Right, gonna jot down some thoughts about a couple of films I saw today and yesterday. All three of them seem to be getting quite some flack and I'm going to try and hopefully make some sort of coherent defense for all of them, though they're not the best work of their respective authors.
Evangelion Rebuild 3.33 (2013) -
Hideaki Anno, Mahiro Maeda
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As usual Anno pulls a lot of bullshit here and as that's pretty much what I've come to expect from this franchise, so I can't say I'm as horribly disappointed as many other voices on the internet. Yes, the timeskip is lame, yes it's mostly set-up for the 4th film, yes all the infuriating pretentious nonsense-symbolic terminology is still there, yes the fanservice and blatant toyselling designs are also still there, but once you roll with those things I think the film isn't that bad. That might seem like a lot of things to overlook but this series has been a very flawed trainwreck for a long time, and part of my fascination for it comes with that.
Now down to the film. People complain that they should've just explained things to Shinji at the start, but honestly they don't know much about who or what the Shinji is that they have before them, they don't trust him, it's also been 14 years and they're in the middle of an attack. You could say that this is all a bunch of convenience so they can't explain anything, sure I agree, but internally I think the logic is sound. The whole thing seems to reset some of the characters again and drive others to extremes. Repetition and regression are very much a tropes of the series, don't forget the last film's subtitle was 'you can (not) advance'! I don't think they've fucked with the characters to an extent where they're unrecognisable, the Rei we see is another copy of the one in the last film and she's the same boring doll that everyone of her copies is before they start becoming more self-aware. Asuka and Misato might be more bitchy, but that's definitely not all they are, and it's logical for them to act this way after all the shit they've been through. Mari still isn't very clear, I hope they do something good with her in the next film because now she seems to be there to sell toys. I've read some fan theories that could make sense but they require more than a reasonable amount of speculation about very minor details. Shinji's still the same, so is Kaworu, and I actually enjoyed how blatantly homosexual they made their relationship this time. Gendo and his adviser are the same. So I don't quite follow the criticism that I've encountered many times that they fucked over the characters. As usual the art and animation is beautiful, I didn't mind the CGI (another big criticism apparently) and as always there's many arresting images in there, even if they sometimes tend to get annoyingly faux-symbolic.
It's definitely not as good as the second movie, but I might like it more than the first, because that was just a pointless retread of the series and this definitely isn't. As usual with this franchise I can't say this is
good, and I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone but it sure is intriguing and I mostly enjoyed watching it.
The Grandmaster (2013) -
Wong Kar Wai
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Similarly to Ashes of Time, Wong seems more interested in the people and world than the actual martial arts, though I have to say he somehow gets the rhythm that his filmmaking style requires. Usually this kind of slowmo vs speed up with quick cutting in action scenes is the most aggravating thing to watch, that train sequence with the robots in Sucker Punch being the worst offender of all. But apart from the very first scene where Leung beats up some extras I really enjoyed the fight scenes. They have a visceral punch but also an artistic touch, exemplified in the dance/fight where he has to break the cake in the opponents' hand. Plus some fights really did go to 5 strikes or so before a cut, which is extremely long compared to fights in something like the Bourne sequels.
Then I think this is the first time Wong actually deals with Chinese history full-on. The settings were often there before but not in this fashion. Unlike the annoyingly generic biopic structures of the first two Ip Man films from a couple of years ago, Wong hops around through time, using major ellipsis, flashbacks and forwards, sometimes announced in narration or captions on screen, other times not. This makes for something much more interesting and engaging to watch imo, although I presume that this is why people have negatively called it 'meandering'. Wong is more interested in the context this time and is even prepared to leave Ip for long stretches of time in order to flesh out other characters who're important in the martial arts world at the time. This is really different from what I remember about Ip Man, which quickly turned in just another anti-Japanese kung fu film.
The performances are compelling though maybe a bit one-note. Leung is cool and brooding, Ziyi is icy, both are beautiful and elegant.
One thing I also always find interesting in these Chinese films is how a woman can perfectly hold her own against a man in a fight, without all kinds of idiotic girl-power nonsense or a particularly sexualised way of representing these fighting dames, (catwoman in TDKR or Black Widow in Avengers anyone?).
To The Wonder (2012) -
Terrence Malick
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I'll start of by saying that this definitely is Malick moving further down the direction he took with Tree of Life, though this is more like a minor, more abstract cousin. It's far less bombastic and its thematic scope is more contained. If you found yourself unwilling to engage with ToL, or unable to care about its characters, this might not be the film for you.
The way I saw this film was as a ballet about love, Oklahoma and modern displacement. And I think I have some things to back up that claim.
Firstly love. Well the whole thing revolves around some romantic entanglements involving Affleck, Kurylenko and McAdams. However I think it's broader than that. Going to quote part of a kind of snide response that Malick seems to invite with his complete lack of irony. It's easy to scoff but not particularly interesting, apart from this:
The sum of the point seems to be a half-baked analogy between seeking love and seeking God.
A point made about Javier Bardem, who plays a priest in one of the tangents of the film. I think he misses the point here. Love and spirituality are the same thing to Malick. This film has some of his most blatant pantheist flourishes, in particular the already often ridiculed line 'what is this love that loves us', which I think works better in the spoken French than subtitled English. It's one of Kurylenko's voice-overs and she says it twice. The first time she goes on to say that this love comes from everywhere. That love is the all-encompassing environment, is nature, is god. Then there's the scene with Bardem where they're touching the glass and the cleaning guy says he feels the spiritual light on top of the rays of the sun. Near the end of the film Kurylenko stretches out her arms to do something similar only there's no glass this time. She just seems to be trying to touch the air and her face. All during the final voice-over of Bardem's priest. He also gives us multiple viewpoints again, the priest who seems crushingly lonely and disturbed, against Kurylenko who goes through all kinds of romantic ups and downs twirling away. The outlook at the end isn't particularly hopeful, clouded weather, no beautiful magic hour sunset anymore and then the brooding Mont Saint Michel shot, which somehow seems significantly like the last shot of Tree of Life with that steel bridge. I think it's quite obvious what he's going for and not a half-baked analogy at all. Whether you agree with Malick is a different matter of course.
Then the ballet. Firstly there's the obvious part where Kurylenko is constantly gracefully moving around, dancing, twirling. At some point she even picks up ballet shoes! Then there's what I think is Malick's fundamental structural base, at least since ToL. Namely music and poetry. I don't know much about musicology so I'm a bit at a loss for terminology here but bear with me. He put this film together like you would a musical arrangement with different movements, ups and downs. That's why a lot of it stays abstract, why there was no script. Music swells, camera movement and editing becomes frenetic, emotions on screen are high. Cut to a different moment in time, emotions are low, the relationship is going badly, cutting is slow, music is absent or moody, camera is largely static. The different 'subplots' are movements in a symphony.
Then Oklahoma. This is quite straightfoward. I thought this film gave a very good sense of the place and culture of where it played. I've also read comments by natives of the state who were particularly impressed so I don't feel like I noticed something that wasn't there.
Then modern displacement. Malick's films have always drawn significantly from the past, this is a first where characters don't seem to be part of or trying to regain some kind of mythological past. Tree of Life is, imo, very much about this same alienation but Jack again looks to the past to find solutions. None of the characters here seem to be able to do that. Unless, I guess, you could link Mont Saint Michel to that, but I'm not so sure about that at this point. I think that's a significant turning point for Malick, I wonder if he'll stay in the present with his next projects. Anyway in TTW you have the outsiders Kurylenko and Bardem, foreign in a strange country, you have modern life entering and disrupting relationships (the visa expiring, the girl at the counter when Kurylenko tells Affleck about her infidelity).
I think my main beef with the film is Affleck. He's an abstraction, a cypher. And I don't find him compelling enough as an actor/entity on screen to overlook not knowing anything about the character he's playing. However I had the same problem with Penn directly after I watched ToL and he turned out to be the one thing holding the whole film together after closer inspection, so yeah. The difference here is that I don't see most of this playing in Affleck's head.
So yeah, this took way too long. I hope at least someone found any of this rambling interesting
