memoirs of an aeon flux

Two films that revolve around women are in movie theatres at the moment. One of them is a cinematic version of an MTV-based comic/anime character, the other a cinematic version of a massive-selling novel. Both films are incredibly well-styled. Aeon Flux is set in the future--earth has been rendered uninhabitable by some weird disease, a small portion of the human race has been saved by a genius genetic scientist , and they all live in a city of his creation, Bregna, a new garden of Eden...but as always there is trouble in paradise. People mysteriously disappear, vanishing into thin air. A small group of rebels has a plan to overthrow the rulers, the best of them, is Aeon Flux. Aeon is played with kick-arse cool  by Charlize Theron in full "trinity-from-the-matrix-only- surprisingly-even-sexier-mode. Note the similarity to the cartoon rendition. That says pretty much all there is to say about the film. It looks really good, from Flux all the way to the future city itself, design is the star of this film. There is an undercurrent of intense sexuality to Theron's portrayal of Flux, she is hot--she knows it-you know it--she knows you know it--it works, but after a couple of hours, enough already.

I must admit that I liked it much more than most of the reviewers have, maybe my taste is lower, or perhaps I am just willing to accept a film that is trying to break some molds about how action dramas should be told. Of course there is plenty of acrobatic action, cool gadgets and glimpses of future technology, but the film is striving to capture a vision of a future world 400 hundred years from now and here it falls a bit short. It looks like a city envisioned by someone with a furniture store on Robertson Boulevard---mostly retro-future, Fritz Lang tweaked through Eames and Lloyd Wright, with a bit of Matrix futurism thrown in-whoever put the art direction together has obviously been deeply influenced by the lingua franca LA interior design. It's like looking through a copy of Wallpaper magazine--sure, it's the future, but we've seen it all before haven't we? Because mid-century modernism got it right--not for me, I like it, but it's a little functional and utilitarian and I think design should be more than that. I like visual attempts made in films like this much more than those that accompany other imagined worlds like Narnia and Middle Earth, which tend towards the folksy and medieval--in the earthiest, and least inspired, sense of the word. I think Bladerunner offered a much more interesting take on what the future might look like and that was 'eons' ago.
Another imagined world with women at its heart is Memoirs of a Geisha. Like Aeon Flux this film relies heavily on design and visuals to add depth to the story. Rather than the future Memoirs reinvents a particular past--a time when Geishas lived in a series of self-contained houses. There has been a bit of controversy because the three lead actresses are Chinese and not Japanese but given that the movie is based on a story written about the life of geishas by a white western male, it hardly seems to be the point really. The star for me is Gong Li, who plays Hatsumomo, the 'bad geisha,' she is so beautiful it is just crazy. Everything about the film is heavily stylized and focuses on the minute attention to detail in Japanese design. None of it is really authentic to the period mind you--but we don't really care do we? (For me, it is this collapsing of the boundary between art and craft--between beauty and functionality, that makes Japanese culture so interesting to me--everything is pretty, just for pretty's sake). Memoirs is a lovely film, slow, purposeful and wonderfully told. It is not important to have read the book, in fact, it may help, because there is usually a bit of disappointment when texts get interpreted visually. Much of the depth of the characters has been scraped away and there is not much emotional depth going on here, which was the most disappointing aspect for me--it is still well worth seeing though.