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Night Moves 1975
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Convoluted and understated (until the end), Night Moves is another example of why I love the Seventies. Nobody gets a happy ending, the plots are convoluted, and the vibes are cynical as hell.
As for the movie, Hackman is great as ever. He really seemed to have had two broad phases - his somewhat incompetent, almost personality-less early/mid-1970s characters and then his charasmatic, worldweary 1980s and 1990s characters. Lots of fun other performances, but ultimately this is mainly a vibes movie, without much deeper to say. Still fun!
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Bushwick 2017
Like Garland's Civil War, but with coherent, lefty politics. This isn't a great movie, maybe not even a good one, but there are images from it and the overall mood that stick in my head. And although he doesn't get to do that much acting-wise, you can see here why Bautista is a star.
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Exodus 1960
I recently listened to an interview with the always brilliant Naomi Klein, about her phenomenal book, Doppelganger. In it, she mentioned that lefty Jews should (re)watch Exodus as "homework" for understanding the prevalence and popularity of Zionist narratives. So, I just did my homework.
She was correct. Exodus operates as an ultimate text for a certain, once widely popular in Israel and the USA form of liberal Zionism. The ways it approaches these angles are fascinating.
(1) The Holocaust and…
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American Beauty 1999
Watching American Beauty is like freebasing Freud while tossing Marx in the trash can. It's emblematic of a certain, white guy late 1990s view of the world that all the problems left are ones of fulfillment; that the worst thing about the current economic system is that there's not enough "meaning." And there isn't! But that's just one symptom of this society’s wider ills.
From its very title onward, American Beauty wants to say something profound about "America." Yet, it…
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