Weathering With You (d. Shinkai Matoko) From the director of Your Name (2016), Weathering is far less coherent than the previous film and the new work, despite its attempt at romance, flounders; primarily because the kids are underaged so that something as discreet like kissing elicits anxious sweating. Instead, the film works as a cautionary …
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Regimented bodies
Venom (d. Ruben Fleischer) Interesting that two movies, Annihilation and Venom, that came out in 2018 have similar imageries of the white human body absorbing aliens without interrupting the integrity of their human physical form, at least outwardly. In the former film, everyone else not white is dispatched to the grave while the sole white …
Colonial inheritance
Hereditary (d. Ari Aster) Where exactly does the movie takes place? The miniatures adds to the eerieness and Muriel (1994) + the single mom from The Sixth Sense (1999) ramps up the creepiness. The unlocatability and everywhereness of the film indicates the universal effects and cluelessness of white settler colonialism. The film could be set …
Water sports
Shape of Water (d. Guillermo del Toro) For a poetically titled movie, it makes a vulgar point to spell out the anatomical part involved in the inter-species sexual encounter that the movie might just as well be called the Shape of Penis. The movie is insistently heterosexual in its point of view that Aquaman can …
American snipers
Suicide Squad (2016) (d. David Ayer) It goes without saying that it’s a terrible film. It is not entirely pointless because it is doing something, which is the placating of underdog sentiments. At one level, the movie is a reaction to the heavily plotted, multi-part Marvel flicks. At another, it is tapping into the Trumpian …
Wolf in Takashimaya bought clothing
Take Care, Red Riding Hood (d. Moritani Shiro) It doesn’t know what it wants to be and it’s not a good movie. Released in 1969, the film follows a college bound student whose plans to begin his studies at Tokyo U is derailed by student protests. The film is so annoyingly classist that it thinks …
Nostalgia for a whiter America
Stranger Things Season 1 – 3 I’ve yet to read someone pointing out the nostalgia for the kind of work and economy that was still possible in the 80s in the Stranger Things series. The Winona Ryder character is a single mom who is able to provide for her two sons just by working at …
Family mart
Shoplifters (d. Kore-eda Hirokazu) I really wish that the movie was more biting or critical instead of its nuanced, “humane” stance. It doesn’t move beyond the realm of a standard understanding of human motivation, a kind of universalized humanism that I’m beginning to tire of. Within these parameters, the movie is a marvel. It is …
Nationalism is kawaii
Mirai (Mirai no Mirai) (d. Hosoda Mamoru) The Japanese title is Mirai no Mirai, which is a play on words because Mirai is the young boy’s little sister’s name and mirai also means future. The kid either imagines or falls into a fantasy world where he skips along different periods in Japanese history. The important …
Unforgiven
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (d. Marielle Heller) I didn’t articulate well why I didn’t like this rather well-made movie. On the literal level, it’s a film about an unlikable character who forges documents in order to pay the bills. She, a lesbian, befriends a gay man who has seen better days and who also …
Orpheus in Hell: Unlicensed Film Reviews 