After every film we watch I always find myself grateful for our short lectures on the history and background of the movie. I know I've said this before in other posts, but I really wouldn't be able to appreciate what is happening in the film without those lessons beforehand. I'm not very familiar with "B movies", and before we studied this film I wouldn't be able to describe any characteristics about them except that they aren't really shown in theaters.
Vanishing Point was really interesting to me especially because it takes the typical "American Hero" theme from main stream movies and blends it with an anti-hero character. The result is this character who seems fed up with society and seems at first to be rebellious, but we later find out that he is just an ordinary Joe who seems like a nice guy.
As for Super Soul, I found him very annoying. He was so energetic and eccentric, it was just so unappealing. I think that Kowalski thought he was annoying at times too. He had to turn his radio off several times, but he did keep turning Super Soul back on so I think that might just be because of his curiosity. He's curious that other people are actually paying attention to him. I think his "going out with a bang" was justified more with the publicity Super Soul gave him, even if the public didn't really care that much... Kowalski didn't know that.
I really like how the way they incorporated the film title into the story at the end of the opening scene. I just wish though, that the beginning of the film made more sense. It shows him turning around and driving into the desert when he sees the set-up. It doesn't match up to the end result.
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The fact that the beginning and end scenes do not match creates a greater drama when we see Kowalski crash. At the end, when I started to recognize scenes from the beginning of the film, I thought about how Romeo and Juliet opens with telling us what his going to happen. I got comfortable knowing that Kowalski was going to make it, as I had already seen the outcome in the beginning of the movie. So when he doesn’t stop, slamming into the bulldozers, I was thoroughly shocked. Personally, if I knew from the beginning that Kowalski was going to crash and die I don’t think that image of him crashing would be as powerfully shocking as it was. And if he just turned around and keep driving like in the beginning, I don’t think there would have been any meaning to Kowalski’s life.
ReplyDeleteI have to say that I kind of liked Super Soul but I too found him annoying at times. I noticed that throughout the movie we never really learn about Kowalski through his own words. When he does have interactions with people it is always kept very short and vague. The only thing we learn, out of his own mouth, is that he likes the drug speed and that he made a bet on his car delivery time. Everything else we learn about Kowalski is through his flasbacks and from Super Soul.
ReplyDeleteHalf way through the movie, I noticed that Super Soul really tries to compose as image of who Kowalski is and how he thinks. He basically gets into his head narrating his thoughts to us as an audience. Super Super plays him out to be some kind of American hero but like you said, he is just an average blue collared Joe.
What do you think this movie was about in a larger sense, besides a guy fed up with society? Why was he fed up? Why do you suppose people in the movie projected onto him the things that they did? Also, what ways does the fact that this is a B movie instead of a more mainstream, bigger-budget Hollywood movie allow the story to be told differently than usual?
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