a review of

holy fish sticks, that was a stinky little ride. if they were purposefully going for cishet yuppie cringe horror this maybe would have worked, but borgli clearly thinks he's the second coming of edgelord christ or something, and this was not actually intended to be cishet yuppie horror (despite the fact that it is). the director of this film is the same mastermind behind this absolutely horrific "film". in fact, maybe this is the feature length version of the linked short? hard to tell. he also dated a sixteen year old when he was twenty six and seems to think that was fine. the icing on the cake is that a twenty-four is now financed by jared kushner's brother. vom. it shows. i promised myself i was a. not going to watch another thing created by this jackass man baby, borgli, and b. also not going to watch any more a twenty-four films, so i guess i deserve what i got for breaking two promises to myself. this was horrific. where to even start. first, i would be so incredibly happy if i never had to see alana haim's face again. no clue why they keep putting that woman in fairly central roles in big-budget films. second. they have seven people credited with lighting in this, which is confusing because it seems like they actually didn't light any of the scenes. about fifteen percent of all the frames in the entire film i could not see well enough to know what was going on. please stop doing this. if you need the latest hdr tech to see any detail in a shot, it's not working. that's not art. just shoot the scenes properly. the writing does not work for me at all. you can't try to make a sincere statment about the ability of humans to change and grow by presenting your argument in this edgelord, debate team, "what if fantasizing about shooting up a school actually wasn't that disturbing" kind of way. fuck all the way off with that, borgli. you try to make your point by torturing us with a bunch of main characters who pretend to be perfect angels who have never done anything wrong while at the same time judging their "friends" to everlasting hell. the worst kind of performative upper middle-class yuppies. (i'm open to the idea that was the whole point of the movie, but it didn't work for me, i hated it.) look. the "worst thing" these people all did isn't actually that bad. and at the same time, borgli (despite making an entire film to say "hey maybe this isn't so bad") cannot put two coherent thoughts together in order to get his point across. essentially nonexistent plot. completely flat, caricaturized characters written in the most unbelievable ways. good acting could not have saved this, and this was fine (not especially good) acting. i'm so mad i got talked into watching this. completely baffling to me how the same person who made this also made the genuinely good "dream scenario". either way, i am solidly never watching anything else he creates (for real this time). writing - one and a half out of five lighting - one out of five camera - two and a half out of five editing - one out of five acting - three out of five