Letterboxd — Your life in film

I didn't love this film overall but that 180-degree rule-break in the opening monologue is fire.

The first half is an articulate, brilliant film that plays like an MTV Greatest Hits rendition of Argento's early career. Later it devolves a little into a slightly gutless and overly rigid dreamscape, which both serves the ideas of the film well and diminishes the overall affectual experience.

Even if he was asleep, he'll think he's seen it all - yep, everything Linklater does best is here, history so minimised that it can be embodied almost entirely in one person's (imagined) version of the menial and everyday. The film works very hard to counterpoint Stan/America's fantasy with alternate perspectives even if it never settles on them, which is of course the most unsettling thing Linklater could do - to remain invested in the mythic whilst in a process of complete examination.

Entertaining in the moment and overall an interesting case study in the fact that there are no stakes in a text wherein literally anything can happen.

The most joyful experience I’ve had at the cinema in an extremely long time is this, a semiotic epic in which two individuals become symbols of history over and over and over again. Rajamouli’s finest work and there’s no doubt about that.

Arrival of the cinema at la ciotat

Some of the most well-directed Hitchcock riffs this side of De Palma, particularly in the first two acts (which outrun pretty much every other superhero movie sans BvS) but I can’t help feeling we could do with an optimistic Batman movie sometime soon. I’d love to see more from this team.

It is less specific than my favourite Mehta films (particularly Maya Memsaab) but this lack of specificity it makes up for in fury; the correlation of the text's women with the plants which grow (literally) from below ground toward visibility is a startling aesthetic principle that the film makes intelligent use of. In fact, even many of the film's male characters are associated with the same imagery (not least through the use of the colour red, but also through the odd match-cut) but this is always framed carefully and explicitly as an abuse of those below, as a punching-down, even an appropriation of sorts.

Probably my favourite of Sean Baker's first three movies, a very richly observed drama full of rhyming aesthetic moments (I'm particularly drawn to the two boat images & the recurrent triptych set-ups in the house, particularly the mirror-based ones), though as with all Baker films it runs for just about fifteen minutes too long & therefore misses the chance to hit maximum impact with its elegiac, magical ending sequence.