Deeply layered with music, painting, literature, history, the Holocaust, and cinema, this is a worthy object of study for somebody else. My path through this material was not translating every word, cataloguing every image, and identifying every sound. Instead, I felt its rhythm and immersed myself in its moments and echoes. I don’t need to know the source of every sample to appreciate a Girl Talk song. That said, the nice ode to postwar Italian cinema put me in mind of rewatching Rossellini’s war trilogy. And the whole thing made me want to take a stab at reading Proust.
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Batman: Mask of the Phantasm 1993
Paying my respects to Kevin Conroy. He was a great Batman and an even better Bruce Wayne.
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Pokémon Detective Pikachu 2019
Moments of absurdist humor give way to more conventional action. The novelty of Ryan Reynolds’ voice coming from Pikachu wears off early but not before the film lands some good jokes. After that it’s mostly action set pieces consisting of Justice Smith running away from something or hanging over an edge by his fingers.
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The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society 2018
I, too, would choose Michiel Huisman over Glen Powell.
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Shame 1968
Bergman crafts an anti-war film that evokes the horrors of both the Holocaust and the Vietnam War. The film effectively captures the degradation of the moral, ethical, physical, and spiritual lives of its protagonists, Eva and Jan Rosenberg (Ullmann and von Sydow). Ullmann looks especially alive and fresh faced before the war arrives on their doorstep and bursts their bourgeois bubble. Powerful and troubling imagery abounds, capped off by a truly haunting final sequence.
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Bros 2022
Funny and romantic at the margins but punishing at its center. The script is overstuffed with queer references to the point of being less groundbreaking and more like the homework Elle Woods failed to do before the first day of law school. (See? I can do it too.) More often than not, the film feels like being beaten with a stick labeled “LGBTQ”. In that case, I guess it really is for straight people.
