Movie Week Reviews

So the first movie I saw this week was Manufactured. Going into the movie I had no idea what the film was about and even after 20 mins of the film I still didn't really know what the purpose of the documentary was. I liked the topic of the documentary which in the end was about China and their employment industry, however the way the film was layed out made me lose interest in the subject very fast. Within the first couple of minutes my attention had been lost because of the never ending panning shot of the factory workers which went on way too long. After that I felt the film had a stop and go sort of rhythm to it which for me wasn't appealing. The change between moving shots of the industry workers (which had a lack of commentary in my opinion) and then going to still shots of photos made the film very slow moving. The still images were really great photography and defiantly had a lot of symmetry to them which I liked but I feel they could have been incorporated into the film in a different way.

The next movie I saw was Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?. I had seen the movie before and was skeptical about watching it again because I honestly didn't like the story at all and was not a fan of the humour the first time around. I decided to watch it again because I wanted to focus on the film making aspects of it. I enjoyed watching the 'painting with pixels' segment before the film because it gave me insight into what the film making process was and the immense amount of work that went into the film post-production. The before and after shots they showed when explaining the color correction process was what interested me the most, if they hadn't done this process the movie would have had a completely different look and feeling to it. Seeing how they started out with a black and white scene and then slowly re-saturated it was an amazing effect. Throughout the movie I looked at the colors and tones of the scenes and really appreciated it and all the work that went into producing just the colors.

Today I watch Pecker and just like manufactured I had no clue what the film was about going into it. I thought the first bit of the movie was unrealalitic, when Pecker was going around taking pictures of random people everybody posed for him. If you try to take pictures of strangers here they look at you like your crazy and are doing something illegal. Pecker is one of the strangest movies I've ever seen from the creepy 'Little Chrissy' to his girlfriend who never stops talking about her laundromat and of course the large Virgin Mary doll that his grandma carries around and who could forget the scene at his sister's gay bar..so disturbing I don't even know what to say.