What did I I receive from my £4 second-hand copy of Watchmen: (Director’s Cut)…?
- About 4 weeks of intellectual stimulation.
- A new historical narrative about the 20th century.
- A new political philosophy to go with it.
- A crash-course on the history of ethics.
- A new appreciation of postmodernist art (to my shock!).
- And a hole in my wallet from buying books to research it all.
Watchmen isn’t a movie. It’s a university course. Snyder…
I paid very little attention to the story because I couldn’t follow it, the dialogue is almost incoherent consisting of quotes from films and literature, and because the film's distractingly beautiful. That's not always a quality I come to Godard for, but here he’s luxuriating in the large house of crazy rich people during an idyllic French late summer. The nature shots are exquisite, built out of a memory of summer holidays; the long grass, the reeds, the coloured leaves,…
A new journey starts. The old world, Krypton, gets destroyed and we're cast into a new one. Inherent within us is the "Codex", the ability to be whoever we want to be, within the confines of morality, just like Superman.
Krypton represents whatever phase of life we left, a place of unlimited potential once - "we crossed the stars" - but eventually it runs dry. Past successes become staid. We mine too deep into the old "planet's core", become rigid…
A painfully hyperactive live-action cartoon for teens with tacked-on Marvel-level philosophy advocating "kind nihilism" as opposed to the suicidal nihilism of A24's other films.
Its teen target audience might explain the ADHD editing, "edgy" jokes about butt plugs, wobbly dildos, and endless Rick & Morty style meaninglessness.
As co-director/writer Daniel Kwan said:
"Watching the second season of Rick and Morty was really painful. I was like, 'They've already done all the ideas we thought were original!' It was a really frustrating…
An eye-opening documentary from 2016 that explains the chaos in Ukraine and reveals Russia's point of view. This war started long ago, and Putin is neither crazy or Hitler 2.0, despite the screaming fits and hysteria from media sources. Obviously that doesn’t mean he’s a saint either.
Produced by Oliver Stone, who certainly sympathises with Russia but is against the recent invasion, and directed by a Ukrainian, the doc packs a huge amount of information into a short space of…
