The Films of 2025

[knives]

I get that and definitely felt that it’s similarities to other stories, especially Minority Report and the book version of V for Vendetta, hurt it, but thematically I think it still reads as powerful because you see people blindly accepting hype that way and corporations still function in that manner. Maybe it’s not novel, but I thought it mostly feeling vital was a more important quality.

[Brian C]

...corporations still function in that manner.

I don't think they do! I don't think the corporate behavior in the movie resembled today's corporate behavior at all.

Today's corporations just want to put a happy dancing logo on their shit so that people will buy it. It's basically all a big marketing loop. All the data collection, all the surveillance is just to build marketing databases. They're not screaming "BLOODLUST IS YOUR BIRTHRIGHT!" as people get slaughtered on live TV.

That's not even a slippery-slope projection of today's trends. It's stuck in the dystopian view of what people of the 1980s thought the future would be like. The dopey brainless corporatism of Idiocracy is a much more shrewd projection of how today's corporation function than what King dreamt up in 1982. We're much closer to "Ass" being a hit show than something like "The Running Man."

[knives]

I don’t think it’s a reflection of television, but it doesn’t take much to connect the dots between what’s shown in the film and what we get from tech companies destroying people and sucking up to the government for deregulation and what’s in the film. The show itself is high concept silliness, but the world it presents seems relatable to the now.

I was thinking of the Luigi assassination during parts as well as data center pollution and tech cult of personalities. That core is the real politics not the game.

[Brian C]

I don’t think it’s a reflection of television, but it doesn’t take much to connect the dots between what’s shown in the film and what we get from tech companies destroying people and sucking up to the government for deregulation and what’s in the film. The show itself is high concept silliness, but the world it presents seems relatable to the now.

I was thinking of the Luigi assassination during parts as well as data center pollution and tech cult of personalities. That core is the real politics not the game.

Well, we'll have to agree to disagree, I guess. I don't think that any of those things have anything to do with each other, much less anything in the movie, except the general concept that "corporations are bad." Seems like that general concept is a hammer making the whole world a nail.

[Lowry_Sam]

From its promotional description, The Running Man sounds like a remake of The 10th Victim.

A desperate contestant enters a globally broadcast death game where hired killers track participants across international borders. Cameras document every chase, every near miss, every kill. Audiences vote, sponsors intervene, and survival becomes performance art. The hunted runs while the world watches, entertains itself, and waits for the inevitable collapse of flesh against choreography.

[Never Cursed]

WTO/99 is the best archival documentary (and doc, period) I've seen in a long time. The footage itself is incredible and the film exudes an earned, righteous, comrades-come-rally anger at the state of the country, but I was most impressed by the care taken by the filmmakers in constructing their depiction of the protests. Chaotic though the source materials often are, they are assembled (almost all films are assemblages of a surprisingly large number of different places/stocks/makers, but few point it out so frequently and to such great effect as this one) with a powerful historic intentionality. The filmmakers at once resurrect a powerful sense of space (even though I've never been to Seattle, after a certain point in the movie I was able to map out where specific new angles were shot from or sequences crossed through just by cross-referencing the material with earlier shots and maps in the film) and of social relationships between the principal groups of actors and make counter-documentary out of a media environment largely hostile to its subjects (in other words, makes counter-counter documentary). While it's a gut-wrenching, sobering watch, I was thrilled the whole way through at the representational and analytical choices being made, by the stories of shifting public policy, media spin, and communal solidarity captured from unexpected or sometimes askance angles. Like any accomplished historical work, its rational arguments and emotive appeals are both well-made by themselves and subtly but irreducibly intertwined. Seek this out if it comes to a theater near you.

[Lowry_Sam]

I missed it when it came around last year, but it's looking like it might be getting revived. WTO/99.
Looks like it's getting more screenings in the next month.