Liquid Nonsense

Lately I've been watching movies that could best be described as "gut wrenching" or "emotionally disemboweling" in some way or another. About a week ago, after I got back from Philadelphia, I watched Takeshi Kitano's "Dolls." That was sort of like taking a melon baller to my heart. Heidi best described the movie as "having tendrils of visual metaphor to rip out your still-beating heart and show you how beautiful it is." A very fitting description for a movie that is essentially about the astonishingly self-natured qualities of love, but that we somehow forgive them because they are, in fact, in the name of love. If that movie had mantras they would be: "Guilt can hold even the most hollowed relationship together," "no matter how much we want the past, a lifetime of selfish wants cannot be undone," and "obsession of another is not a substitute for one's own life." Highly recommended.

Tonight I watched "Babel" by Alejandro González Iñárritu. The movie was exquisite. I've probably spent at least the last half-hour crying in my movie room. The title makes absolute sense by the time the movie is over. Cultural misunderstandings abound, whether it's the collision of neighboring countries or social groups clamoring for acceptance from their peers. Equally, it could be a treatise on the nature of despair and isolation that derives from cultural interaction. It's a small world after all? Somehow it makes me think of Serial Experiments Lain, but without the ubiquitous technology metaphor.

I'm going to attempt sleep now and hope that I don't have some seriously fucked up dreams.

Labels: movies