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shadowkatDecided to see the movie Tar with Wales today.
Discovered much to my annoyance, that Wales is a very noisy and somewhat animated movie partner. During the movie, she sighed, cursed, grabbed my arm, and exclaimed "Oh God" or "Oh my God" or "Shit".
I, on the other hand, was fairly quiet in comparison.
It wasn't too big an issue - and I didn't complain about it. If anything it made the movie more interesting. But I did worry a little about the people around us.
The movie itself is a Todd Field film, and much like his other films focuses on an anti-hero and takes the audience deep inside this character's point of view. It's more of an extended character sketch - focusing on one character's emotional, mental, physical arc. Considering it was focusing only one character - it could have been a lot tighter. The movie was three hours long, and felt at times interminable. Wales and I agreed on that - actually we agreed on everything about the film.
I'm not sure it was the best film for me to see today mood wise. I might have been better off with Ticket to Paradise, this one felt a bit like a horror movie. But, I was curious about the movie - the reviews had indicated that it was a fun and twisty tour de force. (It wasn't. I'm beginning to think these reviewers are on something.)
The set-up is Lydia Tar, top composer, who studied with Leonard Bernstein, actions are starting to catch up with her. She is an excellent conductor, but abusive to her assistants, and ruthless with those she works with and is in competition with. Her ruthlessness and aggressive behavior is enabled by her passive aggressive wife, and not helped by the field she's working within. There's a lot of folks culpable here. And since we're solidly in her point of view - outside of whomever is filming her and texting about her - the film takes on a kind of paranoid quality. Lydia feels persecuted by unseen persecutors, and is slowly losing it. Drip by drip.
Field gets across during it the complexity of people. How they are more than one thing and not easily categorized or demonized for their actions, since there are many, diverse actions to choose from. From Lydia's point of view she's not an aggressor, so much as constantly fighting against persecutors, and isolated by them.
There's one scene early on in the film, where a student refuses to play Bach, stating he intends to distant himself from an entitle white male misogynist. Lydia, a lesbian, is furious with the student, and sardonically asks if he's ever really listened to Bach - to the music? And rips into him for his lack of talent, inability to appreciate artistic achievement, and hypocritical judgement. How about Ludwig Beethoven or others? The student states he was impressed by lesser known more modern composers and shrugs off the classics. Then storms off after Lydia tells him he's nothing more than a social media influencier and fraud, with no place in music. Later, it turns out that someone film the exchange (when they were told not to bring any tech into the class), and photoshopped it together (rather poorly) to show Lydia as a sexual aggressor who bullies and harasses her male student, who also happens to be a person of color.
It brings into sharp focus the cognitive dissonance of the "artistic behavior" vs. the "social behavior". Basically, how can an artist of such superior caliber and technique, be such a cold jerk? Towards the end of the film, Lydia is being accused of driving her previous assistant, a budding violinist and composer to suicide, by making it impossible for her to find work anywhere. Yet, did she?
The first part of the film show's Tar's Wikipedia entry being edited by unseen hands. The film questions what is true on the internet and how the internet bends truth to its whim - often to cancel out artists or destroy them.
The film also starts with the end credits. We get the production, crew, editors, location, assistants, first before the film starts, and the at the end the actors in the film. It's disorienting, and unsettling. The audience squirmed and looked about and grumbled - wondering why they were being subjected to it.
And our introduction to Tar is through the eyes of third parties, in this case her assistants, who are texting about her. We see their texts but not them, and we can only speculate as to whom is sending the texts. Is it her assistants or someone else. There's a uncomfortable and at times pervasive feeling throughout the film that technology is trailing Tar, watching her moves, recording it, and sending out derogatory information to ultimately cancel her. Does she deserve it? Hard to say - she's brilliant, and also cruel - often both simultaneously, but those around her are too. As are those invested in taking her down. She may be predatory towards Olga and Francesca, her assistant, but Francesca seems to be plotting her demise behind the scenes, and Olga, likewise.
There's gothic horror element here - that's hard to describe.
Anyhow, the first part drug, and it really does have a pacing problem. Possibly because of the director's desire to follow in the Kubrickian style of hyper realism, pacing be damned. I dozed off during the first hour.
It does perk up a bit in the second hour, and begins to drag again in the third. There's quite a few false endings.
It is a haunting film. Makes one think. And makes the audience work a bit to figure it out. Sections of it are confusing, and it took me a while to figure out who Krysta was - for a bit I thought she was Tar's wife, no, it's Tar's former assistant/protegee, who she may have had an affair with, then unceremoniously broke it off - and ruined the girl's career.
Bits of the film remind me a lot of Black Swan - so if you hated that film, I doubt you'd like this one. It's not an easy film to watch at times. And it ends oddly.
But it does stay with me. I'd have preferred one that didn't, though, this weekend.
[I was admittedly distracted during it by a recent loss in my family - another one. My cousin died this weekend. So I kept thinking about him and his Mom off and on all day long. Grief isn't a straight line or time line or linear in anyway, it is best described as a spiral. Circling up and down.]
***
Just finished watching Peripheral the Amazon Prime series adapted from William Gibson's cybernetic science fiction thriller. It's good. But I also adore William Gibson's writing. He's among my favorite sci-fi writers - among the few, I'd put in the literary category of sci-fi. Hard science, with something to say, and falling more in the speculative category.
Peripheral is about two gamers in Appalachia who make their money playing video game simulations. Flynn is excellent at them - and uses her brother's avatar to play. She's female and can't play as herself - but she can play as him or in a male body. And she gets to higher levels than he does.
Little does she know that the game they are playing in 2032 is taking place in real time in London in 2099. The new headset she puts on - places her in an Avatar's mechanical body in 2099, where she feels his pain, etc, even if she just the puppeteer pulling his strings.
Well produced, acted, and with great F/X, the first episode was even better than expected. If a tad long. Amazon likes to do 85 minute episodes or episodes that are much longer than 45 minutes to an hour.
Discovered much to my annoyance, that Wales is a very noisy and somewhat animated movie partner. During the movie, she sighed, cursed, grabbed my arm, and exclaimed "Oh God" or "Oh my God" or "Shit".
I, on the other hand, was fairly quiet in comparison.
It wasn't too big an issue - and I didn't complain about it. If anything it made the movie more interesting. But I did worry a little about the people around us.
The movie itself is a Todd Field film, and much like his other films focuses on an anti-hero and takes the audience deep inside this character's point of view. It's more of an extended character sketch - focusing on one character's emotional, mental, physical arc. Considering it was focusing only one character - it could have been a lot tighter. The movie was three hours long, and felt at times interminable. Wales and I agreed on that - actually we agreed on everything about the film.
I'm not sure it was the best film for me to see today mood wise. I might have been better off with Ticket to Paradise, this one felt a bit like a horror movie. But, I was curious about the movie - the reviews had indicated that it was a fun and twisty tour de force. (It wasn't. I'm beginning to think these reviewers are on something.)
The set-up is Lydia Tar, top composer, who studied with Leonard Bernstein, actions are starting to catch up with her. She is an excellent conductor, but abusive to her assistants, and ruthless with those she works with and is in competition with. Her ruthlessness and aggressive behavior is enabled by her passive aggressive wife, and not helped by the field she's working within. There's a lot of folks culpable here. And since we're solidly in her point of view - outside of whomever is filming her and texting about her - the film takes on a kind of paranoid quality. Lydia feels persecuted by unseen persecutors, and is slowly losing it. Drip by drip.
Field gets across during it the complexity of people. How they are more than one thing and not easily categorized or demonized for their actions, since there are many, diverse actions to choose from. From Lydia's point of view she's not an aggressor, so much as constantly fighting against persecutors, and isolated by them.
There's one scene early on in the film, where a student refuses to play Bach, stating he intends to distant himself from an entitle white male misogynist. Lydia, a lesbian, is furious with the student, and sardonically asks if he's ever really listened to Bach - to the music? And rips into him for his lack of talent, inability to appreciate artistic achievement, and hypocritical judgement. How about Ludwig Beethoven or others? The student states he was impressed by lesser known more modern composers and shrugs off the classics. Then storms off after Lydia tells him he's nothing more than a social media influencier and fraud, with no place in music. Later, it turns out that someone film the exchange (when they were told not to bring any tech into the class), and photoshopped it together (rather poorly) to show Lydia as a sexual aggressor who bullies and harasses her male student, who also happens to be a person of color.
It brings into sharp focus the cognitive dissonance of the "artistic behavior" vs. the "social behavior". Basically, how can an artist of such superior caliber and technique, be such a cold jerk? Towards the end of the film, Lydia is being accused of driving her previous assistant, a budding violinist and composer to suicide, by making it impossible for her to find work anywhere. Yet, did she?
The first part of the film show's Tar's Wikipedia entry being edited by unseen hands. The film questions what is true on the internet and how the internet bends truth to its whim - often to cancel out artists or destroy them.
The film also starts with the end credits. We get the production, crew, editors, location, assistants, first before the film starts, and the at the end the actors in the film. It's disorienting, and unsettling. The audience squirmed and looked about and grumbled - wondering why they were being subjected to it.
And our introduction to Tar is through the eyes of third parties, in this case her assistants, who are texting about her. We see their texts but not them, and we can only speculate as to whom is sending the texts. Is it her assistants or someone else. There's a uncomfortable and at times pervasive feeling throughout the film that technology is trailing Tar, watching her moves, recording it, and sending out derogatory information to ultimately cancel her. Does she deserve it? Hard to say - she's brilliant, and also cruel - often both simultaneously, but those around her are too. As are those invested in taking her down. She may be predatory towards Olga and Francesca, her assistant, but Francesca seems to be plotting her demise behind the scenes, and Olga, likewise.
There's gothic horror element here - that's hard to describe.
Anyhow, the first part drug, and it really does have a pacing problem. Possibly because of the director's desire to follow in the Kubrickian style of hyper realism, pacing be damned. I dozed off during the first hour.
It does perk up a bit in the second hour, and begins to drag again in the third. There's quite a few false endings.
It is a haunting film. Makes one think. And makes the audience work a bit to figure it out. Sections of it are confusing, and it took me a while to figure out who Krysta was - for a bit I thought she was Tar's wife, no, it's Tar's former assistant/protegee, who she may have had an affair with, then unceremoniously broke it off - and ruined the girl's career.
Bits of the film remind me a lot of Black Swan - so if you hated that film, I doubt you'd like this one. It's not an easy film to watch at times. And it ends oddly.
But it does stay with me. I'd have preferred one that didn't, though, this weekend.
[I was admittedly distracted during it by a recent loss in my family - another one. My cousin died this weekend. So I kept thinking about him and his Mom off and on all day long. Grief isn't a straight line or time line or linear in anyway, it is best described as a spiral. Circling up and down.]
***
Just finished watching Peripheral the Amazon Prime series adapted from William Gibson's cybernetic science fiction thriller. It's good. But I also adore William Gibson's writing. He's among my favorite sci-fi writers - among the few, I'd put in the literary category of sci-fi. Hard science, with something to say, and falling more in the speculative category.
Peripheral is about two gamers in Appalachia who make their money playing video game simulations. Flynn is excellent at them - and uses her brother's avatar to play. She's female and can't play as herself - but she can play as him or in a male body. And she gets to higher levels than he does.
Little does she know that the game they are playing in 2032 is taking place in real time in London in 2099. The new headset she puts on - places her in an Avatar's mechanical body in 2099, where she feels his pain, etc, even if she just the puppeteer pulling his strings.
Well produced, acted, and with great F/X, the first episode was even better than expected. If a tad long. Amazon likes to do 85 minute episodes or episodes that are much longer than 45 minutes to an hour.
