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Totally Fucked Up 1993
Viewed as a series of formal gestures, Totally Fucked Up is clearly impressive: I particularly appreciate the way Araki frames his teenage solipsists as they laze about, filling the entire frame with their beds, making the site of their apathy seem almost inescapable, or the decision to dwarf the characters with neon signage in almost every scene filmed outside, the monstrous, unintelligible fragments of capital pervading every inch of the city. The issue, then, is that I think he hews…
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Ginger Snaps 2000
succeeds where prestige horror fails, insofar as Ginger Snaps completely gets that the structuring metaphor(s) aren't enough by themselves. there's definitely insight here about puberty and sex themselves, but far more interesting is the profoundly human scaffolding built around it about what those traumas can do to relationships. idk it's just kind of wild to watch a horror movie that bothers with empathetic and sophisticated characterization when most contemporary horror cinema is either soulless art-horror or sadistic torture porn bullshit.
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Hanagatami 2017
For Toshihiko, his youth was like a game of hide-and-seek:
it was dark before he knew it and everyone had gone home