Despair and Delirium

[alobear]

My cinematic adventure of yesterday started with Nocturnal Animals, a brutal and bleak study of regret and revenge. Quintus_Marcius recommended it, but says he feels the critics have misunderstood it, whilst still giving it rave reviews. It will be interesting to see if my response falls into the same trap. I thought it was excellent - very involving, despite the rather grim and depressing subject matter. All of the characters were deeply flawed, but I sympathised with most of them to a varying degree, which demonstrates both good writing and excellent performances all round. The scene that resonated most with me, as a writer, was the flashback where Edward gave Susan, his wife, a piece of writing to read. She was honest about her response to it, and he said, "All I wanted was for you to like it." Now, one interpretation of this was that Susan should have been more supportive, and that her apparent rejection of his writing was at least partially what led to his later actions of revenge against her. However, my view is that his attitude in that scene is the worst possible attitude a writer can have towards getting feedback on their writing. You need to be able to take criticism, and accept other people's views, or you'll never improve, and it's far better to get people's honest opinion than to expect them to lie and tell you your writing is great when it isn't. I was also distracted by Susan (in the present of the storyline) apparently having an adult daughter - my thought was that she didn't look much older than me, at which point I realised I'm actually old enough to have an adult daughter myself, which threw me a bit. So, I may have come to the film with an unusual perspective, and I may have missed some of the depth and nuance. But, it seemed to me to be about deeply unhappy people who either blamed themselves or others (rightly or wrongly) for the decisions that led them to their current situations, but didn't seem able to move on or choose to improve matters for themselves. I related to both Edward and Susan in different aspects, and I don't know what would have been right for either of them, either in the past or the future - and perhaps the message to take from the film is that you should learn from your mistakes but not dwell on them?


Dr Strange made for an excellent palate cleanser after a nice Mexican meal with people I hadn't seem in far too long. It was fun, and funny, gripping, and tense, visually stunning, and thematically satisfying. I thought Benedict Cumberbatch did an excellent job at portraying Strange's arc from asshole to hero, without making him entirely unsympathetic at the beginning or entirely praiseworthy at the end. It must have been quite galling, though, for an actor of his stature to be consistently upstaged by his comedy cloak. The cloak in question was undoubtedly the star of the film, in my view - I particularly loved the fact that it was asymmetrical, and it provided most of the funniest moments, while simultaneously looking incredibly stylish. The mid-way sequence of trippiness when Strange first met the Ancient One was a bit too hallucinatory and went on too long for my tastes, but all the gravity-defying landscape-bending in the fight sequences was awesome, and the reverse-time stuff was also pretty cool. I certainly look forward to spending more time with this character, though it's a shame he's apparently being co-opted into the Thor series, which has yet to live up to expectations.