I Make Things

The iloveyou project is going very well. So far I’ve gotten great footage on video. I opened up the exposure to make it all white. Tomorrow night I will drop off the super 8 footage and then I pick it up on Thursday. I am also doing this project to see the differences between film and video. If it turns out, I am going to transfer the film to video as well to make more comparisons.

Polaroid taken by Erik Borgesen.

After taking video of Erik, who is extremely photogenic, Eric photographed me with my Pro Poloroid. As you can see there is my little Sony TRV22 and Matt’s Bauer S 709 XL that he is graciously lending me.

Last night Jennifer and I went to go see this Bertolucci movie. It was good, but confusing. Themes of homosexuality mingled with fascism, repressionist government spies, murder and sleeping around. The fashion was fantastic and the lighting was good. It gets a 6/10 for plot, a 8/10 for lighting, a 10/10 for fashion and cool cars, and an overall 7/10.

I went and saw “Dolls” this evening at the nwff. It was just ok. The main idea was that bonds of love will be our undoing. In each of three tragic stories of love, director Takeshi Kitano drags us through three barely linked stories to send his poetic message that “love sucks.” I get the feeling that Kitano had a bad breakup and rather than getting out there and dating again, he wallowed in misery and made this movie. If it was therapeutic for him, it wasn’t therapeutic for the viewers. I give this move a 3/10 for plot, a 4/10 for technical stuff, and a 7/10 for pretty.

In the first story, a man betrays his lover to marry the bosses’ daughter, at the wedding he learns that his betrayed love has attempted suicide and has become severely mentally ill. He goes and gets her and together they wander the countryside as vagrants connected by a beautiful braided rope until they finally fall off a cliff in the snow and swing in the air, dead and still connected by the rope hanging from a limb.

In the second story, a 40ish year old man stabs himself in the eyes with an exacto in order to have an afternoon with his pop star idol in a rose garden. He dies shortly after trying to make his way home along a road with a walking cane. I got the idea that the director/writer was trying to say something about other people instead of himself. He was creating a world of people who are pop star groupies that I don’t believe he really cared about.

The third part was about a yakuza boss who left a girl in his youth. She says she will wait for him at the park every Saturday and bring them lunch. In his old age, 50 or 60 years later, he returns to the park bench and begins a sweet relationship with her without telling her who he is. She’s about to catch on or he’s about to tell her, when he is shot by a former yakuza brother. This scene was the most cliche in the whole movie. Instead of showing the bloody wound, they cut to a red leaf floating down a river. Despite the rather cheezy ending, this was the strongest part of the movie with the best acting.

All in all, I didn’t mind watching it, it was pretty. I had a good time checking out how they did the lighting for each scene. Shooting snow at night is tricky and they did a good job of lighting it.

The director/writer tried to convey something through this movie. Something about how the bonds of love that bind us, will be our undoing. I don’t agree with this cynical statement. Also, the movie wandered between realistic love story and surreal symbolic message. If I could boss Takeshi Kitano around, I would tell him to make another movie and tell just one story. I think that I would also tell him to get over his broken heart and next time he has a break-up he should seek counseling instead of making a movie.