(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

I saw "Revolutionary Road" which was like a swirling mishmash of a lot of different things. I guess most prominently, the "Going to Marrakesh" song by John Darnielle and "The Yellow Wallpaper." It was about language as hegemony and counter-hegemony. It was very Foucauldian in parts. The whole discourse or rationality/irrationality about the abortion, and the implication, that April calls her husband on, and he backpedals--but it's true, and it's there--that if she doesn't love him, therefore she is insane. And, of course, the mentally ill Greek Chorus character, whose mental illness seems to manifest primarily as telling the truth. I also thought the cinematography was amazing in that sequence almost at the end where Kate Winslet is standing in front of the window, shot from the back, bleeding through her skirt.

As a sidenote, I found it amusing that in "Titanic" Kate Winslet becomes an actress, and travels the world, after not ending up with Leonardo DiCaprio.

Comments

[uberconfused.livejournal.com]

I saw it last night as well. I liked it better than I thought I would, but I still found it kind of melodramatic. One review I read compared it to American Beauty, and that strikes me as apt: atmospheric music does much of the emotional work; the cinematography is slow and deliberate; and the characters are in various states of unhinged-ness--which the viewer is asked to accept prima facie. I dunno, I guess I felt like a lot of the movie was really lazy. It was only because the characters were accessible and sympathetic that I came to care about them at all.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I also saw all the comparisons to "American Beauty" that I guess are so plentiful because Sam Mendez did both. I liked "American Beauty" more, but I am not sure that this is a worse film--it's just so raw. It made me cringe not because it as a film was melodramatic, but because I thought it was an accurate reflection of how melodramatic people become when they feel desperate and trapped and cornered.

[olamina.livejournal.com]

I do think the first ten or so minutes were overly melodramatic like a bad college improv class or something, but (thankfully) it toned down.

[olamina.livejournal.com]

I really liked it. Kate Winslet was great, Michael Shannon was wow, Leonardo DiCaprio was tolerable. It felt really tight and intense and uncomfortable in all the ways something like that should feel. I was really pleasantly surprised there.