i watched this after reading Patrick Nathan writing about it. i think he got right what this movie gets right, which is that it "turns music into a matter of faith": it turns it into this thing that is orienting, constitutive, a spine, immaterial in the sense of beyond. really the language I wanted to type there was that it affirms, restores a kind of relationship between art and artist. affirms, yes, because I think creating art is fundamentally formative…
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Passion 2008
honesty is not possible as an individual; it is only possible through interaction with the other—that which is external to the self—that self-understanding, and thus honesty, is possible. (only because I feel compelled to point it out to myself wherever I see it, but it is a material dialectic being traced: here, it is not a "true nature" that compels each character toward an inevitable conclusion or shaping each of their possibilities but rather whatever is true in the characters…
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Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
embarrassing. this sucks.
this movie is so racist it is insane to me. it's not good-natured ribbing, it's not even mean-spirited cheap shots: the worst part is how earnest it is, like it's doing an ugly caricature and thinking it's being kind and generous.
one of the most obvious tells to me is how this movie uses language (English, Mandarin, Cantonese). Evelyn and her husband are immigrants from China, so why in so much of this movie, especially in the…
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After Yang 2021
hm.
an entry into the artificial human and techno-orientalism subgenres of sci-fi. the aesthetic choices and to some extent the direction in this movie felt jarring to me, reminding me a lot of Her (2013), Ex-Machina (2015), Black Mirror's 'The Entire History of You' (2011) and 'Be Right Back' (2013), all works that concern where exactly the veil is between humans and almost-humans. for one, its the not-so-distant future-ness of it, set in a time that could almost be contemporary,…
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