graduate student in history, i try to write a full-length review for every feature film i watch
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Drive My Car 2021
Before watching Drive My Car for the second time, I thought it would be valuable to read Haruki Murakami’s story collection in order to consider the bases of adaptation and how Hamaguchi employed and modified the narrative threads Murakami introduced in Men Without Women. The collection as a whole, as is fitting for Murakami’s writing with such a title, is lacking in the weight it purports: stories and events that just sort of happen, peopled by misogynistically nonhuman female characters,…
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Platform 2000
In the very first scene of Platform, the theater troupe around whom the film revolves is acting out a play wherein the actors pantomime riding a train just by sitting on chairs onstage. About an hour and a half later, the film finds the characters on a railroad bridge; the shot lingers on this empty bridge for a prolonged duration before—finally—the train they heard coming passes them by. In the film’s final scene, a train horn blares unexpectedly somewhere offscreen…
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Eephus 2024
I had the privilege of seeing Eephus followed by a Q&A afterwards with the director Carson Lund and former MLB pitcher Bill Lee, and on top of that, a few of the actors were in the theater as well. Everything about the movie is simple and small, but always reaching for something more: the two teams in the film, in their endless stubbornness, want to play the final game they can at Soldier’s Field no matter what happens in between.…
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Modern Times 1936
Even though there were sound elements used in City Lights, Modern Times was Charlie Chaplin’s first film to use dialogue, and thus represents a major change in his style of filmmaking. The film follows the Tramp yet again, and this time first working as a laborer in a factory, then getting arrested, and then thrown out on the street with nothing. Along the way he meets the “gamin” played by Paulette Goddard, a girl who is forced to scrounge for…
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The Fisher King 1991
The tale of the Fisher King from Arturian legend is somewhat peripheral, but his relationship with the quest for the Holy Grail presents an interesting jumping-off point for a modernized retelling of an Arthurian story. Moreover, on paper the combination of Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams in the lead roles is attractive, and for me, proposed a bedrock decent experience. It wasn’t much more than that, though. In the story, Jeff Bridges plays an absolute asshole radio host named Jack,…
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Evil Does Not Exist 2023
Ryusuke Hamaguchi has said that he wrote Evil Does Not Exist around its beautiful score, as well as its fantastic title. Often, in part because of this, the film feels almost like a poem, offering a heightened window into reality but not arriving at a necessarily satisfying or even clear conclusion. In the film we follow Takumi, a local odd job man—in his own words—in Mizubiki, a mountain village in central Japan, and his daughter, Hana. Sometime in the near…
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