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ngruber-1
Reviews
I Used to Go Here (2020)
Uneven
The tone was all over the place. Sometimes people behaved like they do in the real world and other people were in some totally different movie (the bed and breakfast host was unrealistic, bradley cooper?). It felt like Kris decided to shoot the third draft of this script instead of getting some good notes. It was sadly also just one of those films where you wonder what the point of it was. What was the filmmaker trying to convey. This is how I felt about Swanberg's previous effort as well. Maybe, like the protagonist of this movie, She's just not a very good writer.
Ratched (2020)
Once Again Below the Line was Working Hard and Above the Line Phoned it In
Just terrible story. Made no sense. Like it was written by a half committed drunk person who turned in a terrible first draft. Such a shame because the music, the art direction, the acting, everyone else showed up and worked hard. What a spectacular waste of everyone's efforts.
Does nobody give Ryan Murphy notes???
Budapest (2018)
Amateurish.
Maybe this is funny in France. I have no idea. But it's so so bad. The jokes fall flat and rely entirely on thin cliches and tired, played out stereotypes. I couldn't make it through this garbage film.
Storyville: 112 Weddings (2014)
It's...OK COuld have been a lot better
I think the idea, the core concept to take all this footage and turn it into a doc was pretty good but ultimately Block's editing doesn't elevate the material. The sum is not greater than its parts. It's a mishmash of old wedding footage and more or less not very compelling interviews. We spent precious little time on the weddings themselves so the effect was diluted and ultimately we weren't invested in any one story. Block got some people to talk about their marriage HE also didn't manage to get too much out of his subject so as a viewer we feel we are watching a very self censored interview. This is really the challenge of shooting a doc without a script...and it's obvious Block had no script.
The Good Night (2007)
What is the point of this story.
It's a real bummer when you see the potential in a cast but the script doesn't live up to their abilities. The directing is adept, the camera-work is nice but ultimately I don't get anything out of this film. You have a character who escapes from his naggy one dimensional girlfriend to a model in some billboard prancing around on a beach. If we are going to get into why dreams are cool please spare us the old cliché of some hot chick on a beach. Clichés or not the biggest crime of the film is that it has no point. I am not invested int he flimsy characters and I don't buy the story. It's a true feat when we spend half of a film inside a character's head and learn almost nothing about him. Paltrow needs a lesson from Fellini, Bunuel and some others who know how to make a dream interesting...
Mothlight (1963)
textures
Brakhage made this piece by physically placing moth wings and other things to white leader and fixing them in place with splicing tape. interesting to watch this because it reminds us how trained we are to look for narrative and pattern in everything we see. i found myself searching for redundancies, trying to "figure out" what was going on. I then allowed myself to just sit back and let myself be transported by the material. Made me feel like I'ma little insect zipping through the grass in a field. Like Brakhage's other works, it is very much a collage projected versus what we traditionally call a film. Not unlike more static visual arts like painting and photography where we allow ourselves to get to the meaning alone as opposed to being given the meaning by the author.