I love The Guardian. The Guardian is like that one coworker that makes a horrible job tolerable. That lone coworker who brought you flowers when your dog died. That one coworker who can impersonate the boss so well you shot coffee out your nose. The one coworker who can ask “who farted?” in French, Spanish, Mandarin, russian, Italian (with the appropriate hand gestures), and twelve other languages. That one coworker who is simpatico.
That one coworker who always tells you the truth.
So let’s review of a review from The Guardian.
With the illustrative talents of Elder G, and hopefully the forgiveness of The Guardian, let’s explore Xan Brooks‘ review of the new Melania movie.
[ed. note: captions are from The Guardian review]
“Candlelight and black tie and my creative vision,” she says, as though listing the ingredients in a cauldron. “As first lady, children will always remain my priority,” she coos, and you can almost picture her coaxing them into her little gingerbread house.
The Guardian
Xan Brooks
Xan Brooks is an award-winning British journalist, film critic, and novelist known for his 15-year tenure as an associate editor at The Guardian and as a founding member of The Big Issue magazine. He hosts the Guardian Film Show and has written fiction, including The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times.
Gemini
Reference: The Zone of Interest
The 2023 movie The Zone of Interest (which Xan Brooks references in the title of his review) is a deeply disturbing movie, not because it shows graphic violence, but because it shows the banality of even the greatest evils.
The Zone of Interest is a 2023 historical drama film written and directed by Jonathan Glazer. Loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, the film focuses on the life of German Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who live with their family in a home in the “Zone of Interest” next to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Christian Friedel stars as Rudolf Höss alongside Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höss.
Glazer wished to make a film that demystifies the perpetrators of the Holocaust, which he noted are often portrayed as “almost mythologically evil”. He sought to tell the story of the Holocaust not “as something safely in the past”, but “a story of the here and now”. He compared his approach to the writing of philosopher Gillian Rose, who envisioned a film “that could make us feel ‘unsafe’, by showing how we’re emotionally and politically closer to the perpetrator culture than we’d like to think” and a film seen through the “dry eyes of grief” that is unsentimental and “forensic”.
The website’s [Rotten Tomatoes] critics consensus states, “Dispassionately examining the ordinary existence of people complicit in horrific crimes, The Zone of Interest forces us to take a cold look at the mundanity behind an unforgivable brutality.”
Andreas Klib stated […] “At Cannes, where The Zone of Interest won the Grand Jury Prize, some critics criticized the film for its lack of storytelling. But that’s exactly the point of Glazer’s film: it doesn’t paint a story, but a world.”
Wikipedia
The Memes
We had to show great restraint, because many of the interweb memes are >= PG13
