Letterboxd — Your life in film

The United States is a nation of indebtedness. The scourge of student loans allowed to swallow a generation thanks to corporate greed. A recession caused be predatory mortgage lenders. People drowning in credit cards — not to mention the sin of usury on full display with payday loans.

Debt exists outside the financial context too, of course. Justice can be theorized as the debts (obligations) you have to others, and what happens when you “default” on those “debts”. And broader…

“Blue Velvet” feels like two films to me. On the one level, it’s this basic detective film where this kid without much experience gets swept up into a world bigger than him. He has to navigate this, maintain his sense of morals, reckon with temptation and violence, and ultimately try and uncover the crimes. In the end, he succeeds and gets the girl. Standard, cut and dry stuff. Nothing too remarkable, nothing too exciting in its plotting or what not.…

"I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!"

David Lynch is obsessed with the human experience. I think all filmmakers and storytellers are — it comes with the job — but with Lynch it seems to leap to something greater than required by the profession. “Eraserhead” explores fatherhood and the dark pressures it can put on a psyche, “Blue Velvet” revolves around a boy becoming a man in both…

My enjoyment of this film went up dramatically once I figured out the allegory. That's the neat thing about incredibly fantastical, absurd art like this — beneath all the wild and wacky imagery is a grounded truth or idea on life. The whole film is this expression of the idea of parenting, the tension it puts on our relationships/ourselves and the fear it causes. It warps our reality, placing us in the strange state of being within our world.

And…

Kimi is as well made as Soderbergh’s last Max film, No Sudden Move, but with a little less bite and cynicism that made his previous film better. 

Soderbergh’s slick filmmaking is back with cool camera tricks and movement. Zoë does great as the house ridden Angela and Rita Wilson particularly does well to make your skin crawl as the gross executive that Angela attempts to report the crime to.

Where Kimi loses me somewhat is how there doesn’t seem to…

Told with the rugged tenderness of a Flannery O’Connor novel but aptly named for a resilient Korean herb that can grow wherever it’s planted, Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical “Minari” is a raw and vividly remembered story of two simultaneous assimilations; it’s the story of a family assimilating into a country, but also the story of a man assimilating into his family.

Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun) and his wife Monica (“Sea Fog” star Han Yeri) emigrated from Korea together in the…