Neil Breen, filmmaker

well, i didnt get get the sense that too many other people that might challenge the absurdity were involved with breens “five film retrospective” - def came off more like a “put a camcorder on the table and ride it out” type of affair to me

but yeah, “deliberate” is a good way to out. id agree that hes a genuinely interesting filmmaker and the way he consistently sticks to his peculiar guns is a big part of that. maybe its just me buying into the narrative but id like to think hes a legitimately weird person that is writing, directing, and acting out his weird fantasies. (also catering etc…)

i get get you mean about the sci-fi gimmicks tho. i might chalk it up to comparatively bugger budgets and using tech hes learning as he goes, notably green screen. but who can really say. weird guy!

btw I think "I Am Here...Now" might be a good dip into the Breeniverse, though there are scenes in it which make me think he perhaps is a little too self-aware. that bit where someone is tied up and getting beat up by a bunch of gangsters, with a sudden cut to a guy in a suit throwing up his hands and saying "I don't want any part of this"...I mean that could've been directly lifted from Tim and Eric

and then the long haired dude going "I like what I see"...if Breen wasn't trying to be funny there then he is indeed one of the strangest filmmakers Planet Earth has ever produced

i am here... now genuinely has a similar feeling to twin peaks: the return

ok so I decided to watch Fateful Findings again and you know what, it really is a lot like The Room. they are both utterly baffling in a lot of the same ways, stuffed to the gills with continuity errors and insanely bad acting. they also both feature the director inserting himself into the film as someone who is, not to be mean about this, someone who's 20 years younger and a lot more sexually appealing. also I think both movies are ones where just watching the more famous scenes doesn't really do it justice. you really need to see the whole thing. and like The Room all of Breen's films seem even stranger the second or third time you watch them.

one thing I find hilarious about his movies is the thing I referenced above...the man really doesn't know how to shoot busy scenes with more than a couple people in them. in Wiseau's stuff this comes across as a bunch of actors just kinda laughing and not knowing what to say. for Breen it's all these cutaways from the action to get a close-up on someone delivering their line. it's a really weird and unique thing which kinda makes some scenes feel like 90's RPG dialogue. his whole way of filming things is bizarre. this movie has so many extreme closeups on someone's face or feet. presumably there's an 'artistic' reason for why he's doing this but it really does make his films seem unlike anything else. there's no space anywhere.

also there's the uh...sexual overtones here. like The Room this movie has some sex scenes between him and someone much younger than him, in which the woman clearly seems uncomfortable. there is also the fact that nobody in his movies seem to be allowed to wear bras. the sexual chemistry between him and the Polish actress who plays his wife is, on a scale of 10, like a -5. but Breen looks super uncomfortable too! it is almost as if he has no idea what sex is! he has like, a 11 year old's understanding of it....you just get naked and touch each other.

some other observations...1) the woman who plays Amy, Jim's wife (who "suicides" him) is maybe the single worst actress I have ever seen. it's like SNL doing a parody of a porn film. she can't deliver a full sentence! 2) those scenes where Breen is naked in a dark room, embracing some woman who I assume is supposed to be his long lost childhood love? that woman's breasts are huge!! much unlike the actress that actually plays her! 3) is it just me or does the movie have two different psychologists used in two consecutive scenes that are played by the same person?? I'm not imagining that right?

actually, I think this movie might be even funnier than The Room. in part because Breen aims for a story that's so much stranger. yes, "The results are in...I definitely have breast cancer" is an amazing line. but it's got nothing on how the first half of this movie is like...90% about marital problems, only to have Breen randomly pepper in stuff like "I'm going to continue hacking into government systems to see what I can find out.....about the national AND international corruption that I definitely know is going on!!" and the ending is just like...what the fuck??

god, amazing movie, I'm not really much into film but honestly I enjoy this shit so much more than pretty much anything else

and yes to his stuff having a David Lynch vibe, though it kind of feels like he's just accidentally doing the stuff that Lynch does on purpose

Also, the Room only had like, one theme or subject more or less, and Breen regularly stuffs like 6-8 into every movie.

The Bob Pollard of bad filmmaking

I mean yeah how would you even describe the plot to this movie? it would come off like you're badly recounting the plots to at least 3 very different films, and if you think "wow how does he connect that all together" the answer is he doesn't even really try, because it probably all makes perfect sense in his head

it's very simple, it's just a story involving a double, there's a global secret and everyone's in on it, several people want to have sex with neil breen, and only neil breen can save everyone, also neil breen is going to deliver a huge speech that is VERY well received

I like how Breen’s end-of-film speeches get increasingly genocidal as he goes on, and this is even after the subplot in the first movie where he threatened to poison the water supply because he’s That Damn Good a special operator.

for Breen it's all these cutaways from the action to get a close-up on someone delivering their line.

i really, REALLY wanted him to mention ozu in his five film retrospective. of course, from what i watched, he said stuff like, “i like all movies, i'm inspired by all of them” instead

here's some trivia: the woman who plays Emily was one of the models in Zoolander!!

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!"

The worst thing about that spinach clip from Fateful Findings is you can literally hear the sound of Breen's lips parting as he smiles

I did watch this on the thread's recommendation, and was not disappointed. (My girlfriend gave it five stars, and immediately asked me to look for more of his films.) frogbs OTM about the sudden cuts/transitions making it seem like video game cutscenes where the player is hitting "skip". I've been re-watching The Larry Sanders Show and thought Breen resembled Gary Shandling a little bit. Didn't like it quite as much as The Room, mostly because the slow panning shots dragged it down a bit, but that's a minor quibble.

the room's equivalent of that are the slow panning shots of the bridge (which, if i remember, are accompanied by people shouting "go! go! go! go!")

a lot of these kinds of movies have that problem, one because the directors have no sense of pacing, two because people are watching as comedies and not drama

I actually don't think the long shots are a big problem here (at least not after the first 5-10 minutes), imo the "drag" of the movie is how many scenes feel like repeats, sometimes in a literal sense. not just "didn't that already happen?" but also "isn't this the exact same scene from before?". if there was a storyboard it would resemble a Moebius strip. just kidding, I know there was no storyboard

Speaking of lynch, there’s that famous quote from Isabella Rossellini “if David weren’t making films he’d be out murdering women” — sorta feels like if breen weren’t making films he’d have shot up a school or place of worship years ago

15 minutes into Twisted Pair and I think this is already the most insane movie I have ever seen

What the fuck is happening in this boardroom

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