An excerpt from my Vietnam travelogue. I watched this in Hanoi on a day that poured on and off, "forcing" me to while away the hours in the local cineplex. There were poorly translated subtitles, so everything here is half conjecture. Most of the names are made up, as well, because there’s no IMDb or character listing online. Accuracy is besides the point. The aim was to pen an absurdly detailed, playfully bored, Dadaist experiment:
“The first Vietnamese film of…
The platitudinous way to summate each successive Wes Anderson film is to deem it the "most Wes Anderson film Wes Anderson has ever made." With Asteroid City, this pithy slogan quickly pervaded the discourse, for obvious reasons. Anderson's stylistic and visual signifiers are all there: the pastel patina, the conflation of foreground/background, the mannered (dis)affection of emotionally damaged/stunted souls, the precociously smart wunderkinds, the sad-sack protagonist with a film camera slung around his neck, the mannequin-style tableaux. Wes' knack for…
Robert Altman's meandering buddy-comedy, California Split, is an instant mumblecore classic. Chronicling two gambling addicts as they bet on virtually everything (horses, poker, pick-up basketball games, boxing) and hang out with an amicable pair of hookers, Altman's cult favorite is both seductively charming while also a deceptively dark look into a seedy American subculture.
Altman's idiosyncratic sensibility is kind of a love it or hit it thing — shambolic, messy, freewheeling, casually precise. California Split feels like Altman operating in…
Echoing Batman’s spiritual awakening, Nolan forges an intriguing thesis of the superhero genre as pragmatic spectacle: implementing deception and theatricality to transform the film into something more than its constituent parts in the mind of the audience. Yet, he also goes to great lengths to show the trickery behind the magic — the method behind the madness. TJ’s Batman is firmly rooted in the rules and principles of waking reality. His story is psychologically complex and relevant — his journey meandering…
