hunorsirko Reviews

Ritual (2000)

Poignant and hits close to home

[8/10 · 24 February 2023]

This movie is closer to a character study that to a conventional story. The minimal plot we have is about a struggling director who returns to his hometown and meets a young a girl who lives in her own fantasy world and follows strict rituals seemingly just to get by every day. Their unconventional love runs its course over 30 days and sees the girl confront her deamons and the director get more involved than he wanted.

The girl is so desperately runs from her past that we would believe something extraordinary and horrible happened to her but as we find out what happened was horrible yes but all too ordinary. The main similarity between this movie and Hideaki Anno's other more famous work Neon Genesis Evangelion is that personal trauma is given subjective significance, it is shown as dramatically as it is felt. We we think of family trauma most of the time we think of the death of a loved one or serious physical/sexual abuse but as it is shown it this film verbal abuse and neglect alone can have absolutly devastating effects on a person. Despite what she tells herself the girl's family is alive she probably hasn't been touched in any way but throughtout her formative years she was insulted, blamed and compared, hasn't been given the respect or even validation as a person she deserves, which collectively let to her current state.

Anno's roots in animation are felt as the movie is beautifully shot, I especially like the contrast between the lush imagery of the girls place and the bleakness of the industrial town representing her fantasy and the outside world respectively.

Ayako Fujitani portrays madness very believably, while Shunji Iwai is subtle and precise. My only grievances are that it may be needlessly complicated and long.

The Northman (2022)

It's good but not that good

[7/10 · 2 February 2023]

I felt compelled to watch this movie after hearing so many good reviews of it, calling it a masterpiece, a modern classic or even "this generations Godfather". I was told this film was supposed to "save cinema" and bring back the bygone.era of historical epics, and that there is more to it than a run-of-the-mill period action flick. This would be the way the movie handles its source material - the ancient nordic sagas - by taking them at face value and not applying our modern day morale system to it not trying to subvert or decontruct it. The hero murders innocent villagers without a second thought and it is justified because they are not the people whose originstory this is. He throws away his chance to have a "normal" happy life with his wife and child to carry out his vengeance to a long dead father and to save a mother who doesn't need saving, and by the end he is rewarded for this, he is literally caried to Valhalla.

And yes this is an inherently interesting concept, experiencing the mindset of humans from more than a thousand year ago who had completly different views on life and death and because of it I'm glad that movie exists. But it's not much more than that and in my opinion this alone doesn't warrant all that high praise. Don't get me wrong it's a very well made film from a technical standpoint and the acting is also very good I just don't see what other people see in it beyond that.

I preferred this directors earlier two films that have a little bit more nuance.

October (Ten Days that Shook the World) (1927)

Influential and impactful

[10/10 · 19 January 2023]

I think these two words describe the best this early silent Soviet movie. On one hand Sergei Eisenstein pioneered the editing as a viable tool to tell stories by putting together seemingly unreleated images (for example the peacock and Keresnky). On the other hand he showed the motion picture can be a form of art and so much more, it can be the means of politics to further an ideology, it can depict history and all the things that previously could only be imagined, it can captivate the masses that were previously excluded from enjoying art. I think this interpretation is especially fitting the message the film is trying to convey: the triumph of the ordinary people over the reactionary forces.

Equilibrium (2002)

Dumb but fun

[6/10 · 28 December 2022]

The movie is set in a dystopian future, where after the Third World War a tyrannical government is in power. They blame the war and suffering in general on human emotion and because of that any feeling is punishable by death, people need to take daily dose of a drug that supresses emotion. Those who still have feelings called "sense offenders" and are hunted by the elit law enforcment unit called "Clerics". The main character is one of them who is starting to have second thoughts about his job.

The story takes inspiration from several sci-fi classics most notably 1984, while its execution is reminiscent of The Matrix: putting heavy emphasize on the spectacle with briliantly. Choreographed fight scenes. My main issue is with the premise which is I think fairly non-sensical, under-developed and has a few holes, most importantly that in a supposedly unfeeling society everybody besides the protagonist is portrayed to be very emotional. The film also suffers from a problem almost all dystopian movies do, namely that it assumes that after the cartoonishly evil dictator and his faceless soldiers are defeated by the raggedy clothed resistance suddenly everything is perfect.

Overall I still enjoyed this movie mainly because of the action and a few well made emotional scenes.