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The Romanoffs 2018
the construction of the self is just what you desire and the strategies you use to get it. social metanarratives are just the games we get socialized to subconsciously play in pursuit of these things. depending on the complexity of the situation, this can either entail direct conscious manipulation of people, or a reconfiguration of your sense of self built on new narratives that help you align with your objective. the line between these two modes is usually fuzzy and…
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The Matrix Resurrections 2021
all democrats are the architect and all republicans are agent smith. this tries to duck the inevitable conclusions of the argument it makes which if anything makes it more descriptive of the culture it represents.
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The Holiday 2006
there's a very extensive essay to be written about various ideological paradigms of socioemotional logistics and increasing neoliberal consolidation into this marketist distillation of "everything" vs the push-and-pull gray line tradeoffs that accompany natural relationships and accurate mental represenations (and hence emotional understandings) of the other that is probably too in depth for this movie. i'll save it for the next rohmer i watch.
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Opening Night 1977
one of the reasons why whiplash was interesting to me was because it was one of the very few things to push back against the conventional liberal narrative that actualization as a social person and an artist are purely symbiotic. the argument that movie makes is purely formal: great drum playing requires elite craft, and getting the level of time-spending and degree of emotional commitment within that time-spending that improving to that point requires will force you to neglect other…
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Three Colors: Blue 1993
it's a tragedy that kieslowski didn't live long enough to artistically mature and learn to embrace his moment-making operatic impulses instead of constantly subduing them for no reason like he does here. his divine comedy trilogy would have been amazing.
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Boogie Nights 1997
young precocious pta inching towards the realization that he wants to be making magnolia and not this but not quite at that point yet.
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Last Night in Soho 2021
empty images. unintentionally pulls off what the canyons and a dozen shitty ferrara films try to do.
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Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives 2010
for as much as this gets [redacted] descriptions of being "serene" and "relaxing", this entire thing is filled wall-to-wall with this overengineered sense of dread. joe is much closer to a lynch type hobbesian liberal critiquing what bad writers would call the "rotten underbelly" of pre-modern socioculture than some carte blanche spiritual humanist. the problem with a lot of it is that joe also does this thing a lot of liberals do where he patronizes down to the conservative ideologies…
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