I adore Havers short form stuff. He’s got an amazing knack for character, funny soundbites (if not ‘great dialogue’) and absurd but honest moments. After watching his video on how Anora is ‘not real independent cinema’, I wanted to give his long form stuff another shot to see what his idea of ‘independence’ is.
In short: loving Cassavetes does not make a person Cassavetes. Cassavetes’ magic does not lie solely in the radical way he made films (which was certainly…
Very entertaining throughout, but barely scrapes the surface of what could/should have been explored
Comes in with good inKentions, but the moments of laugh out loud hilarity are consistently withered by the most obvious, audience disrespecting you-go-girl-isms, stemming primarily from the central ‘real world’ mother-daughter relationship. In between the eye rolls at the tired tropes of outdated feminism, biting satire is mixed with silly doll-world slapstick to great effect, leaving me feeling like this could have been a significantly better film had they abandoned the real world entirely and just left us in Barbieland,…
If I’d seen this in anything other than IMAX 3D, I imagine I’d have much stronger negative opinions. But this film, perhaps more than any other I’ve ever seen, is so explicitly built for that theatre experience that grading it without some degree of a curve seems nonsensical.
Is it full to the brim with eye-roll inducing dialogue?
Absolutely.
Does it drown you in its Cameronian sincerity? Obviously.
Will it leave you wanting for nuance?
Almost certainly.
But will I…
