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Origin 2023
i’ve seen things you people wouldn't believe…. a tasteless dramatization of the trayvon martin murder that treats a pack of skittles and a hoodie like shorthand iconography... like nick offerman in a maga hat… i watched a montage set to a clair de lune soundalike and shot like one of those levi’s commercials that thinks it’s malick cutting between the aforementioned murder, a brutal rape below the deck of a slave ship, and jews being herded into a concentration camp.…
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Green Border 2023
How to depict Muslim people for white directors:
- make them pray on their prayer rug in every occassion possible - even when running from border police
- make them say allah every two seconds
- always bring up the halal / haram food problem
- repeat -
Bottoms 2023
Damn girl 😐 you got the whole squad laughing 😐
Kinda shocked by the effusive, glowing praise for this bafflingly incoherent, profoundly unfunny comedy that never seems to establish a clear tone nor fully define or commit to the heightened absurdity/surreality of its world. How are people reading this as a campy Gen-Z/high school parody when it very clearly feels like it’s reinforcing the genre tropes it’s satirizing (and such an inert and lazy reinforcement at that)? Overacted Twitter-brained lobotomy…
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There There 2022
Oh, Bujalski. I'm thinking about how many of the 'mumblecore' (whatever that means anymore) directors moved on to more slick, higher (if still generally low) budget movies when they got enough clout to do so. Not that Bujalski didn't either, but I admire his willingness to make an experiment like this that goes back to the lo-fi playfulness of his earlier days. And it's the best kind of mumblecore-style filmmaking, just like Lynn Shelton's Humpday: a film that, despite its…
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Can't Get You Out of My Head 2021
I had to pause this a bunch and watch episodes of Sex and the City to clear my brain
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Shiva Baby 2020
[W/O]
(0:32)
I actually forgot that I'd sampled this. I have nothing to say about it. The whole comedy-of-embarrassment faildaughter vibe just didn't work for me.
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New Order 2020
I can't do any better than CJ saying "First half: 4, second half: 1" except knock each down a half-star. The sub-Haneke bullshit of the second half attempts to implicate all but just reduces itself to pointless nihilism, and by only really caring for its 1% characters it undercuts its thesis of the rich and poor becoming the playthings of real power in treating the latter as either an intemperate mob or tamed chattel in the periphery.
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Jumanji: The Next Level 2019
I can’t recommend enough the therapeutic value of getting together a group of friends to see whatever random trash is playing at the Cineplex for a laugh.
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The Lighthouse 2019
Provisional 3.5-star rating because I really don’t know what to make of this. It’s certainly a technical marvel, chock full of atmosphere, a real cinematic sledgehammer. But as for what all the sound and fury is in service of, I’m much less certain. Dafoe and Pattinson are always fun to watch here, but ultimately I didn’t find their situation or the way it progressed to be especially compelling. I don’t doubt that there’s more to be examined in terms of…
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Bacurau 2019
A completely bonkers movie that begins as a Brazilian social drama, observing the townspeople's cultural rituals and impoverished conditions at the hand of a corrupt mayor with an almost western-inflected sense of community. Beautiful desert and mountain vistas interrupted by small character interactions and location detail that carry a sense of local history as well as their procedures for everyday resistance. But then a shift occurs. There are a few off-kilter tonal and formal details that signal it; a split…
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