Remember “New French Extremity” from 20 years ago? Now it’s time for the New French Unsubtlety. This got tiresome though I enjoyed Demi Moore essentially making a Robert Aldrich psychobiddy. The long shadow of The Shining also falls across this film, especially room 237. Not sure what to make of all the ogling of Margaret Qualley. Kinda enjoyed the way it’s set in Los Angeles but clearly not shot here. Gave it a strange oneiric quality. I may downgrade my rating half a star in the next 72 hours.
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Spetters 1980
Verhoeven’s penultimate Dutch film predictably created a shit tempest in the Netherlands and while it made money it also pissed everyone off. This is Verhoeven and his longtime screenwriter collaborator Gerard Soeteman’s answer to Saturday Night Fever which also puts it in the tradition of Fellini’s I Vitelloni: bleak coming-of-age stories about working class young men at the crossroads of adulthood crushing their spirit and the seductive purgatory of terminal immaturity. Verhoeven vision, even 44 years later is pretty radical…
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Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022
Look. I get it. It’s been a hard two years and we all need our feel good. Sure. And I am very very very happy for Michelle Yeoh (who should have been an American megastar 20 years ago), the comeback of Ke Huy Quan, seeing James Hong finally get his figurative flowers (and literal star on the Walk of Fame), seeing Jamie Lee Curtis have fun and be the monster for a change, and Stephanie Hsu is major discovery…but this…
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The Zone of Interest 2023
What if I told you that thinking this film is about Nazis is all wrong? What if I told you this family is really about us. All of us. Going about our day, planning vacations, worrying about work, while atrocities are happening that we have been conditioned to accept as normal? Really struck this time by the way animals are presented and used in this film. And the scene where a woman seems to have a rude moral awakening during…
