joesnuff

Someone here had their finger on the pulse, as all the right stylistic and narrative choices seem to have been made. Which is good or bad depending on your expectations. Everything from the grit film stock and hyper bland color palette (dull becomes interesting) to the continual string of acoustic folk numbers. We also get the smarmy attitudes flaring between parents and their kids, kids understandably beginning to crack in their parents' broken image. Self denial and transference. Role reversals. The main character's inner crises get outwardly expressed with transportation related woes (I've noticed this in a lot of films lately).

So these recent "indie" family dramadies, I'm sorry to report, are beginning to look and smell the same. Characters are introduced as if they are already beyond hope. Yet things still get worse and then get better, and we can see it coming if we've already watched a couple of these. People are crude and selfish and blunt, and this is supposed to add up to "real". Still seems cartoony to me, only the lines are drawn deliberately crooked.

It's like they try too hard to look and feel like something closer to real suburban life than life on a screen. But because each scene and story arc is on beat, it defeats itself. Underneath it all, this art house release is still movieland as much as the multiplex release. Smarty, but not smart.

I prefer stronger visionaries, riskier artists, even if that means more warts and less movie charm.

In spite of all that, I'm okay with charm and there is charm - The way Ellen Page's eyebrows dance around the bottom of her long forehead is precious. Even when she's, well, always cutting into others.

And Dennis Quaid is, I guess trying on a different role? Here he goes for the irony in pretending to know. He writes about knowing and criticism of theories of knowledge (epistemology). His book title, You Can't Read, was not really his idea and thus it was probably meant to describe himself. He cannot read people. Hiding behind one's book knowledge is funny, because it ends up revealing to others exactly what it tries to obscure.

Sarah Jessica Parker generally annoys but her character had a couple of great moments. She pulls off the I'm-telling-you-something-is-wrong-without-telling-you bit that women can be sooo good at. It had charm because I cringed, knowing that indirect form of communication, the female's own trademark.

I love story with impact, new ideas and rich characters. I love exploring the mechanics of the thing. There are few films like 2046 proposing radical new ways of vicariously experiencing time and place. Easily misunderstood or confusing, it can be. Understanding and completing the 'story' in these kinds of films doesn't occur in the films themselves. We complete them in the realm of reflection, experience, and assumptions made in how to reflect, collect, categorize, and morph them with our own life stories. Sometimes these films are just a call to empathize with the filmmaker.

Wong Kar Kai is a filmmaker who calls for a personal empathy. He works to capture all the unique dynamics of romance, and how they bend our sense of time and space.

He turns his camera every which angle to try and find new vocabulary for telling a story. Well, he doesn't tell stories, he asks whether stories are found in relationships. We get pieces of stories on top of hidden stories, our focus shifts from "story" to emergent feelings out of the glimpses.

This is sophisticated, and scary when unprepared for the exotic nature. We want the familiar, but are given delicately meandering puzzles, opaque hints at beginnings, middles, and endings. Just like we don't always know at what point our own stories are unfolding. But we know the emotional states as they are lived.

Since 2046 lacks many standard cadences, it is a struggle to follow the statement through the movements. These are not even vignettes, these are a seamless series of leaps that push and pull like the emotions of day to day life. They have an indecisive flux we hope is asymptotically reaching a conclusion, but they just keep coalescing and spilling over into the imagined future from where no one has yet returned. Once we think we have moved beyond the past do we then realize that we create an unknown future by attempting to reconstruct the past in the present.

And so the main character is a writer of 'fiction' (this very movie) who through the process of embedding real life circumstances into his science fiction he also tries to determine if there is a destination this is all heading. 2046 is a place you visit to relive unchanging memories so that you will never change. Alternately, 2046 is also a time existent only within a science fiction novel when people will access substitute lovers without the haunts of what broke them in the past. So they think.

He has already been damaged by the loss of an impossible standard that cannot be met by another (see In the Mood for Love first!). So in his novel, lovers become characters. Feelings become fictional ornamentations in the future. In the present, he cannot connect with the women who come and go. In the fiction, the lack of connection is simply a matter of technological limitations.

Think about what happens in the aftermath of a failed relationship or a missed opportunity. We may grieve, but also sometimes we obsessively construct a future fantasy based on what should have happened if things had gone right; if only some vital detail didn't change things how it did. We inhabit that imagined future and interact with our counterpart ghost, making plans and times and places accordingly. We might use this process as a shield and a warning. Or it sabotages, taking on a life of its own as a mental blueprint, directing the actual present and perceptions of new companions.

Lush, poetic cinematography fills each second of this film to great mood inducing effects. In 1960's Hong Kong, where the bulk of the events take place, the dynamics of romantic encounters hide in unassuming corners of that society, only brought to light by looking at the normal world in very abnormal ways. One almost gets the impression that set pieces and abstract designations were literally dreamed up. The camera often cramps our frame of vision. Various off-center closeups which in a sense shut out the outside world, but paradoxically bring it all in to bear. There are many places where the camera does not seem to have a good shot of a character or an event, we the viewers were just unlucky to miss the opportunity of getting the full revelation of something.

And it frustrates; we want to know everything but get very little by way of visual exposition. We are forced to work on the clues, the voice overs, the symmetrical accidents in different centuries and different countries. This is not analogous to idly putting together a complex puzzle set, this is reconstructing a mystery while at the same time being on the verge of shedding tears at the quiet understanding that it isn't a mystery, it's life with a character who mediates between reality and fantasy to deal with it all. I know the kinds of things this film is about, but I've never looked at them from this stance before. As is often the case, the artist (here the writer/filmmaker) is just the one who experiences what the rest of us experience and talks about its secrets rather than conceals them.

See this film if you want to know how it's possible to visually show the invisible, inner turbulence and romantic visions that tend to hide from the outside world. On the whole, 2046 weaves in the present a future fiction invaded by the past, bred by the throes of confronting the human faces of opportunities that appear, disappear, reappear and fade and collapse into each other.

When we reach crisis moments with someone we love, we are faced with a couple of ways to deal with it, depending on the circumstances.

One way, vis a vis pessimism, is in assuming something is so broken that it isn't fixable. And so we take measures to fully complete that break. Even when this is necessary, it is still painful because there's always a little bit of self-destruction that is unavoidable. Erasing memories involve erasing little parts of ourselves as well.

Another way, more in hope, is to consciously reach back and search out all the good memories, so as to recreate the once shared life based upon those genuine moments and experiences. This is intended to fuel our desire to save the sinking ship. A declaration of interdependence is drafted in one's mind, something giving evidence that the positives of the relationship well outweigh the negatives, and those negatives are seen as just part of the package.

So Kaufman, et al, drew up a scenario in which both of these approaches occur within the same relationship. To bring us deep into the broken psyche of someone in this situation, we begin at the aftermath of the end (after some preliminaries), and we work backwards. Isn't that what people do when they mull over a painful split with someone they love? Working backwards every step, through the good and the bad, to survey all the pictures that were painted, the visions co-created, the inspirations drawn from each other and for each other.

It's a sort of mnemonic museum at that point, but as time begins to flatten those landscapes, the walls begin to crumble, the pictures will become fractured and dirty and harder to discern. Faces are blurred. Items are missing. Memories are trodden by frantic changes in circumstances.

The peculiar cinematic genius here, of course, and what makes this film a must-see, is in exactly how Kaufman and Gondry present this phenomenon. The massive, compelling centerpiece of this film is the single, vivid night of our protagonist Joel who, in the most literal sense possible, chases down his fading dreams of Clementine.

Thankfully, we have a director who is masterful at cinematic flow of the quirky, so that the convoluted arrangement of memories, visions and various interspliced scenes are strung together in a complex tapestry that does not quite overwhelm our senses. We can accept this theatrical style put to new use in a truthful dream logic. For instance, Joel walks us directly from the trauma at Barnes and Nobles to reflective conversation in a neighbor's apartment, in a seamless flow (the only seam possibly being a door frame, but it's more of an incidental passage marker); lending immediacy to his confusion over that fresh experience, visually recalled within a somber dialogue. And that was just to prepare us for the spectacular night journey to come, having been foreshadowed by the series of lights turning off in the bookstore. An atypical journey, instead of events unfolding, they are folding back in on themselves. A multitude of vignettes in reverse is a very unique form of storytelling.

One more point. It must be a great time to be an actor who gets to be involved in these kinds of projects. The kinds of projects I'm talking about are where a main character, as narrator and guide, take us down a certain path in the story. But then (typically within the climax of the third act) it is revealed that this path was unreliable from the start, fantasy, or deception. And so we as the audience have to reach back and reinterpret all the mannerisms and motives of at least some of the characters we think we have come to know. (Think of the Usual Suspects, where in the final series of explanations we are offered several possible alternatives, and so we have to construct several possible characters out of a single actor).

So the actors in Eternal Sunshine get to act within at least two possible dimensions at the same time, always striding the possibilities that will be presented later, in a way to convince us of things we are not really supposed to be convinced of. Of course its fun to be tricked by sudden twists in the story, but the real treat is in the acting that is open to interpretation. I have no problem with this being a recent cliché in "edgy" films, because it encourages deeper levels of interaction from the audience. It is one more way for a film to effectively reach out and mingle with our spotted minds.

Vermeer himself was the least interesting character. Too often in films about artists or other obsessive types of craftsman, the assumption is that it is good enough to simply portray their bare obsessiveness and idiosyncrasies and think we are then accepting the genius of this person's craft. But I think that's only one aspect of the top psychological layer, it doesn't really draw me into the artist's eye.

The story itself (fiction as it was) was only mildly interesting. However, for me, a mediocre story doesn't necessarily mean a mediocre film. I don't mean the story was bad, only that it is familiar territory for us if we've seen period dramas - i.e., an outsider stepping into an already unstable family situation, unintentionally inflaming already strained relationships. It was done well, but nothing new.

But that's OK because in this case I feel the story wasn't the main point, it was about the nature of art in its illumination of characters (both literally and figuratively). The drama was just a foil to carry the themes that can't be put into words (or words would ruin it).

Then, there's much good to say about the thematic undercurrents (subtext or whatever) which frequently ripples to the surface. These filmmakers were basically reading back into history (or, creating history and environment around a figure whose background is literally dark and void) their modern psychological stance on the way an artist's creativity and an artist's so-called sexual being can parallel and intertwine, and so on.

I recall the attempted rape scene of the girl by Vermeer's patron. It begins outside as a chase among the clean hanging sheets (blank canvases?), its purity is tainted by muddied hands, and so also goes the tainting of the model for the commissioned work. A family member coldly watches this wicked act from the inside, watching through the distortions of thick window glass. This distorted view of the girl was later redeemed by the illumined view offered in the Vermeer painting, a symbolic gesture of restoring her purity. The girl being affectionately represented on to a Dutch master's easel would allow her inward image to shine, it would be validation of her humanity despite everything else.

With a modern fiction being implanted back into a historical riddle, they attempt to answer the questions regarding this particular work of art: What do we do and what can we know when only the face is illumined, with only a stark pearl ornament shimmering from (presumably) window light? No environment, no background, no status, no known connection to the world around her. Just darkness and void.

That's why the film ends with the zoom *out* from the earring of the actual painting, out to the whole picture, because this is a symmetrical finish to the rest of the film which had started with the background and methodically zoomed into the earring itself. Now at the end, the dark background is no longer void, it is filled with life and pain and love and survival and disappointments and so on. The seeing-eye of a mystery in art expands; a pupil dilates. Good job on their part.

After watching this a couple of nights ago, I'm pushing Thin Red Line up to my top five. Wow... WOW. What an experience. It's like a three hour, semiotic meditation on war as an encapsulation of various human conflicts and aspirations. The way in which it was executed (visually and otherwise) was rare genius.

This is not merely an anti-war film, though I can see how it is received as such. It's not quite as naive as the ones usually considered anti-war films. In this one, the experience is even richer when one knows the history surrounding the Guadacanal invasion and what was at stake... then and only then to go here to see things from the narrower perspective of these ground units... that is very engaging.

But that historical conflict itself is just the top layer in this film. We get many reference points to the depths. I'm thinking for example of the voice-overs as nude exposures of the characters' souls.

• Soldiers are carried through with visions, or disturbingly peaceful memories.

• The disruptions and the brutal indifference of nature. Interesting how Nick Nolte's character derives his war tactics from the same.

• The inevitable but still ambiguous changes which overcome the characters who live through a hell.

At the end of it, I can see that these characters have changed profoundly, even if they don't give away too much for us to go on. But at the same time I'm not entirely sure whether they've changed for the better or for the worse. This open-endedness was subtle yet very intelligent, a rare thing for a filmmaker to believe in. It's relatively easy for actors put into hyperbolic situations to announce with trumpets a dramatic change in their character, so we can all get it and learn the same thing at the same time.

But Malick doesn't want to take us around there with an immediate and easy roundabout flank to the plateau of enlightenment like that. We will have to work our way up to that peak of discovery (self-discovery?) by the direct path of a simple enough surface story, but must strive to understand the undercurrents one slippery step at a time. And each one of us is going to ascend at our own pace because it is each our own journey of conflict.

I didn't see any previews or know much about the movie when I saw it last night. I thought it was superb. The multiple twists in the plot are expected by now, that's just a little bonus logic game M Night wants to play with the audience. It's fun.

(spoilers ahead!)

For the first twenty minutes or so I was struck by M Night's ability to convey as much drama as possible in such a restricted setting. When all actors are so confined in their mannerisms and emotion, every little thing that does get through counts, it speaks volumes. Well done. I was also amused by being so wrong in my initial criticism of the dialogue and delivery. I thought these actors were not trying too hard to slip into a 19th century style. Some sentence constructions were so forced into the bygone style of speaking, it was getting humorous. How wrong I was though. This director can easily be underestimated. Just wait till the end, he always seems to say.

By the end of it we see how a group of people will go through so much effort to construct a fantasy world as a response to their despair over the real world. M night may even perhaps be self-referencing here, with the quirky temptation of the filmmaker who wants to make his movie and fantasize about living in that world he has constructed, a world where every mystical occurrence has very naturalistic explanations (the explanations which can be delayed for a very long time, the important thing is to captivate the audience by their own imaginations), and most importantly that there is always finality after tragedy in an M Night kind of way. Our cameo appearance of the director this time is indirectly given only as the voice of the manager of security and a thin reflection on a fragile glass surface. Behind his image, a stockpile of medicine. I wonder why? Is the Walker Preserve M Night's self-contained world of a film, and his job as creator/director in part is to simply keep things running smooth and not let the outside world interfere with his project? He himself is the gatekeeper to the well being of his characters lives and so on? It can after all be a very stressful experience, keeping all that in order.Digressing.

But the very thing the people wished to escape from had risen up in their very midst, among their very own offspring. Such a failure was bound to happen because their entire fantasy was founded on secrets and lies. Curiosity and feelings of betrayal lead to unexpected reactions, the presumption of innocence itself was a lie. Suffering so much loss in the "survival of the fittest" world that modernism had borne inspired a history professor to head up a new colony to start afresh under the very same principles which modernism in part started with. Man living in perfect unity within a Utopian environment. The Puritan/Mennonite/Amish world was just a mode to operate under, what perhaps 20th century folk might start to consider the "noble savage" in their simplistic and naive forms of living. But they do find that purity itself was a constructed illusion. By deciding to remove themselves from the surrounding evils of the world, they thought this would eradicate the existence of evil in their midst because their motives were "pure". But what really mattered were the same things that matter in the rest of the big bad world... courage, wisdom, love. Innocence is a fantasy, only doing good is what counts. And doing good is what is done in response to surrounding evil, not in the absence of evil.

Overall beautiful movie. The real "horror" in this movie was their seeming final agreement to preserve their microcosm after all that had transpired.

Spoilers included.

Not just a bunch of empty CGI. I truly cared about the outcome, and what happened to all the main characters. Much of the imagery was frightening in an effective manner. Appreciated the unbridled contrast between the pure beauty of heavenly realities and the decayed ugliness of evil. So many of the once beautifully created beings who still maintain some semblance of their former glory, but roam about a cursed land, visually and morally ugly in their depraved state.

At the same time, this finale is far from perfect. In fact the entire series suffers from action-movie-itis. PJ relies heavily on cliched cinematic devices for both battle scenes and sentimental scenes. It started to distract me from appreciating the flow of the story at times. I was sensing too much insincerity in eliciting emotional responses from the crowd, and this where I feel the director's limitations were blatant many times. Such key scenes would have been handled more convincingly by a more mature director... like Ang Lee (a la Crouching Tiger) or Peter Weir (a la Gallipoli).

A quick example is these multiple dying/death scenes: always a close friend or family member right there to shed tears for the death (cue viewer's tears), but then after about the right amount of time we discover... he's not dead! he's alive! and that's great for everyone, because now we have the feeling of triumph following perhaps the viewers' deepest emotions of grief when we were being tricked into thinking this was a death scene. I know this was thematically important to do with Gandalf early on, but it's happened to so many of the main characters before and since, I've lost track.

This is a case where the audience is being underestimated and slightly insulted, because the filmmakers are self-consciously aiming for the widest global audience possible. It's a bit of Lucasitis here, but again forgivable in the bigger picture.

I thought about the role of the EYES in this film, this saga. The eye of Sauran; the eyes of Pippin witnessing a glimpse of Sauran's plans; the elvin eyes of Legolas, interpreting weather patterns to foresee an evil presence; the eyes of Frodo revealing his present condition at all times (the actor doing his acting through peculiar eyes - he was cast for this reason). Plenty of close-up shots of the eyes of many characters. The witch-king and its horrific lack of eyes. The details in Gollum's eyes, like the varying degrees of dilation correlating with his split personalities. What was perceived and learned from the eyes and through the eyes heavily propelled this entire story to its very conclusion, and the "eye" of the camera is no exception. Like when the camera rises above the ledge in Mount Doon, and we see Gollum's eyes and face through the ring he finally holds between his fingers, we see in his disturbingly gleeful expression the fruit of his lust.