"when the image is new, the world is new"
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Water 2005
Extremely moving--and maudlin--at once. Mehta's accuracy here, her ability to capture such small, subtle moments of kindness (and cruelty too; the banality of the widow-caste Ashram) far outstrips the script's melodramatics. Not that the melodrama's bad, mind you. Ray and Abraham are smokin' hot together. Doomed, sure. But hot.
Anything for Chuyia offering Sadananda fried dough. The world for an offering. The sum of human kindness. Autonomy is a terrifying, suicidal force...regardless of how small or great the act.
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Flesh + Blood 1985
Verhoven's 16th century Italy is, among the grime and gruel, avarice and aimless barbarianism--a carnival of rape. Mean. Cruel. Nasty. Gnarly. Women as divine, dreaded commodity; madonna's of unsatisfiable desire. Men, abysmal, doom themselves to a black death.
Paul does offer a statue of St. Martin of Tours a kind of holy, divinatory power. Where this statues sword leads, however, is anything but salvation. Copernicus, Martin Luther, Tenochtitlan's fall...this is the age of reformation, revolution, colonial bloodlust. What's a few dead mercs in the face of the Italian renaissance? What for the rape of a petty noble?
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Mad Max: Fury Road 2015
"Witness me."
Cinema of unbridled momentum and diesel fumes. MM;FR is a movie firing so furiously on all cylinders it almost seems redundant now to mention any one of its greatest attributes save to remind whoever's reading that it is, indeed, one damn fine piece of art. But a few more words of praise can't hurt, can they? Let's just say that Miller's latest addition to the Madverse is a case-in-point of 'kinetic' media--revelling in a purely idiosyncratic sense of…
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Devs 2020
"He's not a fucking genius, Stewart. He's an entrepreneur."
Well oh well. Interesting to see Garland move his particular brand of gloom/doom glass-box sci-fi into the luminous world of 'primetime' television. Hulu's packin' heat baby! Or trying to. Or wants you to think it does. Either way, Devs does make for some good episodic fun, or dread, however you see it--with some caveats. I think I still prefer a Garland anchored by the more limiting demands of medium/small-scale Hollywood production.…
