Gabriele Mainetti
Freaks Out

Hello

The whole COVID thing has to be mentioned. Because I've never been one for many words, but if I need to be a pain, I'll come here. Now that I've made everyone happy, I'll make another small premise: these lines are full of spoilers of other things that are not related to the title above, petty envy, and disorganized parentheses. Just like that, because I feel like going freeform and telling a bunch of my own crap, but contextualizing it in a way that's still very polite.

The serious thing about COVID is when it happened. I spent over a year listening to the stories of people who locked themselves up at home going through their türbe

-TÜRBE PARENTHESES

friends, I have finally aged. Now if I smoke and look at my hands, they seem like someone else's, I can handle less than my mother, it's done, I have to give that up too. Or I can smoke the forest - legal weed - like the fathers of the generation slightly before the millennials who switch from the forest to the vape from the vape to the forest from the forest to CBD liquid, remove the resistance, add the resistance, wash, clean, remove the lung, put the lung-

books, music, movies, and everything. A year living the lockdown through the words of others. Who tried to enjoy it, I told myself. Lucky them, I thought.

-PARENTHESES NOT ME

do the lockdown with a 3-year-old child. For heaven's sake, I wanted the bike, but imagine a COVID happening in 2015: I'd have gotten through THREE-QUARTERS OF MY LIST OF MOVIES TO WATCH

Then at a certain point we started seeing each other again, going up and down the country depending on needs, events, commitments, and oh, you hear quite a few perspectives. It's not uncommon for people to propose to me - but let's go to the cinema, no? I practically haven't been since 2019! Ahahahahaha - what are you laughing about. Cinemas closed by seasons, but for many, it seems they were closed for two years straight.

-TITLES PARENTHESES

two years without big jumps if I think about that piece of junk Tenet or that deadweight Titane that takes on a bit of the squidgame discourse. A different story for EMA, a completely different work from Larrain's previous ones, and that succeeds in one of the most improbable intentions in recent history: to ennoble reggaeton. Same nonsense the latest from shamalalalaaaaayan who offers the usual structure just to make us understand that now he writes films as templates. And you could go on with Nomadland, the good but not too much Another Round, and lots of other stuff but to tell the truth, now that I think about it

in the end, it's not that incredible. For people, the couch has become the cinema chair, and it's been like that for a while. You hear plenty of positive reviews about this film, but also plenty of meh. Quite a few defenses for criticism of the running time,

-NICE BUT LONG PARENTHESES

we talk about the length of movies as a criterion of judgment. First of all, no. Second, nice but long doesn't exist. As I wrote elsewhere, I don't go to a concert to say "nice, cut this solo," I went to hear people play things I like, and I listen to them as they want me to hear them. If the movie sucks, obviously I can find it long. But NICE BUT LONG means NICE BUT I WOULD HAVE DONE IT DIFFERENTLY. Of course, dear, you didn't make it.

about content, approach to themes, characters, factions. But in the end, let's be serious: we will never, ever, ever hear someone analyze a soccer match only to find out they don't know what an offside is. Very often, those who don't know what an offside is don't even go to the stadium. By this, I mean that shifting the entertainment of those who happened upon the cinema by chance to a full-package subscription paired with prepaid and flavored with soap operas (the series), it's not exactly a cosmic surprise.

And so why did I like Freaks Out, besides the usual reason I'm biased as already explained for Jeeg. Because what cinema is (even in the most commercial sense of the term), Freaks Out makes me think of it immediately. The reason I'm in that seat is in most of the successful elements of the film (both technical and emotional), the roots of my passion for this art are grounded in the pathos that, even in this case, these guys managed to bring out. The reason why you automatically forget the weak points is because those who wait to see it on stream won't catch a single one, at most they'll say: nice but long. And I have no desire to explain the offside to you, but there's no reason to, really.
I'm just furious because I can't smoke in peace anymore.

bye