Letterboxd 5019o Zebra

Cool as Ice 545928 1991 - ★★

Mon, 26 May 2025 06:31:41 +1200

4v291o

Watched on Sunday May 25, 2025.

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Game of Survival 3p1610 1989 - ★★★

Sun, 25 May 2025 10:48:28 +1200

Watched on Saturday May 24, 2025.

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Souleymane's Story 5k606o 2024 - ★★★★

Sun, 25 May 2025 09:19:50 +1200

Watched on Saturday May 24, 2025.

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Bitter Gold 12m53 2024 - ★★★★

Sun, 25 May 2025 04:46:49 +1200

Watched on Saturday May 24, 2025.

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Happyend 4f4l1b 2024 - ★★★★★

Sat, 24 May 2025 13:21:46 +1200

Watched on Friday May 23, 2025.

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Mission 1h3df Impossible – Dead Reckoning, 2023 - ★★★★★

Sat, 24 May 2025 02:04:34 +1200

What once felt like a weakness now resonates as this film's key strength, that its central antagonist is little more than an esoteric, invisible presence wielding data as a weapon. The convoluted nature of it all gnaws at a collective fear of the unknown, a series of feverish and hopeless attempts to prevent the world from careening into a freefall of algorithm driven chaos, that human instinct might be diluted down to a homogenous set of information hellbent on dissolving our ties to the world around us, eroding truth and scrubbing morality out of the equation. This franchise has always sought a way to hit at the heart of its heroes, but connecting a sense of personal involvement to a collective of ghosts is its own herculean task. The threat here, despite being depicted as little more than a crackling matrix of swirling data, is the complete dissolution of self. A complete erasure of freedom, bought and sold by the highest bidder, global powers too blinded by opportunism to see they will only be wielding power at the behest of something they can't understand, bound by the same submission to unfeeling data the rest of us will be. A world that produces mythological cinema on such a staggering scale is a world worth fighting for.

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Mission 1h3df Impossible – Fallout, 2018 - ★★★★★

Thu, 22 May 2025 13:15:14 +1200

Watched on Wednesday May 21, 2025.

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Mission 1h3df Impossible – Rogue Nation, 2015 - ★★★★★

Thu, 22 May 2025 01:53:22 +1200

Watched on Tuesday May 20, 2025.

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Mission 1h3df Impossible – Ghost Protocol, 2011 - ★★★★

Wed, 21 May 2025 17:19:36 +1200

Watched on Tuesday May 20, 2025.

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Mission 1h3df Impossible III, 2006 - ★★

Wed, 21 May 2025 11:52:33 +1200

Takes the sweeping romanticism and myth making of 2 and brings it crashing back down to Earth with some of the safest blockbuster stylization imaginable, a completely faithless piece of cinema that operates on television thriller levels with outsized ambitions and performances that punch far above the directorial fervor. Abrams seems to hold a tacit understanding of the visual cues of large scale action without understanding what makes it all tick. Bay without the adrenaline-fueled, roided up testosterone energy, Cameron without the sense of celluloid grandeur, Scott without the furious delirium of overcranked aughts visual language. Plot so wrapped up in vague political gesturing and its overworked attempt to ground Hunt in a human world that it forgets to establish any stakes beyond the interpersonal. It's as if the film was worked backwards from its opening sequence, establishing a personal connection and a villain feverishly trying to threaten his family, a villain who must now justify his violence through some sort of obfuscated macguffin whose implications are nebulous at best. Working so hard to accomplish so little.

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Mission 1h3df Impossible II, 2000 - ★★★★★

Tue, 20 May 2025 14:22:08 +1200

Mission: Impossible in heroic bloodshed mode, unapologetic pop cinema myth making that only seems like a mystifying stylistic diversion in retrospect. In a world where the franchise could go on to be a diverse genre vessel rather than a series of globally escalating stakes and stunt showcases, M:I-2 would stand the test of time as an unrestrained vision of blockbuster possibility, as melodramatically romantic as it is ruthlessly violent. Steeped in aughts stylistic flourishes, flowy wuxia wirework, and precision tooled fight choreography, it is Woo's Hollywood love letter to Hong Kong action commercialism. Soaked in oversaturated neon highlights, frames lined with fire and graced by doves, moments held with dramatic fervor and dripping with the kind of latent sensuality that only the sweat and nu-metal of 00s imagery could conjure. Nothing else like it.

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Chairman of the Board p7156 1998 - ★

Mon, 19 May 2025 06:32:41 +1200

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

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Sinners 5z1711 2025 - ★★★★★

Sun, 18 May 2025 11:47:59 +1200

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

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Final Destination Bloodlines 1q4s64 2025 - ★★★★

Sun, 18 May 2025 11:47:40 +1200

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

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Suffer 2h3248 Little Children, 1983 - ★★★★

Sun, 18 May 2025 11:43:44 +1200

Completely incomprehensible British garbage, the kind of brain damaged SOV schlock that's composed of a putrid blend of banal surreality and scanline dread. There's no way to recreate this particular brand of brain melting trash because the logic has all been scorched away, muted by layers of oddities and idiosyncrasies that beg to be explained while never finding any interest in generating any sort of connective tissue. Thus the film's central orphanage becomes a sort of incoherent limbo, a liminal space where characters drift through and experience horrors completely disconnected from any semblance of reality. Decaying corpses shamble through the garden, children become both victims and aggressors, violence slowly brews beneath the dirt until blood splatters beneath every flickering scanline. The sound designer has been found dead in a ditch and a local pop sensation gets crucified and becomes Jesus. Child or not, you are doomed to suffer.

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Four Mothers 3t6k3m 2024 - ★★★

Fri, 16 May 2025 17:16:39 +1200

Watched on Thursday May 15, 2025.

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Friendship 12c21 2024 - ★★★★

Fri, 16 May 2025 13:33:21 +1200

A surrealist, hallucinatory nightmare about the miserable anxiety of making friends as an adult filtered through the pensive lens of contemporary indie cinema. Everyone is poisoned by Marvel spoiler brainrot and all anyone can do is scream at everyone else to ask them questions. Ordering Subway is either our worst nightmare or wildest fantasy. Licking a toad and meeting a guy named Jimp is kind of just where we're at, culturally.

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The History of the Seattle Mariners 6k73x 2020 - ★★★★

Fri, 16 May 2025 06:18:18 +1200

Watched on Thursday May 15, 2025.

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Kingdom of Heaven 2xy2h 2005 - ★★★★

Thu, 15 May 2025 17:10:09 +1200

All death is certain.

What will you make of your life?

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¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! 5r155b 2024 - ★★★

Thu, 15 May 2025 06:30:25 +1200

Watched on Wednesday May 14, 2025.

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Go Go Tales 1l424n 2007 - ★★★★★

Wed, 14 May 2025 02:43:00 +1200

A world disintegrating. Existence in flux. The American dream as the electrifying high of surviving another day in a wasteland of transactional relationships, constantly hoping that one of a thousand bets hits with just enough return to keep your head above water. Ferrara's microcosm of a landscape purely ruled by capital - every action in service of the next dollar, an extant hustle that breaks down every interaction into little more than an exchange of value. Flesh for ink on a check, alcohol to wash down the next promise of future return. Saliva, sweat, and semen under the buzzing neon, washed in pink and blue as cash deteriorates into imaginary currency, another mask to stonewall the working class with the promises of tomorrow. Everyone suffers beneath the weight of it all - Dafoe's slimy club manager as almost as sympathetic as the rest of them, so blindly convinced of his dream that the capitalistic villainy begins to trickle down. Threatened by the looming visage of Bed Bath & Beyond, simultaneously an anarchic punk rejection of corporatism as well as the terrifying reality of what becomes of us when we are forced to submit to these capitalist structures. What makes it all magic is Ferrara's ability to cut through the noise by way of his idiosyncratic stylization, the cutaways to life viewed through a humming CRT, these fuzzy moments of truth amongst the larceny of the hustle. All centered around the revelatory sequence of cabaret night, where the veneer is shed for the briefest moment, where everyone allows themselves to truly express who they are through art, free of judgement. Longing for a world where our humanity is no longer tied to the next paycheck - maybe, just maybe, we can carve a space to care about. The cycle never ends.

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White Lightning 7wq 1973 - ★★★

Mon, 12 May 2025 11:16:11 +1200

Watched on Sunday May 11, 2025.

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Junk Head 5a3b49 2017 - ★★★★

Mon, 12 May 2025 05:31:22 +1200