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effectual posted:I didn't get the impression it hates women at all. That's because it doesn't. Check the key scene where a group of aggressive prostitutes converge around Henry while he dreams of his loving wife. What the film eventually reveals is that it's these women who really care about him, while the dream of a perfect wife is a fake. If you want to talk politics, you have to note the unavoidable fact that Jimmy appears as a hippie, a homeless man, an anarchist... and finally as a pure subject - brain in a jar, effectively. The film functions very well as an allegory for the efforts of the political left in a very post-communist, authoritarian-capitalist Russia. We have a hero who mingles with prostitutes, beggars, cripples, and other outcasts. Hardcore Henry is likely the best movie of the year.
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Apr 10, 2016 09:14
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 10:54 |
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Cacator posted:I'm surprised this is getting such a good reception here. Aside from, yes, feeling like you're watching someone play Call of Duty, while I didn't get motion sick the very act of watching it was exhausting and the complete lack of script or interesting characters (aside from Copely) didn't really give me much of a feeling of involvement despite you literally looking through the eyes of the main character. Maybe if the latency in the video wasn't so bad it would be a bit easier to follow. Me and a friend agreed it was an interesting experiment but we couldn't picture ourselves watching it again. The film is actually incredibly tightly written, to the point that every single gag contributes to the central theme of embodied cognition. Kramjacks posted:People have of course already said "it's like a videogame", but I've gotta say it really is a videogame. The mute protagonist, who gets mission objectives that are displayed on a mini-map. Jimmy explaining how to use the grenades like a tutorial. More specifically, the ghille-suit Jimmy leading Henry through the abandoned buildings was literally the Mcmillan mission from Call of Duty 4. For example, though this is the plot content, the film constantly emphasizes that - in its very form - it is not a videogame. We are always several steps behind Henry, as he's sensing things that we don't and making decisions we can't understand except retroactively. The film is very non-immersive. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Apr 11, 2016 |
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Apr 11, 2016 04:54
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Kramjacks posted:I never felt this way at all. It never seemed like Henry knew something I didn't. It's not exactly a question of knowing more than the audience. But, for example, you have the bit where Henry yanking on a power cable behind him so that a guy is struck by a flying TV. That's the sort of thing that requires spacial awareness that we lack. And we in the audience aren't treated to the camera lingering on the cable, or anything else that would illustrate the decision-making process as it happens. In a videogame, it would certainly have to have been set up with some sort of tutorial thing. But when you get the grenade gag, half of the joke is that Henry hasn't required a tutorial at all before that point. He just intuits things.
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Apr 11, 2016 17:53
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"A post-traumatic subject is … a victim who, as it were, survives its own death: all different forms of traumatic encounters, independent of their specific nature (social, natural, biological, symbolic), lead to the same result: a new subject emerges which survives death (erasure) of its symbolic identity. There is no continuity between this new post-traumatic subject ... and its old identity: after the shock, a new subject emerges." -Zizek "Being dead, Don Quixote could no longer speak. Being born into and part of a male world, she had no speech of her own. All she could do was read male texts which weren't hers." -Kathy Acker "You're half machine, half pussy!” -this movie There's a bit of a disappointing inability/refusal to theorize Hardcore Henry, given that it begins with the shattering of the toy robot into a flurry of partial objects that swirl 'around' this indiscernible fixed point. The whole relatively-slow opening shows us the imposition of Henry's new identity through his being provided with a name, an apple from Eve, and an enemy: this 'bad' totalitarian despot, who threatens the 'good' humanitarian corporation that happens to own every part of Henry's body and has been (gently, non-coercively) shaping his motivations from the start. The film is a solid critique of ideology, where the point is that, as Zizek puts it re: Fight Club, "in order to attack the enemy you first have to beat the poo poo out of yourself." The movie demands to be read as part of a conversation with Vertov: "Kino-Eye, Dziga Vertov's Soviet silent classic from 1924 (one of the highpoints of revolutionary cinema) takes as its emblem the eye (of the camera) as an 'autonomous organ' which wanders around in the early 1920s, giving us snippets of the NEP ('new economic politics') reality of the Soviet Union. Recall the common expression 'to cast an eye over something,' with its literal implication of picking the eye out of its socket and throwing it around. [...] This, precisely, is what revolutionary cinema should be doing: using the camera as a partial object, as an 'eye' torn from the subject and freely thrown around – or, to quote Vertov himself: 'The film camera drags the eyes of the audience from the hands to the feet, from the feet to the eyes and so on in the most profitable order, and it organises the details into a regular montage exercise.' We all know the uncanny moments in our everyday lives when we catch sight of our own image and this image is not looking back at us. I remember once trying to inspect a strange growth on the side of my head using a double mirror, when, all of a sudden, I caught a glimpse of my face from the profile. The image replicated all my gestures, but in a weird uncoordinated way. In such a situation, 'our specular image is torn away from us and, crucially, our look is no longer looking at ourselves.' It is in such weird experiences that one catches what Lacan called gaze as objet petit a, the part of our image which eludes the mirror-like symmetrical relationship. When we see ourselves 'from outside,' from this impossible point, the traumatic feature is not that I am objectivized, reduced to an external object for the gaze, but, rather, that it is my gaze itself which is objectivized, which observes me from the outside, which, precisely, means that my gaze is no longer mine, that it is stolen from me. There is a relatively simple and painless eye-operation which, nonetheless, involves a very unpleasant experience: under local anesthesia, i.e., with the patient’s full awareness, the eye is taken out of the socket and turned a little bit around in the air (in order to correct the way the eye-ball is attached to the brain) – at this moment, the patient can for a brief moment see (parts of) himself from outside, from an 'objective' viewpoint, as a strange object, the way he 'really is' as an object in the world, not the way one usually experiences oneself as fully embedded 'in' one’s body. There is something divine in this (very unpleasant) experience: one sees oneself as if from a divine viewpoint, somehow realizing the mystical motto according to which, the eye through which I see God is the eye through which God sees himself. Something homologous to this weird experience, applied to God himself, occurs in the Incarnation." -Zizek A similar thing occurs, though not as effectively, in VHS2.
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Apr 13, 2016 01:52
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It's extremely straightforward: it's the future and the villain's a mutant. They even use the albinism from The Omega Man.
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Apr 13, 2016 07:57
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