Nope and Hidden Blade
Sep. 4th, 2023 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraNope, 2022 movie. I really liked this - smart and gripping and original. The first of Peele's movies I've watched without reading a synopsis first, and it was just fine for my level of horror-aversion. Reminded me of Green Knight in some ways, tonally and in some of the use of imagery, although Nope is definitely more coherent/traditional in how everything eventually adds up where Green Knight was more surreal.
I suppose I can rank Hugo movies now, behind the cut.
Avatar: Way of Water is an easy last place, behind Severance which at least tried to be interesting. I'd be happy to see any of the other four win, but I guess I would have to say Wakanda Forever is the weakest of them, being a franchise story and a little less tight plot/theme-wise. I think Everything Everywhere All At Once is very likely to win and I would have to agree - that was so neat to see such a genuinely original SF story - and then, Nope vs Turning Red is hard because they're such different kinds of movies, but both so good at being the movies they were. Maybe Turning Red first, though, in that I'd really like to watch it again sometime, whereas Nope was more of a one-watch kind of movie for me? Thus:
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Turning Red
Nope
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Severance
no award
Avatar: Way of Water
I also watched Hidden Blade, 2023, which I had failed to see in the theater, which turned out to be just as well, since by renting it streaming I was able to watch it once through, read some stuff, go back, watch most of it again, read some more stuff, and watch some scenes an additional one or more times. I mean, I really liked it, but the combination of nonlinear storytelling and my own illiteracy made it a challenge! For context, this is a Chinese spy movie about Chinese resistance to the Japanese occupation. My relevant history classes were a long time ago, and while I remembered the basics about the Communists, Nationalists, and Japanese, I had definitely forgotten most of the specific names, years, cities/regions, and progression of events that get referred to, and I never had the visual literacy to, like, quickly recognize uniforms. And my monolingual ears don't even pick up the difference between Chinese and Japanese (really different languages!) unless I'm paying very close attention (definitely not on a first pass while reading subtitles), let alone the differences between Mandarin/Cantonese/Shanghainese (much less different, to my untrained ears, at least), so, all of the information and characterization being conveyed by language choices was flattened in the English subtitles. (I suppose really good subtitling could have used different colors or fonts or italics or something...)
Anyways, I found the whole process of figuring it out and then catching new details on the second or third watch very satisfying, and this is very much a movie about gorgeous people wearing gorgeous 40s costumes having psychological drama at each other (punctuated by occasional violence and war atrocities), so it was also a treat just to spend more time looking at them, even if I wasn't also looking at the complicated and subtle things people were doing with their facial expressions. It is definitely from the Chinese Communist perspective in the way that many American spy thrillers are from the American perspective - the Communists are the heroes here - which I thought was interesting (I'm not sure I've ever watched a spy movie where the leads weren't American or British? maybe I'm forgetting something?) but might be off-putting if you don't want to compartmentalize it from the wider context of shitty things the CCP has done (the same way you might compartmentalize an American spy thriller from the shitty things the US has done). For me, I already agreed with the POV of this movie that the Japanese invasion was horrific and the Chinese were the right side of that situation, and I don't really feel strongly about Communists vs Nationalists but was willing to go along with "these characters believe that what they're doing is right and necessary and given the information they have in this time period that's a reasonable belief". (Interestingly, the movie (at least from what I could tell) mostly stuck to saying critical things about the Nationalists rather than positive things about the Communists - I guess it would be fraught and complicated to have characters, like, talking up Mao, but slamming Chiang Kai-shek isn't going to wade into any contemporary muddy waters.) I definitely don't have the literacy to think in any serious way about where the characters might be in 10 or 20 years, re the famine and Cultural Revolution and all that. I bet there's some fascinating fic out there in Chinese...
I suppose I can rank Hugo movies now, behind the cut.
Avatar: Way of Water is an easy last place, behind Severance which at least tried to be interesting. I'd be happy to see any of the other four win, but I guess I would have to say Wakanda Forever is the weakest of them, being a franchise story and a little less tight plot/theme-wise. I think Everything Everywhere All At Once is very likely to win and I would have to agree - that was so neat to see such a genuinely original SF story - and then, Nope vs Turning Red is hard because they're such different kinds of movies, but both so good at being the movies they were. Maybe Turning Red first, though, in that I'd really like to watch it again sometime, whereas Nope was more of a one-watch kind of movie for me? Thus:
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Turning Red
Nope
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Severance
no award
Avatar: Way of Water
I also watched Hidden Blade, 2023, which I had failed to see in the theater, which turned out to be just as well, since by renting it streaming I was able to watch it once through, read some stuff, go back, watch most of it again, read some more stuff, and watch some scenes an additional one or more times. I mean, I really liked it, but the combination of nonlinear storytelling and my own illiteracy made it a challenge! For context, this is a Chinese spy movie about Chinese resistance to the Japanese occupation. My relevant history classes were a long time ago, and while I remembered the basics about the Communists, Nationalists, and Japanese, I had definitely forgotten most of the specific names, years, cities/regions, and progression of events that get referred to, and I never had the visual literacy to, like, quickly recognize uniforms. And my monolingual ears don't even pick up the difference between Chinese and Japanese (really different languages!) unless I'm paying very close attention (definitely not on a first pass while reading subtitles), let alone the differences between Mandarin/Cantonese/Shanghainese (much less different, to my untrained ears, at least), so, all of the information and characterization being conveyed by language choices was flattened in the English subtitles. (I suppose really good subtitling could have used different colors or fonts or italics or something...)
Anyways, I found the whole process of figuring it out and then catching new details on the second or third watch very satisfying, and this is very much a movie about gorgeous people wearing gorgeous 40s costumes having psychological drama at each other (punctuated by occasional violence and war atrocities), so it was also a treat just to spend more time looking at them, even if I wasn't also looking at the complicated and subtle things people were doing with their facial expressions. It is definitely from the Chinese Communist perspective in the way that many American spy thrillers are from the American perspective - the Communists are the heroes here - which I thought was interesting (I'm not sure I've ever watched a spy movie where the leads weren't American or British? maybe I'm forgetting something?) but might be off-putting if you don't want to compartmentalize it from the wider context of shitty things the CCP has done (the same way you might compartmentalize an American spy thriller from the shitty things the US has done). For me, I already agreed with the POV of this movie that the Japanese invasion was horrific and the Chinese were the right side of that situation, and I don't really feel strongly about Communists vs Nationalists but was willing to go along with "these characters believe that what they're doing is right and necessary and given the information they have in this time period that's a reasonable belief". (Interestingly, the movie (at least from what I could tell) mostly stuck to saying critical things about the Nationalists rather than positive things about the Communists - I guess it would be fraught and complicated to have characters, like, talking up Mao, but slamming Chiang Kai-shek isn't going to wade into any contemporary muddy waters.) I definitely don't have the literacy to think in any serious way about where the characters might be in 10 or 20 years, re the famine and Cultural Revolution and all that. I bet there's some fascinating fic out there in Chinese...
