Are powerful men ever innocent?
It goes without saying that every single technical aspect of this is incredibly well done, with MVP going to legendary production designer Jack Fisk. And you already know the story is engaging and important, the book is fantastic and should be on every American’s reading list.
But it’s hard to invoke real, substantive, emotion with such a huge and sprawling narrative. The movie is so concerned with its own march from scene to scene, that…
Two pretty great kids make horror media on and around a lake one summer.
Thirteen year old Bastien is cool for his age. Quiet, smart, observant, funny, a good dancer. And for most of the movie, or for the fun part of the movie, at least, he does an admirable job in the face of experiencing his first older woman, 16 year-old Chloé.
Chloé has irrupted into puberty while Bastien is just on the threshold of it. Chloé is a…
A tokusatsu exploration into the importance of sadness. Reminding us that sadness is a fundamental part of being human. That sadness is necessary to achieve actual transformative happiness. It's charming and interesting stuff to hang a whole bunch of wonky ass action on.
Obviously, I’m here for the production design, kitschy weightless last-gen CGI, and overall super fun vibe... so I’m not sure I needed as many momentum-killing scenes centered around longwinded emotional elucidation, but I ain’t mad. There’s probably…
You cannot explain to me a geopolitical policy that justifies this. There is no rationale, no logic, no reasoning of human governance that should allow for this. The minute you’ve bombed a child your history, your culture, your pride, your grievance don’t matter anymore. Your trauma doesn't matter anymore, because trauma that inflicts more trauma is the path to mutual destruction. None of your reasons for bombing a child matter. My nation, the United States has bombed children. And many,…
For every time I’ve ever complained here on LB about not getting enough male full frontal in movies, directer Sebastián Silva shows me a dick in this one. And I’ve bitched about it a lot. Good. I love dicks. So it was a bummer that the first act of this was so tedious, even with all the dicks.
But the minute the second act turned, this movie went from shitfuck annoying, to really, really great. The movie whips its focus…
Anime paced manic pixie fantasy romcom, from meet cute to grand gesture (never trust a grand gesture - grand gesture people, in real life, are the most frivolous with another's heart).
The movie has incredible production design throughout, it's absolutely stunning looking. The visual world building and background jokes are really well handled. The leads are very cute.
But the script is broad and slight. The characters, even the leads, are scarecrow people, caricatures instead of characters. For me, protagonist…
I didn’t always buy the attempts at naturalism here, there are some scenes that felt forced to me, but I was absolutely captivated throughout. There were several very long scenes that worked like magic. The final negotiation in the bar between Antoine and Xan, with Lorenzo watching on, is sort of a masterpiece.
And I do love me a good bicameral flick, that is, a movie that changes gears entirely at some point. This becomes such a different movie that…
The Guardians of the Galaxy flicks, for all their faults, are the only Marvel movies I could give a shit about, precisely because of Gunn’s innate ability to hum along in the same collective key as Wally Wood, Jim Steranko, George Pérez, Jack Kirby (Captain, my Captain), Steve Ditko, Louise and Walt Simonson, Gil Kane, Jim Starlin (the Starlin is strong here), Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, et al.
That is to say, Gunn singularly knows what makes the sci-fi side…
Do it yourself SUPER FILM BRO Barbie review... helping woke, spoke, bespoke, and toked men sound smart.
Instructions: Choose from one of the following contentious main discussion points, then choose a corresponding potential argument position that best sums up your feelings about Mattel’s most recent toy commercial -
1. It’s an Attack on Men...
- Yes. Men must be sheltered. Continued attacks on masculinity and the overall queerification of the Empire is exactly how Rome fell. The war with Oceania…
“Fuckin’ John.”
The lunacy of taking a dumb bullshit job too seriously.
The lunacy of believing in a mission to an utterly inhospitable Mars, when we are so completely unable to function as people with one another right here in the world we’re actually evolved to live in.
When protagonist David meets another “John Shepard” from another team during the Viking space probe retrieval exercise, and David’s Viking space probe is just a fucking trashcan while the other team’s space…
A huge entry in the “Movies are People” school of cinema for me. Watching it made me a more expansive person. It’s a compassion engine. A courageous act of truth telling on the part of these women, both to the audience and to one another. One of the very few things I know without any doubt is that women are stronger than men, and here we have a good contender for Exhibit A.
We get the “events” of their “story”,…
Gaze at the prodigals of the attention epoch! See them rise! See them fall!
One of the stronger works of sardonicism I’ve seen in a while, precisely because it’s also mixed with an actual attempt at character study. It goes hard enough to be really funny, but keeps a measured sheen of realism to give it some heft. More than once it felt absolutely satirically ruthless.
I thoroughly enjoyed that, when it was all said and done, the film itself…