Eddington

emma stone underused don’t buy the marketing, this isn’t a western. it’s a comedy as with beau is afraid, aster shows off his directing skill which just draws attention to his writing weakness. what starts off so strong conceptually devolves into another absurd nothing ending i wish aster had the guts to wrap up what he sets up, like garcias missing wife, what actually happened to louise, what austin butler’s whole thing is actually about. and clearly the ending with the antifa super soldiers or whatever is supposed to be an insight into joe’s interior delusions— him imagining himself as an old school western sheriff saving the town. but i think the theme of someone losing themself to twitter-brained q-anon conspiracy bullshit would come across so much stronger if aster had actually connected everything he sets up into one cohesive plot. like what i thought was gonna happen is Vernon’s self-help group is the real epstein-pedophile cult that is funding antifa and solidgoldmagikarp and ted garcia all at once, the way Joe is implied to believe. then when Joe becomes a paraplegic spokesperson-mayor, he’s subsumed into the conspiracy he thought he was fighting the same way maga is subsumed by the deep state but aster kinda just wants to turn it into a joke ending so he can alleviate himself from the criticism for the crime of “saying something”. but then he literally scalps a native so i don’t think it’s fair to accuse aster of “both sides bad”-ing; the conservatives in this movie literally kill people while the progressives are annoying teenagers, and i do think it does a good job of empathizing with people from all walks of life and understanding the underlying root causes behind why people are doing what they do (notably, both Joe and Brian are brought to political extremism because they want pussy)