If you’re a handsy repressed smug conformist with no original thoughts yet love to hear yourself talk, you’re probably a secret fascist just waiting to be given permission by an authority figure to murder. That’s just facts. You romanticize and aggrandize yourself, but like all romantics you’re just a blockhead tool waiting... longing... to be told you're important.
Director Juraj Herz was a survivor of Ravensbrück concentration camp as a child and you can see how that personal experience gave…
At first it is performative, and what a performance. Jason Holliday struts and vamps around a Hotel Chelsea penthouse, constantly amused at his own struggle and all the colors of his life, which he relates to us with the skills of a master recanture. His joy is contagious. The camera is there to be seduced.
We slide in and out of focus. Now and then the film becomes visually murky, pleasingly abstract, but Holliday's stories and infectious laughter continue on.…
I BOUGHT A FARM
My Newest YouTube Vid,
Most of you will ignore this, and rightly so.
And most of the few who do click through will only spend 30 seconds watching it, just long enough to log a view (thank you!)
A very small portion of you will watch all the way to the end, experiencing PURE CINEMA. (hahaha... naw... it's pretty stupid)
In classic martial arts film fashion, each fight here escalates in creativity and intensity, becoming more and more entertaining, and the last twenty-minutes go pretty hard. There’s some absolutely amazing stunt falls in the back half. But holy shit... it is a slog getting there. Frankly, story drag while waiting for the good bits was a problem with even some of the greatest martial arts films from the 80s... but why are we still making that mistake as late as…
Acknowledging that this is as hollow and frothy an act of male-gaze feminism as Barbie was a corporate didactic toy commercial (I found both extremely entertaining) does not mean this movie isn’t also a gloriously weird modern cartoon parable about fathers and daughters, little girls and women, husbands and wives, lovers and enemies, sex workers and clients, cruelty and humanity, philosophy and reality, and the balance between the desire for an adventurous life and the joys of a settled one.…
This is what Edward Yang was talking about when he wrote, “we live three times as long since man invented movies”. Last night I got to be on the streets of Mumbai, watch a young Hindu nurse dress in a burka to infiltrate the neighborhood of the Muslim man she loves, I traveled to a beach side village of another woman as she tried to figure out the next chapter of her life, and so much more. A slice of…
