a bit of a grump
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Emilia Pérez 2024
Not nearly as bad as I heard it was - but yes, it’s tacky, it’s tasteless, it misfires its tone, and obviously worse, it shamelessly exploits both “transness” and “Mexico,” depicting them both as Audiard apparently sees them and nowhere near the perceptions of people actually located inside either.
I think that’s part of the film’s frustrating appeal, in that it reshapes these weighted (and quite real) social constructions as semi-coherent cinematic themes, ready to be deployed to and digested…
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The Trial of the Chicago 7 2020
history Sorkinized so that everyone has the same mission, to make America great again.
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Danton 1983
Wajda makes the French Revolution all about him.
Retelling the story of Robespierre executing his former ally Danton, Wajda casts Polish actors as the tyrannical leftists, and French actors as the heroic centrists, in an attempt to draw parallels with the then-current Solidarnosc movement in Poland against the Soviet aligned Polish government. That same movement sold his country to ultra-capitalists a few years later, and thus the parallels obtained a new and completely unintentional irony.
Wajda was partially financed by…
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Céline and Julie Go Boating 1974
it’s enigmatic and playful, somewhat meta and boundary breaking
plot description is tough: two women who seem to be telepathically linked begin to experience shared hallucinations of a staid bourgeois murder mystery?
but these two women meet for the first time and also seem to be great friends, or grow to be such, and sometimes one pretends to be the other, and their anarchic performances in the real and dreamworld seem to have an effect on “reality” even though the…
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