. but I did get the DVD - perhaps the last DVD I will ever buy - and I will be watching it tonight

I am so fucking confused right now

Sounds like he delivered once more!

Like Lynch or Tarkovsky, Breen's films are quite subtle and complex so you need to rewatch them again and again.

I guess we'll never know what goes on in the mind of Breen but this really did feel like he filmed two different versions of the same movie and just put all the footage together - it's not really clear if these actors are supposed to be playing the same character throughout the movie. like one of them appears to die three times and other times is in a wheelchair, but then is doing karate moves five minutes later?? even for Neil Breen it's incomprehensible. still very entertaining, though I hope his future movies aren't all green screened like this