Vibes is good.
“I like breathing. I’m good at it.”
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Same. When she took her final flight in S2 I was floored. So much emotion put in that one hand movement.
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I saw it in a double bill when Gus van Sant’s Elephant came out. The maker, Alan Clarke, would have been quite a big deal on British television and made some well regarded films like Rita, Sue, and Bob too (which comes up in Clio Bernard’s amazing the Arbor based on Andrea Dunbar’s life and works). The crux of Blindboy’s criticisms are on the 35 minutes mark there and he’s dead right about the fatal flaw of the film. For me he’s too generous with the positives - it’s just people going out doing what look like professional hits with no dialogue and giving foley artists the license to go wild with the echoing footsteps in underground car parks (was anyone actually murdered in an underground car park in the North? Seriously?). Okay maybe it’s just me that gets annoyed with foley artists thinking everyone is wearing Chelsea boots on parquet floors all the time (see Blow up) but it got wearing after a while.
Anyway he’s right that deracinating the killings leads to a facile “understanding” of the troubles. He’s also right in that it doesn’t feature any paramilitary police, army, or special forces/intelligence agency killing or being killed (it was made in a highly censored environment). It also is probably not representative of how and what types of killings were done. I get that its formal minimalism might have seemed revolutionary at the time but given the state censorship it was made under at the time and given its lack of engagement in actual issues it is at best a slight and formal piece best viewed as an abstract rather than a serious engagement with the actual Northern Ireland.
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Aaaaah, Kaiju!!!
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Ah, Dr. Who…
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Contains Spoilers
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“I don’t make films anymore,” said Haenel in a new interview with the German magazine FAQ. When asked why, she added, “Because of political reasons. Because the film industry is absolutely reactionary, racist, and patriarchal. We are mistaken if we say that the powerful are of goodwill, that the world is indeed moving in the right direction under their good and sometimes unskillful management. Not at all. The only thing that moves society structurally is social struggle. And it seems to me that in my case, to leave is to fight. By leaving this industry for good, I want to take part in another world, in another cinema.”
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Pretty spiffy collection. These films come from various sources, some of which won’t be available to everyone.
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Neptune Frost is dense, a film and musical like few others. Even describing it as a movie would be inaccurate. For artists and directors Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, the “film” of Neptune Frost is just part of a multimedia project encompassing the music and graphic novel, first brought to realization with the MartyrLoserKing album released by Williams in 2016 and a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2018.
It’s a deliberately lo-fi Afrofuturist story about the links between modern-day colonialism and the capitalist system that feeds on it, about queer liberation as a step toward liberation for all, and the ability for a community to embrace the technological chains that are used to hold them back and instead take control. It’s a story of this intersex runaway finding a community that rejects the capitalist system run by “The Authority” to live collectively, using the land and the minerals once stolen from them to enrich themselves. A story where the role of these devices in both control and liberation of race, labor, gender, sexuality, and existence is explored in depth through the eyes of the oppressed.
It’s also a love story, just one where the fight to be free is deeply intertwined into the dynamics of the relationship between Neptune and coltan miner Matalusa. “We see how Neptune’s power is distributed through her connection with another superhero, Matalusa,” noted Uzeyman, as both they and Williams spoke about the film over Zoom. “Energy comes from his work in the coltan mine, the precious metal used to distribute power in our technology. That is their story. We are proposing this universe, but between things, a lot of what we experience is made by your mind and your own persona and your own poetry and your own ability to be a part of that world.”
This looks interesting, but unfortunately has a very limited release and is not playing anywhere near me. 
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I was a few episodes in before I realised 
Then again, I didn’t watch much GoT.
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There were way too many characters in GoT for me to remember any of the actors except for the main characters.
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Oooooh, are we allowed to say that around here? 
Meither neither. I think I lasted 2 episodes. Thanks to the pointless, gratuitous violence and conventionally vanilla hetero sex, just for starters.
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All that and the realisation that it was going to take years to finish.
I’m not that good at commitment…
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I binged the series in about 2 months (1-2 eps a day weekdays). The last 3 seasons are pretty short.
Since the show employed virtually everyone in the UK who wasn’t doing Doctor Who at the given moment, there is a lot of “Hey, I recognize that actor!”
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Which is great, looking back now, but back 10 years ago or whatever, ugh…
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