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Reviews
Akyrky koch (2020)
A Father's Will
A subtly moving film about life's reckoning, involving a clash between ideology and life, idea and values. An old writer experiences abandonment by his own, while feeling helpless in saving the life of a successor of his work, adding towards a "Kyrgyz national idea". Ostensibly still celebrated, the writer ends up in a nursing home, his resources sacrificed in tending to his duty to those he once raised, while they fail to live up to their own - resulting in seeing his hope obliterated of both prolonging the life of his ideas and being able to grant a final act of basic humanity. The state, ravaged by corruption, cares little about the fate of the "national idea" and those who carry it, although they insist on having the old man televised from his humble room, an exact replica of Van Gogh's Bedroom, albeit in black and white; while ignorant of the younger writer and his "Father's Will" epos.
The film is shot in black and white, until the final scenes where the writer makes it home in the country. Even his father's yurt seems to have fallen apart due to the relatives' negligence, and colour finally illuminates the writer's final resting place, under the apple trees in his father's garden.
Invisible to others, black and white, remain the glorious landscapes of the homeland, which the old man had contemplated on his "Road to Eden", grieving that "caring only about the material, you don't see miracles".
The father's legacy - an old typewriter, an epic painting, and his few belongings are being sold on the side of a busy road.
Babylon 5: Comes the Inquisitor (1995)
Fantastic
I've studied Narcissism for years, and this guy here - The Inquisitor - sums up and demolishes its premises in two minutes. Then quickly throws in the poetry of twin flames - how we must burn for one another without fear. Possibly the best, most concise and astute, most articulate and meaningful writing for television.
Hvítur, hvítur dagur (2019)
The ratings/comments here are unbelievable
First of all I'm a fan of slow, poetic and realistic cinema, but this seems more like a home movie - minus the happening. The metaphor is as flat as the film itself: a man aspires to build a house; to not build the house is what he doesn't want (to literally quote the dialogue). He's recently widowed and has a little granddaughter. The film alternates between stills of a house and mundane conversations with the granddaughter. Around minute 40 the man sees a tape where his deceased wife had sex with another man. In the following twenty minutes there are no developments, only more musings: "I just wanted a home", "I always felt she hid something", etc. I wouldn't waste another hour.
Leaving Neverland (2019)
Hopefully a fullstop to the "aesthetics vs ethics" dilemma
Leaving Neverland - such a great and important film and cultural moment. The biggest celebrity of all exposed for what he was, a morbid and macabre narcissist, will hopefully dispel the myth of celebrity per se, or at least start that process.
To a great extent, MJ himself is a victim - but this does not condone or explain the horrible things he did.
As to the "aesthetic dilemma" many seem to nurture - if you see the film and still consider MJ's crying, shouting, yelling and screaming "the work of a genius", you have some problems.
Art is but a personal expression. Valuable art is beneficial to humanity.
A huge applause for the victims, the men who told their story.
Twin Peaks: The Return: Part 9 (2017)
"My foot"
Alongside the clumsiness and disjointed dryness of scenes, dialogue and characters, I feel Lynch exploiting and stressing what should be viewers' nostalgia, with rather flat melodramatic tricks (the underscore, Bobby's perpetual sentimentalism, Shelly and Norma in their uniforms triumphantly posing for the audience...) Is Jerry Horne's foot now infested with body thetans? At least tell us that in the juicy, hilarious voice of L.Ron Hubbard. To consider I might find Xenu more compelling, is not flattering for Mr.Lynch. I understand he is not particularly emotional this time round, but I didn't expect him to be clueless and humourless akin to a cerebral narcissist, with the emotional confusion and self-aggrandizing coupled with castigation of both the self and the audience.
Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
Make sense
Latest episode (8). A few homeless men revive Cooper's doppelganger and Bob's head pops out of his stomach in a slimy bubble. A rock band performs for five minutes, a nuclear explosion is unfolding for ten. The explosion triggers something in space to puke something, including Bob's head in a bubble. A giant in space views the event on a cinema screen, gets lifted up, and from his head oozes Laura's face in a yellow bubble, which is sent down to the United States through a saxophone pipe. There, an evil Abraham Lincoln asks people for a light, then crushes their skulls and goes live on radio to say something about a well and the white of the eye which is a horse. A swarm of homeless men wander. A cockroach-frog mutant crawls into a girl's mouth. Evil Lincoln walks out into the darkness.
Twin Peaks: The Return: Part 8 (2017)
Laura Palmer was just an alien sent to earth to fight evil Lincoln
This is the shocking premise. However, I think all of us, myself included, are trying to be as lenient as possible to this director. So, please, stop reporting me for abuse.
First of all, I'd have to address the stereotypization that "people who don't like "The Return" were probably hoping it would be a nostalgic walk down memory lane". I for one wasn't even a fan of the original series; was rather hoping for a continuation of the psychological journey that was FWWM, this time with Cooper as protagonist.
I grew up in a communist state where much of my childhood was marked by certainty that Reagan was going to nuke us anytime, and watching graphic films about the destruction of Hiroshima and its people was obligatory from age 7, so all that somehow translated to me in the recurring nightmare that the Earth was going to be swallowed by a giant swarm of insects that just kept and kept spawning, suffocating everyone, beginning with myself. (What's interesting is that Lynch might be confirming the theory of the collective unconscious; during my nightmare, I used to scream: "Take the scary thing off my mouth.") Thankfully, I outgrew the nightmare by my teenage years; and although I can remember, I doubt people in the Western world much younger than David Lynch could recollect quite such paranoia. And while his peers would have enjoyed all the classic examples of US 1950s cinema and found the subject familiar, I doubt that same age group would have been the target of whatever we just witnessed. That "piece of sheer cinema" did connect for me the childhood nightmares with a brief adolescent interest in horror, but I regret to say I have not been fascinated by brain-eating zombies since. Saying that, I might just rewatch that horror comedy (the one where they yell: "Brains! Brains!"), instead of revisiting Lynch's regression into an infantile brain, which made me stop the episode half way.
I heard that an author who was much respected in the Twin Peaks community, had said that anything James and Evelyn far surpassed The Return; and he had said it prior to this episode.
I am inclined to think Lynch only became a famous director in order to be able to impose on larger audiences his fandom of a specific rock band, whose performance within the film was pretentiously but unsurprisingly insipid, given the overall musical score of The Return. ("People" should drop their nostalgia for Jimmy Scott along with that for cherry pie, die-hard Twin Peaks fans would say.) Had I been a David Lynch, I'd have tried to squeeze at least four tracks by my beloved Judas Priest into an otherwise unrelated "piece of art".
Lynch may once have aspired to be a Bunuel or Polanski, but his true desire may have always been to remake 1950 scf-fi - nothing wrong, if he was able to contain a narrative.
What the story should have been? I'd like to have seen a film about Dale, as we had a film about Laura. I was down with Dale's multiple personalities, hoping they were projections of a complex mind. Someone had even suggested Mike and Dale were one and the same. This all would have been fascinating, even if it were more complex and difficult to comprehend than Eraserhead and Lost Highway altogether. Twin Peaks was about Laura, but Dale and Laura seemed to be intrinsically connected - I wanted to learn how.
We now do learn. Laura is a Christ-like figure who still suffers for our sins. Maybe Dale (a demigod?) will help her destroy Bob and bring the world back to pre-explosion order.
The faux-intellectual that is Mr.Lynch has been hilariously overinterpreted by his admirers. Kafka's portrait at the FBI should have already indicated he is not to be taken seriously.
Emma (2009)
Completely unwatchable
Other viewers have commented this title much more competently; I come to merely express outrage. "Modern adaptation"? The modern thing about it is the characters yelling at each other; being not just mannerless but plainly rude to each other and thus violating (not adapting) the author. It is below Gambon to ever have been in this. I had to shut it off after a few minutes, because it hurt my ears more than the action film on the next channel. I have acquired the English language to some degree by watching screen adaptations of English literature - which made me fall in love with the language. This 'Emma' is not just a violation of Austen: it is a crippling of language AND culture. It is about as much a carrier of culture as your next Legally Blonde.