Nai Nai (Grandma) is dying, and the family aren't telling her. Billi (Awkwafina) and her parents moved to America years ago, while the rest of the family stayed in China or resettled in Japan. Immigration has geographically cleaved the family apart and invested them with different codes: in the eastern ethic, you protect (conceal? coerce?) Nai Nai from the truth; in the western ethic, you tell Nai Nai and empower (force? pressure?) her to choose what to do next. It's…
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Force Majeure 2014
Force Majeuere has one of the most ingenious set-ups for a black comedy-drama: a family are on a skiing holiday; there's a dangerous avalanche; the father runs away to save himself, abandoning wife & children; it turns out the avalanche wasn't dangerous after all. The father has to sheepishly return, and the family to confront his abject failure in this trial of being a good father, husband, protector.
Ruben Ostlund's is a cruel cinema, a cool, clinical amphitheatre where he casts…
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All About My Mother 1999
A ludicrous spider-web of relationships; close-ups of tears and foundation battling it out on faces barely an inch away from Melpomene masks; a weird sense of pacing where expendable moments are stretched out and significant ones compressed; Penelope Cruz looking absolutely radiant, like a real sacrificial lamb. Melodrama is all about excess & disproportion - *over*emotionality, *over*indulgence in colour, plot, etc. - and Almadovar really does it best (at least, for his generation).
In reference to Almadovar's "Talk To Her", Daniel…
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