Watched in three sittings separated by a week each. After finally finishing, I'm sad to say I got less out of this behemoth than I did out of many feature-length films.
Now there are quite a number of cinema verité films I rather enjoy, even long ones like Frederick Wiseman's City Hall or Steve James' Hoop Dreams. But Wang Bing takes that style and philosophy to an extreme. Through an inordinate amount of handheld long takes, he lets the camera…
It's rare and exciting to encounter a new film that completely defies conventional understanding, even when branching out to the fringes of arthouse cinema. But here it feels like Weerasethakul has almost developed a new cinematic form. In my view, he goes even further beyond his prior films which, for example, utilized narrative dualities connected spiritually. With Memoria, he has almost fully removed the narrative guiderails, leaving solely its spiritual backbone to bind the film together. We're generally familiar with…
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…
Talk about committing to the bit.
If I hadn't known any better, the extreme formalism and experimentation on display would've led me to believe this was a director's late-career work, the product of decades of honing one's craft, finding one's artistic voice, and navigating the grammar of cinema only to later destroy and reinvent it. But this is unbelievably Peter Greenaway's feature debut.
This can best be categorized as a mockumentary, but it's truly unlike anything I've seen, even other…
