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Red Flowers and Green Leaves (China, 2018)
Liu Miaomiao and Hu Weijie’s Red Flowers and Green Leaves treat a very complicated matter in a very simplified way. While being a story about marriage, the film only explicitly follows one side of the story: it is told from the point of view of the groom, Gubo (Luo Kewang). At first, this might seem…
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Regular Film Posting (January 13-20)
Brave (2012) & Aladdin (1992) Been watching Disney films with Olivia for the past months. Instead of commenting on each, will probably just lay down a general observation for both. Disney films, for better or for worse, have been great showcases of white American contemporary culture. Contemporary, being contemporary for each of the films’ releases.…
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Regular Film Posting (January 6-12)
Sorry to Bother You (2018) It is not hard to love this film. On one end, it functions as a (re)affirmation for everyone to see it being about the value of human labor as essential to generation of any sort of value. On another, it’s a real bait for Marxists, probably a more effective bait…
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Regular Film Posting (January 1-5)
Insects (2018) There are three living surrealists in cinema who are still actively working to this day. David Lynch seemed to give up back in 2006 with Inland Empire to focus on his new age campaigns (which he calls transcendental meditation) but were able to make a comeback in 2017 with a new season of…
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Killing (Japan, 2018) [SDAFF 2018]
If one is to assess Killing as the work of Shinya Tsukamoto, you may find it kind of lacking as it is less spectacular than the director’s 1980s and 90s works. But that does not take away the complexity of the themes that he is dealing with. Structurally, the film is closer to Gemini (1999), which tried to expand…
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Mirai (Japan, 2018) [Reel Asian 2018]
Mirai finds Mamoru Hosoda recreating the dimensional experiments in content, as seen in his The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), and in form, like in Wolf Children (2012), but intimately takes place in a single setting. But this film is no downgrade. Rather, the choice of form and content pushes the technique both to its conceptual and theoretical limits.…
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NIGHTSCAPE (South Korea, 2017)
Inchun Oh’s NIGHTSCAPE presents a simple but admittedly scary situation via an ingenious application of first-person POV style. Found footage has been the weapon of choice of low budget filmmakers for some time now. Right away, found footage necessarily implements the film frame as the characters’ subjectivity and bypasses conventional narrative’s need for establishing sequences. Due to…
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Violence Voyager (Japan, 2018) [JAPAN CUTS 2018]
There is no escaping the visual charm of Ujicha’s conceptually playful science fiction film Violence Voyager. While being a follow up to a film with similar style, the elusiveness of availability of the director’s first feature, The Burning Buddha Man (2013), makes Violence Voyager still quite a novel treat. While the style isn’t anything new, Ujicha’s “gekimation” being a variety…
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Dukun (Malaysia, 2018) [NYAFF 2018]
Dain Iskandar Said’s Dukun might be confusing at first, due to its choice of narrative style. The film presents itself in a non-linear way as it strives to bridge genres. At first, the narrative seems to pivot on Karim (Faizal Hussein), who’s looking for his missing daughter. The narrative structure becomes rambling as he meets Diana Dahlan…