(Monday) Movie Meetup — Eddington — Meet from 7:15, film at 8:20

"... a magnificently off-the-rails poison pill of a film, one that skitters from paranoiac thriller to reactionary satire to something far more caustic and unnerving."
★★★★ Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail

We're going to see Ari Aster's divisive neo-western satire Eddington.

We'll meet in the Watershed cafe/bar from 7:15 pm, to say hello and chat. After the film, we will stop for a while to share thoughts and reactions.

Buy your own ticket from the box office or online.

ABOUT THE FILM

In May of 2020, a standoff between a small-town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and mayor (Pedro Pascal) sparks a powder keg as neighbour is pitted against neighbour in Eddington, New Mexico.
— Watershed summary

"The first truly modern American Western, Ari Aster’s Eddington is also the first major Hollywood movie that’s been willing to see the COVID pandemic for the hellacious paradigm shift that it was — as the moment when years of technologically engineered polarization tore a forever hole in the social fabric of a country that was already coming apart at the seams."
★★★★★ David Ehrlich, IndieWire

"Your mileage will vary according to your stomach for this stuff, but I found myself breathless with giggles at times, sometimes the therapeutic laugh of recognition and sometimes because Aster has a keen eye for what’s most absurd about human nature."
★★★★★ Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times

"Excoriating and exhilarating in equal measure, it is the first truly great movie to deal explicitly with the unique madness and malice that the global pandemic revealed, a kind of touchstone for a time and place that with only a few years remove feels at once as fictional and otherworldly as a sci-fi novel, and at the same time the very real-world harbinger of the political shifts that proceeded."
★★★★ Jason Gorbe, Paste Magazine

"The problem with Eddington is not its cynicism — Network (1976) is cynical and is brilliant — the problem is its aggressively self-confident incoherence. It’s the obnoxious uncle at the dinner table concluding that they’re all as bad as each other. Liberals are compromised and dishonest; the right are rabid and irrational. Meanwhile recent political events – specifically the second election of Trump – have not so much overtaken the film as lapped it several times over and made this kind of both-sideary look disingenuous if not simply wrong."
— John Bleasdale, BFI Sight & Sound