2. Nutcrackers (2024, David Gordon Green)
3. Gladiator II (2024, Ridley Scott)
4. Juror #2 (2024, Clint Eastwood)
5. I Saw the TV Glow (2024, Jane Schoenbrun)
6. Lisa Frankenstein (2024, Zelda Williams)
7. Anora (2024, Sean Baker)
8. Blitz (2024, Steve McQueen)
9. Challengers (2024, Luca Guadagnino)
10. The Substance (2024, Coralie Fargeat)
Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
Exodous: Gods and Kings (2014)
Napoleon (2023)
I’m a fanatic obsessed with every movie Ridley Scott has done since The Counselor (2013), a period which includes his (to me) highly acclaimed RED camera quad. So if you choose to read what follows, disclaimer: I’m stubbornly unqualifiable when it comes to my bias in favor of being a Ridley Scott apologist. I know Gladiator (2024, Ridley Scott) sucks (in some ways). But I will rave about it as a masterpiece nonetheless. (And I’m intentionally dropping the II because the new Gladiator is a cash grab for a younger generation of ticket buyers that you know has no qualms replacing its predecessor in the arena in cold blood.) The best form of revenge is to be nothing like the one who inflicted you is talking about this movie.
Like Michael Bay, a Ridley Scott movie is fodder to be torn apart yet maintains a unique visual/pacing that’s impossible to mistake for anyone else. David Scarpa’s script is late Scott—the equivalent of thrash metal, all muscle all the time. Paul Mescal is less of a star presence as we might have taken Russell Crowe for, and that’s all for the better. Gladiator starts off with a coastal invasion and then delivers a steady adrenaline drip of gladiatorial blood matches up until the house lights come on. So detracting critical reviews are all the more welcome; Gladiator enjoys taking a beating more than Scorsese’s LaMotta.
The characters in Gladiator are shallow, and cynically underdrawn because here, it’s more efficient and what the crowds really want. Women don’t belong here. Mescal’s wife is expendable in the opening scene—who could miss the feeling as soon as she appears she’s going to be slaughtered? Same with Connie Nielsen: she’s ruthlessly employed as a concession to the studio as a callback to the source who’s sacrificially executed in front of the large crowd (both diegetic and non). Pedro Pascal’s a pussy, which makes him the antagonist. The plural protagonist in Gladiator is actually Mescal and Denzel, who despite their ideologies, earn hero status by mowing down bodies for entertainment and prey on the subjugation to power of the masses. The gates of hell are open night and day.
Gladiator indicts the audience’s tastes and politics more harshly than Joker: Folie á Deux and just about as accurately as Idiocracy. Ridley Scott has posited the twins’ status of aristocracy as code for all the few hundred million dollar budgeted movies being made nowadays: young, spoiled, fickle, entertainment-addicted, amoral, falsely appointed polarizing tastemakers. One can easily imagine how many hits Barbarian Bites Dog Monkey would get on youtiktaktube. Their Rome rotting is why ours is, tentpoles and review aggregators. But what fun right?
Denzel should have been the victor. He had the political acumen Mescal didn’t. That would have been real life. But to gain their hearts and minds ($$), we all know the studio has to instead deliver a vengeful climax. And I still can’t stop laughing when I think of the final shot. When Mescal asks his father what to do and we get that music cue and the gag me with a stick schmaltzy hand through the wheat field it’s the biggest fuck you to the audience no effort to the point of hilarious that makes me so happy about how unabashedly cynical this thing is. I can’t wait to see this again.
11/18/2024 AMC Phipps Plaza 14
Atlanta, GA
As courtroom drama, the genre blends well with its plot. The prosecuting attorney says something to the jurors early on like, “nobody wants to be here. That’s what makes you such ideal candidates.” Being stuck in the theater for 2 hours is very conducive to taking an active interest in this jury room. I’d forgotten what a joy it is to watch a movie that is so familiar you aren’t doing the exhaustive work in something like a say, Oppenheimer. But that isn’t to say the plot isn’t well executed, because it feeds you just enough to grow increasingly intrigued.
The dialogue in Juror #2 is mischievously adorned with so many double meanings you have to acknowledge it as pointing to the duality of justice. And yeah, sometimes it’s heavy handed, like when the defense attorney is in a 50/50 pointing right at Juror #2 talking about finding the guilty man who did this. But I love it. It’s my ham this Thanksgiving.
The theme of Juror #2 is morally complex. And it's constantly embodied by its characters; mainly the 2 couples. You’re indicted as being complicit when you ask yourself what you think of character moral dilemmas like “when you let her walk away alone in the rain at night is that how you treat someone you love?” I see 2 sides, and I don’t know. The midpoint for me is when Zoey Deutch hears “Old Quarry Rd.” That’s the point of no return. And like, what about all the awesome overt symbolism names like the accused SYTHE (as in grim reaper), prosecutor FAITH (as in believe in her to do what’s right), and JUSTIN (not quite justice but close enough).
In closing, you’re with Justin because Nicholas Hoult has to be as nice and as good as he looks. And you see him struggle to do what he knows in his heart is right. And you want him and Zoey Deutch to be happy; until he makes his decision; and you realize it was never possible. When the credits roll it hits you that most people decide what justice is in their own minds, and the chills up your spine are because in reality the life or death verdicts are in the outcome of a bunch of random ordinary people who on any given day will probably succumb to their own prejudices.
11/18/2024 AMC Parkway Pointe 15
Atlanta, GA
The theme of Nutcrackers manifests itself as a symbiotic redemption plot. This is foreshadowed with the line of dialogue JUSTICE (Homer Janson) first recriminates UNCLE MIKE (Ben Stiller) with by the denunciation “You’re incapable of loving anyone.” So, if Mike’s arc is to realize his bigshot real estate values aren’t what are most valuable in life, then Justice’s is something like gaining the courage and self-esteem to get out of his own way with first love MIA (Maren Heisler), and overcoming his insecurities about performing ballet related to what the other kids will think of him and losing his mother.
I would argue this is Green’s most personal film to date. And his most tearjerker. Nutcrackers, thematically, is also something of a trojan horse in the scrappy orphan genre. Because like say, Addie Pray, the orphan typically is emotionally out of reach and violently defensive because of the justification that too many adults have relinquished or avoided custody of them; if nobody wants me then I don’t want nobody. But the KICKLIGHTER BOYS had amazing parents. Parents who wouldn’t send them to school because that’s where “they teach you how to be like everyone else.” And the clincher in Nutcrackers is that at the end (because of Mike) the boys and all of us are shown that if you had parents who loved you, then even after they’re gone, their love will always stay with you. And it’s the catharsis of that magical profound depiction of love that sets this movie apart. And it doesn’t hurt that in return the boys show Mike how it's okay to not try so hard to be (materialistic?) what he thinks would make him successful in the eyes of everyone else.
In most movies, the second act is the longest and most integral to engaging the audience with its plot; but Nutcrackers’ second act is the shortest. The first act is like Uncle Buck or Home Alone in the way there’s this big two-story house full of kids (and in this case farm animals) where if you’re a kid, you wish you could live. And I never want to leave this house. If Act I is Uncle Mike superficially trying to be a good uncle and figure out how find these kids a home, then Act II is going about it. But it’s here where at the Wilmington Estate we also get to meet Mia. When Justice and Mia are together you feel exactly what it was like to fall in love for the first time. The warmly lit singles of them up at the top of the staircase are tender, romantic, pure innocent melt your shell of cynicism holiday hearth.
It’s great how you just get a hint of ROSE (Edi Patterson) at Wilmington’s because you know it's imminent she’s gonna sleigh. You remember how dark Green can be though when Rose makes that yogurt threat. Anyways, so yeah, Act III is the ballet performance and yes, that’s what you wanna wait for. That’s why the pacing of this movie never wavers. Worth mentioning all I’ll say is the biggest pathos Mike moment for me is that simple utterance of the web page “that I made.” Oh man I’m gonna cry again.
Visually, the defining motif for me is the 4 boys running through a field together. And there’s this amazing scene early on where the boys have this bonfire at night to scatter their parents’ ashes, and there’s this in-camera phaser effect where the glowing flames seem to stretch vertically. It says something words can’t. And there’s a pan over to um I think Arlo frame right close on him and we share in something you wouldn't have thought possible for a movie to be able to.
During and after my viewing of Nutcrackers there are so many jokes I been trying to quote. Instead of an exhaustive inventory of them, I’ll limit it to some of JUNIOR’S (Uly) creative imagination’s best crop. What does he say at the Nativity? “…and that was the first time the baby Jesus knew what ice cream tasted like. And Creamy’s only present was a tombstone.” That’s my kind of comedy. And when Mike is reading Junior’s composition book, the line about a bunch of people went to a party at Ronald Reagan’s house and Junior says “why not?” with such truly enthusiastic wonder it’s infectious; that timing is art. The set-up and non-sequitur payoff is all over Nutcrackers, and what Green is a master at getting through improvisation.
It’s like when Rose is mentioning how if Mike were to ever want to visit the boys and she could provide lodging accommodations, “I have a foldout couch… in my bedroom.” Maybe I shouldn’t say it’s so much a non-sequitur punchline as much as it’s a sophisticatedly clever unexpected one. (And the pullout couch zinger kinda goes back to an Eastbound and Down joke that uses a deceptively innocent into more overt type pick-up line to similar effect.)
In closing, Nutcrackers shows us how to wreak havoc if it’s fun. And reminds us how to love. Justice loves to dance. Junior loves to write. To love to be able to be yourself, pursue your creative passion, and find people that mean something to you prove to be what we leave celebrating after the film’s over. So, it’s only incidentally a holiday movie (shh don’t tell anyone). It’s not life-affirming, it’s the poetry of look at all life can be, and has been the whole time right in front of us.
11/16/2024 The Murphy Theatre
Wilmington, OH
The only thing I find more shamelessly gratifying to indulge my sight with than a gorgeous brunette Hollywood sexpot-star actress from the 80s is static framing.
Visually, The Substance (2024, Coralie Fargeat) boasts a unified graphic adherence to bold, clean, meticulously art-directed powerful images that are as forebodingly sterile as a Kubrick bathroom. Why in the first scene does ELISABETH SPARKLE go into a bathroom that’s a replica of the Overlook bathroom? Who cares?
The Substance is a work of style. Art is style. And art works best when neither its maker nor its viewer attempt to process it through their intellect. On a superficial level, The Substance continuously kept me in awe of all its locked-off static frames, poised staging of long takes, symmetry, single-point perspective, center-framed inserts and hideously ravishing still lifes. And its setting is pretty much confined to Elisabeth Sparkle’s condo, which heightens a sense of her emotional isolation in life. I can’t get enough of that white-tiled bathroom or the dark purgatory room she builds inside it—very much expressionistic of her own psyche. And if that’s the case, her view of L.A. outside that giant window with the billboard of her is everything fake, her imagination, the uh stuff that dreams are made of.
But of course there are several aggressively jolting quick cut, montage chop, impressionistically Mickey Mousing cued music video style sequences interspersed throughout. I hate to make comparisons, but I’ll limit myself to this exception: there’s a lot of Jonas Åkerlund feel to all of this. And I love it. It all leads to this notion I’ve always had of movies not being real life. Like the exercise show hosted by SUE, if she’s wearing the same oufit, doing the same moves, to the same song, why film new episodes every week? When a movie can become something that doesn’t let itself be hampered by the logic of real life is when art flourishes.
Thematically, what is The Substance about? I don’t know. I’m not gonna throw around any lazy worthless terms like male gaze, or standards of beauty. Those aren’t themes. They’re pseudo academic critic garbage. This movie used a language of emotions to get me to feel an empathy conveyed without changing the way I think; even better, it changed the way I feel. (And that is real life.)
There’s nothing new about the themes in this movie. But it still utilizes them in the process of forming something fresh. And like Gremlins (1984, Joe Dante), it knows the audience loves a set of rules at the beginning, especially because they know by the end they’ll all be broken, and we’ll all be confronted with our worst fears. Because what more is a morality tale than that?
09/21/2024 AMC Phipps Plaza 14
Atlanta, GA
It was hot. We were in Lone Pine, fresh off a few days camping and hiking up Mt. Langley, and it was hot. We'd done a favor for some folks we met on the trail, driving them from a trailhead to their car to save them a couple days of hiking they had decided or maybe realized they weren't up for, and we'd taken ourselves out for the traditional massive meal cooked by somebody who wasn't us, competently accessorized by a beverage buffet. As we prepared to make our ways back to the Ford Focus, I craftily noted that my plan was to take the ice cubes with me, and put them in my beloved Nalgene, even then heating in the car, probably to near boiling.
"You know Nalgenes kind of suck, right?" asked Noodles. Aghast, I protested: "T-that bottle is my friend. It's been so many places with me! It's served me well, it's never let me down!"
She wasn't convinced. Anyway, that's a story about one Nalgene, one that's been up Langley, up much of Whitney, through Desolation Wilderness, and other places my lapsed indoor kid ass has dragged it. Here is another story. And here is a third:
For many years, I've had a 32-ounce Nalgene in the work fridge, so I can have a nice cold glass of fridge water any time I want. Since I like my water cold, it's not uncommon for me to fill up the bottle and throw it in the freezer, so as to get it colder faster. (Feel free to adopt this trick for your own life.) Since I am forgetful, I have long had a post-it note on my work desk, reading "You have a Nalgene in the freezer."
I recently got a new desk at work. I swept off all the things on the surface of the old one and forgot about them. I forgot, I guess, about a lot of things.
The other day, I got to work, in the mood for some fridge water. I opened the fridge, and saw no bottle. "Odd," I thought. Then I opened the freezer. "Shit," I thought.
(Look what they—well, I—did to my toy.)
This is far from the first time I'd frozen this bottle, but it will be the last. I'm fairly unhappy to lose the stickers: Tabs, The Best Show, etc. I'm annoyed that I fucked up: I used to take a lot of pride in my memory, and as that capacity degrades with age, the space freed up by less pride and less capacity is more than overflowing with new shame. In this case, shame about breaking a useful tool that I had enjoyed and employed for a long time. Farewell, blue Nalgene. The world shall look on your like again.
(Poor fuckin' guy.)
(Our sick culture insists that the greatest grief be reserved for the military, no matter how many ways there are to serve, so I must borrow these pretty sentiments for a bottle that served and served, but was never a soldier.)
Okay but to be fair, Back to Black (2024, Sam Taylor-Johnson) also shows how great having a serious drinking problem, bulimia, and being in a toxic co-dependent relationship are as well. If, like me, you were going in expecting a tragedy, you’ll get one; but it’s not one that has anything to do with the setbacks its protagonist faces.
The morally sick feeling I got watching Back to Black comes primarily from the way it has assembled its narrative to glamorize all of the self-destructive plot points in the main character’s life without any consequences; and does so in a way as to romanticize them as a means to giving us a fairytale melodrama. While I was playing along with all of this I even imagined this careless, uneven, full of plot-holes manner of storytelling to be in the style of someone who was so messed up themselves that their impaired judgment is to blame. So, reading it that way it works. Secondary to my take on the tragedy is that whoever is responsible for approval of the rights to Amy Winehouse’s life story signed off on it. That’s what’s sad to me. All of these despicable low-lifes cashing in on this is the real tragedy.
The flaws mostly have to do with structure. There are a couple of separate cases she says she’s pregnant and then it's never brought up again. And there’s a point where she decides to go to rehab, then we see her winning Grammys for that song with the lyrics she wouldn’t go to rehab? And I don’t want to spoil the ending but it definitely feels either forced or fake in the way she gets clean and therefore happily ever after.
None of this is to say I didn’t love this movie—I very much do. I had only seen Marisa Abela in that series about financial institutions set in Britain that I never at all could follow, but then the only reason I watched that show was because of Marisa Abela. She’s screen-gorgeous in the kind of Hollywood glamorous way that makes this stupid fairytale magical. When AMY is supposed to be too skinny in an unhealthy warning sign way, by today’s standards Abela looks fit with a cute tummy—not like say Haynes’s Karen Carpenter gaunt razor blade emaciated Barbies, or for that matter, the real Amy Winehouse. And I laughed out of shock when she smokes crack for the first time and the camera on her underscored with rapturous swept away with joy cue happens. (Well, she smokes some rock drug that’s amber in hue and because they don’t say, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be crack or meth.) And later as if the first time wasn’t enough, after she’s married, BLAKE gives her a gift in a black velvet jewelry case that’s the same drug, but this time illuminated from within with a light gag. So I should clarify, while the movie may not condone her drinking or eating disorder, it sure as hell seems to stylistically glorify her drug use; and maybe it’s worth mentioning that at no other time does the movie break from its verisimilitude in such an expressionistic way.
Back to Black taps into everything a romantic work of art needs. Young, beautiful, talented, and true to herself, fairytale Amy gets her prince, her kingdom, and all that makes her happy. And she feels real emotions both highest and lowest. She turns her pain into great art and numbs it through a kind of self-destruction that makes her art better so it’s as if she doesn’t live by the rules of us mortals. And because the real Amy Winehouse’s life story is too compelling to make a bad movie out of, even though this is such a bad movie that doesn’t stop it from being a satisfyingly dark melodrama. So I both admire and enjoy its uneven quality because it crams so much exposition into its 2 hour runtime yet throughout it wisely never strays from the emotional world of all these little moments that it makes the most out of and never suffers from that biopic curse of doing what a documentary should do and forgetting that it's cinema and that's someone else's job.
04/19/2024
AMC Madison Yards 8
DCP
The first thing you notice is the music. I was enamored with a type of music that was coming out of Olympia and Portland in the ‘90s from like K records and Kill Rock Stars, then moved to what happened to it? Did it reemerge in Brooklyn or something? Has it vanished? Schoenbrun gets it though. It was like indie lo-fi folk twee, but also encompassing anything from Riot grrrl to hardcore. And in I Saw the TV Glow it’s fundamental to the mood and emotionally stimulating catharsis Schoenbrun excels in.
Then there’s the look. Shot on 35mm, its compositions veer towards saturated primary cool colors. And oh so dark. Visually this all evokes something like a scary nocturnal space we get lost in, yet somehow safe and secure, even comfortable, at the same time.
And if you recall in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021, Schoenbrun) there seemed to be this almost like ASMR hypnotic vacuum quality to the dialogue. In I Saw the TV Glow there’s a little of that, but the rest of the time the actors deliver their dialogue in that atonal way you find in all Fassbinder’s movies.
So moving on from its style to its content, what is I Saw the TV Glow really all about? I think there's some significant amount of doubling going on. Like with media (the TV show is also a symbol of and interchangeable with music) some of us can use it to escape our everyday real life, but also become overwhelmed by the emotions we discover about our own realities we are confronted with through it. And when this gets depicted in parts of the narrative that may become confusing I think that’s the point. Mr. Melancholy can be different things to different people: depression, drugs, suicide, disassociative thoughts or behavior.
The doubling of OWEN and MADDY’s drives could be seen as respectively attachment/fear of change vs runaway impulses/desperate for freedom. Owen has a voice that sometimes sounds like the weird sound device used when someone wants to remain anonymous as they’re recorded on an audio track, which could be a doubling of the ambiguous distortion of identity as akin to something someone genderqueer might experience. In contrast to Maddy, who’s firmly embraced that she’s a lesbian but has her own struggles with assimilating and fitting in. But the beautiful thing is that they find each other.
All of the Pink Opaque scenes are so much fun. And this nostalgia dependency as psychological horror mechanism is the perfect vehicle for Schoenbrun to yet again break free from conventional cinematic formalism and achieve such an effectively enjoyable form of personal artistic expression. Just go with it. For me the most haunting moment I encountered was when Owen is old and he says how happy he is because he finally got a family of his own. What does that mean? What does that line mean to you? I find it sad that I find it so difficult to believe him. And the way I identify with where that desire would come from in him and his need to assert this makes me so sad. This feels like the first movie to be scary in a touching, achingly connective with ourselves and those around us way.
04/27/2024 Plaza Theater ATLFF
Atlanta, GA
DCP
In Lisa Frankenstein (2024, Zelda Williams), there are quite a few instances wherein its screenplay brings a jolt of life to the gothic teen romance genre. Foremost among these is the way its protagonist’s arc shows her not only eventually embodying everything she would seem to be in opposition to (something like a shallow, selfish, slutty mean girl), but also introducing a love interest who in turn takes up her former role: the hopeless romantic outcast loner. Yeah I know that sounds like the arc of the guy in Can’t Buy Me Love (1987, Steve Rash), except there the love interest doesn’t become everything Ronald Miller was in the trade off/reversal way we get here.
And then there’s the way the couple first meet. One would think LISA SWALLOWS (Kathryn Newton) is in love with FRANKENSTEIN (Cole Sprouse), and when she brings him to life her dreams have come true. But Diablo Cody’s screenplay instead does the contrary: it subverts our expectations by having Lisa accidentally bring Frankenstein to life through the mixup of her wishing she could be dead and him perceiving her to have meant she wished to bring him back to life so that she could be with him. And it’s emotionally brutal. She’s not into him at all. Never was. And this inciting incident sets into place Frankenstein now having become the hopeless romantic outcast reject Lisa was. Now I’m in the story. Now that feels more true to life and even more true to the gothic romance genre.
The other thing is how excessively dark Lisa’s backstory is, which also happens to lead to a very vague probably not at all intentional or seen by anyone else buy me half-baked theory I have. Presented as a flashback told by her step-sister Taffy, supposedly one night when Lisa and her mom were home alone a masked intruder broke in and murdered her mom; and yet the dad seems to meet and happily fall in love with Taffy’s mom 6 months later. Obviously the tonal shift here is meant to be shockingly funny—and it is. But when I weighed up how the dad doesn’t seem to care at all when either of his wives and his daughter all die (the Fuddrucker’s line), this kinda makes me feel like maybe he’s a predator.
And in closing, Taffy’s end of the telephone conversation with the investigator trying to get clues about her mom’s disappearance has gotta be the funniest moment in the movie, and is some of the best gag writing around.
02/09/2024
AMC Madison Yards 8
DCP
In Challengers (2024, Luca Guadagnino), through the language of cinema (which is always to say, subtext), the evolving balance of prominence between gay and straight sexual relationships in modern mainstream movies is depicted through tennis. Though its point on its timeline constantly bounces back and forth, the story is an obviously gay guy is married to TASHI DONALDSON (Zendaya), and the guy we all know he really belongs with is his opponent in a tennis match.
Before I saw Challengers I thought if a mainstream Hollywood movie was subversive that it also had to be provocative. But in a very confident way, Challengers doesn’t so much try to do a gay version of a romantic relationship drama as much as it allows its gay relationship to freely exist as one of the key dramatic components of the film alongside a straight relationship, while even adding in the classic romantic genre tropes career v family v friendship v sexual attraction v power dynamic v what works for you and all that. At first you find tennis is about fucking; then that tennis is also about relationships; and the best part is that the tennis is both. And just as in real life, sex and relationships are only individually learned through experience. When Tashi says “I don’t want to be a homewrecker,” it doesn’t stop her from going after each of the 2 gay men for her own different reasons; and she learns as she goes. In Challengers Tashi not wanting to be a homewrecker really means not wanting to have to hinder the gay relationship—because ultimately she (and the film) don’t. Because in the movie world of make believe she can not want to spoil what she knows the 2 men have, then spoil it, and still not spoil it, because when people get a happy ending in a Hollywood movie they don’t need answers. This movie isn't provocative, it's elevated. It's not about thinking about lifestyles or politics because it proves in cinema, form is about where you can take the story and its characters as a means of providing an intelligently well crafted entertainment. And it's good when a movie lets you decide and figure out things for yourself, but even far less seldom achieved and way better is when it understands the form of cinema so well it never bothers to try to deal with any.
Zendaya’s character is present as an object of sexual desire. From the first shot of her entering the court with her lithe body and wind blowing up her skirt as she flaunts her rear end in an obvious nod to 50s mainstream Hollywood’s Marilyn Monroe Seven Year Itch campaign, to her luxury underwear, and athletic outfits flattering her thigh gap, Challengers depicts both homosexual and heterosexual attraction. (Because we know Hollywood would love to have a mainstream crossover box office hit. And you obviously don’t have to be a guy or hetero to think Zendaya is hot.)
The point isn’t to try to wonder about the logic in how it can realistically do both, because cinema isn’t about reality; and in this case points to the similarity of the two and defies the burden of having to stick to only one or the other. It’s like a well crafted joint fitting. Because this isn’t just a bi movie where all three hookup to like say poly is the easy solution. And even though I just said cinema isn’t about reality, here it succeeds in ultimately communicating a very real truth: in life there are some who go after things they want so bad they are competitors, and when they get serious about it, it becomes their whole life and they don’t stop until they do everything they can not only to get it, but to obsess, and study the ways the game is played and even every aspect of what it is to play. It gets to be metaphysics really. Notice how often characters ask "is this still about tennis?" And once you get to that level is it still a game? Hint: long ago Renoir precisely answered this for us when he told us la règle du jeu.
But another thing that’s so great about Challengers is how it's so easy to follow in a way that’s always very fun and sexy. Although as satisfying as it all is, my only sneaking reservation is that when Luca Guadagnino gets to the point of too much like Snyder cut levels of slow motion in the tennis matches that he might be tongue in cheek parodying the mainstream Hollywood style to a degree that's no longer genuinely enjoyable. But the synthy Reznor-Ross electropop thumping is more delightfully hypin as anything they’ve done since The Social Network. Okay so final random thought, without analyzing it too much or anything, I’m still thinking about how if Tashi is considered either as the woman or female character or the straight relationship signifier, does it mean anything that she gets injured so early in her career and can no longer compete on the court? Oh and my answer is yes this is absolutely a mainstream Hollywood movie and the evidence I'm basing this final assertion on: all the product placement.
04/26/2024
AMC Phipps Plaza 14
DCP
