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Presence 2024
more KIMI than THE LAUNDROMAT thankfully (i don’t hate the latter; post retirement soderbergh tends to have a high floor, low ceiling with me). as usual with the late career stuff, PRESENCE is a matter of good to questionable material wedded to soderbergh’s reliably abrasive formal instincts, the success of which is variable and almost besides the point — the man just wants to shoot something! koepp’s script is strange and ham-fisted but it’s also unafraid to plunge into deeply…
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Bye Bye Love 1974
“what do you like better, porn or actual sex?”
“whichever’s dirtier, obviously”
sorta like PIERROT LE FOU by way of gregg araki. two malcontent lovers go on the run and find their only solace in each other and fujisawa’s swooning pop art formalism. cars are set ablaze, splashes of primary color bleed across the filmic space, there’s at least two shootouts with the police. such lush romanticism can’t survive such a hostile world but that doesn’t mean there can’t be…
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Nomadland 2020
cinema of moral concern. reminded me a lot of my peers' short films when i was at NYU — humanistic, handheld, more interested in tastefully naturalistic performances than any sort of formalism. it's a movie entirely shorn of rough edges. zhao's animating sensibility seems to be a sort of apolitical curiosity, her camera framing her subjects in medium close ups that close off any suggestion that these people's pain and marginalization could be the result of larger social forces. it’s…
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Bo Burnham: Inside 2021
burnham never met a punchline he couldn’t thrice annotate to ensure us that he's as in on the joke as we are. maybe there's something clever about that but it mostly just made me wish for braver, more confrontational comedy. who needs all that self-reflexive scaffolding? flashes of brilliance in burnham's bubblegum pop formalism (certainly blows emerald fennell's out of the water!) and as with EIGHTH GRADE, he proves himself a talented mimic but that doesn't change the fact that…
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