there's slice of life, and then there's the whole damn cake.
the four hours of A Bright Summer Day deliberately build a space and a time with the fidelity of a memory.
it's beautiful to behold: frames within frames within frames — through windows, doorways, and mosquito nets, we observe the goings on of this greek chorus of characters. massive crowds are staged just-so; long tracking shots thoughtfully reorient the audience between fraying narratives. some moments capture the delicate overlap…
i feel like my experience may have hinged heavily on watching Herzog's 1979 version recently, but i adored this as a exploration / interpretation of a familiar narrative (though i wonder if my experience would've changed if this was my "first" nosferatu watch)
on a technical level, this is Eggers' finest piece of filmmaking; the way the camera moves as an ethereal observer across space/time really brings you under the film/antagonist's mesmeric power
acting was great across the board, but…
a film about immigration, architecture, survival, spirituality, addiction, achievement, guilt, artistry, obsession, camaraderie, capitalism, isolation, co-dependency, community, xenophobia, love, surrender, sex, and sacrifice — the things we build, and the things we break.
oftentimes, the word "epic" is used in filmmaking to describe things like Dune or 1917. something that portrays action, fantasy, or spectacle at a grand scale.
but The Brutalist is epic in the scope of what it explores; what it expresses. does it perfectly succeed in every…
“if [our child] is a girl, we’ll name her Sunnyhope. if it’s a boy, we’ll name him… Francis.”
this was perhaps the line of dialogue that truly broke me in the otherworldly indulgent self-insert fanfiction of this overburdened opus of a film
okay, look: making a sweeping work about postmodern ideals is well and good, but what makes that kind of art interesting is how those ideals collide with reality and human adversity. i guess when you’re a director whose…
