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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 2011
I watched the miniseries and read the book and still did not really get this. In fact I only read the book because there was one line in the miniseries that intrigued me so I wanted to know more. That line is not even in this movie. The fact that you have to put so much effort in and know so much of the historical context to understand this story is actually a very loaded cultural question at the moment.…
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The Keep 1983
Michael Mann is a god. To watch his films is to see the potential Leo Tolstoy saw in the medium and what Sergei Eisenstein and DW Griffith made early stabs at with their films. To appreciate the climactic sequences of Heat, Miami Vice, Last of the Mohicans, Ali, Thief, and maybe Manhunter is to understand that Mann designed those films to crescendo with purely visual moments accompanied only by overwrought highly emotional music. They are successful attempts to use the…
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The Zone of Interest 2023
The repetitive and cliched "banality of evil" theme works pretty well at first but then the film has nothing beyond that as it goes on. There's some interesting turns involved in showing us the social pressures within the insular elites of the Nazis. The filmmaking suffers greatly from the reality TV approach. I kept wondering why the visuals seemed so sloppy. Turns out they just turned the cameras on and let them roll. Bad idea. It also makes a major…
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Ferrari 2023
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who revere the work of filmmaker Michael Mann and people who I presume are missing parts of their brains.
As a full brained Mannhead, I have to admit the end of this movie strikes me as a major departure for him that I didn’t quite understand. But that’s for subsequent viewings. At first glance, this is a film filled with color and passion and people haunted by ghosts.
Some of…
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Midsommar 2019
If the whole thing with the parents and the sister at the beginning had been cut out, how would the plot be different in any sense? If that sequence where she exhales a black cloud of smoke were cut out, how would that change the film at all? If you've just witnessed a group of people commit a violent act, would you really sneak in and take pictures when you were expressly forbidden to do so previously? Or what about…
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