Jan 4, 2015

Wrote a review on Kubrick's Spartacus

http://nextprojection.com/2015/01/03/stanley-kubrick-cinematic-odyssey-spartacus-review/

80/100. While the film was made during a high point of Hollywood cinema, there’s no doubt that an unsupervised Kubrick would have wrought out a true masterpiece

 

Jan 1, 2015

Happy New Year to all my film heads.

 

Dec 31, 2014

All right, you guys were right....Norte, the End of History was pretty dope. I would have watched it sooner if I had known what a Christmas movie it was!

With that said, I'm still struggling with the final hour or so, as the film stacked egregious acts and tragedies on top of one another. It felt a tad manipulative after what was such a sure-handed first three hours.

 

Dec 25, 2014

I recently saw...

Two Days, One Night
Black Coal, Thin Ice
Starred Up
Locke
Jauja
Clouds of Sils Maria
St. Vincent
Blue Ruin
The Captive
Norte, the End of History

 

Dec 15, 2014

Film of the century in bound

 

Dec 11, 2014

Julianne Moore is going to win the Oscar and I'm okay with that, she was fantastic in Still Alice. She's delivered some of the best performances of her career in this and Maps to the Stars, it would be cool to see her finally win her well-deserved Oscar. All that being said, Marion Cotillard's performance in The Immigrant is still my favorite female performance of the year.

 

Dec 7, 2014

Really fiending to see Mommy.

 

Dec 6, 2014

I haven't written anything.

It's weird seeing some unknown filmmaker that I was obsessed over blossom into this international star. It's even a little annoying. I loved him way back when every critic bashed his style; now those guys are bandwagon fans. I always feel like, when that happens, you suddenly have a different relationship from then on.

Mommy is great, and I think for the average film lover, they'll think it's his best. It's a little more refined in terms of its narrative and it's burts of musical cues are a welcoming surprise; whereas in Heartbeats, it's almost all stylized (which is why I adore it). I never thought Xavier Dolan would top some of those beautiful music sequences from Heartbeats and Laurence Anyways ("b--- b---" sequence and clothes raining down, respectively), but there is a sequence in Mommy that may top all of that. It's almost like something out of a Terrance Malick film. I couldn't believe my eyes.

In the end, I prefer Heartbeats. I fell in love with his style then and it's something else for me. Mommy may be more accessible and features a bit of everything he's great at doing.

 

Nov 24, 2014

I just want to check in to say that Jauja is an instant hood klassik.

 

Nov 24, 2014

I'm back as well!

 

Nov 23, 2014

Though I kinda disagree on Whiplash, I strongly agree with your review on Interstellar, particularly your point on Nolan gleaning over key moments. Along with his penchant for awkward exposition, Nolan's slavish devotion to narrative might be his biggest weakness as a filmmaker. By constantly driving from one major plot point to the next, he rarely gives his films room to breathe, and the result, like The Dark Knight Rises, can feel stifling and overstuffed.

Nolan is certainly able to craft moments of genuine moviegoing awe, especially in IMAX (the ship dwarfed by Saturn's rings, the giant wave, the docking sequence, etc.), but he gives the viewer little time to take it all in (visually, intellectually, or otherwise) by hinging it all on incessantly moving the narrative forward.

One of the film's stronger moments is when McConaughey says goodbye to his daughter and, as he drives away, Nolan overlays the countdown to launch, as if to suggest that leaving the planet is a mere afterthought to leaving his children. It's a moment Nolan conveys not through exposition, but simply through visuals and editing.

 

Feb 25, 2019

The Bryan Singer thing again feels like a slap in the face. That Rami was the dominant choice among thousands of voters is astonishing, that he was still voted for after his press run is even worse. I burst out laughing when he first showed up on screen with the full on gay look, which of course was immediately referenced in the movie. I don't understand how anybody can take that movie seriously, nor do I understand the industry propping it up despite everything surrounding it. I know it was a wild success, but if there was ever a time for Hollywood to take a public stand against their depravity in the wake of their half baked me too movement it was now.

Instead they just keep jerking each other off, like a bunch of underage boys on Bryan Singer's face. At least his career is over.

Not to mention the entire script is structured around the formulation of their most popular songs. They go from one gimmick sequence to the next without even an attempt to connect them to the collective works they were apart of. I've read some wild theories about the song Bohemian Rhapsody itself, yet the most we can get IN THE FILM is the absurdity of it being a single and the Galileo lines?

 

Jan 16, 2019

I'm sure this one will be on many "best of 2019" lists. I saw it at NYFF and it will probably end up on mine. The trailer is cool, but perhaps doesn't quite capture how strange and brutal the film actually is.

 

Dec 5, 2018

They're immaculately well made tbh. They're incredibly sweet and funny family films made with Wes Anderson-esque precision. The second one in particular is just superbly crafted. I walked out of the theater with a smile on my face and (no joke) a warm feeling inside.

 

Oct 7, 2018

• 
  All Good 2018
  ★★★½ Watched 05 Oct, 2018
  
  Aenne Schwarz' restrained performance sustains this subtle character study of a woman trying to hold it all in. Hand camera realism draws closer as Trobisch examines relationships, power dynamics, harassment, and the problematic social practices which tie it all together.
  
  75/100 - Very Good.
  
  No likes
  
  
• 
  Long Day’s Journey into Night 2018
  ★★★½ Watched 04 Oct, 2018
  
  A sensory pleasure which evokes the liminality of wake, dream, revelation, and memory.
  
  At once, the film carries a surrealistic aesthetic as well as a spiritualistic one. When begins the 3D one shot, a dream-like trip through time unveils hidden facets of human imagination and creation and our vulnerability to the unbeknownst.
  
  77/100 - Very Good (3.5)
  
  No likes
  

 

May 12, 2018

http://variety.com/2018/film/news/terrence-malick-tree-of-life-longer-criterion-version-1202807034/

 

Mar 24, 2018

I think I've perfected this meme.

 

Mar 14, 2018

I think that's a fair point, but Lady Bird doesn't strike me as an especially egregious offender in this regard. In her youthful myopia, I also don't think Lady Bird's teenage angst is primarily rooted in financial anxiety, at least in terms of real-world consequences. Her mother is the one who is really concerned about their precarious financial state, while Lady Bird is simply locked into her dream of going to school in New York, irrespective of the ramifications. This is partly why she goes behind her mother's back in the first place. Lady Bird may lie about where she lives, but that's motivated by the very teenage concern regarding her image at school. On the other hand, she doesn't seem all that worried that her dream could inhibit her mother's ability to support her family.

In the end, we know that a similar decision worked out for Greta Gerwig herself, but Lady Bird concludes before we discover what happens to Lady Bird and her family in the subsequent years (Perhaps they're hit hard by the 2008 crisis...). However, we do know that by the end, Lady Bird at the very least recognizes her mother's sacrifices and potentially the legitimacy of her real-world fears. So yeah, I think you bring up a reasonable concern, but I think Lady Bird is aware of it to an extent.

 

Mar 13, 2018

everybody stay blessed

 

Mar 9, 2018

ME: Kinda lame how Bresson narrates the most mundane s---.

BRAIN GENIUS: An apparent paradox in Bresson’s style – the over-determination of the everyday world and simple events, perhaps even more to the ear than to the eye (17), which Susan Sontag calls “doubling” (18) – might be more usefully considered as a kind of irony. But it is an inherent irony rather than the common affective irony. Usually we recognise irony as a process in the reader/spectator produced by textual elements working in a common mode. Bresson’s alternation of action and voiceover to represent the same thing (the priest leans against the door, his voiceover says “I had to lean against the door”) uses different modes of telling. Image and word take radically different paths to imagination and empathy. Images showtheir signifieds, words pass through the referential circuits of the spectator’s personal storehouse of signifieds. Affective irony operates two paradigms for the same signifier, thereby bringing the signifier into question; inherent irony operates two signifiers for the same paradigm, bringing the paradigm into question.