Post by Vits on May 1, 2019 17:32:56 GMT
The documentary MARWENCOL showed a man named Mark Hogancamp who creates a miniature village with dolls, takes photos of them and displays them in galleries. I didn't like it, because so much of the running time was Mark telling the fictional stories that represent each photo. It's not until the last part that the connection between his art and his traumatic past starts to be shown, even though I (and I'm sure most viewers) could tell that he had a psychological problem from minute 1. WELCOME TO MARWEN is a fictionalized version of this real story. From the beginning, we see MARK suffering due to PTSD. It's not enough to justify the 115-minute running time, but it's an improvement over what should've been a documentary short. I was moved by MARK's journey. What I don't get is why does one the men who assaulted him have his sleeve rolled up (thereby showing his swastika tattoo) during his sentencing hearing? I understand that the scenes representing MARK's imagination are supposed to be over-the-top, but Alan Silvestri's music score is just as intrusive in the real-world scenes. Also, those scenes don't make for a very entertaining subplot. Did they have to take up half of the movie? Even though they showcase a lot of visual effects, Robert Zemeckis' directing and C. Kim Miles' cinematography during the quieter real-world moments impressed me more. Steve Carell's performance is great, while Leslie Mann's and Merritt Wever's are good, but Gwendoline Christie's is bad. Seeing the female dolls throwing themselves at MARK's doll was clearly making fun of his male ego, especially since one of them is based on a porn star.
6/10
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When he met his new neighbor NICOL, I thought "She's clearly going to be the love interest whose only purpose is to make the protagonist feel better, which is also a bad way to write female characters, so it will seem like a hypocrisy." It turns out that NICOL only saw MARK as a friend. However, she's still a character without personal motivations.
She's the kind of woman who always wears pretty dresses and doesn't move a lot and only speaks when it's needed for the scene (yes, kind of like a doll, ironically). She doesn't even react properly to this man she has just met using dolls named after them and describing a love story. You know who else doesn't have personal motivations?ROBERTA, MARK's friend with whom he decides to go out at the end, which makes us go back to the first problem. This wouldn't bother me so much if MARK's doll hadn't said to an evil Nazi doll "Women are the saviors of the world!" You didn't earn that.
Also, it's heavily implied that the way MARK chooses people to base his dolls on depends on how much they affect his life. I like porn as much as the next guy, but is the actress really comparable to his friends?! Early on, there's a line that reminds the audience of another one of Zemeckis' movies. What's said could be included in different contexts and could make one think of other movies, so it's a subtle allusion. However, during the climax, that idea comes back as a reference so direct and so out-of-place in the plot that it made me cringe.6/10
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You can read comments of other movies in my blog.