An artist collects and processes images of their mother’s restaurant kitchen and their grandmother’s daily life, reanimating memory and embodied knowledge through various image formats: 35mm portraits on oscillating lenticular prints, laserjet prints of 35mm film transferred onto 16mm loops, and photographic prints on polystyrene. An intergenerational critique unfolds.
Like all modern societal phenomenons, it started with a meme. This one highlighted that when there’s a mom in a Pixar film, she is almost without fail given striking curves that highlight the bottom half of her body following a minuscule waist. From Elastigirl to the skeletal Mama Imelda, the animation giant’s artists seem to have a fixation on making exaggeratedly curvy maternal characters.
Omaha reminds us of what it can feel like to look at old family photographs. You sit with the bittersweetness, allowing it to wash over you; not drowning in it, but certainly affected by it.
Eternals is an interesting concept and unique visuals, but slow pacing and rushed character development suggests it should have been a mini-series.
The film does not add anything to its own conversation or genre, and falls flat once it’s about to end and must declare some sort of conclusion.
Outer Banks (2020-) knows its audience: young adults in a country that can’t stop romanticizing good ole’ treasure hunts. Add a little of Riverdale’s (2017-) sex appeal, and no one can look away. Forty years after The Goonies (1985) America’s consciousness hasn’t strayed from the same tropes: treasure hunts, a vulnerable white male lead, and the whitewashing of a racially segregated setting.
