eatinglovepies

I had all but forgotten about the original 1993 movie until after I saw this one, and watching them back to back really makes you appreciate a brilliant filmmaker like Ang Lee that comes but once in a generation.

Without comparing it to the OG, my initial thought of this remake was that I wouldn't have lasted 20 minutes if it weren't created for audiences like me (millennial, Chinese, green card, marriage, IVF). It has the premise of a romcom but without the comedy, the design of an indie drama without the raw emotional punch except in a few places, and all the insufferable qualities of contemporary mainstream filmmaking.

After watching the original, my main complaint of this film is now...there's no banquet! The OG was brimming with culture, a true banquet made to dazzle, literally and figuratively. It appears filmmaking, like banquets, has become a lost art.

Had to check it out for myself after listening to Revenge of the Tipping Point, a fantastic audiobook production, which offered constructive criticism on the movie's representation of gay people. Clips from the movie were played in the book so I knew I was in for a trip.

This movie is similar to The Great Santini with melodrama dialed up to 11. Many aspects of it are laughable by today's standards, the dialogue, acting, direction, I could not take this movie more seriously than an episode of a sitcom. While it didn't pack the punch it should've, I still find it valuable in terms of its dissent on authoritarian style parenting. In the three decades since, society has largely learned to stop projecting our ideologies onto gay people, maybe one day we will learn to stop projecting them onto our children too.

While the final episode USS Callister is the most epic, entertaining, appealing to younger audiences, this one is the episode that defines Black Mirror for what it is, a tangible, horrible, ugly reflection of our living reality. If you have lived long enough that words like "capitalism" "inequality" "loss" have visceral meaning to you, if you have ever been confronted with the value of a human life, maybe even your own, you will resonate with this episode.

The actors were perfectly cast in their perspective roles and dark as it was there were moments of hilarity. Similar themes have been brilliantly explored by Don Hertzfeldt's World of Tomorrow Episode Three which I highly recommend.