Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Castration Movie Anthology I: Traps 2024

  Watched 14 Mar 2025

  Lots of dialogues that adroitly tow the line between comically embarrassing and embarrassingly real (I've given several speeches that were painfully similar to the Superman speech, though I still don't think I've gotten close to the Harry Potter Film School one)
  Then the rest is a similarly incisive portrayal of a woman letting her friend down - and the long-winded hangout form almost makes you forget that the stakes are pretty fucking high.

  Sit down, mate. It is us.

  (Also…

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  Once Were Warriors 1994

  Watched 08 Mar 2025

  As Social Issue Dramas go, it's nothing groundbreaking: the beats it hits (and it hits them hard) almost start to feel checkbox-y.
  It's still pretty powerful, though. Seeing the dead ends of a masculinity gone wrong, the shame and the pride and the undisciplined formless rage, the inability to shake it off for even a moment and begin to grasp what's wrong, it's something that always gets me thinking. I know these men, and I just wish they could be…

Popular reviews

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  Megalopolis 2024

  Watched 27 Sep 2024

  Hmm... Southland Tales by way of Ayn Rand rather than PKD?

  Coppola, perhaps admirably, sets out to fulfill some duty of the filmmaker to Say Something About Our Society. Of course, he doesn't really have anything to say, and he certainly isn't offering anything in a comprehensible or even viscerally resonant way.
  "Cancel culture is bad, populists are bad" is as concrete and substantial as he gets thematically, and everything else is so lightweight as to be meaningless.
  The narrative…

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  Cuckoo 2024

  Watched 29 Aug 2024

  It was alright. It's always at an adequate tempo, never downright dull or boring, but I'm not sure it's ever anything like Exhilarating. Aren't really many scares, isn't really much blood, narrative isn't particularly sharp (despite the film being pretty straightforward) and the thematics aren't all that interesting or well-developed either (Aliens/Super Metroid type stuff but Cool Big Sister rather than Mom).
  But it entertained me well enough.
  Will mainly go down as a foundation block for Hunter Schafer's future career doing Things That Aren't Shit (although Kojima almost certainly has her covered there, so who knows if it'll even matter much on that front).

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