![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Mar. 29th, 2005 02:21 pmHappy birthday to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jacqui!
I just watched The Saddest Music in the World, and was disappointed because I kind of hated it. The things I disliked about it are the director's fault, and from watching bits of the short films that are included on the DVD, I can tell it's not just this story (though the deliriously homoerotic Sissy Boy Slap Party is entertaining, and Sombre Dolorosa is amusingly bizarre).
His visual style is very cluttered. It's supposed to be reminiscent of the 1930s and earlier silent film, but no film I've seen from that period (and I've seen plenty) was shot so chaotically. So the film has some evocative images... cool ideas that I think work really well as stills... but they aren't representative of the work as a whole. It's like he tried to fit everything he could into any given frame... or like he didn't make enough choices or the right choices... or all of the above. I also hated what I saw of his earlier work, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. The last movie I recall hating this way and for these reasons was Todd Haynes's Poison, which is at least visually organized. But I hated it because it was pretentious as hell, in a Look At Me I'm An Auteur kind of way.
Anyway, I had been looking forward to seeing Saddest Music from the time I first heard about it almost a year ago. It has moments, it has images, but it doesn't live up to its promise, especially not the promise of Kazuo Ishiguro's (sigh!) darkly comedic script. All the notes are there but the director doesn't hit many of them.
jacqui!I just watched The Saddest Music in the World, and was disappointed because I kind of hated it. The things I disliked about it are the director's fault, and from watching bits of the short films that are included on the DVD, I can tell it's not just this story (though the deliriously homoerotic Sissy Boy Slap Party is entertaining, and Sombre Dolorosa is amusingly bizarre).
His visual style is very cluttered. It's supposed to be reminiscent of the 1930s and earlier silent film, but no film I've seen from that period (and I've seen plenty) was shot so chaotically. So the film has some evocative images... cool ideas that I think work really well as stills... but they aren't representative of the work as a whole. It's like he tried to fit everything he could into any given frame... or like he didn't make enough choices or the right choices... or all of the above. I also hated what I saw of his earlier work, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. The last movie I recall hating this way and for these reasons was Todd Haynes's Poison, which is at least visually organized. But I hated it because it was pretentious as hell, in a Look At Me I'm An Auteur kind of way.
Anyway, I had been looking forward to seeing Saddest Music from the time I first heard about it almost a year ago. It has moments, it has images, but it doesn't live up to its promise, especially not the promise of Kazuo Ishiguro's (sigh!) darkly comedic script. All the notes are there but the director doesn't hit many of them.
