Wrong
I watched this movie earlier this summer and I keep thinking about it as I work on my own feature. It’s just perfectly weird. And maybe not a great film but there’s something about the tone and the absurd humor that I really love and would take any day over the bro comedy genre that is popular these days.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and making apartment scenes interesting
I watched Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf this week after we used it in my cinematography class at Chicago Filmmakers as an example for a lighing setup exercise. It’s a good film to watch for indie people on ultra low budgets because it takes place mostly in a living room, which is where we often end up shooting stuff because it’s the easiest location to get.
I like the way Mike Nichols uses the camera to create movement and action within a single setting so that the visual experience is varied and remains interesting. The room and the walls are full of books and decorations that give it texture, as opposed to sparse or blank white walls.
Watching Westerns This Week
This week I’ve been watching Westerns to get into the genre more. I watched Blazing Saddles (which I’d never seen all the way through), True Grit (the Coen brothers version, 2nd watching), and Once Upon a Time in the West.
I’ve seen most of the Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns but I’m not sure how I missed Once Upon a Time in the West–maybe because it’s almost 3 hours long? Anyway, it didn’t feel that long and it’s a great film that really takes advantage of the medium. It’s very much a visual story (and so beautiful) with sparse dialogue and a 15-minute opening sequence that’s full of tension and story with barely a single line spoken. Anyway, it’s my favorite Spaghetti Western now, replacing For a Few Dollars More, although that’s definitely a more playful, fun movie.
True Grit is also beautiful but with sparring witty dialogue as opposed to just letting the images tell the story. I saw True Grit as a film about about overcoming oneself to help another (at least in the end) and Once Upon a Time is about overcoming another to help oneself (and get revenge).
There’s something about westerns that I admire. Or maybe it’s just old movies in general. There’s a certain willingness to accept your fate and face it stoically. It’s theatrical and perhaps not true to life, but there’s a nobility to it, something to aspire to.
On the other hand, I wonder if these men go home and are ever happy. The protagonists never seem to have parents or wives or families or even friends. So the individualistic life is romanticized but I wonder if in reality it wouldn’t be cripplingly lonely.
As for Blazing Saddles, it’s hilarious, but you already knew that. And nobody had to cry. Imagine that, a comedy where no men cry or have awkward sex.
Thoughts on Snowpiercer
I loved this movie for the sheer entertainment although the ending was a bit of a let down and didn’t quite punctuate the action up to that point, if that makes sense. Spoilers below.
A lot of people have been talking about the social critiques and it’s the kind of movie that could be claimed by people on both sides of social/political/economic issues. You can read it as a warning about global warming, but on the other hand, the solution to global warming in the movie basically destroyed earth.
I saw it as a critique of the perils of a social structure that has an underclass for whom meaningful participation in society is impossible. They’re kept down and there’s no way to move forward on the train. In the movie, this is done at gunpoint, overtly. In America, the mechanisms are more subtle. So you feel righteous as the back of the train rises up against oppression, especially against such a decadent ruling class, but the nice little vicious twist is that the revolution, while just, basically ends civilization as they know it. The train derails and almost everyone on it dies.
It’s hard to see the ending and think “this is a great alternative to where we started two hours ago, for all its faults and injustices.” Or did you take solace in the fact that we all get to start over in the snow? Because the missing act in that movie, what happens next, is that two children starve/freeze to death and get eaten by a polar bear, which may be more or less inconsequential to the future of carbon-based organisms on the thawing planet, but it’s not an optimistic picture of the future of humanity.
The (ironic?) thing is that the movie doesn’t really consider a third way–it frames the question in your mind as a binary–society as is, or obliteration? Well obviously you choose status quo because you don’t want everyone to die. But that’s a trick because there’s also an infinite number of alternatives along the spectrum of keeping things similar but changing certain things at the margins. Keep the class structure but make it merit-based. Or keep it and make life more humane for those at the bottom. Or change it entirely to something more egalitarian. Or send everyone at the front to the back and vice versa. Just to name a few.
Why didn’t this ever occur to Curtis or Wilford?
Thoughts on The Lego Movie
I enjoyed this but not as much as people I’ve talked to. It felt a little too frantic for me, but I thought it was a good satire of The Matrix. I saw Emmet as Neo, a basically boring guy that had done nothing of note who all of a sudden is chosen as special/the one. Basically a childhood fantasy that the world will see you as special, in the Lego movie, an actual child wishing his disconnected father (also a grown child) would see him that way and in The Matrix as an ostensibly grown man stuck in adolescence, waiting for someone to see him as he really is (well, as he thinks he is..). Normal for a child with an emotionally absent father but well, not really normal for a grown man.