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Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed 2023
Adored the way clips were incorporated into
the narrative, as if to say Rock's on-screen persona and his personal life, as much as he and the Hollywood machinery tried to keep it separate, couldn't be but intrinsically linked with each other. -
A.I. Artificial Intelligence 2001
jesus fucking christ.
i had gone my entire life never having seen A.I. and only vaguely grasping what the movie even was, but i went into it functionally blind and… did not know what i was getting into. what a devastating fucking movie. a film that posits love as a life-giving and life-destroying force, the spark in an endless cycle of destructive, wholly-encompassing grief, and the finger that can eventually snuff it out. as soon as we meet David, there’s…
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The Naked Spur 1953
upon introspection, I feel that this story could benefit from having a modern remake. more time to explore each character and flesh out their goals so that their bouts of conflict with one another are much more defined. as well as break from the rigid 1950s studio trappings, including the unbelievable romance and positive ending.
though I would never want to replace yet another signature Mann directed final shootout. THIRD TIME he's done a cliffside shootout with jimmy stewart, and it doesn't get old!
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Drive My Car 2021
Impossible to overstate how beautiful this is.
Also, including sign language in the play (and the film) is absolutely brilliant.
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Winchester '73 1950
For a movie built around the awesomeness of a gun, this is also surprisingly interested in the madness, inanity, and frightening unchecked power that comes with gun ownership.
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M 1931
Aesthetically unimpeachable--it's basically the equivalent of watching cinema learn how to walk by sprinting into a full gallop, and it feels contemporary even 90+ years hence--but it also reminded me of "Goodbye Earl" by the Chicks.
Stay with me here.
"Goodbye Earl" is a song about solidarity and responsibility for the other as not only the best way toward justice but the only way, particularly in a modern world that lends itself so easily to the anonymizing forces of capitalism…
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Silence 2016
"Go on, then, Rodrigues, pray. But pray with your eyes open."
I remember reading a review of this when it came out that dismissively compared it to Shinoda's original adaptation, arguing that Scorsese's emphasis on Endo's rumination on faith came at the expense of the novel's critiques of colonialism. It struck me as a blinkered, surface-level reading of the film then; now, it seems downright oblivious. Scorsese has worked with strong scripts for so much of his career, but he…
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In a Lonely Place 1950
Bogart as a boozing, down-on-his-luck Hollywood screenwriter? Yes, please!
Gloria Grahame lights the screen on fire in every frame.
Criterion Blu-ray.
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The Gray Man 2022
Only an improvement on Cherry in that it doesn't actively seem to be undermining the validity of its subject. In this case, its CIA nonsense and its literally impossible to be unfair or offensive toward that particular organization. Even so, this also achieves a kind of breathtaking bewilderment at just how the Russos are able to render everything so ignorable. My take is that they became obsessed with the tech and started to not care at all about the substance…
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Rocco and His Brothers 1960
Rocco and his Brothers is an excellent film in it's own regard. Epic and dramatic realism that is both fatalistic and hopeful in an arc of history and progress.
But its hard to come to this now and not go... oh, this is where Coppola got most of The Godfather.
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