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butterflydm · 5 years

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The Untamed | Chen Qing Ling | Mo Dao Zu Shi

Continue to Rewatch posts: Episode 1 | Index

I am officially finished with all fifty episodes of the live-action drama version of Mo Dao Zu Shi and having finished it, I now immediately want to experience the story all over again. There were twists (some I accidentally spoiled myself over the course of my first viewing and others that stayed surprises) that will definitely affect the way I feel when rewatching, and I suspect the emotional character and relationship work will be even more impressive on a rewatch. …also, I’m gonna watch it on viki.com next time instead of the Tencent youtube channel, because I hear that viki has better (less awkward?) translations.

Non-spoilery summary: Chaotic bisexual disaster dies in the first five minutes of the show but then the story really begins when he gets resurrected years later. It’s a love story amidst a backdrop of magic and politics and family and mystery. The love story itself is one of my favorite kinds — between two people who share a similar moral foundation but express it in very different ways. The love story is… technically (?) subtext due to very real censorship concerns but, um. It’s more than emotionally satisfying. It’s epic and tender and funny and sweet and heartbreaking and ultimately rewarding. I feel emotionally healed by this story in ways that I really needed.

Vaguely spoilery warning: There is a flashback that literally lasts just about thirty episodes (this is not a typo). So, if you feel like that might be confusing or strange for your viewing experience, start at episode three. When you get to the part mentioned at the start of the other summary, go watch the first two episodes. I actually went back and rewatched the first two episodes about halfway through the flashback episodes and it was already a whole new experience at that point. I imagine it will be even more so when I rewatch again now having seen the whole show.

Spoilery glee under the read more (this is all specific to the live-action drama, as I haven’t read the original or watched the other version yet).

An Incomplete List of Things I Loved:

The love story, of course. I was very impressed with how honest and emotional and deep it was. The heartbreak we see Lan Zhan suffer during Wei Ying’s downward spiral and then his death brought me to tears on multiple occasions. But the story also made me smile and cover my mouth with my hands because I was giggling over how sweet it all was. It’s a love story with so many dimensions — a schoolboy crush, a growing admiration, deep fear and concern, heartbreak, and then the incredible softness and joy of getting back a love feared lost forever.

Wei Ying | Wei Wuxian. Wow. Honestly, he’s gonna end up on my list of favorite fictional characters ever, I feel like. Seeing his journey was heartbreaking and then heart-healing. Redemptive death is a subject that I am personally not as interested in exploring, so having this story begin at the death and then BRING HIM BACK to actually deal with everything that his choices created make it a very compelling story for me. And one that dealt with trauma and revenge and morality in complex ways.

Lan Zhan | Lan Wangji. What is this literal angel from the heavens we have been gifted with here. Just. He is. so wonderful. And he gets some great character development and I’m very impressed with the tiny expressions that say so much. Joking aside, he’s not perfect, and that’s part of why he’s such a great character. He has his public face that covers up his private feelings, and his public face is stone (one of the Jades of Lan) but he has so much intense emotion whirring around underneath. He’s incredibly controlled, which is both good and bad. He grows in reaction to adversity, and we also see how deeply his grief has marked him in the future. Lan Zhan after Wei Ying’s resurrection is so incredibly soft with Wei Ying pretty much at all times? He’s gotten the most amazing gift in the world, after all, and he is gonna fucking treasure it. And so much of his stoicism comes from having a difficult time finding the right words, not from any kind of arrogance on his part.

The family relationships, both good and bad. The brothers Lan. The three Jiangs. The Nie brothers. THE WEN SIBS (my heart, please take it). The destructive fallout that Jin Guangshan caused by being a cheating dickhole.

Going back to WWX for a moment (I Really Love Him) — specifically the exploration of trauma and how it has the potential to create horrible people and how to avoid that. Because there are a lot of similarities between WWX and several antagonists — all of whom put on a slightly different version of false face to distract from the complexities underneath. Xue Yang and Jin Guangyao aren’t born into privilege, they fight to become more than what they were born to be. The question of revenge and what we owe to the people who lift us up — another good example is not the main Wen villains but Wen Zhuliu, whose morality WWX directly confronts and challenges. When Wen Zhuliu says he kills in order to honor the promotion/trust given to him by the Wens, WWX points out that he’s sacrificing other people for his honor. And this is the biggest difference, of course, between WWX and the antagonists — WWX also ‘owes’ the Jiangs for taking him in, but he doesn’t murder innocent people for that, instead he does things like sacrificing his golden core. WWX has a sense of perspective, not taking fifty lives in exchange for a crushed finger like Xue Yang does. And he doesn’t murder other people to cover up his mistakes like Jin Guangyao does. One of the heartbreaking things about WWX after his time in the burial mounds is how clearly traumatized he is, yet how much he tries to cover up that trauma by playacting as the Wei Ying that he used to be. The smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes anymore. Flinching away from Nie Huaisang touching his shoulder. He’s damaged and only the people paying the most attention to his mental state (Jiang Yanli and Lan Zhan) really notice how bad it is but neither of them are able to do more than soothe him in the moment. It’s so painful to watch.

Wen Yuan | Lan Sizhui. All the junior disciples are darlings but omg his story touched me so much. Because one of the heartrending things that WWX is experiencing before he dies is that all his sacrifices for the Wen survivors appear to have come to nothing. He sees their dead bodies; hears their deaths being talked about with glee. For this child to have survived means his time as the Yiling Patriarch was NOT in vain. He wasn’t able to save most of them, but he (and Lan Zhan) saved this child, who we get to see as a nearly-grown young man and he is a sweetheart of a boy. Seeing him reconnect with Wen Ning and then WWX was… very emotional.

Complex morality in terms of what love means. This is a topic that is only briefly touched on verbally but resonates throughout the story, because, both Wei Ying and Lan Zhan do, at various points, see love as something that cages (though from opposing perspectives). The story of Lan Zhan’s mother, locked away by his father; Wei Ying worrying that love would be a yoke around his neck. This is something they both worry at and struggle over at various points. Is love a leash? Is it love to put your beloved in a cage, no matter how golden? How do you prevent your love from becoming a suffocating and controlling thing? Lan Zhan talks about this with his brother, Lan Xichen, describing his affection for Wei Ying in the only terms he ever saw as an example for love — that he wants to bring Wei Ying home and hide him away. That’s the struggle he goes through during the years of Wei Ying’s darkest emotional times. Lan Zhan can see that things are bad (though Wei Ying never admits it until after his resurrection, when they go back to the burial mounds and he says how hard those years were for him and the Wens) but he doesn’t have a toolkit to address the problem in a way that would be acceptable to Wei Ying. This is something Lan Zhan takes HUGE steps to overcome once Wei Ying is back. Like i mentioned above, he is So Soft. He has regrets and now this most painful regret is something he has the chance to address and fix. To make his love into a partnership instead of a cage (and they make such good partners!). In terms of this specific theme (and I don’t know how important it is in the book, relatively speaking), the temporary separation of the characters at the almost-end of the last episode really worked for me. Lan Xichen was shellshocked after what happened with Jin Guangyao, and there was a reaction shot of Lan Zhan looking at him that made me go “oh, yeah, he needs to take care of some things on the home front” and I think he also needed to prove to himself that he was capable of letting Wei Ying go, to prove to himself he’s not his father. Because his father abandoned all his sect responsibilities to seclude himself inside his… idea of love. So, in terms of the themes the show leaned on, I liked that separation with the promise of reunion. And then the last shot of the series, which brings that promise to life.

Overall, the story feels very compassionate. It wants you to love the majority of the characters and it sympathizes with the audience’s pain when those characters suffer. It rewards deeper thought. It rewards the viewer for caring about the characters, which is something I’ve really needed this year specifically, when it feels like so many shows have been punishing their audience for caring about the characters.

One last thing (there are tons of other amazing parts! But this is the last for right now): I have such a complicated love for Wei Ying in episode 32, specifically when he calls out the sect leaders on their hypocrisy in coveting his power while condemning him for creating it. Everything about his scene on the rooftop breaks my heart — he’s laughing and crying at the same time and he almost looks like a corpse himself, pale skin and purple lips. Everything about him screams that he’s on the knife’s edge of just fucking losing it over all the trauma he’s suffered and how lonely and scared he feels. It’s a stunning performance.

Continue to Rewatch posts: Episode 1 | Index

#wangxian #the untamed | chen qing ling #mdzs #mo dao zu shi #wei wuxian | wei ying #lan wangji | lan zhan #long post #text post #i have seen all the episodes of the drama but only once #except for the first two which i watched again part of the way into the flashbacks #once i felt like i would have a better grasp of the characters #the show has some things are not perfect #but this post is about how the show made me feel overall at the end #which was very positive #anyway if there are any factual errors i apologize!#and i loved so many more characters than just the ones i mentioned here!#mdzs meta #adding that tag so it will show up when i do personal tag searches in my own blog

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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For a long portion of my life, I got hung up on the unlikelihood of my existence.

This is not uncommon. We’ve all, at one point or another, idly wondered what might have happened if our parents never met, or something similar. But this sort of wondering goes doubly for adopted people, like me, whose existences are so often driven by one-time, chance encounters that resulted in completely unplanned pregnancies.

But all of our existences are unlikely, the chance meeting of the exact two right cells to create us. And because the thought of that randomness is more than a little terrifying, it’s natural that we ascribe deep meaning to the thought that everything went just so, that we get to exist, even as all of the other us-es that might have been live as shadows haunting our occasional speculations.

The thing I never quite realized about all of my questioning the circumstances of my existence was that it was easier for me to speculate on the unlikelihood of my life, because I, ultimately, had a pretty great, pretty comfortable life. It took a long time, and many years, for me to realize that situating myself at the center of this story made sense if the story was about me, but it erased the stories of so many others. Like my biological mother — what was her life like in the months after she gave me up? Or my parents — what were their lives like waiting for a child?

I am not sure Dan Fogelman, creator of TV’s This Is Us and writer/director of the disastrous new movie Life Itself, has yet made that leap, judging from his reaction to criticism of the new film. For as much as he wants to tell big, epic stories of the unlikelihood of life, he can never escape the comfortable confines of the life of a big-name Hollywood writer, where trauma and pain are things you visit upon characters, not things real people, in our world, have to live with.

If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know this is kind of a weird still to provide. Amazon Studios

Fogelman has built his name as a writer on the sorts of structural tricks and twists that tend to define genre storytellers. But though Fogelman has dabbled in sci-fi and fantasy, it was only for his (genuinely very funny) ABC sitcoms The Neighbors and Galavant. When he unleashes something from his bag of tricks, it tends to be in service of the kinds of intimate, relationship-driven tales of families and lovers that form the backbone of realistic fiction.

When this works, it really works. The vast majority of Fogelman’s twists — especially in This Is Us — exist mostly to keep the audience guessing, but they do a surprisingly good job of replicating the ways that we trick our brains into not thinking about traumatic events.

This Is Us took way too long (a season and a half!) to reveal how its central death happened, but in so doing, it ended up telling a much better story about emotional repression, about trying to stop thinking about the things that hurt so much that you turn your life into a void of feeling and how that can ruin a person, or even a family.

So when Fogelman handles this sort of plot well, it’s manipulative, yes, but it’s also cathartic. We live alongside the characters’ emotional repression, so we, too, get to feel the ways it starts to leak and then burst out of them, in the way that we might also deal with our own grief.

But where constructing a story like this on television allows for ample space to play out the ebb and flow of those emotions, doing so on film is really, really tough.

That’s where Life Itself flops. Fogelman has taken what amounts to a season’s worth of This Is Us twists and reveals (maybe more) and squeezed them into a 109-minute movie. The movie’s truly grating opening 10 minutes involve Samuel L. Jackson reading the stage directions from a screenplay (including instructing the camera to “push in” on certain characters), before completely changing the movie’s protagonist not once but twice, hitting one character with a bus, and breaking the fourth wall over and over. “Get ready for the unexpected!” the movie promises, and it then proceeds to deliver the “unexpected” so ruthlessly that you’ll guess every twist before it happens.

This is all in service to Fogelman’s single most driving thematic concern — the idea that any individual life is a collection of so many small, unlikely events that led not just to one’s own existence but the existence of all of the others that we might value. Thus, Life Itself takes the form of five “chapters” (technically six if we count the Samuel L. Jackson interlude as its own prologue) that detail the lives of several different characters who are important to the movie’s overall puzzle.

And yet the “book” (yes, there is an actual book) that gives the movie its structure wouldn’t be withholding anything from its audience, because its author (who serves as the film’s post-Jackson narrator) would be known to any given readers.

Thus, the twists in Life Itself don’t serve any real purpose other than to keep the audience guessing, dazzled by the random coincidences that make up a life. And it’s here where the movie gets a little mean, because doing this requires glossing over a whole bunch of unpleasantness that Fogelman’s vision simply doesn’t have space for, other than as something to overcome.

One character, for instance, sees both of her parents die at the age of 7, then has to sit in the back seat of the car behind their lifeless bodies — her father missing his head — for an hour while waiting for rescue. She is promptly placed with an uncle who molests her until the age of 15, when she shoots him in the knee and he backs off.

This is presented not as horror but as adversity, as something to overcome. And I’m not saying that people can’t learn to live with trauma, but Life Itself doesn’t have room to explore how that might happen. Its answer to the question of “how do you live with horrible things” is, “Eh, I guess she got some therapy?”

Part of this movie takes place in Spain. Amazon Studios

Reducing trauma into something to be overcome is, ultimately, an extremely privileged point of view, the kind of idea that drives too many “sad white person movies” (of which Life Itself mostly is one). It reduces the genuine struggle of anyone coping with psychological burdens and all-consuming grief or depression into something that can be turned into a three-act structure — or, worse, an aside in a movie that has no time for it.

And, like, Fogelman can create emotionally affecting narratives with psychological weight! This Is Us has examined the story of a black child adopted by a white family with real sensitivity for both sides of that equation, and its best episodes have dug into how everybody can have the best of intentions in a situation like that and still come up wanting.

But even at his best, Fogelman’s work is a little like listening to James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” while shopping for candles in a Pier One: It never stops to question its economic comfort, its upper-class value system, or its essential whiteness. There can be a spiritual balm to that sort of storytelling, especially when it digs into the inability of some white communities in America to really deal with grief or other emotions.

But when a script treats grief and trauma as something to be visited upon characters by a cruel writer, so that we might realize how Everything Is Going to Work Out, it only underlines how everything is going to work out mostly if you have enough money and privilege to make sure it does.

If Life Itself is like shopping for those candles at Pier One, though, then the Barnes & Noble next door is also on fire. There are whole swaths of this movie that exist solely to punish the characters, and even though sections of it are set in 2037, in 1985, and in 2079, the whole thing looks like it takes place in 2013. (There’s not even an attempt to suggest what the future might be like, other than a nod to the idea that New York City bookstore the Strand is somehow not underwater and still selling print books in 2079, which — good for it.)

The movie’s women are all clever, rather than intelligent — and it’s not clear Fogelman understands the difference between the two — and the men don’t fare much better. This is a script larded down with ideas that never stops to consider if you would really marry the man who inadvertently caused your mother to be hit by a bus as a 4-year-old.

There are a few small moments that work in isolation (mostly involving the story of Antonio Banderas as a kindly Spanish olive tycoon — seriously), but the movie as a whole buries itself so deeply in its first half-hour that it can never dig its way out.

But the worst thing about Life Itself is how it can’t realize that it’s limited by its own point-of-view. It harps on the idea of unreliable narrators in literature, without seeming to understand either how the device is used or how it works or how literary critics have approached that idea throughout time.

But it also suggests that all stories de facto have unreliable narrators, because of the limited perspective of those who are telling them. I’d say this is Fogelman’s apology for the movie, embedded in its text, but if he was that self-aware, Life Itself probably wouldn’t exist.

Life Itself is playing in theaters everywhere. Sadly, the second half is just kinda dull, which keeps it from true bad movie magic.

Original Source -> Life Itself is a disaster of a movie, caught in a web of its own privilege

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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