Check it out:
During the first third of
Baraka, that's what you get, a random assortment of images from all over the world, each one more beautiful than the one before. It's hyptnotic, I was loving it and thinking to myself "another hour of this? Bliss." (also: "I hope they drop the music soon").
At the 30-minute mark however, out of nowhere, we see a tree getting cut down.
Uh oh. The tree falls down.
A local looks in disbelief.
Oh shit, it's a dumb, heavy-handed message movie.
Time to blow up a bunch of rocks.
And why should we not cut down trees and blow up rocks? Next shot:
Ah yes, children. They're the future, apparently. This is all very profound.
Dehumanizing working conditions, yes.
The monotomy of urban life, of course.
Dehuma... we already did that one.
Animals being processed for food. Awful.
Again, we already did that one. Or are you drawing comparisons between the animals in the factory and the people people in the subway?
You are. That's deep. Urban settings, modernity, technology, this is unbearable; cue mystical man in extreme agony:
That'll get the message across in case someone missed it. So is this the part where you go about showing us all the things that are wrong in this otherwise beautiful planet of ours? I bet it plays like a checklist of generic clichés. Let's see, famine?
Check. Poverty?
Check. Prostitution?
Check. War?
Check. Hum... oil fires?!
Check. Overall desolation?
Check. You're not doing the Holocaust, are you?
Look, it's a mini-
Night and Fog! How cute. Seriously though, this is terrible, can we get back to the seemingly random though not necessarily meaningless collection of pretty shots? You're so good at that.
Actually, nevermind, I stopped caring an hour ago. Please go away now.
On to
The Addiction then, a pretty straight forward vampire movie disguised as a weighty art film. The narrative arc is what you'd expect, but Ferrara still manages to put a fresh spin on the genre (is it a genre?). For one, he grounds the movie in reality (as much as possible) from very early on, by establishing visual analogies between vampiric blood lust and heroine addiction.
It's immediately much creepier. The main departure from your typical vampire movie, though, is that the vampire here also happens to be a philosophy grad student, so besides biting and sucking on other people's necks, she's constantly trying to justify her actions by invoking Heidegger and Nietzsche (amongst others) and making broad statements about humankind, particularly in regard to a supposed propensity for evil.
—
There is a difference between jumping and being pushed.These are all obvious, simplistic, mostly inconsequent, but that's ok because it's part of the character rather than an attempt on Ferrara's or screenwriter Nicholas St. John's part to say something oh so incredibly profound (I'm looking at you,
Baraka guy). In the last few minutes of the film, it becomes obvious what it is they're going for, and how much of a red herring the philosophical mumbo jumbo really is.
Also noteworthy are the gorgeous cinematography and Lily Taylor's performance. And Christopher Walken has a few minutes in there somewhere. So yeah, it's fun.
Needless to say,
The Addiction moves on.