I went in expecting something weird and messy, and it is to a degree, but it's not manic in the slightest, which was really what I was geared up for. Instead, it's this thoroughly melancholy and pensive piece of theater about the passage of time and the ways that we use story to create meaning out of that passage. Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton have unexpectedly great screen chemistry, and the storybook framing of the movie is not nearly as…
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The Exotic Ones 1968
Extremely boring for something this weird: 10% travel brochure for New Orleans, 50% burlesque performances, 25% footage of a caveman-looking swamp monster who gets captured and put on display in the strip club, and 15% crime caper involving misappropriated money connected to the mob--100% couldn't hold my interest. After watching Ron Ormond's post-conversion movies with Estus Pirkle, I thought I'd go back to one of Ormond's older, heathen movies for context, and I gotta say, I think I found the one guy whose art got more interesting during his Jesus phase.
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This Place Rules 2022
Can't believe I wasted my last movie-watching opportunity of 2022 on this garbage. I haven't watched a ton of Andrew Callaghan's online work, but I've seen enough to know that he has a preternatural, almost Nathan-Fielder-esque ability for using his flat affect to draw incredible comments from the people he interviews, and that's on display here. There are a dozen fascinating documentaries to be made from the raw material captured here (the influencer street fight at the beginning, the heartbreaking…
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American Factory 2019
American Factory has a lot of really good raw material about the fresh evils of multi-national corporations and the ways in which labor gets exploited by global capitalism. Its central fight for unionization at the Fuyao factory in Dayton, Ohio, is rousing and vital. All of that is why I've given American Factory anything close to a positive rating. But the rest... woof. The fact that this movie frames the whole conflict of the situation as some sort of American…