Film Matters Magazine

Part of me was truly hopeful that Michael Gracey’s Better Man (2024) would be a box office hit. It did not seem like it necessarily went unnoticed. There was plenty of buzz in online film spaces after the trailer first came out. After all, it was difficult to simply gloss over a musical biopic about British pop star Robbie Williams except he is a CGI Planet of the Apes style monkey, even if it was about somebody that most people in the U.S. (myself included) had never heard of. When I saw that trailer, I had a feeling in my gut that we had an instant classic on our hands, and no one could see it yet. My friends all thought I was crazy. Maybe I am just starved for things that dare to stand out in the current cinematic landscape, or maybe I am just easily pleased. Whatever the case, I took a friend (one of the doubters) to see it opening weekend and both of us were blown away.

In 2011, a narcissistic pre-teen Greg Heffley (Zachary Gordon) graced the silver screen alongside the tumultuous Heffley family in David Bowers’s surprisingly timeless Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules. A film that by no means possesses a notable deal of pre-release hype or expectations of high-art cinema, Rodrick Rules completely steamrolled the initial Diary of a Wimpy Kid as a sequel. Rodrick Rules is exactly what you would expect from a comedic, young-adult adaptation film; and yet, the film somehow persists as a cinematic embodiment of youth culture, cringey jokes and all.

I’m not a fan of Dune 2.

William Friedkin’s 1973 film The Exorcist has been heralded as one of the scariest movies of all time. Even now, fifty years after its release, it consistently tops lists and polls on the subject and is frequently discussed as a lingering, disturbing film that epitomized the Satanic Panic of the 70s and 80s. The combination of Friedkin’s esteemed directing, Jack Nitzsche’s spine-tingling score, haunting performances from stars, and grotesque special effects garnered critical and audience acclaim and an Academy nomination for Best Picture (The Exorcist). To suggest The Exorcist is anything other than a masterpiece of religious horror is nigh blasphemy, but I’d like to propose a comedic interpretation of the film as a metaphor for the purest horror in every woman’s life: puberty.

Most people are familiar with John Hughes’s modern classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), a narrative with the moral of taking your time and enjoying all of life’s pleasures. The film follows high school senior Ferris Bueller who convinces his two friends, Cameron and Sloane, to skip school and spend the day exploring Chicago. The narrative can be summarized by Ferris’s most famous quote in the film, “Life moves pretty fast; if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it” (Hughes, 1986, 00:04:36). However, this quote can be interpreted through different understandings, such as a critique of the capitalist tunnel vision focused on social climbing, overlooking the small pleasures of life Ferris urges viewers to enjoy. An against the grain reading provides insight into the anti-capitalist worldview the film embraces. This perspective can be seen in the visual style and narrative throughout the film. Many elements in the film convey these anti-capitalist ideals, such as the red Ferrari, a consumerist product worshipped by Cameron’s father due to its price and status, and its destruction at the end. The Ferrari can be seen as an allegory for the inevitable downfall of capitalism and consumerism, with Cameron’s acceptance of its destruction echoing the realization the lower-class will have, recognizing the triviality of capitalism the children realize throughout the film. A vitally important scene to arrive at this understanding is the scene in which Ferris and his friends attend a high-class restaurant, highlighting the film’s anti-capitalist ideals. Through the presentation and staging of characters, this scene depicts a rejection of capitalism due to its subjective class categorizations and the ease with which capitalist rule can be subverted, conveying the film’s anti-capitalist ideals.

The first time I watched Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009), I was devastated. I was anticipating grit, but I wasn’t anticipating a film that would make me feel complicit in its discomfort. Critics praised its gritty realism and the trance-like debut of Katie Jarvis, but Fish Tank never made it across to mainstream success—and I understand why. This is not the dreamt-up London, nor the reborn one—it is an encircling maze of concrete and compromise.

With five Oscar nominations, near-universal critical acclaim, and ranked #38 on Rotten Tomatoes’ list of top romantic movies, Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) resonated deeply with audiences through its exploration of modern romance. As Richard Corliss of Time Magazine notes, Jonze created “the splendid anachronism of a movie romance that is laugh-and-cry and warm all over, totally sweet and utterly serious.” However, beneath its surface-level charm lies an unsettling narrative about intimacy and control. Can a relationship truly be romantic if one partner is fundamentally incapable of autonomy? In the context of the #MeToo movement and the rise of commercial artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT, Samantha’s role shifts from a caring companion to a submissive, voiceless entity subjected to a psychological male gaze.

From Deleuze to Baudrillard, Inception (2010) unravels like a dreadful amalgamation of every first-year film lecture I sat through years ago: long and drawn out, whilst being slightly confusing. Nolan sets out to achieve a mind-bending, puzzle film that instead reads like a failed interpretation of psychoanalytic film theory. His desire to capture dream-like experiences fails to project the true disjointed and illogical nature of dreams as he struggles to find a happy medium between too much and too little narrative continuity. Nolan himself explained that the film is an exploration of what would happen if people shared a dream space, where an individual can access another person’s unconscious mind (Nolan and Thomas). Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams discusses the nature of unconscious dreaming; “the mind, as a result of its being turned away from the outer world during sleep, is not capable of giving interpretation to the objective sensory stimulus, but is forced to form illusions on the basis of the indefinite incitements from many directions” (Freud 186). The Nolan approach to capturing the unconscious mind fails to indulge in the true irrational nothingness that dreams evoke.

Kaguya-sama: Love Is War (Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai, Mamoru Hatakeyama, 2022) is a romantic comedy anime series about the student council president and vice-president, Shirogane and Kaguya, as well as the absolutely comedic romantic shenanigans between them. Despite both of them liking the other person, and knowing that they probably like them back too, they absolutely refuse to confess, and their war is to get the other person to confess to them (yes, it doesn’t make sense, and that’s intentional).