4v291o
a bar brawling ugly sexy sweaty bloody broken movie. I need to fuck that old man
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Anne Bancroft telling a whole life story and also the story of a whole generation of women with one expression.
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Michael Clayton was a nice little mid-budget thriller. Tilda Swinton did so much with the little screen time she had. Not my favorite performance of hers, but definitely the best in this movie, just above Tom Wilkinson.
Clooney was… Clooney. He’s better in comedic roles. I don’t think he was bad, I just think a better, less movie star-faced actor would’ve done better.
You can really tell with Michael Clayton and Andor that Gilroy is a starry-eyed student of 1970s film.
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failed New Jersey polycule
I have thoughts about this but not enough coherent ones at the moment, so here are two posts I made about it.
I’ve been on a Journey with my sexuality and fallen into limerence with a dude who wasn’t right for me because searching for someone who was right for me was too scary, so I somehow relate to both Alyssa and Holden.
Banky sucks but Holden disgusts me more because he’s just pretending to himself and others he doesn’t have regressive beliefs until he can’t pretend any longer and then takes out his anger at his internal conflict on people who care about him.
Ben Affleck has exactly two emotions.
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I could be convinced this movie takes place in Purgatory. Nobody really feels real, but in a way that’s enjoyable and campy instead of annoying and boring. The topless psychic really put MALLRATS over the top for m.
I imagine Jay and Silent Bob as neutral forces of destiny, timeless and everywhere. This is why they make perfect sense as unwitting prophets in Dogma. I also think their little side adventures here would fit right in to a silent film.
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Clerks is not a good movie, but I do believe it is exactly the movie Kevin Smith intended to make, which makes it a good movie.
The rare movie where I see any starred review between 0.5 and 5 stars and I think, “Yeah, I could see that.”
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I went to the Resurrection Tour and Kevin Smith talked for almost two hours. The man loves to perform! This is one of my favorite movies, so I’m excited to have a feature for the rerelease coming out soon on Movie Jawn.
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Sam Neill is captivating on screen in the movie that put him on the map. Hard to believe any woman would dump him for a “right-wing prick” who looks like a frumpy old woman.
The movie is a little meandering and it withholds catharsis from the audience, but it’s absolutely worth seeing.
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Watched on Tuesday February 4, 2025.
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“HELP ME, I’M BRITISH.”
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This rips so fucking hard. Coogler’s love for the blues and roots, for Black folks and community, for the ancestors, is all so stunningly portrayed here.
I was not expecting to see 1930s American South Chinese characters with legit Southern accents, either. So cool!
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Vampire stories often live or die on the swanning, sexual aura of the bad guys. You don’t watch Interview with the Vampire (dir. Neil Jordan, 1994) for Louis de Pointe du Lac’s whining; you watch it for Lestat de Lioncourt’s vamping. And you certainly don’t watch True Blood (2008-2014) for Bill Compton’s moral struggle—you watch it for Eric Northman’s abs. New Vietnamese vampire movie Daydreamers has mild vamping and ab-ulous one-dimensional villains, and perhaps that will be enough for some, but it suffers from a narrative identity crisis, shoddy fight choreography, and insipid main characters. If you’re searching for the next movie that’s so bad it’s good, you may have lucked out with Daydreamers, but if you’re hoping for a solidly good movie, you’ll want to look elsewhere.
In Daydreamers, the vampires of Vietnam, descended from French colonizers, have a rule: kill no human, except for those who discover your vampire identity. Nhật (Tran Ngoc Vang) lives in a vegan vampire cult among the riverboat community of Ho Chi Minh City. His estranged brother, Marco (Thuan Nguyen), convinces Nhật to live it up for once in his very long afterlife and have a fun night out on the town. However, the night’s events turn deadly as Nhật accidentally reveals his vampireness to a human teenage girl, Hạ (Trinh Thao). Nhật must protect Hạ from murderous vampire queen Triệu (Chi Pu) and evade capture by Lộc (Thạch Kim Long), the enforcer of his vampire cult.
Is Daydreamers a campy joyride made for the villains to look sexy and chew the scenery? Is it a noir about a human detective and his guilt-ridden vampire mother who leads a cult of vampires who aspire to humanity? A tense brother-against-brother serial killer crime drama? Maybe even an Anne Rice knock-off, or a socioeconomic allegory about the unfairly maligned riverboat people? Daydreamers wants to develop four narrative threads simultaneously, but these threads are so incompatible that the result is confusing and distasteful. Imagine a version of Twilight (dir. Catherine Hardwicke, 2008) that tries to challenge stereotypes against poor people by having the Cullens live in a trailer park, with dialogue lifted from a soap opera, and Bella and Edward routinely entering clubs in slow-motion while EDM beats pulse in time with strobe lights. Imagined it? Then you are halfway to understanding Daydreamers.
In an interview with Vietcetera, Bùi explains that houseboats on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City inspired Daydreamers, saying: “I noticed a bunch of boats anchored by the banks. I wondered, ‘Who are those people who live in them, on the fringes of modern society?’ As the sun set more and more, the boats looked like rows of coffins… Growing up in America, I was influenced by vampires a lot, and by nature, they live on the fringes of society… That was my way in! So what if [the people in the boats] are vampires?”
I wish Bùi had kept this inspiration central to Daydreamers. The parts of the film about the riverboat community are interesting and novel, such as the character of Lộc, the human detective and enforcer for his vampire mother’s cult. Long’s portrayal of Lộc relays irable depth and gravity, especially for a character given such thin development despite a fascinating hook. However, Bùi does not keep the story focused on the riverboat community long enough to make them the centerpiece of the narrative. We spend too little time on the river and too much time in clubs and Marco and Triệu’s opulent penthouse apartment to claim that Daydreamers is really about the riverboat community.
Read my full review at Movie Jawn!
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This movie started an obsession with the German version of Bowie’s Heroes.
I’m logging this well after I saw it, but I realized it wasn’t logged and yet I knew the exact date I last watched it. Jojo Rabbit is a favorite of mine so I couldn’t let it go unlogged.
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There’s so much to appreciate about Vengeance is Mine, but what stands out most is the range in emotions and the range in lighting - from funny to horrifying, sometimes in the some moment, and from pitch black to bright white. The scene in pitch black where you only see the white gloves of the officers is particularly memorable for its use of light and shadow. The frame with him going upstairs and his mom coming out from the shadows was amazing. The last conversation with his father was so purposefully staged and lit and performed.
Modern popular movies will often undercut serious emotional scenes with a quip, a practice for which they have been justifiably lampooned. Here, Imamura contrasts the horrifying and serious with the situationally humorous. There’s no assigned comic relief, there’s no winking jokes at the audience, and yet Imamura masterfully relieves the tension by showing us the humor in the absurdity of life.
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All of the things you loved about 70s-90s sci-fi/fantasy blockbusters in a genuinely fresh coat of paint, held together by Idris Elba, a locked in fixed point who understands the ridiculous heights he needs to go to to sell the story and dialogue.
Charlie Hunnam is a different story. Everything about this movie still holds up to my fond memories, but Hunnam’s one-note performance is a real travesty in a movie where every other actor understands what kind of movie they’re in and dials it up to ridiculous but endearing.
Why they cast Charlie Hunnam’s Australian twin as his antagonist is beyond me. I understand he’s meant to be a foil, a representation of what Raleigh used to be, but it is genuinely difficult to tell them apart at times.
If it sounds like I’m dumping on Pacific Rim, I’m absolutely not. It remains one of my favorite sci-fi blockbusters. The Kaiju and Jaeger design is amazing and the establishment of scale is phenomenal. “Drift compatible” is a great narrative and character development tool used sparingly but effectively, not to mention a gift to AO3 writers everywhere looking for another au to write their OTP into. Hannibal Chau has such a great memorable character design.
I could go on, but yeah I love this movie. I’m just sad they whiffed on the casting for the main character.
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No one, not even Nicole Kidman, has ever made dying of tuberculosis as sexy as Val Kilmer does in Tombstone.
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“I don’t act that way to change the world. I act that way so the goddamn world won’t change me.”
There is so much to love about Desert Hearts. The cinematography in particular is gorgeous. People today talk about “every frame a painting,” but in modern films that’s come to mean wide shots of still characters. Better films like Desert Hearts center on “every frame an emotion.”
Audra Lindley had a difficult job selling her character as both sympathetic and horrible, and she did it perfectly. In my heart, I’m awarding her posthumous awards for her performances as s Parker.
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Moving and infuriating and clarifying. I urge all Americans moved by this movie to keep that fire going and denounce American politicians of any political party who use our money to fund the Israeli government’s atrocities against Palestinians. Tell your friends and family about this movie and this struggle. Protest loudly with whatever voice or platform you have. Have reading club and film club discussions about books and movies made by Palestinians and transform those discussions into political protest and action. Don’t just talk about it, protest about it. This is all one struggle.
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This was somewhat entertaining, but I saw most of the funniest, grossest bits in the trailer. There's an interesting midpoint twist that doesn't really go anywhere, and the main villain spends most of the time in one room monologuing with crazy eyes. Amber Midthunder deservers better roles than this. Jack Quaid was breezily fun and he's got a charming smile and great comedic timing. I'd recommend this if you want a fun, unsurprising movie about a guy in over his head.
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Mickey 17 is Bong Joon-ho's heartfelt satire about choosing to fight when the world beats you down
I have a confession to make. I was a very early Twitter adopter. In fact, I ed on November 4, 2008, so I could celebrate America's bright new future with the election of our first Black president. In those early Twitter days, it was a free-for-all of folks creating the microblogging culture, including weirdos pretending to be celebrities like nascent Twilight tween heartthrob Robert Pattinson.
I was never a TwiHard, but I was obsessed with Robert Pattinson for about two months in 2009, an obsession fueled by tweeting at him about our mutual love for Kings of Leon. Yes, even though I cut my teeth on 2003 American Idol forum sock puppet drama, I fully believed Robert Pattinson had a Twitter known only to the lucky few on Twitter. He was, of course, a fake, but director Bong Joon-ho has revived the dream of A Robert Pattinson for Everyone in his excellent, heartfelt sci-fi satire Mickey 17.
In Mickey 17, Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) is a down-on-his luck denizen of near-future Earth who, to escape a chainsaw-happy loan shark, has signed up to be an Expendable worker on a spaceship . As an Expendable, Mickey is cloned and used as a human guinea pig who is reprinted every time he dies from vaccine trials or radiation exposure. The ship is led by failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa Marshall (Toni Collette), who dream of creating a beautiful civilization on the all-white planet of Niflheim.
Ruffalo and Collette give performances that are both entertaining and revolting in how true they are to our American political reality. Ruffalo as twice-failed politician Kenneth Marshall gives us an unholy amalgamation of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, RFK Jr., and Uncle Baby Billy from Righteous Gemstones. Toni Collette as his wife Ylfa Marshall gives us a blending of her faux-hippie Knives Out character and Department of Homeland Security Secretary and proud puppy-killer Kristi Noem.
Mickey 17 lives and dies (and lives and dies) by Robert Pattinson's performance as Mickey 17 and the more volatile Mickey 18. Luckily, Robert Pattinson is a celebrity and a weirdo, and he is more than capable of playing intense weird little guys, as you will know if you've seen Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse or Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron or, indeed, Catherine Hardwicke's Twilight. Pattinson fully sells the pathetic, wet, downtrodden Mickey 17 and the angry, hot, righteous Mickey 18. In Mickey Barnes, I see the disassociation of Thomas Howard, the slyness of the Heron, and the self-loathing of Edward Cullen.
Naomi Ackie is also a joy to watch as Nasha, who falls for Mickey's pathetic wet rat aesthetic as soon as she lays eyes on him in the cafeteria. In one memorable scene, Ackie channels all of our rage at the buffoonish clowns in charge in a very cathartic rant. Steven Yeun and Anamaria Vartolomei do good ing work as Timo and Kai Katz, although further character development was likely cut for time in an already lengthy movie.
Bong Joon-ho struggled to kill his darlings in Mickey 17. There are friction points introduced but never fully explored, such as Nasha's military job and her love for an Expendable, and more time on character development with less on side stories might have created a tighter narrative. Mickey 17 also struggles to balance the story among the character relationships, the buffoonish politicians, and the mysterious Creepers, the giant tardigrade-like animals who are native to the planet. Mickey 17 deserved an 8-episode limited series where every plotline and character shines, but Warner Bros. Pictures certainly would not have accepted the cost.
The back-and-forth release date and poor marketing for Mickey 17 make it clear the entertainment conglomerate didn't know what to do with a movie about exploitative capitalism and the political leaders who perpetuate it. I'm not sure what Warner Bros. Pictures expected by giving Bong Joon-ho a blank check, because exposing the cruel buffoonery of capitalism is the man's entire career, but then again, I did read a Mickey 17 review that asked, "Why does this movie even need to be about exploitative capitalism or whatever anyways? Parasite already did most of those things much better." Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav just looked at an Academy Award winning director and saw dollar signs.
Twinning is having a moment in science fiction. Severance, A Different Man, The Substance, and Mickey 17 all interrogate the terrible things we do to alienate ourselves from our own emotions to escape the traumas imposed on us by exploitative capitalism. Mickey Barnes struggles to reconcile the factions inside himself, those cowed by trauma and those with spitfire and fists. This mirrors the struggle among American factions, those who will surrender to the Kenneth and Ylfa Marshalls of our world and those who will fight, even if it means we go down swinging. Mickey 17 is in no way a simple Trumpian parody, and it's not just about the horrors of exploitative capitalism. No, Bong Joon-ho has gifted Americans with a giant unmissable arrow pointing the way out of our moral and political mud-pit: we need to get really fucking angry, because we deserve better.
Thanks for reading, check out the review on my site if you’re so inclined and follow me on Bluesky.
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We come to this place for blood.
We come to the New Year’s Eve show to shriek, to cry, to rage against the superficial commercialized world that creates the horrendous loathing self.
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Bong Joon-ho said kill that man.
The most dangerous (to power) scene is one sequence at the end that many people are going to say makes it drag, but it’s essential to Joon-ho’s message to the audience, and it sets it apart from other resistance genre movies that serve more as release valve than call to action.
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Watched on Saturday March 1, 2025.
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The closest real-life equivalent* to Jackson Maine is Brandi Carlile, which is probably why she’s in this movie.
*musically speaking, not the drugs and alcoholism
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There are some interesting choices here that reflect America’s current reality. For example, Skyfall indulges the myth of a lone genius who can rewrite the world with code, but it also predicts that government officials will think humans will become irrelevant and their jobs can be replaced with software. Notably, the villain here is also in the mold of Empire’s sins coming back to haunt it, and now men shaped by colonialism and apartheid are tearing down America.
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Truly great art must be unexplainable, mysterious, confusing, and hostile to the audience because life is unexplainable, mysterious, confusing, and hostile to the living.
Comparisons have been made between Possession and Nosferatu (2024) because Lily Rose-Depp has said she was inspired by Isabelle Adjani’s performance here. I can definitely see the similarities in the performance. However, comparing the two films reinforced my opinion that the Nosferatu cinematography is bloodless. None of the perfectly designed painting scenes in Nosferatu come close to the feeling and tension in the fight scene in Possession where Anna slaps Mark and the camera cuts to the close-up of Mark's face.
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someone let this old man sleep
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Watched on Tuesday February 11, 2025.
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LOVE HURTS hurt so bad. Ke Huy Quan worked overtime to salvage this movie, and he’s so fucking charming, but it’s still not nearly enough. Mustafa Shakir is also pulling his weight as The Raven, a handsome poet assassin dressed like a runway model English professor.
Unfortunately, the movie insults your intelligence with voiceovers about character motivations and feelings, and it’s still unable to commit to an emotional arc for the main character.
Ariana DeBose’s hair looks like camel humps. She’s trying to channel Harley Quinn and failing miserably. She’s obviously 20 years younger than Ke Huy Quan and has no chemistry with anyone or anything in the movie.
I’ve never walked out of a movie before and I came very close to walking out of this one.
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Watched on Sunday January 26, 2025.
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A quiet, slow start, but after experiencing Lost Highway I figured it would kick into high gear and not let go at some point, and it did. Lynch seems to be encouraging us to hold on to love and light even after the inevitable loss of innocence.
The other relevant theme is that violent, sadistic men have psychosexual trauma and fetishize the 50s and 60s and are going to make it everybody else’s problem.
My only critique is that I wish I’d been given more insight into why Jeffrey wanted to investigate the ear and the singer in the first place. I can make my assumptions - he’s had a boring white-picket fence life, he’s thinking about mortality with his father in the hospital, and he’s looking for excitement - but for the first 50% of the movie I wasn’t sure if those assumptions were correct or if he really was just a pervert, as Sandy says. I get that the ambiguity is supposed to draw you in to the movie more, but it actually just distracted me for half the movie.
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Weird dreamy horny little Escher painting of a movie.
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a poem yearning for a corporeal form
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I never saw this is a kid. As a 30something woman, I was mainly thinking, “They never would have let that Black kid in the pool,” or, “That kid is definitely going to end up marrying the girl he tricked into kissing him and I’m going to be annoyed by it,” or, “Why is the impoverished Black man keeping a baseball worth thousands of dollars in his cabinet and why is he not more upset with these kids for almost killing his dog.”
I can’t help but think this movie is just another in a long line of post-Civil Rights, post-second wave feminism movies trying to rehabilitate the image of mid-century America as a time when everything was hunky-dory. When America was great.
This is not to say you can’t have fond memories and nostalgia for movies that you enjoyed as a kid. It’s just probably good to interrogate if the things you “know” about mid-century America are things you learned from a movie at a fifth-grade sleepover.
My partner convinced me to watch this by telling me James Earl Jones and Margot Kidder were in this, and I guess 1.5 out of 2 isn’t bad.
(It’s Karen Allen. Karen Allen is in this. I also often get my mouthy brunettes who fluster the hero of late 20th century action-adventure movies mixed up, so I can’t blame my partner too much.)
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I saw THE BRUTALIST in 35mm at the Philly Film Society Center. I didn’t realize most of this movie takes place just outside Philadelphia, so that was a fun surprise for the audience.
THE BRUTALIST is an absolute feast for the eyes and ears. The decision to shoot on VistaVision results in beautiful color throughout the film. The shots of the green hillsides at the construction site are especially lush. The first half is tight and focused and it’s mesmerizing watching the intense physicality Adrien Brody brings to the role. The second half is relentlessly depressing and there’s less of a clear narrative direction, but I never felt bored during the 3.5 hours. The 15-minute intermission was very appreciated.
I do wish Erszébet had been given more development and depth, and Felicity Jones is not quite the right actress for the role. I felt this most keenly, unfortunately, during a very important scene towards the end of the movie that was let down by uncharacteristically blunt writing and forced acting.
There has also been some discussion of the “message” the director is sending about Israel. To me, the only message is a statement of fact - Israel was created, and the anti-Semitism and prejudice against foreigners among many Americans pushed many immigrant Jews to move to Israel. Whether that is a good or bad thing is left up to the audience. You can make your own judgement on whether or not you agree that should have been left ambiguous.
The evident envy and animosity Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) feels towards László Tóth reminded me of the “symbolic capitalist” lens that is now popular among the right. See articles like “Is Wokeness One Big Power Grab?” by Thomas Chatterton Williams if you are unfamiliar with this noxious, underdeveloped and incoherent strain of thought. I wrote a thread on Bluesky explaining the sleights of hand the author uses to make it seem like his thesis is at all ed by his anemic arguments.
Harrison Van Buren wouldn’t be out of place in a 2025 The Atlantic opinion piece, decrying the elitism of working class immigrant artisans who withhold their arcane knowledge from the masses.
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This movie took a little bit to get going, but once it hit the 20-minute mark, I was all in. Saoirse Ronan’s character reminded me of my kind, naive one brain-celled dollface Persian. I’d like to see her do more comedy. In fact, I’d love to see more of this buddy cop duo.
I also really loved the references to The Shining. There are probably other classic movie references I missed!
It’s going to be interesting seeing The Brutalist tomorrow after watching Brody be such a smarmy comedic douchebag in this one today.
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Convinced some family to watch this over a holiday visit, which was really just a stealthy reason for me to watch it again. Still just as hilarious. I do think some gags overstay their welcome, and they could have shaved off 10 minutes for a snappier story. Still, I haven’t seen a movie this creatively, inventively funny in many years.
Many people have mentioned the Looney Tunes/Buster Keaton inspiration, me included, but discussed less are the homages to other classic films. In the shot of Jean getting chased by hordes of beavers, I see Indiana Jones getting chased by a horde of natives as he runs towards the airplane on the water. In the sled chase scene, I see (and hear!) the speeder chase scene in Return of the Jedi.
The other thing fun about this movie is that you’re never sure if the gag is going to be that the rules of our physics ARE in play or are NOT in play. Will gravity work here, or will it nonsensically cease to exist for the bit?
HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS, like Looney Tunes before it, rejects the constraints of reality and exclaims that it will do whatever is funniest and most unexpected in the moment to keep the gags rolling.
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My previous review was two stars, but the longer I think about it the more I appreciate it.
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Is “beautiful to look at” the ideal form of a movie? Should we not rank how good you are at transferring the characters’ emotions onto the audience and having something interesting to say above vibes and aesthetic? Is Nosferatu the final boss of -core culture?
Lily Rose-Depp and Nicholas Hoult do fine work here. Willem Dafoe is the only one trying to inject a little levity into this movie, to varying effect. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is doing a bad impression of an “I SAY OLE CHAP” Victorian era Englishman, which is odd for a character who is German. His best work is in his last few scenes.
That said, “I’m a shipman, Sievers,” has meme potential to replace “Sir, this is a Wendy’s,” among a certain type of film nerd (me, I’m the film nerd).
I kind of wish Eggers had gone full crazy and made it so that Ellen chose to submit to Orlok not out of duty, but out of lust. Just let the girl be a monster-fucking freak. The sexual politics of this are already fucked, so at least say something fucking interesting.
I’m becoming very bored with modern cinematography in movies by auteur directors. The cinematography calls so much attention to itself. Yes, the characters are perfectly situated and the light falls on them just so and the costume design is immaculate - BUT. Cinematography should serve the story and the emotions.
Emotions are not perfect. Human stories are messy. More and more these types of movies say “look how well I can compose a shot” instead of “look how well I can use film’s visual language to convey an emotion or a state of mind.”
A great example of this is the scene with Harding and his girls where he’s holding them on the floor of the bedroom after his wife falls ill. When I saw that scene, I thought about how beautifully the pale light shone on the girls and their father. I thought about how meticulous the attention to detail was in the girls’ room. I thought about how pained the expression was on Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s face.
What I didn’t feel was terrified and despondent. I didn’t FEEL as if my partner was dying and I had to console two children and my city was falling to the plague. I didn’t FEEL the texture of my girls’ frilled and ruffled dresses under my hands. I didn’t FEEL as if my world was ending.
I’ve been watching a lot more older movies, some classics and some more obscure, and so many of the great ones use cinematography not just to show a beautiful picture but to convey a beautiful emotion. To bring this back to Eggers, I fucking love The Lighthouse. I think that movie is far more interested in conveying the mental breakdown experienced by the men, but it is still a beautiful movie to look at it. It is possible for Eggers to do both, but I don’t think he nailed that balance in Nosferatu.
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Amazing practical effects, Kurt Russell’s baby face, incredibly tense act 1 and act 2.
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When it comes to unhinged musicals released in 2024, The End covered the “forgiveness for past crimes” theme much better than Emilia Pérez. This movie is more sympathetic to a murderous cartel leader than to her victims. On a technical level, Emilia Pérez had more dynamic choreography and lighting than The End, though.
Zoe Saldana’s two big numbers were electric - her opening number in the street and the other at the banquet. I’ve never been all that impressed by Saldana, so it was great to see her have fun and excel here.
Karla Sofía Gascón did a great job with the difficult task set before her. I wish she’d gotten big numbers like Saldana did, so she could’ve really shown off.
Selena Gomez honestly surprised me, she was better than I thought she’d be. My issues with her character Jessi are related more to the disted plot, which I thought suffered from overextending itself to cover Jessi’s relationship with Gustavo and Emilia grappling with her actions as a cartel leader and Rita’s desire for a fulfilling life and independent career, and as a result giving none of those things enough time to develop or come to a narratively satisfying conclusion.
I’m hardly an expert on how films handle gender essentialism, but I did find some of the assumptions underlying choices made by the movie to be worrisome. For example, Emilia’s man-voice comes out while she is assaulting her former wife for the crime of getting remarried five years after her husband died. I had the uncomfortable feeling that the writers believe men are violent and women are nurturing, which is the exact line of thought that leads a certain kind of person to become transphobic.
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I could sit here all night writing out the things I love about this movie. Instead I’ll just say, who doesn’t love watching Robert Pattinson do hard manual labor while dressed like shirtless Mario?
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Watched on Tuesday December 24, 2024.
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I somehow always knew I needed to see Margot Kidder as a slutty sorority mean girl. I could fix her? No, she could fix me.
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“this one weird branch of evolution produced a humanoid creature and it wants to fuck you, kill you, or both” is a top tier horror trope and it is put to devastating effect here. Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens are so fun to watch.
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This review may contain spoilers.
I found out a few days ago that my partner had never seen Interstellar, so I immediately booked us IMAX tickets for the 10th anniversary showing. Getting to listen to them find out that Cooper was the bookshelf ghost was a top five movie-going experience (no, I don’t know how they went for 10 years without finding out the plot twist to Interstellar).
The storytelling and emotions and score and cinematography were excellent in 2014 and remain excellent in 2024. However, with the ing of time also comes new contexts and realities.
Human-powered space exploration
Cooper is framed as a hero for saying NASA should have continued human-powered space exploration even as the food system collapses and billions of people die. That hits closer to home in 2024 than it did in 2014.
The richest man in our real world is obsessed with building (unsustainable) human colonies on Mars. Meanwhile, summers are unbearably hot and new viruses kill seven million people in five years. Fifth dimensional future humans are not coming to save us through the power of the McConaissance. We will not be launching space colonies by disrupting Earth’s gravity, so we should probably spend some billions on the only world we have.
Funnily enough, after Cooper is told his son Timothée Chalamet doesn’t have the grades for college, Cooper is also framed as a hero because he calls out his son’s teacher and the government for only wanting the school system to produce uneducated farmers. One common propaganda technique in the conservative orbit is to discredit a university education to certain segments of the population, likely for the very reason Coop identifies.
Women
Matthew McConaughey as Cooper is sweaty, scruffy, dirty, and disheveled in almost every scene. He has big UGLY emotions, especially in the famous scene of him crying while watching videos of his suddenly adult children.
On the other hand, Jessica Chastain as Murphy and Anne Hathaway as Amelia Brand have perfected the no-makeup makeup look even in the apocalypse. The soft light illuminates their flawless skin at all times.
Men are people, women are pretty when they cry.
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what happens when an immovable object (boy mom) meets an unstoppable force (girl who farts on command)
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The End is a post-apocalyptic anti-plot underground salt mine bunker musical character study of seven unnamed characters and the crushing weight of self-delusion and guilt you endure when the only people who can forgive you are dead.
It is quite simply the most unique, frustrating film I have seen all year.
The entire ensemble cast is great, although I wish Lennie James as the Doctor had been given more to do. Swinton and Shannon do great work here as Mother and Father, because when do they not do great work. Swinton’s performance of The Mirror brought me to tears. I really think she’s my favorite actress, both for her performances and also the unique projects she picks.
This is my first time seeing George MacKay, and he gives a fantastically off-putting and vulnerably exposed performance as the Boy. I look forward to watching The Beast later this year. As the Girl, Moses Ingram proves that the writing on Kenobi did her wrong. She is gutting and I loved her powerful, mournful voice the most.
The End is probably a tad too long, and perhaps more tension could have been introduced to keep the audience engaged. However, these things are not why I called The End frustrating. It’s frustrating because it denies you the catharsis you so desperately want for yourself and for the characters. I find it interesting to consider all the reasons the director wanted to deny us that catharsis.
This might not be a movie everyone will enjoy, but I also don’t think it’s a movie that cares to be enjoyed. Watching this movie while eating popcorn felt immoral.
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Side note: Someone with a statistically normal distribution of all ratings called The End “bereft of formal risk” which encapsulates the problem of chasing a bell curve instead of considering a movie on its merits. You look like a ding-dong.
My shortest distance between two points is always broken by this place.
I feel like one of the books I read in my college class History of Gender & Sexuality just got up off the shelf and became a movie (complimentary). Is it a good movie?
On a technical level, maybe not - the lighting is very dark, the audio is sometimes muffled, some subtitles are wrong, and it makes you work hard* to understand the story and relationships between the characters - but all these drawbacks also reminded me of every time I’ve been in a musty gay bar surrounded by second-hand smoke and messy gays. The difference here is 1971 had much cooler fashion and many more folks struggling with the closet than 2009.
*I actually love it when a story makes you work hard to piece together the story and relationships. I get to complete a puzzle and watch a movie at the same time! I realize this may not be fun for everyone.
The film does have flaws that reveal discriminatory attitudes towards trans women and sex workers. The attack on Karen felt out of place, although Candy Darling’s performance when Karen emerges from the men’s bathroom is heart-breaking and vulnerable. I also didn’t care for the film deciding the two sex workers would be the two main villains, although Rue McClanahan is a delight to watch vamping across the screen.
As frustrating as these prejudices are, they are also educational as to commonly held beliefs about the tragic trans character or the duplicitous sex worker in the 1970s - and how these beliefs haven’t really changed all that much in the past 50 years.
It’s true there’s a lot of doom and gloom and depressed closeted men in this movie, but there are also so many moments of familial camaraderie and caring. The Christmas fairy sequence where a homophobe is run out of the bar is lovely, as is the break to sing religious Christmas songs around the piano with a chorus of gay men who have been shunned by religion and family but still find comfort in songs they first learned with their family.
This is Christmas 2024. We’re bracing against an oncoming attack against our trans family and the rights that generations of queers before us fought so fiercely for. This movie is a good reminder of why we fight, who we are fighting for, and the prejudice we must defeat within our own community, because we are stronger when we fight together.
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Wile E. Coyote meets Don’t Starve meets Charlie Chaplin. This was so fun to watch and so creative. You should know as little as possible before you watch it, so stop reading and start watching!
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I guess I watched this movie long enough ago that I never wrote or logged a review when I watched it. This is possibly the best film of the 2010s, and a very fitting end to that decade and a very fitting beginning to the 2020s.
]]>- Nickel Boys
- The Substance
- Love Lies Bleeding
- The Brutalist
- Hundreds of Beavers
- The End
- I Saw the TV Glow
- The Outrun
- Dune: Part Two
- Cuckoo
...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
]]>- Nickel Boys
- The Substance
- Love Lies Bleeding
- The Brutalist
- Hundreds of Beavers
- The End
- I Saw the TV Glow
- The Outrun
- Dune: Part Two
- Cuckoo
...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
]]>- The Fall
- Pan's Labyrinth
- Jurassic Park
- Star Wars
- But I'm a Cheerleader
- Parasite
- Portrait of a Lady on Fire
- Spirited Away
- Legally Blonde
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
]]>Five best released in 2024, and five best released in previous years.
]]>- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
- Calibre
- The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
- Wolfwalkers
- Princess Mononoke
- Poor Things
- Dirty Dancing
- Bodies Bodies Bodies
- Mad Love
- The Innocents
...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
]]>- Compartment No. 6
- Perfect Blue
- My Heart Is That Eternal Rose
- Green Snake
- Long Way North
- Seven Samurai
- The Fabulous Baron Munchausen
- El Sur
- The Heroic Trio
- Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
]]>Wait for Jaime: Some of my friends, Tokyo Godfather, 8 women, hundreds of beavers, Black Christmas
]]>- Design for Living
- The Thin Man
- Red-Headed Woman
- Mädchen in Uniform
- Our Betters
- Wild Boys of the Road
- Trouble in Paradise
- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
- Midnight Mary
- Freaks
...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
]]>- Do Revenge
- Thirteen
- A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
- Shiva Baby
- Titane
- Bodies Bodies Bodies
- Winter's Bone
- Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
- ing
- The Watermelon Woman
...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
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