being:
1) A significant movie made during the 1970s American film
renaissance, and
2) A movie about Hollywood in the 1930s, and
3) A title I've been encountering for years,
all should have put this one in front of me years ago.
But it took until now.
So I will call this a kind of a sleeper, because that is what it
appears to be, now. No one seems to be watching it, not even the
most film-historically-literate.
It's shot in that 70s take on 30s Hollywood (a la Chinatown), and it
has surprisingly little about Hollywood, and a whole lot about people
who haven't come to embrace how their lives' reality doesn't match
what they thought it should be -- which gets in the way of them
actually achieving their dreams.
And then the apocalyptic meltdown. This is what "Perfume" wanted to
achieve but produced silliness, instead. It almost happens here, but
ends up being just what it should: A creepy turning point, instead
of a narrative failure.
