Letterboxd — Your life in film

Quick Review 1/3

My face when I see Pedro Pascal make this face.

(They're the same face)

Merging comedy, drama, action, and a meta exploration of one of the most iconic and idiosyncratic actors of the last 50 years was never going to be easy, but this movie sure doesn't make it seem even one iota less hard. Frankly, it's a shaggy mess -- the script, the tone, all of it.

But consider The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent a…

Quick Review 2/3

Even though I don’t think this sticks the emotional and especially the philosophical landings that it seems like it wants to at the very end, the general setup and the sheer earnestness of the movie are just too good to be held back by much. Multiversal realities are dominant movie-going fare right now, but I don’t think anyone has used them simply as an emotional and sociological metaphor before, for post-post-modern malaise, for our ever-increasing subsumption by…

Quick Review 3/3

A soft but weighty, perfectly bittersweet film about what it is to inherit familial pain, joy and memory, and what it is to pass them down as well. But it is also a film about those blessings of inheritance unexpectedly reversing and moving upstream: from daughter to mother, from child to adult, past to present, fantasy to reality. Whatever is happening metaphysically in Nelly and Marion’s meeting is rightfully ignored, and whatever is happening emotionally between them…

Hong Sang-soo, as a filmmaker, is known to work much more improvisationally than most. According to him, he begins working on a film a mere month before shooting, generally beginning with location scouting and casting. Throughout this month of prep, usually the most firm thing he’ll ever arrive at is a story treatment. Dialogue is often only prepared once shooting begins, sometimes on the day of a given shoot.

Of course, Hong Sang-soo and Kim Min-hee had a very public…

I've heard a lot of talk about how this film utilizes the female gaze and how refreshing this is. I certainly won't disagree with that at all, but moreso, I feel that Portrait of a Lady on Fire doesn't merely utilize gaze but is wholly about gaze -- gaze as an active, productive substance, like light, bringing warmth, life, illumination, perspective. The film's opening scene sets the tone: we, like the students, are being taught how to notice, how to…

🎉"There is only one man on that engine!"🎉

Certainly I had to watch another all-time favorite when I had the chance to see two movies on my birthday, and I figured I was up for another comedy. The only decision was between Keaton or Chaplin, so I flipped a coin and it came up for the Great Stoneface and his utterly perfect film The General, which blew me away two-and-a-half years ago.

It's equally impressive today, a masterclass in how…