#19012019

[20190119] day6official update

DAY6 1ST WORLD TOUR 'Youth' MOSCOW 2019.01.18 

“My funny Soulmate”

+ Bonus (the dance he was doing)

Segundo día

TAEMIN @ SMTOWN Live en Santiago (Chile)

I saw Widows tonight. Steve McQueen x Gillian Flynn. And I would say that it plays like what you would imagine a McQueen-Flynn joint would play like. 

I left the cinema with two questions: one of which I don’t really have an answer to, and the other which I think I do.

The first is the question of whether or not a film should be released at all in a censored version. 

Many years ago, I saw an interview with Wong Kar-Wai talking about all the different versions of The Grandmaster (I think there were three). He said something along the lines of -- if I remember correctly -- it wasn’t the same film with scenes added or taken out depending on the version; they were essentially three different films. Or at least that was the approach he took to editing each of the versions (Chinese, European, and American).

For many scenes in Widows, the dialogue was either bleeped (or a “cleaner” dub played over). I can’t say for sure whether or not there were scenes missing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were. I know, for example, that there were at least three scenes cut from Burning which I also watched in the cinema here in Malaysia some months ago.

Every time I see an obvious cut or hear a bleep or see the mouths out of sync with the dub, it takes me out of the film. Without a doubt, my enjoyment of Burning was compromised by all the senseless cuts.

The question I thought about, coming out from Widows, is whether or not the films should be released at all if the censorship body is not okay with releasing it in it’s complete version.

One way I see around this is to have the filmmakers themselves make the “cleaner” cut. Entrusting the re-cutting to people who know the story in and out is not only the best way to get the cuts done more elegantly, but it might also force the filmmakers to be creative; to find the way to tell the story a different way.

But recognising that that would not be impossible, considering how much it would cost in time and money, I don’t really have any other solution. To release or not to release. I say not to release, but also, I don’t really know. Maybe there’s value in watching even a butchered film on the big screen.

The second thing -- and this is more directly related to Widows -- is the difference between TV and films, when it comes to binging and watchability. You see, Widows is based on an old British TV series of the same name, and I think the film suffers from that. It does feel like a whole lot being cramped into a two hour film, and I wondered whether it wouldn’t have been better to just give Steve McQueen and Gillain Flynn the money to make it as a 5-episode series like Carlos. The question is whether people will watch the 5-episode series version of Steve McQueen and Gillian Flynn’s Widows.

Someone I was talking with recently mentioned that she doesn’t watch many films because films are overly long and she doesn’t have the time. Yet, this same person will, in one sitting, watch three to four episodes of The Good Place, which, if you look at it purely in terms of numbers, is about the time of the average film. It’s very similar with me as well, only in my case it’s American Vandal.

So why is it so easy for us to watch several episodes of a TV show in one sitting but not a film of comparable length?

My theory is that even though the lengths are technically the same, the activation energy required to stat one is vastly different from the activation energy required for the other. Like Newton’s law -- pretty much anything we do starts of in the default state of inertia -- and at the risk of mixing my metaphors, a certain activation energy level is required to start the process of whatever.

Let’s say to get yourself to watch the new Mia Hansen-Love will take 7 points of energy. And let’s say, for arguments’ sake, that it will also take 7 points to start the first episode of The Good Place. So one episode  in, the film and the TV would’ve taken the same amount of energy. But for every subsequent episode of the TV show, the energy requirement gets lower -- because you already know the characters and the tone and general storyline -- and it keeps going lower till it gets to the point where no energy is need to continue watch the show. You’ll almost be on autopilot.

For every subsequent Mia Hansen-Love film, you’ll need the same exact 7points of energy. Every time. Because it’s different characters in different storylines and you’re never really sure about the tone. With films, you always have to buy into them every time. This is why you have a long Netflix queue of all these critically acclaimed films, but end of rewatching films you’ve already seen.