Really putting that Criterion Channel subscription to good use.
The ratings really don’t mean much.
It's practically cliché now to say that this movie is hauntingly relevant today, so instead I'll just say that the United States has always had an affinity for and skepticism of populists, always simultaneous. What I haven't really seen remarked upon much is that both director Elia Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg unrepentantly named names at Joseph McCarthy's HUAC hearings; Rhodes, despite being inspired by Billy Graham and Huey Long, is a clear analog for McCarthy as well. I'm not…
"Soup won't be computerized."
"Why not?"
"It's a liquid."
What I think makes this film special is how willing it is to sit with the uncomfortable. I've seen the film talked about in terms of how the Internet transformed the way we interact with one another, but I think it's suggesting something more, well, uncomfortable: we were never actually "good" at communicating or connecting, and new technologies simply add new dimensions for us to awkwardly grasp at each other in. It's definitely among the best of the hyperlink films of the mid-2000s. Miranda July, make more movies please!
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
The movies: we are so back.
The first half is a great, Carpenter-esque pressure cooker; the second half is perhaps a bit more of a conventional thriller, but the perspective shifts make this more interesting that it would seem on paper. Josh Hartnett is excellent here at playing a psychopath: for all the criticisms of Shyamalan dialogue sounding like he's never heard people talk, Hartnett plays it like a sociopath rehearsing the interactions he's practiced to sound "normal." In fact,…
I honestly don't even know where to begin this, so I'll start with the beginning of the film. The most subtly successful thing this film does is let us hang out with the Pavia family for a significant chunk of the film before the inciting incident occurs. They are clearly a family of means - they live in a beachfront house in Rio, after all, and bought property to build a new house outside the city. But wealth does not…