20 May 2019: The Fits

What a creative coming of age movie. I loved the performances & the economy of dialogue. The story unfolds very simply but there’s so much there to unpack. 

I watched another movie called The Falling, starring Maisie Williams, about girls st a boarding school who mysteriously start to have fainting spells. Of the two movies recently to compare becoming a woman to having seizures, The Fits is by far the superior one. 

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1 April 2019: Climax

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The dancing was hypnotic, especially with the very Gaspar Noe-y camerawork. It felt very long for being 96 minutes, though. With Irreversible I didn’t mind the extended shots where nothing much is going on, because the plot & dialogue had me on the hook. This one had a very loose plot & what seemed like ad-libbed dialogue, so it was much less engaging. I did appreciate the depiction of people on LSD without the usual visual movie cues that accompany it. It was an interesting change of pace to be entirely outside of the characters’ experience.

27 March 2019: Dave Made a Maze

Light-hearted, surreal & very silly. I liked this a bunch. The art direction is absolutely wonderful. And those kill scenes! I’m always thrilled when something this original comes along.

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14 August 2018: Ex Machina

Another one I’d been putting off for ages, I guess because I was afraid it was depressing? Wow is this good. I don’t normally give a movie five stars after a first watch, but there is just nothing that they don’t absolutely nail here. Acting is great, especially Oscar Isaac, it looks beautiful, & most importantly, it does exactly what it sets out to do, & keeps us on the chain the whole time. I’ll always love a movie that stays out ahead of me & controls my understanding of what’s going on, & that’s exactly what this one did. Alex Garland was able to get that awesome Black Mirror gut punch of understanding out of a feature-length film, which is no small feat. In conclusion, daaaaaamn.

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8 August 2018: Polytechnique

The order he chose to present the events in pretty much ruined what would’ve been a solid movie.

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4 July 2018: Midnight Special

Pretty disappointing after Take Shelter. It felt weird structurally. I usually like to be plopped into a story already in progress, but there didn’t seem to be any reason behind doing that here.

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2 June 2018: First Reformed

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Should’ve come with a trigger warning for specifically me. Jesus H, what a screenplay. That floating scene? Heart stopping.