No smoking gun exactly, just the usual under-resourcing, under-preparation, and conservatism of US film finance. Kassovitz does seem temperamentally ill-suited to big-budget filmmaking, but he also seems to have been dealt a series of losing hands, which his irritability and compulsive hands-on approach didn’t help. Michelle Yeoh makes an interesting point that he’d probably do well in the less-restricted work climate of China (as she phrases it, though I suspect she means Hong Kong); the simultaneously overstuffed and fragile US model…
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Christine 1987
Blood on the TV, monotony in life and affect. I never had much use for punk,* but it does occur to me that the cinema of Alan Clarke works concurrently with punk while pushing its angry, depressive energy into distinctly adult realms. It’s one thing to be young and rightfully furious about the state of the world; but what about when you’re in your 50s, faced with the deepening crisis of Thatcherism? Clarke’s mature perspective gives a gruesome clarity: his…
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Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022
I feel like, in response to growing up and realizing they’re not meant to be important artists or leaders or activists or whatever, and that they’re just living an ordinary adult life like the rest of us, certain millennials have doubled down on that disappointment from the high expectations they had in childhood and are now like, actually I am the *most* important person in every universe that exists. Multiversal main character syndrome.
With an escalating mass mental health crisis…
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Ready Player One 2018
"I hate myself
I hate myself
I hate myself
For loving you"
The text people are searching for to decode this bizarre film is Hiroki Azuma's critical theory book Otaku: Japan's Database Animals. I first heard of the book through McKenzie Wark, who, following Azuma, posited that Japan had begun grappling with post-modernity several decades earlier than the rest of the world. This I think is true, because what began in Japan can be seen emerging in the United States…
