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darkfrances's Replies
Nice, very nice!
+ the main premise: couple goes away to said town for holiday cum penance after accidental death of child
I have just assumed that the goo monsters were still trying to protect the Witch of the Waste, even in her powerless state. But that point could have been made more clear.
As to the mother - she is relatively aloof and careless, on the one hand. On the other, when she meets Sophie at Howl's house she had been sent by Suliman, so we can assume that a discussion between the two had taken place. That mother is willing to betray her daughter and her friends is pretty nasty, and the info that she was a stepmother would have been helpful.
As to Suliman's goal... Now that I think a bit more about it, I think she wanted Howl to be less of a wild card. He was not entirely loyal to the court (we're not sure what enemies he was fighting in the various times he was away from home), plus she knew he had given his heart to a demon, and that was bound to have bad consequences. She would rather have an obedient Howl at her side, but a Howl depleted of his powers was still a reasonable alternative to wild Howl.
Hmm, I looked up the book's synopsis, and it seems indeed that the movie changed / eliminated various aspects. And it did make the war a bit confusing - although I suspect that the point was that war was bad and all parties involved should stop it no matter who was who.
Suliman's behavior is confusing indeed. I assumed she just happened to be under the King's command, so she was doing what the king wanted (which was war) - but this does not explain clearly enough her attitude to Howl.
I have also noticed that Miyazaki's movies tend to contain no villains - there is no bad character, instead the various nasty situations arise from mismatched plans or needs, by missing the broad picture, or by genuine mistakes. However, I find this rather interesting and satisfying: it seems to genuinely regard various matters from multiple perspectives. Just as it happens in real life - there are no arch-villains, just people who want or need something that is incompatible with somebody else's needs or wants... You know how it's said that history is written by the victors? I'd say the same about moral values and the rift between right and wrong: on a social scale, it's written by the victorious mentality. On an individual scale, it's written by whatever one-sided perspective gets ahold of us.
So a villain is usually only a villain if we limit our angle.
At least this is how I see things - there are no villains around me, although plenty of discomfort has come to me from other people. It's just that this discomfort comes usually without ill intent, and even when there IS ill intent, it's usually caused by something independent of me (hunger, tiredness, a dying parent, a lost job etc.).
Overall, I do find a lack of villains far from childish.
As to the general cute/funny mood - personally I haven't thought that it diminished the more serious themes of the movie, but I haven't read the book, and a brief plot synopsis wouldn't help here too much.
"Plus you have to remember that the time we spend with him in this movie he is suicidal and hates himself and everything else. That doesn't make for a very pleasant character."
Absolutely. He's in a really dark place, and there's never any light coming out of those places. Depressed people are truly no fun being around - that they don't mean to be like that, and that pushing people away works against them too, only makes the situation more tragic.
Well, seen from that specific angle, sure, I guess.
But I don't think it wanted to be a Mulholland Drive. To me it felt a bit closer to - I don't know, Eco's Foucault's Pendullum, narrative wise. It deals with meaninglessness, which begets bastardized meanings and halfbaked truths. It's weird that in this story there does seem to be a meaning behind everyhing - but it's such a pile of hippy wacko scientological insanity that I'm quite sure it's not meant to be taken as more than a manic episode.
I'm still trying to process what happened in the final act of the film. But it most certainly is not meant to be dreamy logic. It's more like a generalized "fuck this world I'm going fishing" thing...
Ha! No I wasn't aware, thanks a lot for the info! I do wish they had gone along with it...
I've seen something like this before, but in Ridley Scott movies: the background of the story has a story to tell of its own.
This is actually a relatively complex story, with many points of view presented.
First of all, the little girl had little sense of right and wrong - just like any other little child. Even less so in fact, since she had not been subjected to a normal social environment. She had only met her father, everybody else was possibly a ghost - or someone not entirely real anyway. And worse than that, her father had been teaching her that the rest of the populace was dangerous and wanted to harm them - and he was right about that too.
Right and wrong are notions (most) people learn slowly, throughout their childhood and adolescence, they are complex things: you are an agent of your own life, but other people are equally agents of their own lives, and sometimes their choices frustrate you, and you are supposed to respect that. A child's immaturity is not characterized by being unable to cause harm - they can do that, even without superpowers. It's just that they cannot be held responsible for it because *they don't know they've caused harm*. THAT's what they are supposed to learn in their first 18 years of existence, or so.
So she's just too young and fvcked over by life to be a "nice" person.
As to her having personal agency or not, that was not an easy equation either. She had about 4 choices:
- stay hidden, and be deprived of a buttload of life
- pretend to be normal, and be deprived of her natural abilities just to fit in
- become a governmental weapon and having even less normal life than in the first 2 options
- go away with mom, which seemed the most decent, from a personal agency point of view...
Not even the conflict between humans and freaks is a black-and-white issue. Sure we are mostly on the side of the freaks, but we are also given a few glimpses from the other side: a rogue freak kid had destroyed a whole city, and what our hero does to the neighbors is clearly presented as disturbing...
Like others have said, yes this IS a feminist movie - but it's feminist in the way of decent, justified feminism.
It doesn't descend into misandry (man-hating), which is precisely as stupid as misogynism (and Warrior Nun does this). Any type of sexism is silly.
WW is feminist first and foremost because it has a genuinely strong lead, and also because she is not objectified in any way. This feat is particularly remarkable because they also keep her nice, friendly, and beautiful, they even have characters noticing how beautiful she is - yet she's still NOT objectified. So they don't fall into the typical trap of either making the character overly feminine and over-sexed, pushed over and leered at, or rough manly and distant. No, she's thoroughly female, she even exhibits "typically female" attractiveness, kindness, and care (and picks a dress as her urban outfit!), but she's also a well-rounded person, with dreams, desires, attitudes, and a personal perspective on things.
Speaking of well-rounded, I actually had a discussion with my boyfriend about her chest plate. He thought it was a bit over-the-top how the tits stood out. Thing is that I've actually done some fencing in my life, and I know that, for a female, there's simply no other way to protect the breasts. You can't compress them under a flat chest plate because a fighter needs to be able to breathe properly, and you can't just make a big single bulge on the chest to cover both breasts because it would be uncomfortable and partially cover the field of view. So the breasts of the chest plate do stand out, but that's because - well, females have breasts, and in the middle of the chest nonetheless :)
Briefly put, she is presented as a human being - and that's what feminism should be about.
Because they had to undo quickly 3 relatively important points of the immediately previous movie:
Ragnarok: Asgard is not a place, it's the people! And we saved the people so we saved Asgard, yay!
Infinity War: Kills half of the Asgardians in the first 10 minutes
Ragnarok: Thor has found a new way to tap into his power, now he's truly the God of Thunder and doesn't even need his hammer!
Infinity War: Purees Thor off-screen in the first 10 minutes. Then makes a really big deal of him needing his hammer back.
Ragnarok: Hah guess what, Loki was not actually dead! And his relationship with Thor is important, look at them eventually getting along!
Infinity War: Kills Loki in the first 10 minutes.
*eye roll*
(not sure it was precisely 10 minutes or more)
I was also a little annoyed by the BLATANT, SCREAMING OBVIOUSNESS of this movie. For crying out loud, they're nuking cute little bunnies while Joan Baez is chanting about the beauty of nature in the background.
And I also don't believe that we're necessarily heading towards environmental doom - but we still DO have to watch out. It's possible that parts of the world are not as polluted today as they were in the 70's specifically because we stopped ourselves before it was too late, and stuff such as this movie, corny as it may have been, contributed to this change...
Lol!!
Also, I suppose that "dentistry" was a huge school in the Xenomorph universe - with at least 3 branches, "outer jaw", "inner jaw" and "queen jaw with see-through fangs"...
The queen must have popped out the 2 (two) eggs somehow, during the fight in the cargo...
Then they hatched and one facehugger attached itself to Ripley - helping her survive the landing even though her capsule must have been broken (by said facehugger), while the other one was waiting in the shadows until it bumped, seemingly by accident, into a hot beautiful cow...
I have the feeling that Alien 3 wanted to be something different - but it lost its way somewhere along the story.
It has a lot more world building - you have all those convicts wrapped in an oddly functional system, you have their oddly shaped religious attitude, each of them has somewhat distinctive features, their world is a literal prison, and they even find a place for the Alien in their reality: it's the dragon.
It also has a very distinctive tone - moody and ghostly industrial in the beginning, then a bit medieval, it almost reminded me of The Name of the Rose in the first part.
It also has the mysterious doctor/convict, Clemens Who Seems to See Through Things
It almost looked like a whole new angle on the Alien story: Alien 1 had the cold, sweaty body horror and isolation, Alien 2 had the thrills curses and shoot-outs, and Alien 3 COULD have had the apocalyptic/mythical gloom.
...Except it didn't.
The religious angle gets lost entirely along the way - I really would have liked to see how a community of alienated religious freaks react to an unspeakable demon, but after Golic's reaction and containment everything reverts to the already standard "survive xenomorph against all odds" tone.
The moodiness comes back a little in the end, in the shape of labyrinthine entrapment, but we'd been missing it for a good hour by that point.
Clemens dies way, way too soon (remember Hicks? who made it to the end of the movie?). What was the point of his "mysterious past", of his connection to Ripley? All down the drain.
And the convicts' personalities were too thin. The final chase scene was fantastic, but the convicts became too suddenly efficient for my taste. They still freaked out and "improvised" :), but overall they were pretty brave and in synch. I would have liked to see them more dysfunctional...
Maybe Alien 3 tried to bring together elements that did not belong together no matter what, and that's it why it failed to be as unique as it could have been...
I was asking myself the same question :). Judging by his position in the end, I think his spine was broken.
It *is* a bit weird to read zombie boards like this one. Kinda like visiting an old derelict building and trying to remember what each room was designed to do.
Or even better, like browsing through a photo album. That is what these former IMDb boards on moviechat are. People can still leave messages, like I am doing now. But there is a great barrier between scribbling now and the events in the picture. The old users are not moving anymore, they don't receive notifications, the links under their names don't lead anywhere, all dialogues are frozen in a state of understanding, or anger, or fun, or boredom, according to their initial state.
...Is it very weird to be nostalgic about the virtual buildings and alleys and pubs of a text-based electronic universe?...
I am personally sick to death of bad ass men. They think it’s cutting edge but it’s really over saturated and stale. I used to enjoy the occasional bad ass man like John Wayne but when every movie has them it’s no longer refreshing, it’s nauseating.
This is a very atmospheric movie, although not a very scientific one. And it does have several narrative glitches.
The one question I had from the begining was: why would you give this name to the spaceships?! Sure it's metaphoric and all, but seriously, the ancient dude's project had failed, he simply died foolishly mid-flight because he got too close to the Sun and his wings were made from wax. I see at least 3 red flags here.
How motivational could that name possibly be?
I'm just complaining that the name doesn't feel appropriate in-world. For us, the audience, the (two-thirds) foretelling feels quite poetic.
And the same could be said for other scientific or narrative inaccuracies.
... Except for Pinbacker, that is. I actually fast forward through his segment when I rewatch the movie - watching characters being chased by some monster in space is NOT why I want to see THIS movie. I'll go to Alien when I need my chased-by-monstet-in-space fix. Here I am for apocalyptic desperate beautiful doom and life/death/horror/light interpretation of the sun. And for the petting-the-sun ending.
The facts are there, but this interpretation is oddly skewed.
She didn't lack self-control, she had spent her whole youth exercising self-control for a dream (hers? her parents'?). And all for nought. My impression was that she was - maybe not quite suicidal, but at the end of her rope for sure.
Imagine training for 16 years to be an artist, together with a bunch of other equally talented kids, fighting skill against skill in a dog-eat-dog competition for social toddlers, and then being kicked out of that life together with 90% of them.
She had not wanted to work in a cafe, she had not wanted to live a sleep-work-sleep life. She could not give a flying frig about the cafe, the job was merely mundane survival to her, which was something she just didn't value enough. She never struck me as someone who cared about simply being alive.
Also, she was probably in Berlin because she needed money, and waiting tables in Germany pays better than a similar job in Spain.
She wasn't dreaming to be big, her dreams had died after leaving the Conservatory. Even then, she had probably dreamt to be big because that was the only way to survive as an artist - anyone less than big is doomed, in a universe of fierce competition.
Also, since she had spent her youth dreading her peers and practising a lonely art, she was probably starved of human connection - and also slightly unskilled in forming it.
So she went with those guys for two reasons: her sense of self-preservation was quite low (because she didn't value her life), and she was offered some human connection out of the blue. Remember, she was in a night club at 4 o'clock by herself.
And then, after passively falling down the rabbit hole, at some point we start to see her choosing "fight" in several flight-or-fight scenarios. Of course, now she was fighting for something else. And she proves to be an uncomfortably clear-headed fighter - which must have been something else she had learnt in the oddly savage Conservatory...
Yeah, I totally had to remind myself about that several times! Like the moment when she's crying in the end, and I was thinking after a while "come on enough of that, we got the idea!". Then I rembered that it was one single take, so of course she'd be crying for quite a while, people don't normally squirt a few tears and move on that fast. It was just that I was used with the rhythm of "normal" movies...
This is quite a goos explanation of her motivation, thanks! Someone before was talking about her "illusion of grandeur", but that's a radical (albeit interesting) misreading of her behavior. She doesn't think she can achieve anything - on the contrary, she's at the end of her rope and doesn't really care about future or safety. She's wasted 16 years of her life only to end up working in a cafe, and she's too young to absorb the punch constructively.
She's also not particularly prone to loving her peers, so her falling into criminality is not that hard to believe...