rec-diary

[rec-diary]

How to break up with your boyfriend

Well Narcissus, it appears I have discovered a third type of movie-one that is neither plot driven nor character driven, but theme driven.

Technically speaking, this is a difficult one to pull off. A thematically heavy film does not have the intricacies of plot development nor the emotional payoff of character development. Usually a movie of yours makes me either think hard or feel deep. And those so far have been character movies or plot movies. This theme movie, on the other hand, evokes specific feelings and makes you think about them, that is, stimulating both thinking and feeling in equal measures.

Enough thesis talk, onwards.

The central theme of Midsommar is contrasting ideals.

Orphan and family. Death and rebirth. Isolated and cherished. Winter and summer. Juxtaposition at its finest, with Dani’s entire biological family being snuffed out, her remaining ties to the outside world burnt away, to a new life in a community that embraces and accepts her.

Dani finally finds what she needs, although in a perverse manner.

The movie is seasoned with heavy foreshadowing throughout. The tapestries at the beginning summarize what is to unfold, while the ahem other tapestry is a blatant 'this is what happens next literally' poster (yeah, the pubic hair love potion one). There is also a painting of a bear and a girl at Dani’s apartment.

There is also a lot of focus on breathing. Dani’s breath can be heard throughout, especially during her panic attacks, the commune has a particular exhale-inhale ritual after downing drug juices, Dani’s family dies by inhaling toxic fumes. I don’t know what this symbolizes. To breathe is the first act of existence, and is often the last. Maybe a nod to the cyclical imagery? Or I’m thinking too much here.

It’s kind of nifty how the boyfriend is named Christian, and the entire movie is about pagan rituals. Another juxtaposition.

The 'friends' represent hubris. Josh is consumed by his academic pursuits, his desire for knowledge leading to death. Mark is consumed by horny. And that’s about it for him, I guess. He’s there to supply dark humor and then get his skin worn by someone.

Another aspect of this movie is grief and trauma. Throughout most of the runtime, Dani is alone. She is left to process her grief on her own, her support system of a boyfriend just doing the bare minimum to not be labelled as 'the asshole that leaves the girl when her entire family is dead'. However in the end, when Dani breaks down after seeing said boyfriend do A FUCKING SIXTEEN YEAR OLD, she is not alone. The women around share her pain, mirror her wailings and expressions of anguish, and cry together with her.

And thus the May Queen is born into her own.

That brings us to Pelle. To me, this is the only interesting character here, since everyone else just exist to personify ideals. Pelle, lures his ‘friends’ for the sacrifice by taking advantage of their lust (and probably to score some brownie points at his little commune). He brings Dani for his personal interests (so much eye-fucking here) and knows he can fuck her for life after Christian is disposed off, once done fucking the teenager (the mating ritual is burned into my retinas, thanks very much Narcissus). All of this makes him look like a selfish and opportunistic person, but from the community’s perspective he is viewed as a valued member, a custom-abiding nice guy who supplies useful 'new blood' for said customs. Oh, another juxtaposition.

What is the message of Midsommar then? All the juxtaposition and shock value aside, is there anything in this movie to take home?

I am not really sure there is.

Don’t get me wrong, it's a work of art. The intent in each shot. The haunting soundtrack. A genre-defying experience of its own kind.

But somehow at the end of the day, it feels empty, lacking in soul and wanting for depth. Just like Dani’s smile.

[rec-diary]

Livin' La Vida Loca

Expectation: Haha funny animated cat go brrrr

Reality: Existential dread, the pursuit of excess, facing and dealing with inevitability and how being happy is something one has to choose, every single day.

Let’s speak about the animation first, because I’m nerdy like that. Aesthetic and visually pleasing, I couldn’t help comparing it to the first Shrek movie, for old times’ sake. And the best part of it is the choppy, illustration style animation adopted for the fight scenes. I loved those bits.

Now the villains. From a storytelling perspective, Puss In Boots features three classic villains: the anti villain, evil personified and the force of nature.

Goldi is the anti villain, an orphan who just wants a proper family, although her means of obtaining said proper family comes at the cost of sacrificing her adopted (bear) family.

Jack is evil personified, in the fact that he has no misguided motivations, no tragic backstory, and only exists to further his own selfish goals, come what may.

And lastly, we have Death, the very force of nature, who being insulted by Puss’ utter disregard for the value of not one, but nine lives, decides to go against that said nature and cut short Puss' time, just because he’s that pissed.

Of course, Death is clearly the antagonist, as he alone drives Puss’ character growth.

Also that whistle. And the sickles. And the blood. And the panic attacks. Pure. Fear.

Jeez Dreamworks, easy. It’s a kids’ movie.

Now let’s talk about Kitty. She’s funny.

Moving on to Perrito. Your archetypal manic pixie dream girl, except he doesn’t try to fix the emo main character for once. Huh. Neat. Didn't know that could be done.

Perrito, despite being the one person who deserves a wish the most (in Kitty’s words) has no need for it. Since he came from nothing, he can see more easily what is right before him, and therefore is content with what he has.

What does Perrito do then? He’s there for you. As simple as that. He’s there for his friends, he’s there when he’s needed, he’s there when he’s not. Loyalty.

I’m glad they didn’t make him a surprise villain, because that would have been far too cliche.

I also liked how the map changed depending on who’s holding it. Puss’ path is about the fear of death and Kitty’s path is about abandonment issues. Goldi’s is about childhood trauma.

It's also interesting how Goldi and Puss parallel each other in the resolution of their conflicts. Goldi finds peace by accepting what she already has, and Puss does the same by letting go of what he could have.

"To new adventures and old friends."

P.S. Puss reminds me of you.

Now I'm off to watch the prequel.

[rec-diary]

About time I watched this.

And oh lord, how beautiful it was.

About Time is one of those movies that does not try to be anything more or less than what it exactly is.

Plain. Simple. Nice.

Boring?

No, because while we have time travel, this is not that kind of a time travel story. And while we have love, this is not that kind of a love story either.

This is a story about making the most of your time by finding pleasure in the mundane, the everyday. The things you and I take for granted, only to miss sorely when they have gone.

The male and female leads get married quickly, and we move to the essence of this movie - family connections, and how precious the time you have with your loved ones is. This idea is brought out in Tim’s character development, in how he changes his purpose for traveling back in time as he moves through time. From finding a partner for himself to trying to keep his family together.

It’s also full of the little things, The dad’s Olympic commentary. Tim doing the same with his daughter. Mary walking down the aisle to Tim’s song of choice, which she doesn’t care for, but does it anyways for him, who she cares for deeply. Tim and Roger’s friendship. Strolling along the beach with your father. Kit Kat being overly affectionate.

I was mostly smiling throughout this enjoyable experience (so much that my face hurt, mind you), except for the part when my hyper-imaginative brain theorized there’d be some drastic alteration from all the time traveling that he wouldn’t be able to undo and he’d die a broken, old man, full of regrets and hate for life.

Which begs the question: is it the tailoring of moments to suit the other person that make them perfect, or does the perfection of moments arise from the inherent awkwardness of human interactions? Because both make for fond memories. After their technical ‘first time’, while Tim thinks it could have been better, Mary thought it was lovely, even though it had been clumsy. But she clearly has a better time when Tim redoes it.

So if one could travel back in time but only to the extent of affecting the choices that shape one’s life, would one do it? Would you redo the little moments that defined experiences so that everything fit in this neat little portrait of life you’ve painted for yourself?

"We're all traveling through time together, every day of our lives. All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable ride."

Every little moment is connected, and changes ripple across timelines. Saving Kit Kat results in Tim’s daughter never being born, but more importantly, it means true change has to come from within.

A tiny nitpick would be that females in the family don’t get the time travel gene. While I understand it’s not supposed to make sense in the sci-fi way, it’s rather unfair to the girls. Wait, is it the presence of a penis that makes one time travel? It would have been hilarious if they traveled through time by imagining where they wanted to go while holding their dicks.

Anyways, I digress.

There’s something a bit iffy though.

In the timeline where Tim helps with the play, he does not meet with Mary organically. He forces their meet-cute and uses information that he should not know but does from the time hopping to get their spark going. While we see how Tim and Mary complement each other remarkably well as the movie goes on, time travel or not, the way he doctored their first meeting to be perfect gives us this slightly tantalizing conclusion: that you really can make someone fall in love with you with enough data of the right kind.

Now how to splice some time travel genes in us, Narcissus?

[rec-diary]

Mementoception

A heist movie, if one is to oversimplify it. And while it has an interesting premise, the structure of the heist movie takes away the novelty of it. Traditional heist movies require all the explanation and masterminding to happen in the earlier scenes, and then balance the exposition with a plot twist when something unexpected happens to throw a wrench in the plans. It’s the same here, but perhaps things could have been executed with more impact if it had been a different kind of story.

Since I don’t have much to say about what is, you’re going to instead listen to me speculate about what could have been.

For that I first propose an additional plot point - dreams can now be recorded. The architect designs the dreamscape, the dreamer populates it and this can be saved for later dream hopping.

The movie opens with Cobb returning to his hotel room to find a dead wife. Devastated by the loss and driven by the need for vengeance, Cobb starts investigating and assembles a team of dream experts to help him.

We learn that Cobb and his wife were dream detectives, with a slight difference - the wife is the more skilled architect of the two. She would recreate crime scenes and other places of interest, while the subconscious of eye witnesses or victims fill it as they dream.

The wife was fond of recording her dreams. She’d create all sorts of fantastical places for Cobb to dream in that they’d visit from time to time. Soon enough, she starts becoming delusional and can’t differentiate between reality and dreams anymore.

The team finds her last dream recording, just taken a couple days before her murder. They enter her dreamscape to find that she has left behind clues and information. There is some character exploration here during this bit, Cobb grappling with his grief and the guilt of failing to protect her.

However dream recordings are not very stable and the longer you stay, the more dangerous they become. Here we learn the implications of “limbo”. Cobb & Co must race against time to solve the murder mystery.

It is revealed she had been investigating something for a long while on her own without Cobb’s knowing, a conspiracy that reality is a dream. During these investigations, Cobb is convinced this conspiracy group had performed the “inception” on her, which is how she became increasingly disconnected, leading to her possible death at their hands. More exciting detectives stuff ensues, ending with the team apprehending the group and bringing the killers to justice. Cobb is happy now.

But the plot twist, like the original, is that Cobb was the one who planted the idea to convince her to return to reality when she would stay longer and longer in the dream recordings. We learn that the whole movie has been a dream recording specifically created by Ariadne to help Cobb deal with his trauma. The wife had committed suicide before his eyes. Ariadne realises she has done more harm than good as Cobb keeps playing the dream recording over and over again, unable to move on from her death. And one day, he doesn’t wake up from the dream.

He’s always happy now.

Beautiful score. A pity it was not enough to make me think or feel anything more.

[rec-diary]

Abre los ojos

“It was a lot of things.”

”And I am here for it. Tell me all those things."

Yes. All the things. A murder mystery. Vanity. Dreams within dreams. Non linear storytelling. A vivacious woman. Sci-fi elements. Sanity. And this uncanniness of knowing something feels wrong but not knowing how to word that feeling.

Vanilla Sky uses dreams to express the theme of escapism, at least that’s what it feels like to me. Sofia, with her spontaneity and love for life, is a symbolic escape from dreary outlooks that tend to cripple everyone sooner or later. L.E. is a business that thrives on selling escapist fantasies, by offering the consumer a chance to live out ‘life’ in a world of their own making once they die. Julie commits suicide as a last resort, because she cannot reconcile with her reality of unrequited love.

Masks. Identity. Image. David had already been wearing a metaphoric mask before the accident, living up to his playboy image. Julie desperately wears the mask of cool nonchalance to repress her flames of frustration. Brian however, does not seem to not have one though. He feels like the most human character. But are you really a person without a couple personas?

The movie ends with Sofia’s voice: Open your eyes. But it also begins with that. Which is slightly strange because David had not met Sofia yet. Is the entire thing a loop happening in David’s dreamscape? What is reality anymore? The lines are clearly more than blurred, and they don’t look like lines anymore.

My only gripe with this one is regarding Sofia- the writing made her less of a character and more of a plot device. The trope of the manic pixie dream girl who shows up to make the sad hero less sad and then dies. I love the crazy fun character that says crazy fun things, I hate that they are often just used to further the protagonist's growth and discarded. Sofia is caricaturised to a concept, an idea, and not a person. That’s what David falls in love with- the idea of her, the symbol of her.

Then there’s the duality of the mind and the body. Bodies making promises to each other. Minds closing themselves off with masks and layers and covers. There are lots of empty shots too. Loneliness, the yearning for meaningful but real connections as contrasted with the allusion of a perfect made-up connection.

"Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around."

In the end, David chooses to wake up. To live reality with the pain that it brings - “you’re dead and I’m frozen”. David chooses to jump, and upon impact, (remember he tells he is scared of heights because of the impact and not the heights itself), he opens his eyes.

Finally?

Finally, I hope.

We must choose. The choice may in the end prove to be a vain illusion, considering how all things end, but you cannot progress onwards without choosing to take that step forward. And David has made that choice, for better or for worse.

It doesn’t matter. The skies will always be vanilla, anyways.

"The little things. There’s nothing bigger, is there?"

[rec-diary]

the search for love.

This one was a journey. The rise and fall of a man in his search for human connection.

I feel like Flowers for Algernon was perfectly balanced in terms of plot and character. One drives the other, and the other in turn shapes the one.

“The more intelligent you become the more problems you’ll have, Charlie. Your intellectual growth is going to outstrip your emotional growth.”

Fantastic foreshadowing.

Charlie starts off incredibly lonely, incredibly motivated and incredibly desperate to please. The motifs of control, fear and resistance to change-the human experience-are explored through the characters.

The psychological aspects - the dissociation, the split personality, the mental blocks.

The theme that science is basically “playing god” is alluded to several times over the course of events.

The constant dehumanization.

And oh, the characters. I loved them all.

They're complex in a way that they become foils of each other. Take the conversation Charlie has with Burt when he realizes no one is a genius. Burt presents a more balanced perspective - acknowledging Nemur as ordinary, egotistical, fearful but also capable of and working on something great. Burt makes a good foil for Charlie’s black and white perception of the people around him.

Then of course, Alice and Fay. Fay representing eros and Alice representing philia-evolved-into-pragma. Both women are essential to Charlie’s emotional growth, and both play different roles. Fay provides him the release he has longed for and Alice satisfies his craving for companionship.

To love and be loved. This is the most fundamental of all human experiences. This is what it means to be human.

“But I know now there’s one thing you’ve all overlooked: intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.”

At the end of the day, people are still people. Human beings. And it’s those human relations that make existence less of a pain that it already is. Because we are biased and fallible, not impervious to emotions no matter what we may claim.

Flowers for Algernon is a journey about love.

[rec-diary]

the highly anticipated one.

It started off pretty well.

I was hooked the moment I saw Lenny in the opening credits shake the polaroid to develop it, and it started fading to white, which is when I realized the narrative is going to be nonlinear. Oh, and he has anterograde amnesia too.

Nonlinear storytelling and an unreliable narrator. Two of my all-time favorite plot devices.

The black and white scenes move forward and the color ones move backwards. The story begins at the end and ends at the middle. I read somewhere that Nolan wrote the screenplay the way it is shown and not chronologically. Very impressive, considering how even a tiny slip-up could ruin the cohesiveness of it.

What is the theme of Memento? Lies and control. How we lie to ourselves to be happy and how we crave so desperately for the feeling of being in control. Facts are flawed. They are static, and only make sense within their context. You take advantage and get taken advantage of. What does time mean to one who is taken back to a reset point every couple of minutes? How do you move on when you’re unable to move forward?

“Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment. This moment a million times over. You have to trust me. If this moment is repeated enough, if you keep trying — and you have to keep trying — eventually you will come across the next item on your list.” Jonathan Nolan, Memento Mori

The plot is perfect. The execution is brilliant. But even now, I still cannot revise my initial rating of it. Sorry, Narcissus I know this one means a lot to you. But the ending while being thematically appropriate, doesn’t satisfy me. Lenny is stuck in a samsara of his own making, living out his self-deception over and over again, until he dies. He can't move on ever.

It feels incomplete to me somehow. Lacking just a tiny bit of, what?

Should he have died then? Would that have satisfied me instead? Or if the plot was more twisted to unravel? Is it because I wanted more of an intellectual challenge after being hyped about it?

I do not know the answers.

“For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick. That's the miserable truth.” Jonathan Nolan, Memento Mori

[rec-diary]

little miss sunshine.

“Watch Little Miss Sunshine itself. Good start. Safe bet.“

“Yeah, got that one.”

“Okay. When will you get around to watching it?”

“Don't know. Maybe one day, I'll wake up and think, ‘Today's a good day to bore myself to death.’ Then I'll go about watching it.”

I suppose I failed because I wasn’t bored to death that day. Or that night either, because of the tiny plot holes that kept me up such as the color blindness going unnoticed for fifteen years of one’s existence. Anyways, I digress.

Moving to specifics I loved, there was the proper application of Chekhov's gun with the porn magazines. The duality of the beauty pageant - the fact that it's fine when the kids are being sexualized suggestively, but when Olive tries the same thing with childlike innocence, it's suddenly unacceptable. The ice cream speech-while the dad was logically right, you see how words like that really eat into a child's psyche. I also liked the parts where they had to push the van-brought back old memories.

If I look at it as a whole instead, the theme of this movie is winning and losing, and how that doesn't always directly translate into being a winner or a loser.

Just because you lost, doesn't mean you're a loser.

And even if you win, you may not end up being the winner after all.

The flipside wasn't explored though, but I can see how that might have been too much and not as impactful as it is the way it is right now.

Funny and cute, is how I’d describe this piece. Is it deep? Not exactly, but it doesn’t need to be. Being a story that takes over the course of a small journey, it is about the characters more than the plot. Well, there’s barely any plot if we want to get technical.

Does plot exist to develop the character? Or does the character exist to further the plot? You'd probably say something about how it should be balanced and both serve each other. Which if you do, then this movie was not 'balanced', the way I see it. But maybe balance isn’t always desirable, especially in the context of storytelling. If everything was perfectly balanced as it should be, it would have more than enough structure but not enough soul. Perhaps.

[rec-diary]

a seven and a half days’ worth of enjoyment.

“There’s a single book in his list. And a bunch of movies.”

“I guess I could give it a go. We do seem to have similar literary tastes.”

The first one I decided to say yes to. The reason why this blog exists.

The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. This book had me captivated by the end of the first chapter. I remember reading it in complete absorption, spending significant portions of my waking hours to its progress. The last time I had done that was for Sherlock Holmes.

So what was it about this book then?

To start with, an interesting premise. A time loop. Rules that confine your thinking and force your creativity. Intersecting storylines that look like independent brush strokes at first, until you are able to step back a bit and view the landscape in all its fullness. Characters that learn about themselves along with you. And of course, a nice little murder to tie up the entire package.

‘Life doesn’t always leave you a choice in how you live it,’ he says grimly. ‘Now come on, we’ve a murder to attend.’

Yes sir, take me. I am a Christie girl through and through, so I absolutely loved the closed room murder mystery. I dare say it was my favorite part.

But what is this story truly about? At its heart, Seven and a Half, to me is about redemption. Redemption and change. The players are in this game to redeem themselves. The authorities are convinced that one of them is irredeemable for eternity. And then, Aiden who through it all, experiences Anna’s development. And changes his judgement of her. As well as of himself. Is Aiden even himself anymore?

Nothing like a mask to reveal somebody’s true nature.

People are never what they seem. But people always have the potential to change. Can they change so much they are no longer the same? Does an individual have a core, an essence that remains constant forever? Or is that just as malleable?

The ending however, seems a bit counterintuitive. Evelyn Hardcastle is revealed to be a psychopath with no apparent motive for her misdeeds (that I could reason) and is so easily written off that it seems to go against the main themes of the book. Well, some villains just are, and while I generally don’t mind that, this felt a bit jarring.

Seven and a Half was thoroughly satisfying for me as a reader, and I can only imagine how constricting but exciting it must have been for the writer.

It was a rush and then a high, and finally a cascade into a curious conclusion.

Sincerely,

The Anna to your Aiden.