Nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia.
If anything, Hollywood has boiled that concept down to a science over the past few years, as this film is basically a summary of everything that’s wrong with the industry in a neat, 148 minute package.
It thinks it’s meta and self-aware by pointing out how cynical and cheap franchise filmmaking is.
That might sound similar set-up as 22 Jump Street, but this film proceeds to be cheap and cynical itself without saying anything substantial beyond its own set up, so it embraces what it’s trying to criticize.
Everything in this movie is structured as an excuse to show stuff you’ve seen before, there are little to no original concepts or ideas that push the franchise in an interesting direction.
It’s mostly a rehash of the first film (mixed with some stuff from Reloaded and Revolutions in the second half), except the action isn’t nearly as good, it’s more predictable and convenient, the performances are nowhere near as memorable (that’s what you get from replacing your 2 best actors), it looks uglier and more synthetic, the pacing isn’t as tight, and it’s a lot more dull because of how much it overexplains itself.
It also ditches the cyberpunk aesthetic, and replaces it with something a lot more bland and boring, stripping the franchise from a lot of its personality.
It’s honestly quite an accomplishment when you think about it: the original is one of the best, most successful, big budget films ever made that still maintained a strong artistic and alternative impulse.
This, on the other hand, couldn’t be any more lowest common denominator if it tried to.
It’s a parody of itself and modern blockbuster filmmaking.
I suppose that was Lana Wachowski’s goal to some extent, but it isn’t very compelling to watch.
3/10
"2046" might suffer from its episodic structure and incoherent development, but aesthetically, it's by far Wong Kar-Wai's finest achievement. It shares the same sense of longing of "In The Mood for Love", but at the same time, serves in many ways as its polar opposite. Instead of focusing on two characters and the obsessive repetition of the same actions, images, and sounds, this time we explore the personality of four different women through a relatively wider sonic and visual palette. The beauty of platonic love is replaced by a compulsive need for sex and human contact, as if Chow Mo-wan is trying to repress the moral restraint that set him and Su Li-zhen apart. He became some kind of playboy, but still keeps missing all the important trains in his life. He then pours his desires and frustrations into an erotic sci-fi series called "2046", where all the women he met are depicted as "androids".
The film bothers to visually show us the world of Chow's stories, with simple yet highly evocative vintage sci-fi sets and beautiful costumes. After the premise, you would expect the two realities to reflect each others. However, they seemed to belong to two completely different films. I wonder if Wong Kar-Wai had shot those sci-fi scenes for some other purpose and tried to forcefully fit them into an "In The Mood for Love" sequel. Other than sharing the same actors, there is close no relation to events in Chow's life.
What's inside a child's head? A whole universe, potentially. Perhaps it would be better to take an iron and smooth out every wrinkle in his brain, preventing him from starting to overflow and become the King of the Pirates.
The exaggeration made cartoon. The equivalent of a screaming gang of kids sticking your head into a pot and flapping it with a spoon. Everything is over the top, from the dialogues to the situations to the images themselves that change style without warning or sense from 3D to the South Park's cutout to directly animate the manga tables. When they go too far and the normal chaos becomes even more chaotic are the characters themselves who apologize to the animators and give themselves a demeanor. An experiment and a flex by Gainax to demonstrate the unexpressed potential of animation (it was 2000 but still applies), successful.
The plot is crushed by the crazy action and his limbs lie scattered between the episodes: you will have time to understand, first you have to go crazy. The series is very good at giving you all the pieces only in the end and they are so many and so crazy taken individually that only after days you can put them together in a coherent puzzle. Looking at it a second time, in addition to the quotes to Monkey Punch, Evangelion and others that you didn't even have time to grasp before to keep up with the events, you realize how many clarifying details are scattered everywhere now that you understand where it is headed. To the point of making you realize that it was all quite clear from the beginning and you are the lazy one, you need to explain it otherwise you don't understand. But life has no explanations, the series seems to mean, only retrospectives. Especially as children.
Children who keep all the infinite possibilities of the future unexpressed and are transforming themselves, mind and body, to resemble at least one of these, chosen by indulging in the illusion of always the same days in which time seems to stand still and nothing extraordinary happens. Even when the extraordinary storms into your life and you find yourself with a baseball bat on top of a building to fend off a free-falling satellite over the city. Because as a child everything is new in the space of that day, then it is immediately taken for granted that it will reappear the next day, so it doesn't take much to learn how to pilot a robot coming from the edges of the universe. This at least until reality teaches you that there is no everyday life in the extraordinary and you feel nostalgia for the pain inflicted by that electric bass that hit you in the forehead, starting the craziest experience of your life and which now hasn't left even a bump.
But we were saying, transformation, from child to teenager, which unfortunately is uncontrollable both inside and outside. And here come in the mind things like the first sexual desires or the homicidal instincts against parents, unprecedented very strong emotions accumulate and overload the body with hormones until they are too many to contain in that slim 12-year-old physique and are forced to overflow in growths, usually pimples, but this is an anime so horns and cat ears are also valid, which refer to other parts of the body that are also in transformation. An uncontrollable anarchy that overturns all expectations of adults, who have extinguished that immense creative and evocative power which survives weakly in them or who have just refused to take it back by bartering it for their controlled lives. Adults who become the antagonists of a child when he refuses their stability and chooses to keep the chaos for a while longer, under the illusion of being able to tame him and become an adult-child hybrid: for adults there is therefore no choice but becoming alien to their troubled children and plotting for their brain flattening.
In fact, what the series wants to talk about is the conflict with the parents, passive, inept, absent and probably dead, from which the children will have to emancipate themselves by finding a way to be better than them and to understand that it still makes sense to have the courage to "swing the bat hoping for a home-run" when every choice seems irrelevant. And everyone tries to do it (at least those for whom it is not too late already) but in a too radical way: childhood idols that have abandoned you are disowned and replaced without knowing that the new ones will too, the divorce of your parents comes possibly averted by a twisted plan of school plays that is not worth the sincerity of a cathartic cry, you play adult but you are too used to sugar and hate the taste of the sourest drinks, you try it with older girls and you don't understand just everything they tell you but it seems that nevertheless it all works before making a fool of you in a childish cry which is a liberation and the admitting of your limits. Because you can have the whole universe in your head and you may be one step away from leaving for its borders, but you are still only a child, and until you understand that you cannot overdo it you will never start growing.
Only 6 episodes, foolishly cool. And as if that wasn't enough, thepillows' alternative rock soundtrack deserves to be heard even after (or without) seeing the series.
WOW this is one epic racing movie! I found this movie by accident a few hours ago and i have to say that this is one of the best racing movies i have ever seen!
The animation is beautiful. I can see that those 7(!) years in production have certainly paid off. Its over the top, realistically impossible and i love it! This is a movie that has to be watched at a big screen tv and at 1080P. Anything else will be an insult to this beautiful movie that deserves nothing else.
Considering that this movie was in production for 7 years i feel that the story could have been better. Most likely most of those 7 years were spent on animating the movie. The movie relies very heavily on the animation and not the story. Also there are a few cliché characters in the movie, but they are not that annoying. All in all the animation really is really the one thing that carries this movie forward, which is why i gave it a perfect 10.
A few years back i saw the movie Speed Racer and although there are some similarities with that movie this one is nothing like it. Its easy a hundreds times better. Whoever likes fast cars, explosions and anime should watch this movie. You won't regret it.
