I was going to complain that I can't because I haven't seen any other movies, but that's not true. I recently watched Quiet Rows, an art movie about a dysfunctional middle class family. Standard nuclear family, parents are unhappy, their two kids are old enough to be out of the house but still live at home. They decide to go on vacation to try to reconnect. But the sunny vistas are sharply contrasted with the grey, miserable lives of the family. Seemed to me that the movie was a kind of satire of those romcoms where the old married couple learn to fall in love again. But here, you have a father who can't connect with his children, and by the end of the movie he has failed to resolve that conflict. A mother, who has chosen to meet her children's indifference with indifference of her own. And then the parents, despite professing their love for one another, are always cold and distant with their partner.
At the 3/4's mark, the mother is walking along a beach. This is the spot in the happier, hollywood version of this film where the family would've begun to reconnect, then something would happen to make that fall apart, and then here they'd realize they love each other. But does epiphany wait on this beach? No, it's fucking Darth Vader. He pulls out his lightsaber. The mother spots a lightsaber laying in the sand and snatches it, then proceeds to duel Vader for a full fifteen minutes in a bizarre display of acrobatics. But this is the sith lord at the height of his dark power, at the lowest depths of his inhuman cruelty, and in the end he cuts her down. Stormtroopers reach the resort. The father sees them first, flees to find his family. It seems uplifting, at last the father will prove his masculine virtue by defending his family from danger, but then the troopers find them, and the father, in a moment of desperation and abject cowardice, uses his own son as a human shield. Both are cut down. The daughter manages to escape out onto the beach, but collapses in the surf, the resort burning behind her, the figures of out-of-focus stormtroopers approaching. The last shot of the movie is of an old polaroid of the family from when the kids were young, everyone smiling, which had served as a too-obvious metaphor for the pointlessness of trying to recreate the past, discarded on the sand as smoke drifts over it.
I was going to complain that I can't because I haven't seen any other movies, but that's not true. I recently watched Quiet Rows, an art movie about a dysfunctional middle class family. Standard nuclear family, parents are unhappy, their two kids are old enough to be out of the house but still live at home. They decide to go on vacation to try to reconnect. But the sunny vistas are sharply contrasted with the grey, miserable lives of the family. Seemed to me that the movie was a kind of satire of those romcoms where the old married couple learn to fall in love again. But here, you have a father who can't connect with his children, and by the end of the movie he has failed to resolve that conflict. A mother, who has chosen to meet her children's indifference with indifference of her own. And then the parents, despite professing their love for one another, are always cold and distant with their partner.
At the 3/4's mark, the mother is walking along a beach. This is the spot in the happier, hollywood version of this film where the family would've begun to reconnect, then something would happen to make that fall apart, and then here they'd realize they love each other. But does epiphany wait on this beach? No, it's fucking Darth Vader. He pulls out his lightsaber. The mother spots a lightsaber laying in the sand and snatches it, then proceeds to duel Vader for a full fifteen minutes in a bizarre display of acrobatics. But this is the sith lord at the height of his dark power, at the lowest depths of his inhuman cruelty, and in the end he cuts her down. Stormtroopers reach the resort. The father sees them first, flees to find his family. It seems uplifting, at last the father will prove his masculine virtue by defending his family from danger, but then the troopers find them, and the father, in a moment of desperation and abject cowardice, uses his own son as a human shield. Both are cut down. The daughter manages to escape out onto the beach, but collapses in the surf, the resort burning behind her, the figures of out-of-focus stormtroopers approaching. The last shot of the movie is of an old polaroid of the family from when the kids were young, everyone smiling, which had served as a too-obvious metaphor for the pointlessness of trying to recreate the past, discarded on the sand as smoke drifts over it.
I hated the movie, it didn't make any sense.