Rebels of the Neon God
This movie (and director Tsai ming-liang in general) had an incredible impact on me when I first saw it many years ago. It was one of the movies where I realized that filmmaking is a boundless art. Even now, several years after, I am still constantly getting surprised and rejuvenated by movies.
This is an interweaving fabric of young adult Taiwanese urban life. It's awkward, meandering and subdued. The story mostly follows two young thieves as they steal arcade machine harddrives, pay phone change, etc and how their actions weave into other people's lives. Any description I give won't suffice. It's the experience of the movie, and the strange realness of the characters that makes it special. Watch it, or don't. You might like it or you might not. If someone ever asked me about Taiwanese cinema, I would no doubt point out this movie before anything else.
4.7/5
Network
Simply one of the best movies I've ever seen. For some reason, the most well-known and remembered part of this movie is the "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" monologue...But this movie is PACKED full of perfect, perfect monologues. It is an eerily prophetic film, and at the same time incredibly farcical. Pretty much everyone who has a speaking role in this movie won an Oscar, and if they didn't they should have. Peter Finch was the only person to posthumously win Best Actor for this film until Heath Ledger.
The story is about Howard Beale, a long-running news anchor whose ratings are starting to drop severely. This leads to his company letting him go, with a two weeks notice. Howard uses his next broadcast to announce that "next Tuesday I'm going to blow my brains out on live television".
Howard is immediately fired, of course, and given the opportunity to apologize to the public on his last broadcast before turning the show over to another anchor. He uses this broadcast to rant some more, and freely speak his mind. The network heads froth at the mouth in anger...until the ratings come in. Before you know it, Howard Beale has his own Glenn-Beck style doom-mongering show, and the network is showcasing a variety of other gimmick pundits in order to get on top of the ratings.
Peter Finch's performance is great and well-deserved of his Oscar...but I feel like I have to overemphasize Faye Dunawaye's performance. Although she also won Best Actress that year, you don't really hear people talk about her role in this movie as much as Finch. She's immaculate, as someone so obsessed with her work, and raised on television programming that she is barely a real human and sees it as an impossibility to connect with people on an actual emotional level.
Oh yeah, and I CAN'T forget my favorite monologue in the film. It's not even done by a main character but it is so immaculately written and performed and is so horrifyingly true that I can't get it out of my head.
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5/5