2019 Chinese movie
Rating: 16/20
Plot: I don't have time for a plot synopsis!
1) The title screen appears 1 hour and 11 minutes into the film, right before this turns into the most magical thing I've seen in any film from this year.
2) And I thought the five-minute opening long take was impressive, the first of many shots in this that managed to trick me. Me! A guy who watches about a movie every single day! Me!
3) "The TV said dreams are lost memories," a character says at some point in this, and this final hour is a surreal journey, purely surreal since it's quite obviously a dream. It's a narrative juiced by dream logic, and it's an exhilarating trip through memories and hopes and dreams within dreams within dreams.
4) I gasped audibly, probably the best way to gasp, while watching the last hour of this movie. I can't remember gasping at camera movement like that since Soy Cuba.
5) "Tricked how?" you might be asking. Well, am I seeing floor or am I seeing ceiling? Wait, these people are a reflection? I had no idea! Another reflection? Got me again, movie! That's got to be a reflection, right? What? Those are flesh 'n' blood people! Movie!
6) "It's living in the past that's scary, not mudslides."
7) That last shot, a symbol of transience, took my breath away. It's maybe the most gorgeous conclusion to a movie I've seen all year, and that's saying a lot because I'm a guy who watches about a movie a day on average. And if you remember #7 on this list while you're watching this movie for the first time, that might be a spoiler. Sorry about that.
8) Water, water, everywhere! Rain, a car wash, a pond, water dripping down walls. All that rain, all those neon lights. Why didn't I see this on the largest screen ever constructed?
9) A watch, claims a character in the middle of a dream narrative, is a symbol of eternity. And the watches and clocks in this movie are busted. So what's that tell you?
10) "Dipping water with the point of a knife,
Examining snow with a microscope,
Doing this over and over,
One still wants to ask:
Have you ever counted the stars in the sky?
They're like little birds
Ever parachuting through my chest."
I decided to create lines from that mini-soliloquy to make it into a poem. It deserves to be a poem! This movie deserves to be a poem!
11) Fruit, a spinning house, the consumption of entire apples, those broken watches and clocks, karaoke, mudslides, movies.
12) And an agitated mule! The mule is a better actor than Brad Pitt, and it has a better chance of making any sense out of this review than you do. And I'm sorry about that.
No comments:
Post a Comment