The allure and danger of looking. Framed perfectly by the opening scene of gawkers over the man killed on the train tracks.

Second Safdie Christmas Day family movie outing.

Just a sequence of events. Almost all plot and no meaningful consequence.

I was asked by a friend’s partner what this was about, and I replied along the lines of “what’s any piece of art about?”, eliciting boos from another friend.

This works best as just a thing to encounter and react to. To borrow from Sontag, “an erotics of art”. I was grinning throughout so much of the film, relishing in the implausible things I was seeing and feeling. It's hard to have an overall reaction to a series of vignettes, and I don't know that the cinema-senses-time link really delivers. But as a whole, I was entranced by what I was seeing. Falling into a shared dream with a mostly full theater crowd.

Couldn’t live up to its predecessor, since they’re effectively out of reveals to surprise with.

One moment did stick out: the first half of the sex scene in the film, and how it genuinely looked and moved the way that actual human beings have sex, as opposed to the way it’s often depicted on screen.