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Films on sexual communication

2001-06-03 15:56:49+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

I finally[Wiki] got around to seeing Eyes Wide Shut last week, and yesterday evening rewatched Sirens. I mention them together because they both seem to be saying the same thing in remarkably different ways, and despite the canonization of Stanley Kubrick, I think Sirens[Wiki] does a better job. The difference is that watching Eyes Wide Shut[Wiki] is a tedious task, it's only in the memory and the analysis that it gets better, and there it sometimes feels like that's because I'm reading more into much of the visual language that Kubrick uses than was actually there.

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#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:31:44+00 by: ebradway

I was greatly disappointed in Eyes Wide Shut. It seemed like half the movie was editted out. I don't think Kubrick would have let it hit the theaters in it's final form. And yes, in analysis it's alot more interesting that viewing.

I watched Requiem for a Dream last night. Compared to other druggie movies I've seen, Drugstore Cowboy, Jesus' Son, Trainspotting, it probably did more to scare me away from drugs than any number of D.A.R.E. cars (BEWARE: the D.A.R.E. site has lots of pop-ups like bad porn).

On a lighter note, I just finished watching AntiTrust. The geeky open source movie. I really enjoyed it. Probably as much as I did the last decent programmer/geek movie, War Games.

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:31:44+00 by: Dan Lyke

There are stories that I really enjoyed that do get better with the post reading/viewing analysis. Robertson Davies is a master of that. But I found in Eyes Wide Shut[Wiki] that when I found the characters involved not only distasteful, but uncompelling, I became conscious of the storytelling technique much more than the story and started predicting dialog based on the colors of the background props.

Now I really enjoy when care has been taken in layout to give the entire scene meaning, in fact I believe that some of the failure of Chocolat[Wiki] was in its composition and layout, but when the stylism of the layout overshadows the story, no matter how brilliant the director wants to show us he is I think it's time to go back and beat on the screenwriters a bit.

To my mind it's much like reading Joyce. Yes, it's very cool that you managed to do that with the language, but it'd be really impressive if you could do like Robert Anton Wilson and make the story compelling enough and introduce your stylistic tweaks gradually enough that I only notice them at the end.