absurdist

Image via Warner Bros. Pictures The new Barbie trailer is reminding everyone that it’s the most absurdist of movies these days that have the highest chance of winning the box office competition. Now that folks are realizing this strange live-action adaptation is squaring off against the genre maestro himself, they’re not sure which movie will end up reigning supreme in theaters. Meanwhile, we’ve learned that James Gunn remains salty over Avengers: Endgame teaming Thor up with the Guardians, a development that…

Ruben Östlund is a filmmaker who is keenly interested in the strangeness of human beings. His last two films, Force Majeure and The Square, were also about humans behaving badly. With Triangle Of Sadness, he makes his English-language debut with a dark satire that places two models, Carl and Yaya, far and away from their comfort zone. (Also read: Cannes 2022: 'Most disgusting movie of the year' Triangle of Sadness is a frontal attack on the super-rich) The film is divided into three chapters and opens by introducing…

TikTok goes a little overboard when it comes to categorizing every last aesthetic into its own microtrend. You notice it when Spotify Wrapped calls your music taste goblincore, or when you strangely end up at a charity gala in San Francisco and a tech exec asks you if he should be concerned that his teen daughter is obsessed with cottagecore (yes, this happened to me). Take any noun, add the suffix “core,” and you’re good to go. There is no more natural terminus to this phenomenon than “corecore,” a meta aesthetic…

The Game Band has announced that the newest season of Blaseball, a horror-fantasy baseball game, kicks off today (January 9). The latest season launched at 3PM today and The Game Band teased that it will send players into a “new era of unruly gods and deadly competition.” “This era will mark the debut of an entirely new kind of Blaseball, formed via the supermassive black hole that ended the previous universe,” shared The Game Band. “The Pre Season already saw players drafted onto different teams, and over the course…

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record. It’s David Zahniser and Julia Wick, with help from Dakota Smith. A little more than a decade ago, The Times wrote a story that annoyed a few people and revealed an open secret at City Hall: Los Angeles City Council members don’t actually need to be sitting at their seats on the council floor to vote. As long as they remain in a limited section of the building, they can meet with lobbyists or staffers in a back room, use the bathroom or chit chat in a corridor — all while…

If there was ever an Armenian new wave or maybe an Armenian absurdist wave, then this sprightly and bittersweet 1969 movie – now revived by the Klassiki streaming service as part of a season of Armenian cinema – would be at the vanguard. It was adapted by the Armenian writer Hrant Matevosyan from his own novel and directed by Henrik Malyan. It’s an elegant, elusive parable of a movie about power and the state.The deadpan coup de cinéma that opens the film is rather brilliant: a frenzied montage of all the exciting things…