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Real 2013
dissociative anti-expressionism....the cinema of perversely disengaged spectacle emptied of itself, replete with gestures echoing imprisoned traumas in a logic so bizarre and inhuman that a comparison to dreams does it a substantial disservice. it takes on affective significance not through inner psychological dynamism, which one might expect from the premise, but rather through structural conceit, doubling, dissolving, mnemosynic, vaporously drifting upwards like imagined lovers disintegrating. the will to see you again is stronger than everything, so he will survive. ripped up in monstrous jaws, and an offerring so that we might never be apart again, in the waking world
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The Sixth Sense 1999
a elegy on the inheritance and iteration of empathy, the most hopeful declaration in shyamalan's oeuvre that we can pass on so much more than trauma and dysfunction, that our own agonies can become sources of incredible love and caring rather than excuses for inflicting pain. our own ghosts are exorcised by faith and understanding, while this allows us to care for others in deeper ways than we could have ever imagined. a perspective that seems almost naive, were it…
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Fractals: The Colors Of Infinity 1995
ok what is there to say really....i'm excited about film which unsews the stitching of knowledge production, the boundaries drawn between science and art, and reattaches them in strange new ways....provokes the question of how organicity emerges, the levels unwinding themselves downwards like dna unzipping, waiting to encode grander designs, technology used to generate and resolve digital images the inverse operation of what the us government uses to observe and control us......the possibility of new worlds contained in the old,…
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Toolbox Murders 2004
the history of brute power is plastered to the very walls, newspapers lining a moldering catacomb which is equally a shrine to the parasitic, quasi-sexual jouissance and vitality the demonic bourgeois of hollywood (in alliance with the military-industrial complex) derives from the pain and death of the poor. grimy, staged, and theatrical: this is a performance, through and through, although the irony of one of hooper's more workmanlike (if certainly not journeyman) efforts being named after its macabre, gothic perversion…
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Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice 2016
the blessed combination of a thoroughgoing commitment to fascism with a still more thoroughgoing commitment to incompetence, zack snyder’s elegy for the decline of our freaking society under “late” capitalism, and his ode to the transformative power of accepting christ, the us government, and our troops into your life. and yet this is also a shockingly cogent and pointed critique of empire in decline, a whirlwind of post-9/11 furor and liberal democratic sloganeering forced to confront its own emptiness and…
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In My Skin 2002
some exchanges:
["you should have felt it" "i feel my leg normally now" ]["you rip your leg open, you don't feel it. i touch you, and you jump and scratch" ]
["it's strange that you felt nothing" ] ["when i do this, can you feel it?" "no" "no?" ]
["i don't know what to say about your cutting" "say nothing"]
[ "is it my fault? don't you like your body?" ]
[(robotically) "hello! this is your wake up call!]…
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Paperhouse 1988
godly...like the exact negative of those awful roald dahl stories about how being a bookish kid gives you magic powers and makes you better than everyone else. escapism without escape and the limitations of dreams brought into focus so that we might understand the things they *can* do better, the pain of isolation and fear alleviated just enough by these brief moments of connection in the fantasies of the sickly. literally broke my heart, also straight up one of the most elegantly composed movies i have ever seen, zero exaggeration
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Spring Breakers 2012
"act like you're in a movie or something"
as utterly contemptuous as it is willing to luxuriate in the vapid sensuousness of white upper-middle class hedonism, an aesthetic defined by the drift between beauty and vulgarity, corniness and the sublimated genuine. and always, always conscious of the fact that what enables said hedonism is the displacement of violence and pain onto black people, who remain conspicuously marginal amongst the decadence of spring break (especially pointed is the fact that the… -
Frankenhooker 1990
pretty dope, there's something to be said here about the suburbanite housewife-to-be being reconstructed from a class of women whose work relegates to them to disposability and transience, normalcy (degenerating into a grotesque parody of itself, natch) built from the literal bodies of women commodified and discarded, perhaps to be returned to later (all at the whims of a dude playing hero). quite empathetic and astute, really. put this in the forced feminization canon
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Dead & Buried 1981
I was livin' in a devil town
Didn't know it was a devil town
Oh lord it really brings me down
About the devil town
And all my friends were vampires
Didn't know they were vampires
Turns out I was a vampire myself
In the devil town
I was livin' in a devil town
Didn't know it was a devil town
Oh lord it really brings me down
About the devil town -
Song of Love 1950
proto-Oshima, a miniature treatise on how a space outside the pressure of normative social forces (paradoxically designed to enforce them) both produces an opportunity for the redirection of libidinal energies that were previously sublimated or suppressed and is simultaneously destabilized from within by said forces. the unbearable tension of a permanently delayed consummation, wherein the ecstatic release prefigures death and thus is never achieved while the desire remains in motion. very hot, if i'm being honest
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Donnie Darko 2001
so, so adolescent but also so impressively, monotonically committed to its depressive teenage psychodrama that it disarms one's instinctive revulsion to the childish rough edges. kelly is clearly fascinated by corniness in all its forms, from the new age wine mom cult built on child pornography to donnie's parents who, if cheesy and ultimately as limited as the suburbia around them, are warmly, instructively so, and he deploys the corniness of his film just like the strange visual overlays and…