perfectly captures the feeling of being trapped in a conversation with an older dude at a coffee shop or something
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The Northman 2022
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
He should have just adapted Hamlet. That would have been sick.
I'm tempted to say that Anna Kornbluh would critique a film like this as an instance of the fetish of immediacy endemic to 'too late capitalism'; but I haven't read that book and I've heard mixed things, so who knows if I'll get around to it. But I think the style of this film is what she is critiquing there. It calls to mind the adaptation of Macbeth from…
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Occupied City 2023
The vibe of humans of New York overlaid with terse reminders that, once, FASCISM EXISTED HERE! It feels like the entire point this film is making is that the Netherlands continued existing after 1945. A completely banal point I can’t do anything with. In the audience Q&A, McQueen said his film was not a history lesson, but a meditation. A series of bare facts, of murders and executions and Nazi terror, sounding over thematically disjointed images of contemporary life, often…
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The Act of Killing 2012
No film gets right to the edge of the absurdity and brutality of class warfare and imperialism like this. Asking the perpetrators of genocidal killing to interrogate their own actions, and then to reenact them in a completely ambivalent series of setpieces, all interspersed with observations of contemporary power relations. The violence that is the reference of the Act of Killing haunts every frame, showing how it never really ended. It collapses action and reenactment, memory and propaganda. The whole film is an attempt to capture the surreality of the genocidaires living prosperous lives, ruling and being celebrated, and it succeeds almost perfectly.
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