Reviews

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  ★★★★ review by Joe on Letterboxd

  Nicolas Roeg's The Jerk

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  ★★★★★ review by Brian Kelley on Letterboxd

  If ever there was a movie made for me and my deep love for singular visions brought to life despite the lack of any ability to so in any fashion resembling standard ideas of "correct", this is it!

  It does little good to describe the plot of this movie and doing so would only ruin the fun of the constant string of surprises that is THE ASTROLOGER. It's the kind of movie where an abrupt change in time and location makes one think either a.) the reels are out of order or b.) a reel from a completely unrelated movie has slipped in. But then you realize HOLY SHIT! THAT WASN'T EVEN A REEL CHANGE and your mind is blown. As soon as you learn to expect the unexpected from this movie it does something to defy your expectations of "expected"!

  It's the kind of movie where the main character makes a movie that is basically THE ASTROLOGER within the movie and then we get to watch The Astrologer watch THE ASTROLOGER inside the movie THE ASTROLOGER for like 5 minutes!

  It's the kind of movie that inexplicably has songs by The Moody Blues.

  It's the kind of movie where someone says "Uranus explodes".

  It's the kind of movie where long passages of clinical astro-babble are considered to be moving the plot forward.

  It's the kind of movie that has an entire dynamic dinner scene shot entirely in slow-motion.

  It's the kind of movie where someone shouts, "You're not an astrologer, YOU'RE AN ASSHOLE!"

  It's the kind of movie where the story is propelled by newspaper headlines which are mostly in FOREIGN LANGUAGES!

  And it's all done without an ounce of irony. It's all genuine, it's all passion, it's all GOOD.

  This movie is only available on 35mm (there's an unconfirmed report of a 16mm print in the possession of Something Weird) and I won't die happy until thousands of people have experienced this incredible film.

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  ★★★★★ review by Jacob Knight on Letterboxd

  Like drinking Mad Dog out of a crystal champagne glass. A work of accidental genius, in which an egomaniac dumps all of his fantasies onto celluloid, without the basic know how to execute his vision (though he seems to have wrangled quite a bit of resources for his inexplicably globe hopping adventure). But there's such a love of cinema that drips from every oddly conceived frame, as he lays stolen Moody Blues instrumentals over languid helicopter shots of pleasure boats, transitions scenes using every known wipe in the editing bay, and creates layered, slow motion tableaus of loving memories and couples fighting over dinner (in what might be one of the greatest escalations in filmic history). If you devote enough of your life to psychotronic films, this is the type of movie you dream of discovering: a bona fide facemelter that builds to dizzying peaks of grammatical insanity, without ever really knowing it's doing so. Long live Craig Denney, wherever your faked demise may have led you. [35mm]

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  ★★★★★ review by Stephen Scarlata on Letterboxd

  The Astrologer is the closest thing to a cinematic religious experience you can get

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  ★★★½ review by laird on Letterboxd

  If I didn't know how movies were made I would have assumed that everything from the acting to the opticals was improvised. More a game of "Exquisite Corpse" than a logical narrative, it's loosely tied together by a series of montages set to 70s AM radio rock and full of flying and spinning calendar pages and newspapers... sometimes. Other times large jumps in location and time just sort of happen. What determining factor informed which events would play out fast, which events would be off-screen, and which events receive the slow, music montage treatment (one of them literally in slow motion) is as mysterious as anything else in this movie.

  The Astrologer easily fits into the category of outsider visions such as the films of Duke Mitchell, but its tone deafness, pretensions and incoherence keep it from feeling as accomplished or sincere as either THE EXECUTIONER or GONE WITH THE POPE. Pretensions? How about re-purposing sections of Holst's The Planets and naming it "The Astrologer's Theme" in the credits? Or ending a movie abruptly, un-jokingly, with a quotation from Shakespeare's King Lear?

  Lingering questions:
  
  Did they intentionally spell astrology as "astrologie?"
  
  Did they intentionally mispronounce libra as "lie-bra?"
  
  Did they intentionally mispronounce lunar as "loon-R?"
  
  What was up with the first person, fish-eye lens urinal scene?
  
  Is there really a Valhalla Tequila?
  
  Is Uranus really a planet of explosions?
  
  How much of this was intentionally funny?
  
  Mysteries all.

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