Films like Agro Dr1ft they are the ones that are hated the most. And we often feel good about hating them. These are the films that give the impression of mockery of the viewer, which only pretend to have God knows what a very high meaning, but in fact do not show it. And, above all, they are not here to disturb anyone. However, the last of Harmony Korin this is a film that really has exceptional intuition, and although it is certainly not one that makes you want to watch it again (not at all, once is enough), it is also one of those after watching which you watch other films of various genre productions. The one who has something to say and who knows how to do it with images, not dialogue.
Header appearance with characters and animations action video game the end of the 90s shows that everything revolves around this imaginary gangster video game or action and war video game, tense and exaggerated, but at the same time terribly banal. Harmony Korine often copies, modifies, and pushes certain film and television traditions a little further than usual in his films to demonstrate their falsity, inconsistency, or marketable nature. He did great with spring Breakers, in which he was referring to an imaginary American teenage party-goer, someone who sells a non-existent world of athletic, slim, fit, always happy and fun bodies with flashy costumes, booze, and the promised but never shown sense of flesh. ecstasy. The actresses in this film were former Disney Channel queens in their twenties (from Vanessa Hudgens to Selena Gomez) who were looking for strong emotions in this world of entertainment at all costs. Harmony Korine himself called it: “The sugary surface from which the media sell American images to the world.” And he was right.
However, he now appears to be targeting another of these pre-packaged imaginings, that is, a set of names, phrases, customs, and visual clichés that are constantly used and abused until they mean nothing more, but which are a guarantee of a sale (both films than video games) because they’ve already digested everything. So infamous that they massage the brain and cause no real reaction. He alone seems to be wondering about their stupidity and therefore how we who watch or play these video games and movies often buy into these performances that are effortless, non-committal and essentially cheap. . Agro Dr1ft there he does just that, exaggerating a little to show artificiality.
To achieve this on a small budget (but in collaboration with big names like Travis Scott in the role or music of AraabMuzik) creates an entire film shot with thermal lenses, that is, vision that detects heat, taking the trend of using fluorescent colors to the extreme, while at the same time grotesquely imitating the rich colors of video game computer graphics. In this inevitably highly hallucinated world (and after all, all Harmony Korine’s films are hallucinated, it seems to him that there can be no film without a chemically altered look) we hear only off-screen dialogue, stupid and repetitive, spoken in loud voices. And as we get closer to the characters, they reveal innards with human-machine-like circuitry, or CGI demons with a very banal design behind them, performing their classic moves, or even have dark angel wings. Everything is mixed with what has already been seen.
There are so many things inside. There is Nicolas Winding Refn and his obsession with power, fluorescent colors and electronic music, there is a synthwave aesthetic turned into violence, there is Call of Duty and the worst male video games. You don’t need to know everything to understand, much of this imagery has spilled over into crappy TV shows, commercials and worse graphics, it’s all around us and for this very reason. Agro Dr1ft it’s so appropriate. All dialogues are built around the continuous repetition of banal and banal grandiloquent phrases: “Your time has come!”, “My time has come”, “You were my friend, now you are my enemy” and so on. They inform her about a special agent for their associates who are up against the big powerful boss. Further it is not clear, but it is not important. Significantly, Travis Scott’s character’s name is Sion, another of the many pre-made references that can be found all over the place, such as Caesar’s story allusions being used in a gangster vein.
Similar operations already exist, for example, kung fury, but as in this case, they rely on laughter, winks, and teasing clichés or quotes to amuse themselves. Harmony Korin wants to destroy them, she wants to open the eyes of the viewer and, seeing Agro Dr1ft it’s a little harder to get serious again about crappy action video games that still look stock. It’s a little more obvious how these hypersexualized images relate to women and always feature very powerful men next to provocative bodies that do nothing but that. And the way we perceive these images has changed: we no longer drink them absently, but notice their cheesy, commercial, industrial character.
He was born in Rome in 1981 and struggled to survive until he became a critic in the golden age of blogging. He began working for pay in the late 2000s and alternated between criticism and freelance journalism for various newspapers. From 2009 to 2012 he was an additional section selector at the Rome Film Festival, then a programmer and for a year also co-director of the Taormina Film Festival. Since 2015 she has been the Italian correspondent for the British magazine Screen International. He is a lecturer in the MA in Journalism Criticism at the Academy of Dramatic Art Silvio D’Amico, published in UTET a book of interviews with Gabriele Muccino called La vita addosso and together with Bietti a pamphlet called “I hate Italian cinema”. He boasts countless threats from some of Italy’s most decorated directors.
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