late night reviews and rants about film and other media
review
In his first film in the Arabic-language Cairo trilogy, Swedish-Egyptian director Tarek criticizes pre-revolution political corruption; in his second, the Muslim Brotherhood; with his latest release, the neo-noir political thriller Eagles of the Republic, Tarek is more daring, taking aim at the active ruling Egyptian government. Except, due to sloppy writing and historical inaccuracies, it is not very effective at doing so.
review
I really wanted to like this both as an anti-colonial critique and as a 'good for her cinematic universe' revenge story but unfortunately the more I think about it the more it comes apart at the seams.
review
What began as a formulaic yet charming Rain Man meets Drive crime thriller unfortunately collapses under its own clumsy writing in the last act.
review
Spielberg skillfully plays with a lot of genre conventions of both conspiracy spy thrillers and golden age sci fi, making for a fun and visually impressive watch that is unfortunately too often interrupted by naive messaging about the compatibility of religion with the existence of extraterrestrial life, mankind on the brink of WW3 collectivity needing to touch some grass and stare at the universe, and milquetoast statements about not being bigoted I guess.
review
As a horror film, it is a decent debut for such a young director on a shoestring budget, but did leave me wanting for more given the promising Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Wishmaster meets social critique premise.
review
As a stand alone film it is a classic formulaic natural disaster film, but given that we shape out understanding of reality through the consumption of media, the realistic depiction of the devastating horror of wild fires (an issue only getting worse as we head deeper into the climate crisis) is handled quite well.
review
Even if it never explicitly mentions Unit 731, that this film addresses the Imperial Japanese Kwangtung Army's biological experiments on prisoners of war--with one particular harrowing scene of (not actual historical) archive footage--is quite subversive as one released in the height of Japanese historical revisionism as state policy. This is the Godzilla-1-era of Japanese Showa Nostalgia era of cinema, after all.
essay
A documentary exploring, to my understanding, the death of cinema and (metaphoric) death of the director, while, through interviews with four different filmmakers, also touching on several different layers of global cinema.
review
Capitalism has the power to absorb all criticism of itself. Howard's psychotic outbreaks are commodified up to when they directly endanger capitalism--only then, direct intervention is required, first, at the hands of Jensen and his understanding of capitalist realism (there are no nations, only companies), and then more definitively at the hands of former communists, now themselves entrenched in the market of media entertainment and the attention economy.
review
Baffled by the amount of people that take Asami's character and what is depicted at complete face value, whereas what is fiction and what is reality is very clearly deliberately blurred to remain ambiguous.
review
Nice little melancholic coming-of-age story dealing with various degrees of self-identity issues, but a bit too on the nose with the criticism of South Korea's cosmetic surgery industry.
review
Bit clumsy how it navigated the societal issues with the dark comedy but all the elements were there, with some occasional sharp writing, and I like how it's pretty iconoclastic, built around a topic that is still very much a taboo in US discourse even to acknowledge.