my name is Julie. i am a trans woman. and tonight is the first time i’ve said those words to anyone other than myself.
i first started questioning my gender identity around my sophomore year of high school. it had never crossed my mind when i was younger; i thought i was comfortable with my identity, until very gradually becoming overwhelmed with the feeling i wasn’t. looking back in hindsight, i think i had always felt uncomfortable in my own…
very happy to report that this is yet another Bong hit. such a delightful time at the movies. hilarious and strange and consistently surprising. works as a goofy out-and-out comedy, a heady sci-fi blockbuster with ideas on its mind, an obvious but effective political satire, and a sweet and affecting romance. pretty rare these days to see a major studio movie as zany and inspired and go-for-broke as this. loved it and it only gets better the more i sit with it.
used to be one of the rotten ones and i liked you for that
now you’re all gone, got your makeup on, and you’re not coming back, can’t you come back?
feels like this movie is basically imprinted on my DNA at this point, an inseparable part of me. genuinely life-changing, a film that’s gonna make so many people feel seen and heard like they never have before. immeasurably special in every way.
a stray note on rewatch: the Twin Peaks…
brings me no pleasure to say that i did not vibe with this. has a handful of fun moments, but for the most part the humor just didn’t land for me at all. found the ironic, detached deadpan schtick pretty grating and obnoxious after a while. really wanted to like this as a big fan of what i’ve seen from Perkins but i mostly bounced pretty hard off of this. disappointing!
truly impressive how literally every single choice here is the most insanely baffling and misguided one possible. make no mistake, though, this isn’t even watchable as a trainwreck (except for the bizarre “man to woman penis to vaginaaaaa” number, which i had already seen on twitter anyway). perhaps the most damning thing about this — aside from how tasteless and transmisogynistic it is, of course — is just how fucking boring it is. a painful, interminable slog to sit through. haven’t hated something this much in a long time. awful.
oh my god i loved this SO much. had me absolutely buzzing from start to finish. an instant classic that reverberates with generations of history and music and folklore. exhilarating as a delirious blend of genres and tones, astonishing as a formal display of craft, overflowing with ideas and ambition from front to back. felt like i was dreaming as i left the theater. like it’s just so fucking cool that this is a movie that exists in this way…
genuinely one of the strangest things i’ve ever seen. feel like i hallucinated most of this. i have no idea what to make of it but i think i loved it? awe-inspiring and completely baffling in equal measure. at times i struggled to vibe with it, at others i was convinced i was watching a late-period masterpiece. in any case, i’m utterly fascinated by it and i will be thinking about it for weeks and i want to see it again. truly singular, beautiful nonsense. the ultimate evolution of late style.
bleh! left a bad taste in my mouth. listen, i get what this is trying to do, i get that it’s trying to just be an apolitical reporting of events or whatever. but there’s an inherent flaw to approaching this specific material this way. this was a terrible and tragic event, yes, but it’s an event that’s part of a longer history of terrible and tragic events. by refusing to examine any broader historical or sociopolitical context, it just ends up…
there should be more movies where the characters are named after classic horror filmmakers. also i spent the whole movie thinking her name was Claire only to find out afterwards that it’s actually “Clear”. Clear Rivers. why is she named Clear Rivers?? anyway this movie is awesome
as satire/commentary, this is incredibly obvious and on-the-nose stuff; it’s certainly not particularly deep or insightful, and i don’t really think that’s Fargeat’s goal here either. rather, she uses this concept as a jumping-off point to simply stretch it to the furthest extremes possible, twisting it all the way into the realm of comically excessive farce. just when you think this couldn’t possibly outdo itself in sheer maximalism and extremity, it does. and then it does again. and then it…