Day 12: A Brief Look Into Relationships

Friday, April 29, 2011

DAY 12, MOVIE 1:

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), directed by Wes Anderson. Every once in a while there comes a film that I didn’t really care for the first time I saw it, but as time went by I appreciated it more and more. The Royal Tenenbaums is one of those movies. The first time I saw it, I thought the premise was intriguing, but I thought the acting (with the exception of Gene Hackman) was rather stale. The movie is about three child prodigies, whose heydays have passed in their adult lives, and all move back home. Meanwhile, their estranged father tries to get back into their lives by pretending to have stomach cancer. Every time I watch this movie, I notice a little more in at least one of the performance. Little by little I understand why so many see this as Wes Anderson’s masterpiece. In one way or another, every character has been hurt by another character, and they all try so hard to let that hurt show on the surface. And then they all try to deal with that hurt in their own way, all on their own. The scene that resonates most with me is when Luke Wilson’s character attempts suicide by slitting his wrists. The scene is so magnificently performed, shot, and edited, that I can’t help but feel emotionally involved with the scene. The color scheme of the scene is much bluer and darker than the rest of movie, which has a lot of warm colors. So the sudden transition in the look adds the right amount of intensity. And when Luke Wilson says, “I’m going to kill myself tomorrow,” a reference to Louis Malle’s The Fire Within, it’s just heart wrenching. But the touch that always gets me is that brief montage before he slits his wrists. Those quick shots of his childhood, of his hawk freely flying away, and of the woman he loves shown right before he tries to take his own life are a beautiful display of looking into the mind of a broken man.

DAY 12, MOVIE 2:

The Social Network (2010), directed by David Fincher. You may want to get used to reading about this movie, because I’ll be watching it a lot during this year. Since I only just covered this movie yesterday, I’ll be brief this time. Tonight I watched this movie with a friend who hadn’t seen it before, and he loved it. He even pointed out a few of his own interpretations, which I found to be intriguing. Specifically the boat race scene set to the music of In the Hall of the Mountain King. I had always seen that sequence as metaphorically showing the twins’ relationship to Zuckerberg, and their pursuit of claiming the Facebook as their own, but I could never quite put my thoughts into the exact words I wanted. My friend summed it perfectly, saying “I see that scene as showing that they were losing from the start.” Another thing he pointed out was how the Zuckerberg and Sean Parker characters were different from each other, in that Zuckerberg has a conscience. During the club scene, Zuckerberg asks Parker if he ever thinks about the girl he loved in high school, and Parker simply says “no.” And then at the very end, we see Zuckerberg can not forget about the girl who dumped him at the beginning of the movie, and is sorry for the way he treated her. For those of you who have seen the movie, you know how David Fincher was able to perfectly show this visually, without saying a single word.