late night reviews and rants about film and other media
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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
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.
review
Charming feel-good fun (with perhaps a bit too much goofiness coming from Gosling's character), but also constantly felt overly reminded that I was watching a Hollywood product optimized for affective impact and mass appeal.
review · Berlinale
While the script is rather formulaic, this had a lot of heart. Definitely enjoyed the playful "kids these days" digs throughout.
review · Berlinale
Entertaining and pretty much what I had hoped Mickey 17 would have been, even if it's at times just a modern reimagining of Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys.
review
While the plot twists are mostly predictable, and this Mark Hamell / Stephen King joint project is also, unexpectedly, rather liberal in its understanding of contemporary politics in terms of individual evils over systems and structures, I really did enjoy this quite a bit.
review
Entertaining if bloated Hollywood romp that manages to subvert enough of the tropes of the original to not make it feel like it's too much of a complete retelling, even if Ridley Scott is constantly shoving pieces of the original in our faces to the point I feel Russell Crowe should've been properly credited as lead actor.
review
Excellent performance by the lead actress in her painful depiction of a desire to belong while constantly pushing away anyone that gets close; but halfway through the film does lose its focus and I felt there was virtually no character development from that point onward.
review
Fundamentally a Hero's Journey reimagination of Frankenstein, Poor Things explores themes of the human condition, patriarchy, and ideology through its subversion of the overplayed 'born sexy yesterday' power fantasy trope of oversexualized, childlike women.
review · TIFF
Blue Giant, an animated adaption of the eponymous graphic novel chronicling the rise of a starting Jazz musician, is a wonderful and sometimes moving love letter to Jazz, elevated by a brilliant soundtrack composed and performed by the ever so talented Uehara Hiromi.
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
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.