i'm usually not super disturbed by movies but there's a scene in this that made me grit my teeth, contort my face, widen my eyes, and feel sick to my stomach. however i wish it had more to do with the “power of cinema" or something like that rather than legitimate concern for the actor involved
feels like ari aster poured different pyrex cups labeled "family trauma", "sexual frustration", "culture shock", "betrayal", etc. into a bowl labeled "psychological themes" and neglected to properly mix them before pouring all the heterogeneous glop out onto a baking tray and putting it in the oven at a too-high temperature then pulling it out an hour before it's done. what i mean is it seems like he wanted to *say* a bunch of stuff about a bunch of topics but…
peter greenaway said cinema hasn’t changed much in its 130 years of existence and maybe filmmakers will finally investigate cinema’s untapped potential 1000 years from now but we might have arrived there early. inscrutable at a glance but actually endlessly ripe for analysis in a way that overwhelms in order to stop the viewer from analyzing it too deeply. dizzying, dumbfounding, annoying maximalism like this isn’t for everyone but for me it’s like an ice cream headache that’s masochistically pleasurable. if the…
