Change Your Image
romdeaucity
Reviews
Vivarium (2019)
A misanthropic and nihilistic movie
The entire movie is basically about how raising children, living in suburbia and working for a living are all one big inescapable, unbearable, life-long torture session.
If you identify with that, you'll find this movie to be profound. If you still have faith in mankind or any kind of belief in God, this film will come across as a pretty depressing and unpleasant screed.
JoJo no Kimyô na Bôken (2012)
I couldn't find much to enjoy after 11 episodes
My main two issues are 1) that the whole show really plays like a stream of consciousness on the part of the writer/creator, with newly-introduced random characters and random things happening one after another and seemingly extending into infinity, and 2) that the writer/creator dude touts the manga/show as a tribute to the power of the human spirit to overcome almost anything, and yet the heroes of the story are routinely shown to abjectly fail/die while the villains always inexplicably accrue so much power that they easily ascend to godhood.
Very 'bizarre' indeed, but not in a good way. Suited to possibly very young and/or hyperactive viewers that just want "content" to continually appear and change in front of them like a kaleidoscope full of sugar.
Chained for Life (2018)
More labyrinthine, pseudo-profound gobbledegook from Hollywood
Another movie that seems like it may be interesting/thought-provoking/heartfelt from a brief synopsis, but all goes downhill as soon as you begin watching it.
Just an endless, winding maze of pretentious filmmaking.
Midnight Mass (2021)
Netflix (Organ Grinder) and Flanagan (Monkey)'s simpatico hatred of God
Netflix has found their golden boy in miserably misanthropic, death-obsessed, Christianity-hating, bile-spewing Flanagan.
A TV show for all those who long to see a Priest sup the blood from a dying man's head - because "Christians are evil and will justify anything with their craaaazy Bible", you see! The whole thread of 'vampirism' is basically just a thinly-veiled excuse to parade around how hypocritical and warped Christians are (or so the show would have you believe).
When you read interviews with the show's "creator" (Flanagan), it all makes sense: this "piece of work" (the programme, not the man; though he is also likely a 'piece of work' in the sense that his output is quite despicable) is a passion project by someone that wants to revel in deconstructing and perverting all things True (in excruciating, navel-gazing, pseudo-intellectual detail).
Ultimately, however, the writer/creator of this 'trash with a chip on its shoulder' is just the Monkey. The perverted Organ Grinder is Netflix itself with its ever-present vicious hatred of God and all things good and pure. The Organ Grinder throws more peanuts to the Monkey while the chimp dances and pleasures itself in front of men, women and children. Everyone in the audience leaves worse off while the Organ Grinder sits satisfied knowing he has once more sacrificed money, art and decency for his own twisted jollies.
I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
When you stare into the abyss... This movie is playing.
I really believe that the only sort of person that could enjoy this film is one who thinks the endless, winding, fractal and self-contradictory Babylonian Talmud holds all the answers to life. If you are one of those people, please watch this movie! You'll love it. For anybody else that responds to the traditional 'Western Civilisation' concepts of structure, order, logic and existential meaning, it's probably best to avoid this one.
(500) Days of Summer (2009)
What the inside of a narcissist's head looks like...
...when another, bigger narcissist has screwed them over and they can't make any sense of it - other than to try and re-write it all into a fictional world where personality disorders are (sort of) noble traits to have.
Basically, the real world writer (and his main character proxy) spent his entire life dreaming that a woman would one day come into his life, "fix" all his issues and they'd live happily ever after together. He falls hopelessly and desperately in love with a girl that "turns heads" everywhere she goes and that all men want to be with. She gets with him: all the while keeping him at an emotional arm's length (because she can) and alternating between playful, manic-pixie-dream sex and detached disappointment/disgust. Eventually she leaves him and marries another guy - which he can't understand as he has no idea that he'd been manipulated and/or how pathological attraction works between human beings.
I believe this to be true for both the lead male character and the writer of the story himself. They both come to the conclusion that "Summer" is totally justified in using others to entertain herself and grease the wheels of her own ego machine, and that it was his problem for not realising it. It's exactly the same message as in "Closer" where Natalie Portman's character (who also "turns heads everywhere she goes" and has men constantly fall in love with her) just "falls out of love" with the sappy guy on the turn of a dime and you, the viewer, is supposed to accept that it's a part of normal human functioning - which, ultimately, it's not. Normal, healthy people don't love you madly 24/7 then stop, all of a sudden, forever.
The characters on display in these movies are certainly not those from a love story... rather, they're something else. Something I call personality disorder.
Closer (2004)
A depressing look at a godless "human condition"
If you want to see what the private lives are like of people thoroughly and fundamentally removed from any and all connection to God, their own conscience and any higher functioning beyond animalistic sin and vice, this is the movie to watch.
All the characters here represent the most selfish and narcissistic impulses mankind can ever have, and yet the movie seems to believe that it's all there is to life. It's somewhat shocking - if you're any kind of a decent person - to realise the abject amoral filth that some people live in every day of their lives, but whoever wrote this movie seems to know that landscape like the back of his hand.
Masters of the Universe: Revelation (2021)
Depressing and bleak. Masters of the Postmodernverse.
A terrible, terrible excuse for a He-Man show, but a worthwhile insight into just how joyless, cynical, empty, broken and depressed everybody working at Netflix/in Hollywood is these days.
Hand them any IP full of sincerity, heart and wonder and they have literally no option other than to smash it to bits (Star Wars, Star Trek, this etc.) and rub your face in the fragments. They can't do anything else: they don't possess the ability to. These postmodern "creatives" live lives so far detached from God, Logos and light - and this show is the perfect window into their world of despair.
More neurotically-grim and sadness-ridden Netflix programming for the pile.
Army of the Dead (2021)
It's a mess
I loved Zack Snyder's Watchmen, Man of Steel, Batman v Superman and Justice League, but man, Army of the Dead is not a good film.
I think that if you're moderately to extremely left-wing in terms of politics, you'll get more out of this movie than anybody else will. Without already firmly believing inside yourself that real world right-wing governments are rounding up and/or persecuting everybody they don't like (a major part of the movie) - and that having borders on a country is fundamentally wrong - the characters here are paper thin. The only likeable trait to be found for our main hero (the 22-year-old daughter of Dave Bautista's character) is that she is singularly and stunningly brave and fearless in the face of the big, bad, patriarchal powers-that-be (the Republican Party, as stated by Zack Snyder whilst doing Press, the early appearance of Sean Spicer, the satirical content of the movie itself) that controls America in this movie. Without the personal belief of you, the viewer, that illegal immigrants should never be detained or deported, this character has nothing to offer you and is nothing. "One-dimensional" would be an overstatement.
At no point in the film is there ever suggested a reason for our main character to be so compassionate, enlightened and valiant other than she's young, female and is clearly opposed to real world, right-wing policies (all of this being satirically present in the film). As such, most people watching this movie will have, at best, no connection to this character whom we're to see as the ultimate hero, and, at worst, a loathing of simply how selfish and irrational she is portrayed.
Not a good movie. At all. More of a lacklustre, partisan attempt at misguided activism - and lacking much of what moviemaking actually needs to be enjoyable and rewarding.
Frank (2014)
Watch some Frank Sidebottom on YouTube instead
Bleak, cynical, insincere, parasitic, postmodern, repugnant, grim, godless guff. The complete and polar opposite to everything the real Frank Sidebottom (Chris Sievey's creation) represented and emanated.
Filmmaking at its most pretentious and joyless. Existentially vapid, utter dreck!
Colossal (2016)
An incredible movie
I just got home from watching Colossal (2016) in theatres here in the UK and it was just phenomenal things I have ever seen. The movie is a true parable and shows that the true "monsters" of our world aren't 100-foot-tall giants, but instead the deeply disturbed and sadistic individuals that walk among us who we may naively call 'friend', 'family' or 'love'. In the everyday, the events and steps of people's journeys through life are the gigantic-in-the-small-in-the-gigantic and this movie showcases that in a way I never thought possible.
The script and execution were absolutely perfect summations with pinpoint accuracy as to the nature of true psychological and emotional pain, domestic abuse and personal morality. Anne Hathaway's character is messed up, sure, but she possesses moral integrity and heart that let her see the error of her ways, which is far more than can be said for the everyday, normalised, controlling and abject evil carried out by Jason Sudeikis' character. The movie is just fantastic and I can't state that enough. Please give it a chance.