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This vibrant companion to modern day China in many ways resembles an older version of China’s civilisation. Her first encounter leads her to discover Rakshasa street and its young guardian Cao Yan Bing, a descendent of the renowned conqueror Cao Cao though not a relative of Chandler.
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I'm not really great at returning to something I started in the past. On another metalevel, however, now I can see the difference between the natural expulsion of ideas and the attempt to rekindle and nurture the same idea a few days later. Sort of like making a green tea with the same tea bag I used earlier, the essence is the same but it's not as vibrant a concoction.
But life isn’t so easily forgotten and pain that we have endured, that has caused us to lament on our sofas and escape reality in a torrent of trending or transient images. The very real pain that one only feels in the depths of continued and unrelenting suffering, such as having a goddamn fucking smoke alarm go off for almost an entire film without a single character mentioning it or a single person involved in making the film think, hey that’s really annoying. It is in these moments of the abyss that we as people can transcend ourselves and push our souls beyond their previous incarnation. Giving up on life is not an answer, while it may seem completely justifiable as you sit watching a man explain semi-porous gas is turning people into rage zombies and your best chance of survival is to wear multiple jackets, beep. Yet as a person saturated with the buttery literariness of your common stone, I seek to expunge the hardships of my soul through catharsis. Finally, to be rid of the plagues of Night Zero.
(Like the problem of unconscious bias but in a good way. Or at least that's how his sagacity presents it) Influenced by Dune and Gladiator, accused of imitating Star Wars, what journey through intertextuality can be constructed and what questions posed of Hirokin: The last samurai. In order to add a little more content for people genuinely interested in study rather than the opinion pieces of a thirty-four-year-old man, I’m going to throw in some information when I start doing these informal hermeneutic reviews. I heard one of the characters say that quote I’ve prefaced at the start of the post and it struck an intertextual nerve within me, so given my complete and unconditional love of Serendipity I went with that. – For context, I called my daughter Serendipity, because I got lucky - bwahaha. My willingness to be clandestine with language for amusement is core to my being. But seriously, I do really like the word on its own merits and it resonates with my subjective interpretation of creation and my role within it. I also called my dog Clover. If you read my dissertation you’d notice I have a strong affinity to Dandyism in my approach to play on the principle that I value luck as a transcendent quality of a person. But I digress, or do I? Intertextuality bitches!
**Contains spoilers**
Hence, today I‘ll actually apply a bit of academic criticism to the film because I can. - I might keep returning to this one as I develop the idea further.
Imagine my surprise when I saw that, as I had guessed writing a review of Superman V Batman, there is already a Justice League film. Not very surprised. Like I said at the time there’s so many of these things coming out I can’t notice them all. But when I did, and the divine Gal Gadot is involved, I thought I’d have a look. How can I make this review different from the last? Reviewing Cars 3 was more of a platform for a discourse on reality and narratology, BVS was a reactionary take, and I am Dragon a more literary practice than review. What Deleuzian assemblage of criticism and media can I find to keep a freshness to these forays into films? Criticism can come from many different angles and focus on any number of things between symbology, scene and story. Which Lego pieces shall I combine here? As yet, I’ve touched upon these films with broad sweeping strokes and not got down and dirty with the details. What I am looking for here is how the elements work together. As inspiration comes from Lego then as Lego combines itself, what is the significance of certain pieces. I cannot and do not want to look so deeply into the structure but pull from it moments that speak to me as a neo-pragmatist and explain why they called to me. Yet what would I be if not a little contradictory, Superheroes are what people aspire to be. Those great and noble beings who have risen above the world and taken the mantle as honourable defenders of justice. But, I am no hero. Not at all. So to adopt a neo-pragmatist angle and to understand what I am not, this review takes the form of three fears drawn out by the film. Three very personal fears and ones that are raw to my being. These are part of my origin story.
I have finally worked out where Paradoxia Grande is going and how it ends – roughly. But, I need to get a bit better at writing. My problem, perhaps as a symptom of being autistic, is a terrible tendency to get a bit repetitive accompanied by a lack of descriptive writing. My sentence structures also follow a strange violation of English, not in the deliberate fragmented Joycean manner but in the way I try and say too much or give too much detail in a single sentence so that it stretches on longer than a person could ever hope to retain the breath to speak and therefore, assumedly, be able to consider in one singular thought without having to double check they read it correctly and thus break themselves out of the flow of reading and lose the immersion that good writing inspires in people to better facilitate their involvement with the rich inner lives of the characters and the emotions or events that are being described. Where to go with this terrible propensity to be overly boorish? Back to Austen I thought, and free indirect discourse. That’s what I love about writing a book how you want it written, there’s absolutely no reason you can’t change how to narrate at any point during the course of it. With that in mind, I wanted to start looking at moving away from the first-person narrative which occurs probably around 1/3 of the way through and for the next chapters move onto F.I.D. Which is probably a lot more like the initial style.
Wait there, this is a film review you may be quandering, what is the relevance of all this? Well, funny you should ask. The name of the film is “I am Dragon” and I wanted to move away from first person things and so in my mind there was a mystic connection between the film and I. Serendipitous in its overt first-personiness, I thought it may be worth a bash. This will hopefully be a free indirect review of a film, it may not be great, but we’ll see.
Trigger rating: 7/10 - I'm not going to hide the fact I think social justice has gone a little whacky of late, I'm not a hateful bigot or anything but I do like to have a jolly laugh about things which are a little sensitive to some. If you feel that you may be too offended by reading some jokes about Antifa and things. You need to calm yourself down. Society has always been chaos, just laugh manaically into the void rather than get mad about it. **Massive MASSIVE spoilers alert** Do not click read more unless you want to completely ruin the film for yourself!!!! Seriously So why you may ask am I doing this? We see a lot of ‘reaction’ video on platforms or maybe we did. I wouldn’t know I never really got into the whole reaction to things scene. I tried Gogglebox for a while but as soon as they put on that awful vicar lady, apparently, she lives not far from me, I couldn’t watch it. All the good ones went on to do other things or just gave up and we sorta got left with these b-list average people. Must be hard being a b-list average person on TV, finding out you are boring and unremarkable to the whole world rather than just your friends and family. Anyway anyway, So I got to thinking; since my first reaction to the film was that Batman v Superman is no different than Batman v Lex Luthor essentially, in either case Superman is pitted against some rich guy. My first reaction to the film was a reaction, hence I got wondering….Why are there no reaction reviews? There might be, but I’ve not bothered to look. I can tell you now that reverse engineering a video medium sensation into written work has difficulties, but we’ll see where this goes. It might be a long one, the film looks two hours and I’m very chatty.
My original thought before the film starts is that this isn’t much of a fight, but we’ll see. I’m beginning this as I watch the film so there will be spoilers this time round as it’s more of a reaction review than a philosophical reflection. |