Task 2

Sometimes, we might get angry with what others did to us, losing our minds. There is no chance calming down during madness. Being outrageous or insane means the logical and reasonable behaviors do not get chance to show up. We always use our first-person point of view to see the world around us; therefore, we seldom rethink about things from some new angel. We might be blind when being unable and unwilling to perceive and understand. Yet, being irrational is extremely selfish and dangerous because it would damage the next circumstances and hurt people around us. Being mad not merely makes us not able to carry on but reveals our weakness to people as well. When being mad, we cannot control our rational sense and thus sometimes it is easy to have opponent get opportunities to assault us. As a result, keeping rational and calming down, especially when we are supposed to be mad, help us to avoid to the damage.
Moreover, using other’s angel to rethink about things is a way to respect people. It presents that we own macroscopically open minds to accept and appreciate different opinions even though they might be opposite to us. Even though rethinking about things with a different logic sometimes is pretty hard, we still have to try harder; otherwise, we would lack tolerance, breadth of view and sympathy. For instance, once my father told me his feelings of 海角七號. He thought that this film was full of strength such as strong script, reasonable plots, remarkable strategies, and appropriate characters. In his opinion, each plot in this movie connected each other, telling the audience the details between each plot and each character logically and rationally. It showed how delicate the script was designed and how diligent the director was. Nevertheless, I totally didn’t agree with my father. My dad often gets lots of wonderful and clever ideas after watching movies, teaching me how to appreciate and analyze a film as I was a child. Yet, this time I couldn’t stand his side. I thought he lacked the experience of watching movies, especially Taiwanese art film directed by 侯孝賢 or 蔡明亮. He liked to see films by 邵氏. Besides, he didn’t study film theories so that he didn’t know that even though the script takes a seriously significant role in a film, a movie is still needed to be designed and displayed by the director. Thus, the director is the main role as an author in a film, so that if there is only a strong and delicate script but the director doesn’t know how to deal with it, the film would be lousy. In my perspective, 魏德盛 designed this script very well; however, in 海角七號, there are too much detailed plots that it seems that they couldn’t improve or promote the quality of it. Such detailed script is sometimes very risky if the director doesn’t know how to present it in a film. He might make the film filled with nonessential parts in his movie and then the main theme would be a blur. I thought 魏德盛 wanted to display the characters and their background information too much. There is no need to explain every detailed reason why a character has to act in this way or do that thing, etc. As we can see in 蔡明亮’s works, he wouldn’t explain too many details about the hero. He just use the camera to display the characters’ behaviors and events, making us observe, discover, think, analyze and interpret them on our own. Such kinds of films can really cultivate and enlighten our ability of appreciating films, even the scenes we in reality. It is how brilliant films teach us. However, the audience, especially in Taiwan, are educated to take highly of the detailed plots and script; otherwise, the film they think it doesn’t explain clearly is lame. Some audiences have some stereotypes that if a director who cannot design a film certainly, he or she might be limited. Yet the truth is a good piece of art work should give its audience a wide imagination which might be ambiguous and multi-meaningful by the filmmaker’s clever shooting style and the art of montage. It is not good enough merely with a delicate script. After I claimed my viewpoint, my father thought that I didn’t have an open mind to accept his opinion and to listen to his meanings clearly. It might make people think that it is hard to communicate and to share thoughts with me. I felt my dad was ridiculous at that time, and I believed that he totally understood nothing about films. However, after I calmed down, rethinking perhaps I did really do something wrong, trying to value it, and agree with it from the different outlook. It was a good lesson I have learned from my father. Sometimes, the more expert we get in our sphere, the harder we are willing to take others’ opinions. And in this way, we would never learn anything various from the outside, being stuck in our situation, and couldn’t move on anymore. Thus, rethinking about things from a new angel is really important to us.