l0vef!lm micro-reviews i-iii
Jan. 27th, 2009 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dubdobdeetom's midnight garden: based very closely on a classic of modern children's lit, in which a young boy finds himself in the time-slippy dreams (or is it vice versa) of a young girl of abt 70 years previously -- faithful, a bit dull, smudged badly by the actor playing tom (hattie when young is much better), and awkwardly stumbles past some of the most (potentially) interesting material, re the look and feel of english small-town life c.1955 and c.1885; the set-designers go on pedantic spree but the camera -- and the action -- takes all this for granted... given that "kid's imagination vs grown-up dullardry" animates what tension there is in the story, it's a bit weird that tom AND the camera are take the wonders of the ordinary difference between then and now so for granted... of course TOO MUCH TELLY has made such time-travel a bit less "wonderful", but OTH, "the victorian house" etc very effectively dramatise some of the material and concrete differences -- unfortunately a film version of a children's classic is only too likely to disdain fly-by-night reality TV, when actually it should be LEARNING FROM IT bah gah pah
(what tension there is: NOT MUCH -- (a) cz the story leaves tom very passive, bcz (b) the problem of time-travel is as always of course "IS EVERYTHING PRE-ORDAINED?")
flandres: a strange -- and i think very effective -- meld of animalistic realism without cultural overview and near-fantasy timelessness, like a kind of elves-vs-orcs epic in which present-day rural working-class farmworkers from somewhere in northern cold and muddy france going off to some hot neo-colonial war and/or policing action in present-day north africa, the middle-east somewhere, the war in particular at once very concretely NOW and dreamily ahistorical (the very present-day looking soldiers are riding crusader-style horses at one point, and the landscape also reminds you of the moment in star wars where r2d2 is captured by alien tribesmen): in addition there's a near-mythological sex-politics being played out, at home and in the war, some of it being played out through a promiscuous, unhappy, mentally troubled farmgirl, whose various beaux go off to the war to various destinies; some via a woman officer in the anti-colonial resistance, raped and responding to this
we're taken entirely away from those economic or political or structural analysis of the hows and whys of war that commonly drive both anti-war and pro-war polemic: i said orc-vs-elf, but really a better description of flandres is orc-vs-orc, people in terrible situations doing terrible things to one another, at the mercy of some vast high-level framework or quest they stubbornly have no grasp of -- the horror that's taken for granted, exploited in fact, as the reason we must Wage War to End War: where elf-empathy shapes most war stories, of all kinds, in the form of higher explanations and justifications developed by savants far from any front-line, and unleashed on the human beasts required to stumble into the designated battlefields, and maybe out of them sometimes also... orc-empathy as a different species of anti-war radicalism?
the lives of others: somewhere between a gleamingly hyperdour realist recreation of life in east germany in the mid-80s (when some absurdly high percentage of the population was actually paid to inform to the Stasi on their fellow citizens (from fallible memory: 60%)) and an allegory -- one small story telling the whole -- of why this seemingly all-pervasive system actually fell apart so suddenly (despite the highest level of high-tech and high-end surveillance achieved in a fully industrialised state, the Stasi totally failed to grasp that everyone they were watching wanted out); it's held together by a superb, frightened, sad central performance, of the "good" stasi-man ordered to spy on an arty couple -- handsome successful admired non-dissident playwrite and beautiful actress GF -- and through the cold precision of his expertise coming to grasp the bankruptcy (and corruption) of the system he has committed himself to, so that in order to do good by what he considers the ideal of his beliefs in central-party socialism, he has to betray not only its institutions, but his own best practice as a technician; the central problem from a realist POV is that we don't get to see why it's THIS surveillance that opens his eyes and changes his heart, after 20 years becoming the best snooper in east berlin (the arty couple are a bit lame, actually: as hard to get excited about as worried about -- the motor of the story is that a fat and ugly high party official fancies the actress and wants useable dirt on the couple for his own ends)::: things i liked a[part from the GOOD STASI's ubernerd rectitude, prurience manifesting as jobsworth precision performance gradually becoming horror, pity and hidden boldness] = the feel of congealed deserted stillness across decades, as if the whole society's in a terrified timewarp; the fact that the genuine dissidents are scruffy annoying slightly self-righteous dorks; and the oddly old-fashioned -- we'd probably casually call it "bourgeois" -- commitment, even if hypocritically or in philistine way, to Art as a High Ideal... the stand-out moment is when Stasi-man approaches Actress in a bar, when she's miserable, and invaluably boosts her ego (and her refusenik behaviour) with a cryptic near-stalkery hymn to her duty to her public...
actually there's a lot of lovely ideas in it, but a kind of hard-to-locate overall flabbiness also, i think relating where our anticipated loyalties will lie, in contrast to where our story-shaped loyalties do lie (this is a fancy way of saying: i rather quickly wanted the arty couple to be jailed for crimes against CLICHE, and don't think the film-maker was enough aware of this element)
(what tension there is: NOT MUCH -- (a) cz the story leaves tom very passive, bcz (b) the problem of time-travel is as always of course "IS EVERYTHING PRE-ORDAINED?")
flandres: a strange -- and i think very effective -- meld of animalistic realism without cultural overview and near-fantasy timelessness, like a kind of elves-vs-orcs epic in which present-day rural working-class farmworkers from somewhere in northern cold and muddy france going off to some hot neo-colonial war and/or policing action in present-day north africa, the middle-east somewhere, the war in particular at once very concretely NOW and dreamily ahistorical (the very present-day looking soldiers are riding crusader-style horses at one point, and the landscape also reminds you of the moment in star wars where r2d2 is captured by alien tribesmen): in addition there's a near-mythological sex-politics being played out, at home and in the war, some of it being played out through a promiscuous, unhappy, mentally troubled farmgirl, whose various beaux go off to the war to various destinies; some via a woman officer in the anti-colonial resistance, raped and responding to this
we're taken entirely away from those economic or political or structural analysis of the hows and whys of war that commonly drive both anti-war and pro-war polemic: i said orc-vs-elf, but really a better description of flandres is orc-vs-orc, people in terrible situations doing terrible things to one another, at the mercy of some vast high-level framework or quest they stubbornly have no grasp of -- the horror that's taken for granted, exploited in fact, as the reason we must Wage War to End War: where elf-empathy shapes most war stories, of all kinds, in the form of higher explanations and justifications developed by savants far from any front-line, and unleashed on the human beasts required to stumble into the designated battlefields, and maybe out of them sometimes also... orc-empathy as a different species of anti-war radicalism?
the lives of others: somewhere between a gleamingly hyperdour realist recreation of life in east germany in the mid-80s (when some absurdly high percentage of the population was actually paid to inform to the Stasi on their fellow citizens (from fallible memory: 60%)) and an allegory -- one small story telling the whole -- of why this seemingly all-pervasive system actually fell apart so suddenly (despite the highest level of high-tech and high-end surveillance achieved in a fully industrialised state, the Stasi totally failed to grasp that everyone they were watching wanted out); it's held together by a superb, frightened, sad central performance, of the "good" stasi-man ordered to spy on an arty couple -- handsome successful admired non-dissident playwrite and beautiful actress GF -- and through the cold precision of his expertise coming to grasp the bankruptcy (and corruption) of the system he has committed himself to, so that in order to do good by what he considers the ideal of his beliefs in central-party socialism, he has to betray not only its institutions, but his own best practice as a technician; the central problem from a realist POV is that we don't get to see why it's THIS surveillance that opens his eyes and changes his heart, after 20 years becoming the best snooper in east berlin (the arty couple are a bit lame, actually: as hard to get excited about as worried about -- the motor of the story is that a fat and ugly high party official fancies the actress and wants useable dirt on the couple for his own ends)::: things i liked a[part from the GOOD STASI's ubernerd rectitude, prurience manifesting as jobsworth precision performance gradually becoming horror, pity and hidden boldness] = the feel of congealed deserted stillness across decades, as if the whole society's in a terrified timewarp; the fact that the genuine dissidents are scruffy annoying slightly self-righteous dorks; and the oddly old-fashioned -- we'd probably casually call it "bourgeois" -- commitment, even if hypocritically or in philistine way, to Art as a High Ideal... the stand-out moment is when Stasi-man approaches Actress in a bar, when she's miserable, and invaluably boosts her ego (and her refusenik behaviour) with a cryptic near-stalkery hymn to her duty to her public...
actually there's a lot of lovely ideas in it, but a kind of hard-to-locate overall flabbiness also, i think relating where our anticipated loyalties will lie, in contrast to where our story-shaped loyalties do lie (this is a fancy way of saying: i rather quickly wanted the arty couple to be jailed for crimes against CLICHE, and don't think the film-maker was enough aware of this element)
