Funky Forest: The First Contact (2005)

Frank and Flip-Flop are getting onto a bus in Tel-Aviv when they hear the explosion. They were on their way to a Shlomo’s rent-a-camel place anyway, so they just looked at each other in mute concern and booked, never looking back. The blast had been in the city but distant, probably 20 blocks, or on the other side of the world in Middle Eastern terms.

When they got on the road towards Ein Gedi, Frank flipped on the car radio for news and Flip translated. She said there was no news of any violence in the city. Of course, she may have just been covering up. A little embarrassed or self conscious, about the unquiet in her homeland. Not speaking an ounce of Hebrew (except, “Shalom,” “Kaki,” and “Hatoul.” All of which he got plenty of mileage out of.), for all Frank, knew the whole world may be in chaos, cities burning, army’s clashing.

So what better place to go when with WWIII raging, than the West Bank?

The Dead Sea is quite simply a trip. A head trip.

Frank had been told you could float on the Dead Sea, but he had not been told that you had to. No choice. The water at almost 10 x the salinity of the ocean literally pushes you out. Walking ankle deep is profound, with the water repelling your feet at each steep. Easily overcome but a unique feeling nonetheless. Once sufficiently submerged, the sea takes over, spitting you back unto the surface any time your guard is down, which is often as you loose balance, cutting your feet on the jagged salt crystals making up the bottom of the sea.

And oily? No one ever warned you the Dead Sea is slimy.

Hadassah says that its changed a lot, with diversion of water away from the already puny Jordan River ever increasing, and the sea dropping a meter or so annually. The water is below what once was the beach, and you have to climb down a rocky slope, and cross a field of more crystals before hitting the water.

Back up at the beach, frying in the sun like turkey bacon in a pan (but non-stick, thanks to the oily water) Frank checks his email, and is delighted that no one back at work is having a crisis. He does get a message from Angry Jamie with his  must-see movie picks, many of which he’s seen, such as the over-hyped (not without reason) Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy 2011) or the perplexingly entertaining bad zombie flick, Dead Snow (Wirkola 2009), and the drab retro-styled House of the Devil (West 2009).

The one that sparks his interest, though, is an odd Japanese pastiche, entitled Funky Forest: The First Contact (Ishii, Ishimine and Miki 2005). This one is news to him, and it is soon zipping its way through his download queue. After all, the hostel they were staying in, though satisfyingly simple and offering fantastic views across the sea to Jordan also had only local Israeli TV.  It was released on DVD by Viz in March 2008; but for those of you wanting a slightly more legal way to purchase, act fast, Amazon seems to have only 17 left in stock right now.

Funky Forest, to Frank and Flip curled up together on a metal cot watching Frank’s little lap top screen, did not disappoint in that it was totally disappointing. Jamie offered the selection as one some-trippy-shit-movie-to-watch-while-you’re-fucked-out-of-your-mind. Frank was comfortable after some Mogen David and vicodin (after a17-hour plane ride JFK-TLV and a tumble over a wall, his back was killing him). But apparently not in a state to really appreciate Funky Forest which requires psychedelic mushrooms and Sudafed and Thunderbird to even begin to guess at its meaning.

First and foremost, it’s long. Two and a half hours, this is really way too long to be incomprehensible. Honestly. Unless you are of course in some mind-bent stupor. Heroin or oxycontin would be best, something that would allow hours of headache free dead attention that you may or may not remember after.

The film is a conglomeration of numerous vignettes, musical and comedy numbers, animation etc. these range from droll little conversations between secretaries to extracting things from bellybuttons and televisions with rectums. The scenes in this latter are straight out of Naked Lunch (Cronenberg 1991), without the thin semblance of a plot. Funky Forest is, in short, a lot like the Dead Sea. It’s an odd thing, and it pushes you away rather than try to draw you in.

But it is oddly entertaining in that Japanese-British way of sticking average button down people into bizarre situations.

Still, if you require a plot, don’t go straying into the Funky Forest, and probably stop reading this blog, whose attempts at both story telling and movie review are tenuous at best.

Funky Forest takes a good deal of the night, followed by some restless hours on the cot as the vicodin wears off. But Frank and Hadassah were up early to se the sun rise over Jordan, before scaling Masada, which is a wonder in its own right, and subject for a blog of another day.

Shalom, kaki shel hatoul!