saracnhamill Reviews

Spaceman (I) (2024)

A beautiful human experience

[10/10 · 2 March 2024]

I love this film. Shallow analysis of this movie will say it's long, it's boring, it's sad. It's just a guy losing his mind in space. It should have been funnier. To which I say. Then you missed it. The whole point. Entirely. Its sparse, lonely, lengthy quietness reflects the underlying hum of our human existence when all the distractions are taken away. It shows what it's like to have to really wrestle our grief, regrets, and loneliness to the ground. And spoiler alert. We all have to wrestle that s*** to the ground sometime. If you don't like this movie - if it made you feel uncomfortable or restless then best get to work on that now. All the love to Adam Sandler for choosing to take a risk and do something so deeply vulnerable.

The Meyerowitz Stories (2017)

As close to real life as it gets...

[10/10 · 13 July 2019]

I am surprised by other reviews of this film, but I think understanding this work depends wholly on whether you have ever lived with or known intimately a narcissist. It may not be pretty to watch, but it's not pretty to live either. And this movie nails it. It may be a small percentage of the population that can truly understand the subtleties of this movie and appreciate them. The skill it took to capture the complexity of these characters and to make it believable is remarkable. Baumbach paints in detail the devastated landscape of a narcissist's world. Hoffman's character displays perfectly how a narcissist's personality cannot and will not make room for anyone else's experience or emotions, especially his children's. Every conversation eventually returns to him: his needs, his opinions, his preferences, his ego, his career, his art, his place in the world. People have remarked that Hoffman is tedious and exhausting in this film. Yes. Because that is exactly the point. And Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller and Elizabeth Marvel are brilliant as the relational afterthoughts of his all-consuming ego. I would recommend this film to anyone. Not because you'll feel great after watching it but because it dares to tackle a deeply complex human subject and succeeds. And isn't that the point of art anyway?