MOVIE: Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

Anatomy of a Fall Year: 2023 Rating: R Length: 151 minutes / 2.52 hours It's interesting how I've seen a lot of crime dramas before, but rarely (if ever) have I witnessed one from a foreign perspective. Movies like A Few Good Men (1992) or 12 Angry Men (1957) focus on the American justice system. Watching a murder trial in a foreign language and in a different country's judiciary style was new and exciting for me. Anatomy of a Fall (2023) does a great job of bringing ambiguity to the proceedings enough times as to make one wonder what truth to believe. The ability of this film to throw a series of twists into the narrative that makes the whole story flip back and forth between guilty and not guilty is an amazing achievement. That being said, despite the marketing for this film making it seem like there was still a question whether the death was an accident or a purposeful moment of murder, I...
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BOOK: I Am Not Okay With This (2018)

I Am Not Okay With This Year: 2018 Author: Charles Forsman Length: 160 pages I'm open to a lot of visual styles for graphic novels. It can be what elevates a mediocre story to something profound, but it can also tonally clash with the message and leave a muddled mess. Storytelling in this format is a challenge to pull off and few have been able to do so successfully. I Am Not Okay With This unfortunately falls into the other camp here. Even if this were just a novel without the "graphic" part, there's not much to recommend it. Filled with cliches about what it's like to be a teenage girl, I Am Not Okay With This suffers from the "men writing women" trope. None of the interactions felt believable or realistic. Instead, they seemed forced through what a man thought these interactions should be based on minimal or merely pop culture research. None of it had the feel of anyone who has lived as...
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