sofi 🌠 Level: 116      Posts: 2918/4152 EXP: 17095873 For next: 228220 Since: 02-18-11 Pronouns: she/her From: たまごっち星 Since last post: 1 day Last activity: 21 hours  |
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Sometimes I write essays and feel like sharing them on a forum so I'm going to do that here and you can do the same if you want if you like to do what I like to do.
A Review of Love Is All You Need? and a Meditation on Conceptualism, Craft, Concentration and Corn by Sofi Not too long ago, a short film called Love Is All You Need?, a little indie piece that follows the plight of a girl dealing with being straight in a homonormative world, started hitting the "buzz circuits". It was like totally lauded as a "visionary" work or something that was "really powerful" and the empathy-creating message of the film is definitely cool and something I can wholly stand behind, especially as someone who deals with oppression like this, but the fact of the matter is the movie actually completely utterly sucks. Okay, that's probably pretty harsh, so I'll back up a little. The problem I have with Love… is the fact that while the premise is pretty interesting, it falls flat in delivering it well. It's too easy to make a film that reverses roles like this and it's worse to make it a really generic Lifetime-esque movie. Everything about this movie is really standard and amateurish, from its murky cinematography to its unintentionally campy dialogue to its heavy-handed directing. Like, holy crap, director, you should, uh, learn some subtlety or something! 
Rather than raising the question that the film intends to raise (about bullying, homophobia, etc.), the movie instead surfaced something that's been swimming in my head: the importance of a work of art's meaning—"the art"—and how that relates to how well-made something was, like a painter's skill or a movie's stylistic execusion—"the artistry". Can something that conveys an honest, interesting idea be a good work of art when it's really badly made? Or conversely, can a film that says seemingly nothing, either by making a statement too obscure or just simply by lacking one, still be a work of art when it's really well made? Before I left for Seattle, the people I hung out with were predominantly "surface-oriented" people who placed high value on things like composition, interesting set design and so forth. Like, they'd shit on this work or that work because it was ugly. So there would be meaningful, relevant works of art out there that they'd turn a blind eye to because it wasn't visually appealing enough. Now I'm surrounded by different people with the opposite view: that aesthetics are secondary to concept, to the point that unless something visibly, obviously conceptual is happening, it's boring. I suspect, though, that the answer lies in balance, for me at least, with maybe a slight skew towards aesthetics, and the problem isn't actually so much an issue with visuals vs. meaning or one's Myers-Briggs type preference but of a society where attention spans are diminishing. There has to be a reason that pacing is getting faster and faster and editing is more rapid and frenetic. It's hard these days to just sit down and focus on a movie, take in shots of a field of grass blowing in the wind and ask yourself what it means in the context of film, the director, society, the world, whatever. Maybe something like the intellectually egalitarian world Kurt Vonnegut envisioned in "Harrison Bergeron" is coming in the form of high fructose corn syrup and genetically modified crops and in multi-channeled social media outlet, in "Fear of Missing Out" syndrome. Reflection is out, self-awareness is a commodity for irony and honesty is only honesty when it's blunt and tactless. But that's a discussion that merits its own essay. The bottom line is, Love Is All You Need? is a good movie for its intentions, a bad movie for its directing and it's successful but only insomuch as it may just capture the normal person's attention and teach them a thing or two about xenophobia and bullying. But personally, I think it sucks. ____________________ Sofi is a Seattle-based freelance artisan poster dedicated to handcrafting the finest in locally sourced commentary for over ten years. |
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