Connoisseur and advocate for “meat-and-potatoes filmmaking”
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Los Muertos 2004
The rustic, hunter-gatherer version of Homer’s Odyssey. I’ve seen people call this mythic, but I honestly took more to the blunt, unflattering chapters of Vargas’ adventure. Snapshots like the static image of two kids moseying around in their barn-like house, while their mother prostitutes herself. Whenever the illusion of mythical travel breaks, Alonso strikes upon a grim, purgatorial state of rural Argentina that’s nothing but hypnotic. Whenever he attempts to actively aggrandize Vargas’ travels, his eye gets lost in a…
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La Libertad 2001
Shit, eat, work, repeat. Even when reduced to the most primitive essentials, there is not one life without anomalies, without splendor, without intrigue. The sawdust sparkles and flickers off the tree shavings, it looks like a water sprinkler. The round bales lean against the fields and skies, they look ancient statues. The patron who tries to underpay me for the wrong lumbar, well, he looks like a fucking whiner, The day begins and ends with lightning, and a meager amount of armadillo meat. We’ll see what tomorrow looks like
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The Boy and the Heron 2023
Arresting images left and right, take any sequence in a vacuum and I’d assume this is a conceptual opus in surrealism, too bad we’re working with two hours of narrative here. Just way too scattershot for my taste, hodgepodge of dreamscapes and cute little critters grows irritating the longer I have to settle into the absence of connective tissue linking ideas here. Like Howl, it’s a tour de force for Miyazaki that makes absolutely zero sense (perfectly fine), but unlike…
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Dune: Part Two 2024
*Who knew that what was once a seedling, slowly forming roots of poised war in the Middle East allegory, and brittle leaves of fleeting allusion to ill-advised prophesy, would burrow deep back in the ground for 2 hours, only to then pop back out fully ripened, unveiling itself as just a shade off from space opera's answer for Joel Osteen. Denis' making a lot of grand gestures here, and boy does that pay off in his spacial precision against the…
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