I think movies have gotten to the point where they are reflective about the inherent danger and evilness of the camera. reflective about the bad shit they’ve been responsible for and the evil they’ve brought into this world. I saw it this year with pearl and nope and fabelmans, I don’t think any of those necessarily are intentionally about the evils of the celluloid camera, but maybe being so in love with film is the same as kind of despising both the medium and the industry. and I really don’t care about movies anymore, I used to watch about a hundred new releases per year and hundreds of older movies every year but tastes change and so does the medium. for a while it was disheartening to see the a24fication of indie films and the marvelfication of blockbusters, everything has became one homogenous blob of certain tropes and certain beats to hit, it’s easier to just not care. it’s easier to just hang up ur hat and accept that after a hundred years this medium died, it was inevitable wasn’t it? it died a sad and uneventful death. I guess that comes off as very cynical which I really don’t think I am nor am I trying to be. I’m just trying to be realistic, that something I once cared about and was passionate about is more or less dead. I’m fine with that, I still saw several new releases I really really loved, saw some older stuff like 1981’s possession and 1985’s smooth talk. this review is all over the place but mostly my thoughts boil down to the fact that Sam Barlow is as in love with the medium of film as he is critical and hateful of it. more than any other movie I’ve seen since maybe 2002’s autofocus and reflections of evil, immortality understands the destruction that films have left in the wake of people who worked on them. it’s impossible to not think of weinstein or spacey or baldwin or morrow or lee when playing through this. how many lives have ultimately been fucked over by this monolith of an industry. whether or not intentional the ‘22 movies I mentioned understand this. pearl with both its exploration of exploitation of young women in the industry and how ultimately escapism via movies is some of the most dangerous escapism. nope with its commentary on how most every movie ever made is built on the suffering of minorities, how it’s an industry built upon this that works every day to put people down. fabelmans is directly about how movies stop people from coping directly with their trauma, a very expensive distraction. immortality is all of this, it’s every piece of criticism on the film industry that’s ever existed, condensed into one of the most beautifully dense things I’ve ever experienced. doing things that are only possible in this medium, not the medium of film but the medium of games, because ultimately this does not work as anything but a game. maybe it’s really cynical of where movies are at and where they’ve always kinda been but at the same time it’s ridiculously hopeful of where games are and where they can go.

(scattered thoughts because I just slugged down a fig apple redbull and wrote all of this in my hour before work lol.
crazy that Barlow actually wrote a competent and not fetishistic portrayal of women here, the story here almost comes off as an apology for how he wrote and treated femininity in her story and most likely everything else he ever worked on.
just insane to see the wide range of influences that Barlow cops from here, I have no real issue with this as it’s just as much an exploration of the problematic themes that the directors he’s borrowing from exhibited as it is a homage to rollin and friedkin, etc.
fucking love how truly skeletal this is, ripped away from anything complete makes this feel much more realistic than her story which worked almost entirely on the gotcha of the plot. stripped away from trying to be cinematic and showing the bones of film production makes this more cinematic in the long run.
I like the costumes ^_^)