the kino park

Marty Mauser is not a very good person. From the deeply insensitive jokes he causally employs in interviews to the sociopathic pursuit of his self proclaimed singular purpose, the cup of Marty’s sins would be sufficiently running over even if he didn’t abandon his pregnant girlfriend, Rachel, in a last ditch gasp for glory. Marty’s actions, all in the name of that lofty aspiration, are frequently despicable and a case might even be made that the platitudes espoused by Marty Mauser represent morsels of the very same grind mindset that echoes across today’s toxic manosphere right wing pipelines. Of course, Marty is hardly the first problematic male ever depicted on screen, yet perhaps his sins are more pressingly identified as the film never really, at least obviously, states that his actions are reprehensible, some even finding them praiseworthy. Yet, in a much discussed and debated moment at the close of the film, one that some have found as tacit support of his pride, a more fascinati...

     it should be obvious that a film with this much Michael B. Jordan cannot be anything but an essential film. *this is a spoiler filled deep dive into Sinners as well as Ryan Coogler's career thus far*      The split personality, a long held literary and cinematic trope, is almost as prolific as its inverse, the cinematic twin played by a single actor, yet, traditionally, each serve distinct and separate purposes. Both of these have mined ample horror as well as metaphorical consideration into the nature of the soul, though the cinematic twin is often a performance tour de force, even verging on stunt casting, while the split personality is almost exclusively reserved for “madness.” In Ryan Coogler’s Sinners , one of two semi-recent twin centered releases (the other Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 , which utilizes its twins for humanist metaphor and political critique), these dueling visual motifs converge, at the very least thematically. Doubling his prefe...

a stunning moment in Chloe Zhao's Hamnet *I don't spoil either film here besides the loose concept that sad things happen in both movies.* Tragedy in a film is something easily approached, but delicately, if not even precariously, executed. Tightrope walking upon the razor thin margin of error for a film to effectively employ a tragic turn of plot all too easily slides into melodrama at best and outright exploitation at worst. Some films and stories have handily approached this by leaning into the knee jerk reactions of its potential, like Titanic for example, a film which takes tragedy as the very focal point of its exploration. Others, like adaptations of Shakespeare, though he very well might have invented the western world's approach to dramatic tragedy, center the film around inherent flaws within its characters and thereby mine tragedy via humanistic study. One of the most difficult tricks to pull is to maintain both the weight of tragedy and a nuanced and grounded co...

*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...