Keanen's Film Blog

This one is a slightly overrated Euro comedy that proudly displays its Cannes laurels before the opening titles. It’s a thinker. It differentiates itself from the Adam Sandler school of comedy that we’re so accustomed to in America. It’s smarter than Barbarian and the latest Top Gun movie, but slightly less entertaining than either. In any case, I consider it one of the best films of 2022 so far.

The plot beats are external to the characters and have nothing to do with the characters, making them look like dumb apes that are passive in their environment. There is no active protagonist. The focus is not on any hero or antihero, just a bunch of people who get the shit kicked out of them by a world that is apathetic to their existence. It’s the furthest possible thing from American storytelling, and that’s probably why the Frenchies love it.

[Read more…]

This movie reminds me of Wrong Turn. The first half is an exquisite psychological thriller drama, and the second half is a cancel-culture-satire-inbred-zombie (spoiler) mishmash. The juxtaposition of pseudo-philosophical social commentary and total B-movie horror schlock works very well as comedy. I feel like the comedy was piled into the second half to make the film more marketable or explain the plot.

The movie sends messages, but the messages get muddled by scenes like a zombie beating a guy with his own severed arm. My main reaction to this movie is “what the fuck?” But I liked it, so good job.

[Read more…]

Girl meets boy, boy fucks off to WWI and leaves girl with her shitty German immigrant parents in the middle of Kansas, chaos ensues.

I don’t love or hate this movie, but it’s interesting to study. The film makes a valiant effort to present character melodrama with the vibrancy of multi-strip color. It achieves all that and more, but my biggest complaint with this performance-oriented picture is how the performances are put to film. The directing and editing soured my experience somewhat, and the film feels like it runs at least 10 minutes too long.

I went out of my way to appreciate this movie. The least it could do is entertain me, which it did in the first half. Then it bored the fuck out of me, so I call it break-even.

[Read more…]

Even for a hardcore Matrix fan, this is a difficult film to describe. Other critics didn’t cover it on release day, and still haven’t covered it. That’s not to say it’s bad, it just asks a lot of its audience.

[Read more…]

The Evangelion franchise elevates itself above shonen anime through its well-written characters, philosophy, theory of mind, and metafiction. (Specifically, the notion that all of physics and human interactions exist in an entangled state dependent on perception, and that human will dictates the nature of the universe and everything that happens. Some call it quackery, some call it the power of love. Why not conflate science with religion? It’s called a world view. Deal with it.)

Nope, it’s a totally rational hard sci-fi franchise! Its departures from “mainstream” science are just satire. Absolutely….

[Read more…]