TwentyNine-Palms (2003): Some Thoughts (and reasons to keep watching)
(spoilers. duh.) tl;dr: beautiful Kubrickian shots, great on failed communication, a shocking ending that makes you re-evaluate everything but wouldn't/couldn't watch it again TwentyNine-Palms is a strange curate’s egg of a film: you’ll either love it or hate it. love it for the wide-slung vistas and brilliant depictions of failed communication; hate it for the low-level misogyny, manic pixie dream girl and tiresome repetition. But even in the hateable things there’s beauty: beauty born of the repeated image and the slow, long track of the camera over a near static image, where every minute touch and sound becomes amplified. Amplified perhaps literally: there’s so little music and sound in this film that when it does appear it’s a shock. Frequently animal noises, footsteps and water splashes hit like tiny bombs on the screen. It helps to highlight the lack of coherent speech, which even when it’s being spoken is in French and unhampered by subtitles. There is as
