arsamana

The Human Scale looks like an student project, a feature-length amateur video filled with nostalgic vamping about traditional urban lifestyle, virtues of walkability, and the conspiratorial evils of cars, highways, and modernist architecture; it's essentially regurgitating Marshal Berman without reproducing those ideas in a practical context. Many have done it better before, most successfully, I think, Alain de Botton in the Architecture of Happiness and the Channel 4 documentary based on it.

Without giving the historical and economical roots of modernism their due, The Human Scale goes through urban experiences in China, Denmark, US, Bangladesh, and New Zealand. In reality, these experiences are all complex, unique, and different, growing out of the discrete cultural and socio-political particularities of their own; but the big auteur Jan Gehl is looking at all of them a with the reductive and parsimonious lens that makes them all seem as the same bridge that leads to modernism (bad), so they are treated as the same.

Also the Soundtracks doesn't make any sense.

Something is rotten in the state (well, mountain hamlets) of Tibet. The Prince Hamlet here is Milarepa Thopaga, an eleventh-century yogi, before he becomes the enlightened mila-repa. After his father's death, the uncle denies him his inheritance and the aunt tells his mother: "If you are many, make war. If you are few, cast spells." The mother, an avid watcher of anime, I assume, takes this advice literally and sends away his son to learn sorcery and take revenge. Unlike Hamlet, Thopaga does not spend much time conflicted about the revenge, or whether collective punishment is justified.

The story's sole conflict is really the uncle and his cronies giving chase, and that's the biggest problem with the film, being a Hagiographical biopic, and not venturing to ask him any of the big question. But maybe Hamlet and Edmond Dantes would have been just fine if they had discovered Buddhism.

Landscape shots, especially at the beginning of the film are stunning, but color-correcting filters are over-used and the cgi is lame.

Apparently a second feature concerning the post-enlightenment milarepa was scheduled to be released in 2009, but was later scrapped.

Rem Koolhaas stands on the ironic horns of a dillema. The media, especially US media, treats him as a starchitect, and his practice benefits from the perquisites of being a celebrity, and on the other hand his art philosophy is built on being an anti-individualist, anti-auteur, anti-French utopian. As Rene Daalder says in A kind of Architect about his early cinematic collabs with Ren "It was all about how eveybody is an auteur."

Considering this, A kind of Architect is a good documentary when it bypasses the subject and almost too vague to understand when it directly interviews (or uses archival footage) of Rem. The interviews with Rem are the least informative, It's almost like Interviews with the people in OMA, as one interviewee points out, is like interviewing different parts in Rem's head. A better documentary would have totally ignored Rem and only interviewed the ideas in his head, with the light out.