I was at a birthday bonfire with some of my oldest friends recently and between joking around we mourned time ing faster each year, the difficulties of aging, and how we hold onto our good times more than ever. anyway, I watched this last night and it absolutely wrecked me
Glad others enjoyed this this, but after the soulful sensitivity of Past Lives, I found Materialists disappointingly trite, a movie that essentially has one joke and concept — dating is reducible to the math of appearance and income — and repeats it dozens of times until the obvious solutions present themselves. Song reaches for cosmic insights into modern romance, but miscalculates by forcing her characters to behave more like mannered thematic devices than actual, relatable human beings. I know I say this a lot when I don't connect with a movie I had high hopes for, but I really wanted to love this.
I love Eggers but his Nosferatu is cripplingly tame and oddly chaste, self-consciously yearning to be a grand, psychosexual gothic fantasia about desire, lust and female agency, but in practice has a sense of eroticism as muted and dulled as the color palette. It reminded me of Wright's Last Night in Soho, another example of consummated cine-obsession that revealed an oddly kinkless vision of their own material. There's a *lot* to enjoy, but I badly wanted to love it.
Eggers…
There's so much to love here, but our boys have too many ideas for a movie again. The Final Reckoning is a maximalist mess, chaotically balancing a weirdly somber series tribute, a (janked) FAIL SAFE-like nuclear arms plot, with an action epic template that's oddly light on action. There are many scenes in caves, and even more of military meetings. At its worst, it reminded me of The Rise of Skywalker, with manufactured stakes where things are "happening!" but nothing…
