The first time I watched it, I was completely moved by the image quality and quirky atmosphere, and I was immersed in the high-speed flow and extremely impactful scenes. The film has a huge amount of information, and hastily explained the settings continuously. But ignore the focus and the mystery itself and focus on the atmosphere and emotions, and you will have more fun. This is not a traditional suspense film that allows the audience to have all the information far beyond the character and then calmly overlook the protagonist's every move, but to let people be in it and experience the weird world of Los Angeles together with the protagonist's perspective and mood. When you are really immersed in it, you will understand many things.
After searching the details of the film for the second time, I thought of another film "Burning" which was also the main competition in Cannes in 2018. It's all about a low-level man looking for a woman who is missing and in love. In the process of exploring, there are constantly unpredictable and very strange mysteries. Both of these two films finally explained explicitly or implicitly that the women who could not be desired by the waste woods finally took the initiative to surrender to the upper-class rich. More importantly, the two films both show the male protagonist's way of resisting or venting only-obscenity. It's just that Li Cangdong has a more complete presentation for this action because Liu Yaren is a writer who is eager to create. At the end of the movie, he imagined that he stabbed the upper class with a knife and it was also subjectively constructed.
Garfield in this movie is a completely delusional patient who is not self-conscious of his hysteria. The director didn't say it directly, but blurred the boundary between reality and reality, and went directly to Cheng Xian's mental activity. In the latter part of the film, there were frequent bizarre murders and convulsions in the characters. I was excited while realizing that this was all nonsense.
Just as the sudden disappearance of the heroine in "Burning" made the hero inconceivable, Garfield was more suspicious of the empty house next to the night. The landlord’s explanation seems to be hiding something deliberately. But at the end, there is a detail. When the male host faces a forced eviction order from the police and the landlord at the door because of the rent arrears for too long, it is also carried out at night, and the landlord also very strongly instructs Garfield to move out immediately. The police on the side offered to give him another day. . So it is very possible that the hostess really moved out overnight because of the rent, and then sold her body to rely on the rich. It's all absurd and meaningless to see the male protagonist struggling to chase the whole movie in this way. Further psychological analysis of the male protagonist, in fact, we have already seen from the composition analysis that the dog killer that appears repeatedly in the film is the male protagonist. From a psychological point of view, the male protagonist has several times fantasized about constantly barking at women. Of oppression. The murdered dog barking desperately before death became a source of subconscious fear of the male protagonist.
Regarding the subject of the film, I thought about it for a long time. This set of his exploration process is not like "Burning", which focuses on reflecting the real society of South Korea and discussing the problem of the gap between the rich and the poor in South Korea. Director Lee Changdong is paying attention to the characters like the male protagonist with humanistic feelings. But here it feels the opposite. The director only uses the male protagonist's morbid brain as a window, and the core is to create a dreamlike, weird and confused world. But as the main competition film in Cannes, I think it must not be limited to this, and I tried to draw a line of expression.
The film continues to show the various media of contemporary society. Games, advertisements, music, magazines, movies, TV. A friend of the male protagonist said when he played Super Mario at home: "Our generation is addicted to video games, passwords, aliens... A hundred years ago, any idiot could do it. Wandering in the woods, picking up a stone at will, and discovering incomparable things. That era is over. The confusion that made everything seem extraordinary no longer exists. We long for mystery, because the mystery has disappeared."
Various popular cultures infiltrate and invade everyone's life, and inevitably occupy a dominant position in our spiritual world. The cartoonist who is more neurotic than the male protagonist in the film puts forward a variety of absurd conspiracy theories, but it is true that it is true that the design of the advertisements is implicitly sexual and pornographic. In the final analysis, the information we receive is developed by others. After calculation, we conduct psychological and demand research on the audience, and then accurately deliver it to the individual. The media's subtle influence on people and even thought control are true. The control of the media is all upper levels of society. They screen information and give some cultural value to the lower level, and the things they endow have become an important part of the real life of the lower level. These are all placed on the old man in the movie, and the director must let the hero smash him to death.
Combined with the current big data, the intelligent push of the media. The worries of the seemingly crazy cartoonist do not seem to be all fallacies. In "A Madman's Diary", Lu Xun uses the madman's mad language to point out a certain real temperament in society from seemingly irrational thoughts. This movie is the same. It is very pleasant to repeat my first time watching this film. People are curious about the unknown and have expectations for the unpredictable. In reality, we are bored with the life of repeating the rules and hate things that are too clear. Fortunately, some people use movies to construct the spiritual world and develop imagination from books. However, in the current situation, most people are attracted by the Internet, and what it provides is often nipple pleasure that has no nutritional connotations. At the same time, the information age has stifled people's imagination of blankness.
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