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Never thought I'd see a horror film that made an interesting point about love. Really thoughtful and interesting look at grief despite how upsetting it is. Really sad and not for anyone with a weak stomach.

Tim Robinson is great and lots of funny and fresh comedy here. I just couldn't fully enjoy it because I felt bad for the main character a lot of the time. The bleakness of much of the plot would require me to distance myself a lot from the main character to enjoy it, but the reason Tim's character is funny is because I can identify with many of his bad choices and impulses.

I keep coming back to this. Funnest dance sequence ever; I love how Qualley incorporates facial expressions and looks totally possessed and unhinged. Great surreal touches from Spike Jonze too.

As usual, Luca Guadagnino manages to open up new, unforgettable aesthetic spaces in my head. I don't want to give away too much, but a beautiful film about desperation, avoidance, and the search for intimacy. Amazing performance by Daniel Craig too.

Damn really makes you think what if ibrain bad

Such a good movie, every character is fully human, the filmmaking is extremely immersive but not sentimental. It's interesting to see how characters in antagonistic positions are nevertheless united in their experiences as working class. A great central message about love. It's also really funny.

That first the first song and dance scene that starts when they discover a dead body was peak cinema, matched only by the happy Irish folk song that starts playing when that little goblin pulls out a woman's uvula.

This was fun. Kind of like Final Destination but with the opposite theme (nothing is fated, death is random)--a theme handled well for the goofiness of this film-- plus with the Rube Goldberg death scenes are well-played for the ridiculous fun that they are.

Normalize babysitters for adults, I need this

When it's bad, it's funny. When it's good, it's a vibe.

Lol

Can we just it that most Yorgos Lanthimos films are just him working out his sexual perversions under a sheen of fake-depth?

Much more fetish porn in this movie than I expected

A has removed this review.

I really liked this as a kid. I went back to watch it, and was shocked. The opening quote was, " "A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

The film portrays the Mayas in a totally hateful way, making them look superstitious, unthinking, sadistic, cruel, and decadent. Basically the way you'd expect to see 'pagans' described by Western Europeans 1,000 years ago, or 'barbarians' described by Romans 2,000 years ago. And the real kicker is, he just made most of this shit up about them, like borrowing the human sacrifice thing from the Aztecs and just inventing the 'mass sacrifice' thing.

He also takes a tribe that looks more like an Amazonian tribe and pretends that they are Maya villagers. But Maya villagers lived in stone houses, were farmers rather than hunters, wore full clothing, and were never more than 20km away from a pyramid (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/apocalypto-tortures-the-facts-expert-says).

Gibson, in other words, makes up a false massacre by a fictionalized version of the 'decadent' and sinful Mayas against their fictionalized villagers to make it look like, when the Spanish did come, the Mesoamericans had it coming and the common people were probably relieved.

This review may contain spoilers.

This movie's not just a great thriller that evokes awe the way Spielberg's films did (with breathtaking scenery too), it also contains a brilliant series of interlocking motifs about spectacle. In many ways, it reminded me of Infinite Jest.

Anyway, here are some random things I noticed relating to it's treatment of spectacle:

Animals in the film are things that people keep trying to reduce to tame spectacles, but who resist this (the horse acting up, the chimp, the alien).

They resist being turned into objects of spectacle. (You can't look at the alien, the alien shuts down all electronics).

The boy in the chimp disaster experiences the most horror when the chimp sees him.

The guy who feeds the horses to the aliens (the scene with the Madame Psychosis-looking figure) calls them the 'viewers'-- the horses are fed to the viewers. By the end of that scene, the human viewers are eaten by the thing they were viewing, the 'viewers'.

The first black man on film is treated the same as the first horse on film, reduced to objects of spectacle. (They also capture the alien on film the same way the first black man was captured on film-- in of the film technology).

The mirror that makes the horse freak out looks the same as the round mirror helmet of the TMZ guy on the motorbike-- he is also a 'mirror', trying to capture and reflect images, he is nothing else besides that.

Emerald, in the penultimate shot of the film, looks directly into the camera, at the audience, challenging our roles as safe, protected viewers.

"mawkish and twee"

First 30 minutes are amazing. Girl saves cat, secret society of cats is thanking and rewarding her in very cat-like ways.

But once she goes to the cat kingdom, things just go off the rails, and it gets kinda ugly and boring.

If more men were like Cooper Raiff, I'd be much gayer. He's such a delight: vulnerable, warm, kind, nurturing, funny, and ionate. The characters in his films feel so real, they are flawed but lovable, they make mistakes, they grow, they reach out to each other. Watching him and Lola hang out was too adorable and funny. Raiff's emotional intelligence as a director is incredible, and not just for his age, and the way events develop in this film subverts the usual tropes for a much more nuanced understanding of people. It's a lovely film, funny, sad, and full of heart.

I watched this right after Cha Cha Real Smooth, and how in the world can people-- especially critics-- have liked this more?

The main character Julie sucks. She is not likable or sympathetic, alright, but she's also not complex or deeply written enough to be interesting or engaging. She is literally no deeper than Bella from Twilight. This is not Renate Reinsve's fault, who did as good a job as she could with the material. It's the writer's fault. Julie's decisions, whether about men to pursue or her college major, are superficial, based on appearances. She gets with her first husband because he's successful, even though she doesn't care for his creative work at all. Then she feels alienated from him for no particularly good reason--he talks about cars and his cat cartoon is a bit crass-- and has an affair with some other guy who has no discernable personality traits outside of being attracted to her and not her husband. Her 'darkest secret' is that she likes soft penises.

The film's 'feminism' is vapid. Julie writes a thinkpiece about liking soft penises and whether feminist women can enjoy giving head. Somehow, this sparks a 'lively debate' (a lively debate about what exactly?) She smears menstrual blood on her face in a drug-trip and imagines throwing a tampon at her dad. These are sloppy gestures towards feminism, but in the end, her character seems completely defined by the relationships she has with men. And then the one character who seems to actually care about social and political issues-- climate change, indigenous rights-- gets treated like some wacky extremist.

The whimsy of the film is annoying. Firstly, it's too in love with its own cuteness, like the worst moments of Michel Gondry or Roman Coppola. Secondly, the whimsical moments often try to imply that there is something cute and quirky going on, while there really isn't. Like isn't it cute and quirky how she plays the cheating game or runs through the street with time frozen to cheat again, because cannot tolerate the slightest feelings of alienation or boredom?!

I really did feel for her ex-husband during the sequence when he got cancer-- the dialogue here was raw and authentic and thoughtful. But sadly, his death gets put aside very quickly in the end as just another chapter in her life, one from which she emerges cooler and with a new haircut.

Some writer once said something like, "The danger of setting up your story so that anything can happen is that then it feels like nothing does." But in this case, it actually feels like everything does.

I kind of expected this to be the sort of movie that starts out really fun and then gets kind of boring and formulaic by the end as it has to jump through the familiar story-structure points. Well, this movie wasn't like that. This movie makes most other blockbuster movies feel even more like careful market-focus-group calculations written by robots and given off bored directors who hate their careers. Because this movie is made by people who actually really love what they do.

This film takes the 'multiverse' concept and actually dares to explore and play with how much fun you can have and how far you can go with that. It manages to be surreal and extremely funny at one moment while making you tear up the next moment while maintaining a Matrix-y sense of fun and awe and an indie movie's sense of clumsy vulnerable sincerity. I'm pretty sure I laughed while crying at the same time. And the visual style of this film is just amazing.

The action is Stephen Chow cartoony instead of tedious and feels as much like dancing segments as fighting ones. The film is kind and at the core of all the surreal and alien things happening, making you really care about the family in the middle of it and their everyday human worries and drama. Which is also kind of the point of the movie-- to find meaningfulness in such a vast and confusing universe, and to love those around you as irreplaceable.

Who the f*ck are all these people? When did the saw guy get replaced with his wierd polycule of followers? In either case, it's very bad and lazy etc. but you know what you're getting into with these things...

There is an important thing that George Lucas missed when he based the Empire and Stormtroopers in Starwars on the imagery from Triumph of the Will. The Stormtroopers, Darth Vader, etc., they are always a drag- serious, grumpy, unhappy, morose.

On the other hand, the imagery in Triumph of the Will and the ideology it carries is so disturbing because it is not like that at all-- it overflows with displays of positive emotion, collective celebration and unity. Some of the music could be taken out of a Coney Island Carnival or early Disney film, some could be taken from a 4th of July Parade. The way people hold their hands up in unity, shouting happily-- it looks less like Starwars' Stormtroopers[tm], and more like the final triumphant revolution scene in V for Vendetta. It is-- to some extent-- the imagery of what Hanah Arendt called the 'mass movement'.

You kind of go in expecting Hitler to look ridiculous and angry the way the character of him looks. But in many ways, his speeches and rallies are a bit bland and vague. Unlike the more straightforwardly ideological speeches of his totalitarian peer Stalin, Hitler's speeches in this movie could more easily come from the mouths of Trump or Obama.

The authoritarianism and conformism of Nazi ideology is well on display here, but the familiarity of the parades and the displays of positive and sincere emotions is twistedly disturbing. It is probably not an accident that Jewish humor is known for being ironic and skeptical of authority. Such humor would certainly fall flat on the sincere and cheerful people in this film. I'm not sure what this says, exactly, since-- as some have rightly pointed out-- irony nowadays is the new form of postmodern authority and a cage in itself, while sincerity is extremely valuable. But films like this certainly make the value of irony clear.

I can't the last time I felt such delight-- someone called it 'stomach magic'-- in the theater. Part of it, sure, is that I love The Matrix. But it's also the sense that during this big blockbuster film, there is a human on the other end who actually wants to communicate with me. It's that wonderful feeling that art can do, make the world less lonely. And the film risks just what it must risk to do that-- dorkiness, sentimentality (as one villain says, "people don't want sentimentality!"), vulnerability to mockery.

The film can also accomplish this feat because it is very self-aware. And not in a kind of smug cool way that allows it to continue being cynical and merely commercial but with an ironic wink. No, the self-awareness is delightful because it is sincere, social, and political.

The film wishes to explore social and political issues, itself, and its relationship to the audience. It is aware that it is a revamp, it hints at the (possibly forceful) corporate decisions that went into making it, and it wants to discuss what that means with the audience, and to really try to be a good film despite these background conditions.

This is a really good movie, very fun and somehow innocent and wholesome in its smartness, and perhaps the best sequel I've ever seen. It's also got a very sweet love story at its core (such a relief from the heap of recent action films centered around revenge).

It's really kind of a good unintentional satire of the kind of people who would make this. Because they're sort of revealing that they think their own cultural rightness is as obvious and objective as mathematics.

Like, yeah, I know that you know that they still teach math in school but you're pissed that they teach multiculturalism and 'openmindedness'. And look, I even agree with Mary Midgley that total cultural relativism is untenable. But do you really think your kids can live in the modern world without having basic values of tolerance towards different peoples and cultures?

How Right-Wing Mass Shooters View Themselves: The Movie

Link to review-> philosophynow.org/issues/121/Everything

Kinda cool feminist angle to it, but the acting (except for Glazer) and milieus made me feel like I was watching an insurance commercial try to be a thriller. The doctor in the movie was like some kind of weird combination between 1970s James Bond, a Jurassic Park scientist, and that Dos Equis guy.

I think this is the only meta-movie about violence I've seen that actually succeeds because it's terrifying and not witty. The director Michael Haneke is particularly thoughtful and his essay Violence and The Media (2010) seems to address his motivations for writing this film:

"Debating whether violence in the media is necessary is a moot point in light of its existence. With respect to our topic ... the question of the FORM of representation makes more sense...

I think that we can by and large identify three dramaturgical premises, of which at least one must be satisfied in order to attain a large audience with the display of violence:

--First, the disengagement of the violence-producing situation from the viewer’s own immediate life experiences that elicit identification (the Western, science fiction, horror genres, and the like).

--Second, the intensification of one’s living conditions and their jeopardization, which allows the viewer to approve of the act of violence as liberating and positive – because it was the only acceptable solution...

--Third, the embedding of the action in a climate of wit and satire – I refrain from using the word HUMOR here (from the slapstick of silent film to... the postmodern cynicism of Pulp Fiction)...

For the viewer, the boundary between real existence and image [in film] was difficult to establish from the beginning, which is precisely why the medium won a great deal of its fascination.

The oscillation between the disconcerting feeling of being present at a real event and the emotional security of seeing only the image of an artificially created or a found reality... Violence became domesticated in its image and the pleasant chill of horror istered in homeopathic dosages was quite welcome.

...The absolute equivalency of all the contents stripped of their reality ensures the universal fictionality of anything shown and, with it, the coveted feeling of security of the consumer.

...How do I give the viewer the chance to recognize this loss of reality and his own implication in it, thus emancipating him from being a victim of the medium to its potential partner?

The question is not: “What am I allowed to show?” but rather: “What chance do I give the viewer to recognize what it is I am showing?” The question – limited to the topic of violence – is not: “How do I show violence?” but rather: “How do I show the viewer his own position vis-à-vis violence and its portrayal.”"

I was thinking about something that might be obvious to many, but which I had never consciously thought about.

Creepy stories/movies/etc. have a lot to do with discovery and knowledge. Children are often used as characters in ghost stories to convey information about the ghost/monster/etc. to the protagonist because they are a semi-reliable source of information. (Think of the 100s of kids in horror movies, like Sinister, who draw little pictures of some creepy little girl no one can see).

'Semi'-reliable because they are prone to error and flights of imagination, but also are creatures with eyes and ears and some knowledge + command of the English language after all.

Tension builds up in scary stories through a slow and (in of the fiction) systematic encounter with a scary creature or thing. The creature is largely brought forward to the protagonist through layers of increasingly trustworthy information about the fact that there IS a creature. (E.g. first, you have the mysterious noise outside, meh probably the wind. Second, dog barking, hmm that's strange at this hour. Third, steps going up the stairs, am I hearing things? Fourth, really seeing the ghost.-- Each new step a more undeniable piece of evidence that there is a ghost.)

Children are somewhere around the middle layer of epistemic trustworthiness. Their encounters with ghosts, I would predict, usually occur in the middle of the plot, perhaps leaning towards the end of the middle. I think this is also true of Sinister.

This was such a cool film, I don't think I've ever seen something like it.

In a time of space documentaries with increasingly impatient, blockbuster-like aesthetics (e.g. watch a trailer for the Cosmos reboot), this film evokes a stronger sense of cosmic awe with no visuals other than black and white footage of brutalist sculpture, intercut with a footage of little green light in a dark void.

The theme of the film is mainly time, it's massive and cosmic scale, and our smallness in relation to it. So the focus on stone seems to invite us to look into this form of time so much larger and more still than our everyday time, more eternal than even the movement of the oceans.

For this reason, one might feel bored at first while watching it. But hiding beyond that boredom is fear, discomfort. This film wants you to embrace that, I think, and invites you to meditate with it, and accept the discomfort of meditating on our smallness and temporariness.

Johan Johansson's music feels massive, ambient, ancient, awe-inspiring, and slightly cold like a nordic forest. It makes one feel small. It's beautiful and intimidating.

Finally, behind the imagery and music is a story that holds it together about people in the future, the last people. These people are an in-between point between humanity and the cosmic scale. They live thousands and thousands of years. They can see the sky in its fullness. They know they are the last to live. It is scary to imagine how you could live your life with any meaning knowing that not only you will die, but so will all your work and everything around you. How do you face and accept death then? But the film offers small glimmers of hope, too.

Tilda Swinton's voice has the perfect otherworldly, mature, detached sound to narrate this story (I feel like she might be an alien...). And her narration does something a lot of read-alouds don't do: she gives you time to think about and feel each sentence, the way you would if you were actually reading a text.

The themes of the story and score (and beautiful photography) go so beautifully with the brutalist design of these sculpture-buildings. They look a bit like abstract representation of the movie's themes, and a bit like the ruins of that future race. They also match the feeling of futurism embodied in the story (which was written in the 1930s) and its vision of the future in a rich way that I'm going to have to think about more. But it captures some very special feelings I've gotten when walking around functional concrete structures in an open field, this sense of cosmic wonder, the hidden and unintended beauty in functionality, and being both small and vulnerable but also connected to something bigger.

It's not as awful as everyone says, but it's not even 1% as good as the book.

I don't think John Krasinski really 'got' the novel. I think this because the way he edited out parts of the book that were key to understanding it. Wallace tends to write in a way where every new part makes you reinterpret the parts that came before.

Here, we get a sense that this is a movie where a bunch of awful men talk, and we see that they all have these problematic sexist views. But, aside from with the last monologue, there isn't much time to linger and think about why they have these views. The novel's thesis was basically that fear makes men act this way-- an existential fear of being judged by the 'other', or of intimately and vulnerably relating to the other, and that objectification of the other is a defense mechanism against their fear of the other. There are also a lot of brilliant short stories between the interviews that really fleshed this theme out-- it's such a shame they were cut.

While Krasinski does a pretty good performance of the last monologue-- which for me (the monologue in the book) is one of the most moving works of fiction I've ever read-- a lot of the ways the book is fleshed out just seem to lack its nuance. And without that nuance, the beauty of the book is lost. I felt left with a sort of pretentious, coffee-shop faux-jazz Wholefoods vibe from it, which is sad because Wallace painfully tried to avoid pretension. It would be a much better use of a couple hours to just find Wallace reading aloud the final monologue himself.

I'm so glad I watched this again 10 years after the first time I saw it. It hit me so much more deeply this time.

It's really rare for me to see a film that is so moving, it leaves me feeling differently towards the world in a profound way. I cried like 5 time throughout this movie, breaking down especially in the last scene. When this film had finished, I felt that life is a tender and beautiful thing, and had such a soft, accepting, and loving feeling towards myself and-- more strongly-- for those around me. As well as a gentle awareness of my own awareness. This is the kind of movie that will make you want to write to your loved ones and tell them you love them. Or sit in your kitchen at nighttime quietly drinking a cup of tea in silence, feeling the full presence of the room and savoring each drop.

The couple times that I felt boredom I realized that I was just avoiding my own feelings, and when I opened myself up to the film's gentleness and slowness, it showed such a beautiful, sensitive, and humanistic view of the world.

A cello player, Daigo, moves back to his home village/town after the orchestra is disbanded, and begins working as an encoffiner. At first, the work seems bizarre and disgusting to him. This part is lighthearted and genuinely funny. However, after observing the respectful and ceremonial approach his boss takes towards the work, he begins to see the profundity of it.

By preparing the bodies of the dead in front of the deceased's family, they return the personhood to the dead person. People look on with recognition ('mom?').

Before, he had been a talented and respected musician (performing, it's worth noting, western-style music-- individual talent is celebrated). As an encoffiner, he was still a performer of sorts (of a traditional Japanese ceremony), but one who had no one's respect (the job was considered lowly and strange by others). By putting himself in this lowly position, he gives back dignity to those who have ed away. He focuses on others. Seeing how this effected the family of the deceased was deeply touching.

This movie expresses such beautiful values. Death is shown as something normal, natural, profound and sad, slightly beautiful perhaps, and minimally scary. I don't think I've ever seen a film that made me feel that way about death before (except perhaps 'After Life'). There are so many cozy and beautiful little moments tucked away, like Daigo chatting with the old man in the bathhouse, getting drunk with his wife, and playing cello for himself alone at night. The main conflicts come from characters coming to see value where they hadn't before, and accept difficult things by better understanding them. It's funny, cozy, soft, and sentimental (the music adds to the sentimentality in the best way).

Beautifully crafted and smart without ever showing off, and with a perfect soundtrack (just as tear-jerking and lovely as that of 'Up'), this film contains the sentimentality that David Foster Wallace referred to when he said, "The next real literary 'rebels'... [will] endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles....treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions...with reverence and conviction... [and] eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue." It seems like this exactly the kind of movie that 'New Sincerity' movement is after.

(Also, it's so funny that the director Yojiro Takita did Pink Films like "Sexy Timetrip Ninjas" throughout the 80s; I'm glad he got a chance to work on his own ideas finally!)

Dave has always been a 'dirty dog'.... but this time, he's... a shaggy dog! So sit. Stay. Because this movie will have you 'rolling over' with laughter, and 'begging' for more!!!

This review may contain spoilers.

As always with von Trier, this film was visually great. It was really entertaining, and the last 10-20 minutes was amazing. I wish von Trier would make a whole movie set in hell or had spent much more time there. And there is a lot of funny and interesting stuff in the movie-- the whole framing of the dialogue with Virgil was great and kinda like Humbert Humbert ironically addressing the audience as 'ladies and gentleman of the jury'. The OCD/'rain' scene was darkly funny.

If the house Jack tried to build (the wooden one) was like an artwork made from love and joy, and Jack (like von Trier) keeps failing to make it, then the movie is the house of corpses (hence the title). Okay, we all already get that. So in this way it's like 'Seven Psychopaths' or even 'Adaptation'. It's almost about its own ineptitude. It must, by its nature, make art from blood. 

But then... how exactly are Jack's murders artistic? I mean, consider the 4th incident. Isn't the whole cis-white-guy murders pretty girl in a sexualized way pretty much, in artistic , kitsch? Isn't it grind-house-type exploitation film stuff? Isn't violence against women sexualized to an alarming and cliche degree? If so, then when Jack's murders fail artistically, does that mean the film also does? Having said that, a few moments stand out-- the house itself at the end especially.

This movie reminded me of David Foster Wallace's idea that irony is song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage. It's kinda interesting that its meta and a reflection on von Trier's work as a whole. But I feel like I do with 'Seven Psychopaths'-- the irony or meta-element is there to somehow to justify the continuation of the bloodbath. This is perhaps just what cynicism is. How much time, minute-by-minute is spent reflecting on what the meaning of all this violence is vs. how much time is spent reveling in the violence?

But I do think that von Trier's irony succeeds in one way-- by taking our love of violence and talking it over the top. Like: "Oh, so you like violence? Well, then here, watch a woman forced to have a picnic with her dead sons." That part was really grotesque and fucking hard to watch. And so perhaps he is trying to punish us for our interest in the film at all, and violence-as-entertainment generally. So the alterations to the film of the most awful stuff actually (as with the film version of Lolita) undermined the subversive point of the film. Because it could have undermined the violence-as-entertainment trope even more effectively the more grotesque it was.

Unfortunately, the fact that so many people liked the film might mean that it failed at this goal, even if it succeeded more than stuff like Seven Psychopaths (and certainly Reservoir Dogs). Funnily enough, Zizek's take on 'Kung-Fu Panda' seems appropriate: Kung-fu Panda makes fun of its own ideology, and yet the ideology survives. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCD3hg6OEQw&feature=emb_title). The new form of ideology is not 'they know not what they do', but is instead, 'they know it, but they're doing it anyway'.

I don't really get why Bergman is characterized as this depressing, nihilistic filmmaker. His films definitely take you to dark places, some of the scariest things about the human experience-- including things like death and absence of certainty about objective meaning or values in the world. But ironically, this very way of filmmaking is so human and attentive to value that it somehow cancels out the nihilism the characters grapple with. There's also a lot of warm and funny moments (I love the beautiful, peaceful scene when they eat wild strawberries and drink milk, before death comes again). The characters in this movie are also really likable and in some ways it almost reminds me of one of the medieval stage-plays it portrays (the literal personification of death, the over-the top humor). The movie gives you a Dionysian experience that maybe ancient Greek theater gave people- taking you to dark places, helping you cope with it, and then pulling you back into the everyday with a glimmer of beauty or hope in the end.

What does it have to say about death? I'm still figuring that out. For one thing, it makes us aware of our aliveness (right after death tricks the main character into giving away his chess strategy, he looks at his hand, "here is my hand, I can move it..."). It is something that in the end we seem forced to accept. It is something that we become fully conscious of only when it is our last day. It is a stupid natural force ("I am unknowing") rather than something sinister. And people are more drawn to art about it than about happiness.

Shoot-out or Western-type movies can be fun but aren't usually the sort of thing I'm that into. But this movie is amazing and not just my favorite in that genre, but is probably a favorite of mine, period. It does with the Western/thriller what 'Get Out' did with horror.

Through the first half, I came to care about the characters and love their community so much that I was truly afraid for them in the second half and felt like anything was possible.

From their communal way of distributing goods and resources, resolving conflicts, to their casual attitudes towards sex and nudity, concern for each other, and the inquiry based way they teach their kids, the community of Bacurau is almost a kind of utopia. I also love how queer and trans people are included in the film and community in the most casual way and without ever drawing attention to it. The town and setting are beautiful and wonderfully shot, and they way music is used in the movie ranges from sublime (the funeral music) to hilarious (the guy with the guitar roasting the bikers).

From the first shot, overlooking the planet, the movie is visually amazing and pulls you into its world. The visual beauty is combined, in the first part, there are these cool elements that, while they are mostly explained by the plot, present themselves before they explain themselves and so come off as surreal (water coming out of the coffin, the crashed coffin truck, the UFO, the town-DJ, the case of vaccines in dry ice). This brought a slightly mythic feeling and gave me vibes of Gabriel García Márquez's magic realism (although this particular association might just be because I'm not that familiar with the artistic histories of South America).

I won't say too much about what happens because it's best to go in not knowing much. But the movie's turn towards more violence and action is used as a critique of Western colonialism, the corruption of Brazil's own government (particularly Bolsonaro), exploitative tourism, and even consumer-entertainment itself.

This review may contain spoilers.

Trigger Warning: Discussion of mental illness and mention of suicide

Having OCD and Panic Disorder, I’ve been avoiding but fascinated by this one, thinking that it would dramatize and concretize the sense of impending dread and doom that accompanies anxiety (and panic especially). And yes, there’s that. But I think the movie is more universal than this. Maybe. So here’s my reading.

It’s about our relationship with death. We’re usually able to push that awareness of death down. Deny it or forget about it in various ways. That one day when everything just goes blank, or, if you believe into the afterlife, you have the most overwhelming and out-of-control experience imaginable, sucked into another dimension- the complete loss of control, going into (hopefully) God’s hands. Or, for many, just that blackness so void that even black will not be there.

When I first got panic disorder, I just could not shake this knowledge that I could die at any moment. I’ve also known people who’ve had panic attacks about this topic, and heard of many similar cases. I think most of us, though, learn to suppress this thought. That one of the worst things we can imagine happening to us will inevitably happen to us. I think that Olivia Taylor Dudley’s constant attempts to talk about dolphin sex captures this well and in a funny way, this attempted escape into the trivial (but one that we’ll regret later, since we can’t properly prepare for death if we can’t acknowledge it).

But okay, now the movie’s premise seems to remove that ability to forget about it. There’s no uncertainty. They know it will happen. And not some far off time, but tomorrow. They have to face it. And this knowledge is contagious because it confronts everyone else with what they know: they will die. The literal contagion of knowing they will die tomorrow is a device to show how encountering someone who is emotionally forced to face their own death can force someone else do to so as well. If you’ve ever visited a family member in the hospital who’s dying, you probably know what I mean.

It was fascinating to see how the main character coped. How she seemed to cherish the world around her, experience itself. Touching the wooden floors in a newfound appreciation. It reminded me of the part in 'Good Old Neon' before the character kills himself, describing his thoughts during his last afternoon at home: “‘This is the last time I will ever tie my shoe,’ ‘This is the last time I will look at this rubber tree on top of the stereo cabinet,’ ‘How delicious this lungful of air right here tastes,’ ‘This is the last glass of milk I’ll ever drink,’ ‘What a totally priceless gift this totally ordinary sight of the wind picking trees’ branches up and moving them around is.’ Or, ‘I will never again hear the plaintive sound of the fridge going on in the kitchen’ (the kitchen and breakfast nook are right off my living room), etc. Or, ‘I won’t see the sun come up tomorrow or watch the bedroom gradually undim and resolve, etc.’”

The movie sits in these moments and lets you sit in them too. It’s deeply uncomfortable and sometimes horrifying, and profound feeling.

There’s a lot of other things to say about it— it was visually beautiful and the jarring editing and use of music brought welcome humor to the movie.

Overall, I found it to be a great use of a magical realist premise, like all great magical realism, to explore an important bunch of emotional truths. I’m actually not sure whether they will die tomorrow or will live with the constant conviction that they will die tomorrow for years and years to come.

I don't like the future of space. This is scarier than a horror movie, on a visceral level, the sort of cosmic scariness that Lovecraft was all about.

Having said that, it's pretty amazing and awe-inspiring, and I guess fear can be a part of awe. (A friend told me that Kant's conception of the sublime included a combination of awe, beauty, and terror-- that would fit here for sure).

Michio Kaku comes in with a little bit of hope-- that if we are able to simulate universes, then there might be an evolution of universes within universes that have intelligent life and possibly some hope that we're not all going to die in an eternity of blackness where even atoms are ripped apart and black holes evaporate.

(As an aside, if the 'big crunch' theory turns out to be true, then there might be hope of another big bang, but the big rip looks more likely right now so our only hope might be alternative universes. If my memory of astronomy class is right, this seems to come down the the volume of the universe and whether or not there's enough matter for gravity to start to pull everything back together-- at the moment it looks like there is not).

Note: For those of you who felt effected by the film and want to help in some small way, I did a little research (through, for example, GiveWell) and this seems to be a good resource to help refugees by giving to them directly, rather than through any third party: www.givedirectly.org/refugees/

This film was extremely well-made and disturbing in a good way. It uses horror as a genre to show us some of the horrors in the world that people have to go through every day, and the trauma they live with afterwards. In of emotional depth, this is on par with horror movies like Babadook, and in of sociological depth it's at least on par with Get Out. As such, it has to be one of the best horror movies I've ever seen.

I at first thought of this as a kind of 'so bad it's good' movie like
The Room, but this film actually really succeeds at its goal. Isaac Nabwana, the director and founder of Wakaliwood had a budget of $200. So yeah, of course the production values are not Hollywood standard, and the helicopter parts are hilariously unrealistic, but this was still much better than most people could have done if they had to make an action movie with 200 bucks. Nabwana's goal was to make a fun and entertaining and campy action movie, and even though that's not really my type of thing, this movie really succeeds at that.

The best part, in my opinion, is the video jokers' running commentary (I hear a video joker is a pretty common part of a certain genre of movies in Uganda, but he calls himself the 'first video joker in English'). It's worth seeing for that alone.

This review may contain spoilers.

ha ha he killeded him

Anyone who finds this film convincing should check out Big Joel's videos on it:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDI4F7eWu7k

www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0dwWLY3SyY

I liked the part when he said "Hey guys this is a MOVIE! I am a CHARACTER! You are sitting in a THEATER, not watching real events but a work of FICTION!" I was like "lol so true so true"

Watching this movie feels like taking a slow walk in the most beautiful forest and thinking about your life in a deep and abstract way, but from a very human perspective. It does something calming and cleansing for your soul and reminds you of how precious life is.

If you read this as a movie about a father's repressed psychosexual anxieties about a man dating his daughter and 'replacing' him, blown up by his subconscious into a planetary-scale narrative about the 'end of the world', it works very well.

• Flip
• Goodnight
• Kenzo World
• Dug's Special Mission
• The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
• World of Tomorrow
• Two Dosas
• The Mask

1. Perfect Days
2. My Neighbor Totoro
3. The Great Beauty
4. The Banshees of Inisherin
5. Departures
6. Call Me by Your Name
7. Spirited Away
8. Anora
9. Up
10. Everything Everywhere All at Once

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Ritual
• The Backrooms (Found Footage)
• Atman
• Melancholia
• I'm Thinking of Ending Things
• Midsommar
• Black Mirror: USS Callister
• She Dies Tomorrow
• Antichrist
• It Stares Back

• After Life
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Memoria
• The Eternal Daughter
• Wild Strawberries
• Mirror
• Memento

• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• Easy Rider
• My Dinner with Andre
• Cinderella Liberty
• Manhattan
• Grey Gardens
• Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
• On the Waterfront
• De-Lovely
• Grand Illusion

...plus 26 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies in which the characters or audience are forced to confront their own mortality head on.

• Ikiru
• Claire
• The Seventh Seal
• Wit
• Melancholia
• White Noise
• She Dies Tomorrow
• Last and First Men
• After Life
• Departures

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Starship Troopers
• Viva
• Funny Games
• RoboCop
• Deck of Cards

• Boro the Caterpillar
• Lost in Translation
• After Life
• Waking Life
• Joe Pera Talks You to Sleep
• Little Forest
• Still Walking
• My Neighbor Totoro
• World of Tomorrow
• World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People's Thoughts

...plus 32 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Suspiria
• Climax
• The Haunting of Bly Manor
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show
• Titane
• Bit
• Berberian Sound Studio
• Closet Monster
• Under the Skin
• Stranger by the Lake

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Trial
• They Live
• The Matrix
• The Truman Show
• Inherent Vice
• The Castle
• Talk Radio
• Never Let Me Go
• Anomalisa
• WALL·E

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Lion King
• Dinosaur!
• Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey
• The Jungle Book
• Andre
• The Cat from Outer Space
• Anima Mundi
• The Adventures of Milo and Otis
• The Fox and the Hound
• Star Wars

...plus 19 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Tokyo Story
• Red Beard
• House
• The Chess Players
• Dreams
• After Life
• Still Walking
• Shoplifters
• Departures
• Spirited Away

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• My Neighbor Totoro
• Little Forest
• Paterson
• Midnight Diner 2
• Up
• Marty
• The Big Sick
• I Wish
• WALL·E
• Somewhere