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jungletechno93
Reviews
La bête (2023)
Cronenberg pastiche with dull & pretentious Nolan trappings
Some reviewers invoked Lynch and Haneke, but those directors' involving subtlety is completely absent. This comes off more like the worst Cronenberg you've ever seen (an imaginary one, not A Dangerous Method), combined with the portentous, barely-comprehensible and boring aspects of Christopher Nolan.
The script is deeply pretentious and clunky. How Seydoux ever agreed to this is beyond me. The writers fail to develop the AI material beyond a reflection of the most basic contemporary fears. It's the type of SF that gets made by people who've apparently seen & read very little of the genre - which mixing up the various timelines at random cannot disguise. But it's not just the script. The set piece imagery consists of hackneyed tropes from SF past (flooded & deserted streets; a dollmaker's workshop) which only serve to remind you how much better the themes were dealt with by Ballard, Fassbinder, Scott etc.
The music is inappropriate and too loud, coming & going to no effect, as randomly as the scenes themselves.
Perhaps most cripplingly, the love interest guy is annoying and not believable as Seydoux's lust object. There's a scene featuring several minutes of heavy breathing that made me lol. I walked out soon afterwards. The film must have been an hour and a half in by that point, and showed no signs of staggering to a close.
The three stars are all for Seydoux, who needs a better agent.
Civil War (2024)
Total failure to engage with its primary subject matter
A generic, weakly-scripted dystopia. Since the characters are poorly developed, and even the set pieces tend to fall flat, there's a reliance on jump scares to elicit response. Cliches abound. The young reporter is an obvious casting error. And worst of all, given it is about media types engaging with a civil war, the film completely fails to discuss the media's culpability in the rise of echo chambers, hate crime and warlike rhetoric, which renders the whole exercise pointless. Imagine a film where the makers had bothered to consider the revolving doors between politics and media, between politics and the weapons industry: there's endless mileage for a great thriller there, perhaps a contemporary update of 1970s paranoia classics like The China Syndrome and Three Days of the Condor. But unfortunately, this director's Ex Machina now looks more and more like a fluke (Men and Annihilation both being missed opportunities). If you want two hours of overly loud and meaningless gunfire, this is for you.
Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023)
A small scale modern classic. Could be adapted into a great TV show
Although deceptively simple in concept and structure, this stayed with me for weeks afterwards. Script and performances strike a perfect balance between comedy and pathos. The Office-style office talk is hilarious, and I'm guessing that some parts must have been improvised. A few members of the ensemble cast are given moments to shine even brighter when we're shown glimpses of certain characters' personal lives, subverting our earlier assumptions about them, and here Marcia DeBonis deserves special mention for a heartbreaking scene towards the end. Casting is very strong; everyone does great work, and Daisy Ridley's performance is phenomenal, helped considerably by some thoughtful framing and blocking that really adds to the character. And while the abstract fantasy element works well, the other big star is the setting. The many gorgeous establishing shots and segues give the town a deep sense of place, somewhere it's a pleasure to inhabit, and left me wanting more. In fact the palpable "slipping into a hot bath" feeling I experienced reminded me of things like Northern Exposure and Twin Peaks - and I would definitely watch multiple seasons, given the chance.