Capo
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Post by Capo on Jul 22, 2007 23:55:18 GMT
Y tu mamá también And Your Mother Too Alfonso Cuarón 2000 Mexico Two sexed-up adolescent boys go on a road trip with an older woman they met at a family gathering. A relentlessly energetic narrative is driven by sterling, convincing performances, to-ing and fro-ing of emotional complexities, a demanding and ambitious visual approach, and a fully involved and involving voice-over. It's an exhausting film with breathtaking camerawork which might be overlooked by less keen eyes because there is much going on alongside it: Cuarón's camera is wobbly but firm, and because it is handheld, it might seem less stylised, less syncronised, than what a dolly would seem to be - but the long-takes are subtle and confident and extremely effective. The voice-over, spoken by nobody in particular (like sixties Godard), gives it both an emotional intimacy and a specific social context; paranthesis interrupts proceedings (and soundtrack) often, either to tell us what this character or that character is thinking about or choosing not to reveal to another character, or to tell us what happens to have occurred, or what is occurring, or what will occur, in this place or that place where the characters happen to be... it is as much about living in Mexico as it is about living in adolesence as it is about living at odds with those closest to you as it is about living in general... and living itself.
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Post by seyfried on Apr 11, 2008 21:50:44 GMT
Back to bumping the favorites, and this time because of being struck by a comment wetdog made regarding Children of Men:
"It's not even important, really. I mean, it's only set in the future to give the details of the fiction some room to breathe. It's about the present, and the infertility is a metaphor. The world is a mess and we have no future. "
I thought this was a very acute observation; in a sense we call this a "morphasis" - the advantageous gain of not looking at a premise too closely and observing the way in which the film is textured or layered. In the case of Children of Men the infertility metaphor, is essentially one of cultural deprivation, or moreover, the tragic exhaustion of latter-day capitalism. On the commentary Slavoj Zizek remarks that by having the film take place in England we can witness the tragedy of historical collapse ("England’s one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t have a constitution because it can rely on it’s substance of traditions - you don’t need it written and it’s in such a country that the loss of historical dimension, the loss of the substance of meaning is felt much worse.") The changing political landscape in Mexico essentially has a similar feel, and by having the main characters seek sexual liberation through the poverty-ridden West Mexican country-side (an area of incredible economic disparity) is the magic stroke.
He's going back there for his next film - which should be incredible.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Apr 12, 2008 23:24:20 GMT
I like Zizek. Have you seen The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, seyfried?
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Post by seyfried on Apr 13, 2008 1:02:21 GMT
Yeah, there's some great stuff there. He gets a lot of flack for misreading Lacan and/or overdoing psychoanalysis within cinema (and if anyone have seen him and David Bordwell go at it...then you know how polemical these things get) but his writing is crammed with so many vectors, passing thoughts, and tangents that he's capable of making me rewatch almost any film just to try to refute or confer. If you liked Perverts... and want something a bit more "dense" check out his Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan... But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, Looking Awry, and The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway -- my favorite.
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