Favorite films

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2025

Watched 25 Mar 2025

The problem with this one is that it flows like a game of Consequences played by just one person, where each scene feels as if it's built solely from the one preceding it.
This turns the destination into something completely irrelevant to the opening, and not in a fun way, because the only person having fun is the one playing it.

2024

2

I enjoyed the family dynamic a lot more than I enjoyed the story built around that tension, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is rather confusing when the film seems to actively use the tools at hand to the story as the main punchline.
Did the film succeed or fail at what it was trying to do? The fact that I can't answer this question tells me that it likely failed, regardless of how much fun I surprisingly had with it for the most part.
Let me rewatch A Ghost Story and come back. Or not come back at all.

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2024

★★★ 9

It's hard to boo when a film is this cool, but sometimes, a film that keeps dodging greatness by an inch is a lot more annoying than a film that just sucks.

This is that film.

2022

★★★★ 2

Park Chan-wook films are like visual poetry.

Taking his film apart is (usually) pointless, as it's the summation of all their parts that turns his films into magic. It's like how Wong Kar-wai's nostalgic style can never be copied - it's not about just using his step printing technique, but about where, how, and why he's using it in combination with everything else that's on screen.

In that sense, Decision to Leave is also about experiencing an emotion, and less about watching, hearing, or reading a story.

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