MVFF #6 (with Todd Haynes, Christine Vachon, and Samy Burch)
Well I had hopes Todd Haynes could make camp I'd enjoy, fairly self-aware camp at that. Sadly that isn't the case here. My problems also start with the premise of the film itself. I do not care one iota about tabloid stories in general, so the idea of making a film about it (within this film, that is) feels ill-conceived to me without enough of a self-reflective satirical lens to…
MVFF #5 (with Tran Anh Hung)
Do not go into this film hungry.
The story is simple and a bit thin for the runtime but it's secondary to the experience here anyhow. The choreography and editing of the cooking sequences are quite wonderful. I mostly agree with the choice to not use any music throughout; certainly the rich sound design of the cooking as is was generally a satisfying sensory experience. But even for someone who loves haute food, I wanted a bit more variety in the filmmaking or really just a shorter film.
On the surface, one of the most ridiculous films I've seen in which its core concept is, on paper, an unexplained mess of massive proportions. But somehow that really doesn't matter at all, the film piles on the absurd jokes and imagery at a blistering pace such that you never have the opportunity nor the mindset to really question what's going on. And, for the most part, I'd say the film's sheer maximalism worked really well.
The one main problem…
"Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality."
As much as many engineers would like it, their field never exists in a vacuum. The purity of mathematical or aesthetical ideas has to contend with the messiness of reality. The idealism of a product's purpose has to satiate some sort of customer need, sometimes an unethical one. Beauty inevitably becomes corrupted, the dream carries with it a curse. Jiro's Faustian bargain is in many ways universal, for all engineers and…
