Post by Martin Stett on Nov 20, 2019 6:14:45 GMT
I haven't seen a thread for this anywhere, so I'm starting one.
I hereby proclaim that all period movies be given the Shakespeare Update, in which the text retains its original language or dialogues, but the setting is portrayed in (mostly) modern dress with (mostly) modern technology.
This is a movie to chew on, but right now I dig it a lot. It's Casablanca as seen through a Kafkaesque hellscape, given immediacy and a dreamlike timelessness by its vaguely modern setting in which people and objects seem to exist outside of time: typewriters alongside modern surveillance cameras, Jewish refugees evading German forces in modern soldiers' gear. People waiting in line for their dehumanizing number to show up on the digital sign to interview for their visas. This is nothing that hasn't been done before, but never has it been so unsettling.
To go back to Kafka, this is really a hysterical comedy of bureaucracy gone mad. By "hysterical comedy" I mean "comedy born out of abject terror," mind you. The whole thing has an absurdist flair for humor, in which one laughs uneasily at the characters being foiled by chance or by dehumanizing bureaucracy, by the juxtaposition of people shopping or enjoying a good time as soldiers approach their city. It's all remarkably funny, on top of being uncomfortable: it's a humor of laughing to break the tension, waiting for the other shoe to fall and spell certain doom for all of our damned souls.
And finally, it's just a damn good drama. Watching Georg take on the identity of a father, of a husband, of a writer, of a mechanic, and finding his own love for other people in the process is some great stuff. I love that so much of the movie is built around this idea of Georg becoming someone else by virtue of needing to be someone else. It's wrenching to see.
So yeah, arguably the best movie of 2018. Not quite as good as Phoenix, but nothing is quite as good as Phoenix, let's be honest.
I hereby proclaim that all period movies be given the Shakespeare Update, in which the text retains its original language or dialogues, but the setting is portrayed in (mostly) modern dress with (mostly) modern technology.
This is a movie to chew on, but right now I dig it a lot. It's Casablanca as seen through a Kafkaesque hellscape, given immediacy and a dreamlike timelessness by its vaguely modern setting in which people and objects seem to exist outside of time: typewriters alongside modern surveillance cameras, Jewish refugees evading German forces in modern soldiers' gear. People waiting in line for their dehumanizing number to show up on the digital sign to interview for their visas. This is nothing that hasn't been done before, but never has it been so unsettling.
To go back to Kafka, this is really a hysterical comedy of bureaucracy gone mad. By "hysterical comedy" I mean "comedy born out of abject terror," mind you. The whole thing has an absurdist flair for humor, in which one laughs uneasily at the characters being foiled by chance or by dehumanizing bureaucracy, by the juxtaposition of people shopping or enjoying a good time as soldiers approach their city. It's all remarkably funny, on top of being uncomfortable: it's a humor of laughing to break the tension, waiting for the other shoe to fall and spell certain doom for all of our damned souls.
And finally, it's just a damn good drama. Watching Georg take on the identity of a father, of a husband, of a writer, of a mechanic, and finding his own love for other people in the process is some great stuff. I love that so much of the movie is built around this idea of Georg becoming someone else by virtue of needing to be someone else. It's wrenching to see.
So yeah, arguably the best movie of 2018. Not quite as good as Phoenix, but nothing is quite as good as Phoenix, let's be honest.