Imperfect Red
Black ~> White ~> Yellow ~> Red : Nigredo ~> Albedo ~> Citrinitas ~> Rubedo. Alchemical refinement through essential states in perpetual rotation, a sublimating spiral. This pertains to a music/color theory* of the film I did not cover when I logged this last, one I have seen no one ever write about so I might as well include this as an addendum. The last entry was an attempt to understand a singular experience by couching it in formalized ideas…
If On A Winter’s Night A Movie Star
or
Différance: The Motion Picture*
This won’t be a true review of Millennium Actress, and to many, may not even pass legibility, let alone seem coincident to the movie. (You may depart now, reader; doubly so if you have never seen it.) A closer approximation would be that I am unpacking what this film, Satoshi Kon’s sophomore feature – and, I believe, his Rosetta Stone – means to me as a text diachronically,…
Prescribed and consigned to the critical adjective “sleek” as objective more than it has a world of its own to operate in. Emphasis on performance registers in a pro forma way for the material and the leads are pros. Only sparingly indulges in its potential for dramatic consequences after the first dinner party gets sewn up so neatly. You’d think there might be more to see of Kathryn and George’s marriage with how the stakes and the film’s insularity stress it.
It’s hard for me to say PWSA is still a “bodies in space” director with the kinds of spaces he evokes here. Personally, I hope he gets Fury Road out of his system, since it appears to have set him onto a chopped-up, propulsive graphic mode that doesn’t seem able to deliver the clarity of genre images and movement that are among his greatest strengths – perhaps this is simply his aesthetic trajectory now as a director – though he is…
My dog passed today. Was emotionally and physically sore after I dug his grave, and wanted something comforting, and dog related, to put on. Probably haven’t seen this since a pre-Kindergarten VHS, but Bluth’s imagery has stayed with me practically my whole life, so why not go back to the well. The wells came up alright. Just what I needed.
This is surprisingly classical (Cabin in the Sky meets a gangster picture), also really good. You can’t keep a good dog down
rip
There are so many competing design ideas in here that the flat staging – I assume done for post CGI – supersedes everything else in my experience whenever we don’t have a podrace or 4-way crosscut climax, whose own synchronicity and momentum is a bit hampered by its tonal juggling. The stoic or monotone delivery by most characters in most scenes is a design choice, and for me, always reflected something utopian about this pre-fall Star Wars: most are reserved,…
