Movie Reviews
Aug. 3rd, 2011 03:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sub_dividedThese are the movies I saw at Fantasia with petronia, with links to her (less reductive) reviews:
Ip Man (The Prequel) : Ip Man is Bruce Lee's martial arts teacher, and this is the story of how he first joins his master's school, the successes and failures he experiences as he learns his craft, the successes and failures he experiences in love, and how he (spoiler) foils a Salt-esque Japanese plot in the decade before WWII. Speaking of the Second World War, I found the "evil villain" music that played every time the Japanese delegation came on screen hilarious (because it was exactly like the "evil Russian" music in American movies).
There's a tragic plot twist, but the movie is not exactly a tearjerker. Actually you can tell where Ip-Man-the-Prequel's interests lie by the fact that the sum-up moral at the end is not "Ip Man was forced to make a difficult moral choice, and as a result he saved my life" but "Ip Man saved my life by mixing other martial arts styles with our style, which convinced me that there is no one 'true' style".
Or in other words: Ip Man is a movie by martial arts nerds, for martial arts nerds, and starring a martial arts nerd. XD.
***
The Trollhunter: Totally hilarious movie that should be ported over to mainstream American theaters, stat. Movie producers completely troll the audience (sorry bad pun) by claiming the movie is "The Blair Witch Project with Trolls". It's got kids running around in the woods with cameras, looking for things that go bump in the night, but it's not the Blair Witch Project. It's a comedy about bureaucratic incompetence, with fairytale injokes. My favorite part was when the three journalism students all swore to the trollhunter that they were atheists (trolls can smell the blood of a Christian man), and my second favorite part was how they managed to score a much more professional camerawoman just in time for the epic finale.
The preview for this movie is also a troll, in that it makes Trollhunter look like a big-budgeted action movie. While it's nice to see the filmmakers sticking to a theme (ie, trolling), it's generally not a good idea to misrepresent your movie in the trailer.
***
Another Earth: This movie is really, really sad. It's got a Pi vibe, in that it features an intelligent and sensitive protagonist, brilliant moody visuals, and this kind of thrumming, vaguely Buddhist music. Then that vibe is combined with an Atonement like plot about doing an unforgiveable thing, so that (spoilers) the mutely sad protagonist first tries to kill herself, and then dedicates herself to the only other survivor of the accident, on the principle that a life can only be repaid with another life (but she killed two people and ruined the life of a third, so she's screwed).* And then THAT plot is combined with an elegy for our lost space program, which also works as a not-subtle SF metaphor for "what if things had gone differently?". The result is a perfect storm of sadness. I cried the whole way through. (To the lady sitting next to me who offered me a tissue: thank you.)
*Not actually an articulated philosophy in the movie, but something that is discussed in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which is the book I'm reading right now.
***
You Are Here: A movie made up of a bunch of thematically-linked short pieces, which were then further linked via re-occurring visual motifs and inter-cuttting. In the Q&A session afterward, the director explained that "the archivist", a character who tries to solve the mystery of how bits of film and audio (taken from other parts of the movie) fit together, and who breaks down when she fails, is really the heart of the movie, but that this might not be obvious at first. Me, I thought it was SUPER obvious from the very first time the character came onscreen, just because I always expect the librarian to be the "adult Mary Sue" of literate audiences. But the director is a dude, so maybe this perspective didn't occur to him.
Anyway, the movie was good. Sabina had a metaphysical take on it - she thought it was about cognition. I thought it was mostly about "Marx’s theory of work alienation" (Sabina's phrase), by which I mean the optimizing process that removes thinking from most people's daily work. Here's what I mean (spoilers):
• A lecturer makes suggestions for how you should look at waves on a beach. He never solicits feedback from the audience, and (later) can't justify himself to a group of eight-year-olds who don't passively accept his authority. It's implied that he gives these lecturers to a corporate audience.
• An interchangeable person goes to work at an office, but forgets how to do the routine things he/she does every day. Daily actions are so completely routine for this person that he/she ordinarily doesn't think about them at all.
• A group of people phone in their co-ordinates to call center, where they are dutifully written down. Why do they do this? These people follow institutional routines every day that have no obvious purpose.
• A man designs a book (actually a long series of books) that allows you analyze a Chinese passage, in Chinese, without actually knowing Chinese, just by following a set of step-by-step instructions. No thought is required, because all of the thinking has been done in advance. However, even the man who designed the system becomes trapped when he puts himself in the role of "user".
• The Archivist struggles to piece together the movie; she does this by obsessively cataloging every bit of evidence, without ever doing any cognitive heavy lifting. In the end the archive achieves sentience before she does, and re-arranges itself.
• The only character who actually has insight into the workings of the world is completely alienated and extracts horrible revenge.
In conclusion, Sabina is probably right when she says it's about a bunch of pieces struggling to think about how they relate to the whole, but I think it's a funny coincidence that so much of this "struggle" takes place in corporate environments where each piece performs a limited function, determined in advance by someone else.
petronia, with links to her (less reductive) reviews:Ip Man (The Prequel) : Ip Man is Bruce Lee's martial arts teacher, and this is the story of how he first joins his master's school, the successes and failures he experiences as he learns his craft, the successes and failures he experiences in love, and how he (spoiler) foils a Salt-esque Japanese plot in the decade before WWII. Speaking of the Second World War, I found the "evil villain" music that played every time the Japanese delegation came on screen hilarious (because it was exactly like the "evil Russian" music in American movies).
There's a tragic plot twist, but the movie is not exactly a tearjerker. Actually you can tell where Ip-Man-the-Prequel's interests lie by the fact that the sum-up moral at the end is not "Ip Man was forced to make a difficult moral choice, and as a result he saved my life" but "Ip Man saved my life by mixing other martial arts styles with our style, which convinced me that there is no one 'true' style".
Or in other words: Ip Man is a movie by martial arts nerds, for martial arts nerds, and starring a martial arts nerd. XD.
***
The Trollhunter: Totally hilarious movie that should be ported over to mainstream American theaters, stat. Movie producers completely troll the audience (sorry bad pun) by claiming the movie is "The Blair Witch Project with Trolls". It's got kids running around in the woods with cameras, looking for things that go bump in the night, but it's not the Blair Witch Project. It's a comedy about bureaucratic incompetence, with fairytale injokes.
The preview for this movie is also a troll, in that it makes Trollhunter look like a big-budgeted action movie. While it's nice to see the filmmakers sticking to a theme (ie, trolling), it's generally not a good idea to misrepresent your movie in the trailer.
***
Another Earth: This movie is really, really sad. It's got a Pi vibe, in that it features an intelligent and sensitive protagonist, brilliant moody visuals, and this kind of thrumming, vaguely Buddhist music. Then that vibe is combined with an Atonement like plot about doing an unforgiveable thing, so that (spoilers) the mutely sad protagonist first tries to kill herself, and then dedicates herself to the only other survivor of the accident, on the principle that a life can only be repaid with another life (but she killed two people and ruined the life of a third, so she's screwed).* And then THAT plot is combined with an elegy for our lost space program, which also works as a not-subtle SF metaphor for "what if things had gone differently?". The result is a perfect storm of sadness. I cried the whole way through. (To the lady sitting next to me who offered me a tissue: thank you.)
*Not actually an articulated philosophy in the movie, but something that is discussed in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which is the book I'm reading right now.
***
You Are Here: A movie made up of a bunch of thematically-linked short pieces, which were then further linked via re-occurring visual motifs and inter-cuttting. In the Q&A session afterward, the director explained that "the archivist", a character who tries to solve the mystery of how bits of film and audio (taken from other parts of the movie) fit together, and who breaks down when she fails, is really the heart of the movie, but that this might not be obvious at first. Me, I thought it was SUPER obvious from the very first time the character came onscreen, just because I always expect the librarian to be the "adult Mary Sue" of literate audiences. But the director is a dude, so maybe this perspective didn't occur to him.
Anyway, the movie was good. Sabina had a metaphysical take on it - she thought it was about cognition. I thought it was mostly about "Marx’s theory of work alienation" (Sabina's phrase), by which I mean the optimizing process that removes thinking from most people's daily work. Here's what I mean (spoilers):
• A lecturer makes suggestions for how you should look at waves on a beach. He never solicits feedback from the audience, and (later) can't justify himself to a group of eight-year-olds who don't passively accept his authority. It's implied that he gives these lecturers to a corporate audience.
• An interchangeable person goes to work at an office, but forgets how to do the routine things he/she does every day. Daily actions are so completely routine for this person that he/she ordinarily doesn't think about them at all.
• A group of people phone in their co-ordinates to call center, where they are dutifully written down. Why do they do this? These people follow institutional routines every day that have no obvious purpose.
• A man designs a book (actually a long series of books) that allows you analyze a Chinese passage, in Chinese, without actually knowing Chinese, just by following a set of step-by-step instructions. No thought is required, because all of the thinking has been done in advance. However, even the man who designed the system becomes trapped when he puts himself in the role of "user".
• The Archivist struggles to piece together the movie; she does this by obsessively cataloging every bit of evidence, without ever doing any cognitive heavy lifting. In the end the archive achieves sentience before she does, and re-arranges itself.
• The only character who actually has insight into the workings of the world is completely alienated and extracts horrible revenge.
In conclusion, Sabina is probably right when she says it's about a bunch of pieces struggling to think about how they relate to the whole, but I think it's a funny coincidence that so much of this "struggle" takes place in corporate environments where each piece performs a limited function, determined in advance by someone else.