As a connoisseur of early 2000s art-y digital video bullshit, I can't believe I have never seen 9 Songs. I saw fucking TIMECODE and I never saw this!?
9 Songs is, simply put, 67 minutes of alternating scenes of
A. Badly-edited footage of live performances from early aughts indie rock bands, and
B. Unsimulated sex scenes
That's the ballgame, folks! Literally! We're talking Franz Ferdinand and full penetration, in glorious 480p. Also, there's a frame story set in Antartica. A…
Such a great movie -- a really well-acted dramedy with absolutely endless background visual gags, what a combination. Prime era Meryl Streep and (briefly) Annette Bening, both so fun and so beautiful. An oppressively stacked cast with a really lovely and tender Gene Hackman supporting part (RIP). Streep and Shirley MacLaine have back to back showstopping musical performances, just for fun, in the middle of the movie. Having read a decent amount of Carrie Fisher's writing, it's so unmistakably her voice -- her most frequent joke format is like, splitting the difference between a witty remark and a non sequitur? There's a lot of that.
I love the Sandman, and I love sports movies, and there's really a lot to recommend about Hustle. Kinetic editing, great montages, propulsive but really unusual score (by Dan Deacon! Hell yeah!) and some really authentic Philly vibes here and there (which makes sense -- Jeremiah Zagar is a good Philly boy! I'm really excited to see what else he does). I guess I would say my only real knock here is that it feels like it retraces the same…
THE BRUTALIST is almost shockingly tactile--it feels like a physical object itself. It reawakens within you a sense of space and place.
Which is all the more impressive considering that it feels like it is barely about architecture.
Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce give titanic performances -- matched by Daniel Blumberg's holy-shit-bombastic score. Lots of other performances jump out. Felicity Jones, Alessandro Nivola, and very much announcing Joe Alwyn, who sort of instantly joins the "what a prick that guy…
