Had forgotten just how nasty and vicious Kon gets here. People compare it to Black Swan a lot but to me this film shares far more in common with a giallo or even a pink film than most Hollywood productions. With regard to gialli and pinku eiga, Perfect Blue is particularly indebted to the ones that came out in the '80s and had a penchant for upping the grotesqueries even as they very overtly interrogated the framework (and the medium)…
"See you at the curtain call," says Cooper as he leaves the sheriff's station, his boyish charm momentarily allowing him to travel back in time and offer a glimpse of the young man he was during the events of the first two seasons. It's a very small bit of audience reassurance; before long he does actually end up traveling in time to prevent Laura's murder by leading her through the woods and away from the cabin where she will meet…
I truly detest how Eggers moves his camera; endless slow pans back and forth, push ins and pull outs, tilts... it's all so tedious, predictable, schematic. As indicated by the trailer and several pre-release stills, this looks awful — dull and monochromatic, par for the course for contemporary horror — but it really stands out how bad he is at blocking and filming interiors as well, something which becomes apparent whenever an actor's physicality is squashed by one of the…
Unbelievably corny, politically limp — Coogler is yet another artist that makes critics conflate paying lip service to Black cultural contributions with having actual politics — and directed with about as much flair as a Netflix miniseries. I suppose it's better to have audiences and critics slobber over this rather than the millionth exercise in studio IP management but this brand of post-To Pimp a Butterfly, post-Beyoncé Super Bowl 50 halftime show Black art is basically regime propaganda for American (neo)liberalism at this point — we have to start aiming a little higher than this.
