"Do onto others what they want to do to you before they do it."
I can't really paint a picture of the cold ethos on display in Caliber 9 better than that simple line, delivered to our ex-con Ugo as he contemplates his next move, standing between a mythological rock and a hard place. This is a living hell that actively punishes people for trying to escape. Besides, Ugo is innocent, right?
I decided to finally dive into the fabled…
Completing Park Chan-wook's vengeance trilogy, I decided to finally watch the "fade to white" version of Lady Vengeance and was rewarded handsomely. Beyond a mere gimmick, this slow bleaching of the color spectrum parallels Guem-ja's moral journey from one of sprawling grief and anger toward a more focused, egalitarian understanding of what revenge can be. After Sympathy For Mr Vengeance gave us a bleak, bloody parable about the terminal darkness of reciprocal violence and Oldboy gave us a grand, Shakespearian…
What the heck can I even say about the movie I grew up calling the best ever made? Terminator 2 was the cinematic bible for me from the moment I first laid eyes on it. Its action was unparalleled, the characters were lovable and badass, and the stakes were beyond epic yet utterly palpable even to a ten year old kid. Nuclear war! Robot apocalypse! Fucking judgment day!
From the opening synth notes over a hazy freeway to the skull…
I had such a great time introducing my wife to this nasty little crime spree / vampire mashup from Tarantino and Rodriguez - the snappy script, the unflinching violence, the cheesy but effective makeup, and most of all the great chemistry between George Clooney and Harvey Keitel burning up the screen right on into that "whoa" reveal final shot. I had to sell her on the movie a bit, she wasn't convinced by the trailer (gotta love old school trailers…
"Does this mean we'll get paid more?"
"So you're telling me you sell slave labor to companies over the phone?"
"If you get shown a problem but have no idea how to control it, then you just decide to get used to the problem."
So there's a subplot in Sorry To Bother You that encapsulates one of the key facets of capitalist realism - that capital will subsume any and all criticism of itself and present even negative realities as…
Brian DePalma finally got the chance to direct a big studio tentpole and the resulting film absolutely rips. The director gets to lean into his pulpier, crowd pleasing side while still indulging in his signature obsessions with surveillance/voyeurism and meta filmcraft-as-spycraft mechanics. The very first scene opens with our Impossible Mission Force team essentially making a film: we've got a director, a damsel in distress, a villain, and a set, and we're seeing it all on the same video monitor…
