"It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen."

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Some Visually Demanding Films

I picked a bad two movies to sew curtains to.  I don't have a sewing machine, so I had to sew by hand which is slow tedious work necessitating a good movie to keep me awake.  The movies were great, but they were too visually demanding to get much done.

The Illusionist is a cartoon with almost no talking.  With a clear nod to Mon Oncle, it's a film about a man who manages on his own as a travelling magician, but ends up with a tag-along.  The one film deals with technology taking over humanity, the other with rock stars getting in the way of more traditional entertainment.  Either way, it's sometimes hard to cope with change.



The girl cleaning his room has broken shoes, so he kindly buys her a new pair.  That dynamic solidifies as she follows him on the train and expects him to pay for her ticket.  She cooks and cleans for him, and for a few other entertainers travelling in the same circles.  It's painted as a tragic, difficult existence, but she brightens it up considerably.  Unfortunately for our hero, it means taking a real job to help pay the additional expenses because he can't seem to stop buying her everything she wants.  It's a sad, funny film.

Then I watched Chaplin.  Another sad, funny film with the theme of women taking everything they can from an older man.  I remember watching Chaplin as a kid, and it was a delight to see Robert Downey Jr. do him justice.  For me, it was worth watching just for that.  And I got most of my sewing done in the horrible flashback scenes as an elderly Chaplin discusses his biography with a fictional editor.  The movie could have been so much better with a ruthless editing.

Then I watched this...


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