Percentages out of a 100 make up judgments and expectations to tell you how good something is or not. That is film criticism now with Rotten tomatoes and the like, even on my love, Letterboxd its out of 5 rating system. Always a gradient always a number to represent and boil down something as immense as art. What would the Mona Lisa get out of a 100? Sometimes I just want to give every film I watch a 5 star review just because it was fucking made, what a feat in of itself! I’ve even heard of social points like in China of rating other human beings on how they are in public. I hate and don’t hate that idea in many ways. It seems we have a want so badly to rate things the judgment DNA in humans, I know that’s not real but I feel it is and belief is everything right? I don’t know is quite a fine answer I think, my mother used to say I don’t know isn’t an answer but I’m finding it more relevant and honest than most “truths” nowadays. We don’t know nothing and that’s okay, which both these films revel in. The acceptance is hard when we have numbers to draw us back in.
Those two percentages up there are rating scores on two films I find completely similar. They flow in the same body. One goes through veins the other Arteries but they are parallel. I will say the obsession with numbers comes up in one and judgement comes up in the other. Both films I give 100% or 5 out of 5 or 10 for 10, but it doesn’t matter anyways, its mattered how they are perceived in history. Seems the critics/public doesn’t agree with me. The films are “Knowing” from 2009 and “Melancholia” from 2011. One has Nic Cage the other Kirsten Dunst. They both deal with themes of deep human suffering. They both are about letting go of control. They seem so different on the surface only because one was marketed as an action thriller end of the world film while the other was marketed as an art house end of the world drama. How crazy expectations with marketing can fuck up a persons view of something. They are both acted perfectly, the world gets destroyed beautifully at the end of each, and they are deep dark explorations of obsession over grief, depression and anxiety. Its always strange to me how much I love end of the world films too and these things make bank at the box office. I honestly put it up to the idea that we all are deeply traumatized and don’t see a way out, except the most exaggerated way. We love stories as humans so it only makes sense. Its fun to create even our own destruction. I’m going to stop talking now because I just wanted to bring up the point of….watch out for how you go into film or anything for that matter, you may already be swayed and you don’t even realize it. In the END just watch both with open minds, go deeper than numbers.
