the scene where Owen walks through high school hallways while he talks about Maddy making tapes for him was really cool too. I was not prepared for the anxiety inducing flashbacks it gave me of forgotten times I traded notes with people. Oof. Haha
Saw this yesterday and I'm still processing, but I liked it. The pacing of the dialog was tough to sit through sometimes, but there's an undeniable magic here. A lot of cool visuals. It feels like a fairytale with a creepy undercurrent running through it simultaneously. I also love a good tracking shot, and this movie has several.
The gym monologue felt like someone grabbing me by the shoulders and screaming at me to wake up I'm gonna be thinking about this movie for a long time
Weird rec, but I revisited Brigsby Bear and would highly recommend it to everyone, let alone folks that enjoyed this film. It's a much more hopeful and comedic take on the media we grow up with and the we find comfort in it and want to live through it when we're experience trauma. It's also directed by Dave McCary, who produced this film. It's on Prime. Felt like a bit of a counterpart to this on rewatch.
Yeah I think that tweet shows how the discourse has seemingly shifted, from calling out cis folks who claim the movie supports ambiguous interpretations to cis folks “completely misunderstanding” the film the whole discourse has been somewhat mindnumbing
There’s been a lot of conversation about cis audiences wanting to read this film as something more ambiguous than a narrative about gender identity
I haven't seen much discourse, but I'm also not using Twitter these days. It is 100% a film about gender identity, but I also feel like there is enough universality to the theme of accepting your true self regardless of what point you're at in your life for lots of audiences to be able to relate to the film, regardless of gender identity.
I think even going beyond the clear gender identity allegory, both this and World's Fair are very universal and hyper relevant. They both speak to the dissociation that's uniquely felt in a technological age and the disconnect we can all feel from our true selves. I don't fully relate to Jane's gender experience, but the general feelings and struggles evoked in these movies resonated with me deeply and really moved me.
You can totally read this in a more ambiguous way, as I did. While I understood the gender identity narrative and how that was deeply rooted in the film, a lot of the emotions portrayed are fairly universal. Things like loneliness, finding one's self even outside of gender identity, the way we romanticize our youth, particularly the 90s, etc. IMO that's why this film is so brilliant because a cis guy like me can get a lot of the allegory, but also align with a lot of the emotions and feelings this is conveying. I'm not trying to talk away how important this film is for those who have had deeper, similar battles with gender identity, but like World's Fair, Jane's ability between both films is superb.
100% agree with the posts thus far, was just recapping for those not on that part of Twitter. I see it as a story about dysphoria, about being trapped in a body, so the gender identity reading makes sense and so do others' interpretations about autism, etc.
Movie got hands Adored this Maybe some of the most clever use of symbolism on screen ever? Really resonated with the queer kid getting their identity from media in excess and struggling to embody who they idealized bit. Mattie’s monologue about being reborn and changing names and moving to a new city after feeling like dying also resonates with me. Can def see how this is a love it leave it movie, it just felt super personal
Alright have been stewing on this quite a bit! I think there being black queer representation that resonated with me so deeply was something I never expected to see. I liked the way the color blue vs. the color pink was used with Owen. The blue cotton candy as she walked through the carnival that she carries like it is this weight despite being this ephemeral thing. I think its interesting that she spits on it to dissolve it because it mirrors Maddy's later comment about needing to summon saliva to survive being buried alive. There's the blue balloon that is next to Owen right after the time skip. She is standing on a bunch of deflated inflatables in the gym and its running out of helium. Oh, and the Luna Juice being blue but she can't hold it in. Compare this to: The pink sleeping bag she takes over to Maddy's each time she goes over. The pink shirt she wears when she's most vulnerable with her feelings about Maddy. The pink light coming in from the windows before she picks up the tape Maddy left her.