The Congress (2013)

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The first 40 minutes of the films are in live action where Robin Wright plays a version of herself who's promising acting career didn't really flesh out after her success in the 80's and 90's while her while taking care of her family and the film industry is revolutionizing itself by using scans of actors to make films. Then for the next hour, it turns into an animated film which stays close to the novel The Futurological Congress, a completely surreal experience.The first stands as a commentary on how the film industry is exploiting artists and the fascist standpoint of the studios along with all the ethical and moral conundrums. But it's when the animated section starts that we understand that it's actually a much wider problem we are seeing here, it's not just the film industry but the whole world that is forgetting the true nature of being human and is embracing the virtual world of lies.Although it throws some of its concept on your face and may feel a little over ambitious to some it's an epic journey that is truly a unique experience. Ari Folman is definitely a genius helming films like this one and Waltz With Bashir

This film has been on the 'to watch' list for years and finally now that i have time for it, i'm wishing i'd taken an ampule into the congress. What started out as a slow, yet fascinating step into the almost now world of entertainment where technology's advancement is able to immortalize actors\characters (eg. young Princess Leia or Peter Cushing in Rogue One, Paul Walker in the fast and furious even Oliver Read in Gladiator) at the halfway point turns into a slower trippy, incoherent, nonsensical, European animation that has you constantly scratching at your head so that come the last 10 minutes you simply just want it to end (and don't expect to find a conclusion in the congress).At over 2hrs it feels longer. Robin Wright pretty much only has one emotion. The animation was mostly fine and never wow. The original idea is squandered. The narrative becomes ever more confusing throughout the film, but you'll not care anyway because of the anti- climatic (twist?) ending.

Huge talents (Robin Wright, Harvey Keitel, Paul Giamatti) totally let down by irredeemable execution. A promising premise, that actors will be replaced by their own avatars, is utterly wasted here. It's like the producers ran out of money, and instead of the live action/futuristic version, supplanted some weird, Fritz the Cat version of the second two thirds of the film, in it's place. "WTF was that all about?" you may, no WILL, ask yourself. Incoherent rubbish is the natural conclusion.This film must have been like the "Emperor's New Clothes" when being pitched. Somebody should have prevented Robin Wright making another terrible choice...

First thing of all: a drug that gives us all our wishes the way we want is not good for economy, for the entire world economy. The main pinnacle of our occidental economy is the fact that people BUY, constantly, with a great variety. People buy all kinds of products not because they need to buy it, but for two main reasons: for social status, or for tradition. It's not just a choice of an individual if she or he is going to buy a new food, drug, mobile-phone, book, etc. Doesn't matter how perfect an Apple phone (Iphone) can be, sometime you either buy a new one, or the one you have gets broken and you buy another. It's for some social reasons that people buy. First, it's because the occident have created a society in which such consumerism is possible with De La Division du Travail Social (The Division of Labour in Society), second, it's because we are born in a family in which it's OK to buy a mini skirt or something like that (for example, if you're born in a Quaker family, you going to have a bad time with freedom to choose what you buy), third, if we are lucky about the previous possibilities, we still buy according to what kind of social group we are integrated, for example, if I'm a skater, the things that I'll buy will be slightly different from what a "headbanger" buys, or a rapper from Brooklyn, etc. And here I get into the second point about what the movie gets wrong about society. What I want to say is that we do not only seek individual pleasure, we also seek social status, we are constantly trying to reaffirm our position on our social groups, and we act accordingly with it. Although the individual has much more liberty to choose and act than it had before the modernity (the consequences being not so good as it seems, as Durkheim shows on Le Suicide), we still are seeking new ways to be more easily socially integrated, that's why the people who use Facebook the most are people with more social life (as some studies have concluded), and even on Facebook we have dozens of crews, and that's why new kinds of social integration are constantly being born and reaffirmed (the boom of "what's up" for example). I don't know if this movie would be scientifically possible, I would not doubt, since technology is improving beyond our sights, but what I do know is that it's sociologically impossible, for two main reasons: it would break the world economy, and second, it's not sociologically viable. And a third point that I won't discuss much further, what about the State? Only in anarchy that would be possible, and it doesn't seems that all order was abandoned in that world, the Contemporary State is a bourgeois State, it needs, as a corporation, to maintain the profits of the dominating class. Beyond this sociological analysis, I must say that the story is a little bit confusing, that "revolt" or "revolution", I could not get it if that was meant to break the new system that was about to happen but failed, or if it just changed the way of how things were going to be, like a single company was selling these drugs but then it became free for everyone. Second, I did not get it that thing about Robin being frozen to wait for a world in which she could be cured (the disease appearing to be "seeing the world as cartoon" or just the "random dreams" she was having?), it seemed just a bad excuse to get her separated from her son for a long time. Although its sociological failure, the movie have a good picture, and it's an interesting sci- fi. And it shows a very important thing about post-modern society: that we are blindly trying to seek happiness and understand what we need by individual ways, we forget that what we need since we invented religion is being socially integrated, not just individual pleasure. As Durkheim shows on Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, we praise society, not a god, and being moderately socially integrated is necessary for our health, as he shows on Le Suicide.