The Virgin Suicides
We've been meaning to watch this movie ever since we saw Lost in Translation because of the whole Sofia Coppola thing. Add onto that the fact that I have the orriginal score composed by Air, and it is amazing. But it did somethign to the movie. The score is very intense, and the movie not quite so intense. In some ways I'm still up in the air about how I feel about Sofia Coppola as a film maker. She has a very very understated style that sits on a fuzzy line between beautifully skillful and loose. This, unfortunately, but also not surprising since it's her first film, feels a little too loose. It's not a bad movie, but it's not as tightly wound as it ought to be. this is what I was refering to with thte score. The subject matter is quite heavy and passionate and the score reflects this better than the movie with a sound that brings up images of a longing for intimacy and all the chaos that comes from hormones and being a teenager. The movie, however, is more of a cold, impassionate attempt to understand those feelings in a distant retrospect. it's not a bad idea, looking at a group of boys trying to come to grips with the lives and deaths of these girls fifteen years after the fact, watching them acknowledge the impact their fantasies had on their future lives (there is a great comment towards the end, in a voice over, about how none of them were able to find in their wives what they had imagined in the Lisbon girls) but the presentation only comes to the present time of the narrative occasionally for brief talks, interview style, with one character, distancing us from the present plight of the characters, and not totally involving us with the past plight of their story. What this means is that you don't feel like you know any of the characters enough to fully connect with their situation because you don't get to know them enough, except for Trip Fontain who is the one we meet in the present interviews. Alot of really good ideas and presentations here, but what needed tohappen is Sofia needed to pick one and run with it.
Total: 63
posted by LFK @ 1:45 AM
1 Comments:
While I would agree about the theoretics of what you're saying, my point was basically that doing so without giving you soemthing else to grasp onto, leves you feeling like you're just sitting and watching pictures move across the screen. I'm talking more from the standpoint of viewer, not analyst. The problem I had was that it was disconnected without allowing us to sympathize with the disconnect, to draw on our own feelings of detatchment and confusion, the times when we've manufactured an alternate reality for the things we're fascinated with but don't really know. This is LFK the film theorist battling with LFK the storyteller. In my mind I think about the movie and say "gosh, I should have liked that so much more" but I felt no sympathy or even emotion for any of the characters except Trip. It's one of those movies that's more fulfilling to talk about the theory and presentation than it is to sit and watch. I felt bad that I didn't like this as much as I felt I should. I'm not saying there's one way to make a movie, but there are certain things that must be taken care of for any movie to be involving. One of those is that you must be able to feel emotion for the characters or the situation. Be it love, hate, sympathy, pity, joy, whatever, we need to feel something for the people and their lives or else, by definition, we don't care about them. If we don't care about them, they become nothing more than meat puppets dancing on screen.
Post a Comment
<< Home