Letterboxd — Your life in film

The concept of reflexivity is well worn territory in film. On one hand, you have very explicit reflexivity like F for Fake and nostalgia like Cinema Paradiso or The Fabelmans. On the other hand is a more subtle reflexivity, like the monolith and interstellar trip of 2001 and the hidden, behind-the-scenes reflexivity of the probably hundreds of obsessive, possibly self-destructive actors/directors/screenwriters who have slaved away creating films about obsessive, definitely self-destructive characters — Fitzcarraldo, The Phantom Thread, probably every Wes Anderson film, and…

I love when Wes really leans into the fakery. This sub-hour whirlwind packs pretty much every tool he has into its limited runtime. With everything we watch there’s an element of suspension of disbelief, and what Wes does so well in his films is he essentially races to break any semblance of believable façade as fast as possible. He just takes a stop-motion yellow-and-pink sledgehammer to that concept and allows us to see that it’s fake, acknowledge it, and move on…

I remember hitting a point with CG animated films where I wondered if the art style would ever change from that big-eyed-but-somehow-hyper-realistic Disney•Pixar style. Not that it’s a bad style! Just spawned a lot of copycats that could never quite match Pixar’s level of polish.

We’re sort of seeing a similar thing now in a post-Spiderverse (or is it post-Klaus-teaser? or even post-Paperman?) where we have a whole lot of films coming out with this 2.5D blend. Part of me…

Easily his most surreal film, Asteroid City takes The French Dispatch’s English translation of a French theatrical play of a story of a boy that inspired a riot from within a magazine article within the story of said article being written [breathes] and runs with that level of self-compartmentalization. This is a dramatization of a play within a made-up story about a playwright within a local television station’s evening programming. Still, it’s so easy to forget that, as the actors (or…