i’ll try not to talk too much about how i wanted to go to tahoe this weekend for some snowboarding but i’m still here in the rain.
not that rain here = snow there or anything.
we decided too late, and then opted to go early sunday morning, only we overslept because we went out for a late dinner on saturday night with hmc’s friends from sony, one of which was in town for the holiday (ha!) weekend, and the other works at the orphanage up here in the presidio.
hmc came down with a cold, to boot. cold + fear of snowboarding because you might hurt your already hurty self + getting up super late = no tahoe trip.
so instead we watched movies…
we finally got around to watching wong kar-wai’s latest, 2046. finally being sort of an odd word, since it hasn’t come out here yet, on the other hand i’ve had a copy that i ordered from hong kong on dvd for over a month now. thus, finally.
it’s pretty good. once we sorted out that it’s not really a time travel epic (whew!), and not even really a science fiction story, we were able to see parallels in the triptych-ness like chungking express and fallen angels, and also in the (un)love story/period piece like in the mood for love. one thing that hmc noted was that it had a real fetishization of objects: a lot of shots just focused on one thing in the excess of the actual plot or the movie as a whole. after she brought it up i saw it everywhere, but now we need to go back to the old movies to see if that’s something he’s always done that we didn’t notice, or maybe we were just being hypersensitive. i mean, there were those cans of peaches in chungking express, right?
we also went out to see kore-eda hirokazu’s nobody knows. it’s a wonderful film that was inspired by a real eventknown as the “affair of the four abandoned children of nishi-sugamo.” in 1988, born of different fathers, these children never went to school and didn’t legally exist because their births were never declared. abandoned by their mother, they lived on their own for six months. it’s an incredibly beautiful movie, but also an incredibly sad movie. i don’t know if you can make a sadder movie. there are things like schindler’s list where the topic is inherently more sad, but the blatant heavy-handedness and manipulation falsifies the experience. here the touch is very light and realistic, a la edward yang, allowing the sadness of the actual content to show through.
lucky you!
well, i’m not sad about missing snowboarding anymore. i’m now sad about abandoned children.
aren’t movies wonderful?
Posted at February 21, 2005 11:40 AMwe’re in the process of getting 6 inches of fresh powder here…which is a rarity in itself. Should be snowing through weds!!! Fuck yeah!!! Tomorrow will be cheap lift tix, no crowds, and killer pack. Sometimes, the winter in Maine ain’t so bad after all!!!
Posted by: kevmo at February 21, 2005 12:31 PMre: the fetishization of objects. the most obvious “design porn” movie in my recent memory is “gattaca,” where pretty much every bit of art direction had a similar amount of import as the theme of the film itself (i actually like it quite a bit, but sometimes the world feels so heavily designed that it sucks all of the oxygen out of the film) — are we talking the same level here?
as i remember, “in the mood for love” was also extremely concerned with the look of things as well.
Posted by: Javi at February 21, 2005 6:43 PMi remember baz luhrmann’s romeo and juliet, where they did an incredible amount of design around bringing the words and phrases into the world of the movie, making “daggers” brands of handguns, etc. to little outward effect.
however, while i do love the look of wkw’s films, maybe i’m just now noticing how that even on top the hazy super-saturated christopher doyle cinematography, he absolutely lingers on certain objects, just to make them look beautiful as opposed to furthering the plot or making some sort of point other than, “this object looks beautiful when shot like this.”
Posted by: e at February 22, 2005 1:37 PMComments are now closed for this entry. Thank you for playing.