Reviews
late night reviews and rants about film and other media
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review
Wife of a Spy
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.
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Audition
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.
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Arco
Loved the environmental metaphors, the bumbling trio of loveable up-to-no-goods, the brilliant French comic inspired artwork, the retro future designs, and even made me sympathetic to the working class robots.
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Another World
It is by all means both narratively ambitious and visually stunning, if not occasionally messy, but for most of its duration this film is just so bleak, I don't think I could actually recommend this to anyone.
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Network
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.
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Resurrection
There are plenty of self-congratulatory films about film, but this is truly the one all-time must see.
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Evil Does Not Exist
Starting of as a slow, contemplative exploration of a small, rural community faced with an ecological disruption at the hands of an ill-planned and predatory development project, Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist is tense, layered and never overexplains itself.