Learning to love Dallas again at the Oak Cliff Film Festival

Posted on August 24, 2023 by reelentropy

Tony Ruggio

Keep Dallas Pretentious. That shirt exists out there, in the glimmer and glamorous ether of the second largest city in Texas, worn by Dallas denizens swathed in club wear and creating noise across downtown via all manner of loud engines and dirty exhaust pipes. So it’s much to my surprise and pleasure to find an oasis among the jet-setters and white collars. That oasis was the 2023 Oak Cliff Film Festival, my first networking foray into Dallas’ cinema landscape in eight years. Surrounded by fellow cinephiles and art world locals, it was a reprieve from a city that often prioritizes business over burgeoning culture, commerce over curation of the arts. There were low-riders strolling down Jefferson Boulevard and high-flyers from the coasts hobnobbing inside the Texas Theatre. 

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‘Barbie’ is all about queerness and domestic violence and it took my dumb ass a week to fully realize it

Posted on July 29, 2023 by reelentropy
We’re going to use all the same media for this. Just, get of my back, OK? Images courtesy Warner Bros.

My Barbie review last week ended with several paragraphs on the romantic relationship played out in stereo between the Barbies and the Kens in the final leg of the film, the main argument being it seems like writer/director Greta Gerwig needs to get her love life in order – Gerwig has, quite famously, been with her romantic and creative partner Noah Baumbach since 2011, they have two children, and neither of them can seem to stop making movies about nasty breakups.

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‘Oppenheimer:’ how I learned to love the bomb and start worrying

Posted on July 24, 2023 by reelentropy
This face, 45 feet tall. Images courtesy Universal Pictures.

10/10 Los Almos, New Mexico, 1940s- The human instinct toward self-destruction has metastasized and now threatens to consume our entire species. Thirty years after a war to end all wars, many of the people who were hurt the worst by it have started a second, and there can be no victory, as it will certainly be followed by a third, a fourth and a fifth.

As this second world war draws toward its close, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is recruited by Col. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to lead a team of scientists in the creation of a bomb to end all bombs, harnessing the power of the sun to annihilate an entire civilization in a single flash of light.

Oppenheimer tells this story in three hours’ worth of detail through the lens of controversial hearings around Oppenheimer’s security clearance renewal in April 1954, followed by Rear Adm. Lewis Strauss’ (Robert Downey Jr.) confirmation hearings as Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce in June 1959, both events that were ruled by innuendo about Oppenheimer’s communist associations before joining the Manhattan Project.

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Come on ‘Barbie,’ let’s go party with gender theory

Posted on July 23, 2023 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

9/10 Barbie is an irrepressible explosion of high fashion, joyous and extraordinary set design and deliberately off-kilter dialogue and body language all delivered with a stone-cold straight face from writer/director/executive producer Greta Gerwig. It may be categorically a satire, but none of it is a joke.  

Barbie (Margot Robbie, who also produces), an anthropomorphization of the iconic doll, lives an idyllic life in Barbieland, which appears to be a pocket dimension in Venice Beach in Los Angeles, where she relaxes and parties and sings and dances every day and night with all the other Barbies. She imagines herself and the other Barbies as uncontroversial icons of female empowerment, beauty and opportunity.

Suddenly, Barbie appears to start aging, unable to recover from the previous night like she once did, and the plastic, imagination-powered plumbing and kitchen wares of her Dreamhouse begin to malfunction as she is plagued with thoughts of her own mortality. She makes a pilgrimage to Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who tells her that she must go to the real world and solve the existential crisis of her owner, or she will continue to age. She is followed by her faithful but hopeless suitor, Ken (Ryan Gosling).

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‘Mission: Impossible,’ the gold standard and the movie of the moment

Posted on July 23, 2023 by reelentropy
“Dead Reckoning” is a navigation term for determining an object’s position based on momentum and prior location, and it’s the perfect title for this movie. Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

9/10 Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has been the movie of the moment since December 2020, when audio leaked of producer/star Tom Cruise tearing into a couple of technicians for standing too close to each other. In the almost three-minute rant that has become like a Bible verse to me, Cruise screeches-

“We are the gold standard! They’re back there in Hollywood making movies right now because of us! Because they believe in us and what we’re doing … You can tell it to the people that are losing their fucking homes because our industry is shut down! It’s not going to put food on their table or pay for their college education! That’s what I sleep with every night, the future of this fucking industry! We are not shutting this fucking movie down!”

Cruise and the Mission: Impossible series are indelibly linked. The series began in 1995 as Cruise’s personal outlet to keep doing his own stunts when productions would no longer shell out to insure him risking his incredibly lucrative face, and as the series and his career resurrected in the early ‘10s, they’ve done so as icons of the type of hardcore filmmaking that is quickly fading into history. It’s beyond fitting that this is the guy who was fighting insurance companies to keep making movies during the COVID-19 crisis, the guy who passersby catch hanging out on the roof of a train between takes.

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