Reviews
Black Burns Fast gets right into it upfront, announcing and dispensing with setup and exposition in teen rapid-fire dialogue, overcompensating, overstating, and shrugging all at the same time. Self-consciously un-self-conscious. It would be easy to be mean about the overacting teens, but you know what? Teens overact irl.
People grieve differently. This is the entire premise of Mngomezulu’s Themba. The entire film is two people grieving differently, and misunderstanding each other’s grief. There is little plot business.
There's a woman talking to the fence about the one time she took Ritalin, and it's still straight-edge early. This is the first sign that the word “fest” might still have some meaning. Everyone here seems to have recently done their laundry. Or had it done. And recently been to the salon, especially the mohawk guy.
FOSTA is a document of our times. As a film it often hedges its bets, reflexively providing quick solutions after touching on the real issues in play.
Black Math | Blood Sweat Sparkles
Black Math gloriously revel in not reinventing the wheel. Screamo, punk, rock n roll grunge, youth, whatever, attacked with gusto. Don't let the word Math fool you into thinking this is prog-rock. It's fucking progressive though. Blood, Sweat, Sparkles plunges onwards with relentless disregard.
Sometimes trash is necessary as a distraction. The most distracting thing about The Polygamist is the one persistent question: Where the fuck do they get these shades of lipstick from?
Reactionary Reviews | Notes From The Underground
Notes is documentary in its truest form. It is a document that aligns to the ethos of what it is documenting. An act of reverence. Refraining from any examination or critique of that it is historicizing. It is here that Notes From The Underground both fails and succeeds.
Belated | The Death Of Bunny Munro
The Death Of Bunny Munro – based on the novel by Nick Cave with music by Nick Cave and featuring a cameo from Nick Cave – is SPOILER ALERT about a character called Bunny Munro who dies.
Circling where the venue should be, a rising niggle. It's not even nine yet according to the listing it’s late, I pay no mind: Jazz is the sufi word for time travel.
Reactionary Reviews | Variasies Op 'n Tema
Variasies toes a line between elegiac and pretentious, and pulls off this high wire act by not resorting to hand-wringing, moving to a subtle, soul-shifting gestalt.
At precisely 38:22 the newish Netflix algo-scripted revenge pile on, 180, falls apart with a single shot.
Reactionary Review | Swift | by Melinda Ferguson
I don’t need to read Melinda Ferguson’s latest pity porn memoir “Swift” to know it’s shit. The promo interview headline in last week’s Business Day says it all. Look it up, I’m not going to give them the fucking clicks. And no, I didn’t bother to read the interview either.