Post-modernism in Kung Fu Hustle

This movie was really fun to watch. It took a while for me to really understand what I was supposed to think about it. For a while in the beginning, I was trying to figure out if this movie takes itself seriously or not.

The animation and computer effects seem very out of place in the serious setting of a Wu Xia movie, and often made people laugh. At first I thought it was just a silly movie like a Kung Pow or one of the Scary Movie films, but the post-modern references to other films and the animated and exaggerated effects don't seem to be there solely to make the audience laugh or to divert from the established style. It seemed like the beginning was packed full of references and visual effects that made me giggle, but there wasn't much to hold my attention to the plot. As the story went on, I became more interested in the story itself through the plot and the kung fu instead of the more superficial (in my opinion) aspects of the beginning. I think this might be to purposely defy our expectations. As moviegoers who would have seen this style of film many times before, we would have a very specific idea of what to expect from this film. Incorporating these new elements into this film challenged what we knew, and made us more open to whatever the filmmakers had for us.

This idea sort of hit me when Professor McRae was explaining the importance of being relaxed in order to be good at martial arts. Similarly, we as an audience had to loosen up and not be so rigid in our expectations for this film. I haven't seen too many Asian martial arts films, so I can't say how original the plot and ending are, but the point is that it had my undivided attention because the movie began by giving me many things to focus on visually then gradually became more plot-focused and the animation and references fell into the background, just serving to further the plot while the characters and the action take over the movie, once we know who is doing what and why.

I think this was a great technique, because there was a reason behind it. Most of the time post-modernism confuses me because there seems to be no reason for it, but here there seems to be some kind of logic behind all the references and such--instead of using references for the sake of making references, here it seemed more like making references to other movies to take the audience out of their preconceived ideas about what the movie will/should be like.

Mulholland Dr--the most wonderfully confusing thing I've ever seen

Let me apologize now. This post will probably not make complete sense and I can pretty much guarantee most (if not all) of my ideas will be vague and trail off. I feel like this film made my brain crash. I am extremely dependent on logic to figure things out, usually more than my senses, but trying to applying logic to this movie doesn't seem to work for anything longer than 10 seconds.

My biggest source of confusion comes from looking at the movie as a whole, before taking any details into account. In class, someone mentioned something about the director hating when people try to explain his movies. I refuse to believe that means he's making movies just for the sake of making movies, but if there is no explanation how can there be meaning. By watching this film I really feel like it means something, that all of the visual and narrative aspects are purposefully there to tell me something, but I'm completely missing the point. Whenever I try to figure it out, the harder I think the less sense it all makes. Am I supposed to accept the movie as a lovely ball of confusion and move on, or do I try to figure out an explanation the may or may not exist?

The confusing effect the film created was more genuine because it extended to the characters as well. In most of the beginning, the characters are all trying to figure out what's going on (not what happened, not what's going to happen, but what is happening in the present), either to find out Rita's identity, or what's going on with Adam's film. As the audience we get more information than the characters, but we are no closer to any kind of answers.

I can say for sure I liked the overall effect of the film. Of all of the movies we've watched this semester this one was the most enjoyable ride once I stopped using my brain. This wasn't the first film that made my brain feel like it was short-circuiting, but when it was all over I could honestly say I really liked it, even though I couldn't explain what happened in it or really why I liked it so much.

This was so different from anything I'm used to that even though it is squarely outside of my comfort zone, it was almost refreshing to come across something like this. I think what I'm getting at is that even though I didn't completely understand other movies, I could find something, anything to make sense of. I feel like this film offers no way to find get out of the mess of confusion the viewer finds himself stuck in.

The reading was very helpful for me to come to that conclusion. At first it confused me about things I didn't even know I was confused about, but that probably has more to do with the film itself than the article. At one point, it seemed to suggest that attempting to approach this movie logically wouldn't be very effective. Once I said to myself, "it doesn't make sense, just go with it," things were slightly easier to understand (and by that I mean I went from understanding nothing to only getting vague shadows of ideas).

Many of the plot lines the article discussed were things I hadn't noticed or felt were very important. For example, When Betty doesn't meet with Adam after her audition and then finding Diane's dead body in her apartment, I didn't see those as huge turning points in the film, and I don't understand how Betty's life ended when she didn't meet with the director. now that I think about it I'm not sure if the meeting didn't happen because he chose the other girl or because she had to leave to help Rita. Either way, I don't see how her life ended there. And I'm REALLY confused about the body in Diane's apartment. There is absolutely no way to put this movie into any kind of chronological order or even determine if everything we see actually happened (although arguably none of it happened because it's all fictional), but Diane's suicide was in another reality or timeline and I have no idea how that dead body fits into the storyline in the first half of the movie.

Is the "heinous absurdity of the entire entertainment industry" and the article calls it being critiqued because the cliches are so over the top that they're ridiculous? Lots of people were laughing the more intense a style got (especially at the really happy beginning with Betty and the old lady or with the detectives investigating the crash or later with the cowboy--at that point even Adam didn't take it seriously when he found out the meeting place). Or is it that they're all so generic and useless by now that really any story can be told through the Hollywood cookie cutter styles?

I think I need to watch this movie a few more times. And I think I need to watch it all the way through before I really get it, because we stopped just as everything went from a little confusing to really confusing and that really screwed up my chances of having a clue.

Wow, I really rambled on, sorry about that.

Heathers

I'm sorry about the late post, I had internet problems yesterday.

I really liked this movie, but I think the reading kind of missed the point about many aspects of it. However, it's very likely that I'm the one that missed the point. I didn't see any deeper meaning to many of the references in the film, either because I'm, not old enough to catch them or because they seemed so natural. For example, I heard them talking about Gilligan's Island on the radio, but I didn't feel like there was anything really important in it--it reminded me that I was watching an 80s movie because many things about high school haven't changed all that much, but I don't think we need to question the meaning of why some unrelated person would feel like they were on an island at that moment. Most of the cultural references in the film just added to the authenticity of it, I don't think we need to analyze it all. It wouldn't be all that accurate if those references were missing, because popular culture is a part of people's everyday lives (especially in high school), and to leave those things out would make the entire feel of it wrong. I thik the author of the article was trying too hard to fit all of those things into a neat little box that had some deeper meaning to the film, and the result, while somewhat helpful, feels inaccurate somehow.

I also disagree completely about the "causality" of J.D.'s actions. I don't think his ultimate goal was to blow up the school tocreate a new Woodstock, because I believe he is a sociopath with no rhyme or reason to what he does. I felt like the huge suicide note signed by the students was more of an excuse for his own actions and had very little to do with the world outside that school. I can't seem to figure out if his father killed his mother or if his mother went into the building to kill herself, but J.D. does have some morbid preoccupation with death and specifically suicide, and I feel like in the end it was all an attempt to give meaning to something he didn't understand. He made up suicides for his classmates and people take the clues behind the suicides and tried to give them meaning, but because the suicides were fake the clues were essentially meaningless, putting all those clues together led the adults to the wrong conclusion-- Heather wasn't a deep and misunderstood girl and the jocks weren't gay, and none of the killed themselves. In the same way, trying to take all the "clues" from the film to give it a deeper meaning seems wrong and will eventually lead to an inaccurate interpretation because the postmodernist references aren't actually clues.

When J.D. said he's been to 7 schools and nothing's really changed, I wondered if there were a string of "suicides" at his other schools as well--he's very good at it, he doesn't seem to have any kind of issue with it, his father doesn't have any kind of strange reaction which leads me to assume he thinks it's a normal teenage thing nowadays. I think the huge fake suicide pact was more of his own way to make things here different. Either way, I don't think his motivations really matter because he's a sociopath. I think the biggest point to J.D. is that there is no minimum age to be evil.

I have a tendency to overlook feminist themes because, to be perfectly honest, I find feminism really boring. I did notice something that seemed interesting though: This is the first movie we've watched where the women are cursing. Men haven't really cursed all that much in the other movies, but generally "foul language" seemed like a male thing until now. There must have been a reason women didn't curse often before and why it was so common in this film.

I also noticed something else and I'd really like your opinions on this because I want to know if there's something to it of if I'm imagining things. At the very end of the film, when Veronica walks out of the school before J.D., she looks like she's about to throw up and she's holding her belly in the way that pregnant women do, not someone about to be sick. I REALLY thought she was going to try to stop J.D. by announcing she was pregnant. Did anyone else notice anything like that?

Shaft

I really liked Shaft, although my reasons are probably a bit backwards. I found it very refreshing because the general setup was very different from the movies I'm used to watching today with one main male role.

Nowadays when you see a typical movie featuring a man, there's lots of violence and special effects and the main character is usually an actor we recognize. He has huge muscles and is so good at everything he tries and everything about him is so wonderful this he seems unreal. Most importantly, there is no one else like him--no other important male roles in these movies, and if there is another man he is usually a sidekick or not as impressive physically.

On the other hand, Shaft is filled with men, and these men aren't all wimps. The few women are little more than ornaments. The focus here is put on the main character in a different way--instead of being one-of-a-kind, he is the best of many. His character is almost too good to be true but remains within realistic boundaries, he still has faults, and he isn't bulletproof. However, he is clearly the dominant one. Watching him interact was similar to watching the alpha-male of a pack of wild animals on the Discovery Channel. He was very imposing, he never backed down from a fight, he protected those he considered friends, and he never doubted for a second that he was in charge.

Another typical thing in recent movies is that the hero gets the girl in the end. There's always one woman and he wants her more than anyone else and when they finally get together everyone assumes they'll live happily ever after. Shaft can (and does) have any girl he wants and it's considered cool that he does.

Vanishing Point

This movie was very easy to watch. Throughout most of the movie, I found myself simply enjoying the driving and the music and the strange people in the dessert. Occasionally something would catch my attention, but for the most part I just went with the flow. At the end, just before Kowalski crashed into the barricade, I felt a strange tension but I didn't know what was about to happen until I saw fire. After about 5 seconds, everything about the movie had changed because I had to ask myself why he had done that. There was very little that could give me a clue, but the more I thought about it, the harder it was to come up with a reason. That led me to wonder why I couldn't answer the question and I realized that was probably the point. Throughout the movie the audience just watches the action, but for the most part it's pretty shallow. As moviegoers we are trained to find meaning behind almost anything in a film, but when the main character kills himself in such a spectacular way there should be SOME meaning or reason behind it. If we can't figure it out, does that mean that his life had no meaning or his death had no meaning? Someone in class said that his death was the only thing that made his life anything interesting/meaningful (or something to that effect), but how can a meaningless death (because he really hadn't done anything wrong so there was no reason for him to die in a police roadblock) give meaning to a life that was at best mediocre?

I agree with the article's description of driving as a means for freedom. My favorite thing about my car is the fact that I can get in it and just drive, which I do a lot. When the author mentioned that driving offers great power but the speeding laws limit that power, even though I knew it was true to begin with, seeing it written down made me really mad and I wanted to rebel by driving 90. If Kowalski's life hasn't been great, and he can only feel power behind the wheel, so why would he want to slow down, especially because the police, who ruined him, want him to? I'm not sure there really needed to be a reason for his speeding, for him as a person or for the plot of the movie,because going fast seems reason enough.

Last Year at Marienbad

I did not like this movie, but I enjoyed watching it. The whole experience was very frustrating and I'm noticing that it's a trend with a lot of the movies in this class, but this one made me realize that I'm approaching these movies in the wrong way. I looked through the notes I took during the movie and during the class discussion, but very little of what I wrote makes sense to me. Now I just have to figure out the "right" way to figure these movies out, because the first thought I have at the end of each movie should not be "my brain hurts."

The frustrating thing about this movie was that it wasn't very stimulating intellectually (if anything, it was confusing), but it was an awesome sensory experience. Many times I found myself staring at the screen like I was watching a picture show only to realize I had stopped paying attention to the action because it was pretty. I imagine that also contributed to why i couldn't wrap my head around this movie. My favorite thing about this movie (and the thing I found most memorable) was when the background would change but the dialogue or action would continue. It was such a huge change thrown into the viewing experience because for the majority of the movie I depended on my eyes, but in these scenes it was like my eyes were having a seizure and I had to use my ears. It was a bizarre feeling to actually become aware of using my ears, but that's exactly what it felt like. In fact, throughout most of the film the silence is so constant and even seems loud to me. Using my ears rather than my eyes to allow the scene to continue kept reminding me to pay attention to something besides the pretty pictures.

This film made me aware of the many different elements of a film that come together to tell a story, mainly because most of these elements were missing or used in a different way. I found it difficult to trust any information I got through my ears. As I mentioned earlier, the silence in some scenes is almost oppressive, so during multiple scenes there was no indication of what I was supposed to feel or what was going on, I just had to watch it happening. This enhanced the feeling that I was watching a silent picture show sometimes, other times it made me feel like I was waiting for something that never came. In these cases, my ears were useless. In other cases, the soundtrack was misleading. Early on in the film two characters were having (in my opinion) a boring and relatively unimportant conversation, but the music playing was entirely too fast and intense for the scene. It felt like my eyes and ears were at war and it took me a while to sort out which I was supposed to trust. In that case I had to ignore my ears and go with my eyes, whereas in my earlier example when he background changes but the sound is consistent, I had to go with my ears and ignore my eyes.

Normally, watching a move with subtitles doesn't bother me because I can read them quickly and watch what's going on. However, with this movie I found it more difficult to follow the action and read along at the same time. It's just a small distraction and has little to do with the movie itself, but that did have an effect on how I watched. I'm not sure if it was because they were small or moved too fast. It's probably also because I tend to read people's lips when they speak and that was obviously not an option here. Unlike with Orpheus, the characters in this film had stone faces. There were no facial expressions, and it made it feel impossible to really get a feel for the emotion of a character or a scene or anything. Without those emotions, I felt extremely limited in my ability to understand--throughout the entire movie, I seriously questioned my ability to trust the information presented, and I think that's a major reason I didn't like it.

Many times, the dialogue was in the past tense as the action played out on screen. I found it extremely off-putting to watch something happen while listening to it described like it already happened.

The other problem I have with this movie is that watching it felt like I was watching someone who created a film with the sole intent to say "look what I can do!" I saw a lot of story telling techniques, but I cannot remember the story the director was trying to tell. I think this film was a great success in film making but a complete failure in storytelling. I'm sure many people disagree with that, but I don't see how the two sides of this film (the story itself and the way it is told) unite, and because of that the story is lost to me.

To be perfectly honest, I don't have anything intelligent or even a little interesting to offer about the article. My ideas about the article don't even make sense to me and I don't see the point in confusing anyone else.

Orpheus

I could sit here and try to analyze this movie for a week straight, and there'd still be things left uncovered or unexplained. The entire movie was wrapped up in an airtight bubble of confusion, and I think that's kind of the point. The complete inability to understand, the way I see it, is a form of chaos. In Greek myths, before the world existed there was only chaos, and I think that chaos is the no man's land between worlds. I also think that's why they repeatedly tell him not to try to understand, and why the otherworldliness of the mis-en-scene provided by the remains of WWII is basically rubble and destruction. Let me explain-- chaos is the opposite of order, and order can be represented through cities and the accomplishments of people. To see these destroyed, like the ruins of Europe, is a clear indication that the characters have left "our" world, and that that world isn't based on the same order we understand. ...I don't think I explained myself sufficiently, but hopefully you can get the general idea.

Cocteau's use of things from the war, like the rubble and the radio transmission, is a brilliant way to represent this chaos because the war was chaotic, and many things from war don't make sense to most people. Seeing and hearing things that would remind the audience of the war would bring up emotions they experienced at the time, adding to the overall effect of the movie. I think it's sad that some of the movie is lost to later generations who can't appreciate all the effects of the movie because they don't have a personal connection to it.

At the beginning of the movie, I thought it was bit like film noir because Orpheus is a hero with a flaw who meets this mysterious lady who (literally) takes him into another world. Although I wouldn't call this film noir, there's something in this I want to address, bear with me, I'll try to make sense. The article mentioned that in some versions of this myth Orpheus preferred male company before his wife died. I started to think about the relationships btwn Orpheus and men and women, and now I think that Death (the woman) isn't who sucked Orpheus into the other world. She took him to another world in a literal sense, but the "world" he lives in for the majority of the movie isn't in no man's land but in his car listening for poetry. Because of this, I think the male poet on the radio is what really pulls him in and gets him hooked. After his return home, he stays in his car and prefers sitting in the car to his wife's company, and spends most of his time with Hurtubise--in this instance he prefers men to his wife (who just happens to be pregnant, making her more feminine than other women in the film).

One thing I found interesting but not really important to the overall picture (please feel free to enlighten me if it is significant, I'd really like to know) is that the otherworld is a dreamlike place, but dreams are open to all kinds of interpretation, but there is no room for any interpretation or anything other than straight fact in the actual place. For example, they wanted Orpheus' exact occupation, and were not able to recognize the subtleties between being a writer and a poet, but it was very important that they had the right information. Now that I think about it, the scene before the judges is like the opposite of a dream inside a place that seems to be made of dreams: the room is nothing special, it looks nothing like where they had just come from and seems like it could be from the real world, and the basic interaction during the scene was very serious and not dreamlike at all.