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During the next few weeks, we are doing a few 2025 Summer Releases, First up, it’s Celine Song’s second film Materialists with Eileen Jones of Filmsuck and Jacobin!!!
Eileen’s review of Materialists:
Back in 2023, Forrest, Conan Neutron, and Kristina Oakes talked on an episode about Celine Song’s debut Past Lives which we all loved. Her second film, also written and directed by her, stars Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans.
It’s a “Romantic Comedy,” although is it? Some have speculated it’s secretly a horror movie, about a Match Maker named Lucy (Dakota Johnson) whose hooking up Wealthy Bored Miserable New Yorkers with each other. She is not in their class strata, and her ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans) who she tried her life out with in the city is still trying to make it as an actor in the same apartment.
As a Match Maker, she sells romantic dreams that can never truly be fulfilled this way.. setting people up by mathematical algorithm in a digital age. But, she gets a chance to live the dream she’s selling… when a Finance Nepo Baby named Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal) starts pursuing her. It’s set up as a formulaic Rom Com, yet Celine Song as a former Match Maker (for six months while trying to get her plays produced in 2015) has alot to say about the transactionality of relationships in a digital age, the need for human connection that algorithmic connection cannot replicate, and these matchmaking services as a business.