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Black Orpheus 1959
The carnival as life. Black Orpheus is a colourful celebration of Brazilian culture and tragic love. It is exoticised and gets rather lost in the wonder it is trying to showcase for an unfamiliar audience, but what splendour it splashes across the screen. Black Orpheus takes us to a vibrant, musical world, one bristling with energy and passionate emotion. It's an unashamedly sexy, romantic movie. Yet it is also one chased by death, and the highlight of the film is…
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Farewell My Concubine 1993
Farewell My Concubine is a gorgeous, sweeping epic of change and history. It captures China's ginormous and arduous transformation, from a land of warlords to a nation under communism. However it is not a film just about these difficult years, but instead a personal, emotional epic, of love, jealousy, and betrayal. It is centred on the beauty of Beijing opera, and it blurs characters within fiction and life, as the leads lose their identities to performance. Gender and sexuality unfurl…
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The Petrified Forest 1936
The Bewitching Bette Davis Binge: Part 1/3
Afterthoughts: Just like Sylvia Sidney a couple of weeks ago, I'm doing another old school actor back-to-backer, and this time it's Bette Davis!
The films I've picked are slightly longer, so it's a three-parter, rather than 4. I'm jumping between different decades with each, to see Bette at various stages of her career.
The Petrified Forest didn't offer much specifically for Bette Davis, but it was more than worth the watch for Humphrey Bogart (the earliest film I've seen him in yet), who is wonderful.
Entertaining little chamber piece.
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Now, Voyager 1942
The Bewitching Bette Davis Binge: Part 2/3
Afterthoughts: Now this is more like it! Masterful performance from Davis in this one.
Mothers like this are absolute hell! I've seen what this sort of oppression looks like up close and personal for a number of years with an ex-girlfriend, and it is very hard to witness its effects on the oppressed.
I wasn't wholly invested throughout, but the mother-daughter conflict scenes were great.
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Crash 1996
A fetish to die for. No film is quite like Crash. This is something disturbed and moody, often without words. It's a lean, potent movie, that cuts down its story until the only thing remaining is an unexplained desire left as symbolism for sexual modernity. Sex mechanised, like internet porn. Human contact gone, just a sterile thrill. Characters in Crash live for a thrill, to feel what others feel. The body no longer belongs to itself, but to all who…
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Eve's Bayou 1997
"Romeo and Juliet. We read most of the tragedies. We're starting on the goddamn comedies."
A young woman narrates the story of her town, founded by a French aristocrat and a freed slave, before moving on to talk about the eventful tenth year of her life. She's Eve, supposedly the descendant of the woman who helped found Eve's Bayou, and what a tenth year it was: full of sex and death, love and betrayal, childhood fancies and comings of age,…
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Black Girl 1966
Upon watching this film, at first I found it very confusing and over-the-top dramatic, but reading into a deeper analysis of this piece made me realize the deeper, intellectual story being told. Every little moment- profound and deeply symbolic in itself, compounds into an evocative story about colonization, slavery- and how it has all never really ended.
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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent 2022
The best parts of this was watching different scenes from past Nicolas Cage movies redone by the master himself. The first half, I couldn’t stop smiling and laughing. The scene where he walks into the pool ala “Leaving Las Vegas” was perfect. Pedro Pascal was a wonderful partner with Cage. A lot of humor and charm between the two of them.
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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent 2022
67
It’s rare when films like this come along. This self-indulgent, self-aware, meta-feast is brilliant. Since 2013’s This Is The End, I haven’t seen a film simultaneously celebrate and mock it’s lead, whilst still being an enjoyable and well made, creative film, until now.
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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent 2022
I cheered louder at Nicholas Cage crying at Paddington 2 than I did at the end of Avengers Endgame.
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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent 2022
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is tonnes of fun. It has a lot of charm to it, since it treats Nicolas Cage with respect rather than mocking him. In a way there's no edge at all to the film, but I think that works best. It's just enjoyable and easygoing. The filmmakers clearly have admiration for Cage as an actor and this isn't some reference-heavy idiocy that a lazier comedy may have tried to be. Instead it presents Cage…
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