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Jackie Brown 1997
Tarantino is kinda like Daft Punk: if you slow down the beats-per-minute and take away the editing tricks, you start to realize they're both sorta just playing old funk records for white mass audiences and you're probably better off listening to Moodymann for this kinda thing anyway.
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Clue 1985
It has sequent murders, archetypal characters, pitch black and slapstick comedy, curvy women, kinky overtones, debts to Agatha Christie and a True Ending so basically if it were a 30-40 hour adventure game or visual novel it would be a masterpiece.
I'm not sure the film is a masterpiece because audience participation is ultimately rendered null but I do know that I'm a complete sucker for its formula.
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F for Fake 1973
The story about Kodar, her grandfather, and Picasso and some forger paintings that the grandfather supposedly made is presented at the end of the film before Welles reminds the viewer that he only promised to tell the truth for an hour and that "for the last 17 minutes, I've been lying my head off." In the commentary to the Criterion Collection DVD release of F for Fake, Kodar claims the idea for this segment as her own. She also claims…
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Mod Fuck Explosion 1994
Was wholly unprepared for any single aspect of this but someday I too wish to be performing kabuki rap mating dances, climaxing on motorcycles, getting into impeccably stylish gang fights and just generally Mod Fuck Exploding.
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Kino's Journey: Country of Illness —For You— 2007
For as many "essayists" specializing in the medium as there are on YouTube, rarely does anyone get to the heart of what makes anime uniquely interesting and uniquely boring, being that it is bar none the most supernormal genre of illustration and storytelling. Nothing else really comes close. For this reason, it relies primarily on its own design for emotional impact; and in this reliance often loses anything in the way of nuance or subtlety. As consequence, anime is most…
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Paths of Glory 1957
The weirdest part of World War I, save for maybe perennial bloodbaths like Verdun, Passchendaele and Ypres, was definitely the beginning. The Teutons, along with their adversaries, were essentially high on Quixotic conceptions of patriotism and war, and so the German army marched through Belgium and headlong into Gallic machine guns, and effectively became the first Europeans to traverse the liminal space between modernity, with all its romanticism and vestiges of the old world, and stumble into the nihilistic epoch…
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Solaris 1972
Was sich überhaupt sagen lässt, lässt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
Invoking Wittgenstein's platitude can only be half as shallow as the speechified literary references in Solaris, whose first one hundred and final ten minutes are among the greatest in film. The trouble is that everything between them is so stupid, and rings of a far inferior artistic mind than that which produced Andrei Rublev eight years prior. What's worse is that…
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Ivan's Childhood 1962
Ivan’s Childhood looks and sounds perfect, but in his first film Tarkovsky never moves beyond the domain of the obvious. Such things were perhaps less evident in 1962, but it seems any person capable of being deeply affected by an art film would also find the message war is hell to be patently undeniable and maybe a bit patronizing. It's not for lack of trying that Sergei managed to convey little else here. Ivan’s Childhood is a film about war…