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brundlefly wrote: Fri Sep 30, 2022 4:59 pm
What happens when you suspect the world is better off without you but get the math backwards? Who wins when two people are fighting for a life no one wants? I’m not pretending everyone will sink in and chuckle along. The delivery system might make Dual seem one thin note held too long; I might envy those who can casually look up from it. And there’s room to find it alien and frustrating and dull and pointless. As Sarah sees life. It may promise action, and it may look sharp and move crisply. But this a march. It is a wallow. It is a mood piece and its mood is the sound of the last laugh. There are people who will love this movie the way they love their sadness and I hope for them they find it.

DarkImbecile wrote: Thu Jan 27, 2022 11:02 pm Since this was purchased in one of Sundance's larger deals, I assume it will be widely available enough soon for someone to offer some insight...

I guess a big deal at Sundance will now get you shuffled off to a second-tier streamer like AMC+ after a token release.

Riley Stearns' Dual now also streaming on Hulu.

Plot synopsis for Angry Neighbors, starring two Academy Award nominees. And they say there are no new ideas!

ANGRY NEIGHBORS tells the story of Harry March, a retired writer whose life starts to unravel when a multimillionaire begins building a mansion across from his quiet island home in the Hamptons. Up until now, he has lived peacefully with his talking dog, Hector, a born-again Evangelical and unapologetic capitalist. To Harry, the gargantuan mansion represents the fetid and corrupt excess that has ruined modern civilization. Which means, quite simply, that this is war.

Sick of Myself

What deceptively begins as a riff on von Trier’s The Idiots evolves into a high concept that refracts our own activity born from self-absorption into apparatuses for survivalism. At first, Signe and Thomas' absurd actions of amoral competitiveness appear to be for sport, but the film quickly settles into a rhythm that reveals its true central conceit: These are people desperate for external validation, to be made important by the only metric worth anything- publicity. If that sounds familiar, that's because it is. Here is a film set in a world uncomfortably close to our own, but where people feel slightly more motivated to accentuate the part of themselves that demand to be considered better than others, which is really just a ruse; an iceberg-model exterior coating an unbearable sensitivity to dysphoria from an overwhelming social world. It's a milieu where we are so segregated from one another that our love languages go unrequited and methods to get needs met are introverted, indirect, and extreme. This film starts by having us judge the surface-level behaviors, and then peels back the layers as we realize that our snap-judgments are reductivist myopic diagnostics that completely miss the ache that drives the repulsive behavior, even if they are vital to uphold.

After a brief setup, the focus appropriately shifts away from the couple and painfully rests on one half of it in Kristine Kujath Thorp’s Signe, who plays the more complex principal with restraint, vulnerability, and courage. It’s through the narrative's cryptically curious and reserved approach and Throp’s phenomenal performance that we begin to broadly identify with Signe’s narcissistic impulses as amplified versions of what we ourselves do to seek the same general ends. Signe desperately wants to be 'seen', even by her boyfriend and partner-in-crime, who she clearly feels alienated from. Take a perverse sex scene involving role playing (the highlight of the film), which is morbidly funny but also deeply sad in its implications on both sides of the acting; not just for what Signe is asking for in this context as a turn-on, but in how her partner hams up affection as a cheeky piece of knowing performance. In fact, she feels isolated from everyone, and as the film progresses we get a greater sense of just how sympathetic her position is, even if we’re repelled by her actions.

One interesting twist on a familiar "amplify socio-cultural familiarities to achieve surreal effect" making the rounds in art films of late, is the blatant awareness the principal has on the goingons. Signe identifies with “narcissism” from the very start, but this doesn’t serve as an aid to either feed or evade the drive to do whatever it takes to fulfill that insatiable part of her needing validation. Regardless of awareness, that part is unhinged, a child crying out for attention. Good or bad attention doesn’t matter, the bar is set at just getting it, like food or water. Yet any caring gesture will be fleeting, and for a generation of neglected children born into a world of 'More', there is no hope at achieving absolute satisfaction, which is just as tragic for Signe as it is pathetic and dangerous for herself and others. This would be a lesser film if it supposed self-knowledge had any role in altering that behavior- but just like IFS therapy, the developed cognitive part isn’t going to influence the younger emotional parts of us still trapped in our feral youth without the support we need to develop them.

Many bits are making broader and direct social commentaries. There's the exaggerated social comparison in the support group, that's a blunt externalization of “hell is other people.” Or a scene where Signe's partner reads the daily news of murder-suicides with a flat affect and she feels hurt because their story didn't make the top headline, but these nods to our externally-desensitized and internally-ultrasensitized zeitgeist only serve to spotlight the pathos of the individual's helpless condition even more. Plus when she attempts to disengage from the harmful behavior altogether, the empathetic and logical personified helping-hand surrealistically redirects her back into an outlet to exploit her drive to be seen and heard in a more socially-acceptable (perhaps even 'ethical' within the world of the film) manner... or does it? Although what is and is not a delusion plays a role here and elsewhere, the actuality of events doesn't take away from the impact of these bizarre inserts. Quite the opposite: they reflect psychological defenses keeping Signe "stable" at all costs, even from her own sense of reality and cognizance of her behavior, which she clearly has at baseline. How wild: that a capable and intelligent human being will force themselves to become insane in order to protect the asset of their bottomless histrionics!

The denouement topically weighs several positions together that have been usurping one another in various threads here and elsewhere in our sociopolitical climate: Singe’s actions and reactive diffusions of responsibility are undeniably problematic and offensive, but her struggle is also real. This isn’t a movie made for people planning to enter and leave with the same rigid binary takes on human value, but it deservedly presents everything as just deranged enough not to didactically sway anybody into radical humanism either. I love the core narrative irony of modeling as a gazed-upon vehicle of attraction conflated with ugly disfigurement as someone to be pitied - because the microscopic Venn diagram incorporates merely Eyez On Me, and that’s the only path conceivably available to Signe to receive predictably immediate responses of gratification for self-worth. Signe's actions are not about the get-rich-quick laziness or capitalizing on a trend of self-pity that her friends accuse her of, but a deep-seated need to not 'be' but feel appraised as a significant agent. All the time. It's not sustainable and so, so very sad. There are so many ways this movie could’ve gone wrong, but it repeatedly finds sweet spots between wry comedy and empathic tragedy, and that’s while pivoting across set pieces and venturing deeper into the relatable sensitivities and completely-unrelatable delusional psyche of our protagonist. Bravo.

Oh and there’s a hilarious cameo I won’t spoil, that’s even better if you get the meta-joke given their profession in the film and know a little bit about their real-life dual career focus

FWIW, this is streaming on Kanopy. I wish I had caught it in the theaters, but IIRC it didn't play that long and unfortunately I didn't have much free time when it did.

The first time I saw it, I kind of lamented it wasn't shot on film, simply because all those dissolves seem to work beautifully when the details contained within disappear in a thick haze of grain. (Visually it would look and feel appropriate since the images typically deal with the past and memories.) Like his previous film, A Quiet Passion, the dissolves can look too clean and devoid of character, as if it was something done on home editing software.

Regardless, it's not exactly a difficult issue to overcome, and it becomes less of an issue every time I watch those scenes. This is a pretty great film and it does bring to mind Distant Voices, Still Lives in the way some past trauma or misfortune feels unshakeable, as if the surviving individuals can't quite escape their grasp. Here it's both the first World War and the criminalization of homosexuality (which to be fair, wasn't past - it spanned Sassoon's entire lifetime).

First of all, WWI always seemed ancient as I never knew anyone who experienced it, even as a civilian, but the few scenes during the '60s made me aware how many survivors were around at that time - I just started comparing them to the WWII veterans I knew myself. When I was growing up, WWII was always something to remember and to mourn, but it's now gotten to the point where extremely few of those veterans are still around, and holidays like Memorial Day have a different feel to them now - it's like the tangible reminders of WWII have understandably faded into something abstract. It's part of the natural life cycle I guess with all wars, but it made the isolation and the inability to move past the trauma of war all the more distinct in Benediction. The world continues to move on and the event for them continues to fade, but for those who were most hurt by it, a large part of them can remain permanently stuck in the past.

The way lives are irreparably re-shaped and damaged by the criminalization of homosexuality (as well as the lack of acceptance of it) felt especially poignant. Moreso in light of recent events (including yesterday's U.S. Supreme Court case, which seems likely to deliver another damaging ruling that will empower the bigots and hurt and marginalize the LGBT community). Just the way Sassoon's life unfolded, and how it may have inevitably led to a profound unhappiness (or unfulfillment) in terms of who he has in his life, was tremendously sad. His final and quiet moments with Wilfred Owen feel especially terrible - everything he should be able to say or do is completely bottled up simply because he's not allowed to. Imagine what it's like spending your whole public life that way, where you can't even touch someone that close to you and how that could even warp your view of yourself and who you are. It's really awful and it's even enraging to think we still have a large part of society that demands we do that to the LGBT community for mendacious reasons meant to cover their vile bigotry. It doesn't come off as a protest film, but more than most, it made me feel and think of the stakes involved.

hearthesilence wrote: Sun Dec 11, 2022 11:11 pm(Also, has Tilda Swinton and Cate Blanchett ever appeared together or at least played characters that appeared together before in the same scene? I know they were in Benjamin Button as well, but on some level, I'm kind of surprised they hadn't been given any scenes together in any film after all these years. I guess it's only a matter of time before we see them as full-blown co-stars just as it was with Pacino and DeNiro.)

If this doesn't turn out to be a crime thriller in which an intensely driven and serious Blanchett is run ragged by an impish Swinton wearing a variety of bizarre disguises in the form of different costumes, wigs and teeth then I will be really disappointed!

colinr0380 wrote: Mon Dec 12, 2022 3:31 pm

hearthesilence wrote: Sun Dec 11, 2022 11:11 pm(Also, has Tilda Swinton and Cate Blanchett ever appeared together or at least played characters that appeared together before in the same scene? I know they were in Benjamin Button as well, but on some level, I'm kind of surprised they hadn't been given any scenes together in any film after all these years. I guess it's only a matter of time before we see them as full-blown co-stars just as it was with Pacino and DeNiro.)

If this doesn't turn out to be a crime thriller in which an intensely driven and serious Blanchett is run ragged by an impish Swinton wearing a variety of bizarre disguises in the form of different costumes, wigs and teeth then I will be really disappointed!

I smell a Heat reboot!

A fairly standard reporting procedural without much in the way of dramatic complication, Maria Schrader’s She Said gets by as well as it does primarily on the audience’s built-in distaste for its antagonist and a few particularly striking performances.

Zoe Kazan creates a distinct enough character, but of the two leads it’s an intense, wounded Carey Mulligan that really stands out; Samantha Morton is similarly striking in a supporting role. Unfortunately, beyond the inherent weight of its subject matter and the straightforward competence of the script and direction, there’s little in the way of character arcs or thorny ethical questions to add layers to the story of the journalistic pursuit of a bad man exploiting his considerable power to harm women. 

It doesn’t appear that the filmmakers felt compelled to take much of any dramatic license with its story and characters — I think most or all of the characters in the film from victims to enablers are named accurately, and Ashley Judd even appears fairly prominently as herself — but it ends up feeling less like a narrative film and more like the dramatization of an episode of Frontline. 

As someone who has never been able to make therapy work for me — despite the regular urging of many people in my life over the last twenty years — the emotion most strongly evoked by Jonah Hill's Stutz was jealousy: the loving ode to his therapist seems to reveal a genuine, warm connection that is beneficial to both parties, and Phil Stutz' proactive attitude that both calls patients on their bullshit and offering them tools to make tangible improvements in their lives seems like my kind of therapy.

Hill uses some fun formal touches — breaking the fourth wall and revealing the artificiality of the whole enterprise — in the course of articulating some of the core concepts and principles Stutz uses to explain some of the ways people can self-sabotage and give in to their own anxieties and doubts, and also devotes time to his therapist's own trials as a child and an adult that helped shape his perspectives. Not a groundbreaking documentary, but a heartfelt and generous one that even over its short running time gave my wife and I a couple of new bits of terminology to use when we try to diagnose each other's neuroses.

Has anyone else here seen Charlie Shackleton’s The Afterlight? Like Memoria, it was created solely for theatrical exhibition, but unlike that film, only a single 35mm print exists. There is no negative, and the hard drive used to output the footage that Shackleton put together was completely destroyed as well. It’s essentially a compilation of scenes from an incredible array of monochrome films produced between the 30’s and the 60’s, that is basically a (sometimes literal) walk through temporality, ambient sound, and memories of filmgoing.

beamish14 wrote: Sat Dec 31, 2022 4:37 am Has anyone else here seen Charlie Shackleton’s The Afterlight? Like Memoria, it was created solely for theatrical exhibition, but unlike that film, only a single 35mm print exists. There is no negative, and the hard drive used to output the footage that Shackleton put together was completely destroyed as well. It’s essentially a compilation of scenes from an incredible array of monochrome films produced between the 30’s and the 60’s, that is basically a (sometimes literal) walk through temporality, ambient sound, and memories of filmgoing.

I did, and loved it, though it is, admittedly, extremely navel-gazy cinephile catnip. The other notable stated, if sort of obvious, limitation on the source material was that as far as Shackleton could identify or expect, everyone seen on screen is dead (though it is admittedly presumptive at times, based on the age of the sources, not, like, digging up death certificates for background actors). At its basest level, it's a delightful game of name-that-film, and yet, if you are a cinephile with any devotion to the theatrical experience as something special in its own right, it's also a charming and bittersweet play on just how fleeting the pleasures of that theatrical experience are in the era of home video, even as it depends on it to exist: moments that disappear just as soon as you recognize them as or for something, faces that haunt you without ever summoning anything identifiable about them and which you can't freeze in place while you spelunk on your iPhone, those singular, throw-away, in-between moments that we as connoisseurs latch onto in the experiential moment for unclear or unconscious reasons. Should I ever get the chance to see it again, I'd happily go out of my way to do so, and I'd say anyone who doesn't preemptively gag at the wankery of it all should as well.

But even as much as I loved it, it feels perverse to put it on my list of favorites of the year, simply because of the sheer limitations on access—which is why I also typically don't list whatever Nathanial Dorsky screenings of his new work I've been to either, which are at this point categorically among my favorite experiences of any given year: if you don't live in NYC or SF or LA, you're likely never going to have the opportunity to see them anyway, so having them in such a specifically commendatory format feels pointless.

Going over my list of 2022 viewings to make sure I met my goal of writing all of them up here, I came across a forgettable Netflix entry I had understandably missed: Operation Mincemeat

Largely coasting on the competence of its actors, John Madden’s unremarkable adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s non-fiction account of an infamous WWII spy operation struggles to realize dramatic aspirations the source material just can’t support. It’s somewhat understandable that the film over-inflates the stakes of the effort to deceive the Nazis as to the location of the Allies’ Mediterranean landings — it apparently isn’t enough to say that misdirecting Axis defenses toward Greece and away from Sicily saved only hundreds or thousands of Allied soldiers’ lives and accelerated the fall of Mussolini’s Italy, so that has to become tens of thousands of lives and the salvation of the entire war effort.

What’s less forgivable from a dramatic perspective is that the relatively straightforward story of the spycraft itself has to be couched in a bland love triangle, while the narrative is overstuffed with detailed non sequiturs that add color and depth to a popular history book but leave a period spy thriller feeling as bloated and lifeless as its central corpse. Colin Firth, Matthew McFayden, Kelly Macdonald, and Jason Isaacs are all fine actors who do what’s required of them here, which unfortunately isn’t enough to leave much of an impression.

To spend more than two hours on a story as ultimately slight as this one is unnecessary, and to do so while sidelining Johnny Flynn (one of my favorite British character actors) for most of the runtime is unforgivable.

Perhaps you’ll like Catherine Called Birdy more as far as anachronistic period prices go. It uses the modern to bring intimacy and care to its setting as well as expanding its concerns to areas that the the past couldn’t organically open. It’s also hilarious and great.

Unfortunately the thread split renders your comment a little unintelliglble, but this was in referennce to my reservations towards Corsage's use of anachronism. Thanks for the rec though, I had no idea Lenna Dunham had brouhgt a film out this year: how did that escape everyone's collective notice?

She actually put out two films this year, which I only know because they've both come up in the Dynamic Top Tens of 2022 thread

On the one hand, I give Dror Moreh's The Corridors of Power a lot of credit for seriously and unflinchingly examining the genuinely difficult policy questions and institutional challenges to dealing with genocide and the large scale killing of civilians — this is a topic that's easy to reduce to slogans, and this film doesn't do that. Avoiding partisan talking points and focusing on the actual decision-makers faced with weighing the risks and costs of intervention or bystanding in the face of carefully planned and orchestrated acts of inhumanity, the film doesn't pretend to offer easy answers or condemnations. It is perhaps unavoidably a selective, incomplete examination of a sprawling subject with many cases to examine, each consisting of extremely specific and unique circumstances, actors, and geopolitical contexts, and Moreh does a solid job of illustrating that in the cases he highlights: Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Libya, Syria.

On the other hand, there are a series of odd choices that draw more attention to the film's choices of what (and whom) to include or elide: for example, starting a documentary on the problem of how to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing with talking head appearances from Paul Wolfowitz and Henry Kissinger — two figures arguably as responsible for mass civilian death as any others in the world — seems intentionally provocative, but one that makes never coming back to them in the remaining nearly 2.5 hours feel bizarre. After a prologue establishing how the global response to the Nazi genocides led to a rhetorical stance of "Never Again" but a confused and halting series of policies and actions, a quick line of narration establishes that the focus of this film will be how the post-Cold War world order grappled with what one of Moreh's more prominent subjects, Samantha Power, famously dubbed "A Problem From Hell". This arbitrary start point seems designed to avoid the darker side to this problem that Kissinger so vividly represents: not how America should or shouldn't approach situations where other countries are slaughtering their citizens, but what it means that America so excitedly facilitated and participated in mass murder across the globe, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s.

And for a film packed with former UN ambassadors, cabinet secretaries, chiefs of staff, generals, and other high-level officials whose decisions directly impacted the American and global response to instances of mass atrocities, it's an exceedingly odd move to end the whole film on a quote from George Clooney about an instance of genocide the film doesn't ever directly address. One can easily imagine a longer version of this project — perhaps Ken-Burns-miniseries length — that more purposefully includes the perspectives of the activists, leaders, and civilians on the ground whose lives, communities, and futures were directly affected by the decisions made by those whose voices dominate the version we got.

Ultimately, Moreh has ably pieced together valuable testimony from policymakers and sketched unforgettable and difficult to witness portraits of some of the darkest events of our lifetimes. As gripping as the events and debates are that he does present, it's difficult not to focus just as intently as the parts of this story that are missing.

Everyone’s spent this year going nuts for RRR: a purposefully heightened action melodrama with exaggerated takes on historical events specific to the country’s national identity. I still haven’t seen S.S. Rajamouli’s film yet, but it’s going to have a hard time being better than the other big 2022 film in that mode: Lee Jung-Jae’s globe-hopping political thriller Hunt.

Lee, who stars in and co-wrote his feature debut, is a brooding, embattled KCIA section chief Park in the mid-1980s, toward the end of South Korea’s postwar string of brutal military dictatorships. He’s pitted against his agency rival Kim, an ex-military officer played by Jung Woo-sung, amidst an escalating series of crises kicked off by an assassination attempt against the Korean president in Washington, D.C. As suspicions grow that a North Korean mole has penetrated the agency, the two men circle each other in an increasingly paranoid and personal set of provocations and countermoves.

As the ever more byzantine series of plot complications pile up on each other, it’s easy to see why many complained about the film being confusing — Lee isn’t particularly interested in providing any more exposition or context than is necessary to move the action along, and it absolutely helps to have at least a passing familiarity with the political dynamics on the peninsula at the time.

Still, the whirlwind of narrative developments is vital to the most fun aspect of the film, as each bit of new information about the main characters’ motives and actions shifts and sometimes entirely flips which of the leads you view as the protagonist and why. By the time you reach the climactic action sequence, Lee has somehow maneuvered you into a situation where

Spoiler

you want both men to succeed in there diametrically opposed goals, which are somehow the opposite of what they seemed to be after the revelations of the second act AND completely different from those they started the film with.

Lee and Jung are extremely charismatic and captivating when the film needs them to be, and just as vicious and off-putting when that’s necessary as well. The film’s gun-heavy action elements never tip over into being the tongue-in-cheek kind of over-the-top, but they also clearly leave reality behind pretty quickly; it took me a while to get on board with Lee’s execution of these scenes and the tonal shift they represent from the moodier, quieter intermediate scenes. Once I did — and saw how the more stylized violence is also there as a bit of a cover for Lee’s interest in other forms of state brutality — the deft dynamism of Lee’s script and direction made this an easily recommended ride.

Some genres of film can benefit from this century’s transition to the crisper, sharper-edged images of digital cameras, but Westerns are not one of those, particularly those with pretty serious budgetary constraints on their production values. Looking like a Showtime production circa 2004 puts Walter Hill’s Dead for a Dollar into an immediate hole, and a tired script and choppy editing can’t help even a game cast dig the film out.

Christoph Waltz rehashes one of his most famous performances as a 19th-century bounty hunter, though one decidedly less loquacious and more robotic than his award-winning Django Unchained performance. He’s sent to Mexico to recover a wealthy businessman’s wife from an apparent kidnapping, but quickly gets entangled in a larger web of lies and betrayals. Rachel Brosnahan is given perhaps the meatiest role of the entire cast, but unfortunately can’t do much of interest with it besides offering some steely attitude.

Willem Dafoe has quite a bit of fun playing a freshly released card shark with a grudge, but mostly spins his wheels in pointless scenes shooting at cockroaches; Benjamin Bratt, Warren Burke, and Hamish Linklater do their best with broad, underwritten characters.

Ultimately, the problem here seems to be Hill, who struggles to infuse any life into the images, pacing, or performances — even the gunplay is tame and uninterestingly staged, with fairly stale stunt work and poor visual effects undermining any charge that you’d expect from a director with no small amount of experience at crafting memorable action sequences.

There are plenty of quirky personalities and moments of humor in Ramin Bahrani’s 2nd Chance, a documentary examining the often bizarre rise and fall of one of the original producers of nylon bulletproof vests, but it really gets under the skin as an exploration of persistently insidious American myths and fears.

The film gets tremendous mileage out of access not only to body armor entrepreneur Richard Davis and his family, friends, and employees, but the trove of promotional and personal videos he produced for decades — videos of Davis shooting himself over and over again in vest demonstrations; recreating police shootings real and imagined to sell departments on the need for his products; and blasting away with machine guns on his family compound. Davis’ manic energy and sense of humor bleed through in both past and present, illuminating both how he was able to charm his way into running multi-million dollar government contracts with products of increasingly questionable value, and how he repeatedly blundered himself into trouble — trouble that he almost always escaped, but others sometimes did not.

Primarily a narrative filmmaker, Bahrani brings a strong visual sensibility to his own footage and in selecting and editing choice moments from Davis’ archives. His narration selectively intrudes when necessary, but mostly he weaves together his protagonist’s own words and actions to portray him, whether Davis is answering Bahrani’s direct questions, selling himself on video by recreating/reimagining his own past, or being recorded on a police wiretap.

As the film goes on, Bahrani keeps a fairly tight focus on the individuals involved, but it becomes clear that his interests are less in the particulars of what Davis did or didn’t do and more in the personal and cultural forces driving the blend of paranoia, persecution, and self-righteousness that is unavoidable in America right now. All that would be enough to make this a worthwhile documentary, but the film’s epilogue manages to present a genuinely touching counterpoint to its main character’s worldview, lending its title another facet and cementing this as one of the better documentaries of last year.

For those with access, run don’t walk to Peter Strickland’s short film Blank Narcissus, a mock-director’s commentary satirizing Code-era constraints surreally through a provocative Jarman-esque art film, as well as an absurdist piece of irreverent comedy where the audio remembrance shapes into the model of a melodramatic Hollywood arc in direct contrast to its visual complement. That’s the best I can do at describing the genius of what may be Strickland’s best (and, a warning, most graphically sexual) film to date

It's an extra on the UK (but not the US) Blu-ray

swo17 wrote: Thu Mar 09, 2023 5:37 am It's an extra on the UK (but not the US) Blu-ray

I'm guessing you're referring to Flux Gourmet

Whoops, not sure how I forgot to mention that part

Coma (Bertrand Bonello)

Bonello crafts his own Tree of Life, only instead of a bloated spiritual surrender, he opts for an incisive, introverted love letter to his daughter -extrapolating her own suspended phase into the vacuum of life itself, normalizing and joining her in her own inherent quarantine of an existence in the only way he knows how: through making a film.

A pretty funny one at that, but also horrifying; both inviting and alienating by design.. entering into the mind of a teenager tends to have that effect. This is definitely its own 'thing', but it's drawing from a slew of influences, and could best be described as melding We're All Going to the World's Fair with Inland Empire, and a little bit of Team America: World Police. I've read others compare this to Lynch, but it's not “Lynchian” in the classical sense. There’s hardly a shred of his traditional style or particular brand of eccentricities, at least not played out as in a "typical" Lynch film, but there are enough thematic similarities and deliberate nods to his later period, specifically Inland Empire. The doll fantasy doesn’t just recall Rabbits but Bonello's score and arrhythmic use of a laugh track is undoubtedly a direct homage, and both the aesthetic journey, anti-narrative jumble, and ideas of Inland Empire are emulated here as distinct from his other work - and certain sequences are less explicitly recalled but still seem to reference scenes of dislocation from it. Bonello posits sensations rather than directed questions, about reality and agency, the unique power of the imagination as a gift and a curse, and even focusing on living in others dreams and wondering who’s the dreamer. Some of the nudges to other works are a bit overstated, as are the bookended notations, but most of them work.

Bonello pitches his focus at expressing the process of an adolescent trapped in a state of limbo, preceding self-actualization but with fully-formed abilities to yearn and question with furious curiosity and want, in friction with the possible. It's an exhibition of states, oscillating between the vulnerable yet fatalistic stove-touching instinct to relentlessly ponder existential queries of free will vs determinism as we attempt to locate meaning in isolation (not a great place to be), and protectively occupying our consciousness with distractions from those analytical mazes. Covid may be used as an inspiring gateway, but these are cognitive rabbit holes familiar beyond external insulating forces like a pandemic or internet culture, and beyond even this developmental stage. Most of us learn how to cope with these concerns a little better over time, but they're still there. As a creative projection of one artist's engagement with the experience filtered through his love for his daughter, I think it's only as wonderful and droll as it is because he's hopeful that she, and we, will make it through, and that limbo doesn't have to be all that bad if we zoom in and out just a little bit

A Love Song - Max Walker-Silverman (2022)

I love a movie that takes its soundtrack as seriously as its images and this film has one of the great ones but more importantly it has a sublime lead performance from Dale Dickey, previously known to myself only from her short arcs on Breaking Bad and Justified. What a gloriously weathered and beautiful face this woman has, like rings on a tree she wears every year with great internal honor and every mark tells a story, every blemish marking another 500 miles of hard road. I give Silverman credit for letting it fill the screen on multiple occasions but more than her central role is the way the material always returns to those wrinkles, the years of grief and loneliness that line her face. Ostensibly about a woman camped out at a remote lakeside somewhere in the American southwest waiting for a figure from her youth - a onetime teenage crush - who may or may not show up.

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When he does show up in the form of the great Wes Studi their awkward initial interactions and dialogue might've been a continuation of a flirtation that was interrupted 50 years prior. The time has passed but their emotions haven't aged a minute. As they get more comfortable with each other the film segues into its piece de resistance - their duet of a Michael Hurley song which must be about as cathartic a moment as either of these two lonely people have ever had. "Can't you see, I'm in Mis-er-yyyyyy" are the lyrics but Dickey really drives home that last syllable of "misery" like a primal howl. When she makes her way out of the campsite at the close of the film she may be carrying a fair share of disappointment but her crippling loneliness has been finally and completely purged. In contrast to Studi who seems destined to walk the western lands in an eternal state of mourning, like a mythical figure doing penance for flying to close to the sun of true love.

This is a beautifully observed, mature piece of work with a great understanding of its characters. And there's Elizabeth Cotten and Jerry Jeff Walker on the soundtrack...