After a long hiatus from watching films in the theater while living on the Bodensee, I dove back in after moving to Munich.
Note that 3-star films are excellent and far from mediocre. I would still absolutely recommend them!
An incredibly emotionally intelligent women is able to deftly use comedy and humor to support her awkward and anxious partner. A man who can become obsessive and uses Freud to try to analyze other people rather than understand their emotions and experience. The women grew up as a military brat, moving when she was young, which made it hard to make friends and led to her being bullied. As an early teen she had a passion for acting and performance. In turn the partner appears to come from a place of significant wealth. That wealth is reflected throughout the film in the couple’s apartment, the wedding, and how they treat a wedding tasting like a dinner party.
But critically the film circles around the women’s use of humor to support the partner from beginning to end. And in contrast the partner and his friends come across grimly. The best friend hid behind his ex, allowing her to be attacked by a dog, and is unable to manage the emotional instability of his current partner, who locked a disabled child in a closet in the woods, ran away and never said anything about, leading to a hunt for the child. Perhaps most perversely this comes out in a “game”. Finally, the partner sexually assaults a co-worker, spurred and held back by his own emotional instability, the combination of which lead him to be headbutted while giving a broken speech at their wedding.
My only critic is that with the blockbuster cast the average viewer (and reviewer) will obsess about the women’s performative obsession with school shootings when she was 14. Describing the film as full of twists when the revelation of the women’s past is hardly a twist, rather a revelation about a character. After a period in her youth where she shot her fathers gun in the woods, took selfies smoking and posing with the gun, and filmed a video explaining why she was going to commit a shooting (with thoughtfully prepared make up and hair), she becomes an anti-gun activist when a shooting and group therapy make her confront what she was idealizing and she is finally accepted into a group of peers. A key and overlooked “answer” in the film to gun violence in America.
A quick glance at Rotten Tomatoes shows many focusing on the women’s revelation and the timing before her wedding. That reflects the core critic within the film. To show how we accept many terrible things, obsess about others that are far less worse, and ignore the good. Like a well adjusted adult who can support the partner she loves despite his weaknesses. I wish the film did more to show the average film viewer this point, otherwise the director should have cast lead actors that not among Hollywood’s leading celebrities.
In a movie about loss it is easy to lose the person who was lost. But the mother, who was faceless at first was given center stage. And then boldly walked back into the film, showing how just a few words can change everything.
The son staring to the spot his mother once stood in the parking lot. How he would drag his hand across the wall, reaching out to his father. The distorted voices and sounds in the music, the ending escaping the narrative of the characters, and the mix of surreal/fiction/real show a young director working with the craft of cinema in countless interesting ways.
The film was a bit long and disjointed, but also incredibly moving, in large part because it was clearly so personal. When the dedication to his mother and city came onto the screen I felt a punch to the gut, a work of fiction became real and I cried.
Even if training and running LLMs requires an unfathomable amount of energy it seems inevitable that they will dominate our society and our lives. Each period of major change seems to happen more quickly than the last. It feels like we’re only starting to see the impact of the previous one, the Information Age. Without VR headsets, people are already living in an alternate virtual world, spending enormous amounts of time on their phones. If we failed to adjust to that much slower moving change, how will we deal with the rise of LLMs? Either way, the only choice we have is to wait to see if we run out of money and the bubble bursts or things keep growing exponentially.
Beautifully shot. While watching I was imaging capturing frames and hanging them on my wall. Sofie’s face lit, while Ingrid was in shadow, only her outline visible.
The end felt like a cop out, both illogical and unnecessary. Why couldn’t she move the wheel chair herself? Why such an absurdly large and bright truck? It could have been a dream, but just as any other scene. There were moments that left me confused, the sudden reversal of Sofia’s relationship with Ingrid and Gomez’s emotional response to Rose. What was Gomez’s specialty?
A slow moving, but beautiful film that captures a foreign and nearly surrealistic environment. The landscapes are simply stunning. I intermittently was asking myself what is green screen and what is computer-generated, but somehow that intentional imperfection created an really interesting aesthetic. The landscape shots were somehow imperfect with noisy colors. At times there seemed to be references to Wes Anderson. The bungee jumping tower and zoo somehow fit perfectly. The focus on hand craft including cooking and the aesthetic of the main character’s home. Pink Floyd and the main characters fighting ability and skill to build a side car. It deserves a TV series, with characters perhaps not as developed as the time allowed, whether that is the many old male figures who tended to die off or the women working at the circus. There were few, but key moments of humor or absurdity.
Here be spoilers! Was Jackie a fictional character? Jackie and Daisy vomit, and when Daisy does it it provides the moment for Jackie to shoot her. In fact that moment may the only time the two characters meet? And then Lou is in the house. At the end of the film when Daisy is dragged away, Jackie is asleep in the car. Jackie may also be an extension of Lou, killing her enemies for her. Jackie works for Lou’s father, just as Lou did before the film starts. Jackie talks to her little brother and mother on the phone, calling her monster, while Lou’s mother went missing. Jackie is the only “magical” character.