Tag: psychology

[EXPRESSO] If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025) | My (Speed) Tube

Definitely an A24 release, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a classic tale for the ages.

Linda isn’t just a mother, she is a psychotherapist that has to tend to her daughter, whose eating disorder has her eating through a tube in her stomach, bringing her daily to a daycare center, while her husband is constantly away due to his job as a ship captain.

She is already stretched beyond her limits, but then one day their apartment’ roof cracks open due to a water pipe collapsing, creating a huge hole and flooding their home, forcing Linda and her daughter to move to a squallid motel in the time being.

Making things even worse, Linda is aggravated by not only becoming even more of a drunkard, repairmen that vanish hence extending their stay at the motel, the medical staff attending to her daughter trying to get Linda to committ properly, one of her patients coming off even crazier than before, among other things pushing Linda well beyond any semblance of a breaking point long since gone.

It’s a fever dream depiction of parental stress, but while Linda is gunning for the “worst mother of the year” award hard as fuck, is also impossible to not emphatize with this woman that is really trying but its also unbelievably flawed and a complete mess of a parental figure, tearing herself apart trying to still cling to reason despite her destructive tendencies, commenting in how often even the safety nets for mental health issues are just not enough.

There are is some horror like-imagery, i guess because it’s a A24 film, though the film it’s just an almost surreal (but not quite) fever dream, an uncomfortable cavalcade into disaster that’s hard to look away from, thanks to Rose Byrne’s incredible performance.

[EXPRESSO] After The Hunt (2025) | Woke Chungus Season

Luca Guadagnino’s new movie is out here as well, After The Hunt.

The plot sees a philosophy professor at Yale finding herself in a thorny situation when, close to receiving a professorship in the teaching subject, a student of hers confesses that the professor’s assistant raped her, but him denies the accusation and rebukes of the student also blatantly plagiarizing her thesis.

It’s a battle of optics-vs-ethics, academy drama and also a bout of pretending that the movie its actually trying to present the characters so you won’t be able to label anyone as “right” or “wrong”, as the script so obviously takes sides it’s almost funny in how paper thinly disguises what it actually thinks, like if we have high profile actors discussing philosophy it will have make movie and dialogue smart.

Even more intellectually insulting are the weak attempts to backpedal towards the end, with the rushed as hell epilogue set 4/5 years laters that feels like it realized last second this is all old hat, and not really worth rediscussing when the current situation is so much worse … not that the epilogue itself helps in anything but making the whole thing even more of a farce.

Also, it’s confusingly toothless for a Guadagnino directed film, that should be provocative and uncomfortable but feels comforting as in, this is reheating the #metoo talking points in a meandering, meaningless and way too late to the party fashion it’s almost “cute”.

If it wasn’t so goddamn boring and shallow, heck, i had my issues with Eddington but even that was more entertaining and aware of the themes and events of the recent past and how they factored in the current sociopolitical scenarios.

Some great performances mean little when the film feels engineered for fishing nominations more than anythin else.