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Re: requiem for a memento of Amelie

Ah, movies...

I saw Requiem for a Dream a couple of weeks ago, and I thought it was
astonishingly done, but ultimately rather shallow.  Okay, drugs are bad.  Is
anyone surprised?  Still, it is brutal and unrelenting in its descent into
hell.  Most fascinating to me were the usage of the short cuts to indicate the
usage of drugs: bam bam bam, we saw flashes of images that combined to evoke a
feeling, not really show us a sequence of events.  I thought that was amazing.
I like it when movies really take advantage of what is *unique* to this medium
and couldn't be done in any other.  Still, it was harrowing.  Ellen Burstyn was
phenomenal, especially in her desparate loneliness in the scene when her son
comes back to visit.  Her detioration and collapse were stunning.  I did think
Aaronofsky overused the subjective-camera bit; where the camera was mounted on
the actor so that he/she stays still while all the background moved.  It works
in isolation, like in the Wachowsky brothers' _Bound_, but when you do it a lot,
the effect is diminished.

I saw the director's cut, but I don't remember five minutes of lesbian sex.  Do
you mean the scene where Jennifer Connoly's character was reduced to being a
sex-performer in order to get her fix?  It didn't feel like five minutes.  On
the other hand, it was so horrifying, it felt like an eternity.  Not having
seen the rated version, I can't tell you what was different, but I bet the IMDB
does.  Ah, here we are: "The edited version replaces the shot of Marion and
another woman having sex with two men with a shot of Marion partially clothed
climbing on top of a man. Also, all the shots of the double-ended dildo and the
shots of Marion and the woman having sex on it have been replaced with
alternate camera angles and shots that hide any indication that the two are
having anal sex on it. Some shots were also re-used to hide the close-ups of
the two butts slamming together."  That's the only difference listed, except
for something in the opening credits to identify the cut version.  I definitely
saw the uncut version then, but I have to say, it was the opposite of erotic.
And the rapid-fire editing just gave you flashes of an image, rather than a
clear sequence of events of what was going on.  I mean, it was clear what was
going on, but it was about 75% suggestion and interpolation.

I just re-watched Memento last night with some friends that hadn't seen it yet.
Although on the sixth time through, I have to say that I don't think it
ultimately holds together perfectly (I can't believe that someone with
Leonard's condition could really do what he does), if you can grant them the
dramatic license they need to make the story work, it's a brilliantly written,
constructed and executed meditation on the nature of identity, memory, and
reality, as well as a very effective parable on the dangers of vengence.  I
think I've got the whole story pieced together, although it all hinges on
accepting Teddy's explanation in the penultimate scene as the truth.  But if
Teddy is lying, and I can't see any reason internal to the story why he would,
then we simply don't have enough information to reconstruct what "really"
happened.  Perhaps that is more in keeping with the theme of the film, though.
:-) Peter (who I'm sure will chime in on this thread, no?) had the fascinating
idea that Leonard could be seen as an Everyman in a more global way, in that
we, as a species, construct an identity based on "notes" that were scribbled
down in situations about which we have no memory (i.e., received texts like a
bible or a constitution), and we have to try to figure out what to trust.  This
time through the film, I paid close attention to Leonard's insistance that "if
you have the facts, you don't need memory", and I think this is a key line in
the film, because the rest of the film shows how wrong that is.  The facts, on
their own, are meaningless.  Leonard has to construct a story to give them
meaning, and in order to do that, he needs memory.  He also insists he can tell
when people are lying to him, and by and large this is true, but he lacks the
context to know what to do with that information.  He can tell something isn't
quite right about Natalie's story about Dodd, and he even intuits that someone
is trying to manipulate him to go after the wrong John G.  But he doesn't know
how to put that feeling together with the "facts" he thinks he knows, and he
cannot tell when he's lying to himself.

I thought Amelie was cute, but the weakest of Junet's real films so far.  (Not
counting that abomination that was _Alien Resurrection_) I loved the resolution
of the mystery of the guy who kept turning up at all the photo booths all over
town, and the "pranks" were (mostly) cute.  I'm not sure what we were supposed
to make of the nasty things she did to her neighbor.  I was also disappointed
that after all the chasing around with the guy, when they do finally meet, they
fall right into bed without getting to know each other at all, which seemed
rather out of character, especially since we were explicitly told at the
beginning that Amelie hadn't ever found sex particularly rewarding.  I was
disappointed that after such an unorthodox courtship we had another typical
hollywood-esque (despite being from France) resolution.  _Delicatessen_ was
way, way better.

Back to work, now...
-- 
Don Smith                    Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                          http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

"just because you're fighting evil doesn't make you good" - Rabbi Dobrusin
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