2012 plundercinematic experience
Rating: 16/20
Plot: It's a love story, the same one you've seen many, many times before.
Any plot synopsis is going to make this sound like something you've seen hundreds of times. And that's because you've seen this story played out hundreds of times. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, they get married, and they deal with conflicts that potentially disrupt their chances of a happy ending. I'm pretty sure, however, that that's part of the point as Hungarian director Gyorgy Palfi--the guy behind Hukkle and Taxidermia, two of my favorite films from a few years ago--assembled this movie by splicing together clips of 450 or so films. Some of those are blockbusters (it begins with a shot from Avatar), some of them are Hungarian movies I've probably never heard of, and some of them are classics you'd find on any cinephile's greatest films list.
Part of the fun is just in the recognition. You see these familiar film clips featuring everybody from Chaplin to Kinski to Nicolas Cage used in completely new contexts. The film opens with that Avatar guy waking up, and then we're given variations of that same guy-waking-up theme. He shifts form and showers, shifts form and continues showering, and shifts form to shower some more. Then, he shaves and shaves and shaves. You get the idea. Eventually, the dozens of variations of this male protagonist meets the dozens of variations of the female protagonist, and hundreds of clips show their courtship and eventually marriage.
It's a movie lover's playground. The juxtapositions are frequently hilarious, and I did laugh out loud a few times at the absurdity of the whole thing. Especially revealing are how similar a lot of the shots are. It's not just what's happening; it's similar camera angles and cinematic cliches that are shown in quick succession. At the same time, it's fascinating to see how different eras, directors' styles, and technological advancements shape these moments--both the really mundane ones and the life-altering ones--differently. Not that you have much time to think about any grand statements Palfi is trying to make about the evolution of movies or human life. The cuts are quick ones, and there's just not much space to contemplate much of anything. But boy, it sure is a good time.
The visuals worked better than the audio for me. Final Cut lifts music from various films, most very recognizable snippets of score, and they're usually launched by a scene from the films they come from. So a shot of John Travolta gets "Boogie Shoes" started. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. But seeing Chaplin dance to a disco hit seems like the type of idea that Palfi had that got this whole project off the ground. Palfi was probably sitting around thinking, "It would be hilarious to see Charlie Chaplin dancing to the Bee Gees," but knew just mashing those together for no reason wouldn't make sense. So plundering and juxtaposing shots from 450 movies was just the excuse he needed to make it happen.
My favorite part, as you might expect, was a wild sex scene. You know, because I'm a pervert. Honorable mention goes to a surprising appearance by Yoda. I'm not sure if it was the best choice aesthetically or artistically to include Yoda and the blue Avatar guy, but the laugh Yoda got from me certainly makes it seem like a good choice.
Highly recommended. And you can find this on YouTube although one of the uploads was without sound at all and the other didn't have subtitles for the non-English movies in there. So I had to play them both simultaneously and watch the one that had the subtitles, pausing every once in a while to try to get them better aligned.
No comments:
Post a Comment