The Beast

Gotta love a bloated wickedly romantic sci-fi by a fan of Twin Peaks season 3 about the elusive, haunting and also potentially erotic nature of technology and how we are pervaded by it and just keep on living and actually don't care anymore. Can't wait to get to 2044 and dig up shit about my past lives or whatever. It takes its time to actually set things in motion, but performances make up for it and some bits are just lovely -- Trash Humpers footage, final credits/extra scene through QR code.

sometimes life feels like a series of patterns you repeat — with different tools, in different contexts. and we become a mosaic of those we love, of what we fear, of what we can do amidst those patterns, most of the time not even knowing where they came from. great film.

You wanna see Dasha from Red Scare pluck a leg hair with her teeth while drinking a Blue Moon and making a very on-brand comment about midgets? George MacKay as Elliot Rodger? Elina Löwensohn as a clairvoyant? Léa Seydoux in not one, not two, but three interlocking timelines, dancing, crying, screaming? Egon Schiele references? Excerpts from Trash Humpers? Donald Trump doing Gangnam Style? One of the densest, craziest films of our stupid decade. Many will cry Lynch, but I say Southland Tales.

A big valise stuffed with concepts but it failed to make me ponder them. We are expected to meekly accept the premise that our DNA is formed by our 'past lives', and sure i could do that for a movie's sake, but it's a bit presumptuos to completely glance over that wild premise and build an entire emotional rollercoaster on top of it without any justification. Seydoux and Mackay are very fine actors though so there's that to enjoy

The unfortunate realisation of a very promising movie

(178)

lolz

Gabrielle Monnier: "All of them?"

Not sure the LA portion really worked for me. That threw me out of the entire thing, not helped by nobody really being able to take Mackay's incel character seriously.

The individual pieces are extremely good, but I am having trouble seeing all the ways in which they fit together. However, I do love Trash Humpers, so that helps.

işkence

Seemed to lose momentum halfway through but pulled some of it back later. Could maybe have benefited from having a more conventional narrative. I know it's meant to be experimental, playing with time, memory but a slightly more straightforward plot might have made the communication of ideas, more effective?

The lesson seems good: the real doomsday is when all the possibility of our incalculability and singularity, directly expressed through feelings, are eliminated for the pursuit of efficiency. The bone of the story looks interesting too: the object of love, a state that many of our feelings are tied to, is decided by something in our psychology that's in a sense "hereditary". The question is: is the flesh of the story truly subtle enough to deal with the tension and composition between those two?

61st nyff