It is oddly fitting that I saw this film on the same day as Rear Window and Souvenir Part II- all three films being aware (to varying degrees) of how their formal construction directly interacts and reacts with their own narrative confines. Though I think in the end, Lea Seydoux's facial acrobatics won me over Jimmy Stewart's constant state of slight bemusement and confusion...
With France, more than the other two, I felt this constant transformation of all the moving…
In this latest episode of who wants to be a post-modernist, Hollywood Hustler and former funnyman, Adam McKay, presents to us the most brazenly obnoxious and predictable attempt at political satire since his own witless "comedy", Vice, in 2018.
Don’t Look Up is so poorly constructed from almost every conceivable angle, that it almost starts to function incidentally as some form of auto-critique – like a parasite on a mission to burrow through someone’s guts, getting confused, and starting to…
At the start of Beckett’s almost 100 pages of notes on his 20 minute short, “Film”, he quotes Irish philosopher George Berkley: “Esse est Percipi”. This basically means “to be is to be perceived”. And despite the fact that Beckett actually misquoted Berkley, – Berkley originally wrote “esse is percipi” – it is likely they would have shared the same sentiment. Lacan would go on to write more extensively about this idea of “being seen” in his works on the…
The main weakness of this film is McKay's reductive approach to telling a very complex and nuanced story. McKay is not a historian and he's not a very good filmmaker either, and in this film it really shows.
The motivations for the protagonist's actions are something rarely shown in this messy biography of former vice-president, Dick Cheney. Instead of trying to show the thought process behind Cheney's (actually very complex) decisions, director Adam McKay presents the decisions as something that…
