While I'm on break this week during spring, I decided that I'd watch a movie every other day. Normally I watch a movie only once a week, to give me time to think about it afterwards, and to give me time to actually want to watch another movie. Because of this I'll instead be rewatching some of my favorite movies, then on Friday I'll watch something new.
Even though this was a rewatch, and I went in knowing that the lens was absurdly wide, I still was not prepared for how wide the lens is.
I mean its just great, man. People coping with loneliness makes for some great stories.
I remember reading this one street photography book and the artist talked about how he rotates his camera in order to keep composition, which is abnormal, which this movie does frequently. You’d think that with such a wide lens, there wouldn’t be much problem to get interesting compositions. But I think because they wanted to keep the camera close to the characters, they ended up having to rotate the camera anyway.
This was the first Wong Kar-wai movie I watched so I didn’t know that the movie was referencing Chungking Express, which it does pretty often. Makes me wonder if Kar-wai’s other movies reference each other and I just haven’t been noticing it.
This marks my first time watching a movie that I fully own. Before I'd been ~acquiring~ my movies, but with Mishima I was gifted the Criterion Blu-ray (which I ripped of course, I'm not buying a shitty disc player). Its very special to me to watch it in the best digital quality possible.
I've never really liked how often people describe movies as masterpieces. Sure there's lots of movies so there's bound to be quite a few, but it still feels too frequent to me. When I first watched this movie I knew that I could probably consider it a masterpiece, but wanted to make sure that I rewatched it before claiming that. A masterpiece is sacred in my eyes, and by naming movies too often as such only devalues them.
After rewatching this movie, I can say without a doubt that this really is a masterpiece. I could go on about every aspect of the movie, and I would never be able to describe how great it is. It has so much to say about living with art and beauty. If you're reading this and haven't seen it, Watch It.
When I initially watched this movie, it made me fall in love with China—at least this movie version of rural China shown. I love the landscapes, the architecture, how slow and deliberate people are, the way the poetry is narrated.
Normally I try to be sort of subjectively-objective with my logging of movies. I enjoy talking about what makes a movie work or doesn't work, as much as I enjoy talking about my personal experience with it. With Kaili Blues, I don't think I can be as objective as I'd want. When I think about this movie I don't really think about the smooth editing between the long take and the rest of the movie. I don't even think about the story of a man discovering things about himself and other people, and accepting it as it is. I just think about the love it makes me feel.
On the surface its a coming of age story, but its more than that. Its looking back on your young self and old times with not only a bit of nostalgia, but also stating it as a fact of your past.
The cinematography is great, I love the warm yellow glow cast on everything
The movie is also very communist, which is cool to watch from a red-blooded-bald-eagle-screeching-gun-toting-dictatorship american perspective.
I mean, what else can I say? These were some great movies. Starting with some loneliness, a state that I'd be in for the next week. Continuing with a reminder to live with your art (though not too much), useful for my tilde30 project. Getting lost again in a world I love. Then ending with something retrospective. I didn't plan for it to work out that in an arc like that, but I'm glad it did.
Will I do something like this again? Maybe. It would have to be a bunch of rewatches again. I do have more movies that I'd like to rewatch, but I don't know how long my stockpile will last if I do this every year.
If I do decide on doing it again, I really wanna try and do something similar to my double feature logs. Where I write about both movies and how they relate to each other. I didn't do it this week since I don't think my writing skills are there, but maybe by another year of writing this stuff I'll get to the point where I can.