The original “literally me”.
Came into the initial watch not knowing anything about it, and was left puzzled, not knowing what I watched. But it was stuck in my brain and wouldn’t leave. Gopalakrishnan made a film, informed by his own struggles with borderline personality disorder, to create a story that in no way holds your hand, filled with ambiguity of a character( and untrustworthy narrator) looking back on his life searching for cause, reason and explanation for his being.…
How colonialism saps the life out of indigenous cultures, turning them into chullachaqui, hollow spirits, no memories, husks of what they once were. Embrace of the Serpent does an incredible job of displaying the emotional and metaphysical aspects of its subject matter, something few ethnographic films made by outside perspective do successfully.
In a film that chronicle the precursor events to a massive revolutionary movement in Angola, it of course is very much invested in the future and the collective action necessary to cultivate this coming events into reality. This is a learned process, done through the educating of the people. The act of teaching is a quality felt in nearly every interaction between people. The old mentoring the youth to an experienced revolutionary with novices or in a variations of power…
I’ve seen one other of Lav Diaz’s films prior being Norte: The End of History but the form and artistic pursuit done here seems by far the best for the story being told. That being a story with anticapitalist sentiments on observations of the wide sweeping influence of an oppressive system through an intimate portrait of families. Families that aren’t cerebral like his Dostoevskian characters of Norte. Instead it focuses on simple people who are concerned with the little changes in…
Probably the best Christmas movie I’ve ever seen. It does everything right. Comedy and story were great and the awkward and janky animation style added to the charm that is this movie, giving the movie an interesting texture to it.
