Films I Watched This Week — Dec 8–14, 2025
Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman (1971)
La Bamba (1987)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
Toni (1935)
Les Misérables (2012)
The House with Laughing Windows (1976)
Secretary (2002)
Charlie Wilson's War (2007)
Él (1953)
THX 1138 (1971)
George Lucas's haunting directorial debut THX 1138 is set in a dystopian futuristic society, where civilians are forced into industrial slave labor controlled by a faceless, totalitarian regime and a robotic police force. To dehumanize workers and to keep them from being disobedient to the system they are forced to wear identical, white uniforms with shaven heads to enforce conformity and erase individual identity. THX 1138 gives us a bleak oppressive society where emotions and sex are suppressed by prescription drugs leaving civilians in a defeated fugue-like state. Civilians are constantly watched by an invasive surveillance system similar to "Big Brother," which uses television cameras and intercoms to control citizens identified by numbers while also distracting them daily with mindless consumerism and media. Christian religious propaganda has become the recreational activity with electronic confessionals (sort of an ATM Jesus dispensing spiritual and psychiatric advice) with the emotionless voice of Hal 9000. What also adds to Lucas's unsettling world is the brilliant sound design by Walter Murch, unsettling synthesizers and low-level bureaucratic radio noise giving us a constant feeling of dread and unease. Lucas borrows from George Orwell’s novel 1984 and Fritz Lang’s visionary silent film Metropolis (the working class lives in an all-white sterilized version of the underworld), among others, but it’s the use of its low-budget minimalism that makes the film standout as its own creation, giving audiences a vividly nightmarish and disturbing future, along with an anxiety inducing escape climax which represents a sort of modern retelling of Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
Show Me Love (1998)
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