Absolute powerhouse of modern film and an impressive popular rendering of some of the hardest-hitting and controversial dialogues in sexuality studies. Challenges us to rethink consent in pressing and pertinent ways, challenges us to give ourselves over to our own opacity. Any film that has me thinking of Saketopoulou’s paradigms of limit consent and exigent sadism from top to bottom deserves high praise. Nichole Kidman’s facial expressions were of discomfort, but this film teaches us discomfort isn’t always a bad thing.
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Being 17 2016
A limit case of and testament to film’s privileged position in exploring the libidinal. A continental inversion of the gay coming-of-age plot where dominant flows of care are redirected in service of holding open the role of trauma, enigma, and just plain ugly in the messy unfolding of sexuality. Aggression, lust, and grief menacingly bleed together leaving only those intensities that lie below the surface. While race, class, sexuality, and nation impress themselves on the space between Damien and Thomas, in Quand on a 17 ans, these—as well as the viewer—are forced to bow to desire itself.
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Longlegs 2024
Truly terrible. Cage’s performance was questionable. Writing was even worse. Satan = scary is a lazy formula. Marketing of this film convinced me it was degrees of magnitude scarier than it actually was (I had to walk home in the dark afterward just to feel something)
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Salt of This Sea 2008
Stunning narrative of diasporic return. Visually stunning and rhetorically righteous. Contends with and holds open the wound of settler coloniality through asking what everyday performance does with respect to land and nation(-state).
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