The Magdalene Sisters

[ono]

Depressing, don't know why I bothered watching it.  Informative, yes.  Dramatically decent, but very little good filmmaking at work.  A hell of a choice of a film for me to choose to watch.  After a certain amount of time, you wonder why you're trying to get through it.  There was no joy in it (not that there was supposed to be), maybe a few laughs, but the film was made for a reason -- to inform and enrage -- and at least it did do that well.

The only bits of actual filmmaking at work were the freeze frame at the end on Bernadette's face, and at the beginning when news of what happened to Margaret spread like wildfire yet without sound.  The film was pretty straightforward aesthetically, other than that.

All I kept thinking was how stupid and ignorant some people are, and how sad that ignorance is.  It extends to not just the subject matter this film addresses, but everything about society.  It's not just Americans who are repressed when it comes to sex.  In certain places, we're moving away from that mindset, but in others, things haven't changed.  Evidence is in what happens in the world every day, as well as many responses to trauma borne out of ignorance and frustration, such as the rapes taking place in New Orleans.  But I digress.

[GeorgeBailey]

Just because the director's influence of the film was mostly more subtle than the "film makeing" choices of freeze frames or other tricks doesn't mean that it was poorly made. 

[ono]

That depends entirely on how you approach filmmaking.  Most people view it as an escape.  A subgroup of that group will look at it as a way to tell a story.  An even greater subgroup looks at it as a way to tell a story through images.  An even greater subgroup sees it as a new language.  This is where people like Lynch, Kubrick, Jodoworsky, Barney, Bunuel, Greenaway, Tarkovski, Herzog, Eisenstein, Deren, and even Von Trier lie.  The Andersons, maybe a little bit, too.  They definitely have potential.  But story is still king for so many of them, but the power of film lies in something else that the former ones I've mentioned have touched on.  So once you've stumbled on film as a medium different than anything else, you find yourself looking at films by those criteria even if the filmmakers haven't tried in any way to embrace them.  So that's why when I watch a film like The Magdalene Sisters, I question the actual filmmaking choices.  Sure, the film wasn't poorly made, but it hardly transcended anything we've seen before, and bordered on tortuous.

[Pubrick]

uh, u don't owe him an explanation.

even if he wasn't a doppelganger.