About five minutes in, I felt like I was reading a masterpiece even though I know very little about the graphic novel/comic genre. This is some mesmerizing inking (Burns won a lot of “Best Inker” awards for this work). The panels almost look like woodcuts. It’s about teenagers and adolescence and how we see our bodies during those important formative years, as simultaneously beautiful and grotesque. The world of Black Hole is bleak, boring, and pretty horrifying. And we’re talking moody teenagers so you get to witness a lot of terrible decisions, angst, ennui, despair, friendship, love, sex, camaraderie, depression, grief, humor, violence, acceptance, and hope in a very short span of pages. Lots of yonic imagery. The author published this over a ten-year period starting in 1995 and it looks like these are almost exclusively what he worked on during that timespan. Amazing.
"Robert Pattinson said to me before agreeing to this, ‘I don’t want to make a movie about a magical lighthouse. I want to make a movie about a fucking crazy person.’”
Saw with LD. Noir, Jung, myth and mythology, Proteus, Prometheus, masculinity, sexuality, very large phallus, isolation, identity, lobster dinners, psychosis, mermaids, flatulence, alcoholism, omens, portents, songs, odes, the-father-is-the-son-is-the-father, Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
“Every Frame a Painting” and it somehow manages to be quite funny at times. Oh and this (emphasis mine):
Underneath the jargon and flatulence, the film is mostly concerned with identity.
Saw with LD. An absolute delight. Maeve Higgins is just wonderful. Will Forte does Will Forte things with aplomb. I thought it was Edgar Wright meets Stranger Things (kinda.)
Jason Bateman directed the first few episodes of this show and appears to be on a roll (saw this right after the third season of Ozark.) It was a 10-episode miniseries that was 5 episodes too long. Everything about the antagonist was either laughable or inconsistent. Cynthia Erivo was magnificent as the wicked-smaht and quirky Holly Gibney whose savant-superpowers remained largely unused by the plot.
An entertaining, unsettling, dissatisfying Lovecraftian allegory for suburban life and child-rearing (esp the teenage years.) Dragged on for a bit: I imagine it would’ve worked great as a Black Mirror episode. Jonathan Aris and Senan Jennings were supremely creepy and magnificent and perfectly cast for their roles 🙌
Moody and plenty gruesome. Got tired of the commune’s many ‘rituals’. Florence Pugh is 💯, as is the creepy-ass soundtrack. Learned about senicide. First half is a bit of a slow burn like “Hereditary”.
Excellent stuff again from Jordan Peele. Thought the first half was about slavery and lost identity. Wisecrack has a great video on the movie’s various interpretations.
Saw with LD. Long, slow, visceral, beautiful, gory. Kept me guessing. Excellent stuff.
There’s a pervasive hush and sense of stillness that lingers over the region of Gokseong, and scenes of brazen, crazed madness are often preceded by shots of tranquil mountain vistas whose lush, thickly forested landscapes increasingly feel smothering and secretive. This is a film as beautiful as it is gory, as painstakingly scenic as it is committed to stark visual interplays between darkness and light.
All the while, the story of Gokseong unfolds in fits and starts, each puzzle piece more confusing than the last. Are the residents of the town being systematically poisoned with a drug that causes them to become frenzied, savage killers? Are they being cursed? Or is it both, and for what reason? Na’s writing layers tension upon tension, particularly through the escalating paranoia that each of the townspeople comes to feel for any and all outsiders.
However, answers are much harder to find in this film than accusations. Horror fans wanting a plot whose ending dovetails nicely with all the elements that preceded it may wind up feeling frustrated, though many more may be drawn into the heart of its darkness: the conviction that terror has come to this town and there is no escape to be had.
Deeply upsetting. One of the best horror movies I’ve ever seen. Anthony Lane of The New Yorker on what gives it its potency
Should you want to measure the psychological disturbance at work here, try comparing “Hereditary” with “A Quiet Place.” That recent hit, for all its masterly shocks, is at bottom a reassuring film, introducing people who are beset by an external menace but more or less able to pull through because, as a team, they’re roped together with enough love to fight back. “Hereditary” is more perplexing. It has the nerve to suggest that the social unit is, by definition, self-menacing, and that the home is no longer a sanctuary but a crumbling fortress, under siege from within. That is why there are no doctors in Aster’s film, and no detectives, either, urgently though both are required; nor does a man of God arrive, as he does in “The Exorcist” (1973), to lay the anguish to rest. Nothing, in short, can help Annie, Steve, and the kids, and they sure can’t help themselves, stationed as they are inside their delicate doll’s house of a world. There is no family curse in this remarkable movie. The family is the curse.
Saw this with SC. Doesn’t let go for 90 minutes. Jim from The Office is killing it these days. MS: “This is what happens once you get away from a toxic workplace.” 😂
