6th of November, 2019
This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com. I was reviewing Kaili Blues, the Bi Gan film. These extremely short pieces are something I do occasionally, and used to do a lot more. The point of them, aside from simply being an enjoyable or insightful self contained piece that happens to be short, is to explore the possibility of criticism as a tool to help the reader see more. I leave out so much of my thoughts of Kaili Blues here that it could hardly be considered a review, but I offer what I see as the most personal or unique insight, an insight that probably very few viewers might have had independently. Reading insights like these from other writers has greatly improved my ability to find them myself—it's like the exercising of a muscle. Some people have this notion that criticism as an artform is parasitic, but that needn't be so. Criticism of one particular work can be transformative: by its capacity to help the reader see the particular work in a novel way, and by its capacity to help the reader by that same novelty in things other than that particular work. That is to say, the broader experience of art and life beyond.
Several shots in Kaili Blues suggest a vain struggling. Shots are designed to look dispassionate, like the camera is bored of drama and wants instead to look at hills and trees, but as if by magic men appear in the only places they can find to fit into the shot: the tiny rear view mirror of the parked motorbike, or revealed behind the train carriage as it turns. Human drama forces itself into the dream, panicking at the prospect that the world will grow old and move on and humanity's place in it will crumble along with the concrete walls.