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I Saw the TV Glow 2024
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
“When I came out of it, I was not even amazed at the ease with which I could put aside the previous night. It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.”
― David Bell in Don DeLillo’s AmericanaIf melancholy is our villain in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, death stalks patiently just outside of view. In one of the film’s longest shots, a ninth-grade Owen (Justice Smith) slowly walks his…
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Barbie 2023
A lot to think through in this self-congratulatory capitulation to consumer culture, foremost of which is how it displays the total aesthetic and moral destitution of mainstream liberal (i.e. wealthy, white, individualist) progressivism.
The aesthetic point is boring and predictable (Barbie is one of the most paint-by-numbers films I’ve seen recently, outclassed by even the Lego movies, which is about all we need to know), so let’s look at the moral dimension: literally lecturing people, not even collectively but in…
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Do Revenge 2022
Only a culture pancaked by the steamroller of our online discourse could produce such a movie: one whose inability to hold more than a single thought in its head results in an outright endorsement of the performative behaviour it tries to satirize. It's an irony so deep and out of grasp for this film that it might as well be at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
It's kind of astonishing: a film ostensibly about performative wokeness (only made possible…
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TÁR 2022
“Time is the thing,” Lydia tells The New Yorker as part of her on-stage interview, “Time is the essential piece of interpretation.” And as she eruditely explains how the composer interprets music by managing its time, the ironic distance between her and us as an audience grows. For while the interview offers a possible frame for the film as a contemplation of time and art’s capacity for escaping or slowing it, the preceding shots of Lydia’s coldly anonymous observers (a…
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