Having been in a less than light mood lately, I have started to re-read parts of the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Not because in good goth fashion he holds my dire souls twixt the measures of his verses’ pincered grip, but because when one is in existential dread it is always good to realise the melodrama of ones actions, thus to negate them into self mockery and therefore good humour. After all, when one feels whiney and wallowing, what better to do than to root out someone who is even more versed and mired in the melancholic mood that permeates the occasional week?
Well, one can crawl into the embrace of one’s lovely boyfriend and watch sappy movies until the mood improves, but my lovely boyfriend is far away from me at the moment and this option was therefore not open for me, and watching sappy movies alone in a mood like that is a recipe for disaster only eclipsed by the horror of country music while in the presence of a warm bath and razor blades.
Mood thus through literature abated, I started thinking about a theme touched upon in EAP and other works of writing and mythology, specifically, the bird that perches in a book-lined study atop a bust of some Greek personage, intoning that single word of anguish to a grief-ridden narrator. And even more specifically still, about the mental state of someone who would put the wellbeing of his mind and soul into the uncaring talons and opinions of a feathered and beaked opponent.
Not that he is in bad company, this nameless narrator shouting at the blackened shadow above his study’s entrance.
Odin, the managing director god of the Norse pantheon was aided by two ravens who embodied thought and memory and who traversed the earth each day as his eyes and ears, reporting back to him each night.
The earlier versions of the Cinderella tales have the ghost of the protagonist’s mother personified by a small bird denouncing the stepsisters and stepmother as treacherous creatures set on bending the world to their desires.
Athena, goddess of wisdom, was accompanied by an owl, symbol of contemplation and dread calm.
In many tales, birds are, if not the harbingers of step sisterly betrayal, at least messengers for a world beyond our own, to be reached only through the medium of air. Obvious symbolism, air being the element of the mind, where fire and water belong to heart and soul, and earth to the material body. Thus, air, being the mind and the reason within it, would obviously bring forth those that judge or guide without heart, weightless retainers to a force above our own ability to deal with it.
Such a shame that the more factual nature of birds never factors into the approximating of divinity. Because birds are, well, vicious and stupid, to say the least.
If I was to put my mental and emotional state in the talons, beaks, paws or otherwise of any non-antropomorph being, I would certainly never pick the one species of animal that does little else but peck disheartenedly at the occasional dropped French frie in some godforsaken square in almost all big cities or makes it a habit to pound itself to death at any and all available pane of glass.
Granted, dropped French fries and panes of glass were not overabundantly represented in the classical worlds, but I find it hard to believe the birds have only gotten stupid in the years since the inventions of these things. After all, would evolution alone not have delivered us birds of remarkable intelligence and eloquence, if they have divine beings and motherly guides to start out from?
In the specific case of the studiously ensconced narrator the decision is easily understandable. He laments the loss of his love, is in a grey and dark mood, and having found an advisor that only answers with one word and one word alone starts asking questions where that one word promises only the worst of outcomes, giving him the chance to beat himself to death on the cliffs of his overpowering grief. Something I am sure we have all at some point in time have desired doing, after all, humanity is no stranger to wallowing in a bit of self pity.
But Noah had no need of such mood-enforcing exercises when he loosened not one but three birds from his famous boating experiment to find a good place to land. Sure, he had little at his disposal to be fair, but logic dictates that if there is enough of a landmass nearby to allow olive branches to be beakily plucked from it then surely mere time or a better, human, lookout would have proven to be as effective as the birds.
That said, it is almost astoundingly likely that the man was just getting tired of having build an ark with all his might and heart and faith and now watching it being crapped continuously on by anything with a metabolism and had just decided to get rid of anything he could not easily reach to kick, and considered it sheer luck that one of them happened to come back with digestible resources. The likelihood that an excellent recipe for dove smothered in olive oil has been invented at the spot.
Why? Why birds? Ok, easily answered, the link to air-symbolism is easily put down. But still, why? Birds are evil, annoying creatures with small brains in little heads that hold no more truth in their evil sodden souls than a drunk beggar railing at leather coats on the streets of Amsterdam holds the wisdom of the world in her bottle.
I just don’t get it, really, but perhaps this is because I have somewhat of an aversion to birds, but all I can think of thinking about Athena’s owl is the drycleaning costs of having something only able to poop processed mouse on ones’ shoulder.
Which, I think, is a bit of a shame.
For now, I will continue my avian ruminations, perhaps to be taken up at another stage.
Stripes at 11101, three birds in hand, one in bush,
Kevin.
For the turnout of this little blog I have relied heavily on the assumption that all my readers few of you as there are, are familiar with a specific work of poetry. This work or the one word that lies at it’s centre has not been named explicitly. For all those who request further information, please let me know.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Monday, May 21, 2007
Venom, Sand, Crap.
Last week, Housemate and myself decided on a long overdue movie day. As I had a Tuesday off, we could nicely schedule in one or two movies for our customary Sneak. A plan was made, refreshments were purchased, and off we went.
The first movie, Blades of Glory, I’d already seen, and reasonably enjoyed despite a tremendous hatred for Will Ferrel. Still, the movie is exactly as one can expect of it, and this is not always a bad thing.
The third movie, the sneakly previewed one, was the movie Black Snake Moan, a surprisingly interesting movie about a town slut and a good Christian. This is a movie I would recommend to almost everybody, but it must be said that part of my reasoning here is a liking of Christina Ricci, who may have had her least Ricci-like role in this little flick.
But the second movie of the day is what we need to talk about here. Need? Yes. Need. After all, sometimes a movie so heinously uninteresting, so laissez fairly acted, so badly scripted and so uninspired in it’s direction and plot that upcoming moviegoers need to be protected from it with all summonable power and tranquilizers.
Which movie?
Spiderman 3.
The movie itself is almost al that could be expected, there are disasters, there are colourful villains who have outlandish powers to counteract the enlarged spideryness of the main character, there are daring rescues and some easily contrived backstories. So far, so reasonable. Nothing we didn’t see in the first two movies.
So what was there that we in fact did not see in the first two movies that we saw now and that propelled this movie into the higher stratospheres of utter and complete crap? I hear you ask this, and as luck would have it, I am well prepared and gearing to answer.
And where to start? Luckily, this movie had a good number of “those moments”. Unluckily, one has to almost relive them to find a good starting point.
What are “those moments”? Those are the exact moments in any film where you realize that impaling yourself on a beverage holder or checking whether it is really possible to gouge through your wrists with an empty crisp packet is preferable to continuing with watching a childhood favourite be bloodily raped in the ear.
And it is also the exact moment where you realize you can’t stop watching, for you might miss the redeeming qualities.
Not that there are very many, if any, in this steaming pile of offal that calls itself a film-reel.
There are a number of reasonable flaws one can mention. The fact that an escaped criminal can get away from policemen with dogs and guns on an open field? Unlikely, but artistic license. The fact that that same escaped criminal can stumble into an open pit thus eluding his would be captors? Yes, sure.
But at the moment where that same pit is the location of a particle physics testing facility where nobody notices that a good sized man has stumbled into what holds their presumably fragile and incredibly expensive testing machinery one has to realize one has inadvertently stumbled into something smelly…
To add insult to injury, the mention that the readings from within the pit o’ expensiveness where off was greeted by one of the scientists with the explanation that it was most likely a bird flown into the pit, which apparently happens often in these environments.
Two things:
1)If you are doing some carefully monitored research on something like particle physics, would you then not prefer to do so in an environment that has, among other things, a reasonable unlikelyhood of birds flying into your testing radius?
2) A bird with roughly the size and weight of a full grown man is a common occurrence?
But still, mister-escaped-convict has fallen into the sand, and for some odd reason a little bit of sand gets stuck in a little bit of his DNA and he turns into sand. I know this is roughly Spiderman canon and I should not say anything, but seriously. Sand. DNA.
In Jurassic Park, parts of amphibian DNA were used to splice together the DNA of dinosaurs from the blood sucked up by prehistoric mosquitoes. The dinosaurs then had some characteristics of the species that provided the splicing materials. This is far fetched, but ok.
SAND has NO DNA. I have eaten a good deal of sand in my life, working up to my bushel, and not yet have I been even able to turn into an enourmous sand-creature, and not for lack of trying, I might add. And for everyone who now wants to say something about nuclear physics, wave theories and the assumption of characteristics through insertion of alien objects: Shut up or I will arrange for some insertion, ok? This did not make sense.
The fact that the weight of roughly a man then walked out of the research environment in the shape of sand also makes little sense, but these scientist obviously had their funding set for years to come, so what do they care.
From here on in, the stupidity gets worse and worse. Letting canon and the inherent bad logic of a creature made of sand lie, as it really wasn’t what crappified this movie, there is more.
This movie introduces Venom. Starting as a black and gooey alien lifeform, Venom quickly morphs into an alternative Spidey suit. As such, it enhances the emotions and powers of its wearer. What it also does, it makes mild mannered reporters absolutely gross dickheads.
I think I need to scrub my retinas with a mixture of bleach and steel wool to get the image of the incredibly emo-looking Maguire strutting his stuff down the streets of New York from off my memory, but at least almost everybody in the movie responds to him with the same unhidden and great loathing I did, so I felt at least roughly justified during this little bit of the movie.
Another thing that Venom does, multifunctional as it is, is turn you into the Son of Mask, as was evidenced by the frankly embarrassing piano and dance number performed midway through this movie. The fact that Peter Parker ends this scene with a good hammering of the ever whiney Mary Jane is obviously not OK, but was more pleasing than anything else the movie offered, and all those who know how I think about slapping the little lady around would know what that says about the rest of the movie.
Coincidentally, the rapid mental decline of Aunt May is beautifully illustrated by her first reaction to her nephew telling her he hurt the love of his life, as she says the hardest thing here is to learn to forgive oneself.
This met with such an almost uncontrollable fit of laughter from Housemate and myself that we felt the need to turn it into a coughing fit lest we’d be forcibly ejected from the movie, but it must be said here that the hardest thing is in fact NOT forgiving oneself, but rather owning up to the dickhead one has become and asking forgiveness from the person one has slapped around a drinking establishment.
During all this strutting and slapping and badly dubbed piano-playing there is the umpteenth try to resurrect the long dead love triangle between MJ, Peter and, euhm… Harry? Bob? Tracy? Played by James Franco, the character of “the other guy” is so unremarkable and so dreadfully unnecessary that it becomes difficult to remember anything he really says. Which is odd, cause the guy’s only function in the movie is to be cuter than Spiderman himself.
In this instalment he apparently gets amnesia from being repeatedly being banged into a wall. Well, fair enough, he gets a beating that would get most people a good dose of death, so he gets off lightly, I guess. Plus, he gets to be in a hospital gown that very nicely shows off some shapely pecs and a good nipple, so who is worrying.
The amnesia gives us a stupid subplot that ends up literally nowhere but in a vengeance fuelled bit of overacting, like, you know, the last movie.
So, to recap, (H)arry thinks (P)eter, as Spiderman, killed his dad and wants revenge. The fact that his dad was a supercriminal does not really factor here, blood being thicker than intelligence and all that, but still.
H uses Dad’s equipment to attack P, loses, gets amnesia, remembers, attacks again, gets maimed, wants to attack yet again, when this movie starts delivering it’s kicks to internal consistency with renewed vigour.
It is at that moment that the butler, of all people, decides to put an end to all this senseless exploding and webbing, by giving us a bit of information that one the one hand would’ve been handy a few movies earlier, and on the other hand is so blatantly and stupidly untrue that all those who believe in the old “is truth beauty, is beauty truth” adage would be well forced to take their own life in absolute terror.
The line? “I bandaged your fathers wound when he lay dying, and they were self inflicted, nobody killed your father” or something of that ilk.
A few things:
1) We had just had a flashback to H cradling his dying father in his arms. So the butler was doing his bandaging at that very moment? No he wasn’t, we and H would have remembered.
2) H’s dad did indeed die of a series of events he had himself set into motion, but Spiderman did have a great hand in this. As I recall, grievous internal damage was the real killer here, which Daddy-H got in a fight with the arachnoid.
3) The butler could possibly have told this to the young ward before all the rampage, since he knows apparently all that goes on in the house. The fact that the very pretty H is by now a good look-a-like to a certain organ playing genius in the bowels of the Paris’ sewer, it would have been welcome information.
I am going to finish this rant pretty soon, but not before regaling to you the absolute coup de grace for the dignity of this film… The American Flag.
At one point, Spidey, on his way to erscue his girlfriend, stops for a goodly length of time to pose heroically in front of a crappily CGI’d image of the good old red white and blue.
It was at this point that Housemate and I chorused a few lines of “Oh Goden this is too cheap” and the movie took it’s final plummet to a future of alcoholism, pain and dejection.
Caveat Emptor, moviegoers.
Strips at Caveat,
Kevin.
The first movie, Blades of Glory, I’d already seen, and reasonably enjoyed despite a tremendous hatred for Will Ferrel. Still, the movie is exactly as one can expect of it, and this is not always a bad thing.
The third movie, the sneakly previewed one, was the movie Black Snake Moan, a surprisingly interesting movie about a town slut and a good Christian. This is a movie I would recommend to almost everybody, but it must be said that part of my reasoning here is a liking of Christina Ricci, who may have had her least Ricci-like role in this little flick.
But the second movie of the day is what we need to talk about here. Need? Yes. Need. After all, sometimes a movie so heinously uninteresting, so laissez fairly acted, so badly scripted and so uninspired in it’s direction and plot that upcoming moviegoers need to be protected from it with all summonable power and tranquilizers.
Which movie?
Spiderman 3.
The movie itself is almost al that could be expected, there are disasters, there are colourful villains who have outlandish powers to counteract the enlarged spideryness of the main character, there are daring rescues and some easily contrived backstories. So far, so reasonable. Nothing we didn’t see in the first two movies.
So what was there that we in fact did not see in the first two movies that we saw now and that propelled this movie into the higher stratospheres of utter and complete crap? I hear you ask this, and as luck would have it, I am well prepared and gearing to answer.
And where to start? Luckily, this movie had a good number of “those moments”. Unluckily, one has to almost relive them to find a good starting point.
What are “those moments”? Those are the exact moments in any film where you realize that impaling yourself on a beverage holder or checking whether it is really possible to gouge through your wrists with an empty crisp packet is preferable to continuing with watching a childhood favourite be bloodily raped in the ear.
And it is also the exact moment where you realize you can’t stop watching, for you might miss the redeeming qualities.
Not that there are very many, if any, in this steaming pile of offal that calls itself a film-reel.
There are a number of reasonable flaws one can mention. The fact that an escaped criminal can get away from policemen with dogs and guns on an open field? Unlikely, but artistic license. The fact that that same escaped criminal can stumble into an open pit thus eluding his would be captors? Yes, sure.
But at the moment where that same pit is the location of a particle physics testing facility where nobody notices that a good sized man has stumbled into what holds their presumably fragile and incredibly expensive testing machinery one has to realize one has inadvertently stumbled into something smelly…
To add insult to injury, the mention that the readings from within the pit o’ expensiveness where off was greeted by one of the scientists with the explanation that it was most likely a bird flown into the pit, which apparently happens often in these environments.
Two things:
1)If you are doing some carefully monitored research on something like particle physics, would you then not prefer to do so in an environment that has, among other things, a reasonable unlikelyhood of birds flying into your testing radius?
2) A bird with roughly the size and weight of a full grown man is a common occurrence?
But still, mister-escaped-convict has fallen into the sand, and for some odd reason a little bit of sand gets stuck in a little bit of his DNA and he turns into sand. I know this is roughly Spiderman canon and I should not say anything, but seriously. Sand. DNA.
In Jurassic Park, parts of amphibian DNA were used to splice together the DNA of dinosaurs from the blood sucked up by prehistoric mosquitoes. The dinosaurs then had some characteristics of the species that provided the splicing materials. This is far fetched, but ok.
SAND has NO DNA. I have eaten a good deal of sand in my life, working up to my bushel, and not yet have I been even able to turn into an enourmous sand-creature, and not for lack of trying, I might add. And for everyone who now wants to say something about nuclear physics, wave theories and the assumption of characteristics through insertion of alien objects: Shut up or I will arrange for some insertion, ok? This did not make sense.
The fact that the weight of roughly a man then walked out of the research environment in the shape of sand also makes little sense, but these scientist obviously had their funding set for years to come, so what do they care.
From here on in, the stupidity gets worse and worse. Letting canon and the inherent bad logic of a creature made of sand lie, as it really wasn’t what crappified this movie, there is more.
This movie introduces Venom. Starting as a black and gooey alien lifeform, Venom quickly morphs into an alternative Spidey suit. As such, it enhances the emotions and powers of its wearer. What it also does, it makes mild mannered reporters absolutely gross dickheads.
I think I need to scrub my retinas with a mixture of bleach and steel wool to get the image of the incredibly emo-looking Maguire strutting his stuff down the streets of New York from off my memory, but at least almost everybody in the movie responds to him with the same unhidden and great loathing I did, so I felt at least roughly justified during this little bit of the movie.
Another thing that Venom does, multifunctional as it is, is turn you into the Son of Mask, as was evidenced by the frankly embarrassing piano and dance number performed midway through this movie. The fact that Peter Parker ends this scene with a good hammering of the ever whiney Mary Jane is obviously not OK, but was more pleasing than anything else the movie offered, and all those who know how I think about slapping the little lady around would know what that says about the rest of the movie.
Coincidentally, the rapid mental decline of Aunt May is beautifully illustrated by her first reaction to her nephew telling her he hurt the love of his life, as she says the hardest thing here is to learn to forgive oneself.
This met with such an almost uncontrollable fit of laughter from Housemate and myself that we felt the need to turn it into a coughing fit lest we’d be forcibly ejected from the movie, but it must be said here that the hardest thing is in fact NOT forgiving oneself, but rather owning up to the dickhead one has become and asking forgiveness from the person one has slapped around a drinking establishment.
During all this strutting and slapping and badly dubbed piano-playing there is the umpteenth try to resurrect the long dead love triangle between MJ, Peter and, euhm… Harry? Bob? Tracy? Played by James Franco, the character of “the other guy” is so unremarkable and so dreadfully unnecessary that it becomes difficult to remember anything he really says. Which is odd, cause the guy’s only function in the movie is to be cuter than Spiderman himself.
In this instalment he apparently gets amnesia from being repeatedly being banged into a wall. Well, fair enough, he gets a beating that would get most people a good dose of death, so he gets off lightly, I guess. Plus, he gets to be in a hospital gown that very nicely shows off some shapely pecs and a good nipple, so who is worrying.
The amnesia gives us a stupid subplot that ends up literally nowhere but in a vengeance fuelled bit of overacting, like, you know, the last movie.
So, to recap, (H)arry thinks (P)eter, as Spiderman, killed his dad and wants revenge. The fact that his dad was a supercriminal does not really factor here, blood being thicker than intelligence and all that, but still.
H uses Dad’s equipment to attack P, loses, gets amnesia, remembers, attacks again, gets maimed, wants to attack yet again, when this movie starts delivering it’s kicks to internal consistency with renewed vigour.
It is at that moment that the butler, of all people, decides to put an end to all this senseless exploding and webbing, by giving us a bit of information that one the one hand would’ve been handy a few movies earlier, and on the other hand is so blatantly and stupidly untrue that all those who believe in the old “is truth beauty, is beauty truth” adage would be well forced to take their own life in absolute terror.
The line? “I bandaged your fathers wound when he lay dying, and they were self inflicted, nobody killed your father” or something of that ilk.
A few things:
1) We had just had a flashback to H cradling his dying father in his arms. So the butler was doing his bandaging at that very moment? No he wasn’t, we and H would have remembered.
2) H’s dad did indeed die of a series of events he had himself set into motion, but Spiderman did have a great hand in this. As I recall, grievous internal damage was the real killer here, which Daddy-H got in a fight with the arachnoid.
3) The butler could possibly have told this to the young ward before all the rampage, since he knows apparently all that goes on in the house. The fact that the very pretty H is by now a good look-a-like to a certain organ playing genius in the bowels of the Paris’ sewer, it would have been welcome information.
I am going to finish this rant pretty soon, but not before regaling to you the absolute coup de grace for the dignity of this film… The American Flag.
At one point, Spidey, on his way to erscue his girlfriend, stops for a goodly length of time to pose heroically in front of a crappily CGI’d image of the good old red white and blue.
It was at this point that Housemate and I chorused a few lines of “Oh Goden this is too cheap” and the movie took it’s final plummet to a future of alcoholism, pain and dejection.
Caveat Emptor, moviegoers.
Strips at Caveat,
Kevin.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Maintenance Blog
Hello dear readers of this little corner that is my little corner of the internet.
Corner? Niche? Grotto?
Well, anyway, over the last few months some changes to this blog have been made, and some apparently need an explanation. And who am I to deny my readers this?
First of all, I have added some link-lists. Divided in cool, regularly visited, and the peeps I know that have their own blogs/sites.
Cool is for things I run into that I find cool, this will thus be populated with things that strike my interest at any given time, things that keep on striking my interest, and things that prompt some sort of project in my non-bloggy life.
Regularly visited is for those sites I spent a lot of time on, either through usefulness, funnyness, or for other random reasons. The first obviously Wiki and IMDB, for where else does a movie- and infobuff like me find his much needed cerebral sustenance.
Peeps I know that have their own website also get a link, starting with the inomparable Bienie, who has been a steady moviebuddy and great friend for nigh on six years now. Shoutout to Bienie.
My brother's band, Black Bandit, needs to be mentioned here as well. There are plans for me to write for the new website, something I am greatly looking forward to, but even if I wouldn't, the band is really getting into their sounds now, with the first small single being printed, and sounding great. Pleace visit them, they have music online, and it is not bad music.
Good, linkage out of the way, there is only the Meez left to explain. Meez, the 3d-ish online avatar. In this case,the Meez is me. Nto remarkably recognizable, the question "why is that girl dancing" has been asked, but in truth, it is me,and it is trying to look impatient. Why it is doing so in church is symbolic, points for those who can spot what it is symbolic off.
Anyways, I am leaving you guys again, soon there will be a movie review again, or possibly a website review, as I am in a reviewy mood but not in a movie mood...
Stripes at half open,
Kevin
Corner? Niche? Grotto?
Well, anyway, over the last few months some changes to this blog have been made, and some apparently need an explanation. And who am I to deny my readers this?
First of all, I have added some link-lists. Divided in cool, regularly visited, and the peeps I know that have their own blogs/sites.
Cool is for things I run into that I find cool, this will thus be populated with things that strike my interest at any given time, things that keep on striking my interest, and things that prompt some sort of project in my non-bloggy life.
Regularly visited is for those sites I spent a lot of time on, either through usefulness, funnyness, or for other random reasons. The first obviously Wiki and IMDB, for where else does a movie- and infobuff like me find his much needed cerebral sustenance.
Peeps I know that have their own website also get a link, starting with the inomparable Bienie, who has been a steady moviebuddy and great friend for nigh on six years now. Shoutout to Bienie.
My brother's band, Black Bandit, needs to be mentioned here as well. There are plans for me to write for the new website, something I am greatly looking forward to, but even if I wouldn't, the band is really getting into their sounds now, with the first small single being printed, and sounding great. Pleace visit them, they have music online, and it is not bad music.
Good, linkage out of the way, there is only the Meez left to explain. Meez, the 3d-ish online avatar. In this case,the Meez is me. Nto remarkably recognizable, the question "why is that girl dancing" has been asked, but in truth, it is me,and it is trying to look impatient. Why it is doing so in church is symbolic, points for those who can spot what it is symbolic off.
Anyways, I am leaving you guys again, soon there will be a movie review again, or possibly a website review, as I am in a reviewy mood but not in a movie mood...
Stripes at half open,
Kevin
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Déjà vu?
“The Fountain” the latest effort of the director of Requiem for a Dream and Pi was shown us as part of the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival. And well titled, in fact, it was. This movie describes itself best as a fountain.
A fountain of plain obviousness sparkling in the light of unrelenting repetition and set in a courtyard of empty beauty.
This movie, due to it’s visuals and enforced tearjerkyness is well on it’s way to be THE overrated film of the year, and since almost everybody who will see it will disagree with me I feel no compunction with regards to spoiling it, snide little bastard that I am.
The movie, pretending to weave three storylines in one, is about a doctor, name of Tom, played by Hugh Jackman, and his wife, Izzy, played by Rachel Weisz. Izzy is dying of a fast growing brain-tumour, and Tom is hard at work doing research on monkeys that apparently have the same type of brain-tumours as Izzy, and he thinks he is very close to a cure.
At the same time, it is about the book Izzy writes, which is about a conquistador in Spain, Tomas, who is looking for the tree of eternal life for his Queen Isabella, whose country is slowly being taken over by an inquisitor.
Thirdly, we have a futuristic Tom who is flying through space in a bubble, with a big and dying tree, trying to get to a nebula in which the tree can remain alive.
Is it obvious yet?
All three Toms being the same Tom and looking for a way to keep his wife with him for ever and ever and effur?
Well, it should be.
And if it isn’t, the movie lays it on. And lays it on thickly.
Examples?
Well… -At one point we see the “evil” inquisitor with a map of Spain, spreading bloodlike ink over the parts he has already taken over. The map is slowly, and spreadingly, taken over by these bloody patches.
-When Dr. Tom won’t go out walking with his wife in the first snow, as they apparently always do, he immediately afterwards loses his wedding ring.
-We get a number of shots of Tom whispering into Izzy’s neck, and the hairs there standing up to his lips. We also get numerous shots of him whispering to the tree, and the fibers of the tree reaching towards his lips.
And when I say “numerous”, I mean freaking “NUMEROUS”. Seriously, if you take out all the double shots form this movie, it loses about 45 minutes. The fact that it would also gain a great deal of solidity and speed need not concern us here, as it clearly did not concern the makers of this piece.
The makers, who also made “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream”, both movies I really liked, RfaD even making it to the unwritten top of my movielist.
This movie will not. Although I am sure it will for many people.
It is emotional, striking and beautiful, but so, so very obvious.
There are no sweet and silent allusions to pain and the loss of power, in stead the mention that Izzy loses her feelings of warmth and cold is directly followed by a bathroom destroying session of ablutionary sex. See, it tells us, just because she is dying, she is no sad and simpering person, she has sex still!
Obviously, she is a sad and simpering person, just not in the scenes we see of her, and clearly uses this sexual act as a way to regain control of a husband (and through him, life, see symbolism) that is slipping away from her. If the directors had chosen to show us this, in stead of the empty pointing at sparks of dying life, this movie could not have impressed me more. As it is, it just saddened me.
At one point, she collapses in a museum, before the eyes of her horrified husband, and he cradles her until the ambulance arrives. Later, she says at that pont she felt complete, she felt held fast. And the chump answers: “yes, that was me, holding you”. Kinder souls would have liked to take him away and explain to him that she was talking about something else, which was presumably what the movie intended us to think. All I could think was that I’d rather hit him with a good sized clue-stick then and there, as it was so bloody obvious.
I would advise anyone to watch this movie, in all fairness. It is beautiful, and that counts for something.
Also, I will starts selling saltlicks, as a simple grain will not do you for the blatant propaganda against the movie-of-the-weeks in which Cancer is a fact of life, and I am hoping to make a profit as soon as this thing hits the theatres.
Gawd.
Shoes at all stripes but one down, guess which one out of five…
Kevin
A fountain of plain obviousness sparkling in the light of unrelenting repetition and set in a courtyard of empty beauty.
This movie, due to it’s visuals and enforced tearjerkyness is well on it’s way to be THE overrated film of the year, and since almost everybody who will see it will disagree with me I feel no compunction with regards to spoiling it, snide little bastard that I am.
The movie, pretending to weave three storylines in one, is about a doctor, name of Tom, played by Hugh Jackman, and his wife, Izzy, played by Rachel Weisz. Izzy is dying of a fast growing brain-tumour, and Tom is hard at work doing research on monkeys that apparently have the same type of brain-tumours as Izzy, and he thinks he is very close to a cure.
At the same time, it is about the book Izzy writes, which is about a conquistador in Spain, Tomas, who is looking for the tree of eternal life for his Queen Isabella, whose country is slowly being taken over by an inquisitor.
Thirdly, we have a futuristic Tom who is flying through space in a bubble, with a big and dying tree, trying to get to a nebula in which the tree can remain alive.
Is it obvious yet?
All three Toms being the same Tom and looking for a way to keep his wife with him for ever and ever and effur?
Well, it should be.
And if it isn’t, the movie lays it on. And lays it on thickly.
Examples?
Well… -At one point we see the “evil” inquisitor with a map of Spain, spreading bloodlike ink over the parts he has already taken over. The map is slowly, and spreadingly, taken over by these bloody patches.
-When Dr. Tom won’t go out walking with his wife in the first snow, as they apparently always do, he immediately afterwards loses his wedding ring.
-We get a number of shots of Tom whispering into Izzy’s neck, and the hairs there standing up to his lips. We also get numerous shots of him whispering to the tree, and the fibers of the tree reaching towards his lips.
And when I say “numerous”, I mean freaking “NUMEROUS”. Seriously, if you take out all the double shots form this movie, it loses about 45 minutes. The fact that it would also gain a great deal of solidity and speed need not concern us here, as it clearly did not concern the makers of this piece.
The makers, who also made “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream”, both movies I really liked, RfaD even making it to the unwritten top of my movielist.
This movie will not. Although I am sure it will for many people.
It is emotional, striking and beautiful, but so, so very obvious.
There are no sweet and silent allusions to pain and the loss of power, in stead the mention that Izzy loses her feelings of warmth and cold is directly followed by a bathroom destroying session of ablutionary sex. See, it tells us, just because she is dying, she is no sad and simpering person, she has sex still!
Obviously, she is a sad and simpering person, just not in the scenes we see of her, and clearly uses this sexual act as a way to regain control of a husband (and through him, life, see symbolism) that is slipping away from her. If the directors had chosen to show us this, in stead of the empty pointing at sparks of dying life, this movie could not have impressed me more. As it is, it just saddened me.
At one point, she collapses in a museum, before the eyes of her horrified husband, and he cradles her until the ambulance arrives. Later, she says at that pont she felt complete, she felt held fast. And the chump answers: “yes, that was me, holding you”. Kinder souls would have liked to take him away and explain to him that she was talking about something else, which was presumably what the movie intended us to think. All I could think was that I’d rather hit him with a good sized clue-stick then and there, as it was so bloody obvious.
I would advise anyone to watch this movie, in all fairness. It is beautiful, and that counts for something.
Also, I will starts selling saltlicks, as a simple grain will not do you for the blatant propaganda against the movie-of-the-weeks in which Cancer is a fact of life, and I am hoping to make a profit as soon as this thing hits the theatres.
Gawd.
Shoes at all stripes but one down, guess which one out of five…
Kevin
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