Review: Youth Without Youth
When I was a senior in college, I took a philosophy course that looked at epistemology and social justice. It was a small course, co-taught by two professors but only comprising a dozen or so students. We met in a teachers' lounge. It was a good course, but also had its share of moments that made me wonder just who we were fooling. Perhaps the best example of this is when a girl named Heather — whose face and personality I can no longer remember, and whose name I only recall because I jotted in my notes next to her quote — capped an argument with, "Thus ended the Nietzschian cycle of circular time."
Come on.
This movie was like two hours of that. You know there's probably something good underneath, and the guy in charge is probably pretty smart, but it still feels a little too much like he's faking his way through the discussion.
P.S. Through a series of scheduling misadventures, I had to sit through this instead of seeing There Will Be Blood. Bad Saturday.
I had a lot of problems with Youth Without Youth... mostly the protagonist's wish to go back to the origin of language. He never says *why* he wants to do that.
Linguists are interested in understanding how language came about because it happened at the same time we started farming and making tools - it's when our brains lateralized, i.e., started using the left brain for certan functions and the right brain for other functions. If Coppola would have connected this into his academic protagonist's desire to go back to the origin of language, then he might have had some sort of theme or whatnot to work with. Also arising at the same time of language and toolmaking is ... consciousness! He didn't address that at all.
So, this film was a big -- he missed the whole point!!
Jan 4, 2008 9:14 PM