(major spoilers)
Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique is maybe most characterized by its thick sense of possibility. Of being on the verge. The camera calmly moves and then calmly sits through a world bathed in amber yellow and seaglass green, and an atmospheric quality falls over these two women's lives. Weronika and Veronique are on the precipice of their own lives, young women wrangling with their own talent, lovers, and convictions about what they want from life as they…
All that which lies behind the text, behind art, behind any work, thing, or person.
When you make a movie that is, in many ways, literally about form as an artistic and narrative concept — itself a form in a periodical; the reporting, editing, and writing of a piece, put front and center; frescoes vs. prints, etc; seminars, television interviews, theater plays, cartoon adaptations; manifestos to martyrs to t-shirts — weave in and out of these forms with purposeful near-obfuscation,…
A Drama, Thriller, Comedy mashup where the whole is less than the sum of its genres, and the end product just feels slightly limp; a running, legal discussion between characters about where the Law resides, either in the clouds as an objective ideal or on the ground as a subjective gut feeling, that seems fascinating in theory but never really enters full bloom; a repeatedly teased menage a troi that never goes full Design For Living, for the more Arthur,…
A peculiar cold open of a tour through the cosmos with a narration reminding us how vast, unknown, and treacherous these foreign bodies are -- gas clouds, stellar explosions -- only to finally arrive at our home planet, with the greeting, "reassuring, isn't it?". But then, refutingly, the music ominously swells as we are thrown into a scene of war. Earth, our seeming refuge from the impassive, gargantuan forces of nature, here house equally gargantuan and impassive forces, in war.…
This is not really a review.
What do yall think about theaters having certain showings in "Taser Rooms", where everyone attending voluntarily signs waivers and agrees to watch the movie in otherwise normal theater recliners that are fitted with decibal sensors which trigger electric shocks via the seats if talking is either too loud, too long, or too frequent?
If I were a billionaire, I would greenlight this plan with my own theater chain, be hailed as a fascist and…
A film about transition, but furthermore, a film that embodies transition.
There is first a movie of soft humor, ostensibly low stakes, populated with ceaseless smiles, and a movie where time (and the camera) seems to move leisurely and slowly, if at all.
And then there gradually emerges a movie laden with the silent and universal fear of loneliness, where some of the smiles can't help but give way -- not in rejection of their former joy but in evolution…
