“We are not leading the lives we are meant for. We are meant for something else.”
Seeing Knight Of Cups in January 2016 was perhaps the worst cinema experience I’ve ever had. The screening was full of couples who loudly debated whether or not they should leave and strangers who called across the room to each other to discuss how “pretentious” it was, offering no courtesy to fellow filmgoers and no justification for their misplaced judgment. The word “pretentious” is rarely used…
Moved To No. 2 In “2018 RANKED” :)
Lisa: “I know you’re going through a lot, so I decided to be generous today.”
Arturo: “You are everyday.”
Lisa: “What’s that?”
Arturo: “You’re generous everyday.”
Lisa: “Oh, well. Thank you Arturo.”
Andrew Bujalski’s Support The Girls is an incredible movie, warmly comforting without shying away from the aching melancholy of its subject matter, and one of my all time favourite films. Following a day in the life of the workers at…
So much precision in the pulp. The music-video-within-a-porno-within-a-movie sequence set to 80s synthpop banger ‘Relax’ is the toe-tapping crux of the film’s formal thesis (one of the theses, anyway); erasing the arbitrary lines between Hollywood, MTV, and pornography in a great, garish orgy of mirrors, bodies, cranes and to-the-beat cutting. Craig Wasson is perfectly cast as the nebbish ‘nice guy’ whose self-righteous attempts at heroism De Palma and the supporting characters scathingly undercut. Demands heady analysis yet dazzles with its surfaces. 9.5/10
Naturally doesn’t compare to her meaty visual albums or revelatory concert films (formally dazzling works that touch the greatness of Stop Making Sense), but critiques that Beyoncé could have done all this in her sleep ignore how impressive that would be. Does nothing to raise her bar but handily meets it for 15 energetic minutes, and the return of the Homecoming marching band aesthetics is a rousing touch.
MCU RANKED - The Road To Endgame :)
ADDED TO 2019 RANKED :)
Avengers: Endgame is not great cinema. Many fans will no doubt insist that it is, lauding it as some kind of perfect masterpiece or the peak of its genre in the days and months and years to come, confusing their high levels of enjoyment and satisfaction with high levels of quality craft. Enjoyment and satisfaction are extremely valuable things, however, and a movie doesn’t need to be…
Full of flaws that will be exaggerated and features that will be ignored, but in my currently overwhelmed and sleepy state, the former take precedence. Like the last Star Wars trilogy-capper, Revenge Of The Sith, J.J. Abrams’ The Rise Of Skywalker is wildly rushed and wildly overstuffed, but not because the previous films didn’t do enough for the story. Rather, it’s because this one does too much, needlessly bogging itself in an interminable mess of macguffins and mini-quests that largely ignores the…
