Informative if you’re looking for some key legacy points about Carter (I found it very helpful in that regard). As far as documentaries go, however, repetitive and shamelessly partial, even manipulative—especially with the constant cornball music that seems intent on shoehorning whatever emotional resonance we *ought* to be picking up on. Made it difficult to trust the director’s message and narrative choices in general. Having said that, I walked away knowing more about President Carter and having a greater respect for him, too. The movie may suffer from what commentators have all said about Carter himself as president: tried to do too much.
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Anatomy of a Fall 2023
Definitely worth watching Anatomy of a Murder alongside this, as Anatomy of a Fall is an interesting re-imagining of similar court-room themes, though with contemporary, trans-national and multi-lingual aspects, as well as much more pointed concerns regarding motherhood, ability, sexuality, and mental health.
Still, both movies examine the role of narrative and drama (theatricality) in legal systems—when it benefits a person to have one kind of life story over another, and when the story of the law meshes or clashes…
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The Hitcher 1986
Moody, existential, road horror full of lonely desert-mountain scapes. Almost laughably absurd in its cruelty, not so dissimilar to how Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer hit me—though more to the nerves than the gut with this one. Pacing is a marvel, how something so linear—narratively and literally—can have so many diversions, false resolutions and endings, not to mention a love story. Something larger-than-life lurks beneath the logic of it all but without ever saying so, without ever directly asking…
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The Holdovers 2023
Explores a variety of responses to the notion that history repeats itself, while doing so sometimes in a spirit of defeat, sometimes in a tone of triumph. So many ideas you’re sure are going to be same-old, same-old, cliches about the old guiding the young and the young guiding the old; the therapeutic powers of human connection and the slow rotting-away of isolation; the surly, old-school teacher and the entitled new-school, rich kid, first at odds but learning to appreciate…
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