lowkey obsessed with this one-time writer/director/producer/actor who woke up one day in the early 70s and said "im going to make a no-budget sci-fi Citizen Kane for dudes into horoscopes and tarot cards" and then disappeared from the face of the earth. ostensibly a rise-and-fall biopic about a carnival fortune teller who becomes a media mogul but it takes so many psychedelic, inscrutable detours (including african prisons, diamond smuggling, sail boats, the making of this movie within the movie, galactic office mirrors, hints of werewolves?? and slomo murders) that by the time it hits the part of the story where he's rich and alienated all of his friends and a quote from king lear pops up on the screen i…

As enigmatic as the spawn he may or may not have created as a random side effect of pursuing his highest dreams and talents, director/writer/producer Craig Denney, is perhaps the Godfather (with a capital “G”) of the hyper-egotistical with-lack-of-talent-but-intense-passion artist creating film that reflects his raw id on celluloid. The only other way of describing this is if Nicolas Cage directed the way he acted; huge emotional swings, breakneck pacing smattered with random techniques, bizarre editing, but with not an ounce of shame and basking in all its flaws. Did I just describe “method directing”? 

Previous to watching The Astrologer I had no idea how big of a white whale this is for some folks. The amalgamation of distinct vision here…

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…

"This is really going well."

Local crazy man Craig Denney chronicles himself in a self-styled semi-autobiographical Charles Foster Kane fable of his rags-to-riches rise to stardom. To best illustrate his colossal ego, revel in the knowledge that Craig Denney directs a movie titled The Astrologer within The Astrologer which achieves universal acclaim, leaving him rich and famous. What sets this apart from other no-budget nonsense, ranging from your Sam Mraovich's and Vitaliy Versace's to the higher echelon of Neil Breen and Tommy Wiseau, was the budget Denney was some how able to raise to bolster this vanity project, which when adjusted for inflation likely exceeded the millions Wiseau spent making The Room. Filmed on location in Kenya, Tahiti, France, and…

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…

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.…

a friend of mine has been recommending me this for years, hyping it up as a legendary bad vanity project. it did not disappoint. the star and director is this guy who kind of looks like a slightly thinner steven toast. he's not terrible looking but insists on not wearing a shirt in like half the scenes, which isn't flattering. after some excursions to africa to steal rubies or something, he becomes the most famous astrologer in the world and seemingly the most famous person in the world. the front page of every newspaper is about him (president ford always gets pushed to the bottom corners). then he blows it all by being a big jerk! speaking of, someone called…