She’s endlessly petty and tiresome, whether she’s throwing a fit because he isn’t eating their yogurt in strict expiration date order, or responding to an expansive fairy tale with a flat, dull, “We’re out of water.” Watching Riley try and fail to please her is exhausting and miserable. There’s no escaping the unpleasantness of the dynamic here: Riley is the cool dude who takes things in stride and looks to the future, and Jenai is the weak, emotional albatross hanging around his neck, clinging to the past by endlessly checking her email and crying over old voicemails. Screen Media FilmsĪnd those changes become redundant as Orthwein and Sullivan keep returning to the same pattern: Riley explores, builds, and innovates, while Jenai picks fights or storms off. But in practice, since they come from such a tabula rasa starting point, it’s hard to track whether Riley and Jenai are really changing as people. There’s some powerful emotional impact in the idea that this extreme situation pushes them both to their own extremes, stripping away their personalities until they each reach a basic level. Orthwein and Sullivan reveal virtually nothing about their protagonists’ former lives, and they’re both simply drawn characters without a lot of nuance. For once, the audience has time to contemplate this question without monsters interrupting the action.īut a couple of major flaws undercut the narrative. Debuting writer-directors Geoffrey Orthwein and Andrew Sullivan openly invite viewers to imagine their own reactions to this Twilight Zone scenario - whether they’d loathe it or embrace it, and what they’d do with endless freedom and endless loneliness. Aliens and cannibals never crop up to change the story’s parameters, and viewers never learn any more about what happened than the characters know. The arguments they have, and the fallout from them, are the only crisis points in Bokeh.
#Film bokeh what is it series#
While Riley’s learning to make his own gingerbread lattes at the local coffee shop, she’s trying to sleep through the apocalypse, and as time stretches on, she gets increasingly agitated and unnerved, until their differing approaches reach a series of crisis points. From the start, though, Jenai is more withdrawn about being alone in the world. He can even act out in minor, goofy ways, like taking a shopping cart for an in-store joy ride, or grabbing an unoccupied SUV and tearing through the streets. They’re both unnerved at first, but soon Riley is celebrating the freedom underlying most zombie movies: he can go anywhere he likes, and take anything he wants. Then, just a few minutes into the film, a mysterious green light pulses in the night sky, and Jenai and Riley wake up to discover that everyone else is gone, and they’re alone in Reykjavik. The lack of physical crisis leaves room for emotional crisis, though, and a lot of time for Bokeh’s characters to ask the big philosophical and religious questions about what an apocalypse really means.īokeh starts with a young couple, Jenai ( The Guest’s Maika Monroe) and Riley (Matt O’Leary), on vacation in Iceland, where they make out under waterfalls, soak in hot springs, and drink in the scenery on walking tours.
#Film bokeh what is it how to#
It’s rare to see an apocalypse movie like the gentle indie science fiction drama Bokeh, where the threats are minimal and abstract, and the characters mostly have to worry about how to spend their time after the world ends. For every quiet apocalypse film like On The Beach, there are dozens of manic ones like 28 Days Later or 2012, where the world comes apart abruptly and explosively, and the protagonists are constantly on the run for their lives. But most apocalypses keep the survivors pretty busy. Apocalypse stories let us revel in the idea of replacing all the burdens of modern society with simpler, more visceral problems, like avoiding zombie bites or fighting off road-warrior gangs. At heart, every post-apocalyptic movie is a bit of a wish-fulfillment fantasy.
0 kommentar(er)
