An alarm clock wakes a man who washes his face, has breakfast, drives his car to work, spins records, returns home, and takes his pills. It's a world of circles - often seen from above: an espresso cup, a stairwell, the pills, and the records spinning. At the dance where the music plays, the rhythms evoke images of a butcher slicing head cheese, gears driving other wheels and levers, a combine churning out bales of hay, a butcher cutting chunks of meat for a stew, and boxers punching. The circle of music and life.
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I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.
If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.
It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.
The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful
Jiří Barta's "Diskokej" ("Disc Jockey" in English) shows a bunch of actions and processes represented by circles. There's also a bunch of labels that nowadays would look like product placement. The neat scene was when one of the records had an Apple logo (the Beatles' record company, not the then-incipient computer company). I assume that this was all meant to be a mild satire on consumerism, although it's hard to tell with the prominence of the logos.I liked "A Ballad about Green Wood", "The Club of the Laid Off" and "Projekt/The Design" (for which IMDb strangely has no entry) better. This one is a little too weird to register.
Take this one with "The Club of the Laid Off", and one can see that Barta had a lot of disturbed fascination with consumerism and the turn Czechoslavakia took in the late 70s/early 80s.The animation wins here. Barta makes a sort of mini-narrative out of what are for the most part primary shapes, circles, triangles, and squares. These shapes serve as dials, advertisements, buildings, meters, food, and of course discs. From a displaced first-person perspective the world is animated through the disc-jockey's eyes.However, even with the stripped-down animation, the drug-addiction commentary, and the awesome music, really the main thing that interests me in this short is how Barta animated the water in the sink. I know that that's a very small part of his much larger concerns, but it was the only part of the animation that looked really inventive and original. The rest of it looks a lot like what would eventually become commercials for the very things that Barta is criticizing.--PolarisDiB
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