Device Notes

Anomalisa  opens with a shot of an airplane moving through the clouds. We can hear the voices of various people before the camera pulls back and reveals that we were seeing through the window of another airplane, and from the perspective of the main character, Michael Stone.  Michael is a quasi-famous expert on customer service traveling to Cincinnati to give a lecture to some business professionals. Like many, many films, Anomalisa suggests that everything we see is part of a character's unreliable perspective.  This opening scene sets the stage for the symbolic device that dominates the film.  All but two characters in the film, regardless of age or sex, have the same face and Tom Noonan's voice.  Only Michael and the film's title character, Lisa, are unique.  Something is seriously wrong with how Michael receives other people. After landing in Cincinnati, Michael checks in at the Fregoli Hotel, where the rest of the film takes place.  This ...

Black Coal, Thin Ice takes place in a world where neon lights cast sickly, artificial colors over everything in a desperate attempt to mask the chaos.  It's a genre movie to its core, the plot composed almost entirely of elements from the films noir of the 1940s, but any lack of narrative originality is more than compensated for by how beautifully unsettling it is as an aesthetic experience. The film begins in 1999, with a police investigation.  Dismembered body parts have been found in coal shipments scattered all over the province.  The film's opening switches between images of a severed arm and a yet-unidentified man.  We wonder if he might be the murderer, or even the victim. We soon realize he's actually Detective Zhang, an cop assigned to the investigation.  Based on clothes found at the scene, the police find that the victim was a man named Liang Zhijun.  Zhang goes to speak with Liang's wife, Wu Zhizhen, who works at a laundromat, but she is ...