The Materialists (2025) was a fantastic and surprising watch. From the trailers, this film doesn't look like much, but given the chance to unfold over its slow pace it provided a calm perspective on what matters most in life and love. Less rom-com and more social commentary. Likely not a repeat watch, but worth watching.
…remember back in the day when real sequential time existed and we lived within it? Remember when pleasure and sorrow could be found in the physical sequence of life’s events and entertainments? Remember when nostalgia was simply the love of an earlier time and not a desire for TIME ITSELF TO EXIST?
Last night I had all to myself, so I decided to head to the theatre to check out this adaption of Stephen King's first-written novel. Thankfully, this adaptation was much better than that of The Life of Chuck (2025).
Sleep—which, when things go well, consumes a third of our lives—poses two opposed existential perplexities. The first is about consciousness: we know that we sleep, but cannot know that we are sleeping, since sleep is, in its nature, non-present. The second perplexity has to do with what we can, in fact, remember, and that is the experience of dreams. While engaged in the non-knowable act of sleeping, we also learn nightly that it is possible to know that we have had vivid, intense, unforgettable experiences that are, at the same time, delusions. Sleep tells us that there are black holes outside the possibility of narrative description; the dreams we have when we’re sleeping tell us that our entire existence might be a narrative fiction.
Although I've claimed this for years, Patrick Rhone put it up online, so it must be true.
Guys. Dudes. Men.
Life is this simple.