a review of 铁玫瑰

2021 CULT MOVIE CHALLENGE WEEK 16: JEAN ROLLIN WEEK On one hand, this movie is super-deliberately paced and the dreamy visuals literally made me drowsy at certain points. But on the other hand, it is extremely Gothic (in all of the literary/fashionable/subcultural senses) while also being a straight-up Punk repudiation of Goth pretensions, in which Rollin calls the young lovers' bluffs by giving them both exactly what they wanted. (Additional note: The version that is available on Kanopy -- which looks to be ripped from the Redemption Films Blu-ray release -- appears to have some cropping at the bottom of the picture, which cuts off roughly half of the English subtitles when they appear. It's not too terrible, and this movie is in no way reliant on spoken dialogue, but it does crop up in a number of scenes. I don't know if other services or even the physical release might have the same issues, but I sent Kanopy a technical report anyway. Fingers crossed they can fix it!) (UPDATE MAY 2021: After talking to Kanopy user support, I was able to determine that it wasn't a problem with the app, but rather with the actual settings on my TV! I'd never noticed it before, but my Samsung TV's screen is actually a little bit off from the standard 16:9 widescreen ratio, which means that when the screen is set to the default "widescreen" display setting, certain aspect ratios [like the 1:62:1 ratio on "The Iron Rose!"] will get slightly cropped on the top/bottom. I changed my screen setting to display the full video image and it fixed the issue like magic.)