Unbothered, unashamed, true to itself from the opening titles to the end credits' all-too-satisfying "Wake Up" needle drop: The Matrix Resurrections immediately feels like the most conceptually daring blockbuster of the past decade. It has absolutely no qualms in being this katana-sharp metatext that gleefully hacks away at the depressingly self-serving ouroboros state of current thought, not giving a single turd about elegance, coherence, or even its own fandom. If you wish to hold it up against the previous films,…
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Dune 2021
Before anything else, let me just preface this by saying that, unfortunately, while I was watching Dune, I wasn't able to turn off that part of my brain the constantly sought to compare the on-screen narrative to its written counterpart. It's something I personally hate to do, since it actively harms my appreciation of a film as its own artistic beast, but, in this case at least, probably because I reread the book during the summer, I just couldn't stop…
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After Yang 2021
The first twenty or so minutes nearly ruined it for me. There was something too generic for the contemplative handling of its director to muster, with references to normalized social competition, surveillance paranoia, corporate holds on everything, everywhere. It's barebones at best and eyeroll inducing at worst; there's a very poignant critique to be made here on how uncommitted the film is to the various labor and social issues its spin on techno-orientalism raise (this article on The Baffler goes…
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Totally Fucked Up 1993
another homo movie by gregg araki
as scattershot as anything I've ever seen, and yet this is one of those rare instances where each piece of random pastiche shrapnel hits a very specific target dead on the face. it's a 16 bullet point listing of modern alienation, where young spaced-out aliens have to face the blinding rage the Big Real has against their existence. america as an amalgamation of of self-deteriorating hate, the bulging belly of a beast that threatens…
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Annette 2021
I really can't recall the last time I saw a film this actively antagonizing, where every itty bitty decision feels put together with a combination of an ironic smirk and a protruding middle finger, both pointed straight at the audience. Even all the way through to the marketing and the trailers, Annette is possibly the biggest rug pull of Carax's career -- and that is saying something. Apart from the opening scene, this really isn't the quirky Sparks musical I…
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Titane 2021
Cinema through the meat-grinder. Where Crash saw the arrival of avenues conflating the human and the mechanical, Titane rides them out to their logical brick wall, all in a hail of mighty thunder. It's all pure commitment to the desecration of the body, to ripping it from the clutches of theory and abstraction into the realm of sheer physicality. Here, gender and purpose cease to exist, it's all just meat and bones anyway -- crash it, break it, cut it,…
