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Dark Glasses 2022
We witnessed the decomposition of Argento's directorial style in the 2000s and after a longer hiatus he now reached a dialectical synthesis of what has made him bad for about twenty years and what made him great before that. The problem of people like Argento but also de Palma or Carpenter is that their approach to film is highly dependent on the history of the medium and doesn't transpose well across different regimes of production. Argento wasn't able to access…
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Phase IV 1974
One of the smartest pulp films out there. It's almost boring to develop all the far reaching and timely ideas contained in this, because they are so perfectly developed by in the text itself. Let's just say that it's highly questionable if any humans shows up in this film at all. The first sign of human civilization we see is the shot of a car blurred by desert heat and it's all steel domes, screens, pipes and wires from there.…
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Lesson of a Dead Language 1979
Decadent mysticism blossoming on the rotting corpse of aristocracy in the last days of WWI. Against the threat of collectivism reactionary irrationalism gathers all its forces channelled by a single officer who uses his last days on earth in search of spiritual apotheosis in the face of annihilation. Gustav Meyrink and Bruno Schulz provide the imaginary for this liminal landscape where Slavic and Jewish Mysticism, Anthroposophy and Symbolism intermingle against the background of the disintegrating old European order where cryptofacism…
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Tenet 2020
As usual with Nolan, this is a film that stumbles over its own hyperbole but still is "important" because it expresses so many obsessions of today's blockbuster cinema in extremis. The action-sequence with some (human and non-human) actors moving backwards, others forward in time seem like the most extreme consequence of Bay's, Scott's and their followers' desire to crack open spacetime by means of digitally enhanced action and unbridled editing. The Transformers or something seemed to bend the laws of…
