My Own Little World

What a ride. What a dark, depressing, riveting ride. I had very few expectations going into You Were Never Really Here . The story, characters, and aim – all were mysteries to me. After seeing it, I have never been happier that that has been the case. This film is shocking, brutal, and just an overall rough emotional experience. It also tells a story of sex trafficking that is too real to be ignored, and my guess is that is the main point this movie tries to get across. You Were Never Really Here mirrors themes of and comments on some recent events in the news like the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, focusing on how the rich and powerful can do anything they want to just about anybody – (horrifyingly) including 13-year-old girls. I was almost brought to tears several times in this hour and twenty-five-minute film because I realized how unfortunately realistic this story might be. The film has a great voice behind it in Lynne Ramsay’s direction. She often takes a slower han...

Yikes. I don’t typically like tame studio comedies, but I don’t usually hate them either. They have very little weight or originality, but because they lack both of those they also do not offend in the jokes or subject matter all that often, making them lackluster yet forgettably so. I Feel Pretty , unfortunately, feels quite ugly: it manages to be both unfunny and cringeworthy in its handling of subject at the same time. I do not know what compelled the writers of this film to craft it in the way they did, but it does not work at all. One of the most puzzling things about the film is how it undermines the entire aim of the film. From the marketing I saw, I Feel Pretty was supposed to be an uplifting film for people who do not have the body type they might desire and therefore lacking self-esteem. Instead, almost all of the jokes made in the film are at the expense of Amy Schumer’s body type, as she thinks after hitting her head hard that she is “more attractive” than she ...

Lean on Pete is somehow bleak yet beautiful. I was taken aback by how brutal this film is to its protagonist. Charley’s life as shown in the film does not start too great, and when life begins to hit him with blow after blow, taking one thing he loves after another away from him, it begins to become almost depressing. By the end of the film, Charley has almost nothing to continue living for – and the fact that he is just fifteen years old and has seen more life than most middle-aged adults I know makes that all the more heartbreaking. He finds a companion in the titular Pete for a while, becoming attached to this aging racehorse; and when he takes Pete’s future into his own hands and runs away with him, it is done with such poeticism and such little dialogue that makes it resonate incredibly well. As good as the film continues to be after that moment, Lean on Pete begins to show its flaws not long after. As events transpire on Charley and Pete’s journey, everything starts...

Infinity War is the Empire Strikes Back of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is a comparison made quite often – not just for this film, but for nearly every franchise. At some point, every gritty sequel will be likened to the practical perfection of Empire and its usurping of its predecessor’s formula. Whether this is deserved or not is a contentious subject with the fans of whatever franchise falls prey to the discussion. With the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though, Infinity War fits the mold perfectly. For the first time in these nineteen films, the stakes are real and not contrived by an incompetent villain. For the first time, the villain is a true psychopathic terror that gets true sympathy that can even approach empathy. For the first time (at least in an Avengers film), this group of god-like beings feels truly threatened by the antagonist, incapable of stopping them. There’s other parallels to be made for sure – like how both Infinity War and Empire split up ...