a review of 电脑梦幻曲

Watched this one New Year's Eve because it was about to leave Criterion Channel (it was in their '80s/'90s cyberpunk collection) and was thoroughly impressed with the degree to which it was pretty much just an album of music videos with the thinnest whisper of a storyline. Both Lenny von Dohlen and Virginia Madsen's characters seem to have the same verbal-communications processing disorder, where they'll have a WHOLE CONVERSATION about how Lenny clearly doesn't know anything about music and owns ZERO instruments (other than a computer with a decent sound card?) but then Virginia's like "Oh I'd love to come over and jam with you sometime." There's also how Lenny thinks he has to elaborately conceal the fact that he owns a personal computer, as though he's hiding a space alien or top-secret military robot in his broom closet. The whole movie has such weird ideas about computers that it all dissolves into pure metaphor at a certain point, although I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was trying to say.