I enjoy the John Wick films, but they’re not very good. The first two are solid because their tight runtimes keep the action front and center, sequestering the narrative to the barest scaffolding for the action. The incredible choreography and matching visual technical skills are why these are so fun, but the actual story is goofy and adolescent (not to mention the dialogue is mostly clichés and cringy variations on well worn aphorisms). Like porno or musicals, the weak narrative…
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The Boxer from Shantung 1972
From the jump, I found this to be disorienting and seemingly graceless, but that was until I got on it's wavelength. There's a unique creative tension that emerges from the rough guerilla shooting style and the bright, familiar studio sets. While realism and artifice are the animating poles of all cinema, the dance between them here is uniquely Chang Cheh's, whose films have a rugged gracefulness that here seems to be constantly on the verge of unraveling.
Unlike other rags…
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HyperNormalisation 2016
Ultimately, Curtis’ argument is that the oversimplification of complex problems breeds oversimplified solutions, and when these overly simple solutions are implemented—often violently—they produce unintended consequences that further complicate the calculus. I would like to keep this front and center, because while Curtis has many aesthetic and methodological weaknesses, the framing of his thesis remains sound, even if he himself is not fully beholden to it. The case for complexity is a flexible position, one that does not divide political and…
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