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Cake day: May 30th, 2024

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  • My - often banal - reasoning for each:

    ‘Ghost’ - I love love (when done correctly) and it’s been long on my watchlist thanks to its cultural zeitgeist.

    ‘La Collectionneuse’ - ‘Ma nuit chez Maud’ is on my watchlist then I discovered it was part of Rohmer’s collection prompting me to watch it in order.

    ‘Secret Admirer’ - It’s love and I have a tenderness for the 80s making it a simple light choice and watch when browsing.

    ‘Topkapi’ - Scrolling through and the name caught my eye as I chose not to enter the palace on a previous trip.

    ‘Love Hurts’ - I wanted to view it in theatres but nobody else did so here I am finally streaming it. I’m now relieved no-one wanted to go.


  • Ghost (1990)
    Posthumous love transcends its pottery-wheel kitsch into genre-blending mastery: part romance, part thriller, part cosmic comedy, and all metaphysical yearning. Swayze’s unchained melody leads to Goldberg’s Oda Mae stealing every scene with perfect levity. Though there, plot issues be damned in the face of love’s victory over death! Its zeitgeist grip is earned and is indeed transcendent. Ditto.

    La Collectionneuse (1967)
    Gamine Haydée’s sexually-liberated presence fractures the languid hypocrisy of two “intellectuals” summering in ennui. Gallery-hopeful Adrien narrates in first-person deceit his moral superiority while coveting Haydée and his friend, sculptor and self-proclaimed barbarian Daniel mimics nonchalance with faux-libertine shrugs. Against their pompous barrage, her nightly routine soon evolves, left ambiguous by agency or mirror. Offering no verdict, but a capsule of 60s moral rot under the sun-kissed Riviera.

    Secret Admirer (1985)
    80s teen tropes abound from slack-jawed parents to mistaken love letters but what sets it apart is its search for romance over sex. Its comedic elements are as effective as Reaganomics yet its embrace of young love’s naïveté and gawky earnestness disarms. Objectively cliché, irresistibly nostalgic.

    Topkapi (1964)
    A meretricious caper gilded by Istanbul’s sun-drenched glamour, buoyed more by location than larcenous genius. Istanbul’s bazaars and palaces shimmer like stolen emeralds, while Turkish wrestling adds cultural heft; both dearly required to divert from languid plotting. It includes the famed wire-dangling theft which birthed a beloved genre trope. This film remains a minor classic, a postcard from heist cinema’s adolescence.

    Love Hurts (2025)
    Anemic Valentine’s entry where romance’s absence is murderously felt. The action sequences are generic edited schlock, but the mismatched casting prove fatal as Quan’s treacly realtor-ex-hitman flails in a role demanding Jackie Chan charm and suffocates on arrival, overshadowed by DeBose’s femme fatale’s negative presence. Their chemistry is even worse, all heart-shaped packaging without a pulse. It exists as a foreclosed property copied from superior blueprints. Mediocrity indeed hurts.


    I preferred when the weekly thread was pinned a few days at the top for easy access and viewing.



  • Garden State (2004)
    A funeral sparks rebirth as a chemical fog lifts when Andrew, numbed by prescriptions, meets Sam, a grounded manic pixie dream girl who radiates sans cloying artifice. Expertly maneuvering clichés with earnest sweetness; each new apt soundtrack elevates his awakening. Though underutilized, the father and he together suture the chronic wound, feeling closure’s quiet catharsis. After long night, sunrise.

    The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
    James and Margaret are bickering clerks unknowingly courting via epistolary exchanges filled with adoring prose. A timeless manuscript of hate-to-love romances, etched permanently into cinema’s DNA. The simple predominant setting elevates characters’ depth, including the side characters to beyond mere fixtures. Eternally charming.

    The Menu (2022)
    Overcooked satire skewers haute consumerism with the subtlety of a cleaver. Chef’s lament, “he aspires for greatness but he’ll never achieve it” echoes the film’s fate. Theming and plating entices as we’re given an amuse-bouche of compelling premise giving way to an entrée of undercooked absurdist narration and a dessert of bland resolution. Style over sustenance; as our protagonist, Margot, says, “I’m still fucking hungry.”

    KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
    Delivering exactly what the title promises, a generic synthesis of K-pop and their idols while slaying demons. Tropes abound as if produced in autotune, character depth flatlines like a dropped verse, and animation occasionally stutters but the original songs in K-pop style, true fandom archetypes, and exaggerated anime-esque reactions crackle with youthful fun verve. Formulaic as K-pop’s mandatory concept change, yet easily palatable like listening to American Top 40.

    The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024)
    Hark! An avaricious shadow falls upon Middle-earth and another withered branch upon the White Tree. Hallowed memory desecrated by this wraith of the Riddermark; landscapes faithfully rendered in mimicry, pallid heroes bereft of myth and soul, animation jerks with the grace of orcs. This is no heir to Peter Jackson’s reverence. Fly! Even The Hobbit’s follies shone brighter.




  • Nomadland (2020)
    “I’m not homeless. I’m just house-less.”
    A luminous psalm of resilience, reframing desolation not as punishment but eudaimonic poetry through Fern, a woman anchored by transience. Barren landscapes tenderly beckon against sterile parking lots; sunsets gild trailer windows and parched sand like sacramental gold. Here, in rootless soil, communal kindness blooms with startling generosity. An elegy etched in mundanity, transforming hardship into quietly effulgent transcendence.

    Babylon (2022)
    Kafkaesque spectacle rolling from chaotic bacchanal speciousness into biting bitterness, then abrupt, saccharine collapse. A relentless three hour Hollywood love letter but the celluloid fever dream never numbs, referential filmic brio accentuates its core passion and the soundtrack defies torpor. La La Land’s darker, inconsistent, messier twin but still an ode to the silver screen and its excess.

    The Legend of the Condor Heroes: The Gallant (2025)
    A panoramic wuxia epic thrusts us mid-saga, directly into a war between the Mongols and the Jin Dynasty while the main character hails from the Song Dynasty. Required heavy exposition occasionally hinders momentum and the brotherhood theme feels rote, yet Mongolian steppes and cultures rendered with breathtaking grandeur and surprising reverence dazzles and awes. A flawed but vibrant cultural tapestry of nomadic spirit.

    Lebanon (2009)
    War’s vitriolic truth funnelled through a tank’s targeting eye; its initial claustrophobic focus curdles into sclerotic fatigue. In a welcome allegory, the turret basket pools with oil, urine, and shell casings like bodily fluids in a wounded soldier. As the Sho’t tank grinds brokenly onwards, the film’s power too stalls. Unflinchingly authentic but ultimately mired.

    Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)
    A fossilized facsimile of Jurassic Park’s greatest hits, desultorily exhuming island form and nostalgic scenes without their primal soul. Human characters swarm like overabundant comp(y)sognathus carcasses; Xavier’s egregious presence hemorrhages goodwill like a sauropod’s arterial spray. Exhausted Velociraptors still outpace their Mutadon replacements and the mutant dinosaur finale is pure abomination, all ugly teeth and cheap shock fills its cranium. Dinosaurs remain theropod-terrible joys, yet this taxonomic travesty lets human bloat titanosaur over Mesozoic spectacle. Franchise ossified in amber; life fails to find a way.


    Automod and pinning failure made me miss this weekly thread initially.

    I knew I should have watched 28 Years Later instead but I got outvoted. I’ll try for this weekend.




  • Brokeback Mountain (2006)
    A lifelong forbidden love ignites when Ennis’ stoic repression and Jack’s yearning defiance collide in one fateful Wyoming summer. Despite the vast wandering vistas, they soon find society’s suffocating edifice still shackles, which shapes their lives through decades of concealed ache. This transcends far beyond just “gay cowboys”, it’s a catholic howl against social conformity’s cage, where love festers in shadows and self-denial becomes survival. Two decades since release, its tremors still fracture the soul. A paradise lost, “old Brokeback got us good” Jack whispers.

    Hair (1979)
    A verdant time capsule of hippie idealism, its kaleidoscopic costumes and vibrant choreography elevates the anti-war anthems filling us with Electric Blues euphoria. We’re all debutantes seduced by the Aquarius dream, Ain’t Got No care but freedom, mocking societal rigidity and hypocrisy which villainizes Hashish yet metes out death. Though late to Vietnam, its spirit remains evergreen showing there’s no difference between Black Boys and White Boys all asking Where Do I Go? Hare Krishna indeed, we’re all Going Down but feverously reminded that I Got Life and needless war is the perennial foe.

    Falling Down (1993)
    We witness Douglas’ character the day he descends into societal anomie, his villainy masquerading as righteous fury. An autopsy of the American psyche; prejudices laid bare, he’s lucid rage erupting between banal bigotries and it chills as he coherently rationalizes each outburst. His hope for martyrdom and his final plea reveals the true underlying universal issue. No catharsis, only collapse.
    @memfree@piefed.social as promised!

    Hanu-Man (2024)
    This anachronistic parody flip-flops between Bollywood buffoonery and earnest heroics. Subpar CGI is the least of its worries as the villain’s sidekick gratingly proclaims “shazam” in nearly every sentence while the villain is a ludicrous relic of 80’s B-movies. Not saved by the monkey god’s might, but by the power of familial bonds and its song and dance numbers. However, I’d sooner re-watch this over Shazam!

    Gladiator II (2024)
    Stultifying spectacle of sequel decay, a thunderous CGI colossus with lightning absent from its veins. Mistaking magnificence for majesty, its marquee celebrities and grand visual opulence siphons essential vitality to leaden choreography and a moribund script. A two and a half hour threnodic parade to inter the deceased Muses.


  • Joy Ride (2023)
    Buckle up for a gloriously raucous hot rod in female-led comedy. It’s unabashedly ribald, fiercely sex-positive, and a welcome reprieve by flipping burnt-out gender stereotypes; although its brazenness may eject sensitive viewers. Even a perfunctory “finding roots” theme and the Deadeye character equivalent to a flat can’t stop it from punching the accelerator. Rare proof that empowerment and raunch can both ride in the front seat.

    The Idea of You (2024)
    A piquant romcom deploying familiar tropes yet elevated by the taboo pairing of an older woman with a younger man revealing societal hypocrisy. While the male interest is the unfortunate embodiment of the manic pixie dream guy, a charming undercooked fantasy, Solène’s family-first sacrifice adds emotional ballast, making the happy ending feeling earned. Formulaic but compellingly human.

    Robot & Frank (2012)
    A warm, quirky tale about a retired thief and his android caretaker forging an unlikely bond. Sadly undermined by extraneous subplots, the most egregious is Madison’s irrelevant character; and a forced revelation defies credulity. Thankfully, its brisk runtime and central heart prevail.

    Wyrmwood (2014)
    Aspires to be a hybrid of Mad Max’s chrome fury and Dawn of the Dead’s dreadful horror but misfires and sputters into shambling neutral. Campy absurdity sparks too late amid tonally jarring shifts, while neither horror nor humour properly ignites. Brief spurts of fleshed-out scenes injects potential but is ultimately devoured by the undead. Choose a lane.

    Eat, Pray, Love (2010)
    “Americans know entertainment, but don’t know pleasure” is this film’s inadvertent epitaph. Profoundly American superficiality, tailor-made for “live, laugh, love” audiences mistaking spiritual tourism for enlightenment. It fully embodies the banal aphorism of its title, pleasant Kodak sunsets masks the starvation of authenticity. A hollow triptych of postcard profundity.


    All this vehicular imagery was fun and a little exhausting to write.




  • Manhattan (1979)
    A gorgeously shot, romanticized, monochromatic love letter to its namesake. It captures not only iconic scenic landmarks of the city, but relational complexities of love through its earnest writing, dissecting the messiness of human connection filled with hidden insecurities with wit and honesty. This is surprisingly my first Woody Allen film but assuredly not my last.
    “You don’t know what love means. I don’t know what it means. Nobody out there knows what the hell’s going on.”

    Demolition (2016)
    Davis suffers from emotional vacancy following his wife’s death and attempts to feel something, manifests in nihilistic dismantling of life’s structures through antipathic antics, even when context arrives late he’s long been anesthetized by numbness. The anodyne sweetness of the rushed third act fails to buttress lost goodwill. I applaud the tricky cinematic concept but Gyllenhaal’s solidity can’t fully salvage narrative demolition.

    Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)
    Visually sumptuous cinematography and CGI can’t elevate this from Beneath its predecessors. It Rises only shortly past Dawn as a middling entry, regurgitating woefully familiar narrative themes while the aptly named Proximus Caesar bastardizes and wages War against the original’s legacy. Its runtime fails to Escape lulls and drags towards a cheap cliffhanger. Not a reinvigorating Conquest for the franchise, but not a completely lost Battle.

    The Rezort (2015)
    Jurassic Park if stripped of thematic awe and dinosaurs are swapped for zombies. Once you overlook its flawed premise and facile social commentary, it shuffles into surprisingly competent, undemanding genre fare. Never transcending its derivative roots, but delivers a prosaic and crunchy diversion for the undead-starved.

    Assassination Nation (2018)
    Blatant derivative of The Purge meets formulaic parody of digital-age outrage but lacks the original’s visceral punch. Chekhov’s gun misfires repeatedly as plot points fizzle in the proverbial rain, nearly making its plot holes redundant. Only the well-shot kinetic home invasion sequence provides an isolated spark. Spiritless vim; ultimately as hollow as its characters’ rage.



  • Begin Again (2013)
    Liking Carney Once is natural, twice perhaps coincidental, but thrice in a row leads me to surmise I simply enjoy what he has to offer. This melodic tapestry of bruised souls finding harmony amidst the cacophony of life offers a genuine, uplifting story that quietly restores faith in humanity - and the commercialized music industry. This is the second Carney movie I’ve watched in recent months and I am sure now to fast-track the remainder.

    The Wild Robot (2024)
    The tender odyssey of true familial bonds; of found parenthood, adolescent growing pains, and self-acceptance amidst adversity. Radiating more authentic heart than modern Disney, its creators’ passion are evident in each frame with animation warmth unseen since Into the Spider-Verse and the more recent Ne Zha 2. It is disarmingly pure and allows one to easily overlook its plot holes. This is a true family film.

    The King and I (1956)
    A spectacle firmly of its bygone era, boasting typical grand sets and dazzling costumes. However, its foundation feels increasingly antiquated and is lacking the enduring charm and compelling narrative found in the The Sound of Music. Technically splendid, emotionally anemic.

    Companion (2025)
    A present on the concept of self seemingly enveloped in a thriller veneer but ultimately we discover the wrapping to be more substantial than the gift. Its potential for deeper resonance is lost with gaping plot holes and narrative convenience that strains credulity. Yet still an enjoyable surface level experience.

    Nobody (2021)
    Essentially John Wick stripped of mythos and plunged into a more grounded, suburban reality. It delivers competently choreographed action but lacks a distinctive style or the relentlessness of its inspiration. A fun, visceral ride, yet ultimately feels like a less memorable, albeit decent, copy.



  • The worst movie of this week’s list if watched in many of the previous weeks would have been situated at the top; what a lineup!

    My Dinner with Andre (1981)
    My god. This enchanting, verisimilitudinous evening had me so spellbound, I desired to be a fly on the wall for every future conversation. Malle masterfully navigates the treacherous straits, avoiding both pretentiousness and the shallows of pseudo-intellectuals. It’s a film composited of the now rare authentic discourse without a hint of artifice or speciousness. There is no grand message being proselytized, just a stark tête-à-tête of two minds shown in this perfectly imperfect cinematic marvel.

    Naked (1993)
    A ravaging, unflinching descent into societal decay embodied by a loquacious nihilist known simply as Johnny who verbally eviscerates the perceived vacuities around him like a feral, intellectual schoolyard bully. This is a raw, ugly world, a X-ray exposing the festering wound of our collective spiritual homelessness. Johnny isn’t just lost; he’s the furious, articulate symptom of a world that discarded him, and which he, in turn, discards with vicious futility. The supporting cast is likewise absolutely brilliant. My singular gripe is the Machiavellian Jeremy subplot did not come to a head yet it barely dims this bleak, brilliant, essential mirror.

    The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)
    “We are infinite.” Rarely does a tagline resonate with such aptness. This beautiful coming-of-age tale flirts with familiar clichés yet endearingly embraces and transforms into a poignant film of self-discovery and healing. While the climatic revelation stumbles slightly, it does not diminish the film’s hopeful tone.

    A Man Escaped (1956)
    This film strips prison escape to its stark, exacting essence, unclad of superfluity, with every sound purposeful, shots only necessary, dialogue and voiceover laconic. The palpable tension stems not from visible villains, but from the solitary, agonizing precision of the attempt. The antithesis of Michael Bay, a symphony of restraint where silence screams louder than any explosion.

    Harold and Maude (1971)
    Young Harold, morbidly fixated on death finds unlikely kinship in ancient Maude’s - possibly cinema’s eldest manic pixie dream girl - vitalic whimsy. Eccentric, hopeful absurdism is its crux and its deliberate juxtaposition has a certain charm that earns its cult status. Understandably divisive, undeniably unique.


    I unabashedly spent the most amount of time writing this week’s reviews, hopefully doing justice to these marvellous films.