GM love story from East Asia, mixed bag of merits and flaws. It made me happy to see a gay movie that had moved beyond the obsessive retelling of the same two or three stories that are imagined to be universal in gay experience... but the filmmaker may have clichés of his own that he's running into the ground.
LIKED:
* First half was immersively romantic and relatable.
* Visual texture was appealing throughout.
DISLIKED:
* Too much plot, presented…
Grown-up Alice revisits Wonderland, and now it's a place that reflects her boring, grown-up concerns; she uses her dreamwork to better understand her role as a late nineteenth century subject of Empire and to make career decisions for herself.
The things Burton changes are all of a piece, and they all point toward a coherent reading that's clearly intentional on his part, but they also clearly indicate how sadly inferior his imagination is to Lewis Carroll's.
On the other hand,…
Glib and carelessly-imagined ode to privilege. I tried to ignore my distaste for the superficial artsiness of the characters, but after the scene where the blonde girl decided it would be kicks to go to a slummy-looking neighborhood and photograph sex-workers I just couldn't. Esp. when the SW were all "Hello, American Lady Woman! We love you! Come taste the wines and cheeses of my village!"
Art is one thing, lifestyle-pimping is another.
It's got a gun and it's got a girl, so it's cinema. I think the only thing I can do right now is transcribe the notes I made to myself while I was watching it. Sustained thought? It's usually beyond me... and I want to read up on secondary materials before I commit to anything.
Episode 1:
It's absolutely a sequel to L'Amour Fou -- in that one, the characters were struggling against the collapse of meaning, and in this…
