This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
When Lee describes the photos that launched her career, she mentions covering an antifa massacre. It's unclear if antifa were the victims of the massacre or its perpetrators. This purposeful vagueness permeates most of Civil War. A film that explicitly doesn't want to “take a side”.. to even represent different sides. But in doing so, it can't muster anything to say, either about the terrors of war, the supposed toxicity of polarisation or the nobility of journalism. The film is…
I did not expect the ethereal, deliberately paced Evil Does Not Exist would resonate for me most profoundly as an allegorical parallel to the biggest news headline of the past month: the tale of Luigi Mangioni, a modern day folk hero who murdered the CEO of a parasitic health insurance company.
I've talked before about my frustration with a pervasive cultural obsession and a leering fascination with the evil actions of individual people, while there is comparable little regard for…
Hits differently post-White Lotus season 3 - I kept on catching Patrick's did-I-fuck-my-brother eyes in Arnie's.
I've forgotten how much I love Verhoeven. His bombasistic style, the ostentatious lean into social satire, littered with scenes of sincerity. My favourite moment is brief, but reflects the film's thematic underpinning - Quaid stops, sans sadness or pity, and sweetly encourages a young girl with facial difference, one of the “mutants” that lives a marginalised existence on Mars. A theme reinforced by the machine gun wielding little person, and mutant bar patrons ready and more than willing to gaslight the fascist police who come storming.
Masterpiece. An incisive, eviscerating satire of American capitalism, compulsive heterosexuality and bodily autonomy. A Verhoeven at the height of his unhinged derangement, paired with his nuanced grasp of theme and metaphor. Very fucking funny and very fucking camp until it's, brutally and shockingly, not. I will never look at pools, chips, boobs, and Gina Gershon the same way ever again.
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
FEMME is a perpetual push and pull. Between masculine and feminine, dom and sub, victim and victimiser, soft and hard, Preston and Jules. But as the film progresses and deepens its two characters, binaries are blurred and burned, breaking the boundary between the two and the absurdity and toxicity of inhabiting just one. Our reaction to the film isn't binary either. We are caught in the fraught feeling of being both repelled and compelled by the actions of Preston, and…
