"Take me to your cinema."
The camera has an opus. It starts simple enough, one murder: the lens the barrel from which the gaze is shot like a bullet; the woman, a prostitute, its receiver. But instead of playing it out as straight succession of ever-increasingly orchestrated killings, Powell doesn't ever feel tempted to turn this into something like a proto-giallo (not that there would be anything wrong with that, mind you); he instead uses this premisse to build a…
If ever there was a movie driven by sheer rage and trauma, it's this one. It's one of those rare pieces where every single frame feels exorcised/vomited out of the protagonist's subconscious being (and yes, I include that *ending* in within this canvas as well). It's stylish, rebellious, vain, crude, unexpected and deeply, deeply hurt at its core, and somewhat naïve. For better or worse, the film is in of itself an encapsulation of Cassandra, totally and unapologetically character driven…
An american Metamorphosis, the world bending man to its will, man accepting it little by little, until he himself becomes crooked. Sometimes I look at what I denounce, at what I fight against, and I see the appeal to it; the call for social brutalism, being strict, impulsive, rash, uncaring, self-centere. I'm compelled to it, and I often fall into those very same holes. Phoenix's character, a club owner who slowly gets reeled back by his family into the side…
" You know what kind of plan that never fails? No plan. No plan at all. You know why? Because life cannot be planned."
One can very much argue that new wave of cinema coming out of Korea during the late nineties was, and still is, one of the most diversified and eclectic arrangements of celluloid ideas in the cinematic landscape. Directors like Lee Chang-dong sought to explore conflicts of morality in characters broken by the world around them, while…
"I can only see what's in front, not what's behind. So I can only know half of the truth, right?"
The beautiful tragedy of the maze of glimmering reflections and turned backs that is being alive. Where we walk others have walked before, repeating the same mistakes, diving into the deep end of the pool yet again without any real assurance on if we will return to the surface to draw another breath, turning our backs on the things we…
