4/23/2024 0 Comments Dropbox very young porn![]() Old, about a beach that makes people old, prods and mocks universal anxieties about losing youth and looks being deserted by the world while marching towards the grave and seeing your loved ones age/die too and, Our Town–like, being unable to halt the cruel procession. Granted, the steady slackening of Eastwood’s one-take standards is apparent more than ever throughout the preposterous, endearingly lazy, and often beautiful Cry Macho, while Old (if overly reliant on gory shock-scares) is the meticulously tuned feat of a craftsman working at full strength, but both are the work of auteurs with distinct personalities working in recognizable modes, and therefore refreshing. Night Shyamalan (who, at 51, might chafe at being identified as a 91-year-old’s coeval, but whose formalist style has always evinced an old soul). As caped heroes continue their ongoing infestation of the ’plexes, and same-y audiovisual content gluts home screens, any sign of “classical style” in new product is clung to like a life preserver, and so it was for many with the latest films from Clint Eastwood and M. Likewise proceeding apace were lamentations for the demise of cinema or at least cinemagoing, perennial keening which gains a truer ring as the state of the industry advances. It was another great year for death, and contemplating the inexorable, ever-quickening drive thereto. ![]() Many rightly lauded the nerve-shredding third episode, North Carolina (a perfect interpretation of the book’s most notorious chapter and one of the year’s great works of horror filmmaking), but what about the fact that the subsequent fourth through seventh episodes consistently did the unexpected, forgoing the story’s expected narrative cause-and-effect for complete visual and aural immersion, making the viewer experience a kind of emotional stasis? You don’t emerge from Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad feeling satisfied, elevated, or redeemed: it’s an unrelenting, savage, yet always humane descent into white-made chaos. It’s in the way the actors are composed in the frame, at once controlling our gaze and trying to escape the camera. That consistency is in the way James Laxton’s camera moves through claustrophobic interior or exterior spaces, sinuous and sinister it’s in the way Nicholas Britell’s music lulls you into tedium or startles you into alertness. Each episode is of a different feel and format (you can see their shapes in your head if you close your eyes), but somehow always coherent. Jenkins doesn’t employ the miniseries format to create the expected narrative beats or to retrofit Whitehead’s story into preconceived, meted-out cliffhanger modules: time moves differently here-sometimes it’s pulled agonizingly like taffy, at other times it’s elided or condensed, but it always feels like time is being carved out of the narrative rather than forced upon it. This is a wholesale reimagining of the story of Cora (Thuso Mbedu) as hellish stations of the cross, using a very weird, very scary, and very sick old America as its backdrop. However, as with Barry Jenkins’s previous films, The Underground Railroad is a miracle, and it somehow avoided all the possible pitfalls of adaptation, pushing, arduously, beautifully, terrifyingly into a realm of almost mystical revelation. And then there’s the general sense of the necessity or efficacy of padding the story out to a ten-episode arc. Focusing on brutality against Black bodies onscreen could make it another in a long line of recent shows and movies exploiting racial violence and degradation yet avoiding that violence could also make it seem unwilling to engage with the reality it means to depict. The book’s magical realist central conceit (the literalizing of the underground escape network for enslaved people of the South as an actual railroad) could seem clumsy or forced when visualized conversely, an overreliance on stark realism could devolve the entire project into a medicinal “social issue” series. One might have been understandably skeptical, if not horrified, about the prospect of an Amazon-produced miniseries adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s harrowing 2016 novel. So, once you've enjoyed our top 10, scroll down and see what else we have to offer.īest Televisual Storytelling (Part One): The Underground Railroad For us, though, this is the end, my friend. Alas, due to that insidious thing known as "awards season," the previous year isn't quite over in the eyes of many movie lovers, real and supposed. It allows us to squeeze out every last inch of both love and bile and subsequently put the year to bed. It’s always a relief to finally unveil our annual 2 Cents column.
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