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  Ghostbusters: Afterlife 2021

  Added by Ian Shade

  Took me fifteen years, but the original Ghostbusters finally clicked for me on this most recent rewatch--finally located the thematic anchor point that I require to connect with any work of art: this film is about as close as we'll ever get to a real world invaded by supernatural forces--humanity responds with idiots, charlatans, bureaucrats, impenetrable technobabble, and science applied in the deadliest and most suicidal way possible. Everyone goes pale and backs away when the proton packs spark to…

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  The French Dispatch 2021

  Added by Ian Shade 1

  “You know what? The difference between you and me is purely political. You see, we both play good piano, eh? But I'm the proletariat of the keyboard... and you're the bourgeois. You play for art... and you enjoy it. I play for survival. That's not the same thing.”
  -- Carlo, Deep Red (Argento/Zapponi)

  "If you're so desperate for a French girlfriend, I suggest you try Vichy."
  -- Shosanna Dreyfus, Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino)

  "La chienlit c'est lui!"
  -- May 68 protester…

Popular reviews

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  Avengers: Infinity War 2018

  ½ Watched by Ian Shade 28 Apr 2018 1

  I can call Infinity War garbage because it is garbage--but I can only get so worked up about its purpose and ambition, its "grand scheme," when I tell you that I'm giving this another Doctor Strange half-star. Intertextuality and all that. Still, this Avengers leads me to the same conclusion as the last one: that the MCU, or Marvel or Disney or Kevin Feige, cannot squelch the auteur's creative voice. But now that they've financed enough creative voices to form…

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  London Has Fallen 2016

  ★★★★★ Watched by Ian Shade 04 Mar 2016 3

  An Iranian filmmaker, long ago displaced by war, somehow gets his hands on a flag-jerking slimeball of a Hollywood movie; his sequel begins with an American drone blowing the hell out of a Pakistani wedding. Olympus has been reconstructed, and the lesson was to take the moniker as literally as possible, to chuck thunderbolts from on high. It's a curious, and nauseating, and natural extension of Olympus Has Fallen and its weird genericisms. Benjamin Asher is no longer an anonymous…