Reel Spirituality

The Lego Batman Movie is not without meaning. Batman demands to work alone, resisting every possibility of friendship and family.

Person to Person is casual but not lazy, sentimental but not sappy. Even with its assumed 1970s look and feel, it feels genuine.

Sundance’s Next category is for emerging talents and under-represented voices. There is enough clever filmmaking here for me to hope Gook grants Chon more opportunities to share his unique perspective.

Whose Streets? focuses solely on the point of view of the protestors and activists in Ferguson. The film isn’t balanced. But it doesn’t need to be. The other side of the conflict has uncontested access to the media.

Crown Heights is certainly timely, as it focused on the ways the system is bent against Black men like Warner. It’s infuriating to watch injustice be done to Warner time and time again.

The New Radicals suggests that we have much reason to be concerned about the direction our world is heading. Maybe the film is right. After all, the idea of printable guns is rather scary when you remember that public libraries are installing 3D printers in some US cities.

Maybe Burning Sands is so true to the culture of its setting, a culture I am foreign too, I was unable to understand everything that was going on in this movie.

I suppose due credit must be given to the film’s writer/director Alex Ross Perry. It’s his direction that coalesces all these elements into such a wistful, resigned film.

Hidden Figures is a balm in troubled times, when we seem more eager to enfranchise and empower bigotry than we are to build a just and civil society. Hidden Figures is encouraging.

Machines presents that idea clearly. It features very poor workers sharing their contemplations on poverty, work, and the meaning of life.

Samantha and Elliot’s need is to love their life for what it is. Romantically, they have to stop pursuing some fake, ideal person they’ve created in their minds, and love the person they’re with instead.

Walking Out isn’t polished. It’s as rugged as its landscape. The filmmakers shot the film in the real snow and mountains in Montana. These shooting conditions are the kind that Oscar campaigns are built around, but this isn’t award’s bait. It’s an independent film.

Watching movies like this, often, though not always, from Europe, always urban-set, I wonder if there really are people like this out there. I’ve known some hard partiers fond of consciousness-perturbing substances, and while they’re lives are in disarray, they’re never quite the nuclear holocaust Mifti’s life is.

At one point, an otaku says explicitly that idol culture is more than a fad – “It’s a religion,” he exclaims. For devotees like him, there is indeed religious aspects to his idol worship.