When I was a teenager I used to delight in playing my LPs backwards and listening for all those Satanic messages. I bet if you played Tenet backwards you’d hear the devil mutter something palindromic like “what the fuck the what”
Now I’m not one to say this film made no sense at all, in fact when the music shut up for long enough that I was able to hear what the characters were actually saying there were literally words…
Having commandeered a friendly whale to beat the traffic I found myself with plenty of time to reflect on this bullshit. I mean, I know I’m swimming against the tide but this is a thin soup of the alphabet variety that spells garbage.
Is this what all the money in cinema can buy: a cutting edge 3D screensaver for the upcoming macOS Pandora? And I thought the MCU was the bottom of the barrel, but this is Cameron in his…
I watched this doco on Leos Carax in anticipation of the upcoming Melbourne Cinémathèque season which features Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais Sang, Les Amants du Pont Neuf, Pierre or the Ambiguities, Holy Motors, It’s Not Me and a couple of shorts. The fact that this makes up the majority of Carax’s output over a more than 40 year career is a tragedy of modern cinema. He makes films that no one else is capable of making, somehow channeling the origins…
A delightful divertissement observing childish play against a static backdrop of constant change. Languorous yet tightly framed and edited. Committed to the invention and playfulness of games. Almost effortless in locating the profound within the silly. All wrapped in nature and the passage of time.
Economy: not a wasted word.
Love: a story of misery, grounded in compassion, but mostly a story of love.
Alcoholic reasoning: depressed because he drinks, drinks because he’s depressed.
The consolations of music: Tchaikovsky’s tragic sixth acting as the main characters’ love theme; Karaoke Schubert!; and melancholic pop.
Colours: never have they been so rich and so sad.
Oppression: Russia’s attacks on the Ukraine breathing down the necks of the Finns, while unemployment and poverty strangle them.
Deadpan delights: Jarmusch’s The…
This was not at all what I expected. I thought it would be a tough as nails noir, but its more like a fairy tale. I’d read a lot of good things about the film’s unbearable tension, but it completely failed to land for me. I found the whole thing tonally turbulent, rocking between a religious fable, a bed time story, a Huck Finn adventure, a dark thriller and a Broadway musical - these are difficult things to combine into…
