Mimicries of Arrested Development

The World is a looong film about dysfunctional development in its characters as well as in their place and moment in time. Stories of arrested development tend to be somewhat plotless, adrift, tending to the lyrical, as opposed to the dramatic, mode. Slow, strangely ominous in the implications of the Beijing we see, and trivial in its use of cell phones, animations, and the replica of "the world," found in Beijing. "Simultaneously" brooding and reductive, unable to begin and already past any present dignity, a curious use of a moving picture to represent immobility, caricature.


Stranger, more arrested, more deserving of absurdism: McCain's theory of invading USian neighborhoods.