Rick & Morty x Lady Bird
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Palm Springs 2020
Very original in its unoriginality. Absolutely bananas all the way through. The visual effects are so so ugly, but I still enjoyed it a lot.
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Soul 2020
I love that Pixar's 3D-animation technology is so far advanced that their depictions of humans have arrived at an uncanny resemblance with the real world. The only thing they can do now is go back to the roots of animation and carve out more cartoon-like worlds with people with exaggerated features. That, in my opinion, is a positive development. It is like the invention of the camera that freed the arts; now Pixar knows that the real world can be…
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The Return 2003
The Return might be the best Russian debut feature since Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood, and director Andrey Zvyagintsev is extremely aware of this legacy. At first the two boy leads were named Archil and David, but after Zvyagintsev joined the project he renamed the boys Ivan and Andrei; naming them after the protagonists in Tarkovsky's first two feature films, Ivan's Childhood and Andrei Rublev.
Some ten minutes into the film, Andrei and Ivan (they are brothers) fight and race each other…
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Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 1975
I am currently working on a project that would never have happened without Chantal Akerman and Jeanne Dielman. Two years ago I had never seen a film of Akerman, but since she has quickly become one of my favourite filmmakers.
What is there so interesting about watching all the mundane activities that every person goes through, day in, day out?
I don't think there is one answer to the above question. What I do know, though, is that Jeanne Dielman…
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Archipelago 2021
- IFFR 2021 -
Since the global pandemic I have been fascinated with the online game of Geoguessr. It can best be described as a game of simulated world travel and geographical knowledge. With the use of street view the players are dropped in a random place in the world and they have to guess on the map as best as possible where they are. All in all, Geoguessr has provided me with a fun alternative to traveling.
Archipelago reminded…
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The Captive 2000
Another reminder that I should read Proust, but as I have only gotten about 1/4th into Dostoyevsky's The Karamazov Brothers I am kind of wary of it.
Knowing little to nothing about Proust's A La Recherche on which the film is based doesn't really matter I believe. Akerman has done a good job in making the story her own, although, weirdly enough, it doesn't always feel like an Akerman film..
La captive is a film about possession or, rather, the…
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Mamma Roma 1962
I had to check multiple times, I just couldn't believe it; Mamma Roma is my first Pasolini film! Better late than never I guess.
There's many characteristics in Pasolini's filmmaking that I recognize from other Italian filmmakers from the time. The poverty, the aimlessness, even the sexual thematics, but I hadn't encountered them in such a strong political product.
I think we can safely state that Pasolini was not the filmmaker that other Italian greats like Rosselini, Fellini and Antonioni…
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Bicycle Thieves 1948
My girlfriend started following a class on Italian cinema, so I took this as an opportunity to go back a year in time; revisiting the semester that I spent in Rome, doing precisely that: studying Italian cinema.
Only one film can start an Italian cinema class and that's Ladri di biciclette. In fact, few films in the film canon that have risen to such enormous heights. Yes, the film is the face of neorealism, yes, it's a deeply humane story…
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Before Sunset 2004
No better way to start the year!
The dialogue in Before Sunset (and the whole trilogy for that matter) might be among the best in film history, subjectively speaking. What I love even more about the film, though, is a concept that Céline already introduces in Before Sunrise.
She says that "if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between."
We can see this in…
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The Apartment 1960
That's how you end the year!
I have been at the wildest house parties, I have been to Vienna, Venice and all other sorts of places for new year's, but last night was one of my favorites of them all.
Spending it at home with my girlfriend, sipping a 0.0% champagne, cooking a nice dinner, doing some puzzling, and of course: watching The Apartment.
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Upstream Color 2013
Oops, still wrapping up 2020 here.
And oh man, Upstream Color did something to me. It brought me back six or seven years to when I first started discovering arthouse cinema. Watching Upstream Color for the first time then I didn't understand much of it. But I already loved participating in the maze or the puzzle that it creates for the viewer. Films like these made want to study cinema and pursue a career in this field.
I was inspired…