One of my favorite movie-based exercises is inventing limited-use genres. I’m still working on a name for this one, but for example: a genre that captures To Live and Die in LA, LA Confidential, Streets of Fire, and Ronin. These are all sort of neo-noir-y, but they’ve also got some other ineffable thing that ties them together, a just goddamn style that oozes from every corner and seam. This is the opposite of one of my other favorite movie-based exercises, which is called Watching Four Movies on a Plane, and which generally consolidates movies like Millenium Actress, Detective Pikachu, The Dead Don’t Die, and New Jack City. Patterns emerge when your mind is a smooth pond covered with Doritos.

The list here deals with the first of those, and the invented genre here is called MAXIMALIST. This is that thing when there is A WHOLE LOT of everything, an excess of carefully moving parts within the frame. In addition to being a trip to watch, it is lovely for being one of those things that can really exist only within the confines of mode/resources of film. With Hyperreal we’ve always aimed to present films that create and utilize their own unique visual language—these are some of my favorites.

Prospero’s Books

Nearly anything of Peter Greenaway’s could top this list. Apart from having dozens of actors on screen at almost any given time in a dizzying array of elaborate costumes directed in an unfathomable choreography that you sense you’re only seeing about 10% of, he plays with frames in frames in frames in frames, and each one is brimming with energy and bizarre imagery. Nothing is ever still. Every curtain or page is always fluttering, every background figure is always gyrating, every pool of water is always splashing. Maybe one day we’ll all get our chance to be a disgraced magician surrounded by naked spirits and magical books. *fingers crossed*

Holy Mountain

Can you trace your favorite aesthetic mode back to a single jaw-dropped explosive moment of viewing? This movie is mine. There is no better genre than the acid western and its expansion, the acid heroes’-quest, and no one does it better than the prophet Jodorowsky. As they say: “You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.”

Mad Max: Fury Road

Sometimes I feel I might be an incorrigible philistine, but if that’s a pre-req for drooling over the best action movie ever made, so be it. Mad Max displays all the best qualities of maximalist filmmaking: sequences that stretch a conceit to its event horizon and then smoothly scale up to a larger universe where the limit doesn’t exist and never did, choreography so vast and complex that you have a hard time believing a network of human minds could manage it all, and sense-obliterating immersion. The real world can wait.

Hard to be a God

I promise you’ll never see a movie with more mud and rain and jangly chains and broken pottery and unidentifiable objects and leering toothless scraggly humans. There is SO much happening, and it’s all SO wet and hopeless, yet somehow the sheer volume of motion and stuff in frame evokes a sort of bastardized elation. It’s a weird feeling. Don’t watch this one more than once.

Salomé

Salomé is Kenneth Anger edited by Transformers-era Michael Bay, and that’s not a gratuitous description.

Sorcerer

While this whole movie is incredible, Sorcerer earns its spot on this particular list purely on the maximalist overdrive of one scene. This hulking peeling beast of a truck is hauling nitroglycerin through the mountains and has to cross a bridge. A rope and plank bridge. Basically blind. In the rain. Like, that sort of movie rain that looks like someone’s got their thumb over a hose over your shoulder sending a steady pounding deluge right on your laptop screen. I don’t know how long this scene actually is, but it felt like about 20 minutes and my mouth was wide open the whole time. Desperate, claustrophobic, overwhelming visual storytelling does not come any more visceral than this.

Singin’ in the Rain

I love that one of the criteria for ice skaters is that they effectively use the entire geography of the rink, and filmmakers that can translate that sort of thing vertically into a frame will never cease to amaze me. Have you seen this dance before? Do yourself a luxe favor and indulge in this lovingly rendered depiction of a sentient, mile-long scarf.

The Matrix Reloaded

You know.

The Adventures of Tintin

The physics of this chase scene, especially around the 2-minute mark on, is utterly baffling and exhilarating. The (pretty well-grounded) complaint about motion capture movies is that the human characters seem soulless, the tentacles from the uncanny valley burrowed in deep around the edges of mouths and eyes, but damn. The unbridled glee of spatial anarchy and meticulously mapped impossible trajectories of zooming bodies eclipse those dead eyes handily.

Fellini Satyricon

Apologies, but this Criterion blurb has way too many TO THE MAX words for me not to let them guest intro this film: “An episodic barrage of sexual licentiousness, godless violence, and eye-catching grotesquerie, Fellini Satyricon follows the exploits of two pansexual young men—the handsome scholar Encolpius and his vulgar, insatiably lusty friend Ascyltus—as they move through a landscape of free-form pagan excess. Creating apparent chaos with exquisite control, Fellini constructs a weird old world that feels like science fiction.” ~swoon~

Waterworld

I would like to posit that this is the most extra movie of all time. It classically thrills me when we can apply words like “folly” or “hubris” to things that have happened during our lifetimes, especially when we get to so thoroughly enjoy the fruits of that tragedy. This movie is truly unbelievable. If there was more of an artist’s eye to choreography and imagination and sensory immersion, I’d award this movie the most-maximalist-of-all trophy; as it is, we have a beautiful testament to the insane heights humans will climb to try and execute a vision and make a buck.

Weekend

Godard’s singular brand of erudite humor is cranked all the way up here. I’ve never intuitively felt a flamed-out car hulk as a punchline before, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t figure out a way. Absurd repetition is a precarious tool, but crushingly effective when wielded well.

On the Silver Globe

This is the best and craziest movie of all time. I was speechless while watching, a week later, and still now. Zulawski’s got a direct bead on an alternate dimension and all of its inscrutable but utterly convincing totemic violence and meaning-making, and we are the richer for it.

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is the first movie I ever watched stoned, and I will never forget the trip. Have you read The Magicians? That feeling Quentin has, of wanting to fall into something, to get to the real thing—that’s how watching this movie in an altered state makes me feel. This is, to me, the heart of maximalist filmmaking. A world born of ultra-imagination is created and is communicated in a language specifically designed to convey that experience and no other. And when it clicks, you have the ineffable pleasure of delivering yourself over for a moment to a deep and watertight phantasmagoria, one that deals in equal parts magic and horror, invention and destruction.

*This piece was repurposed from my published listicle over at Conflict of Interest.

MAXIMALIST FILMS: Gleeful chaos reigns