EVIL DOES NOT EXIST @ Film Forum
This Week
This week I’m seeing EVIL DOES NOT EXIST at the Film Forum. I’ll be going to the 7pm showing, so with the 106min runtime we should be out by 9!
For the past few weeks due to work stress I took my break from the more, shall we say, niche films that I tend to enjoy. The stress got to be enough that last week I didn’t even write a newsletter update, instead choosing my film at 7:20 on the Tuesday and showing up 15 mins late to the 9:30 showing!
This week, I’d like to go back to the types of films that tend to give me the most pleasure: little explorations of humanity with beautiful visuals and excellent score. I think EVIL DOES NOT EXIST will really scratch that itch.
The film takes place in an idyllic forest community outside Tokyo where corporate invaders have bought choice land for a glamping site. The Film Forum describes it as “a mesmerizing immersion in Hamaguchi’s enigmatic artistry, with long tracking shots fixed skyward and a lush, hypnotic score as variable and complex as the characters themselves.”
What more could you want?
(As a side note to anyone who’s looking for something a little less heavy to see this week, THE LAVENDER HILL MOB is also playing this week at the Film Forum and promises to be a comedic blast!)
Last Time
I now owe two film reviews, but for the sake of brevity I’ll make them both quick. Two weeks ago I saw WE GROWN NOW (side note: I’m not sure why so many movies I’ve been excited about recently feature all caps titles). Going in I didn’t realize it was meant to capture the aura of a particular historical event at the Cabrini-Green public housing project in Chicago. That would’ve been useful!
I had two major problems with the film. The first was that it featured two 8-year-olds who spoke with the heaviness of an 80-year-old who’d seen some shit. The second was that (spoilers) it seemed meant to capture the impact of a particular shooting on the life of Cabrini-Green residents. However, I discovered after reading critical discussion of the film, the lives of those residents in the days following the shooting were similarly impacted by the release of a horror film meant to take place at Cabrini-Green, which the film didn’t touch on at all. That details makes me take issue with its thesis of capturing a moment.
The second film, which I didn’t send a newsletter about and saw last week, was Deep Cover. It was an excellent noir that perfectly hit the spot after leaving the office at 9:20pm. I honestly don’t have much more to say about it.