Got nothing to say up here. Move on to the reviews.
Movies
I think people are being a little hyperbolic about how bad this is; the sound design/music is terrific, and there are enough arresting images to suggest that if the movie had just gone complete avant-garde waking nightmare, it could have been special. But regardless, this still isn't good, mostly because, as those hyperbolic pans have explicated, the movie is insistent on being about a central metaphor that is by turns convoluted and just not very interesting. When I was taking creative writing classes, almost every professor I ever had told the class that, unless you have something truly special to say, you should never to write any story in which the main character is a writer because it had been done to death. Perhaps screenwriters should institute such a guideline regarding screenplays that are "about trauma when you really think about it," because the well is quickly running dry. Grade: C
Great fun and a great example of auteurism in the original sense, i.e. a director leaving a personal stamp despite the formulaic restrictions of the studio system. It's not hard to imagine a more robust sci-fi blockbuster interrogation of institutional failure in the Bush administration (it already kind of exists, and it's called Minority Report), which is 100% what this is for maybe an hour before it gets wrenched back toward convention. But 1) Tony Scott is super good at those conventions, and 2) the questions and pathos of the opening hour are strong enough that they haunt the rest of the film regardless, even as it starts to become recognizably Bruckheimerian. Denzel is of course incredibly watchable, and despite Scott's considerable talents, I'm not sure this would work half so well without our man in the lead. Grade: A-
Surprisingly rad. I wouldn't have pegged myself as a "vaporwave Koyaanisqatsi" guy, but here I am. I gotta watch the rest of these. Grade: B+
I'm usually very onboard with movies that are really committing to the live-action cartoon bit, and that's exactly what this movie is doing, structuring setpieces as if they were Looney Tunes shorts and stitching them together into a 90-ish minute montage that purports to be a crime thriller. But I sure was not onboard with this. Any individual bit would probably work well enough on its own, but taken as a whole, it's just tedious and nonsensical in a way that feels counterproductive after a while. And so much shouting. So much. I want to believe there's a good Sam-Raimi-directed, Coen-brothers-scripted slapstick comedy to be made, because that sounds like a peanut-butter-and-chocolate situation to me (imagine Raimi directing Burn After Reading!), but sadly, I think we're well past the point in either of those parties' careers where that's a realistic possibility anymore. Grade: C
Wild and at times wildly incoherent, even for John Waters, and the surreal fantasy of this film makes his other films feel like gritty realism. I've seen a lot of Salò, and maybe I'd make that comparison, too, if I'd seen that movie. To me, this feels like Waters's take on Fellini, if Fellini had a more rigorous political conscience. I don't think any other Waters movie I've seen has more contempt for the ruling class and bourgeois norms, which is really saying something. I'm unsure how to feel about this movie's relationship with sex and gender, but the good thing about John Waters movies is that they are more self-evident forces of nature than they are fodder for takes, so I guess I'll just duck that issue. Also, the ending is incredible. Truly made me want to stand up and cheer. Grade: B
Some real hair-brained logic here from Cronenberg: a plastic surgery mishap gives someone a vaginal cavity in their armpit, and inside the cavity is a thing that bites people, and this creates a zombie apocalypse. I might have enjoyed this a little more if it were more phantasmagorical, a la an Italian movie from the same time period, but early Cronenberg is unrelentingly beige, which gives the film a weirdly dry quality for as nutso as it is. Still, there are some good sequences and a terrific ending. Grade: B-
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