Device Notes

Jurassic World 's overbearing jabs at itself have led some to suggest, in line with the film's director, that it intends to attack the audience who comes to see carnage.  The most graphic death in the film is that of an irrelevant character.  We know who she is but she barely has any lines and remains offscreen for most of the movie.  Three pterosaurs pick at her, ending in her being devoured by the mosasaurus.  We can hear her screams even over the loud score and sound effects.  The brutality makes it a bit jarring.  It's personal yet random, and too late in the film to introduce any new stakes.  It's a bizarre choice of what to emphasize, so it raises the question of whether it relates to anything else the film is going for. Indeed it does.  You see, Jurassic World  is "self-aware."  Therefore, according to director Colin Trevorrow, this scene is "subversive."  It's intended to subvert the audience's sensibilities.  It con...

  The Red Shoes makes sure we know where the characters are, but does not create a strong sense of place.  For a film that travels all over the globe, it is strangely uninterested in capturing local detail.  We remain with the members of the Ballet Lermontov, backstage or in private spaces, in modes they expose to each other but not to the public eye.  They share a rapport that isn’t entirely comprehensible to outsiders.      The high-class decor and the sumptuous colors are beautiful, but highly artificial.  It eschews realism in favor of exaggerated dialogue, performance, and design.  When the main character Victoria goes to meet with the impresario Boris Lermontov, she silently ascends a large staircase overgrown with plants, with a blue dress flowing behind her.  We don't need to see this, except to luxuriate in a place where most people would never get to go.  While the insularity of the characters' social world speaks to ...

Soon after Ghost in the Shell starts, we see Major Motoko Kusanagi jump out a window after completing a sordid and violent assignment.  As she falls in slow-motion, she activates a cloaking device that turns her invisible; her body dissolves, giving way to the sight of the glowing, futuristic cityscape below her.  For me, this is one of the weightiest images in the film: a person, augmented by technology, subsumed by the city lights.  From trash floating in the water to mannequins in storefront windows,  Ghost in the Shell  provides us with signs of life at every turn.  At the same time, its images are irresistibly suggestive, offering themselves up to any number of interpretations, encouraged both by the film’s montage and the characters’ conscious attempts to analyze their own anxieties. This is appropriate, as Ghost in the Shell is concerned with more than the questions which its characters raise, or which might occur to audie...