A hilariously stupid movie about imaginary geopolitics, but at least it has them. I continue to puzzle over how those championing Top Gun: Maverick have no issue with its total lack of specificity regarding modern global conflict, real or imaginary, as if the purest form of the blockbuster were simply high-octane effects and unchecked machismo detached from nationalistic and philosophical difference. Uhh no, it was always about creating wildly irresponsible depictions of ideologically driven terrorists, preferably from other nations who hate the U.S. for perfectly justifiable reasons.
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The Black Phone 2021
More soulless filmmaking from Scott Derrickson. Everything is geared around thematic parallels and empty homages. This is the sort of product one gets when harebrained screenwriting workshops become a filmmaker’s primary reference point for quality. Everything is overwritten and overplotted, and the explicit debt the film owes to Fritz Lang’s M is less a meaningful allusion that gets examined in some way than just a nod to other cinephiles that Derrickson has, I guess, seen that movie too.
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La La Land 2016
Please allow the candor of my passions a forum without preemptive judgment.
The “post-racial mystique”, as Catherine Squires calls it, need not be found in cases where racial recognition unexpectedly springs to the surface. On the contrary, the very concept of being “post-racial” means that race does not factor into discussions regarding politics or the polity, because the urgency of those conversations have been lessened or even permanently quelled. Accordingly, depictions of history, especially those guided by nostalgia and longing…
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Shiva Baby 2020
When I interviewed John Waters in 2016, he said "I want to be an insider now that everyone wants to be an outsider." With the latter point, he might as well have been describing the tone of Shiva Baby, a movie so certain of its edgy, outsider status that we can rather easily dismiss it as an attempt to place itself on the inside. That's what Waters was getting at: self-describing as quirky, weird, unconventional, etc. has become a navigable…
