The Bloody Child(dir. Nina Menkes)
I was expecting this to be in black & white since the stills on IMDb are in black & white and are gorgeous, but it was actually shot in color and looks quite amateurish. It might be due to the DVD's poor image quality or that's just how the film looks. It plays like a Kenneth Anger film stretched out to 85 minutes without a rhythm that becomes progressively faster and an ending that isn't reminiscent to a sexual climax. The film is fragmented and what the director is happy to admit in the interview on the disc presents it's "narrative" backwards. It's kind of hypnotic in it's showing little bits and pieces of footage in a repetitive manner, but it can become tiresome at given lengths of time. There's one stretch where it seems like the film was just repeating itself over and over and the whole cackling and reciting lines from Macbeth on the soundtrack made zero sense. It seemed like the director was attempting to make her film have more artistic merit with it's overt references to that play and The Bible. They really serves no purpose and the African footage, while interesting to watch, didn't make much sense, either, but it added to the film's oblique nature. The film was able to create something resembling a state of mind by showing pieces of it's "narrative" and was quite fascinating. It's repetitive nature made the film sort of dull especially in that stretch mentioned above and the feeling that the director tried to stretch her material to feature-length is simply inescapable. It's flawed, but I definitely recommend.
*** out of ****
Unknown Pleasures(dir. Jia Zhang Ke)
The same problems that plagued The World plague this film: a running time that's overlong and a narrative that's a little overly preachy about the social and economic problems in the director's homeland. Platform was epic and sweeping with it's narrative given that it spanned what seemed like many years and didn't have to strain to present the social problems in China while this film's story much like The World's is small and contained making it seem strange when Jia attempts to include references to China's larger social problems in the narrative. As the young protagonists watch the news, the audience is expected to take this information about China and apply it to their story, but their story is so small and insignificant that such an assessment doesn't really yield any sort of profound results intellectually. It's obvious that the characters' aimlessness is mainly a result of society's defects as one character proves that he's not totally unmotivated by attempting to enlist in the military but isn't able to because of an illness. This aimlessness causes the characters' downfall, which is similar to the one in The World, and the audience is probably expected to be outraged given that their aimlessness wasn't totally their fault, but it's too heavy-handed to really register on an emotional or intellectual level. The film definitely has some great moments like a character describing the beginning of Pulp Fiction and the film suddenly transitioning to a night club with a techno song that uses a sample from "Miserlou" blaring afterwards. It's moments like these that make the film worth watching because they're self-contained and fit within the scope of these characters' lives. It has it's fair share of problems, but it's still good.
*** out of ****
I was expecting this to be in black & white since the stills on IMDb are in black & white and are gorgeous, but it was actually shot in color and looks quite amateurish. It might be due to the DVD's poor image quality or that's just how the film looks. It plays like a Kenneth Anger film stretched out to 85 minutes without a rhythm that becomes progressively faster and an ending that isn't reminiscent to a sexual climax. The film is fragmented and what the director is happy to admit in the interview on the disc presents it's "narrative" backwards. It's kind of hypnotic in it's showing little bits and pieces of footage in a repetitive manner, but it can become tiresome at given lengths of time. There's one stretch where it seems like the film was just repeating itself over and over and the whole cackling and reciting lines from Macbeth on the soundtrack made zero sense. It seemed like the director was attempting to make her film have more artistic merit with it's overt references to that play and The Bible. They really serves no purpose and the African footage, while interesting to watch, didn't make much sense, either, but it added to the film's oblique nature. The film was able to create something resembling a state of mind by showing pieces of it's "narrative" and was quite fascinating. It's repetitive nature made the film sort of dull especially in that stretch mentioned above and the feeling that the director tried to stretch her material to feature-length is simply inescapable. It's flawed, but I definitely recommend.
*** out of ****
Unknown Pleasures(dir. Jia Zhang Ke)
The same problems that plagued The World plague this film: a running time that's overlong and a narrative that's a little overly preachy about the social and economic problems in the director's homeland. Platform was epic and sweeping with it's narrative given that it spanned what seemed like many years and didn't have to strain to present the social problems in China while this film's story much like The World's is small and contained making it seem strange when Jia attempts to include references to China's larger social problems in the narrative. As the young protagonists watch the news, the audience is expected to take this information about China and apply it to their story, but their story is so small and insignificant that such an assessment doesn't really yield any sort of profound results intellectually. It's obvious that the characters' aimlessness is mainly a result of society's defects as one character proves that he's not totally unmotivated by attempting to enlist in the military but isn't able to because of an illness. This aimlessness causes the characters' downfall, which is similar to the one in The World, and the audience is probably expected to be outraged given that their aimlessness wasn't totally their fault, but it's too heavy-handed to really register on an emotional or intellectual level. The film definitely has some great moments like a character describing the beginning of Pulp Fiction and the film suddenly transitioning to a night club with a techno song that uses a sample from "Miserlou" blaring afterwards. It's moments like these that make the film worth watching because they're self-contained and fit within the scope of these characters' lives. It has it's fair share of problems, but it's still good.
*** out of ****
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