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hexmixprobably way too tired to be making this post/attempting to say anything smart about these films rn, but i shall post nonetheless.
did end up seeing Mars Express a while back, and then just caught I Saw the TV Glow today, and since i need to stay up a bit longer to give Riot his last pill for the day i figure i might as well do something at least somewhat constructive, so: short reviews of each. note: there's gonna be spoilers.
Mars Express, dir. Jérémie Périn:
was initially interested in this one due to both Dissertation Reasons as well as the stunning animation. and i do have to say that the movie's worth watching for the animation alone. it's very beautiful; i really liked the facial animations in particular, but it's all such a pleasure to look at tbh.
the movie itself is billed as cyberpunk (i'd disagree with this categorization) and neo-noir (big Yes there tho), but the movie mostly excels as a detective flick. the parts of the film dealing with robots/androids/transhumanism are all staunchly average; the movie is absolutely not doing anything new or interesting there. that said: the mystery narrative is very engaging and works well with the animation. the characters are all likewise interesting and sympathetic, and the voice acting (i watched the english dub) was very, very good. it's a solid neo-noir with fucking gorgeous animation that i would definitely recommend.
unfortunately the other reason i watched this movie was for my dissertation, so i kinda do gotta pick at the robot bits a little:
the single most interesting thing Mars Express does in regard to its portrayal of robots/androids are the backups represented by the main character Carlos.
Carlos the human died during a robot uprising 5 or so years prior (this conflict is never explained in any detail) and his body was never recovered. but, due to the common practice of making "backups" of your brain/memory/self, Carlos is able to continue living as a sort of android. his friend Aline (who is otherwise incredibly negative towards robots) treats him as if he had never died; as if he's the same man. the two of them have even worked out loopholes in the programming that leaves him subject to robot laws (i.e.: shutting him down/putting him in standby mode in order to circumvent a suspect simply ordering him to release them.)
we see the exact opposite when Carlos goes to visit his ex-wife and daughter: he's treated as a pariah, and it's left sort of up in the air as to if this is because he's no longer ""human"" or because of the domestic abuse he perpetrated when he was still alive. the reveal there is actually very well done, and i appreciated the uncertainty it casts over the initial assumption that the ex-wife and her second husband are merely prejudiced against robots/backups.
Carlos' existence adds another dimension to the well-tred analog of robots to marginalized groups in much robot fiction: Carlos and other backups like him are portrayed as distinct from other robots, both within the world-building and the narrative itself, and yet they are subject to the same restrictions and are treated as inhuman despite their existence being tied so wholly to individual human beings.
the film doesn't do anything with this, but i personally found it interesting and would have liked to have seen more emphasis placed on Carlos, in particular due to the abrupt shift in the last few minutes of the film:
MAJOR SPOILERS HERE
Aline, the main character for the majority of the film, is killed in the last 10-15 minutes, immediately after the "mystery" is solved. as a PI she was entirely carrying the narrative, so it is not unexpected that she dies once her use as the vehicle for the "mystery" becomes null.
however what follows doesn't exactly lead to anything more than cliché: the robots leave to form a society of their own where they can be free of the shackles of humanity (nevermind that this is not a genuine desire but a directive programmed into them in what's effectively planned obsolescence; "we want you to buy our new robot replacement so we need to phase out all the robots"). the attempt is almost certain to lead to the destruction of the robots anyway, and requires them to shed their physical bodies and upload their "consciousness" to a big ol' honkin' hard drive which may or may not be stripping them of their selves, not one hundo percent sure on that tbh, it's been a few weeks.
regardless: it presents a type of ascension while still playing into the same sort of "more human than human" tropes that crop up in a lot of robot fiction. it admittedly didn't do anything for me, but i don't think it was a "bad" ending per se, just that it felt a little like a cop-out to me, especially due to the sudden shift to Carlos as a focus: it felt very much like the movie needed to drag itself on a few minutes longer after Aline's death, and that responsibility was shuffled over to Carlos, who had not been enough of a focus to then carry on the new narrative weight foisted on his character.
in other words: Aline's death felt like it was solely for cheap shock-value, or even an afterthought, and so when the film continued on it feels off balance, or like you're watching a deleted scene; something tacked on. what about the robots? they were central to the mystery, after all!
unfortunately the movie really doesn't say anything ABOUT robots except the most surface level commentary that is mostly piggy-backing off norms established by the genre. these kinds of assumptions about how the genre-savvy audience is going to react to things works well when you're subverting them (as with Carlos and his wife) but less so when you get to what is clearly meant to be a profound ending that ends up falling flat due to so much of its weight being borrowed from the genre.
it's not BAD. like i feel like i'm coming off a little harsh here lol, so like to be clear: it is not a bad film by any means. it just also isn't doing anything new or interesting with the narrative or themes.
as i said, it's a solid film, and the animation is so damn tasty; like please do watch this film if you get the chance, it's definitely worth it.
just, as someone who wallows in robot fiction, it's not adding anything new lol.
I Saw the TV Glow, dir. Jane Schoenbrun:
alright. so. going to start by saying that this isn't going to be one i'll ever feel like watching again. i think it's actually overall a nice film, it's just not one where i'd get any enjoyment out of a repeat watch.
i think that, above everything else, it does a fantastic job of capturing the feeling of alienation that comes from going through high school as one of the "weird kids" (like BOY DOES IT). there's also these sort of warring impulses between the film's desire to get real deep in the guts of the compulsion (especially among millennials) for nostalgia with the portrayal of the suffocating effects of conformity and smothering one's true self.
the deflation of the power of nostalgia is both shown to "kill" the self as well as used to criticize the tendency towards a rose-colored view of childhood (and particularly of commercial properties--this film is VERY LOUDLY about millennials).
because of this, nostalgia becomes both sickness and cure: Maddy/Tara gives in to an escapist fantasy to avoid the misery of reality while simultaneously attaining a freedom of self (in denying her own reality), whereas Owen/Isabel denies his self in favor of conformity/reality. the film ends pretty unequivocally in despair: Owen cuts himself open to gaze into the reflection (he cannot gaze directly at his Self; only a flipped image, only indirect) of everything he has repressed and hidden for decades, everything which he can further only parse through the images of a TV show (his chest cavity is emptied of everything but television static and blue-white light; the "heart" that Isabel lost represented in white noise).
his association with Isabel (which is further complicated by the fact that it is Maddy who first assigns him the role as Isabel) becomes synonymous with his Self: the impulse of millennials to frame their identity in relation to a nostalgia that ends up little more than listings of commercial properties (Pokémon-Ninja Turtles-My Little Pony-Batman-Rainbow Brite). the Pink Opaque becomes a frame through which Owen is better able to understand himself, but it likewise becomes a crutch: Maddy disavows herself to become Tara; Owen allows his Self to suffocate rather than face it and in the end can only visualize what he's lost through the lens of nostalgia. he's "embarrassed" by how badly he "misremembered" the Pink Opaque. he flashes through a miserable life in the suburbs stumbling along after what he thinks is expected of him, the death of Self evident in his wheezing breaths that speak to Isabel's slow suffocation. Owen screams out for help and the world stands still: any aberrations from the norm are denied both reality and existence. Maddy feels that she has to enter a TV show to become her true self because the world denies who she is. the world is designed to deny who she is.
it's a message that i feel is a little too on the nose; a little too clunky and at odds with other strains in the same film. it really can't end any other way but with despair: neither Maddy nor Owen can, in the end, exist as the people they truly are. Maddy has to deny her previous life to become Tara and Owen buries and buries and buries that girl in the pink dress.
i feel that Schoenbrun definitely gets that sort of despair across; especially when it comes to fighting to come to terms with your gender and sexuality in a deeply heteronormative and bigoted society (Fred Durst has one line in the film and it's to tell his son, "Isn't that a show for girls?"; the high school has the "inspirational" message "pain is weakness leaving the body" posted up on the hallway walls; the film is not at all subtle here). i just also think that the treatment of nostalgia is somewhat at odds with itself. and hey, maybe that was intentional!
i do think that certain scenes work a lot better than others, whereas some choices in direction work to the detriment of the film as a whole (the delayed reveal of Owen and Maddy spending more time together for example: the shot of Owen in the dress--this delayed insight to Owen's character comes at the expense of Maddy's; she feels much more flat than he does). conversely, the scene where Maddy draws the ghost tattoo on the back of Owen's neck is one of the more painfully intimate scenes i have ever seen in a film. the WEIGHT in that scene, good fucking GOD.
you've also got the excision of Owen's father from the majority of the scenes he's in (Shoenbrun pulls the same trick with Maddy's stepfather to a lesser extent), where the living room is cut off from the camera: Owen or his mother is seen conversing with someone there, tho we don't see or hear them. we do, however, often see the flickering glow of the TV screen. Owen's father is a cut-off foreboding presence that is always shown at some distance even when he is finally shown: teenaged Owen stares up at him as he drives them, Owen's head in his mother's lap represented by a lower angle shot gazing upwards at the back of his father's head. or later: Fred Durst bathed in alien TV light staring at nothing from a room away, again at a distance, as the audience in the place of Owen stares back at him. heck, even when his father pulls him from the TV he stands positioned behind Owen where Owen can't see him (also talk about another weighty scene, WOWEE).
these things are all VERY well done, and very very intentioned. things fall apart for me in places (the prolonged music scenes, for example, don't actually add anything to the film at all, they just add extra noise and stretch out the pacing unnecessarily), and then there's the not-very-well done old age makeup for Owen but not his boss? are we meant to see him as aging faster than everyone else bc he's killed off his true self?? who knows.
but like overall i thought the film was very well done; it's just also not one i'm going to gain anything else out of a repeat watch. i'd certainly recommend it, and i really do feel that Schoenbrun captured the feel of growing up an outcast to the tee. and then of course Justice Smith's performance is very, very good. OH and all the shots from the Pink Opaque are fantastic; like just spot-on for the genre.
of these two i definitely enjoyed Mars Express more lmao. I Saw the TV Glow has by far more to say, though its messaging gets sort of muddled. it's really more of a character piece than anything, with a heavy focus on identity. i enjoyed both films tho!
did end up seeing Mars Express a while back, and then just caught I Saw the TV Glow today, and since i need to stay up a bit longer to give Riot his last pill for the day i figure i might as well do something at least somewhat constructive, so: short reviews of each. note: there's gonna be spoilers.
Mars Express, dir. Jérémie Périn:
was initially interested in this one due to both Dissertation Reasons as well as the stunning animation. and i do have to say that the movie's worth watching for the animation alone. it's very beautiful; i really liked the facial animations in particular, but it's all such a pleasure to look at tbh.
the movie itself is billed as cyberpunk (i'd disagree with this categorization) and neo-noir (big Yes there tho), but the movie mostly excels as a detective flick. the parts of the film dealing with robots/androids/transhumanism are all staunchly average; the movie is absolutely not doing anything new or interesting there. that said: the mystery narrative is very engaging and works well with the animation. the characters are all likewise interesting and sympathetic, and the voice acting (i watched the english dub) was very, very good. it's a solid neo-noir with fucking gorgeous animation that i would definitely recommend.
unfortunately the other reason i watched this movie was for my dissertation, so i kinda do gotta pick at the robot bits a little:
the single most interesting thing Mars Express does in regard to its portrayal of robots/androids are the backups represented by the main character Carlos.
Carlos the human died during a robot uprising 5 or so years prior (this conflict is never explained in any detail) and his body was never recovered. but, due to the common practice of making "backups" of your brain/memory/self, Carlos is able to continue living as a sort of android. his friend Aline (who is otherwise incredibly negative towards robots) treats him as if he had never died; as if he's the same man. the two of them have even worked out loopholes in the programming that leaves him subject to robot laws (i.e.: shutting him down/putting him in standby mode in order to circumvent a suspect simply ordering him to release them.)
we see the exact opposite when Carlos goes to visit his ex-wife and daughter: he's treated as a pariah, and it's left sort of up in the air as to if this is because he's no longer ""human"" or because of the domestic abuse he perpetrated when he was still alive. the reveal there is actually very well done, and i appreciated the uncertainty it casts over the initial assumption that the ex-wife and her second husband are merely prejudiced against robots/backups.
Carlos' existence adds another dimension to the well-tred analog of robots to marginalized groups in much robot fiction: Carlos and other backups like him are portrayed as distinct from other robots, both within the world-building and the narrative itself, and yet they are subject to the same restrictions and are treated as inhuman despite their existence being tied so wholly to individual human beings.
the film doesn't do anything with this, but i personally found it interesting and would have liked to have seen more emphasis placed on Carlos, in particular due to the abrupt shift in the last few minutes of the film:
MAJOR SPOILERS HERE
Aline, the main character for the majority of the film, is killed in the last 10-15 minutes, immediately after the "mystery" is solved. as a PI she was entirely carrying the narrative, so it is not unexpected that she dies once her use as the vehicle for the "mystery" becomes null.
however what follows doesn't exactly lead to anything more than cliché: the robots leave to form a society of their own where they can be free of the shackles of humanity (nevermind that this is not a genuine desire but a directive programmed into them in what's effectively planned obsolescence; "we want you to buy our new robot replacement so we need to phase out all the robots"). the attempt is almost certain to lead to the destruction of the robots anyway, and requires them to shed their physical bodies and upload their "consciousness" to a big ol' honkin' hard drive which may or may not be stripping them of their selves, not one hundo percent sure on that tbh, it's been a few weeks.
regardless: it presents a type of ascension while still playing into the same sort of "more human than human" tropes that crop up in a lot of robot fiction. it admittedly didn't do anything for me, but i don't think it was a "bad" ending per se, just that it felt a little like a cop-out to me, especially due to the sudden shift to Carlos as a focus: it felt very much like the movie needed to drag itself on a few minutes longer after Aline's death, and that responsibility was shuffled over to Carlos, who had not been enough of a focus to then carry on the new narrative weight foisted on his character.
in other words: Aline's death felt like it was solely for cheap shock-value, or even an afterthought, and so when the film continued on it feels off balance, or like you're watching a deleted scene; something tacked on. what about the robots? they were central to the mystery, after all!
unfortunately the movie really doesn't say anything ABOUT robots except the most surface level commentary that is mostly piggy-backing off norms established by the genre. these kinds of assumptions about how the genre-savvy audience is going to react to things works well when you're subverting them (as with Carlos and his wife) but less so when you get to what is clearly meant to be a profound ending that ends up falling flat due to so much of its weight being borrowed from the genre.
it's not BAD. like i feel like i'm coming off a little harsh here lol, so like to be clear: it is not a bad film by any means. it just also isn't doing anything new or interesting with the narrative or themes.
as i said, it's a solid film, and the animation is so damn tasty; like please do watch this film if you get the chance, it's definitely worth it.
just, as someone who wallows in robot fiction, it's not adding anything new lol.
I Saw the TV Glow, dir. Jane Schoenbrun:
alright. so. going to start by saying that this isn't going to be one i'll ever feel like watching again. i think it's actually overall a nice film, it's just not one where i'd get any enjoyment out of a repeat watch.
i think that, above everything else, it does a fantastic job of capturing the feeling of alienation that comes from going through high school as one of the "weird kids" (like BOY DOES IT). there's also these sort of warring impulses between the film's desire to get real deep in the guts of the compulsion (especially among millennials) for nostalgia with the portrayal of the suffocating effects of conformity and smothering one's true self.
the deflation of the power of nostalgia is both shown to "kill" the self as well as used to criticize the tendency towards a rose-colored view of childhood (and particularly of commercial properties--this film is VERY LOUDLY about millennials).
because of this, nostalgia becomes both sickness and cure: Maddy/Tara gives in to an escapist fantasy to avoid the misery of reality while simultaneously attaining a freedom of self (in denying her own reality), whereas Owen/Isabel denies his self in favor of conformity/reality. the film ends pretty unequivocally in despair: Owen cuts himself open to gaze into the reflection (he cannot gaze directly at his Self; only a flipped image, only indirect) of everything he has repressed and hidden for decades, everything which he can further only parse through the images of a TV show (his chest cavity is emptied of everything but television static and blue-white light; the "heart" that Isabel lost represented in white noise).
his association with Isabel (which is further complicated by the fact that it is Maddy who first assigns him the role as Isabel) becomes synonymous with his Self: the impulse of millennials to frame their identity in relation to a nostalgia that ends up little more than listings of commercial properties (Pokémon-Ninja Turtles-My Little Pony-Batman-Rainbow Brite). the Pink Opaque becomes a frame through which Owen is better able to understand himself, but it likewise becomes a crutch: Maddy disavows herself to become Tara; Owen allows his Self to suffocate rather than face it and in the end can only visualize what he's lost through the lens of nostalgia. he's "embarrassed" by how badly he "misremembered" the Pink Opaque. he flashes through a miserable life in the suburbs stumbling along after what he thinks is expected of him, the death of Self evident in his wheezing breaths that speak to Isabel's slow suffocation. Owen screams out for help and the world stands still: any aberrations from the norm are denied both reality and existence. Maddy feels that she has to enter a TV show to become her true self because the world denies who she is. the world is designed to deny who she is.
it's a message that i feel is a little too on the nose; a little too clunky and at odds with other strains in the same film. it really can't end any other way but with despair: neither Maddy nor Owen can, in the end, exist as the people they truly are. Maddy has to deny her previous life to become Tara and Owen buries and buries and buries that girl in the pink dress.
i feel that Schoenbrun definitely gets that sort of despair across; especially when it comes to fighting to come to terms with your gender and sexuality in a deeply heteronormative and bigoted society (Fred Durst has one line in the film and it's to tell his son, "Isn't that a show for girls?"; the high school has the "inspirational" message "pain is weakness leaving the body" posted up on the hallway walls; the film is not at all subtle here). i just also think that the treatment of nostalgia is somewhat at odds with itself. and hey, maybe that was intentional!
i do think that certain scenes work a lot better than others, whereas some choices in direction work to the detriment of the film as a whole (the delayed reveal of Owen and Maddy spending more time together for example: the shot of Owen in the dress--this delayed insight to Owen's character comes at the expense of Maddy's; she feels much more flat than he does). conversely, the scene where Maddy draws the ghost tattoo on the back of Owen's neck is one of the more painfully intimate scenes i have ever seen in a film. the WEIGHT in that scene, good fucking GOD.
you've also got the excision of Owen's father from the majority of the scenes he's in (Shoenbrun pulls the same trick with Maddy's stepfather to a lesser extent), where the living room is cut off from the camera: Owen or his mother is seen conversing with someone there, tho we don't see or hear them. we do, however, often see the flickering glow of the TV screen. Owen's father is a cut-off foreboding presence that is always shown at some distance even when he is finally shown: teenaged Owen stares up at him as he drives them, Owen's head in his mother's lap represented by a lower angle shot gazing upwards at the back of his father's head. or later: Fred Durst bathed in alien TV light staring at nothing from a room away, again at a distance, as the audience in the place of Owen stares back at him. heck, even when his father pulls him from the TV he stands positioned behind Owen where Owen can't see him (also talk about another weighty scene, WOWEE).
these things are all VERY well done, and very very intentioned. things fall apart for me in places (the prolonged music scenes, for example, don't actually add anything to the film at all, they just add extra noise and stretch out the pacing unnecessarily), and then there's the not-very-well done old age makeup for Owen but not his boss? are we meant to see him as aging faster than everyone else bc he's killed off his true self?? who knows.
but like overall i thought the film was very well done; it's just also not one i'm going to gain anything else out of a repeat watch. i'd certainly recommend it, and i really do feel that Schoenbrun captured the feel of growing up an outcast to the tee. and then of course Justice Smith's performance is very, very good. OH and all the shots from the Pink Opaque are fantastic; like just spot-on for the genre.
of these two i definitely enjoyed Mars Express more lmao. I Saw the TV Glow has by far more to say, though its messaging gets sort of muddled. it's really more of a character piece than anything, with a heavy focus on identity. i enjoyed both films tho!
