Film

06/14/2018

An OASIS in the Desert of the Real: Ready Player One vs. The Matrix

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“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” – Jean Baudrillard (Accredited to Ecclesiastes)

What are the themes of Ready Player One?

We should, at this point, know the themes of The Matrix. Themes like “humanity cannot be contained”, or like “man’s hubris will be our downfall”, or perhaps the most important: “reality is always better than a dream”. The Matrix indulges itself in its themes, presenting as less of a film sometimes and more of a Socratic dialogue with automatic rifles. It’s Plato’s Cave crossed with the brain-in-a-jar theory, updated for the late 90’s, with Y2K looming and computers becoming household appliances. Artificial Intelligence– the idea that a computer might become smarter than its programmer, was awesome in the original sense, and people are still wary. But the choice, as it were, always comes down to the red pill or the blue pill. Do you stay in the dream, in the cave, in the construct, or do you go out and face reality?

Ready Player One doesn’t seem to have that problem.

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05/03/2018

The Epic, the Serial, and Avengers: Infinity War

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SPOILER WARNING: I will do my best to avoid major spoilers, but as with any review, it’s a bit buyer beware. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t get angry with me if you think I’ve spoiled something.

So, I definitely wanted to talk about Infinity War this weekend, and I was wondering what I might talk about outside of a straight review or a breakdown of my reaction to it, but I was given a great assist from The New Yorker, of all places.

Just… the hottest of takes right there Mr. Brody.

And yes, technically he’s right, but reading through the article it’s clear that all of these things that he’s saying that are technically true (none of the characters have proper introductions, it feels like the season finale of a TV show, the ending compels the viewer to put on the next part) are, I think, supposed to be interpreted as negative. But these criticisms are rather dismissive to all the people, films, and characters that allowed this movie to be made, like Homer, The Ten Commandments, and Buck Rodgers.

Those things do fit together in this context, of course.

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04/13/2018

R for Ratatouille

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F for Fake and Ratatouille are kind of the same movie.

I mean, no, they’re not exactly the same. But they’re both mostly about someone taking credit for another person’s art, with strong critiques of the commercial business of art and a subplot deconstructing the relationship that art critics and other art experts have with artists and their creations. They’re even both directed by highly respected auteurs trying to salvage a project that the original director couldn’t complete.  It’s just that one of those auteurs is Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles) and the other is Orson Welles (Citizen freaking Kane). The conclusions that both of the films come to are disparate, but contradictory.

First, a bit of plot summary. Ratatouille is a film about a rat that manages to become the head chef at a Parisian restaurant that somehow used to have 5 stars despite the Michelin rating system only going up to three stars. He achieves this by pulling the hair of his hapless human companion, which controls the human like a marionette. It’s my favorite PIXAR film of all time. F for Fake is an Orson Welles mostly-non-fiction film that is about two of the most notorious fakers of the 20th century. The first is Elmyr de Horay, an art forger that specialized in the post-impressionists, particularly Picasso and Modigliani. The second, and more famous of the two, is Elmyr’s biographer Clifford Irving, who also wrote a best-selling, but fake, autobiography of an even more famous man– a business tycoon by the name of Howard Hughes.

The things to unpack in these films are mostly the questions that they raise about the nature of art and art criticism. Kyle Kallgren’s review of F for Fake begins with the question “Is there such a thing as fake art?” I would posit that both films say the answer is “no”, but for different reasons.

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01/23/2018

My Favorite Film Scores

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So this post came about because a) I have to push back the other post I was planning for today because I haven’t finished the research for it and b) the film I am focusing on for what is now next week’s post has a particularly iconic and important score in terms of film history. I also really don’t care for it. Not to give too much away, it’s a very bass heavy and monotonous score and not very motivic. Well, it has one motif. Still, I started thinking about what I do like in film scores and that naturally lead me to some movies that I really enjoy the music of.

I’ve talked about music in film before. This list is going to cover films with mainly non-diegetic music, meaning that the music is present in the film, but isn’t happening within the world of the characters. All of these films also have wholly original score, save one notable exception– mostly because saying that Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 have great scores is fairly redundant. I also managed to only repeat one composer (no surprise as to who that was though). The films are listed in chronological order as well, because the films I picked really aren’t a fair comparison to rank.

Let’s get started.

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