Just goes to show that for some people making an anti-fascist masterpiece can only mean making a masterpiece of fascism.
And now, a long, obnoxious rant.
Army of Shadows is 150 minutes of the most austere horseshit you’ve ever seen - a right-wing simpleton who wishes social relations could be as much of a simulacrum as possible, making a comic book thriller trying to convince me that “there really is nothing to be done about fascism after all”. A film that…
This turned out so long because it is about comparing two Lynch films, sorry about that.
Lynch’s 90s are bookended by his two most outliers projects and I feel like general cinephile consensus has shifted toward recontextualising The Straight Story as a key auteurist text while downplaying the significance of Wild at Heart. While I’ve always liked both of these, Straight Story used to be one my favourite Lynch films, whereas this was always towards the bottom, which is why it was…
We should stop giving people money. Cinema is not the playground where you can show off the toys daddy bought you. It is not the clay to be shaped in your image, not a monument to your auteurship, not a battleground of brands. I think if you are a respectable director, you should only make a big budget Western film if you plan on really respecting the wide shot, and even then, it is probably better if we close the…
We can never have another John Ford because everybody with those aspirations has now grown up on television. It’s not even the issue that Nolan invests too much into the “Manifest destiny” cowboy’s ethos of discovery, because you can make a fascinating movie about what his role is post-Reagan, post-9/11, in the post-ideological world of today where his ideals have nothing to hold onto but dust. An explorer made to be a farmer because maybe - just maybe, since Nolan…
Eggers‘ whole attitude about inhabiting historical traditions of folklore and the occult supposedly unspoiled by modernity is so laughable and phoney, considering how this whole film reeks of tired Gen X platitudes and pathologies. The most essential thematic core of Dracula is our tortured, contradictory relationship with desire, so it is most telling that Eggers lacks any capability of portraying eroticism, and instead opts for this weightless, overdone visual style that mostly spotlights how much he is directing and what cool…
