Nolan has delivered his opus, his characteristic play with syuzhet, fascination with time and science (fiction), and rattling on the cage bars of a prima facie stable masculine subjectivity all landing in a fusion that feels like one of the most important films in a long time.
There have been many pixels spilled discoursing about this thing: whether it’s leftist or not (how facile a heuristic for such a multifactorial product), how much sympathy is appropriate to extend to the…
There’s a lot of fat on this one, Hartley’s script acting as a bit of roughened form emphasizing the literary as opposed to talky quality of the script (most of the dialogue feels proper to the page more than the breath), while the video format adds a floaty, rough sheen to everything. The typical approach to style here is workmanlike and nondescript, save for two specific devices.
The first of these is the obvious, titular dogs who punctuate and penetrate…
One of those films to watch when in need of a visual reset. I’m promiscuously consuming a wide net of media that recently contains more sludge than art. The sludge has its merits; I’m no longer advancing a purist dogma about film because it’s unsustainable, alienating to anyone who isn’t already a converted cinephile, and isn’t a theoretically defensible position because it’s predicated on an ontological stability or uniqueness of “cinema” as a concept that’s increasingly untenable in an era…
Haven’t seen something so technologically innovative in ages, using digital film as an opportunity to free the camera. In the silent era, Napoleon saw silent cameras affixed to horses, free for movement in a subjective way. The introduction of sound saw camera placements stabilize, lose their mobility because of bulky sound equipment. Nowhere else have I seen all of the opportunities afforded by digital filmmaking taken so thoughtfully and creatively, all aimed at a kind of ontological reframing that equalizes both animals and technology with the humans that maintain them.
Had multiple times during this where I legitimately considered running out of the theater bc of how much of it hit close to home. One of the most touching examinations of internalized homophobia I’ve seen in ages, treating the milestone of adult gay dating with the same gravity that coming out/coming of age dramas treated that specific queer milestone.
There’s something very compelling here about how the film handles unrealized potentialities, the supernatural conceit here working in a therapeutic mode…
