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★★★★★ Watched 26 Aug 2021
The Years of Lead – Book Out Now!
"Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."
–Theodor Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society"
"Adorno does not wish to negate representation; on the contrary, he argues that the aesthetics of post-Holocaust poetry are of a particular 'barbaric' character... Adorno is attempting to describe a new form of poetry which is stylistically and thematically awkward. The language is…
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★★★★★ Watched 14 Nov 2022
MESMERISM AND THE END OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN FRANCE
This one little stray title on a textbook lying discarded in Mamiya's room was what tied it all together for me. The Enlightenment was a 17th and 18th century philosophical movement that sought to understand the world through empiricism and rationality. Here, in 1997 when Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure was released, at the end of the 20th century, at the peak of the postmodern era, that search for truth and understanding is…
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"Rules are rules."
The military into which our protagonist Lieutenant Drogo enlists may remain explicitly nameless, but both narrative and historical context clues as well as a few scattered iron crosses let us know what's going on here. By 1976, Italy was deep in the black heart of the Years of Lead, and far-right extremists were terrorizing the nation. It would still be two more years before the Red Brigades kidnap and assassinate prime minister Aldo Moro, but the resurgence…
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"Even before we enter the world, we are marked by karma."
Preceded by its reputation, of course — how I hadn't seen it until now when it's so obviously My Shit will forever remain one of life's great mysteries — but while I knew it was a stylish revenge thriller that played a large part in inspiring Kill Bill, what I didn't know about was its rich cultural and historical context.
Our story takes place 20 years after the Meiji…
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★★★★★ Rewatched 04 Mar 2015
"Hey pretty girl, time to wake up."
There was a time not too long ago when if you asked me what my favorite movie was I might have told you Mulholland Drive. There's a lot going on in the film and I certainly won't claim to understand all of it (something I might have done when it was my "favorite movie"), but I do have a reading of it that seems to answer a lot of the questions it poses,…
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In a selfish attempt to cope with his separation anxiety, a sociopathic student abuses his relationship with his mentally unstable best friend in order to throw his future away on a single day of raucous debauchery.
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