film roundup
KEITH UHLICH
It’s a Sin (Dir. Peter Hoar). Starring: Olly Alexander, Lydia West, Keeley Hawes. This magnificent fiveepisode drama from British writer Russell T Davies (Queer as Folk and Doctor Who) follows a quintet of friends over an eventful decade. It begins in 1981, with gay aspiring actor Ritchie (Olly Alexander) escaping from his small-town Isle of Wight home to a London loft that he and his circle nickname “The Pink Palace.” Life’s a party until a new disease—first called GRID, eventually HIV/AIDS—begins its indiscriminate reign of terror. Davies infuses this tragic subject with vivacity and hilarity, in-between inevitable moments of heartbreak. (Saddest needle drop of Laura Branigan’s Gloria ever!) Peter Hoar’s direction is exuberantly attuned to the way people create makeshift families in the face of adversity, and the cast is uniformly excellent, with special mention to Keeley Hawes as Ritchie’s mother, who proves, as the series goes on, to be a most complex kind of antagonist. [N/R] HHHHH A Glitch in the Matrix (Dir. Rodney Ascher). Documentary. Room 237 and The Nightmare director Rodney Ascher tries for another in his series of mindfuck documentaries with A Glitch in the Matrix, which explores the possibility that the world we live in is a computer simulation. The film is principally informed by a 1970s lecture by Philip K. Dick in which he outlined the theory, as well as the more popularized version that emerged in the wake of the Wachowski siblings’ immensely popular 1999 sci-fi neo-noir The Matrix, innumerable clips of which are utilized here. Ascher also conducts Zoom/Skype interviews with proponents of the electronic universe idea (many of them with their appearances altered into video-game-friendly avatars) and interweaves these scenes with asides on Minecraft, Plato’s Cave and Elon Musk, among other subjects. The meat of the movie is an audio interview with ‘Matrix Killer’ Joshua Cooke whose murder of his adoptive parents is unfortunately exploited to tsk-tsking ends. The film’s droning, ambient album doom-and-gloominess still manages to compel. [N/R] HH1/2
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