Assassination Nation

[Something Spanish]

https://youtu.be/OuVGhpC2_ug

Got sold on the supposed Grindhouse with a feminist voice factor of this one, only to discover the depths of ineptness held in its storytelling. This needed a female scribe behind the keyboard, felt like everything was filtered through what guys fantasize feminism to be about. Has a good premise, then takes forever to get to the good B movie stuff, which would have been fine had there been some story progression . Then when it gets to the good stuff, material we see in flashes in the film's opening, the action is direct-to-DVD bad. The big action Assassination Nation is built on is borderline amateurish, even for B movie standards,  all the material leading up to it dragging sluggish and redundant as the same commercial being played repeatedly. We get the point early on, yet the writer/director insists on staying in the same spot until I lost all patience. The idea of leaking personal data and its repercussions was inventive, the way its handled was as if the director did not know where to go and was stalling for time.  Add to that awkward monologues of girl power that just felt inaccurate, like a desperate attempt to hop on the #MeToo bandwagon meanwhile entirely missing the movement's point.  The one good thing I guess is that the director seems to have captured the social media generation fairly accurately, he just needed a more focused story.

[WorldForgot]

The big action Assassination Nation is built on is borderline amateurish, even for B movie standards,  all the material leading up to it dragging sluggish and redundant as the same commercial being played repeatedly.

I really wanna blame marketing for this one -- had Neon not emphasized its violence, the film would have played as an indie with escalating chaos, ala Ingrid Goes West. This is, to me, much more interesting than The Myth of the American Sleepover or other American Indies about restless-teen-suburbia, although that monologue that ends the film is awful. Thought all the performances carried the film, but not even Odessa can wring the life out of the script once it gets to Act III's marching-band lvlz of bombast. Also, I'm a sucker for direct De Palma references.

Had fun watching the Levinson Family Camera Rigz show off the junior-directors visual ambitions in grand strokes you can't do without industry money. Had so much fun actually that I saw it three times, because this flick in particular gets my friends talking -- no one hates IG more than millennials...

One of my friends has completely sworn off social media after seeing this film -- he says before he had thought it was his imagination that no one listened to each other. Now he's not convinced any of our conversations are being heard, that is, that in all relationships we're still just seeking net gains. But this movie has plenty of examples of healthy conversations, too! It's about your expression'z value to other/the threats therein but yeah, it does have a film-school-y film to it, I guess, especially in its dialogue. This film should have been marketed as close to that as poss -- This is a fun, sexy indie about the conversations we do and do not have about weaponizing sex and gender. But yeah I realize how that sounds, too. Catharsis for the brickwall news cycle and misogyny.

[matt35mm]

I loved this movie. It just worked for me. I don't even care about the parts that aren't 100% as developed as they could be because overall the movie caught me off guard, hit a groove that I vibed with, and I admired its messiness and anger and empathy. It made me feel a lot of things. Watched it a second time recently (my first viewing was at Sundance) and it confirmed my feelings. There were better movies that I saw this year but this one made me feel the most and has lingered with me the longest. Honestly I loved how much of a mess this movie was, and it had greater impact for me because of that. It felt more sincere to throw all this rage into a blender and vomit it onto the screen than to make clean coherent points. I don't go to movies for coherent points. I go to feel something.

Would definitely suggest people see this in theaters while they can. It hasn't been terribly well marketed so I don't expect it to remain in theaters for too much longer.

[Something Spanish]

Heard a lot of good things about it before going in, but the thing just bored me to tears. How many scenes can we get of leaked phones/computers ruining a character's life? I like messiness in movies as much as the next cinephile, loved Madeline's Madeline, yet could not stay interested in this one.

[polkablues]

I'm genuinely shocked, based on how completely the marketing had turned me off of this movie, but I'm with matt35mm on this one. It reminds me of Donnie Darko a little, in the sense of how hard it swings for the fences, even if the ball lands in the outfield more often than not. It's a desperately naive, nakedly ambitious film that's so eager for you to get what it's saying that it practically blasts its themes through a megaphone, but at least its saying something.

Seriously, fuck whoever was responsible for selling this thing. They made it look exactly like the nihilistic edgelord bullshit that the film itself is VERY SPECIFICALLY DISAVOWING.

[Something Spanish]

was thinking of giving this a rewatch now that its on hulu

[WorldForgot]

Do it for the yung De Palma headz ~

[jenkins]

dang really. there's so many of you and everything. mm oh idk. maybe my timing is off. what if i never get to like Euphoria. omg. oh everything's okay it doesn't matter and i'm the one who's missing out