A peculiar cold open of a tour through the cosmos with a narration reminding us how vast, unknown, and treacherous these foreign bodies are---gas clouds, stellar explosions---only to finally arrive at our home planet, with the greeting, "reassuring, isn't it?". But then, refutingly, the music ominously swells as we are thrown into a scene of war. Earth, our seeming refuge from the impassive, gargantuan forces of nature, here house equally gargantuan and impassive forces, in war. The Heavens and the…
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Twilight 2008
Twilight is a document---if you know, you know---of many things, but perhaps most so of one very special thing. A thing of which google retrieves no complete inventory, of which youtube, devastatingly, has no supercut. Thus, I have done the work. Presenting: a thorough catalog and description of ALL QUIVERING GAZES in Twilight.
Before we dive in, let us examine the parameters of what I have defined as a "quivering gaze". A quivering gaze is any discrete gaze directed from…
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Remember the Night 1940
(mild spoilers)
This film really has its ways of getting its claws into you. There are the more obvious ways, of course, like the comfy, lived-in grace of the Sargent family; the sparkling and tender chemistry between MacMurray and Stanwyck; the latter's doe eyes evincing mischief and warm, invitational heartbreak, sometimes in quick succession and always with equal ease. And then the broad outline of the thing -- Sturges setting things up with a prototypical Screwball premise (a beautiful thief!…
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Day of Wrath 1943
(heavy spoilers)
Additive ambiguities -- I wrote about them in my last entry, and now in Day of Wrath I've found a movie entirely predicated around them.
When the film opens on a witch hunt, this being Dreyer, we're meant to raise an eyebrow about the validity of this religious panic. And yet, Marte, the woman whom the hunt is for, admits in secret to another character that she is well acquainted with tapping into the power of evil. But,…
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Late Spring 1949
A film about transition, but furthermore, a film that embodies transition.
There is first a movie of soft humor, ostensibly low stakes, populated with ceaseless smiles, and a movie where time (and the camera) seems to move leisurely and slowly, if at all.
And then there gradually emerges a movie laden with the silent and universal fear of loneliness, where some of the smiles can't help but give way -- not in rejection of their former joy but in evolution…
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The Green Knight 2021
This is not really a review.
What do yall think about theaters having certain showings in "Taser Rooms", where everyone attending voluntarily signs waivers and agrees to watch the movie in otherwise normal theater recliners that are fitted with decibal sensors which trigger electric shocks via the seats if talking is either too loud, too long, or too frequent?
If I were a billionaire, I would greenlight this plan with my own theater chain, be hailed as a fascist and…
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