I suppose there are two different types of daters.
There are those, like myself I suppose, who reach deep into life and fall in love each time, or want to. This path strings an alternation of ecstasy and disappointment.
Others may deal with these encounters as if they were mere meals; perhaps some turn into warm companionship and others become memorable. But the expectations are low, as if it were a normal part of life. Traffic crossings.
But not me. I want passion and nourishment. I want an encounter that begins a life. Because I am open to cinematic passions, I can find these experiences frequently. I consider it part of my job here to point you away from the disappointments so you can try some of the deep experiences that are out there, sometimes hiding.
First, the bad news with this date. The story is another one of those Manichaen broken yinyang cosmos things. There's some clever folding in that the world of most of the movie is drawn by the "good" girl, who is a circus performer. It starts out with that strong folding, then devolves into a "beat the clock to save dying mommy" routine. Also, the music is horrible once our heroine leaves her circus world.
You're better off at that point turning the sound off and putting on the richest music you know. For me, it is the early Rubinstein Chopin, so delicate and deep. It matches what is magical in this, and why I want to send you to spend an evening with it.
The visuals are so cinematic, your emotional fluids will be stirred, especially after the wonderful running start at the beginning. That's a Fellini-esquire circus sequence that by itself is engaging. The editing is frantic, and many prior circus movies are quoted, plus the famous Seurat painting. That's when I fell in love. It wasn't the "tumble into risky territory" love you'll find with Tarkovsky where you really are betting your soul.
Its the kind of love where you are turning yourself over to a partner who's been there, who can always pull you out.
After the circus, you enter a synthetic magical universe that -- if you open a bit -- will transport you. It has some deficiencies: I wish they exploited vertical depth like many have recently. An excuse might be that all those known tricks require a frantic swooping that wouldn't fit here. What we have here is languid, dreamy, the tone of our best, meditative Chinese filmmakers.
You remember "Savage Planet," and the best of "Aeon Flux"? You'll have that in undiluted measure here. Some things to appreciate: the absolute consistency that consecutively adds to a coherent world, each curl of smoke and fog and tentacle curls the same way. Each ragged line and edge contributes to the fuzzy physics of the place. Each hue comes from the same sad but accommodating sun.
The other thing is how the space is filled with fog, smoke, tendrils, all sorts of things that place the soul of the thing -- and your soul for a while -- in the pure impressionist mind. Its not objects you see that your eye needs to assemble into a world. It is the essence of the world itself that comes to meet you and blend into the fluid of your eye, out of which you precipitate surfaces which infer objects.
See this, with your own music. Enter this with your own story, the one that's there is a mere placeholder.
See this and fall in love. Safely.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
There are those, like myself I suppose, who reach deep into life and fall in love each time, or want to. This path strings an alternation of ecstasy and disappointment.
Others may deal with these encounters as if they were mere meals; perhaps some turn into warm companionship and others become memorable. But the expectations are low, as if it were a normal part of life. Traffic crossings.
But not me. I want passion and nourishment. I want an encounter that begins a life. Because I am open to cinematic passions, I can find these experiences frequently. I consider it part of my job here to point you away from the disappointments so you can try some of the deep experiences that are out there, sometimes hiding.
First, the bad news with this date. The story is another one of those Manichaen broken yinyang cosmos things. There's some clever folding in that the world of most of the movie is drawn by the "good" girl, who is a circus performer. It starts out with that strong folding, then devolves into a "beat the clock to save dying mommy" routine. Also, the music is horrible once our heroine leaves her circus world.
You're better off at that point turning the sound off and putting on the richest music you know. For me, it is the early Rubinstein Chopin, so delicate and deep. It matches what is magical in this, and why I want to send you to spend an evening with it.
The visuals are so cinematic, your emotional fluids will be stirred, especially after the wonderful running start at the beginning. That's a Fellini-esquire circus sequence that by itself is engaging. The editing is frantic, and many prior circus movies are quoted, plus the famous Seurat painting. That's when I fell in love. It wasn't the "tumble into risky territory" love you'll find with Tarkovsky where you really are betting your soul.
Its the kind of love where you are turning yourself over to a partner who's been there, who can always pull you out.
After the circus, you enter a synthetic magical universe that -- if you open a bit -- will transport you. It has some deficiencies: I wish they exploited vertical depth like many have recently. An excuse might be that all those known tricks require a frantic swooping that wouldn't fit here. What we have here is languid, dreamy, the tone of our best, meditative Chinese filmmakers.
You remember "Savage Planet," and the best of "Aeon Flux"? You'll have that in undiluted measure here. Some things to appreciate: the absolute consistency that consecutively adds to a coherent world, each curl of smoke and fog and tentacle curls the same way. Each ragged line and edge contributes to the fuzzy physics of the place. Each hue comes from the same sad but accommodating sun.
The other thing is how the space is filled with fog, smoke, tendrils, all sorts of things that place the soul of the thing -- and your soul for a while -- in the pure impressionist mind. Its not objects you see that your eye needs to assemble into a world. It is the essence of the world itself that comes to meet you and blend into the fluid of your eye, out of which you precipitate surfaces which infer objects.
See this, with your own music. Enter this with your own story, the one that's there is a mere placeholder.
See this and fall in love. Safely.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.