Saw all 24 hours. The whole thing was just sublime, and I've only got some musings and observations:
• These characters do so many things with clocks. They start the clocks. They stop the clocks. They enter the clocks. They climb the clocks. They pull the clocks out of corpses. They kill using the clocks. They kill the clocks. They embrace the clocks. I was geniunely curious if someone would pull an American Pie with a clock.
• I knew…
A visually spectacular fairy tale in dazzling Sovcolor [had to Google that one], Ruslan and Ludmila showcases an exhausting array of visual effects, bringing to life a decapitated giant, a tiny sorcerer with a magical beard, halls of coral and crystal, jacked stone titans in chains, and chandeliers made from inverted fountains. At two and a half hours, it never runs out of imagination.
Really the only drawback is that Ruslan himself doesn't make for a super interesting character. Ludmila,…
I like how Lawrence Jordan gives each image its own separate color before superimposing them. It gives each layer its own space without worrying about blocking out negative space or turning everything into mush.
Anyway, I thought this one was pretty nice. Probably the closest thing to narrative that I've seen him do (wandering a Gothic castle full of spirits), but still open enough for the surreal engravings to speak for themselves.
Hands down the most David Cronenberg™ film that Cronenberg has birthed this century. It nicely ties together a few ideas that've stuck with me from Annihilation, Evolution (2015), and That Episode of Invader Zim. Fans of eXistenZ, Crash, or Dead Ringers will feel right at home in the unsettling, antiseptic world Cronenberg builds, but his preoccupations here most remind me of his adaptation of Cosmopolis. Here once again is a capitalist world locked in a cycle of self-destruction and transformation.…
