the kino park

One of Greta Lee's past lives I suppose *a spoiler free review* Whether in fact due to its own uselessness or even perhaps a better word would be unworthiness, any kind of thematic engagement with Tron: Ares seems about as productive as expecting its lead actor to be able to successfully open a film. While in another world maybe the movie’s swan dive into a cesspool of current issues could be commended, both those inherent to its premise and even some that seem unnecessarily added, its abject failure to approach anything even resembling an insight seems so glaringly obvious that to point this out conjures mostly just a feeling of thuddening inanity. Why spend undue energy acknowledging that while yes, making some consideration into AI was probably inevitable for a film in the Tron- verse, the fact that the film centers around dueling billionaires, locked in a tech war, was not a choice that needed to be made for a movie about sentient video games. It’s choices of this ilk and their...

   you can almost hear how badly film twitter wants to call him unrecognizable here *no spoilers here really, though I guess I mention general ideas related to the movie*           To talk of The Smashing Machine is really to talk of its star. This of course is the wrestler turned actor turned marketing maniac, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a hulking mass of human muscle whose “films” of the last several years, or perhaps more fittingly brand extension campaigns, are essentially synonymous with the least critically acclaimed movies of the decade. Whether you are thinking of Red One, Red Notice, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle or Jungle Cruise , these are films about as acclaimed as their titles are diverse. While past movie stars of his luster and caliber were at least occasionally interested in lending their influence to more, to put it bluntly, artfully driven work, for some time Dwayne Johnson has been seemingly deadset on a spiral of increasingl...

*I openly spoil the ending of Alien:Earth season 1 as well as several more of the Alien films here. A short summary of my thoughts on the season without spoilers is that I think it's pretty good. It goes in new directions while homaging the long running film series in a way that was far less grating than Alien: Romulus last year (even if I still enjoy that particular film). I remain resolute in my feeling that its a generally bad idea to take things that are movies and make tv-shows out of them, even I think this one by and large works. *          Perhaps because AI then did not exist, nor does it really exist now in the way they thought it would, the conception that AI could teach us about the human soul is almost equally prolific a science fiction trope as its malicious world destroying counterpart. For every Terminator, Hal 9000, and human battery farm, there is a reformed T-800, Haley Joel Osment, and a little girl stuck in a train station (that of cour...

     A piercing close up of Chase Infiniti, one of the film's finest performances *this review contains loose thematic spoilers and some allusions to the film's ending *      As loaded a quote as it may be, when Jean-Luc Godard said, “all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” he did so with a maddening simplicity equaled only by its political fervor. The default conceit of the statement speaks to both a narrative efficiency that perhaps ought to be considered more frequently in movies yet subtextually also to the exploitative nature of the artform itself. In something of blunt summary: all you need to make a movie is something that will satisfy an audience’s fetishes; something pretty to look at, be it an actor or an image, and something of inherent drama, i.e. something exciting, even something violent. Cinema has, of course, long been considered and dissected for its inherent voyeurism and while Godard’s classic consideration worked as a mission ...