what's poppin, what's the deal?
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllPinned reviews
More-
Cruella 2021
There are some definite oddities here, resulting from both the textural elements affixed to an on-rails revenge narrative and all the over-determinative story elements trying to interpose a good/evil existential question between the two stages of character transformation that already existed at the basic level. If I like one thing about villain origin stories it's that it mostly shifts the traditional Hollywood narrative away from transcending the good/evil opposition represented by an external figure (a villain) and toward the plot…
Recent reviews
More-
Danger: Diabolik 1968
Consists of a heist triumvirate where the object in each case represents a different impossibility: invisible, unavoidable, then incommensurable -- but it's always a sublime distillation of commodity to-be-plucked from its substance (fetish) and rendered material-thus-unsubstantial, economically speaking.
Diabolik itself, by being that dangerous possibility and inevitable failure of the suspension of the impossible, makes the heist-object poke out. Such is the condition of the heist movie narrative.
-
White Squall 1996
a great case of how merely extending, and mourning in its empty aftermath, the ideological project beyond its tragic, already-in-its-genesis endpoint turns that same inevitable violence into the very legitimation of its inception as an exception to the social. Extra patriarchal and extrapatriarchal.
Popular reviews
More-
Nathan for You: Finding Frances 2017
Maci, a hired escort: It's kinda weird having cameras around, right?
Nathan Fielder: We could turn them off if you want.
M: laughs Could we?
NF: Do you want to?
M: Does that defeat the purpose?
NF: What's the purpose?
M: You're filming something. It's kinda the purpose, right?
...
NF: We do have this drone. It'd be cool to get a drone shot, maybe.Nathan Fielder's just fucking brilliant TV show has always been built around the similitudes between…
-
Sicario 2015
There are a few things you will see many crime thrillers have in common. Among them are the ominous aerial shots, night-vision photography, and scenes operating with only a single limited light source. Denis Villeneuve no doubt uses all three of these, but it is the subtle impressionist inflections he adds to them which sets this film far apart. I am going to focus on his aerial shots for two reasons: One, they especially stand out for their exceptional ability…
