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Never mind that crap mitch, watch the Bronson.
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Beau is Afraid (Ari Aster, 2023) 7/10 This isn’t a movie, it’s a slow-motion panic attack, a Kafkaeque acid trip through the self-made hell of Beau Wasserman. A three-hour Murphy’s Law horror show where everything that can go wrong does go wrong… and then some. Beau lives in a neighborhood that makes BLADE RUNNER’s cityscape look like a Utopian five-star resort. The streets crawl with the damned -- junkies, maniacs, and walking corpses. Well, sometimes real corpses lie around there too. Beau’s apartment is a war zone, tagged with despair and soaked in filth. Step outside, and you’re one wrong move away from getting gutted by a naked lunatic serial killer who made the evening news. And when his mother literally loses her head in a freak accident, Beau does the unthinkable. He leaves and journey’s, because his mother's last wish was for him to be present at her funeral. This is a movie about a man so afraid to take charge that life bends over backward to punish him for it. He drifts, he panics, he suffers. He’s a marionette in a nightmare… I don’t know how Aster came up with this kind of movie… I imagine he nodded off with a pile of Kafka books in his lap and an empty bottle of absinthe on his side. The movie certainly has its moments, and more than once it made me genuinely laugh. Joaquin Phoenix as middle-aged timid Beau Wasserman carries the movie and once again demonstrates that he is one of the most interesting actors in today's movie landscape. It’s not really a horror movie, it’s not really a comedy, yet it is definitely both. And yet, for all its madness, BEAU IS AFRAID overstays its welcome. It’s big, bold, and relentlessly original, but also bloated. A three-hour descent into existential terror should have a payoff, but Aster seems content to keep the audience trapped in purgatory alongside his protagonist. Some moments are hilarious, some are gut-wrenching, a lot make no sense at all (and some of the “make no sense” moments are nevertheless hilarious and/or gut-wrenching) and a few are pure cinematic insanity. But by the end, you might find yourself asking: Was it worth it? Maybe. The more I ponder the movie, the more I like it. No question the most original movie I've seen in a long while. It sure is a movie that sticks, and I’ll likely watch it again some time. It’s not really an easy movie to like, but it sure is one that’s hard to forget.
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Posted: |
Feb 10, 2025 - 9:51 AM
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By: |
Ado
(Member)
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Wild Robot is for sure a good film, it has already won quite a few awards, likely will win an Oscar. Maybe you just saw it in the wrong mood for those 30 minutes that day. Hey Ado, I'm just giving my opinion. The movie didn't work for me on multiple levels and I rarely give up on a film. That's cool if you or others enjoyed it. It does get much better as it goes along, it is somewhat stylistically similar to the painterly approach of the last two animated Spiderverse films, which, though good, were rather radically overpraised, and the second Spiderverse film had a 'throw everything at the wall approach, and ran WAY to many minutes long. The style of Robot is somewhat more restrained, kind of impressionist. There is absolutely some stuff here for the young kids, so you gotta take that for what it is. Personally I feel pretty non-adult some of the time, which is largely a retraction from the decaying state our world, which, ironically, is a sort of background theme in Robot, barely seen till the end part of the film.
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