An avant-garde explosion of discontent featuring some of the best dissolves ever committed to celluloid. A militant affront to the homogeneous image of Blackness constructed by Hollywood and a direct denouncement of police brutality that embraces the commonality of blackness, the body, and the need for escape from the oppression brought by the white majority and the agents of the state that serve their interests. Radical formal expression elucidates the discontent and anger but also the commonality of collective power. Hollywood itself would later make this malleable, distort it, and arguably exploit it in the construction of the blaxploitation genre in which the communal nature of rebellion and collective action was largely replaced by individualist ideals of excess and action
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Magical. Mayu Matsuoka's performance in this is one of the best of the 2010s. Akiko Ohku is making some of the most playful, poignant ruminations on connection, companionship, and self. To call this a rom-com feels far too reductive, as what Ohku has crafted with Tremble All You Want is such a distinctive vision that transcends the strictures of genre. It aims to elucidate the complexities of consciousness through the cinematic art form and it largely achieves this due to its ontological approach that fully recognizes even our identities and ideas are often in contention and consistently adjusting and refining how we engage and interact with the external. People always vaguely reference "the magic of the movies" but what Akiko Ohku is doing with Tremble All You Want and her follow-up, Hold Me Back, which is also exceptional, is bringing truth to that adage through a formal ingenuity that takes full advantage of what this beautiful medium for expression is capable of.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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