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Babette's Feast 1987
There is only this life — self-denial, cruelty & bitterness are not the right way to live it. A film about eros in its most expansive definition — & how one might lose then regain that quality of aliveness. When I watched this almost exactly a year ago in the middle of a drawn out emotional crisis, I found it almost too affecting & moving — I couldn’t stop crying (not exactly an uncommon experience at the time). Back then it seemed like…
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Burning 2018
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Boring & misogynistic. Some beautiful shots — but the characters were all thinly drawn & without interesting motivations, Hae-mi was particularly two dimensional — a grimly disposable feminine cliche. The central premise — the “metaphor” in which “burning” means murdering women — attempts to intellectualise the same old cinematic/cultural tropes around violence against women. Evil rich man murders women for thrills without consequences because his perfect life is otherwise frictionless — isn’t this an enormously overdone fiction? Actually burning down greenhouses would…
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The Brutalist 2024
Loved the first half. László Tóth talking about his concrete brutalist buildings as the only architecture capable of surviving wartime bombings made me think of the Yiddish phrase associated with the resistance movement — Mir veln zey iberlebn (“We will outlive them”). The big, cold, austere buildings as vessels of collective grief & mourning — as a seed for a future community. Although the film quite obviously thinks about Zionism, I saw a similar interest in Bundism. Their ideology of doikayt (“here-ness”)…
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