Change Your Image
yamachin
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Lists
An error has ocurred. Please try againReviews
Vox Lux (2018)
An astonishingly well-crafted critique of society + amazing acting by Portman
I am writing this review because I don´t understand how this film could receive such a low imdb rating, and so many negative reviews. Short of giving up hope on the movie-going audiences that use imdb, I intend to at least give my opinion here, too, that is: Vox Lux is almost a masterpiece, certainly one of the most memorable movies of 2019. These are the facts that support my claim:
1) Natalie Portman´s acting - award-worthy, I´m serious. Some scenes literally had me awestruck.
2) The soundtrack - Sia outdid herself.. I wonder if she has a personal relationship with the story, in the sense that she is also critical of fame?
3) Jude Law´s acting - a comeback?
4) the story and screenplay -- wow, I was blown away, especially the twist at the end really took the story to another level, but right after the first 10 minutes I found myself leaning over to my friend and saying "this is going to be a great film"
5) the cinematography - very well done.
6) and, last but not least. THE PACING. if any film school student wants an example of great pacing, he should watch this movie. Not one scene carries on for too long, and all the shifts between chapters happen at the seemingly perfect moment, including the ending
That´s it!! Go and see this movie and support cinema like this financially! It will not be a waste of time or money.
Tavarataivas (2013)
Excellent and entertaining example of practical philosophy
I do not think that, as one other reviewer here obviously does, this documentary is staged. Of course he has to "catch himself" at the beginning of a scene, whatever that means, as it is an extremely personal movie. One example that underlines the realness of the movie and the effort undertaken by all involved, in my opinion, is how the girlfriend is filmed only minimally. Tell me one reason why to do this if it were staged!? Also other aspects, that only make sense as a documentary. THIS FILM IS NOT STAGED. The director (and star) compiled this documentary out of many, many hours of material, after the experiment was finished(think of the grandmother), and it is well documented in newspaper articles and such that he really undertook this experiment (he became a semi-celebrity in his native country). If all that were fake, it seems just a little less effort than the real deal, and therefore I find it hard to believe that this isn't sincere. Don't believe the naysayer (singular, I am sure).
Generally speaking, this movie is a must-watch for people who love any kind of documentary and are interested how different mindsets navigate through our, let's face it, more and more materialistic world. It not only shows (doesn't tell) the viewer how the most important things can not be bought, which is something almost everyone knows, but still ignores in daily life, and also at the same time asserting the importance that things do, after all, have in our lives, as memorabilia, nostalgic things that are "useless" but we hold on to nevertheless, and so almost this documentary becomes an elegy for a kind of overlap of material and immaterial realms of humankind, likable to the overlap between the material vinyl record (nowadays nostalgic, because non-CD & non-digital) and the immaterial music, which then remains, connotation-like, as part of the silent-again record.
Because, as the poet Robert Duncan (1919-1988) once wrote so aptly:
When silence / Blooms in the house, all the paraphernalia of our existence / Shed the twitterings of value and reappear as heraldic devices.
What value has the life of a homeless man compared to the life of a millionaire? Surely the latter hast more "twitterings" of value in his mansion, but maybe, just maybe, the homeless will one day HAVE just what he needs, not more, nor less, and BE just what he wants to be, not less, whereas the millionaire more often than not can very well BE less than he wants to be, despite all his wealth-induced prestige. Therefore for further reading I (strongly) recommend:
- "To Have or to Be?" by the social psychologist ERICH FROMM, first published in 1976.
This movie, this EXPERIMENT, made more than a 35 years after Fromm's insights, represents nothing less than a psychological self-experiment with philosophical implications - and it is a very entertaining one, too.