L’avventura (1960)

                The movie L’avventura directed by Michaelangelo Antonioni and released on the year 1960 was made to confuse its viewers because of how the story did not have a clear story line and conclusion. It is a very mysterious movie which had no closure to each scene which left the viewers hanging and curious about what happened next. The movie did not have a specific story and had numerous plot twists without conclusions.

         The movie is about a group of wealthy friends cruising around. Sandro and Anna were lovers who had misunderstandings and Anna wanted to be alone and then got lost. Sandro and Anna’s friend, Claudia started looking for Anna. While searching, Sandro started flirting with Claudia and heard about a lady named Gloria Perkins who attracted a lot of men in Messina. After, Sandro asked Claudia to marry him. While in the search for Anna, the two had gone to Taormina to check on a hotel Sandro’s boss and the wife is staying. Here, Sandro saw Gloria Perkins and was attracted which resulted to him and Gloria in a sexual encounter. They were caught by Claudia but she did not do anything about it and showed compassion. 

            The movie was very confusing and was very shallow. The context of the movie was not specific and was very unclear. Personally, I do not recommend the movie because it did not have a conclusion. It confuses the audience and makes me question what the point of the movie really was. 

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What the heck did i just watch?? This film was probably the most disgusting movie i’ve ever seen. While watching, I felt so awkward during the film and it was really off-putting. I was expecting the typical horror film plot in which the main character/s are being haunted/hunted by a monster of some sort. Little did I know that the main characters of this film would be both the ones being the monsters.

Even with the rare occurrences of addiction to cannibalism, I found myself expecting and foreseeing the turns of events in this film. I already started to suspect something weird to happen when the film was clearly trying to show the strictness of the family when it came to being vegetarians. Sort of like how game of thrones shows these details for you to analyse as sort of easter eggs, it felt obvious that there was more to the scene when the mom and dad were so insistent on her not eating meat. The roots of my suspicions probably stem from personal experience. No, I am not a cannibalist, but I used to have really strict parents as well. Parents that would reprimand me for doing a lot of things but wouldn’t really make me understand why.  These rules set for me by my parents didn’t stick later on in my college life, similar to that of Justine’s experiences. 

I found the movie to be very unrealistic, and that took away the greatness of the film. When the video of Justine acting like a beast uncontrollable over human meat surfaced because of Alexia, I would expect everyone else to be disgusted. Although people were seen to be avoiding her, none were really shocked about it. The fact that Alexia probably has been causing those freak accidents to happen at he same area frequently, and not getting caught. Even when Justine ate her sister’s own finger off and Alexia was not a tad bit pissed.These made the whole film seem so ingenue and I didn’t really feel a connection with the characters.

Goodbye Lenin was set during the breaking of The Berlin Wall. Now we go 40 years forward in the edukator, and it seems that the western ideas have taken over. There is no mention of the east, west germany, and all their respective ideologies, but glimpses of the divide are still apparent in 2003 as seen through The Edukator. Jan and Peter are two best friends who call themselves the educators and break into homes of the rich and powerful and re-arrange the furniture to instill fear into those who they believe to be abusive and terrible people. Motivated by a personal grudge, Peter’s girlfriend secretly joins Jan for the first time as they break into Hardenberg’s house and do their usual re-arranging. 

Since  Jan and Jule abruptly raided his home, they were not expecting his arrival. When Hardenberg caught Jules at his home, Jan and Jules’ choices were either to get caught, or to either kill/kidnap hardenberg. They chose to kidnap him with Peter’s aid. It was quite obvious how lost and regretful the three were, doing the kidnapping. They never wanted to commit a crime this extreme, but they believed that they were left with no choice. Honestly, everything was meticulously done and prepared for before Jules came into the picture and messed shit up. Jules screwed things up even more when she allowed herself to have a secret love life with her boyfriend’s best friend. How annoying right?

The 3 alongside Hardenberg end up staying at a cabin away from town as they figure out what to do next. The 3 grew fond of him as he started to become more of a friend than an enemy. Debates arise over dinner as Hardenberg tries to defend his ideas and actions. The edukators made themselves judge, jury, and executioner as if they were better people than their victims, but throughout the film I realised the insignificance of their doings, and their own inadequacies with the help of Hardenberg. As the film went by, it seemed that Hardenberg was more in control of the three. Finally exposing Jan and Jules’ secret relationship, the three are in shambles, and it seemed that they were more faulty than that of Hardenberg. As things start to calm down, they finally let Hardenberg go back home. Throughout the film, the three edukators seemed to learn more from Hardenberg, rather than them teaching him a lesson, so it really made me think, who is the real edukator?

I am a big fan of horror movies. Having known beforehand that Trollhunter is a horror/drama film, I set my expectations really high. Sadly, I found the movie very underwhelming. It isn’t your average horror film. When I finally realized while watching that it was one of those horror ‘found footage’ sub genre films, I thought that it would continuously gather more suspense, and a sense of fear. I think that I expected the movie to be this way due to the fact that I grew up with films such as “The Paranormal Activity” series that use the same film strategies as Trollhunter. The movie being a documentary type of film, felt really draggy at times. I feel that the film really lacked when it came to horrific/nail-biting scenes.

Although I didn’t find the film worth watching, I guess the film excelled at other aspects. One would think that the film would excel in showing the spooky parts of Norway, and its culture, but the film actually did a better job in showing the pleasing parts of it. Looking past those ugly, low quality trolls, we see the grand scenery that Norway takes pride off. I also think that I wasn’t able to connect much to the film, due to my non-existent knowledge of Norwegian culture. Knowing that this is one of the better films that the Norwegian film industry has to offer, I can’t help but assume that there’s more to it then what I saw.

Ultimately, I didn’t enjoy watching the film. I felt that the quality of this 2010 film was unsightly, especially when it came to the trolls. There was too little action, and when there was, it would be very underwhelming. On a positive note, the film was actually able to get me involved with the characters, but this involvement wasn’t so  pleasing and I always found myself annoyed by the decisions the characters would make. If they were to remake this movie with more action, suspense, and thrill, I would definitely watch it. A good takeaway from watching this film is that I appreciate Norway more.

HOLY COW.. is what was continuously being said in my head throughout each scene of this movie. In most movies, the longer you watch the film the more you get to understand everything, but this is definitely not the case for this film. It seemed that whenever I added another scene to the big picture, the more did it unhinge me. I was just getting more puzzled as I watched the film. Even until the very end, when you would expect to have everything finally piece together, things were just made even more confusing.

The movie started with Monsieur Oscar in what I think is his actual form? At the time he just seemed to be an ordinary wealthy businessman who lived in a great house, and owns a limo, but his day to day assignments proved otherwise. M. Oscar had 8 assignments for the day and through his assignments he was able to showcase to me the abnormalities and the randomness of life. Through his different roles/personas, I sort of tried to make sense out of everything by proving to myself the significance of what he’s doing. I just feel that, although some assignments he did were weird and seemed to have no positive effect on anybody, there are actual people in our world who act similarly and they are sort of important in maintaining the balance of the world, I guess?

Just when things got really weird after the finger-biting homeless, and old beggar woman role M. Oscar surpasses death? Or so I think he does? He gets stabbed in the neck and you’d expect him to die by then, but he turns out fine and goes on towards his next assignment. Later on in the movie, it is revealed that other people involved in M. Oscar’s assignments, are also playing a role or doing an assignment as well. This just made things even more confusing, and I really couldn’t tell between reality within the film, and acts vis-a-vis.

As he continued to succeed in completing his assignments, I started to doubt his humaneness due to how much talent he had. It didn’t seem possible to be that talented to be able to perform all these personas. Without consulting external analysis, I came to the conclusion that M. Oscar is a robot, or isn’t human at least? This probably isn’t the case, but to me it explained a lot of blurry parts in the movie. How he was able to escape death, how he was able to have so much unique talents and skills, and how an agency with so much parallelisms between employees are just some of the parts explained by my theory. Even the title could seem to hint to something of the likes.

Until this very moment, people relentlessly try to impose conditions/limitations towards love. With the right mindset, none of the implications set by others can truly alter your feelings nor define your relationship. Day in, day out these boundaries set by people prove to be false by the likes of Emile and Angela in Godard’s A Woman is a Woman.

A Woman is a Woman revolves around the comedic, and unusual love story of Angela, and Emile. The central conflict being that Angela wants to have a baby, while Emile doesn’t. The film showed how imperfect their relationship was through many scenes of them arguing over such little things, and constantly insulting each other. Despite all this, the film was able to portray the true feelings of the couple from within.  

Godard’s A Woman is a Woman proved to be a true masterpiece to me as I unthinkingly came to appreciate the unorthodox methods of Godard in many aspects of filmmaking. To name a few, the way he uses musical accompaniment in almost every scene of the film to emphasize parts of the film. Secondly, his very playful methods of cinematography as seen through his transitions between scenes, and the way he immerses his audience as if they were being talked to by the characters in the film. Lastly, the unpredictable, yet rewarding plot. He used music and different sound effects so smoothly that it helped me predict what was to happen in every scene. He used different methods of cinematography to define important happenings in the film, and he froze the frame five times in which a character spoke to the camera as if he/she was talking to the audience which gave the film an even more comedic feeling. The plot of the film followed the usual three plot structure, but the confrontation and the resolution was so odd that I was confused whether an event such as Angela hooking up with Alfred actually happened. I couldn’t put to reality or relate to many parts of the film, and this got me feeling awkward watching it at most times. At the end of it all, as I finally found time to process everything, I realized one thing. I realized that real love has no boundaries.