“It’s like describing a dog to someone who’s never seen a dog, and then asking them to draw it.”
You find Mark & the Macrodata Refinement Department if you go far enough.
“Backrooms” does feel at times like the work of a first-time screenwriter, but it does not feel like a feature directorial debut. The concepts, design, and mythology aren’t just refined; they’re epochal. Liminal, uncanny, and seared irreversibly into my brain matter.
Additional Ramblings
- Everything around the…
“I’ll be anything you want me to be.”
I could make it work.
Perverse, merciless, and precociously masterful. Not in years have I been so psychologically exhausted by the end of a film. A movie that will initiate within ten minutes a biological, human survivalist instinct to crawl out from under your skin and get the fuck away.
I needed desperately for someone to rescue me from “Obsession” - physically rescue me - because I simply could not bring myself…
“They’ve been planning this for a million years.”
Did someone say Spielberg and aliens? All too happy to revisit War of the Worlds (2005) in anticipation of Disclosure Day.
I’m particularly thrilled this exercise doesn’t portend looking at Ice Cube’s bewildered face through a ZOOM window. There may not be a wider chasm of both quality and logical coherence between remakes.
Spielberg’s version is among the most underappreciated and misunderstood spectacles of the 21st century. I’d go so far as…
“… it came from somewhere, traveled across oceans to find you. And maybe, that somewhere… was me.”
I have a sick predilection for anything redolent of “All About Eve” (1950), “Persona” (1966), or “Mulholland Drive” (2001), i.e., actresses (or in this case, a pop star) and their paranoid symbioses with women who may or may not be the other half of their whole self. It’s one of our most potent, reliable cinematic constructs, especially in competent hands. Needless to say,…
“There must be retribution.”
Furiosa, darkest of angels. Fifth rider of the apocalypse.
Any tempered expectations I may have had going into this film have since been wrangled, quartered, and shattered beneath the tires of a motorcycle-drawn chariot. In other words, enshrine it in Valhalla. “Furiosa” delivers.
Propulsive, irreverent, subversive. Astoundingly ambitious. An engine running on unbridled horsepower with a perverse sense of humanity. It’s also explosive. Very, very explosive.
There is no world builder like George Miller. He is…
“Someone’s trying to kill us. We are trying to kill them.”
Visceral, propulsive, and upsetting. A film about the horrors of war and the breakdown of communication.
“Civil War” is certainly provocative, but not in the way you might expect. Garland doesn’t necessarily parse his film’s political mythology, much less the real contemporary landscape of American politics. He extricates the audience from the baggage of reality; it’s surprisingly alleviating, if not perhaps a little cowardly.
I am concerned that people…
