{"id":18815,"date":"2026-08-04T20:00:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T00:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=18815"},"modified":"2026-08-02T22:06:04","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T02:06:04","slug":"where-the-chocolate-mountains-2016-pat-oneill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/18815","title":{"rendered":"Where the Chocolate Mountains (2016, Pat O&#8217;Neill)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One digital motion image after another, feels like installation art.  Lot of scrolling or rotating wood textures.  Other recurring things: a woman&#8217;s face, a man&#8217;s hairy body, a laser light show.<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/13841\">Leviathan<\/a> over Arizona:<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/choco1.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p>Preening seagull in flames before a <em>MST3K<\/em> planet floating over a mirrored river and floating heads staring back at us: it all feels vaguely satanic<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/choco2.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p>Soundtrack by George Lockwood, that&#8217;s half the movie.  I was already appreciating the sound effects, then after twenty minutes someone says the movie title out of the blue, sparking a series of dialogue clips from some noirish film(s).  The credits list a ton of audio sources (the Prelinger archives of course, and some <em>MST<\/em> movies to match the spinning planet).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/letterboxd.com\/msicism\/film\/where-the-chocolate-mountains\/\">Sicinski<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Jordan Cronk in Cinema Scope:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Chocolate Mountains stretch in a southeast direction across the Colorado Desert &#8230; this 60-mile region, almost totally closed off to the public, is home to the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range &#8230; utilized by the US Navy and Marines to test aerial bombing and weapons technology. So it goes that <em>Where the Chocolate Mountains<\/em>, O&#8217;Neill&#8217;s first feature in over a decade, is not a film about its eponymous locale, per se, but a film about the idea of the Chocolate Mountains; most viewers are likely unaware that these particular mountains even exist. It therefore matters little that at no point in O&#8217;Neill&#8217;s film do the Chocolate Mountains actually appear.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/choco3.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<br \/>\n<strong><em>Horizontal Boundaries<\/em> (1997)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Each segment takes three or four strips of natural scenes or human activity and overlays them as they cut and move and slide over each other in a v-hold loop.  After a few of these he breaks the pattern, an animation cross fading into an opening curtain, using a cloudy sky as image matte, stutter-loops from stock films on the soundtrack.  Then a blaring siren loop and fast white pulses between a carousel of helicopter shots.  Footage will loop around horizontally or vertically, the sense of time all manipulated and broken.  Voices heard on the soundtrack were mostly from <em>Dragnet<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/horiz1.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/horiz2.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/horiz3.jpeg\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One digital motion image after another, feels like installation art. Lot of scrolling or rotating wood textures. Other recurring things: a woman&#8217;s face, a man&#8217;s hairy body, a laser light show. Leviathan over Arizona: Preening seagull in flames before a MST3K planet floating over a mirrored river and floating heads staring back at us: it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1049,233,1595],"class_list":["post-18815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2010s","tag-digital-video","tag-pat-oneill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18815"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18879,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18815\/revisions\/18879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}