After a long hiatus from watching films in the theater while living on the Bodensee, I dove back in after moving to Munich.
Note that 3-star films are excellent and far from mediocre. I would still absolutely recommend them!
In a movie about loss it is easy to lose the person who was lost. But the mother, who was faceless at first was given center stage. And then boldly walked back into the film, showing how just a few words can change everything.
The son staring to the spot his mother once stood in the parking lot. How he would drag his hand across the wall, reaching out to his father. The distorted voices and sounds in the music, the ending escaping the narrative of the characters, and the mix of surreal/fiction/real show a young director working with the craft of cinema in countless interesting ways.
The film was a bit long and disjointed, but also incredibly moving, in large part because it was clearly so personal. When the dedication to his mother and city came onto the screen I felt a punch to the gut, a work of fiction became real and I cried.
Even if training and running LLMs requires an unfathomable amount of energy it seems inevitable that they will dominate our society and our lives. Each period of major change seems to happen more quickly than the last. It feels like we’re only starting to see the impact of the previous one, the Information Age. Without VR headsets, people are already living in an alternate virtual world, spending enormous amounts of time on their phones. If we failed to adjust to that much slower moving change, how will we deal with the rise of LLMs? Either way, the only choice we have is to wait to see if we run out of money and the bubble bursts or things keep growing exponentially.
Beautifully shot. While watching I was imaging capturing frames and hanging them on my wall. Sofie’s face lit, while Ingrid was in shadow, only her outline visible.
The end felt like a cop out, both illogical and unnecessary. Why couldn’t she move the wheel chair herself? Why such an absurdly large and bright truck? It could have been a dream, but just as any other scene. There were moments that left me confused, the sudden reversal of Sofia’s relationship with Ingrid and Gomez’s emotional response to Rose. What was Gomez’s specialty?
A slow moving, but beautiful film that captures a foreign and nearly surrealistic environment. The landscapes are simply stunning. I intermittently was asking myself what is green screen and what is computer-generated, but somehow that intentional imperfection created an really interesting aesthetic. The landscape shots were somehow imperfect with noisy colors. At times there seemed to be references to Wes Anderson. The bungee jumping tower and zoo somehow fit perfectly. The focus on hand craft including cooking and the aesthetic of the main character’s home. Pink Floyd and the main characters fighting ability and skill to build a side car. It deserves a TV series, with characters perhaps not as developed as the time allowed, whether that is the many old male figures who tended to die off or the women working at the circus. There were few, but key moments of humor or absurdity.
Here be spoilers! Was Jackie a fictional character? Jackie and Daisy vomit, and when Daisy does it it provides the moment for Jackie to shoot her. In fact that moment may the only time the two characters meet? And then Lou is in the house. At the end of the film when Daisy is dragged away, Jackie is asleep in the car. Jackie may also be an extension of Lou, killing her enemies for her. Jackie works for Lou’s father, just as Lou did before the film starts. Jackie talks to her little brother and mother on the phone, calling her monster, while Lou’s mother went missing. Jackie is the only “magical” character.