The word "brain burning" has been particularly frequent recently.
In order to understand "Creed", some people went to the theater to brush two and three brushes;
Someone at home has watched the analysis of the whole network.
This is a movie, it is simply a big quiz.
Nolan once again refreshed the difficulty.
At the same time, Netflix has launched a new film.
The degree of brain-burning is not inferior to "Creed", but it has a completely different viewing experience.
It turns out that brain-burning tablets can also be so small and fresh;
It turns out that falling in love can also be so careful and terrifying...
Without further ado, Uncle Fish will talk about it—
"I want to end it all"
I'm Thinking of Ending Things
This new film is not small, and the director is the famous ghost Charlie Kaufman.
As a screenwriter, he won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for "Warm Inner Light".
As a director, the first two works were shortlisted for the main competition unit in Cannes and Venice.
"New York Metaphor" is still regarded as a god by many fans.
Some even believe that Kaufman is expected to be the next David Lynch.
In the brain-draining film world, he still continues to create surprises.
From the most everyday life, discover the whimsical ideas of the world.
He is as obsessed with "time" as Nolan, but doesn't use big scenes.
Rather, it focuses on the ordinary little things that ordinary people experience.
It seems that everything is normal, but it has deceived you unconsciously.
When you finally react, you will definitely be impressed.
The core event of I Want to End It All is very simple:
The boyfriend drove his girlfriend to see the parents.
The problem lies with this pair of parents:
Mom is played by Toni Collette of Genetic Doom;
Dad is David Hurris, the "Lupin Professor" in the Harry Potter series.
Looking at this cast, you know that something is going to happen.
What the hell is going on? Let's start at the beginning.
The heroine's name is Lucy, and she has not been with her boyfriend Jack for a long time, but it feels as if a long time has passed.
She felt that the relationship was progressing at all and that there was no future in sight.
There was no enthusiasm or passion, and it was so plain to continue to live.
This psychology is also summed up as "Newton's first law of emotion":
People tend to stay in the relationship after the expiration date of the relationship.
She didn't tell her family that she was dating, and Jack was particularly concerned about meeting her parents.
So, on a snowy dark and windy night, the two drove on the road.
As soon as she set off, Lucy began to retreat in her heart:
I want to end it all.
The woman's intuition is still very accurate, and sure enough, it is not comfortable along the way.
Lucy heard that Jack's mother had been in poor health lately, so she quoted a quote from Hollywood actress Betty Davis:
"The taste of getting old, the mother cannon can't stand it."
It was supposed to be a joke, but Jack seriously pointed out that the word "mother cannon" was inappropriate.
She usually likes to write poems in private, mostly describing loneliness:
"Coming home, like an alien who has arrived at the moon"
"Is it the wife who greets you at home, or the loneliness in the shape of a wife?"
But Jack had to ask her to read it.
The air was awkwardly almost frozen, and outside the window was a feathery snow.
Before she reached her destination, Lucy was already desperate to go home.
She fell silent, wondering why she had been with Jack in the first place.
Is it because he is as out of place as he is, weird and cute?
Or is it because being with him can attract the attention of others?
After a series of chats, they finally drove to Jack's parents' house.
A house stands abruptly in the ice and snow, without a shop in front of the village, giving people an ominous premonition.
The two stood in the doorway waving upstairs, but their eyes looked in different directions.
Mother watched them through the window, as eerie as Breaking Bad.
Escape from Desperate Town
What's even stranger is that Jack is in no hurry to enter the house and has to take Lucy to visit his farm.
A flock of sheep huddled in a dark sheepfold, the more mad they looked.
After turning around, I finally entered the house, but I didn't see my parents.
The camera moves strangely ahead of the protagonist, as if an invisible force is guiding them.
Lucy noticed strange graffiti and scratches on the door leading to the basement.
Jack was vague, only to say that the basement was not yet finished.
Claiming that the scratches were left by the dog, and the dog looked abnormal and nervously kept shaking his head.
The atmosphere was eerily quiet, when mom and dad suddenly appeared.
The expression was inexplicably exaggerated to the extreme, and even laughing looked like he was crying.
From the farm to the house, from Jack to his parents, there is an indescribable sense of weirdness everywhere.
At the dinner table, they tried to talk to Lucy, but the four of them couldn't talk together, and the scene was extremely awkward.
Mom accidentally said a slip of the tongue, which made people think about it:
She describes quantum physics as "quantum psychics."
Psychic medium is the Western name for psychics. They can communicate with ghosts and gods, and even borrow the power of ghosts and gods.
Could it be that the plot is going to develop in a supernatural direction?
Don't worry, Kaufman's brain hole is not so easy to guess.
The lengthy dinner table dialogue is about to lose patience, and it is only then that the film begins to show its true colors.
As soon as the camera pans, Mom and Lucy have changed their hairstyles and outfits!
Looking at the photos hanging on the wall, they are all weird, and the family of three has no smiles on their faces, and they look very different.
Mom seemed to be much older and could always hear someone whispering to herself.
She lamented, "Life doesn't get any easier, it's basically a fast train to hell."
He began to laugh incessantly, as if insane.
The word hell is particularly harsh, like pressing a mysterious button for the whole movie.
Then everything got out of control and stunned.
Seeing that the snow outside the window was falling even more heavily, Lucy sat still and wanted to leave immediately.
However, when I turned back, the living room was empty...
She noticed a room door with "Jack's childhood bedroom" on it and went inside.
Met Jack's dad, as old as seventy or eighty years old.
Mom was also in a wheelchair with gray hair.
But in the next shot, she passes by with a dirty laundry basket and is back to her youthful form.
Lucy put her clothes in the washing machine, and when she came out again, her mother was in a dying state again.
And Dad got younger.
Neither the male nor female protagonists have changed their ages, but they have seen the various stages of their parents' lives.
Time and space twist and distort in this house, like a twisting Rubik's cube.
The first half of the film makes the audience confused and confused;
Then slowly reveal the truth in the second half.
After their mother's death, the two drove home.
Lucy muttered:
"People think of ourselves as a point through time, but the truth is that we stand still, and time passes through us."
A word about the view of time and space that just happened in the room.
They stopped halfway to buy two glasses of ice cream, and in order to throw away the paper cups, Jack had to drive to the school to find the trash can.
But Lucy felt that the weather was too bad, and it was completely incomprehensible to do so.
However, Jack still insisted on driving to the school, but bumped into a strange old man.
The question is, how can an old man suddenly appear in an empty school in the middle of the night?
Jack thought the old man was peeping, and without saying a word, he rushed into the school to teach him a lesson.
Lucy followed, only to see the old man, jack missing.
By the time she found Jack, the two of them each had a younger doppelganger.
The doppelgangers walked toward each other and danced, and for the first time, the picture became bright and warm.
The two also married in the presence of the priest.
At the end of the film, Jack becomes old and stands on the podium to give a speech.
"Logical reason can only be found in the mysterious equation of love."
A person performed a stage play of his life on stage.
The audience is full of the same old classmates and family.
When I first started watching "I Want to End It All", I thought the movie was about Lucy wanting to end the relationship;
Seeing the middle, I thought it was a thriller of the "Escape from Desperate Town" genre;
Finally, I realized that this was the last big dream of an old man on his deathbed.
That's right, it's all the brain hole of the mysterious old man at school.
As a cleaner, my daily life is monotonous and boring, and I have no partner or family.
The only pastime is to watch the clichéd TV series.
Lonely Mind fantasizes about the characters of Lucy and Jack, so the film implies from beginning to end that they are actually the same person.
Whenever Lucy thought, Jack telepathically asked her "what was she thinking?"
Jack had a picture of him as a child hanging in his house, but with Lucy's face.
The paintings stored in the basement were also painted by Lucy.
As for neurotic parents, of course, it is also imagination.
As the old man's life comes to an end, Lucy and Jack grow old together.
He gave the imaginary couple a happy ending, and he died on that snowy night.
The old man may be a cleaner without a name, but there is another possibility:
He is actually the prototype of Jack.
It's just that Lucy didn't meet him in real life.
The plot of the movie is rather obscure, in other words, Kaufman did not want you to understand.
The "brain-burning" of mainstream commercial films is a narrative strategy that establishes logic through a set of worldviews to achieve self-justification.
As a result, viewers can use the details provided by the film to test their conjectures.
Thus obtaining a great sense of accomplishment from puzzle solving success.
But Kaufman's films don't explain at all, and they don't cater to the audience at all.
What he had to do was to find a form of cinematic art that would present the obscurity and messiness of consciousness itself.
Using retro 4:3 picture ratios, rich and dim colors, and untraceable editing, we create exquisite "stream of consciousness" images.
Instead of trying to stitch together those confused space-times, let them jump, evolve, and iterate on their own.
This is bound to make the movie extremely difficult to understand.
But isn't that the complexity of consciousness?
It changes all the time, and there is no single correct answer.
Every viewer has their own interpretation, no right or wrong.
Kaufman's films may be much more "brain-burning" than Nolan's.
But that's what makes it so.
Enjoying the process is often more important than finding the answer.
"Feeling" a movie is often more important than "understanding".