The Other Side of the Wind (d. Orson Welles) Fascinating and infuriating bullshit. Watch how the guys patronize the underage girl. Sexist and disturbing, but also indicative how they’ll treat people not like them: white, straight, male, connected, upper middle class, liberal/creative types. I felt uncomfortable watching it precisely because people like me don’t belong …
Author Archives: orpheusfx28
Already dead
One Cut of the Dead (d. Shinichirou Ueda) Clever and funny horror flick from austerity Japan. Budget is small and so are the living quarters. It’s mainly set in an abandoned facility which may have been used for wartime atrocities too, folding Japanese war history with its industrialization and its current abandonment of such industries. …
Trauma privilege
Leave No Trace (d. Debra Granik) Nice film. Father and daughter have been living off grid but law catches up on them and they’re forced to integrate into society. He has PTSD but none of the scenery chewing. She is kind and caring, a rare representation for a teenage girl. Everyone they meet are concerned …
Holy smokes
What’s actually burning? Resentment at the rich? Yuen’s casting may also suggest the anger directed at Korean immigrants who made it good, actually so good, that they’ve been flaunting their successes back in Korea. He yawns at the boredom of his latest entertainment, women usually below his class and women who are insecure. And then …
Bullshit jobs
The Ballad of Buster Scuggs (d. Coen Brothers) Support the Girls (d. Andrew Bujalski) Take a look at what the Coen Brothers did with Buster Scruggs. They’re reworking the western by providing unexpected characterizations and endings. But are they really going far enough when they are still using the same painfully tired stereotypes for Native …
White trauma
You Were Never Really Here (d. Lynne Ramsay) Lyrical retelling of Taxi Driver, to some extent. Ramsay’s NYC is also USA circa present day. The interiors are all wood paneling, a throwback to when things were more secure only to be told in flashbacks that things were never that great. Joaquin does the embodiment of …
The art of self-policing
Blackkklansman (d. Spike Lee) Interesting to see two films with black protagonists using the “white voice” released in the past year. For Lee, speaking with a white voice also means a black director making a Hollywood film about racism for the widest/whitest possible audience. The black protagonist, an undercover cop, calls it being a professional. …
Cowboy blues
The Rider (d. Chloe Zhao) Nice small film that’s on the conventional side, Zhao and co. offer us a milder, more sensitive western. What’s so refreshing is how non-bombastic the film is with regards to Americana (though it’s still there); toxic masculinity; “race”; etc., while addressing these issues in its own way. (I kept thinking …
Bird shit
Bird Box (d. Susanne Bier) Instead of asking what the movie is about, why not venture to ask why does this movie exist? This is a story movie. The characters don’t matter as much. Why this rather nifty story, though not quite original since we’ve got A Quiet Place this year, except here they need …
Let them eat irony
The Favourite (d. Yorgos Lanthimos) An ahistorical historical film. Imagine the film’s scenario in the present, like the way the dancing sequence indicates, which by the way has been done to startling effect at least 15 years ago by Sofia Coppola and a teenybopper Heath Ledger movie, there’s no way the film’s representation of women …
Orpheus in Hell: Unlicensed Film Reviews 