deonsdomain

[deonsdomain]

[deonsdomain]

The Gaze

The gaze is what seemingly connects all of us. By that, I mean all of us gaze upon others with eyes that observe one another through pre-conditioned social norms and defiances of said cultural norms. With the gaze, we begin to understand we interact with the world, more importantly, other people around us. The gaze is a more prolonged viewing of something or someone instead of a glance. Looking at someone holds grounds for life-changing possibilities since we finally see someone for the first time looking beyond the surface. Gazing at someone has never been easier with the creation of social media. I can get on TikTok right now and scroll endlessly, finding anything I could ever want. There is an expectation of having a perfected sense of self with social media. The typical counter to this self-prescribed notion of self perfected sense is that one should not participate if one is not ready for criticisms of themselves. It feeds into the ouroboros that we have been forced into and created. It is a never-ending cycle of toxic positivity, unbearable nihilism, and horrible objectification of everyone you’ve ever thought about. Though, we all know that that isn't the case with all of social media. We have all found our niches and cliques, allowing us to be ourselves. Being accepted and seen keeps us coming back to social media.

A personal example is that through TikTok, I started getting gym motivational posts and thought nothing of it until I began to want to go myself. I eventually started to post my own gym stories, and before I knew it, I had made some friends from this, which strengthened my need to keep going because of the visual progress I was making. In a way, I was objectifying myself for the visual pleasures of others, but at the same time, I wanted to be seen by others for something other than my body. It was a weird contradictory example of life wherein I posted my body for pleasure. Still, I was also interacting with a community that motivated me to keep going and better myself.

I think this speaks to the male and female gaze. Both are different. While being a film student, I constantly watched films from all around the world and from different kinds of directors. My professor made it a priority to get underheard voices seen in this class. We watched two films to counter the male and female gaze in this class. We watched American Honey, a film directed by Andrea Arnold, a female filmmaker whose work tells stories of women whose voice might not be heard or is overshadowed by someone else. Arnold’s work is genuine empathy for the women in her stories and the cold, harsh reality they live in. At the same time, the women might find some comradery with their group of friends, that never lasts long. Arnold’s work contains sex scenes, but they are less for the erotic visual pleasure of an audience but a sight into the character’s headspace. The act of sex in Arnold’s films is important as they become important to the character.

We then watched Superbad, where the character of Seth (Jonah Hill) is to have sex with his high school crush, played by Emma Stone. Emma Stone’s character in Superbad is an object of desire for Seth as we see him look up and down her body. Superbad attempts to give some characterization to Stone’s character by having her explain to Seth that she and she are good friends, but as she is about to get to the point of her monologue, she is cracked in the head by a drunk Seth as he stumbles onto her falling asleep. Not to mention another film like American Pie, where the male character’s whole purpose is to have sex before the end of the year because that's when they become real men. They eventually wind up with different women from all kinds of backgrounds through shenanigans. Some of the boys may have started with the wrong intentions but warm up to their eventual crushes by the end of the story. When the characters are denied sex, they are upset, and by proxy, the audience is supposed to root for the young boys in the “quest” for this.

To simplify, watch a female director vs. a male director. There is a difference. Even when films deal with darker subject matters like death and abuse, a film like American Psycho, whose character Patrick Batemen has been co-opted into internet theory of chad and beta males by appreciating what we know to be the terrible qualities of Batemen. This perspective or gaze of irony allows for the negative traits of a character like Lou Bloom from Nightcrawler to be viewed as an appropriate anti-hero for young men to admire. While the directors are telling us not to like these people beyond the scope of being a passive viewer enjoying the filmmaking, the internet has instead become the active viewer by taking these characters out of their intended gazes of disgust or displeasure and has morbidly flipped the intentions into a warped amalgamation of the worst character traits into a product only the internet could produce.

The videos have been great resources to prove this “theory” to be true in our observable every day. Look at the gross-out comedies from the early 2000s where a conventionally attractive person gets with the main character despite all of his red flags. In turn, we’re supposed to think that this is good or beneficial for both characters, and everything turns out great for them in the end. The video from The Take is my favorite, with so many different resources being compiled in the video from James Bond to Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Showing these videos help identify the difference between the gazes and the intentions of the female gaze. Those intentions are: the roles of the unconscious and desire in viewing practices, the role of looking in the formation of the human subject or the self, and the ways looking is always a relational activity, i.e., being looking at/looking at someone.

I’ve always found the theories of gazing exciting and necessary to interpret the world. The world is complex, full of interesting people and their stories, but how we tell those stories changes the actual weight of said stories. Have you ever had a great story but messed up the delivery? That is Hollywood and the performative art industries, as they have yet to do their part to tell the stories of the otherized. While we have made some progress, the notion of progress is only defined by those who tell the stories. Frankly, I’d rather not have corporations determine the progress of many transgressive individuals who have been commodified to sell late-stage capitalistic dreams of progress.

[deonsdomain]

The Gaze

The gaze is what seemingly connects all of us. By that, I mean all of us gaze upon others with eyes that observe one another through pre-conditioned social norms and defiances of said cultural norms. With the gaze, we begin to understand we interact with the world, more importantly, other people around us. The gaze is a more prolonged viewing of something or someone instead of a glance. Looking at someone holds grounds for life-changing possibilities since we finally see someone for the first time looking beyond the surface. Gazing at someone has never been easier with the creation of social media. I can get on TikTok right now and scroll endlessly, finding anything I could ever want. There is an expectation of having a perfected sense of self with social media. The typical counter to this self-prescribed notion of self perfected sense is that one should not participate if one is not ready for criticisms of themselves. It feeds into the ouroboros that we have been forced into and created. It is a never-ending cycle of toxic positivity, unbearable nihilism, and horrible objectification of everyone you’ve ever thought about. Though, we all know that that isn't the case with all of social media. We have all found our niches and cliques, allowing us to be ourselves. Being accepted and seen keeps us coming back to social media.

A personal example is that through TikTok, I started getting gym motivational posts and thought nothing of it until I began to want to go myself. I eventually started to post my own gym stories, and before I knew it, I had made some friends from this, which strengthened my need to keep going because of the visual progress I was making. In a way, I was objectifying myself for the visual pleasures of others, but at the same time, I wanted to be seen by others for something other than my body. It was a weird contradictory example of life wherein I posted my body for pleasure. Still, I was also interacting with a community that motivated me to keep going and better myself.

I think this speaks to the male and female gaze. Both are different. While being a film student, I constantly watched films from all around the world and from different kinds of directors. My professor made it a priority to get underheard voices seen in this class. We watched two films to counter the male and female gaze in this class. We watched American Honey, a film directed by Andrea Arnold, a female filmmaker whose work tells stories of women whose voice might not be heard or is overshadowed by someone else. Arnold’s work is genuine empathy for the women in her stories and the cold, harsh reality they live in. At the same time, the women might find some comradery with their group of friends, that never lasts long. Arnold’s work contains sex scenes, but they are less for the erotic visual pleasure of an audience but a sight into the character’s headspace. The act of sex in Arnold’s films is important as they become important to the character.

We then watched Superbad, where the character of Seth (Jonah Hill) is to have sex with his high school crush, played by Emma Stone. Emma Stone’s character in Superbad is an object of desire for Seth as we see him look up and down her body. Superbad attempts to give some characterization to Stone’s character by having her explain to Seth that she and she are good friends, but as she is about to get to the point of her monologue, she is cracked in the head by a drunk Seth as he stumbles onto her falling asleep. Not to mention another film like American Pie, where the male character’s whole purpose is to have sex before the end of the year because that's when they become real men. They eventually wind up with different women from all kinds of backgrounds through shenanigans. Some of the boys may have started with the wrong intentions but warm up to their eventual crushes by the end of the story. When the characters are denied sex, they are upset, and by proxy, the audience is supposed to root for the young boys in the “quest” for this.

To simplify, watch a female director vs. a male director. There is a difference. Even when films deal with darker subject matters like death and abuse, a film like American Psycho, whose character Patrick Batemen has been co-opted into internet theory of chad and beta males by appreciating what we know to be the terrible qualities of Batemen. This perspective or gaze of irony allows for the negative traits of a character like Lou Bloom from Nightcrawler to be viewed as an appropriate anti-hero for young men to admire. While the directors are telling us not to like these people beyond the scope of being a passive viewer enjoying the filmmaking, the internet has instead become the active viewer by taking these characters out of their intended gazes of disgust or displeasure and has morbidly flipped the intentions into a warped amalgamation of the worst character traits into a product only the internet could produce.

The videos have been great resources to prove this “theory” to be true in our observable every day. Look at the gross-out comedies from the early 2000s where a conventionally attractive person gets with the main character despite all of his red flags. In turn, we’re supposed to think that this is good or beneficial for both characters, and everything turns out great for them in the end. The video from The Take is my favorite, with so many different resources being compiled in the video from James Bond to Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Showing these videos help identify the difference between the gazes and the intentions of the female gaze. Those intentions are: the roles of the unconscious and desire in viewing practices, the role of looking in the formation of the human subject or the self, and the ways looking is always a relational activity, i.e., being looking at/looking at someone.

I’ve always found the theories of gazing exciting and necessary to interpret the world. The world is complex, full of interesting people and their stories, but how we tell those stories changes the actual weight of said stories. Have you ever had a great story but messed up the delivery? That is Hollywood and the performative art industries, as they have yet to do their part to tell the stories of the otherized. While we have made some progress, the notion of progress is only defined by those who tell the stories. Frankly, I’d rather not have corporations determine the progress of many transgressive individuals who have been commodified to sell late-stage capitalistic dreams of progress.

[deonsdomain]

Come To Life - Otherwise Known as the Song that Kept Me Going

A song like Come to Life could easily be an overly ambitious piece that falters in delivery with corny writing. Instead, it’s a song about the desire to change your life and wishing for something new. It is about Kanye wishing he listened to Kim more and his emotions about her being absent from his life, to have that person who also had dreams like you. Kanye expresses in the song his fear of dying alone without her by his side. Kanye’s numbness, and his silver lining holds him together during the lifelong nights when he peeks into the darkness, wishing for a life different from his. The song, in a nutshell, is about the importance of his wife and children in his life, making his life what it is, and his fear of losing them.

“Here go all your problems again (I thank God) Three, two, one, you’re pinned (I thank God)

Uncle now he back in the pen' (Hallelujah)

Auntie shut down again

Did she finally come to life? (Thank you, Jesus)

Ever wish you had another life?

Ever wish you had another life?

Ever wish you had another life?”

I think about a lot of the people in my life suffering from depression and myself. People affected by the criminal justice system and it’s crooked in America preying on lower-income areas with marginalization redlining and building freeways through neighborhoods separating them from the community. American life in the broader lens is a depressing existence once you become aware of the inhumanities occurring all the time because of the system built to demolish possibilities for those who weren’t even aware of such mechanisms taking place. Being pinned by depression or being pinned by the prison system, what’s the difference if the end result is the loss of innocence, life, happiness, or family? Wishing I had another life is something I have all the time. Sometimes I would sit in my car after a long day at my old job and look at the polluted night sky wishing for something else. I would think about how I have wasted years of my life doing nothing because of the lazy characteristics I built along the way. I would wish time and time again that something would happen to change my life, that a cure-all would fall into my lap because, at the core of my character, I am lazy. I wanted so much to be a better person and do more for people around me, but my ineptitude prevented such progression. I have been trying to accept failure as part of my life, but it gets hard when all your life you have been led to believe you’re a special individual in elementary school, but when thrown into the later grades with people who are smarter, funnier, more skilled, in essence, better than you; you begin to realize that you’re the fraud and have been propped up your entire life that you are beyond your years when in reality you’re years behind. I know it’s not true in my heart of hearts, but it becomes hard when you have crystallized this mirth in your character.

“Don't you wish the night would go numb?

I've been feelin' low for so long

I ain't had a high in so long

I been in the dark for so long

Night is always darkest 'fore the dawn

Gotta make my mark 'fore I'm gone

I don't wanna die alone

I don't wanna die alone

I get mad when she gone

Mad when she home

Sad when she gone

Mad when she home

Sad when she gone (Loosen right now, the spirit that wants to run)

Floatin' on a silver lining (In the name of Jesus)

Yeah, you know where to find me, ridin' on a silver lining

And my God won't deny me, tell the Devil, "Get behind me."

And all the stars are aligned, lift me up every time

You know exactly where to find me”

Wishing the nights to go numb is what I do all the time. At night when the end of the best days of your life come, you begin to wish you could go back and relive it. Sometimes the night marks the end of the great day and the start of the worst tomorrow. It could be mindsets, or it could be your depression. My depression weighs in on me all the time. I think about how each night I wasted my day doing nothing or not perfecting my craft. I struggle to realize that failure is normal. I struggle to deal with that seasonal depression. The verse where Kanye describes the night as always darkest before the dawn refers to David Psalm 30:5

“For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

Kanye West on fire for his third listening party of DONDA in Chicago, 2021.

That verse is eye-opening that my pain is temporary and that there are people who love me for me, for all my flaws, for my shaper edges, for what I defined as my weaknesses they despite my self-assured rationalizations - that I am deserving of love and the passion of life.

Kanye wanting to make his mark on the world is exactly how I feel. Perfection has defined my expectations. Each time I do something, I want to do it perfectly and make it the end all be all of whatever I am writing about or making. I don’t want to settle as a mediocre artist. I cannot live with being good. I would die if I were accepted as a great artist. I would disappear if I became synonymous with excellence. I only find joy in perfection. Perfection is where I am making my mark in my field, and I have yet to do so. It becomes this cycle of self-abuse wherein I tell myself I am not good enough and that no one will like what I do or that they’re lying to me to preserve my feelings. Some days it feels more true than others. It’s a weird dichotomy because my rational self is telling me that the irrational self is wrong, and I can hear the rational voice. Still, the lingering sludge makes it hard to accept what I am good at, my achievements, or what I am capable of accomplishing.

Not wanting to die alone is a fear of mine. When I would have the worst bouts of depression, I would accept that it is okay that I die alone since we all die alone. In a cold scientific sense, we all die alone. We don’t take our loved ones with us on the journey afterlife, whatever it may be. We are not cold-hearted scientists. We are human beings with a complicated structure called emotions inside all of us. We want to be surrounded by loved ones by the end of our life it’s natural. Depression has this awful serpentigenous way of telling you it’s okay if you die alone. I don’t want to die alone, but I keep thinking that it wouldn’t be the worst way to end my story if I did. My story is what I choose it to be, but my depression takes over my writing and makes it harder to live.

Riding on the silver lining is what keeps Kanye going. Kanye finding that he is lifting himself from the cavern of despair floating into the daylight. The most accurate visualization I think about is when the sunshine breaks through a rainy day and shines on you. For a brief moment, you feel the warmth of the sun on your skin. Those days make me the happiest. Kanye may have God to help him find his silver lining, but I have my family.

“Did those ideas ever really come to life?

Make it all come to life.

Make it all come to life

Prayin' for a change in your life

Well, maybe it's gon' come tonight.”

Kanye touches Kim’s dreams, if she did make them come true and if she wished she had another life. It further reiterates that the point of the song is to make your dreams come to life. In this case, to make your significant other’s dreams come to reality as well because your dreams should be theirs too and vice versa.

We all secretly wish that things would magically change. Some of us pray to God for that change to happen when it’s most convenient to us. Others may look for other ways to wish for it to happen. Either way, Kanye gives hope that those dreams could come to life tonight.

“Sadness settin' in again

Three, two, one, you're pinned

Uncle right back in the pen'

Tell me how auntie been

Took your thoughts and penciled 'em in

Should've wrote 'em down in pen

And maybe they'll come to life

And maybe they'll come to life

Sadness settin' in again

Three, two, one, you're pinned

Uncle right back to the pen'

Tell me how auntie been

Thoughts, you had penciled 'em in

Probably should've wrote 'em in pen

And maybe they'll come to life

They could finally come to life

They could finally come to life.”

Sadness settling in again is the cyclical route that depression takes on people who suffer from it. There are days where life is utterly miserable and others where life couldn’t be better no matter the situation. Kanye being open about his bi-polar and depression diagnosis and being a thematic element of his previous albums Ye it ties appropriately to a song like Come to Life.

The line referring to penciling in your dreams instead of writing them down in pen is the common truth that you can’t erase marks made by a pen. Kanye is telling people to try and do that with their passions to fully involve themselves in what makes them happy, and maybe they’ll come to life. It’s a scary line when I think about it. Just now writing this, I think about the anxiety gnawing at my stomach, thinking about how others will judge what I say or point out that I missed something as plain as the nose on my face. I’m taking that advice by writing this and trying to accept the feedback, good and bad.

While I haven’t spoken much about the instrumental on this song, here is where it truly shines. Using the piano chord to transition is so beautiful I cry almost every time I hear it. It feels like for a brief moment, I am not suffering from my sadness. I feel like I can really do anything. I feel the warmth of life glistening on my skin. Moments like this are why I listen to Kanye - there is no recreating music like this.

“You know where to find me, they cannot define me

So they crucify me, how so fazed when I leave?

Come and purify me, come and sanctify me

You the air that I breathe, the ultra-ultralight beam

Brought a gift to Northie, all she want was Nikes

This is not about me, God is still alive, so I'm free

Floatin' on a silver lining, floatin' on a silver lining

So when I'm free, I'm free.”

Kanye refers to his song Ultra Light Beams from The Life of Pablo, which is another song about the power of love, religion, and passions. North West being interested in Nike brings Kanye to a crossroads as he has had a very public falling out with Nike with his YEEZY line tied to Adidas, which is the main competitor to Nike. Coupled with that, Drake is one of Nike’s biggest spokespersons and the drama surrounding Kanye and Drake today only amplifies the complicated cocktail of emotions swirling around Kanye’s psyche. Kanye comes to accept his daughter’s interest in Nike and doesn’t want his ego or business pursuits to get in the way of his love for his family. Any good parent wants to see their child flourish, and Kanye, like any good dad, wants the same for his daughter.

When Kanye is saying he is floating on his silver lining and proclaiming that he is finally free, it uplifts my spirits for a second. Life is challenging most of the time, and when you have struggled time and time again with no fruits of your labor, it makes you question what you’re even doing it all for. Kanye wants us to think about the silver lining in every situation to find the good in the bad. That message is a hard one to actualize since it becomes routine for me to be a pessimist and find the worst in everything, so if things turn sour, I’m not caught off guard, but living like that prevents me from enjoying the positives that life has to offer. My life for all the shit I’ve been through has been a good one, and I have a lot to appreciate.

DONDA is one of my favorite albums of 2021. Kanye being so close to his mom and losing her, with this album being a eulogy for her highlighting how far he’s come because of her sacrifices, makes me think of my mom. It’s no lie that I am a momma’s boy, but that’s because she has been through so much for me. My mom is that person I look up to. She may not know it, but she is my hero. She is someone I want to be. My mom has always been in my corner, fighting for me and being there for me when I’ve been at my lowest. There hasn’t been anyone like that in my life who understands my depression like my mom. I love my mom, and sometimes I wish I could do more for her to help her with her demons, but I know that I am doing a lot for her. At the end of the day, I just want to be able to do things for my mom that she did for me when I was a kid fucking up my life. DONDA highlights that love for your mother and how important Kanye’s mom was to his life. If I ever lost my mom, I don’t know what I would do. She is the person that gives me strength when I need it. For those days when we would fight, she would still love me even when I told her I hated her. My mom did a lot for me, and for that, I have to say -

I love you, mom.

[deonsdomain]

Trump Card Review

I can clearly recall the day I came across Dinesh D’Souza on YouTube in late 2016. This was during my phase in life where I thought I was smarter than other people because I watched popular conservative personalities on the internet. This was during a time where I was trying to find my identity in politics, where did I truly stand on topics. This was during the election of 2016, where it felt like a shift in the politics I knew as a kid. Something seemed different, more divided if you will, maybe they were always like this and as I got older, I finally realized the situation. I would watch these videos that had millions of views of talking heads going to colleges and trying to impose their point of view. The appeal at the time was that they were confronting ideas that seemed to attack a viewpoint I didn’t understand because I was close-minded. It wasn’t until I went to college and started talking to people that come from my background that I could see other’s perspectives.

So how does this tie into D’Souza, well next to Ben Shapiro this was a guy I saw in the recommended section on YouTube all the time, I never clicked on the videos but I was aware of him being someone doing the same thing. I wasn’t aware that he pleaded guilty to a campaign finance violation donating around $30,000 when the limit is $5,000. His lawyer was claiming that it was a misguided act of friendship. This is important because since then he has had this chip on his shoulder about it claiming that Obama was going out of his way to suppress conservative voices. Instead of accepting that he got a light sentence and a cushy place to call jail he instead tried to make it a point of contention in his other films. While I have only seen Death of a Nation I probably will get around to his other films because from Trump Card and Death of a Nation I believe that D’Souza is a fraud. He is a liar who will say anything to provoke people and try to “own the libs” which gets clicks and mouthpieces to discuss what he’s doing. It comes off as pathetic when looking at his personality he’s built up.

Eventually I met new people with ideas that challenge mine. It was easier to see their perspective since I was able to associate with them, know who they were, and acknowledge where they were coming from. I got curious and began to wonder what D’Souza was up to these days and that’s how I came across his film Death of a Nation which I dragged my brother and a friend to. We were the only people in the theater who were under the age of forty. Watching that movie was akin to having my brain become smoothed over and then shaken about like how a baby would shake their rattler. It was easy to laugh at the movie because it was pure nonsense. Much of nothing about that movie really amounts or added to anything other than echo beliefs you already had. It was a film that was never going to expose anyone to anything new.

So what is Trump Card all about then? Well as the title implies it suggests that Trump is someone who is created by the system democrats put into place when having Obama in office. D’Souza then starts to interview people on the fringes of politics asking them questions about Obama being a part of the deep state, or how Ilhan Omar is somehow going to cause the fall of America since radical Muslims love her, but doesn’t do anything to help back up his points other than the trustworthy words of someone who claims that he gave Obama oral while he was doing crack in a limo. D’Souza also then looks to tackle school shootings saying that democrats and liberals have helped create an environment that allows for these crimes to happen since they are doing everything in their power to remove guns. It is really disgusting to watch D’Souza exploit the pain of a family for his talking point to “own the libs” as you see that the parents are still suffering from the loss of their child in a school shooting. D’Souza has a technique of asking leading questions to get the answer he wants for the skewed perspective of how republicans are the only people who are here to protect the country.

It wouldn’t be a D’Souza documentary without the horrible recreations. This time it’s 1984 and Lincoln narrating a speech as he rides a train into modern day whilst also having the communist flag across recognizable landmarks and having figures like Stalin and Lenin on Mount Rushmore. At least this time he has learned how to use green screen effects and using better rendering methods for this 3D effects since in Death of a Nation it looked like it came from the PS2 era of visual effects. The purpose of having 1984 is to have it alliterate how liberals want to control your mind ala 4 is actual 5. In his Lincoln monologue it is just Lincoln speaking about America at the time while having him looking concerned out the window of a train as we cut to B-roll footage of America’s landscapes with an anthem playing proudly.

Trump Card is a movie that is only out right now since it’s an election year released in October. If you were to ask me I don’t think that this is meant to convert people, but to help reaffirm those who already believe this. This is not anything more than a propaganda piece for Trump since Trump was the one who pardoned him from his light sentence. This is also the same movie that is takes a section dedicating it to Trump’s apartment ventures in New York ignoring all the racial issues that occurred during the time or fails to acknowledge how Trump wanted the death penalty for The Central Park Five and still believes that they are guilty of their crimes they have since been proven innocent of. This is nothing more than a fluff piece that serves to give an ego boost to Trump’s followers as they are some of the most vindicated people in the country right now, but aims to give them more ammo to fire out when people want to criticize the President. For me, this is simply a poorly made film that aims to do nothing more than leave me disinterested and disgusted with the attempts to make something to cover the truth or disfigure the reality of these hot button issues so much that it is hard to believe that this is even real. It is mental gymnastics put together in one convenient film for people to observe for years to come.

[deonsdomain]

Billy Star [Review]

It's really no secret to pretty much anybody that I talk to that I absolutely love this boy band. I love everything that they do and I feel as though they are one of the most creative and inspirational groups out there right now. The what I'm saying is not entirely new I feel so everybody has been and deservedly so as they are one of the most unique and diverse bodies out there, they are truly an inspiration to me and several other people I know. So when I heard that there was a short film I wanted to check it out and honestly I loved it. Of course, it is technically flawed in certain aspects, put on a scale of enjoyability I had such a fun time to watch this and I had such a connection to it. Maybe the separation of me and my love for the band will have a deep play on the rating here. Though as human beings we are always feeling and we always have some context before we go in and see anything and that does affect how we do something post view. The music here fits the short film it really does. I feel so much passion coming from Kevin and that he really wanted to tell this story that really does feel authentic. As someone who is enamored by the celluloid of film, I am completely awestruck by Kevin and his boy band, the short film, and I love you Brockhampton keep doing what you’re doing.

[deonsdomain]

Wings of Desire (1987) [Review]

The reality of life is a delicate balance in the medium of cinema. One one hand you can have it so sweetened that it becomes false and unrealistic, and on the other hand you can have it so nihilistic that nothing seems to matter. It's a delicate and fragile for one's grasp on it may be too strong making it fracture. The fragility of life in the fridge ility of time itself is the subject matter of the film. It's contemplative and slow. It takes its time and it probably does so as we listen to the ramblings of people and their inner thoughts from the perspective of angels looking at the city of Berlin during the time of the Berlin Wall. What is truly remarkable about Wings of Desire is that it captivates the audience by almost having nothing happen. We have the main plot of our angel falling in love with a human and wants to live amongst them, but that is just one small tiny aspect of this film as it does deal with existential angst and philosophical topics such as self-identity, time, and the ultimate perspective of life.

The film is truly a treat for the eyes we spend a lot of time getting landscape shots of Berlin, close-ups on faces, beautiful black and white photography, and color used sparingly. There are several shots that are so beautiful that you really have to pause and think about them and put yourself in the shoes of these angels as they watch over the city. There are several long takes of us following these people as we hear the ramblings of the subconscious, and even though they aren't main characters we understand them as people. The small struggles and the lived in lives that these people have, giving the film a more authentic feel putting it leagues above other slice-of-life films that try to capture this feeling.

In the third act of the film, this is where we understand the praise from everyone who has seen this film. There is a true love of life that comes from this film and pours out from the screen to the heart. There are several instances of our character enjoying the most mundane and meandering aspects of our lives and yet he enjoys every single minute of it lapping it up as though it will never come again. Smoking a cigarette and enjoying a cup of coffee may seem normal to us but to him, this is the most beautiful thing he has ever experienced. Seeing the color red, or wearing clothes that he has bought himself bring him so much joy but you can't help but feel the radiance. Why it becomes so effective is that we have spent most of the time of the film being in complete black and white, so when we finally switch to color our life begins to fill with color. A simple statement yes but when used in this film it is so effective and captivating.

Wings of Desire is a small contemplative piece of cinema. It understands how normal life works, and decides to take pleasure in all of those aspects that we try to escape from by going to the cinema. It isn't talking down the audience, nor is it holding its hand, instead it merely tells us their thoughts and allows us to digest it and think about it when we leave.

[deonsdomain]

Antiporno (2016) Review/Analysis [Spoilers]

This is a truly weird experience. It's unlike most things that I've seen within the medium. Whatever goes, goes, and that's the art of surrealism and I think that's important to keep in mind when watching this film because sometimes we just get so caught up in our story that we can never let the medium experiment. From the same director as Love Exposure one film that I have not tackled yet due to a daunting runtime, but one I plan on seeing relatively soon. This is my introduction to this man's work and I want to see more. Explaining again the surrealistic aspect of this film it makes me wonder what else this director has in store. There really isn't a narrative story there is, however, a narrative framework which the film works in.

We follow a nameless protagonist who is at one point a school girl, a painter, a novelist, and an actress. Because there is a lack of a story we ourselves as the audience have to piece together what is being laid out in front of us, think of it as a ginormous jigsaw puzzle that will take more than a day's work to put back together. What I gather about the film is that it is a comment on feminism and Japanese culture. Now I myself have never been to Japan so I don't understand everything about the culture or the way that they treat women and pornography. That might just be lost in translation. However, there are several sequences that stick out to me with clear meaning than one may first see. For instance, there is a lizard in a bottle who the main character says has grown too big to escape the bottle. Towards the end of the film, the same thing can be said about our main character as she is grown too big for her bottle and cannot escape. This might be in reference to light decisions that one makes and can never back out of for they have permanent repercussions, or in the narrative framework that the actress is now stuck in a business that will never respect her and she only desperately wants to escape. In the last 10 minutes of the film, our main protagonist sits at a desk and explains what the film means and begins to hammer her head into a cake. But I think it's trying to convey is that we need to understand everything and so we have to take it in places where it will beat us over the head with what it means, then we as human beings have to have an understanding of what we're viewing or else we will disregard it as nothing, thus bashing her head into the desk explaining the "meaning" of the film. Our main character also talks about being a virgin and a whore at the same time, that one cannot exist without the other, and maybe the way that Society views certain women as only one or the other, pure or tainted.

What is so amazing about this film is that it breaks its own rules and goes with the flow and doesn't decide to backtrack. There's a moment where we break the fourth wall on we understand that this is just a film set only to transition to another film set where it isn't a film but instead real life. There are several instances were reality and fiction begin to blend together. Several times with the assistant we see her transitioning from being nice to our protagonist to being outright despicable, and the same way about our protagonist. She can go from being an extremely nice person to being a woman who abuses her staff to the point where she forces someone to be raped. Where she herself was also raped for the sake of being a part of a porno to prove that she is a whore and filthy.

It goes without saying that this film looks beautiful from its stark bright colors and use of minimal locations. There are several instances of dolly shots that allow us to really understand the geography of the location we're in. The lighting goes from intense brightness to balance off of the bright colors painted on the walls to dark moody coloring when the scenes have darker undertones to dim out whatever optimism our protagonist might hold. The script is complex and almost nonexistent at the same time. I can see several people watching this and waiting for Antiporno to get the point, but what this film does is dilute its point and wrings it out for every last drop for those who love this film to lap up and beg for more.

Antiporno is one visceral surrealist nightmare about the modern culture of Japan and the place of women within its society. It touches on themes of power, abuse, self-identity, choice, and freedom making us being to wonder ourselves the value of another person and the lens we view others in. Simply put, Antiporno is a film that we may never truly understand and one that requires the utmost attention from the audience, but if you're willing to make the trek it is a worthwhile and rewarding experience like no other.