• Rev [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    That actually sounds like really good storytelling. I love it when books or films give you this very vague and subtle gut feeling of things going horribly wrong but you can't quite articulate how or why, or what it is even that feels off. A great example is how at least half the viewers could have sworn they saw the head in the box in Se7en but it was never shown. Hell I was pretty sure myself it was quasi-subliminaly flashed for a moment on the screen and had to go back and rewatch the ending.

    Btw, I just remembered another title with explicitly anti-imperialist messaging that's pretty effective emotionally - Black Sails. It's a TV series rather than a movie but was no less cinematic than stuff made for the big screen. It's also the one and only serious no holds barred pirate "movie", despite the history of on-screen pirate renditions being as old as cinema itself.

    • Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I've been meaning to watch Black Sails for a while, pirates and naval stuff in general has always fascinated me since I was a kid and the first Pirates of the Caribbean came out.

      I was talking with some friends about our favorite films this year, and I think mine has to be Uncut Gems. Just the sense of dread and anxiety that builds up through that film is crazy. I was having a particularly bad week when I went to see it in theaters, in the time before COVID, and I had an intense reaction, almost a anxiety attack watching the movie- and I'm normally a pretty calm person, I don't get anxiety attacks. I liked Sorry to Bother You, obviously Boots Riley has got good politics, but surrealism just never quite works for me. Living in the midst of capitalism is already so crazy, figures like Elon Musk or Jeffrey Epstein or Mark Zuckerberg are already so evil that turning them into over-the-top caricatures just dilutes the message for me. I feel bad because I didn't like Invisible Man for similar reasons, even though Ralph Ellison definitely had good politics, and both works are explicitly about black liberation, but for whatever reason surrealism just doesn't jive with me.