YCSE just stares and stares at Holmes' face for the longest stretches, expending so much effort in unearthing her impossible truth, and I just could not give a flying fuck. She is just not compelling to me. Giving sociopaths this much time and energy is not worth my time, or your time, or Fielder's time frankly. Our cultural obsession with sociopaths is one of our main problems. People seem bowled over by where Fielder takes this fixation -- the second-half introduction of [redacted] is a lot of fun but I didn't find it particularly revelatory. You can tell how pleased with himself Fielder is as he and his co-director Lance Oppenheim cut back between actors and recreations and real subjects watching reenactments and on as if he's solved the Hellraiser puzzle-box but it's like multiplying zeroes for me -- none of this adds up to anything of substance. These are questions that far better filmmakers who don't rely on buzzy gimmickry have been asking about "fiction" and "non-fiction" filmmaking for generations. If Fielder was creating something actually artful out of this meta maelstrom -- if he was making something like Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, say -- then that would be a different potato. But he just kind of plops all of this dog-half-eaten homework at our feet as expects us to be bowled over. He managed to crawl and curl up inside an ass of his own making -- huzzah for him, I guess.
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Thanks for [redacted]. I need to see this ASAP I guess before it gets spoiled. I've been lucky so far.
Your take is good. I think what worked for me is how modern and surreal it all felt. It says a lot about this moment, where the boundaries between reality and fantasy are collapsing. I agree that it's not as groundbreaking as people are making it out to be. But something like that image of a man, sitting at a kitchen table next to his hologram wife - it felt potent to me. It think we're obsessed with sociopaths because late-stage capitalism breeds them like mice, as we stand on the precipice of a post-human world.
The stuff with the husband was def more nteresting than EH was. I actually spent a lot of the movie thinking he might be a plant. (I kept waiting for a rug pull beyond what we were getting; I really thought there would be more to it.) The fact that the husband let the crew film him showering, full frontal -- obviously I would call that out, being me haha, but I do think that said a lot about him as a person, whether it was some sort of dominance thing, or even flirtation; a power thing or posture. A "we're not covering up anything, really!! See, here's my dick!" gambit -- whatever kind of manipulation it was it was ridiculous. Moments like that were thought-provoking. There are a few of them.
i'm loving the conversations around Billy being gay. Thoughts?
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