Light Spoilers for You Can See Everything ahead - be forewarned!

It would be difficult to put onto the page all of the thoughts that have been crashing through my head since I saw “You Can See Everything” last night. But of course, the thing that has been keeping me up the most - literally keeping me up; it turns out the 10 PM showing was not the best for getting a good night’s sleep - is trying to wrap my head around the psychology of Elizabeth Holmes. I wanted to raise a few ideas here that especially stick out to me as a therapist with experience working with some very mentally ill people in my professional life.

To me, the scene that stuck out the most - that, in a way, feels like the closest thing the film has to a thesis statement - is when Nathan, in the first conversation he ever has with Elizabeth, brings up the magician David Blaine’s magic trick in which he seems to drive an ice pick directly through his hand. As Nathan explains to Elizabeth, people think it’s a trick, and that there must be some sort of smoke and mirrors. But the truth is that David Blaine has spent years hollowing out a small hole in his hand for just this purpose. The trick is that there’s no trick.

In much of the discussion of this film that I’ve seen (as well as the discussion of Holmes in the documentary itself!), it seems like people really, really want to believe that the Elizabeth Holmes we see is an intentional manipulation, that she, just like David Blaine’s ice pick, is smoke and mirrors. Firstly, I think this interpretation is natural: many of the lies that we encounter from others, or that we ourselves tell, are knowingly told for personal gain. But beyond that, I think there is something almost comforting in believing that Holmes is some sort of chess master-like expert of deceit. In every episode of Scooby-Doo, we feel relief when what appeared to be a monster is unmasked to be nothing more than a normal person with banal, explainable motivations. It is a comfort to think that Holmes is a rational person, acting knowingly (though immorally) in her own best interest, just as we want to see ourselves as rational, self-aware people.

However, I think the film challenges us to consider another possibility. What if the trick is that there is no trick? What if the ice pick really is going through David Blaine’s hand? And, to add my own analogy, what if, instead of being a Scooby-Doo monster, with a rational actor underneath just waiting to be unmasked, Elizabeth Holmes is nothing more than a mouse in a maze who has unthinkingly learned the best way to get to the cheese? 

That may sound harsh to Elizabeth Holmes, but I don’t mean it to be. There may be ways that all of us fit that mouse in a maze description. To explain what I mean, I want to take a slight detour into my work as a therapist. I currently work at a mental health treatment center for individuals with severe mental health disorders. As I watched the film, I more and more began to connect Holmes’s behavior in the movie with my experience working with individuals diagnosed with personality disorders. Many personality disorders - Borderline Personality Disorder, Avoidant Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder - can include deceitfulness or manipulative tendencies as part of their presentation. And while this deceit can sometimes be the intentional kind of lies that we’re used to, it would be missing the mark to say that it always is.

Let me illustrate this with an example. At our treatment center, we worked with a client with a serious trauma history who ended up being diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. One of this client’s core problems was that she was pathologically dependent on others and completely avoidant of ever taking ownership over her life. This manifested in some truly remarkable ways. Despite seeing many, many medical professionals who failed to find any diagnosable issue, this client suffered from frequent seizures, which could manifest as her fully falling out of her chair and writhing on the floor for minutes. These seizures predominantly happened when others were around, and seemed to increase as expectations in her life became unmanageable for her. At other times, this client claimed to hear voices, to have multiple personalities, or to suffer from various other medical ailments, though all of these behaviors lessened when they didn't result in attention from others or in someone else stepping in to take care of her.

Was this client lying? It depends on what your understanding of the word “lying” means, as Nathan and Elizabeth discuss at one point in the film. It is almost undeniable that this client was not “really” suffering from much of what she claimed to, and that these behaviors came from a desire to manipulate others to get outcomes she wanted (attention, care, reduced responsibilities). But I have to tell you, the longer I knew this client, the more it seemed to me that she was completely, perfectly convinced that everything she described was real. She was no Scooby-Doo monster, and there was no mask - this was “her truth”, to quote Holmes. As opposed to intentional lying, this client seemed to have learned that acting in these ways could manipulate outcomes in her favor, despite the fact that she was completely consciously unaware that manipulation was the intended function of her actions. Over the years, these behaviors became more and more reinforced, just as a mouse learns to navigate a maze to get a reward without ever understanding what it is doing, what a maze is, or that it is even in one.

In the simplest possible terms, one doesn’t have to understand why they do a behavior in order to do it, and benefit from it. And, while “You Can See Everything” argues convincingly that we can never know the truth about Elizabeth Holmes, it is at least worth considering the possibility that Holmes herself does not understand the full extent of her own manipulation, even if manipulation is the intended effect of her actions. Consider what we see in the documentary: Holmes seems to have her head in the clouds, to “not care about money,” to operate on a different wavelength far removed from the earthly concerns of most, even while she also has a knack for placing herself in romantic and business partnerships with men (first Sunny Balwani, then Billy Evans) who care a great deal about money. Consider, too, how well this works for Holmes: Billy Evans negotiates to ensure that they will get paid for their participation in the documentary, and yet Holmes has complete plausible deniability when confronted about this by Nathan, and can maintain her “creative visionary” persona even while she profits from her husband’s actions. Indeed, it was precisely this dynamic (with her prior partner Sunny) that led to Theranos’s success in the first place. Even just the fact that Holmes appears to so effectively win over Nathan, and by extension the viewer, is a result of her strange, disarming presence. But are Holmes’s persona and actions an intentional manipulation, or is it simply how she's learned to act because it gets the best results? What if, when Holmes claims over and over again that she has no idea what happened or how she could have arrived at this point, we believed her? 

For me, the brilliance of “You Can See Everything” is the extent to which it calls into question not just whether any of us can see into the hearts of others, but how much we even struggle to see what is within ourselves. Because, of course, it is not just Holmes who may do things without understanding why; all of us have layers of unconscious drives that dictate what we do more than we may care to admit. It’s worth wondering what mazes we've been running through, and what we've been running toward, without ever stopping to notice. 

I am an only child (and daughter) with a dead dad. I think that’s why I waited so long to see this masterpiece. I wasn’t sure I could emotionally bear it. Without getting too personal, I related to this movie in ways I was not ready for. Like Sophie, I attempted to get my dad to open up about his past as a child, and didn’t understand why he left so much a mystery to me. (He would not even tell me his real name!) Well, after he died, as a young adult, I learned a bit more about the unthinkable trauma he had endured growing up, and I realize now he was trying to protect me. To see such an intimate and raw portrayal that reflected my experience in this movie was honestly really affirming if heartbreaking. I’m sure many others connected in a similar way.

The restraint of the film, and particularly of the final scene, when Calum walks through the doors and disappears into Sophie’s memories, is what makes this movie land so hard for me. It didn’t leave me crying, it just left me wanting a minute more of Calum, and because I knew he was gone, I sat there feeling empty. It mirrored the experience of death and grief so realistically in that way…I was waiting for us to see Calum die, or see Sophie learning the news. But instead, so often when someone dies, it’s like they just disappear. You often don’t get to say goodbye, aren’t given any closure. Just the memories, confusion, and wanting to go back and relive a moment. And my inability to cry after the movie really reflects my own relationship with loss and grief. Just a profound feeling of emptiness and an inability to comprehend someone ending. I’ve never seen it on the screen until now. Charlotte Wells, thank you. I wish I could give you a giant hug. 🥲

First off let me say this is not something that I set out to do from the beginning, and so for parts of it the connections may seem a bit forced. I’ve been vegan since 1994 and I’ve seen tens of thousands of movies, and often after seeing a move I’ll start thinking of a “vegan angle” to it… I finally gathered them all together in a list and put them in an order that makes sense, at least to me.

Since images are not allowed here is a link:
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Row 1: Delicatessen — Ravenous — The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover — American Psycho

Consumption becomes a claim to power when another being’s body is understood primarily through what it can provide. In Delicatessen, the butcher turns prospective employees into provisions for his tenants: employment, commerce, and neighborhood solidarity sustain an arrangement whose victims disappear into its benefits. The vegetarian underground makes that apparent necessity contestable. Ravenous gives consumption a more expansive justification: eating people literally produces strength, allowing the predator to mistake the rewards of violence for evidence of its legitimacy. Manifest Destiny extends this appetite across a continent. CTWL locates the same entitlement within domestic and commercial ownership: the gangster treats his wife, the restaurant, and its occupants as possessions subject to his appetites. When his wife’s murdered lover becomes a prepared meal, the distinction between possessing someone and consuming them becomes brutally literal. In Psycho, restaurant culture and bodily violence inhabit a world where surfaces receive meticulous attention while individuals remain interchangeable. The opening’s bloodlike sauce makes elegant presentation momentarily indistinguishable from injury. Consumption conceals the encounter it depends upon: someone lived before something became available for consumption.

Row 2: No Country for Old Men — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — The Silence of the Lambs — Eyes Without a Face

The distinction between ordinary practice and atrocity becomes unstable when familiar techniques are applied to unfamiliar victims. In No Country, the protagonist begins by hunting animals and becomes prey himself, while his pursuer’s cattle gun transfers the technology of slaughter into human encounters. Chain Saw develops that transfer through the handling of bodies: a person is struck, hung on a meat hook, and stored as flesh. The spectator’s horror depends on recognizing procedures whose customary victims rarely receive comparable identification. Lambs extends bodily appropriation into eating and clothing: one killer consumes people, while another treats their skin as material for his own transformation. The FBI agent’s childhood attempt to rescue a lamb interrupts that entitlement with an attachment to the creature marked for slaughter. Returning the lambs from symbols of her trauma to frightened animals makes their suffering matter beyond its role in her development. In Eyes, the surgeon’s effort to restore his daughter turns other women into sources of replacement skin; experimental dogs inhabit the same apparatus of confinement and bodily use. His daughter’s release of the animals rejects an arrangement under which one cherished life warrants the sacrifice of others. Affection becomes dangerous when it grants unlimited permission.

Row 3: The Face of Another — Au hasard Balthazar — Woman in the Dunes — The Fountain

The meanings assigned to bodies can determine whose suffering becomes recognizable and whose remains available for use. In Face, disfigurement alters the protagonist’s social existence, while a manufactured face restores access to recognition without resolving who he is. His treatment exposes the dependence of sympathy on an acceptable surface; his subsequent behavior complicates the assumption that recognizable appearance guarantees moral character. Balthazar moves this problem from appearance to allegory. The donkey becomes a Christ-like figure bearing humanity’s sins; returning him to a donkey reverses that movement, revealing the ordinary condition of beasts of burden beneath the sacred interpretation. His exhaustion requires consideration without first becoming redemptive. Dunes reverses the position of an insect collector who becomes a captive laborer: the man accustomed to determining another creature’s movements discovers that food, shelter, and developing attachments can coexist with coercion. His adaptation does not retrospectively authorize his capture. In Fountain, devotion to a dying wife recruits an experimental animal and an extraordinary tree into the struggle to preserve a particular human life. The conquistador’s body eventually nourishes the vegetation from which he sought immortality. What he approached as a resource becomes the world to which he must surrender his own body.

Row 4: Dead Man — Ghost Dog — Under the Skin — Cloud Atlas

The familiar positions of observer, hunter, and moral judge become unstable when humans lose their presumed authority over other lives. In Dead Man, the wounded fugitive touches a dead fawn’s wound, mingles its blood with his own, and lies beside it. The animal’s death ceases to be scenery: their wounded bodies establish a kinship that does not depend on the fawn possessing human abilities. Ghost Dog makes that recognition less morally reassuring. The hitman’s care for pigeons and confrontation with bear hunters coexist with his profession, exposing how an ethical code can protect certain lives while authorizing the destruction of others. His contradictions raise the question of how convictions acquire their boundaries. Skin deprives humans of the authority to draw those boundaries: men entering apparently intimate encounters become bodies captured and processed within purposes they cannot comprehend. Their vulnerability makes the consumer’s position reversible. Cloud Atlas organizes bodily use into an entire social system. Manufactured workers serve customers before their own bodies are recycled into food; the function imposed upon them becomes the justification for denying that their lives could exceed it. Their awakening exposes the circularity of the arrangement: being created for exploitation cannot establish that exploitation is their proper destiny.

Row 5: Never Let Me Go — Ex Machina — Blade Runner — The Lobster

Institutions preserve their authority by deciding which demonstrations of inward life will count—and whether recognition will change anything. In NLMG, the clones’ artwork is collected as evidence of their souls, yet the society benefiting from their organs retains the power to disregard that evidence. Their sensitivity can be acknowledged while their destruction continues. Machina places the examination itself inside an owner’s controlled environment: the inventor confines his artificial woman and arranges the conditions under which a visiting programmer encounters her consciousness. The programmer’s desire to rescue her becomes entangled with an expectation of personal attachment; her independent purposes expose the limits of sympathy that anticipates a reward. Blade Runner gives manufactured beings an existence defined by compulsory labor and a deliberately restricted lifespan. Their demand for more life exceeds the commercial purpose of their creation, while “retirement” disguises killing as the disposal of obsolete equipment. Lobster makes classification itself an explicit punishment: failure to satisfy society’s requirements results in expulsion from humanity into animal existence. The protagonist’s dog is already his brother, preventing species appearance from settling the question of who remains within. Those required to prove their personhood face an authority whose own right to judge remains unquestioned.

Row 6: Cow — Okja — Chicken Run — Babe

The movement through human predation, captive bodies, and manufactured lives arrives at the animals whose exploitation those analogies have made newly visible. Cow follows a dairy cow through a system that organizes her reproductive life, separates her from her calf, and ultimately disposes of her. Remaining close to her makes production perceptible as a lived experience rather than an inventory of outputs; ordinary care cannot cancel the authority exercised over her body. Okja concentrates sympathy through a girl’s relationship with one animal, then confronts that attachment with a slaughterhouse full of others. The rescue is real, but its success leaves the machinery—and its remaining victims—in place. Chicken Run makes escape collective: the chickens recognize that their insecurity arises from the farm’s purpose, not merely from an unusually unpleasant owner. The conversion from egg production to pies reveals how quickly a supposedly protected productive life becomes disposable when a more profitable use appears. Babe secures an individual reprieve by demonstrating an unexpected talent, exposing both the possibilities and limits of recognition through usefulness. The pig’s survival leaves a question for every animal unable to herd sheep: why should continued existence require exceptional performance?

Thoughts? Any films you would add or remove?

Wow…that was a surprisingly heavy movie. While the story was a bit unrealistically serendipitous at a few points, it has an incredible amount of detail, rich worldbuilding, excellent acting and offers a fascinating look at the Chinese perspective on American militarism. Food serves as a handy stand-in not only for community building but also nation building and economic development.

I also appreciated subtle character details that humanized people on all sides of the conflict. Apparently the star, Shen Teng, is a big comedic actor which makes his restrained, dramatic performance all the more impressive. I couldn’t help but think that his hero’s journey was reminiscent of the Odyssey, filled with detours and monsters to outwit before finally making it home years later.

Again, my main critique is relates to the story. While the chef character was apparently a composite of actual Chinese restauranteurs who stayed in Iraq after the US invasion, the scenes of him saving orphans and rescuing child soldiers seemed a bit too on-the-nose and over the top. As far as I know, nothing like this ever happened in the Iraqi context, so these plot points make an otherwise nuanced movie feel a bit propagandistic. There was also a child labor aspect that seemed a bit…questionably casual?

Overall though, I’d give it a 4.5/5, definitely worth a watch. It felt well-researched and well-shot, you could almost call it an epic tragedy.

Curious to hear if anyone else had the chance to catch it.

Even though all of them discuss similar themes and almost nothing happens, I find Ozu's films so endearing because all these little everyday things feel so nostalgic, and I can almost bet that I have lived them firsthand (at least they make me feel so). Children massaging granny's shoulders, parents eating sweets hidden from the children, children expecting parents to always come back home with toys. Every little experience, I cherish so much. Ozu makes a harsh life feel worth living.

As the title 'Early Summer' (Bakushu in Japanese) suggests, the movie depicts a period defined by change. It is a post-war, pre-modern period, as a character says about Noriko. The scars of WW2 are still fresh, and you can sense westernisation in every aspect of Tokyo life - toys, cutlery, dresses, the honeymoon culture, shortcakes, churches. It's a time when families are becoming nuclear, people are migrating for jobs, school friends are being left behind as you enter colleges, and friends from bachelor days feel distant as you get married. The world's drifting apart as globalisation knocks on the door. But life goes on.

I cannot finish this piece without mentioning Setsuko Hara, ever so charming. Very unexpectedly, Audrey Hepburn is also mentioned. Also, the conversations between Noriko and Aya are to die for, neeee?

Regarding spoilers: I will avoid plot specifics, but this post will touch on the major themes of the movie with a few references to key moments.

It has been striking to see the diversity of reactions to You Can See Everything, the documentary by Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim that follows Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she begins a prison sentence that she earned for defrauding investors by misrepresenting the capacity & potential of Theranos's blood-testing technology. There are a few moments in particular where Holmes says something that strains credulity - something almost certainly untrue - and we are left wondering whether she is being deliberately deceptive or if she actually believes this untrue thing. This is the crux of the story, and I think people are missing out when their reaction is along the lines of she's an inveterate liar; why are you even wondering about what's going on in her head? Because we are increasingly surrounded by bullshitters like Holmes, it's valuable to understand how they differ from liars... and how they can be much more dangerous & destructive.

So, how does a liar differ from a bullshitter? This video has a great summary, and although that link should start the video at the 4-minute mark, the prior part is worth watching if you haven't thought too hard about epistemology (ideas like when someone tries to speak the truth but says something untrue, or someone intends to deceive but they end up speaking the truth). The video cites the book On Bullshit, which lays it out as follows:

[The author] makes a distinction between "bullshitters" and liars. He concludes that bullshitters are more insidious: they are more so a threat against the truth than are liars who, like truth-tellers, are resolutely concerned with the truth, the latter in telling it, the former in avoiding it, unlike bullshitters, who are almost entirely unconcerned with the truth.

I came away convinced Holmes actually thinks she is (and always has been) speaking appropriately, while not really concerning herself with whether her words and actions are truthful. This is the way of the bullshitter. We can't know with any certainty what's going on in her head, but it seems that her mind has re-shaped ideas, words, and definitions such that her outlandish claims are actually... fine. (I hesitate to say "true" because the core idea here is that these people aren't concerned with the truth; they just want things to go their way.)

There's a great moment when Fielder puts her on the spot, asking "what do you think it is to lie?" and, as I recall, she comes up with a solid definition: "to say something you believe to be untrue". So how can someone know what lying is, say things that aren't true, and still earnestly believe they're not lying? They can "hack" this scenario simply by changing what they believe. The bullshitter believes their own bullshit, and I think Holmes fits the bill perfectly.

This portrait-of-a-bullshitter feels quite timely: our lives are increasingly being impacted by bullshitters, from the people in power to the feckless media to the influencers that will say anything as long as it benefits them. Theranos was famous for the disconnect between what was promised and what was actually delivered, and we see the same thing happening routinely in the US, from the government's wildly corrupt and anti-accountability sins to the chatbot purveyors bullshitting their way into a bubble so massive it will almost certainly tank the global economy. (For anyone feeling the urge to defend chatbots' abilities, I'll remind you that Sam Altman said "we are close to creating a genie that grant any wish". What the fuck?)

Responsibility & culpability look very different for the bullshitter, and in practice this grants them freedom to behave carelessly... without meaningfully grappling with the consequences. Even when facing incarceration, Holmes didn't express a bit of remorse. This is because she believes she did nothing wrong. I'm sure there will be no remorse from those in the government who have no regard for the truth (even after it has disastrous consequences), and the same applies to the people who are burning literal trillions of dollars on the ridiculous promise of AI-enabled miracles.

If you saw the movie and still want to shout at me "you fell for her spell, sucker - liars must be held accountable!", I don't particularly disagree. But I still think it's fascinating to investigate how a person navigates the world with essentially zero concern for what is actually true. Especially because these people are routinely tolerated in positions of power (which - I think - is having catastrophic consequences that are only just beginning to emerge).

I haven't seen it discussed elsewhere but it would seem to not be a coincidence at all Lance Oppenheim released Primetime within a month of You Can See Everything. The same director is taking apart the convention of media and how it's perceived, along with the obvious parallels of how the subjects of dramatized non-fiction (fiction based in non-fiction?) feel/are impacted by the work.

I don't really know if I had any thoughts or feelings about Chris Hansen before seeing Primetime. Living through To Catch a Predator, I always thought it was a at best low brow, at worst extremely exploitive. However I never really associated the show with the man. After seeing Primetime, I can't help but think Chris Hansen's greed and willingness do nearly anything on the show to gain notoriety/fame portrays him as a bad guy.

Compare this to Elizabeth Holmes' portrayal in The Dropout and how she claims it has impacted her in negative ways. Now is Elizabeth Holmes a malevolent person? That's a whole other topic. But she clearly feels helpless to this portrayal in media as inaccurate to actual events. Even Amanda Seyfried admits as much - That it's just a movie and isn't expected to be completely accurate to the actual events.

Just really had me re-evaluating how the real Chris Hansen felt about his portrayal.

And I am so glad that the movie was made.

Made by a filmmaker, Gus Van Sant, whose work I usually intensely dislike, to put it mildly. Van Sant is the rare filmmaker who is able to make a movie about teenage male prostitutes and make it come out tedious.

Yet, I appreciate his Psycho very much. It's an ode to a classic, of course.

But more than that, I love it because of how it brought a Black-and-White classic into the 21st century. Psycho 1998 makes an attempt at answering the question of how classic movies would have been received if they were made today. I wonder a lot about how 1998's teenagers reacted to watching the remake, right in the middle of the post-Scream renaissance of the slasher horror genre.

Psycho 1998 makes the case for the timelessness of great cinema.

Got around to watching Na Hong-jin's Hope since it recently came to Amazon Video last week. And boy, what a ride it is.

Arguably the best aspect about Hope is how Na Hong-jin makes no allusions to what he's making. It never tries to pretend it's smart or deep with its story, characters, or any of the crazy events that go down. Instead, Hong-Jin embraces the B-Movie craziness while also paying homage to countless great monster films as Ridley Scott's Alien and John McTiernan's Predator. If anything, Hope is one of those rare films in recent memory where it feels like its primary goal is to keep the audience entertained, something it does pretty well.

What's more impressive though is the clear effort and production on screen. Hope has been circling around the internet as being South Korea's most expensive film and it does show, especially during the city sequences. Credit has to go to the production designer Lee How-kyoung, as the sets of Hope Harbor being rampaged and destroyed look incredible and even life-like. I can't imagine how long it took for the crew to set some of the environments up given the first half of the film takes place in the town.

And Hong Kyung-pyo's cinematography. Honestly, out of this world. The way he jumps from long takes to framing characters from a distance plays out so seamlessly that it's almost unreal. It's especially notable during the action sequences that feel far ahead of most Hollywood action films nowadays. No split-second cutting or whiplash editing. Kyung-pyo just lets the action play out with only a few cuts and a lot of steady-cam movement. This results in some of the most fluid action scenes that still manage to look astoundingly wild. That one shot involving Sung-ki being dragged by the guy on the horse... just insane!

As for the CGI and VFX, I wasn't really thrown off by it as others. Yes, the monsters clearly stand out from the environments and are clearly made by a computer, but I actually think it works in the film's favor. It adds to the B-Movie charm quite well in terms of the fluctuating quality between the great sets and less than grounded creatures.

Nevertheless, I can see why Hope has been pretty divisive amongst critics and audiences as it's pretty simple otherwise. The characters are basic with no real arcs and a good portion of the second act slows things down considerably. I wouldn't say it drags since it does give some detail into the monsters attacking the town, but I still think Hope would've benefited from cutting it down by about 20 or so minutes. The fact too it ends on a cliffhanger is also something I'm concerned about, since it's not been confirmed if Na Hong-jin will be able to do a sequel.

Regardless, Hope is one entertaining action film that is just fun to watch. I'm still surprised to see it got nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes given this seems like the kind of film the festival tends to avoid.

I've been thinking about the rather unusual position Timothée finds himself in at this stage of his career, and I wonder whether we're witnessing a shift that could have much greater implications for his longevity in Hollywood than people realize.

There's an interesting paradox developing. He's arguably more commercially valuable, connected, and influential than ever before, yet I can't help but feel that some of the cultural capital that made him so compelling in the first place is beginning to erode.

What originally distinguished Timothée wasn't simply his talent or appearance. It was the perception that he represented something different in Hollywood. He occupied this interesting space between mainstream success and artistic credibility. He seemed unconventional, intellectually curious, somewhat elusive, and relatively uninterested in the machinery of celebrity. Whether that image was entirely authentic is almost irrelevant. It was a significant part of what made him culturally interesting.

Now, his public identity seems increasingly intertwined with the very celebrity culture he once appeared to exist outside of.

I don't necessarily think Kylie is responsible for this transformation, nor do I think their relationship is inherently damaging. But I do think it represents a fascinating shift in the world he's chosen to inhabit. The Kardashian-Jenner family operates within an extraordinary ecosystem of wealth, influence, visibility, and commercial opportunity. Those connections can undoubtedly expand someone's reach, but they don't necessarily translate into artistic credibility or cultural respect.

And I think that's where Timothée's position becomes particularly interesting.

Hollywood has always rewarded fame, but there's a difference between being famous because people are fascinated by your work and becoming someone whose celebrity begins to overshadow it.

The more commercially powerful he becomes, the less he may actually need the audience that originally championed him. Yet that audience arguably played an important role in establishing his reputation as a serious, unconventional actor.

There's also the question of overexposure. Part of his original appeal was that he seemed somewhat inaccessible. Now, despite remaining relatively private about his personal life, his public persona feels increasingly calculated and self-aware. The mystery has been replaced by spectacle, and I wonder whether that's a sustainable exchange.

Of course, his professional achievements speak for themselves. He's extraordinarily talented, and I don't think his career is remotely close to collapsing. But artistic success and cultural relevance aren't necessarily the same thing. An actor can continue securing prestigious roles, commanding enormous salaries, and accumulating industry recognition while gradually losing the public goodwill and fascination that once made them feel exceptional.

Perhaps this is simply the inevitable transition from promising young artist to established Hollywood superstar. Or perhaps we're watching someone become so embedded in the machinery of fame that the qualities that originally distinguished him are becoming harder to recognize.

What I find most interesting is whether this trajectory is intentional. Is he consciously trading some of his artistic mystique for greater commercial influence, or is this simply what happens when someone becomes extraordinarily famous at a young age?

And more importantly, can someone maintain genuine artistic credibility when their celebrity begins to eclipse their work?

I'm curious whether others see this as a temporary shift in public perception or something that could meaningfully shape the next decade of his career.

Please don't downvote opinions. Only downvote comments that don't contribute anything. Check out the WHYBW archives.

I started keeping subtitles permanently on a few years ago and it has genuinely changed how I experience films. You catch dialogue you would otherwise miss entirely, notice wordplay and references, and never lose a whispered line again. Some people argue they are distracting and pull you out of the visual experience, and I get that — but for me the trade-off is worth it. I find I actually engage more deeply with dialogue-heavy films because I am processing both the audio and the text simultaneously. It has made me a more attentive viewer.

Curious where other film enthusiasts land on this — poll here: https://www.getqibble.com/poll-detail/do-you-watch-everything-with-subtitles-on-even-though-your-hearing-is-perfectly-fine

Really enjoyed both movies, but what i keep coming back to, is the very sweet, intentional and effective of mini montage scenes of childhood.

not sure if i can share youtube links hare but those scenes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maEC9NS6CkA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G8jZKqrwyk

Make me tear up...

Captures that intense innocence, child like wonder and imagination and sad nostalgia feeling.

What are some other movies that similar scenes or even better focus entirely on that type of cinematography and feeling?

Digger amazed me. I went in without knowing anything, and I don’t know the last time a movie managed to change my perspectives and surprise me like this.

I also read and heard many criticisms later, and I want to comment on the one I find the most bizarre.

But first an overview of common problems people seem to have with it. Anything related to people’s dislike for Tom Cruise or his involvement with a movie like this doesn’t interest me too much. I don’t care about his personal life and find him to be an excellent actor, like Digger clearly showed. Overall there isn’t much to discuss here, if you just can’t watch Tom Cruise that’s fine but that also means you don’t have anything to say about Digger.

Second criticism is also something I can’t really debate, and that’s the fact that some people just didn’t like the experience. Either because the first part (satire) was too corny to them, and even if that was the point, it still wasn’t pleasant to watch; or because the second part (meta commentary) took them out of the movie where they could no longer care about the satire plot or had a good reason to care about the meta/ making the play plot either yet. Or because it looked ugly, and again, even if that is on purpose, it doesn’t make it pleasant. Those are the basic things I saw mentioned a lot.

Personally, I totally enjoyed the satire part for itself and was immersed in the story. When the meta segment took place, it made me curious to see where it’s going, while still being interested in the plot of the satire play too. And I thought it all looked very cool and unique. But I can’t convince anyone about what they find corny, boring, or unpleasant to watch, and I agree that the awareness that something is a purposeful choice doesn’t necessarily change the experience. My experience was just the total opposite, it pulled me in from the start and then just kept being more than that.

The third criticism is something I heard a few times and kind of annoys me, it seems more like a reaction to marketing (hiding the twists.). I heard a few people say how the big “twist” , by which they refer to the first twist that tells us the satire is actually a play, should have been known from the start, or how it was underwhelming. The structure of the movie clearly fits into three parts, the reveal of the play sets the second part in motion, and I am surprised by how many times people who talk about their disappointment with this twist totally forget to even mention that this sets the stage for the second twist that leads to the third part of the movie. For me, the first reveal had an interesting destabilizing effect where I realized there was more to what I thought I was watching, but the second reveal was the real shock and put everything in place.

So I am not sure why anyone would think that changing this flow would have been better in any way, or act like the movie blew its big twist after the first 15-20 min as if the second and more important one never happened. The sequence is so clean and makes perfect sense, so I don’t get this.

But my biggest disconnect is with people who seem stuck on the second part of the movie as if the third one never happened. I keep seeing the movie getting accused of wanting to be a satire but removing itself from being a satire by shifting to meta commentary about satires.

In fact it seems most posts here about this movie are super focused on what the movie says about satires and their power, or lack thereof, even implying that the movie’s main focus is commenting on Don’t Look Up or something. While obviously that commentary is an element the meta segment seems to be focused on, the movie then does the complete opposite from this perceived removal when it tells you that all the events seen in the satire actually happened.

This completely changes all the implications. Cruise’s character now 20 years later may have issue with some parts being too much of a caricature or unrealistic, but you as viewer would think that the overall criticism is that the whole satirical play is unrealistic and exaggerated, just to learn that the actual plot, the most extreme part of it, is completely real.

And then it really doesn’t matter if Digger is a cartoonish villain, or if he was actually a bit more charismatic and refined, or if he was on a plane with the president or not, because the most outrageous elements of his life and actions aren’t even a question, they happened.

Instead of staying in the meta space of examining satires while making a satire, the movie pulls you into a realistic drama where it clearly stands behind its story. It’s no longer a satire or a meta movie, it’s a tragedy.

It had a profound effect on me, that final switch of perspectives. It was sad and shocking, and I really can’t remember the last time I was surprised like that.

Even if it didn’t manage to affect you that way, I don’t get how anyone can blame it for not being brave or for hiding behind a meta satire, criticizing in a way that tries to avoid criticism etc. There’s no bigger statement it could have made then it did by declaring it was all real. It’s obviously not trying to remove itself from its message, it totally dives into it, and just in the moment when you think you get what it’s doing.

I mean, that scene where they are debating the point and validity of the satire (and I disagree that it was done in a way that made the director seem incompetent or the satire total trash), just to hit you with the facts that everything you were watching happened, you realize as a viewer that you didn’t even understand the actual issue of pt 2. They live in the post Digger world so for them it makes sense to debate the approach the play took, but for the viewer, you basically learn that the actually important part (plot of the play) never even was a question.

Anyway, I am not explaining anything with the post that the movie doesn’t explicitly say, and I am sure everyone who saw it got it, but that’s why I don’t get why this is what it gets shit for.

This is the only film I’ve seen that genuinely convinced me I might’ve been having a stroke in the cinema.
That isn’t a joke, I’m not taking the piss, it even got to the point where I was tempted to pull out my phone and check to see if my face was drooping.

This has nothing to do with my actual opinion of the film, I’m just desperate to know if it made anyone else feel like this?

Keep in mind, I’m somebody who LOVES films that make you feel completely disoriented and uncomfortable.
Gaspar Noé is literally my all time favourite director lmfao.
I also adored Birdman and thought the tense, disorienting atmosphere in that film was phenomenal.
So…I don’t know what happened here?

Again, I’m not criticising the actual content of the film when saying this, but it almost felt like it was edited by someone on bath salts and not in a good way.
The discombobulated pacing and structure felt like an intentional decision given the film’s context, but in my opinion, it was executed horribly.
I need to make that distinction because I know I’m inevitably going to be told “but that was the point”, which again, is something I’m aware of.
However, I’m not sure how that is supposed to exempt the film from criticism, especially in regard to the particular creative decisions that were used to communicate the film’s underlying commentary.

I really don’t want to start any beef lol, if you loved this aspect of the film I think that’s great, I just want to know if anyone else felt the same way.

I watched A Few Good Men recently, and there's something about the ending that I found more interesting than Jessup's famous confession. Earlier in the movie, we learn that Dawson was punished for disobeying orders to bring food to another Marine. So he was clearly capable of breaking the rules when he thought it was the right thing to do. But when Santiago was targeted with a Code Red, he followed orders.

That's what makes the final verdict interesting to me. Dawson and Downey are cleared of murder, but they're still found guilty of conduct unbecoming a Marine. Downey doesn't understand why. Dawson eventually realizes they should have protected Santiago.

What bothers me is that these men were trained to obey, and then punished for doing exactly that. I'm not saying they shouldn't be held responsible. They absolutely should. But the military system that taught them to act this way also bears responsibility. For me, that contradiction is one of the most interesting parts of the movie, and it gets a little overshadowed by Nicholson's courtroom scene.

Just watched the film today, and have three claims. Curious if this sub agrees or not. Tons of SPOILERS:

Claim #1: This was not a documentary.

A24 and Nathan agreed to compensate Billy for his participation, knowing this wasn't customary, and could undermine the film's credibility. Sure, they could've reconsidered calling it a documentary had Billy and Liz actually pursued compensation, but that last-minute reversal wasn't known to A24/Nathan when they agreed to Billy's terms. My theory is that, rather than risk their credibility over having agreed to this in the first place, they deliberately framed the agreement as something made under protest through a clever reenactment. Marketing the film as a documentary was disingenuous, but a clever move by A24. It also gave them the moral high ground if audiences, Billy, or Liz ever questioned their integrity or motivations for accepting Billy's terms in the first place.

Claim #2: There were three sociopaths in this film: Nathan, Liz, and Billy.

Nathan: Given Claim #1, I'm convinced Nathan was in character from the moment we saw him on screen. His mannerisms, responses, questions, and even moments of tactical vulnerability were likely carefully calculated. We essentially watched one sociopath (Nathan) outsmart two others (Liz and Billy), while those two believed they were outsmarting him. A couple examples: 1) Nathan opened the interview by revealing how much he already knew about their history, essentially calling them out rather than trying to build rapport. This immediately put them (especially Billy) on the defensive. I think this was deliberate, particularly given how the compensation agreement had shifted the leverage between them. 2) Nathan included footage of himself writing notes on his arm, along with his discussion with Amanda about the word he supposedly misremembered. Both moments humanized him, but then he had Amanda reenact the scene using both words. If he'd genuinely made a mistake, or was actually nervous going into the prison, I don't see why that reenactment was necessary.

Liz and Billy: Billy is obvious enough, so I won't spend much time on him. Liz though never convinced me she was benign or easily manipulated. I think Billy and Liz are business partners first, romantic partners second. The hot-mic moment where Liz was being coached on how to answer difficult questions was pretty telling. So was her seemingly random comment about not receiving financial compensation for her transparency, which felt like an unconvincing attempt to CYA. I also think her tendency to answer Nathan's straightforward questions with overly literal responses was intentional. It gave her a way to avoid answering without appearing evasive. My read is that Billy genuinely believes any publicity is good publicity and wants to cash in on whatever remains of Liz's reputation. Liz probably sees cooperating with him as her best shot at leaving prison with some financial security.

Claim #3: Amanda was acting the entire film, including during the supposedly candid off-camera conversations with Nathan.

Again, this goes back to Claim #1. If this was no longer a documentary, but a dramatization under Nathan's creative direction, Amanda arguably had more leverage than anyone. Nathan also had a pretty convenient justification for her involvement. I think this explains why A24/Nathan chose to present events in that particular order: the agreement with Billy comes before Amanda's involvement, while the last-minute compensation reversal is only revealed at the end. That sequence makes Amanda's involvement seem like a justified response to an ethical dilemma, rather than something that was potentially part of the plan all along.

The film gave me the illusion that I could see everything happening behind the scenes, when I was really only seeing what Nathan/A24 wanted me to see. Maybe that was the whole point, and for that, it's a solid 5/5 film for me.

Edit: Apologies to those who haven't watched it yet. I tried to hide/redact all 3 claims, but couldn't figure out how to do it similar to how I hid the names in the paragraph above.

Spoilers for the film.

I wrote a long essay on Nolan’s The Odyssey, and one question hasn’t let go of me since I saw it. Nolan shot a film entirely on IMAX film cameras for the first time, which gave him the biggest frame of his career. He filled it with a world from which the gods and the big battles have almost been removed. So what holds up the epic?

To be honest, there’s no direct focus on IMAX in the essay. It’s more on the meanings that follow from it. It seems to me the epic here rests on a disproportion between people and what is greater than them, and this disproportion has several levels.

The first level is the gods. IMAX, as is well known, began as a format for surveying the world - all those films about nature and space, views from above - offering a gaze that used to be attributed to the gods. In The Odyssey, though, there are almost no gods. Nolan strikes out the council of the Olympians, Proteus’s news, and the peaceful realm of the Phaeacians, and the misfortunes of Troy’s conquerors look more like bad weather and bad luck than anyone’s wrath. Only Athena remains, and over the course of the film she goes through metamorphoses. In Homer she guides Odysseus home. In Nolan her image takes the place of the golden dog on the brooch Penelope gave her husband before the war, and the goddess herself, almost like a hunting dog, pursues him through his memories, now in the guise of a victim and of conscience. The gods can no longer help, and still Athena won’t let him go. The place above stands empty, and the enormous frame hands this lacuna over to the viewer. More lies open to him than to any character, but his eyes are still the same human eyes.

The second level is values. Without the gods, what remains of them is a rule that can be turned against another. Accordingly, the Trojans let the horse in because they share their gods with the Greeks, and so this rightness opens the gates, letting the enemy in under the guise of a gift. Then Athena’s priestess is killed and the goddess’s statue beheaded, and at the end Odysseus and his son defile her temple with blood and fire. The one who has to answer is the one who knew the rule and broke it. This is what gets to me most in the film: the guilt of Polyphemus, who speaks only once he has been blinded, or of the Laestrygonians, who attack without a single line, weighs less than the hero’s. People don’t measure up to their own ideals either. Songs make Helen the beauty a thousand ships sailed after, yet at Menelaus’s feast she sits with a scar on her face, barely granted a glance by her husband or the guests. The scar cuts her beauty in half, just as Menelaus cuts the fleet in half when he says only half of that thousand survived. The image they went to war for no longer coincides with the living woman.

The third level is the world itself. The open spaces are flooded with sun and almost empty of people, and life huddles in patches of torchlight. The story stands on the threshold of the Bronze Age collapse, rumors of the Sea Peoples creep across the oikoumene, and until the very end not a single tablet or written text appears on screen. This huge, indifferent world is about to crumble, and the meaning of the war is small in it and keeps slipping away. At the suitors’ feast a nameless singer squeezes the war into a refrain, “a face, a fleet, a war, a man, a thought, a trick,” news arrives late, and Menelaus cuts his story short, deciding everyone knows the rest. In effect, only the camera sees the connections between scattered places, and the bigger and emptier the frame, the heavier the small figure inside it.

Hence what keeps the film from ending. Everything horizontal in it can be overcome: the sea can be crossed, the years waited out. What resists is the vertical. Circe sends Odysseus down to the dead, the fate of Troy is decided in the cramped belly of the horse, and memories cut through the present in short flashes. Nolan has never been fond of closing his endings. Think of the spinning top in Inception, or of Cooper in Interstellar, who makes it home and then flies off again. In The Odyssey, I think, he names the reason for the first time, and it is the depth of what was done. Odysseus returns to his palace calling himself Sinon, the man he left to die by the horse, and at home he repeats the very ruse that once opened the gates of Troy, so the crime enters the house along with him. Remorse catches up with him only after the temple has burned. The goal is reached, and still he leaves for the west, into an exile he all but seeks himself. There is a reckoning in this departure, but also a refusal to hold on to what he has achieved. He promises that their story will survive in song, and adds right away that “our mistakes will once again be forgotten.”

To me this is an epic in an unusual sense, and the sublime in it lives in fall and overthrow. Troy falls, the goddess’s statue loses its head, and the weight of everything that stood above the human being comes down on him and on what he has done. I understand that without gods and big battles the film can feel detached, but this distance seems to be part of the design.

I’m curious how others read it. Did it feel epic to you without gods and big battles? And did the IMAX scale feel like spectacle, or like the world’s indifference?

I wrote about this in more detail in the essay, if anyone’s interested: https://medium.com/rock-nheavy/the-duration-of-ruins-e3ea8a70602c

There is of course the fact that Bush's War on Terror plays in the background of this film, the Saddam Hussein statue falling clip, Stone Phillips appearance as he goes to do coverage in Afghanistan, etc.

But the structural parallel goes much deeper, the movie is critical of To Catch a Predator in all the same ways we are now critical of The War on Terror. I'll stay outside of the film for a second. There is the way that both TCAP and TWT stoked the fear of Americans, a danger on the doorsteps of our home that got its way in through the dangerous internet, a danger on the doorsteps of our country getting its way in through immigration and radical Islamic beliefs. There is the way that both existed primarily as media productions, sure there is a reality underneath it but it was amplified to manufacture consent for American intervention in the middle east as well as to manufacture consent for Hansen's TV show. There is the way that both kind of "produced" their target so that they could catch them, as a way to justify themselves. Hansen "produced" predators the way Bush "produced" terrorists.

By production, I don’t mean to say that pedophiles and radical Islamists don't exist, but rather they are both instances where crime had to be generated before it actually occurred so that there was something to punish. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, etc.

Now in the language of the film itself, the parallels continue. I'll rattle off whatever I can remember (and used in my essay about ): 1) The way Hansen is unable to ditch his formal tone and demeanor in his personal life is like a military man who is stuck in that mode 2) The way he shows clips of himself from his show to his sons like he is a soldier, fighting for some great cause (the critique being that both what he and a soldier does is actually kind of weird to show a child) 3) The entire arc of Decoy Dan. He goes from a young boy joining the military kind of confused why it's all so serious and weird, to accepting his role, becoming Hansen in that one scene where he takes Hansen's position in the episode. Of course he has his many doubts, and Hansen employs the language of a general to his soldier: "you're part of something much bigger, you're helping children, you're fighting an ancient evil, etc." All the way to the end where Dan and the attorney general share a brief moment together re the musical Rent, like two soldiers meeting in battle and seeing each other's humanity for a second before one kills the other. The "DECOY DAN!" yell was a fun one for me in the theater and it is also exactly how a general would summon their grunt. 4) The general imagery of the final scene with the officers and the media crew working together and transforming into a movie raid

Primetime is also a descent into madness film. By the time he's telling Dan that what they are doing is fighting a great ancient evil from India Hansen has already lost his marbles. He is maniacal about his big sting operation, like a general plunging deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness, a crazed Captain Ahab type. Primetime definitely brought to mind Apocalypse Now for me, especially the register it shifted into for that India scene about the great evil, how Hansen's descent into madness resembled the crew's descent into the jungle, they are going crazy. It's a critique of the madness that seemed to be driving us to keep boots on the ground in the Middle East during the 2000s.

A quote from my essay: "Both Hansen and Bush are reactions to a post-9/11 America. They pledge allegiance to the transcendental American fantasy, driven by this sense of capital-J Justice. And so they must step into this father figure role: how dare you disobey daddy, I’ll teach you a lesson."

The 2000s were a decade of slipping control for America, and the powers that be that wanted to maintain the image of that perfect American fantasy lashed out to try and preserve their legitimacy. This is Bush's War on Terror, but it is also Hansen's To Catch a Predator. The way they both utilized the media spectacle is only half of the equation, but the placement of both next to each other in the same film, asking Hansen's iconic line: "You see how this looks, right?" back to Hansen is really cool art. This film knows the power lies with the one behind the camera, and turns it back on The War on Terror, Hansen's To Catch a Predator, and the joint "father figure" that was losing it's grip on the American family order in the 2000s. In many ways, it's very relevant today as well.

The whole essay is here, I go more into the Foucault and "father figure" stuff there if anyone's interested: https://smtsmtpostmodern.substack.com/p/the-primetime-essay?r=gseqz

My thoughts on Digger. Full of spoilers; if you haven’t seen it, don’t read this. Go see the movie.

“Digger” is not a satire. It is about billionaires, the oil industry, politicians and about climate change - but none of it in any specific sense.
 
On the one hand, it is a critique of the state of the entertainment industry, while at the same time seeking to transcend its limitations.
 
But at its core, it is a manifesto to our society, which will inevitably fall into the same traps that lead us to our downfall. And it’s not because of specific individuals or events; those are likely interchangeable. It is due to the predispositions of human nature that drive every individual human being. As a result of which individual or short-term benefits are always prioritized over the common long-term good.
 
Controlling the narrative is a key theme throughout the movie, recurring in aspects such as the censorship firewall and the hypocritical eco-friendly company. It is also Oil billionaire Digger Rockwell’s obsession - not only part of his business, but his driving force, to the point where he also seems to be outwitting himself with it.
 
“They know the facts - the story has yet to be told“ says Rockwell who then, just to prove his point, makes his employee Ganesh compromise his principles by soothing his conscience with a made up story. Deep down, Ganesh wants to try a bite of the tuna he’s been offered - but without the guilt that comes with it. So he accepts the narrative the billionaire is providing him, though he should have known better - which is the analogy for how the world deals with the over-exploitation of the Earth. By subsequently revealing the trick, Rockwell forces Ganesh to admit his complicity. During his monologue in the European Parliament he does the same thing to the public, though no longer to demonstrate his power, but to create a distraction and to save his skin in the face of disaster.
 
Politicians going mad in the face of death, rich men clinging to power, employees fearing for their jobs, a population seeking easy answers and scapegoats. Either ignoring or nuking our problems, and praying they disappear. None of “Digger’s” characters are innocent, everyone is guilty and has their own motivation. Led by our individual greed, convenience, fear, we all collectively drive and shape our society.
 
It is shown where this leads. “Digger’s” satire layer is just a grotesque play that distorts the facts in order to please and appease an audience. Rich men trying to control the narrative, the actors collaborate, the crowd applauds. The same old rules still apply, yet - as we are about to see - in a world that should have rebelled long ago.
 
Following an announcement, the audience leaves the theater and walks into the dystopian streets “Digger’s” last image is dedicated to. Nothing remains of the satire with which it all began. In the movie’s final stroke, the parallel lines of fiction and reality become a tangent for a brief moment. It ties the spectator to its bleak core message (and the reason why it should be watched in cinema): The credits roll and the very same announcement sounds again - this time with no one left to hear but you. You might realize that you now have no other choice but to physically mimic the audience in the movie. The show is over; you will stand up, leave the cinema, and walk outside.
 
Fortunately, our streets barely resemble “Diggers” grim vision of the future. But the question that Iñárritu makes us ask ourselves is how close we are to the path that leads there.
 
What seemed to be a satire turned into a dark tale of a worn-down world. Society slipped into a future where everyone loses and anyone could have seen it coming. Regarding climate change, the allegory is clearly visible - we know the facts, only our future is not yet written. However, “Diggers” implications go well beyond this specific threat to humanity.
 
It is dark, it carries a corrosive power, it combines art and message in a way that is masterfully executed - I've not seen anything like it.
 
So, what is the takeaway then? Iñárritu provides no answer. It is reasonable to assume that, if he truly believed in this inevitable course of events, the effort of making this movie would have been pointless.
 
What if Iñárritu, akin to Digger Rockwell, uses the very same method and tells us the story to the facts that we already know? In that case, “Digger” might be satire. But an absurdly grim one - no, its seriousness is disarming.
 
It’s the dead-serious remark that we will have no other choice but to somehow find a way to overcome our inherent flaws.

I got into Nathan Fielder years ago from a random video essay on Nathan For You, and somewhat naively, I never felt it was in bad taste. The most memorable characters: The Bill Gates impersonator, the private investigator, the small dick sports car guy, the guy who drinks his grandson's piss. In a sense they were kind of bad people, or at least a little deserving, and that's why it felt ok to laugh at them. And the others, my mind just kind of brushed them off because Nathan takes a lovably submissive role in any interaction. 

Then he takes the same concept and applies it to Benny and Elizabeth and I start to see a different perspective. It starts with a jeering feeling: she's a bad person and Billy is probably silly, stupid, or as bad as her for being with her. Then Nathan is talking to her father, we're laughing at how funny the interaction is, and suddenly he drops that Elizabeth was sexually assaulted. In a flash, you realize this is horrifying. We keep laughing at this whole situation but slowly the reality sets in as a family gets torn apart right in front of our eyes, and there's this perverted, voyeuristic, almost manic feeling to it that made me feel really fucking weird and disgusted.

You realize this whole situation is fucked and everyone’s been laughing like wolves. It's heartless to make fun of a woman as she's being pulled away from her family, especially if were to believe her act that shes markedly autistic and doesn’t even understand the most obvious joke of all time. And then there's the flip side, where she might be performing for us and for Nathan. Meanwhile I still felt empathy for these people, even Benny, who is revoltingly manipulative and narcissistic.

Although Nathan seemed to have walked the line quite tastefully, there’s one moment in particular that I found very gross. On the day she’s going to jail, he’s cracking sex jokes and giving her gag gifts. Does does he or Lance or any of the crew have not a shred of empathy for a family that is likely never gonna be the same again? 

The obvious devil on your shoulder is going to say, “Yeah, but she’s evil too. She defrauded people.” okay? Does dehumanizing and torturing someone become OK just because they are not your definition of a good person? This is a much more callous and deep and cutting and fucked up version of Nathan for you. 

I started to feel a little bit of hope when I saw Amanda Seyfried. She's kind, beautiful and composed in a way that almost sets you at ease. She’s right, she’s doing the right thing. The mythologically correct thing. She tries to empathize with Elizabeth, she gets into politics with Benny at the dumpling dinner, and she does everything politically and optically right. But then you start to think “Why the fuck does she look like she’s having so much fun.”

In the recreation, when Elizabeth says she gets bullied in jail because of Seyfried's show, you see a crack in Amanda’s veneer. The perfect performance fades and all of a sudden she starts grasping at reasons why Elizabeth is guilty and reveals herself to be just as opportunistic as Elizabeth or even Benny but she’s better at following the rules and presenting herself as pure and good. She had very little thought in her own effect on this person. She, just like us, thought: Elizabeth Holmes is bad so it doesn’t matter what I say about her. Kind of emblematic of how our politics feel right now. 

And then Elizabeth herself. I almost want to believe that she is the manipulative person that the entire media has portrayed her to be, because the flip side of that is so shockingly disturbingly depressing: This fucking Benny guy is just one of the many men who has been completely taking advantage of her doe eyed love and has led her like a lamb to the slaughter into this horrible mess.

I usually say I watch movies to be entertained, or to get some insight into why we do the things we do. This made me feel disgusted at the real people, the characters, the production, the audience next to me giggling, and myself for sitting there, and yet, somehow that ends up being profound and beautiful and layered. I’ve not seen art this good in a long time.

I find it very interesting to think of how kids today are growing up with some of the most discussed films being Poor Things, Nosferatu, One Battle After Another, Backrooms, The Substance, Oppenheimer, The Odyssey, etc. These are very artistic, strange films compared to what was popular when I was growing up.

Maybe I'm overestimating how popular these films are, but they seem genuinely trendy among young people and online. I'm imagining what my perspective on cinema would be if I'd grown up on films like that, rather than discovering them much later when I *decided* to look more deeply into cinema.

Of course there's still Marvel, Disney, Tik Tok, brain rot, etc. To be concerned about, but I could imagine a new wave of really interesting, sophisticated films coming from Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

What do you think?

I am neither a native english speaker nor a cinephile, so please expect a lot of mistakes. Skip directly to the questions if you don't want to read my opinion of the film. I just felt I had to type it as I have seen a lot of users take time to give detailed answers without mockery, for even films or opinions that the majority of the public dismiss as dumb, I felt it would be insulting if I didn't do the same.

I went to watch Digger with my gf and I really enjoyed it, she on the other hand thought it was superficial. I disagree and I think the discussion around it proves that. She thinks the only reason I enjoyed it is because I don't watch any movies, and that I don't know better. She has an arts background and clearly knows movies better than me.

The parts that resonated with me, were Kenny Rockwell saving Curtis' daughter and Curtis being grateful for it even though he is highly skeptical of the Rockwells. I did go through something similar when my father was hospitalized and the insurance company wouldn't let the hospital do their job, and their representative kept came directly to our room to annoy us and find a reason to reject us, even though we did the proper procedure and made the payments correctly. My father knew the vice president of the insurance company and gave him a call. All it took was one call from him, and everything sailed smoothly. I felt what Curtis probably felt, a mixture of appreciation and guilt, even though I shouldn't, as he himself was the direct cause of the situation and probably the cause of suffering for many others. Saying that I do believe he did care about my father.

I don't think Kenny is actively malicious or represents nihilism in a traditional sense. He is evil, yes, in the sense that he is okay with the status quo that benefits him, but I do think that he genuinely wanted to help Curtis. I also doubt that he would be okay with swapping places with the lower classes. To me what he meant by "it doesn't matter" was, as long as people are content with hating his Uncle and satisfying their emotional needs while actively doing nothing about it, how Digger Rockwell is portrayed is irrelevant. He doesn't have to actively manipulate the audience by interfering with the script. As seen in the last seen when Curtis gets a call about his daughter being safe and looks back at the audience who are eager to see him jump off the cruise ship, I think, Curtis satisfied with hearing that his daughter is safe, is content, and lets go of the skepticism of Rockwells he had through out the rehearsals, and gives the same to the audience and celebrates the success of the play.

I also disagree that the movie mocks the audience or that it completely disagrees with them getting a satisfaction from the satire. Yeah the Level 4 warning at the end credits is direct, but there is another scene, where Hannah the director of the play, who is only seen as pompous Brit and completely dismissive of Curtis, speaks directly to the camera with tears in her eyes without any refutation from Curtis before they are cut off by Kenny. Maybe this is me reading too much into it, but the sudden shift caught me off-guard, and me take her seriously as a character.

Oh, I enjoyed the shift in calming animals sounds to scary ones, supposedly the invasion of Bull frogs decimating the native population.

Either way, I enjoy that people have strong disagreement about what the movie or characters represent, it makes me see through different perspectives. I don't think it is bad movie at all and its really nuanced.

The thing though, is my gf is more familiar with movies and has seen a lot of this directors movies. She says he is more direct and is known for his technical prowess than depth, and I am reading too much into the movie because it reminded me of something personal. And that his films aren't that deep, lack any genuine nuance, and are pretty much "style over substance". Also that there wouldn't be multiple interpretations of it as he is unambiguous in storytelling She also called him pretentious. I think she just hates him though.

I was thinking was watching his other movies, and while, I know art is subjective, I would be really embarrassed if what I saw was only in my head. I am worried that whatever connection I felt to this movie will be lost once I realize that my gf maybe right.

So,

1. Should you try to enquire what the creator actually wanted to show you, even if it destroys what you thought you saw?
2. Should you ignore the creator and his other works in order to avoid ruining one of his work that you cherish, even if it means that you are misreading him?

Either way, I found this movie to be satisfying. I got the tickets dirt cheap at 70% off as the movie is flopping. If it stays next week, I don't mind paying the whole price to watch it again.

Today I watched "Hope" by Na-Hong Jin,  when I saw the trailer I knew this movie will have very very bad CGi and eventually it was true. There was one scene where alien was running and a tear fell from her eye, that scene's CGi was so worse it made me remember Indian TV serials. Na just pushed us into the scene without any context, In starting it was hard to grasp the emotions of characters, but gradually it settled. The movie was very inconsistent (up and down and up and down). I was expecting something like "The wailing" but it's ok if it's different. Performance were good, I liked the dialogues. I liked the Invincible guy(Chief's grandfather's brother's grandson -second cousin).It's a decent watch. The main problem was for me that I couldn't understand the bigger picture, what was this trying to say that both civilizations are on a verge and they're hoping to come out of this tragedy they're suffering from, or am I dumb or was there a big metaphorical meanings. If someone knows please explain or Na was trying to say something like Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut).........