tinokiev Blog

Under discussion:

My Blueberry Nights  (2008)

Just finished watching Wong Kar Wai My Blueberry Nights . It was all the signatures of the director, subtle and not so subtle sexual analogies. The whole film is an allegory to attach and deattachment in relationships. In 2046, Days of Being Wild and In the mood for love he explored similar aspects of life, but this movie approaches love on a total different way, being his first English speaking film.

 It follows the story of a girl trying to forget about a love on a road trip, this journey starts on a Cafe where he is desperately looking for his ex-partner, but her search turns into a very curious friendly relationship with the Cafe owner, who seems to have his own theories about forgotten loves. 

During her trip she meets different characters that somehow are experiencing relationship problems and are desperately finding a way to cope with them, as she travels around the country she learns from them and grows with them, always writing postcards of her experiences to the Cafe owner.

The cast was extraordinary, Natalie Portman was radiating, and Jude Law was at long last playing a romantic character he deserved, his performance was so natural it remind me a bit of "closer". 

During the film there is many "cameo" shots from his other films, specially being on the same cafe environment as Chunking Express, and I definitely loved that, He also had some color experimentation very similar to what he did on Fallen Angels. 

I believe the movie its going to feel very slow for many western people who are not used to his style, but its definitely more "generic" or easy to follow and get engaged than his other films. It will be a great start to getting to know Wong Kar Wai. So if you haven't seen any of his films, this is the one to watch first.

The cinematography was meticulously perfect, as usual. Again, many "borrowed" shots of his other films, but to watch them on a Western environment and cast its a whole new experience. The score was not impressive, but most of it worked pretty well, A very nice signature song composed and performed by Norah Jones, another one a beautiful piano and singing by Cat Power and curiously an harmonica version of a song he used for a commercial in Japan.

And you will never think of a blueberry pie  the same way you did :).

Ivan. 

Under discussion:

Transformers  (2007)

Loser with stupid parents is in love with hot chick interested in muscles, finds himself a robot car who choses him to save the world from an invasion of evil robots, during the process he gets the girl and saves the world.

So first you get a terrible cast, fix them into cliche stereotypes, then come up with a bunch of punch line jokes about sex, puberty and robots. Spend one hour and a half trying to discover the secret of where the mistery, why the robots want it, etc., and suddenly make a random team of secret agents come and explain everything in 5 minutes.

Take the secondary characters that you involved while trying to explain the whole thing (blonde fake australian girl and big fat hacker) and dissapear them from the existence. Take the main girl and turn her into a super tech geek, Get the good soldier to come back out of nowhere and help the hero to save the earth.

Spend millions of dollars in animating random fights that look real and are no longer than 5 minutes in total, and spread them around the whole film.

Spend the last 10 minutes on a voice over - epilogue of hapiness and lessons of life.