Reviews

Cronenberg first short-movie. It is pretty enjoyable, only seven minutes, and looks like an exercise, a simple one, but good enough I dare to say.

You could say the whole movie has a pretty good atmosphere, by the chosen location, the sound recording seems noisy, but for the seven minutes, it gives some layer to the surroundings, although most likely the movie just had bad sound recording.

The story it is about a psychoanalyst that leaves all his patients and hides himself into a open, snowy, dreary field. One of his patients goes after him, when all the others found other doctors.

The encounter and their conversation feels more like a Monty Python sketch, and it feels more like it was an exercise of dialogue and a way to discuss the ideas Cronenberg was trying to think about at the time, which totally relate to his later body of work.

He sets two important ideas, the first one, is related with communication, the title of the movie reinforces that, the conflict it is on that movement, of trying to relate with others, and to try to speak out, to express yourself.

But this desire has consequences, which the psychoanalyst is not prepared to go through anymore, he says, an analyst has to dip his finger into the murky, forbidding, scrummy aquarium of the sick mind, Ralph!

In the end, Ralph and the Doctor talk about their definition about time in the subconscious, reinforcing even more the antagonism of the two characters, and showing that in his first work he was already exploring and trying to understand the unconscious and the human mind.

When he goes back to Jung and Freud in Dangerous Method, he is back where he is started in 1966.

Script-wise the film follows all the rules, but doesn't make an stiff movie, or a collection of predictable clichés, far away from that. All the resources that are used in the movie are used in order to tell a story that it is the core of the movie, the growing and life changing friendship between Philipe (François Cluzet, the French Dustin Hoffman) and Driss (Omar Sy), the second has worked in previous movies of the directors and writers of the movie (Olivier Nakache, Eric Toledano).

It is a movie that can blend together perfectly humor and drama in many levels, all the time it plays with that. The spontaneity of Driss is key to explain the force that drives through out the movie, along with the intelligence and sensibility of Philipe.

Many of the scenes that we can find it funny and interesting in the movie, it is under this blunt honesty, socially we are under so much scrutiny and so much expectations of behavior of what it is expected, that we can end up drowning in our skin, and probably no one would realize. How can we overcome, our own fears, the weigh of our own lives and really see one another?

Friendships can do that. And that it is the story of the movie. Two true friends. "Brothers".

He laughs at the Opera, which I have been one time in Austria, and I would definitely agree with him, unless you are over 70 year's old, you will might like it though (just don't forget to bring your pants, they won't let you in otherwise). He is able to look at Philipe with no pity and with compassion. They are both able to acknowledge one another and have fun.

Movies are made of scenes, of fragments of life. The whole plot can only work, because these emotions and moments come in high level into the movie. True as for what can be recognized by our emotions. - Moments of friendship, it is so easy to see their intimacy. - Moments of teenager joy. (when he gets to drive the car) - Moments of real emotion for the characters. etc...

Some truths we think, are so hard to face, that we are not able to admit to ourselves, but only a true friend, can look at it and be able to help us out, to be who we truly are. We usually live with two lives inside our hearts and minds, but things only really start when they become one. And that it the whole story.

A fairy tale, that name, and my upbringing, always made me imagine not so dramatically the savage that really means to be eaten by an wolf, or a gigantic baby live stump, after all everybody would be leaving happily ever after the Wolf belly was cut by some savior, so the tragic end was not so tragic after all, the spell would always be cast off. One of the matter is, Folk tales although morally intended, could somehow as well ending up have an inconsequential value to whatever force, or miss- action that drove the main characters down that road for whatever that it is was trying to say, therefore loosing their original intention and it's poetical and moral intentions to a happily ever after ending.

Folk tales is a better name for what it is intended, to have our imagination protected like that, or for the children you could say, looses an important aspect of beauty, of actually dealing with the real world in ways that are much more intriguing than the ones that we have been classically presented for the last century and so on, and that it was just blown into my face, how much has infected my own imagination, in realizing I can only imagine the characters being eaten up in a cartoon kind of way, where they are not on the ordeal of the tragic to be experienced. I remember receiving this book when I was kid about this giant, I confess that I don't remember the exact plot of what happened, there are gardens, roses, and he dies, the sadness of that story is not exactly because he dies, but the poetry contained in there, it was something that moved me, that made my whole day ethereal, Things were different that day and tasted different, that experience made my life bigger. Of course, there are measures for what and how it can be shown, I am not here advocating to spook children out of their pajamas and cookies, they are so very sensitive to what it is given to them, but their imagination are much more than princesses and princes fairy tales, and that it is my point about that.

The other point it is to become friends with the monster. "Oh, please don't go—we'll eat you up—we love you so!" Where the Wild Things Are

So the plot of the book it is simple, and if you read the synopses you will know, what the movie is all about. A contemporary folk tale. "When a childless couple learn that they cannot have children, it causes great distress. To ease his wife's pain, the man finds a stump in the backyard and chops it and varnishes it into the shape of a child. However the woman takes the root as her baby and starts to pretend that it is real. When the root takes life they seem to have gained a child; but its appetite is much greater than that of a normal child." (it is funny how whoever writes plots always want it to make very intriguing, so you can be drawn by the riddle of the mystery that it is left upon the lines).

In this case is kind of ludicrous.

The synopses is also the plot of the movie. You could say that all the plots can be done one Thousand times, and what it is actually inside the sandwich that counts. But it is not exactly how many films are made, so many rely so much on the plot, and those mechanisms really give the whole energy for things to happen. But for this movie, things are driven in a different manner, what happens in this flow, inside the story and how it is told that really matter, what it is added inside the sandwich, the journey, the world created, the actual experience of watching it, can only be told in the end, as of while it was happening you couldn't really understand it. This assumption has a meta-linguistic force in the movie, only Alzbetka finds out about the tale, and only she is able to have some control over what it is happening.

Jan Svankmajer adds to the sandwich black humor, surreal Kafkian situations, the old pedophile from Family Guy is there, Strong characters, the food obsession in many many levels, the never ending desiring and consumption driving we can have, how we can be socially driven by the assumption and pressure of that imaginative other's can put upon on what we are, the "mother" completely lost and hysterical on her desire of having a baby, our responsibility as the maker of our own nightmares, our own personal jails, the funny behavior of the cops, and most amazingly to me the thin and amazing thread that he makes this whole world stand upon something we can easily recognize as reality and complete dreamlike surreal experiences, all at the same time.

His shorts movies are inside the story as well, as adds, we can see that the Avante-Garde can quickly be absorbed and consumed into the main stream. A good example examples was Gummo, that turned into Beasts of The Southern Wild, but anyway... Of course, there is the airplane theory, that after it was invented, airplane inventors start to pop up elsewhere, but I am not really sure it is exactly like that.

In a folk tale, I think we are kind of obliged to try to answer this question, what it is the physiological moral power that this story has?

I would say, that it is telling that people (grown ups) and society, can be amazing misunderstood cry babies that are ought to consume bluntly everything it faces, so be caution with your desires. Maybe it is something else. But I think it is about this egotistic, anthropomorphic view of the world with never ending consequences and it's folk tale consequences.

What strikes me about this movie it is how little I can give to make much sense of it. I guess it has some social comments on it, about our consumption and our consumerism society, on life and everything else. But most importantly, it doesn't really matter, you get to just experience, pay attention and to be in that state of not getting it. I think that might be the experience to have, unlearning things. Turning them upside down, to transform them. In a personal level it affected me, after seeing a sequence of his shorts and this one, to be more conscious on how we act and driven our desires, you know that feeling of salivating when you think about a bacon sandwich, it has stopped, and it was interesting to be that far apart, to change that programming to one that wasn't completely destructive and irrational.

All this conversation, reminded me of that Elliott Smith song called, "A distorted reality is now a necessity to be free."

The cultural significance of art work is whatever that is, what we arbitrarily give as value to those paintings, subjectively we are ought to create it's meaning, the paintings of the Chauvet caves in the South of France, doubtlessly have survived the test of time and it is easy to acknowledge them and to tell on their importance on art history, but what can we do or say as confronted by a Forty Thousand year cave painting that is particularly beautiful and impressive by so many aspects.

"In a forbidden recess of the cave, there's a footprint of an eight- year-old boy next to the footprint of a wolf. Did a hungry wolf stalk the boy? Or did they walk together as friends? Or were their tracks made thousands of years apart? We'll never know." One of the Herzog's narrations on the movie that goes to show a lot about the role of imagination and narration on the making of history. The imagination also has skin and bones, it has happened also. Any work of art confront us with something to recognize, something to get, I guess most people can find themselves on indifference, or angst or anger, when confronted by an work of art that rings no bells, that pulls no confrontation, that leaves us there, staring, in the riddle of our own souls.

It is important to notice that all the archaeologists, the art curators, the historians, even with all the technology, that enables them to make all the assumptions on history, on how their lives were, on what were the reasons for the paintings and how they were produced. We are still driven to a fundamental questions, that might be key to understanding the importance of art in our modern culture and the understanding of the power that imagination and art plays in weave the very own fabric of our lives.

And that what it is left to do for all the people interviewed in the movie, fantasies of understanding, what this knowing that we share it is all about, and each one of them in their own uniqueness make their story about it, through a variety of means, the nose and smelling being one of the funniest ones. I am not sure if a traditional history TV channel would be able to show all the quirks of it's own subject matter, it takes courage to undermine and to be honest and frank on what it is being filmed, and that It is one of the characteristics that must be valued under the making of a documentary.

It is Herzog methods, or just his personality, he can pick and choose what it is of more interest to him, he deliberately says and uses what got his attention, and drives the interviews to a sphere where he can confront people with his own sense of humor and his own inquisitions and interests of what he is trying to show, he is capable to show us, how laughable we can be, we can see bluntly the mechanisms that he uses when he asks for the archaeologist to not go get the sphere and asks him if he thought he could kill a horse with it.

The idea that the cave man were of a different soul by the ex-circus man and archaeologist, that they had a different perspective on life, a different way understanding it, and the same for seeing and doing the art work that they have made. It reminded me a similar story I have heard about this indigenous person in a forest in Brazil, and he was very concerned on making fire, because soon the sun was going to set, the researches who wanted to walk as much as they could during daytime were not that worried of getting wood to make fire, one of the researcher tells that he them used his lighter to make the fire, and that in just one second there it was, this simple act somehow, this whole culture condensed in this little technology, were able in the indigenous eyes to make his whole world fall apart.

So, when Herzog highlighted by what at first seen absurd and delirious connections on the albino crocodiles and the nuclear power plants, are really scary for the poetic and real inquiry that it is trying to make, simply by showing things that are actually there and putting one and one together and pushing us into seen, what a huge, and laughable project of society and humanity we can be. How far have we moved?

All and all I think Herzog it is pretty funny, and I will finish with one more peace of narration he delivers as seeing some ancient human sculptures, "there seems to have existed a visual convention extending all the way beyond Baywatch".

Movies are opportunities to take us into different worlds. In this documentary we are taken upon the Zhongnan Mountain, that by itself would be already a hike that would have left many people behind, not only saying all the rest of the challenges ahead.

The movie goes into the life journey of Documentarist Edward Burger, who stayed over four years studying with one of the monks, who separately or in small groups lived along the peaks of the Zhongnan mountain in China. We get to know all of the other hermits that live in other peaks considerably nearby, in very simple and honest interviews, we are one on one with every character, he characterizes them as, The Ascetic, The Wise Sage, The Student, The Friend, The Determined, The One that Smiles, The One that speaks like a Poet, and The One that it is my Guide. We get to experience the very personal and authentic journey that the author had to live in order to show us.

From all the wisdom and insights that are shared in the movie, It always stroked me a couple of things about Zen and Buddhism, how much little is given to thinking. All the energy it is given to actually living, for the moment, to the practice, to your own actions, to discipline and to meditation. The other thing it is to how prone they can be to laughter and to have a sad and compassionate look into life. I think these three characteristics are key to understanding more about the Buddhism, the tragic, the childlike perspective and the practice.

It is the tragic, that it is so ingrained on our mythology, or the just the acknowledgment of our own death, of our own fluidity in this life.

It is the child perspective, where life can be blissful, before we put upon so much weigh, where we are still good at playing with nothing.

The attention it is to the practice, to our actions, to be aware and to be present in every moment. All this discipline, it is to be able to see your true self, to see things as they are, and not as we have imagined upon.

All of the monks interviewed, talk to us straight forward, but we are driven so strongly by our culture, by the myriad of false premises of what we should expect and desire from life, that we just don't expect how easily we could end up falling from what we just believed while listening to them. It is very important to pay attention on how their lives are, to really hear to what they have to say. Notice that they are mostly concerned about the practice, their everyday tasks, simple as that. We can watch this movie one thousand times, live over and over again up to five hundred years and yet never really see this movie or worst never being free.