I have just finished watching "The Falls"

Once, Sean Penn came to my college and spoke to my film class. He had just seen Amores Perros, the first internationally recognized movie by the guy who ended up doing movies like Babel and 21 Grams. Sean Penn said that if he had made Amores Perros, he would stop making movies.

If I had made The Falls, I would stop making movies.

Odd, long and unexpectedly funny, The Falls is a British mock documentary about 92 victims of something called the Violent Unknown Event, or VUE. There is no narrative, but there are a number of narrators. The names of each of the subjects of the documentary start with the letters F-A-L-L, hence the name of the film.

The style of the narration is very straight-forward, but the stories themselves are absurd - or, rather, there seems to be some sort of strange internal logic too it, but you could easily drive yourself mad trying to figure it out.

The VUE itself is suitably abstract, but seems to give its victims a number of new languages, some characteristics of birds, immortality (rather more incidentally), and either an obsession or a fear of birds, flying, running water, and cataloging some specific aspect of the VUE itself.

I am not really equipped to fully describe the oddness of this film, or why it seems so effective to me when I'm sure it would be very frustrating to someone else (it took me over four months to watch, which is ridiculous).

My best guess is that it's the presence of a fully formed and detailed world, abstract enough that it seems just outside our understanding, but seemingly present and real to its creator. Also that that world is so absurd, and how conscientious its author is to present that absurdity with humor.

I can't explain it any better than that. Here are a few other works that accomplish exactly this, and just as well. Like The Falls, they are the sort of thing that I can pick up to read or watch from any point in their narrative. Here they are, from least to most obscure:

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Hunter S. Thompson

My Family and Other Animals
Gerald Durrell

Narbonic
Shannon K. Garrity

The Crime Studio
Steve Aylett

Unicorn Jelly
Jennifer Diane Reitz