It's been months since I've posted anything and I'm going to start with this?
You'd think maybe I'd write about school, my newspaper job, or talk about that never-off-topic theme, inseguridad en la capital!!!
--but no, I want to further hype an already-hyped movie.
The spectacularly goofy image above is from French director Michel Gondry's latest creation -- a spectacularly goofy film called The Science of Sleep.
(Disclaimer: if you've been reading this experiment in narcism of mine for a while you might have noticed that I'm a bit of a Michel Gondry fan)
Michel Gondry has a fantastic disregard for linear narratives. He employs a kind of temporal disorder (if 'temporal disorder' is in the DSM IV it might have director's mug by it) -- an experimental rearranging that shuffles the elements of classical storytelling. This was thoroughly apparent in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the unforgettable feature film about forgetting. Gondry returns to employ similar techniques in his newest film.
I went to see The Science of Sleep at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Not surprisingly, I loved it.
Gondry's mutant experiments in consciousness evolve in a bizarrely organic way. Memory turns to fantasy then to dream and back again. Thanks to this narrative playfulness, some call his films erratic, overly naieve or too fantastical.
Take the New Yorker's Anthony Lane:
Stéphane (see the giant hands above), the hero of the film, is played by Mexican actor Gael García Bernal. He has returned to Paris (from Mexico, incidentally) to live with his mother. Soon a love story develops between Stéphane and his next door neighbor, Stephanie. But it is an unreal, dreamy, confused kind of love story. You could even call it imperfect.
Take A.O. Scott in the New York Times:
Mr. Gondry, who would rather invent than explain, makes a plausible case that a love story (which is what “The Science of Sleep” is) cannot really be told any other way. Love is too bound up with memories, fantasies, projections and misperceptions to conform to a conventional, linear structure.
You'd think maybe I'd write about school, my newspaper job, or talk about that never-off-topic theme, inseguridad en la capital!!!
--but no, I want to further hype an already-hyped movie.
The spectacularly goofy image above is from French director Michel Gondry's latest creation -- a spectacularly goofy film called The Science of Sleep.
(Disclaimer: if you've been reading this experiment in narcism of mine for a while you might have noticed that I'm a bit of a Michel Gondry fan)
Michel Gondry has a fantastic disregard for linear narratives. He employs a kind of temporal disorder (if 'temporal disorder' is in the DSM IV it might have director's mug by it) -- an experimental rearranging that shuffles the elements of classical storytelling. This was thoroughly apparent in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the unforgettable feature film about forgetting. Gondry returns to employ similar techniques in his newest film.
I went to see The Science of Sleep at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Not surprisingly, I loved it.
Gondry's mutant experiments in consciousness evolve in a bizarrely organic way. Memory turns to fantasy then to dream and back again. Thanks to this narrative playfulness, some call his films erratic, overly naieve or too fantastical.
Take the New Yorker's Anthony Lane:
Filmmakers with more patience discovered long ago that to sit in the dark and watch a movie is itself a species of dreaming, and that a tentative love story, say, can seem quite unreal enough...without having extra fantasies forced upon it. Gondry, who sharpened his talents on music videos, has no time for such meditative airs, and he makes Stéphane’s dreaming as silly and scattershot as possible, so as to rebuke the stolidity of the mature world.
Stéphane (see the giant hands above), the hero of the film, is played by Mexican actor Gael García Bernal. He has returned to Paris (from Mexico, incidentally) to live with his mother. Soon a love story develops between Stéphane and his next door neighbor, Stephanie. But it is an unreal, dreamy, confused kind of love story. You could even call it imperfect.
Take A.O. Scott in the New York Times:
Mr. Gondry, who would rather invent than explain, makes a plausible case that a love story (which is what “The Science of Sleep” is) cannot really be told any other way. Love is too bound up with memories, fantasies, projections and misperceptions to conform to a conventional, linear structure.