“We say hip, hooray, Hip, hip hooray, For fat!”

– Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil, The Fat Song

“So will someone tell me what happened or not? A brother shouldn't turn against his brother. And a guest shouldn't turn against a guest.”

– the host

28 is no age to die, regardless if your name is Susan Superstar or Edie Sedgwick. But it happened, right during the wrap-up of Ciao Manhattan. Edie was gone, just like that, snuffed like so many of the other #Warhol Superstars. What did remain was footage, so much abandoned footage shot in the 60s when those stars were shining at their brightest. That footage, set in glitzy black-and-white Manhattan, is where Edie and Paul America race around town on amphetamine. Or see a doctor to get shots of some sorts.

“Speed is the ultimate, all-time high. That first rush. Wow! Just that burning, searing, soaring sense of perfection.”

– Susan

And there's colour footage too. Susan, topless, semi-(un)consciously dragged around the floor of her empty pool-turned-Superstar-temple. She babbles, drinks, dances around in her panties. And she ODs. Like Edie would even before this movie had seen the light of day.

They snuff so fast, these bright Superstars.

Slow cinema of a different kind. We spend long hours in the company of a father (Vasilis Diamantopoulos) and his sons Sakis (George Dialegmenos), Nikos (Dimitris Poulikakos), and Giannis (Nikitas Tsakiroglou). The four of them – rich, bourgeois – have inherited a country villa and the plan is to do nothing for the next seven years. No work, no unnecessary movements. There's #sleep, lots of it. And copious amounts of food prepared by maid Sofia (Olga Karlatos) – she comes with the house; chattels personal – in addition of her body to be consumed by the increasingly idle men.

“Do you want to work? What a nightmarish idea”

Οι Τεμπέληδες της Εύφορης Κοιλάδας is a slow satire, quietly addressing Greek #class struggle through the viewer's observation. Who do we follow? The father, who quickly surrenders to sloth; the sons – young, with their whole lives ahead of them; the maid – never questioning her position and slavishly fulfilling her duties of the flesh, in bed and in the kitchen?

The similarities are there but unlike #MarcoFerreri's La grande bouffe (1973), there's no culmination in decadence. No euphoria to speak of. No grand release either; while the camera roams the mansion, attuned to #Mahler's tone poem Symphony No. 1 [Titan] – our only clue of the passing of time; even the vegetation succumbs to ennui – the story plods on. One of the men gets dressed, to go to work. It's foolish.

“Clicks, clacks, riding the backs of giraffes for laughs, S'alright for a while, The ego sings of castles and kings, And things that go with a life of style, Wanting to feel, to know what is real, Living is a, is a lie”

– The Monkees, Porpoise Song (1968)

“Today over lunch I tried to improve morale and build a sense of camaraderie among the men by holding a humorous, round-robin discussion of the early days of the mission. My overtures were brutally rejected. These men do not want a happy ship. They are deeply sick and try to compensate by making me feel miserable.”

– Sgt. Pinback's video diary

On the other end of outer space, far far away from existentialist odysseys and crypto-fascist space operas, there's a little stoner cosmos where a small, dilapidated starship manned by long-haired freaks drifts about.

“You know, I wish I had my board with me… even if I could just wax it once in a while.”

– Lt. Doolittle

Dark Star started out as a highly ambitious, underfunded student film that, in a blessed pre-Lucas, pre-blockbuster universe, got recognised for its #counterculture glory. In the early 70s, when #surfing was not yet mainstream and a handful of restless pioneers continued west despite the lack of mainland, a cross-pollination between beach blond daredevils and stoner culture happened.

Carpenter's laidback space odyssey fully embraces the beach bum spirit; it's meandering, incoherent, and whatever the superlative of no-budget may be. With at its core: #boredom, the most honest form of cinema.