On Monday, the final day of our four-day Easter weekend (Australia does Easter right), we still had the projector set up in the garage from the Sunday family viewing of Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which I wrote about yesterday. Because I'd already rewatched five movies since Friday night -- it's a favorite of mine to use long weekends to rewatch movies -- I decided to go for two new movies, one in the afternoon and one before bed.
In the afternoon I chose a longer foreign film, probably subconsciously remembering the daytime viewing of Wim Wenders' Perfect Days, which I wrote about here. I selected Lee Chang-dong's 2010 film Poetry, which came highly recommended from Filmspotting guest Michael Phillips way back near the beginning of my listening to that podcast. As I was watching I was reminded that Lee also directed the 2018 film Burning, which some people love but which I only like, finding it a bit inscrutable.
After a nap on the couch that we positioned in front of the projector -- I actually napped a couple times during and after the film, which I really liked, but was tired from waking up early to watch the Celtics' first playoff game -- I loaded a bunch of new films on my Kanopy watchlist, having watched Poetry on Kanopy. I determined to watch one of these after going to play tennis that night.
I went with Alexander Kronemer's 2021 film Lamya's Poem, which I'd never heard of, but I was captivated by the animation style, plus I have a proven affinity for animated films set in the modern-day Middle East, having named The Breadwinner among my runners up for the best of last decade. Lamya's Poem is a Syrian refugee story, and I ended up liking it quite a bit, though not as much as The Breadwinner.
I chose Lamya's Poem because I always think animation looks especially good on our projector, which is part of the reason I scheduled my eighth (!) viewing of Tangled on Sunday. It had nothing to do with the fact that I'd already watched a movie called Poetry earlier in the afternoon, though I noticed the connection about 15 minutes in.
If you want to know how unlikely it is that I would have watched two movies in the same day that evoke poetry in the title, only one of the other 6,945 films I've ever seen also does so. If you guessed Dead Poets' Society, you'd be right.
How do I know this? Well, lists of course. I searched my movie spreadsheet for "poe," and the only other hits I got were for movies directed by Amy Poehler (I've seen two of those). Actually, I also saw a movie directed by Tayarisha Poe, that being 2020's Selah and the Spades.
It was, I'd say, a contemplative double feature in that both films use lyric and verse to try to make sense of a world that often doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense that you have to raise your shithead grandson because his mother abandoned him, and that he's implicated in the raping of a classmate that led to her suicide (Poetry). It doesn't make sense that a senseless war lost you your father, and now you have to leave the only home you've ever known to try to make a new life in Europe (Lamya's Poem). But maybe with the words of poets, we can somehow figure our way through to going on.
No comments:
Post a Comment