Uncut Gems Is Going to Kill Someone.
And what a glorious death it shall be.
Walking into the theater to see Uncut Gems, I saw an unusual warning notice sitting on the ticket counter: “STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER contains several sequences with imagery and sustained flashing lights that may affect those who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy or who have other photosensitivities.”
This triggered a whiff of nostalgia for my ten year-old self, back when the notorious Pokemon episode “Dennō Senshi Porygon” took out damn near every epileptic in Japan — in fact, the name has never been translated because the episode was banned from import by every other country on Earth. It also caused me to scoff at the very notion of being taken down by any movie. Twenty-two years after the Pokemon incident, I’m a healthy grown-ass man with excellent blood pressure and no history of motion sickness, let alone seizures. What mere media could possibly put a dent in my iron constitution, I asked myself, with no small amount of self-satisfaction?
An hour after I left that same theater, I found myself gripping my chest and giving serious consideration to the idea of going to Urgent Care for an EKG, since I was pretty sure that watching Uncut Gems caused me to have an arryhthmia.