IMDb meta-data is runtime is 1 hour and 32 minutes, under-rated at 7.0 by 82,620
Genre: Sy Fy and empathy.
Verdict: Recommended for adults.
An intense tale of hubris, tragedy, and redemption with a blinder at the end.
It charts the budding relationship between a distraught man and the guilt-ridden girl, he nearly psychotic and she certainly neurotic, each with good reason.
What’s to like? (In no particular order.)
– the living Jupiter in the opening sequence.
– the video boxing.
– the essay about the losers being the people who go first.
– the other earth hanging in the sky ever an invitation to think twice.
– the chance meeting with a one-time high school classmate at the convenience store and his incomprehension that she is a janitor and her directness in saying so.
– the working class side of New Haven in the fall and winter as a setting: Barren, foggy, hard, bleak…. Yet the spring will come.
– the saw concert for one.
– that there was no resolution at the end just more questions.
And I really liked the very end. It was quite unexpected and yet dead obvious, both at once. If only…..
Cryptic and enigmatic at times, but it assumes an audience of adults who will not implode if everything is not rammed home with shouting, primary colours, and capital letters, an audience of adults who might later think about what they have seen in this empathy machine. The air of mystery that hangs over the film adds to its forlorn appeal. For example, what are we to make of the elderly janitor? His suicide attempt makes no sense and does not relate to either the major theme (the other Earth that is within us all) or the minor theme (the relationship of the wounded man and broken girl).
The rough edges show in some of the photography and camera work. Please use a tripod in the future.
The idea of another Earth figures in ‘The Journey to the Far side of the Sun’ (1969), reviewed elsewhere on this blog. But there is no other point of comparison between the two movies.
I cannot recall what prompted me when I bought on iTunes except that it was Sy Fy just before leaving for Honolulu in August 2012, and watched on the unendurable (see next paragraph) flight to Honolulu on my own before I went on to Omaha. Loved it. Put an edited version of these notes on IMDB and read Roger Ebert’s laudatory review. I posted a review on the IMDb but forgot to put it on the blog, until now when I went looking for it.
This flight to Honolulu promised to be unforgettable because my Economy seat mate wanted to tell me his sad life story at full volume even before seatbelts were fastened to make me a captive audience. Ten hours of that might have been fatal for one of us. But immediately after take-off a cabin steward said I could [hint, should] move to an empty row up ahead. There is a god. I did so, though even at that remove I could still hear my former seat-mate going on about his woes to those sitting behind him, and they encouraged him to go on, and on, and on, and he was still at it when those ten hours later we stood at the baggage carousel in Hono. Why this cabin steward picked me is the miracle in this story.
I read some of the one-star reviews on the IMDb. What a world! Lifeforms below Republicans exist. Who would have thought that was possible.
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