A Confucian Confusion

2025-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Edward Yang</li>
Released in 1994</li>
Watched at home (first movie in the new house!)</li>
Final feelings: Funny, fast, but with the characteristic deliberation of Yang's other films. Really fun!</li> </ul>
It feels like a divine act predicted by The Great One himself that I would go visit my parents for the first time in 3 years a completely changed (medicated) woman, and then the first week back watch this movie. Edward Yang is just doing something for me, folks, in a way that so many contemporary films of the Chinese diaspora that I have seen have not. The signature interiority and interconnected blossoming of drama that thrives in Yi Yi also features heavily here. If you liked that one Every Frame a Painting video about the 2-shot</a>, maybe give this movie a try since 90% of the conversations (which make up 90% of the whole movie) are shot in 2's.
As a caveat, I don't know what this will be like in terms of character density for audiences that do not have any familiarity with at least Mandarin Chinese (some characters also speak I think Hokkien in this film? It sounded not recognizable to me and I know that's another major language on the island). It's not as clean and spaced out like Yi Yi, living up to its name. Conversations are fast, the cuts go from one dramatic peak to the next, I think overall it gives a "sloppier" vibe. Think of the difference between delicately placed and framed sushi at an omakase vs your favorite beef noodle soup, filled with noodles and meat and vegetables. In both dishes there is an orchestration of the parts that warrants appreciation, but by the end of one you might feel a satisfying closing to a beautiful piece, and by the end of the other you might be covered in soup splatter after slurping and munching with carnal delight.
Onto why I love this movie. First point, I think women exist in this movie on a plane of existence that will make the default western audience member uncomfortable (or at least annoyed). The worst kind of mentally ill woman is the one who knows she's crazy and takes it as a dare to be even more bold and more mentally ill. I, personally, aspire to be such a woman. This movie has these characters in spades, with Molly in particular reminding me so much of the worst of my bipolar disorder. When she wants connection she lashes out instead, criticizing, thoughtlessly disagreeing, sometimes even violently hitting the other person. She is exactly the kind of character that would lead a weak audience goer to quip, "I didn't like that annoying lady who didn't just shut up and do her job good!" I love that this movie doesn't let men have a superpower of monologuing through their juvenile insights about the world (and women) and then it just be a thing everyone believes and is okay with. So many times in this movie a dude is just talking for so long and at the end of it is a woman who just completely refuses to accept the basic principal of the statement from 50 seconds ago.
God, the fights in this movie are so good. If you have ever sat at a dinner table and listened to 2 other people fight, and the fight doesn't involve you so it becomes this spectator event, and if you've gone through that and kind of enjoyed it, this movie will feed that hunger in your guts for that sort of thing. I bet writers Edward Yang and Hung Hung were really good at arguing with their spouses, or at least their parents. People weaponize the things the other person said in this with all the technique of a kung-fu master, catching verbal arrows and throwing them back recklessly. It might feel exhausting for some, but for me it was just so entertaining because most of the characters are not completely in the right or wrong. And in fact, if you have familiarity with the Chinese concept of saving face, you will deeply appreciate how exhausted all these young people are at keeping up appearances and lying to others constantly.
And that's another great thing about this film: the characters span many young people of different genders and backgrounds with various white-collar jobs. Some parts are a little too Taiwanese nouveau riche to really relate to, but there's just something about taking the setting of the same introspective, characterful drama we've come to expect from Chinese diasporic filmmaking out of the family and into the workplace. And by taking the winning method and setting it in a new place, we get some genuinely beautiful insight into characters lesser writers would pigeonhole into their own humiliating self-flanderization for cheap comedic impact. Akeem's whole ark in this film, from sniveling rich boy to still sniveling but realizing there is room for himself in his own life honestly felt poetic to me. It is exactly the kind of magic I remember feeling the first time I watched other movies by Edward Yang.
This movie is not perfect. It is honestly confusing at first because so many people are introduced so quickly that I genuinely have no idea how easy it is to dive in to if you aren't like me and can't also listen to the Chinese and glean at least some meaning to pick up on things. You'll just have to tell me if that's you and you watch this movie how it went for you. There is a little hint of queerbaiting in this film and I wish that Yang had the guts to just full-on make Molly a bisexual and turn this soup into a stew. But also, this is just so much fun to watch. Shooting so many scenes on 2's means Yang has to find ways of introducing interest into these lingering conversations. Maybe the best of the bunch is an encounter that's happening at a bar where an arcade machine suddenly makes a loud noise right as the character makes a good point. I laughed a lot at that. Ah, it's just so cool to watch these people act on a long take where the camera just holds. That's something consistent I see in all of Yang's work I've watched. He is not afraid of letting the camera sit there and have the environment do the talking. If I wanted to make a video essay about this movie I might just do a cheap knock-off of EFaP and cut my favorite 2-shot's together. I'm sure someone else has done that but it just seems like it would be fun.
Would love to watch this one again now that I've got the characters figured out so I could catch up on some details I'm sure I missed the first time. This was really fun! So different from Yi Yi and A Brighter Summer Day but also so similar where it really counts.

Blue Velvet

2025-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by David Lynch</li>
Released in 1986</li>
Watched at the Pacific Science Center IMAX</li>
Final feelings: My intuition says this is about why David Lynch should have just kissed Kyle MacLachlan on the mouth, wetly, with tongue.</li> </ul>
Learning about David Lynch's pseudo-woo-woo framework of "intuition" feels like both a blessing and a curse in this one. At times, blue Velvet really does feel like it's tapping into a psychosexual genius that only Lynch could conjure up with his straight-to-subconscious method. But the comically straightforward conclusion to this makes it all feel like a loud and devastating wet dream, like the one I might as well have been having just now before the fire alarm suddenly woke up my whole house with nary a candlelight flame in sight.
Then again, insofar as this movie is about dreams, maybe here we see the crying out of a queer and transgressive life David Lynch wanted for himself only to have it be ultimately supplanted by the crushing weight of conventional modernity. Maybe this is one of the most memorable films I've seen that depict the extent that masculinity in our culture imprisons men into violent contradictions and outbursts because they feel like they aren't allowed to really express their needs. Maybe this is one of the least convincing depictions I've seen of how motherhood will save you from your deepest, most unsavory desires.
Also, real Lynchiacs will be able to tell me, I'm sure, if this movie is just the blueprint of Twin Peaks.

Women and Femmes, or Females

2025-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Grace Carmack & Eden Aztlán</li>
Written by Nelle Tankus & The Femmes</li>
Released in 2025</li>
Watched at the Theater Off Jackson</li>
Final feelings: feeling more critical and important every day</li> </ul>
Live theater is so much different from film that I'm not sure how to approach writing about this, but I know I want to write about Women and Femmes, or Females. I want to write about this play because, in the days after the original viewing I have noticed that it's impossible to even talk about this thing with cisgender people. There is simply no language that is established in the liberal queer mainstream for cis people to access about this work, and yet the whole work is directed so much directly at them. It's incredible, I haven't seen any new movies about transness that felt fully esoteric to the cisgender standpoint (though Castration Movie is on my list and I have never heard a cis person talk about seeing that film). Even I Saw the TV Glow has a large enough distribution that I got jumpscared by a cis man who streams Street Fighter suddenly bringing it up one day while I happened to be watching. But at one single party I went to, I listened as my girlfriend tried to describe the play plainly to a cis man, and his initial reaction was, "oh so is transmisogyny when trans people are misogynistic?" The conversation completely broke down.
Women and Femmes, or Females is a play, but at times it sounds more like a rant, and at other times it sounds more like therapy. I think therapy in movies is its own beast, but one thing about plays is that their proximity to the audience, especially in this small, black box style productions, makes their artifice much less dominating. A movie can envelop your whole world such that you completely lose sight of its nature as a production, but for these small plays the production is inescapable. What that means is that the rantings and therapy that feel tired in indie movies about relating to your parents feel truly at-home on a certain sort of theatrical stage. The play is set in a play, after all. Hamming it up with silly-walks level body motion is one of the chief ways this play initially endears its audience to its toxic white feminist writer character. And at the second half, Nelle Tankus, the one named author of the play who also played the pivotal stage manager character in our show, has a mic-drop level monologue that is so honest, I almost wonder how much of it was written (probably all of it because my guess with absolutely zero evidence is that playwrights are a little neurotic).
Now that I've said all that, the natural question is to ask what actually happens in this play and what is it actually about. Bluntly, it's about transmisogyny, AKA the intersection of transphobia and misogyny that trans women experience and that is violently enforced on all people who may someday choose to throw their cismale lives away. It's specifically about the ways that cis women, trans men, and AFAB nonbinary artists (AKA transmisogyny-exempt or TME people) can violently exclude trans women while still pandering to their audiences' senses of morality with respect to women's equality and empowerment (and pander to their own ethics as well). If you are like the cis man at the party, this review is not the place to start learning about transfeminist theory. Ironically, I am not entirely certain this play is even a good place to start learning about the concepts and language of transfeminism. But even if the theory gets lost, Women and Femmes, or Females is worth seeing. At minimum, you get to watch multiple trans women emote on stage, which is the kind of behavior most of us know better than to do in public if we want to stay safe. Every expression of a trans woman in this play, every look into the audience, every sigh of contempt and every indignant scream, feels like an offering for all the others who have to police their entire existences for the convenience and sensitivity of others. It's a gasping exhaustion and righteous fury at every cis lesbian who has shamed, villainized, and excluded us, at every cis woman who has used us, at every job that has terminated us, and at all the stupid and shit art that passes for feminism because a cis woman wrote it about other cis women.
As a closing thought, I want to give a shout out to the 3 cis women who showed up at this play and sat in the front row, designated for people who wanted to interact with the show, who had no clue about anything in the neighborhood they were in, and who were the easy targets for the 2 rants from trans women in this play that are directed at cis women in explicit and pointed ways. I wish I had interviewed them afterwards just to hear what their deal was and why they were at the play, and how much of what they just saw landed for them. That is something I've only ever experienced once at the movies, and this time I got to feel a satisfaction that they were getting what they deserved, even if it was only in my head.

Sing Sing

2025-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Greg Kwedar</li>
Released in 2023</li>
Runtime 105 minutes</li>
Watched at The Northwest Film Forum</li>
Final feelings: poignant, moving, honest</li> </ul>
If you believe the common truism that every person is capable of genuine artistic expression, then the natural conclusion of that belief has to be in the abolition of prisons. Sing Sing is one such work of art that expresses this contradiction that haunts our seemingly humane and justified social order. It derives its power from its intimate perspective, both from the camera's viewpoint and from the casting of real-life participants of the theater program at Sing Sing. Truly it is a gift when film can pull so close to the source of the mundane magic of real life. Divine Eye, played by himself(!), represents the exact kind of person that is written off in our culture as fundamentally irredeemable, but here we see how justified his foibles are. His standoffishness, his fear of vulnerability, and especially his relationship to violence are reflections of his environment, not just from prison but his entire upbringing. When watching him get into conflict with Divine G, I think of the many conflicts I have heard of from my own connections inside, and how they all felt fundamentally resolvable if all the participants were not trapped in a deeply hostile and zero-sum environment. Divine Eye's ultimate growth and success as an actor and as a man calls into question our most basic assumptions about criminals, art, performance, and the roles we think convicts, and especially Black men in the criminal legal system, can take in our society.
I have no idea what Sing Sing is like to someone who just accepts the status quo as being the natural order of things. Maybe if I have a criticism of this film to reasonably offer, it is that by focusing on the seemingly extraordinary nature of the program and its attendants (and it's teacher! in my experience it is extremely hard to find outside sponsors for programs at prisons!), we cannot easily see that there's something else awaiting all of us beyond the institution of prison. Maybe there's a person out there who will watch this film and see it as a heroic story of how the right people got out of prison, and we can conveniently wipe everyone still inside out of sight, out of mind. Sing Sing, I think, leaves room for this liberal interpretation, and that's maybe a missed opportunity. You sit, you watch, and you cry, but it's a hopeful and enriching cry. The hope is for you.
For us, in the audience, we are conveniently separated out from the consciousness that demands all prisons be dismantled forever. In effect we are like the audience of the very plays these people are putting on. In Sing Sing, the audience exists in a tacit envelopment of the program and any interaction between the two groups is represented mostly in the first 5 minutes of the film when the real Divine G cameo's as a fan wanting a signature (though Divine Eye's introduction into the group also explores some of these ideas). In real life, however, the programs I know of put on by LGBT groups in prisons are fragile and often in constant conflict with the administration and with other inmates, sometimes even other queer inmates (and this phenomenon is exploited by the institution itself to great effect)! From what little I've seen in Washington State, the relationship between the "group" and the "audience" is a fundamental tension, but you won't see much of it on this screen. It's not inherently bad, but it might make this feel a little closer to good, clean, pat-on-the-back feel-good entertainment than it has to.
Although, there is the ending to consider. In real life, Divine G eventually got out of prison, but I wonder what would have happened if we pointed the camera to someone in the troupe who stayed locked up when he left. I wonder what would have happened if we had imagined that he stayed locked up entirely. Could such an image agitate an audience member towards participation in this story? I don't know. But even in this punched-up fantasy of the actual RTA theater program, we see Divine G look over to the other cell as he gets ready to leave. Inside, he sees a painfully young Black man looking back at him (looking back at us). It's a brief moment, but it feels damning. Even in this happy ending, the system unceasingly churns through people. In this world, even our most hopeful fantasies are morally bankrupt. I'm not ready to call Sing Sing placating, and I'm not ready to call it revolutionary, so I will just call it the word that moves in me when I think back on the film, and that is honest.

My Cousin Vinny

2025-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Jonathan Lynn</li>
Released in 1992</li>
Runtime 120 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: felt a little humorless this go around</li> </ul>
No idea why this time watching this film the vibes were just not as good. Marisa Tomei is as compelling as ever and I really just wanted her to be the whole movie. This time around I kept thinking they exonerated these kids in-part by finding the other people who actually drove the real stolen car, which means immediately after the cheers and celebration of our friendly neighborhood Italians and also the poor, hapless Ambiguously Jewish</a> boyfriend, those two strangers would get thrown in the chair and all the execution jokes turned a little sour for me. I loved this movie the first couple times I saw it and it's a favorite of my dad's, this time I just didn't want to stay in the realm of the comedic and I'm not sure why! It was a weird start of the month for me I guess!

Glen or Glenda

2025-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Ed Wood</li>
Released in 1953</li>
Runtime 71 minutes</li>
Watched at The Beacon Cinema</li>
Final feelings: it's true, my fellow men. The natural outcome of your existence is transvestitism.</li> </ul>
A lot of random thoughts for this little diamond in the rough:
First, once you learn that Ed Wood is both directing and starring in this film as Glenda, the whole project becomes the most unsubtle wish fulfillment in existence. This movie is a dress rehearsal for him to reveal to his actual girlfriend, Dolores Fuller, who is playing his fictional wife in the movie, that he is a cross-dresser and therefore implicated in this mental disease of gender. Fuller was apparently "shocked" to learn of this fact after this movie's release. If you want to imagine what that shocked conversation probably looked like, it's conveniently depicted for you in parts this film. And if you want to know what Ed hoped would come out of that conversation, it's seemingly also depicted here. Reading the director's bio on Wikipedia, I feel like he just injected his own life into the story as much as possible to the point where it seems comically specific. Even the angora sweater in the movie is playing to his own personal taste. Were people just more clueless back in the day or was Ed just really practiced in not being dressed up in the house at the wrong time?1</a>
Second, I will admit I got a little tilted watching this at the theater and hearing so much laughter during certain parts of this film. I promise I am over it now. This is genuinely and comically over-the-top and presented in that exact matter-of-fact tone that we associate with the era, so there is a level of absurdity baked into the thing that no one could be blamed for laughing at. I just took it all very seriously (or rather, just the parts with Glen and Glenda) because it was so earnest. It just felt bad to me to laugh when Ed Wood was clearly litigating his very legitimate real-life fears about his secret double-life. And it felt so terribly sweet to hear these very funny conversations between working class men around the country politely discussing and defending the validity of the plight of the man who thinks he's a woman. Transvestitism ought not be a target of our shame, but of our pity!
So, while it's funny to see the image of the steel being extruded and then cut while off-screen the steel workers talk about men who want to have a sex change, and it's funny to compare the medical "progress" of understanding transvestitism with the progress of airplanes and automobiles, it's also true that Ed Wood was writing this and maybe hoping to move the needle on something by taking advantage of the salaciousness of the idea of a sex change. The most frustrating part of the conclusion is that the path forward into out womanhood is gatekept. For Glenda, the psych explains that her best outcome would be subsuming into her new wife Barbara, as opposed to the example of Alan/Anne, who was born a "pseudo-hermaphrodite" and could thus surgically attain the complete womanhood. We laugh at the oafishness of the psychiatry, but this is still the framework for our modern medical gatekeeping for trans health care.2</a> Thus, it's got a lot of over-the-top dressing, but forgive me for being somewhat reticent to lean in to that characterization for all of what Glen or Glenda is doing.
Third, the absolute best part of this movie is the fact that it's all happening as a conversation between a cop and a shrink, because everything the cop is saying makes it sound like he, too, hides cute shoes and skirts in his closet and is desperately concerned for his-I mean for all the other poor men who are suffering from this mental illness.
To conclude, this film has a special voyeuristic quality that goes into and out of the screen: just as the audience is learning how to understand this strange and reaction-demanding thing called a "sex change", Ed Wood is toeing the line as close as possible with making a movie about his own excitements and his own performance without saying so in the movie. What I don't know is how widespread the knowledge that Glen or Glenda was made by a cross-dresser, was made by someone at least adjacent to the dreaded transvestite. If people knew that fact going in, as modern audiences do, how would this movie differ to if you were like Dolores Fuller, and simply had no idea at all? I guess all I can say to that is, if you know, you know. ---
^{1
Then again, I remember wearing fruity Forever21 tops with a waist cincher underneath to work in my early twenties and I am certain the only person who noticed was the only other woman in the office and she never said shit about it.
</div>}^2
Refer to this essay</a> by Leah Tigers (and all the essays on this site are great) for an excellent primer into the history of the psychiatry of "dysphoria". </div>

Four Weddings and a Funeral

2025-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Mike Newell</li>
Released in 1994</li>
Runtime 117 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: marriage should be abolished</li> </ul>
Ok you simply must believe me that inside of me is a white woman that is breaking things and screaming to be let out because she wants to fucking love these kinds of movies so much. She just adores these stupid movies about cishet monogamous relationships and wants to be a sap about true love and missionary sex all that shit. There's just one problem! I always end up despising how on-screen relationships end! I especially hate how movies like this have so many characters that are just dying to not be heterosexual and/or cisgender. And I hate how all these characters will have interesting chemistry and dynamics that just get sprayed with the industrial herbicide of monogamy which forces everything to come to the same, predictable end: death! Death of all the cool women, specifically! The contempt you end up accepting towards the random women who become accessory to the ordained-by-god pairing that is not even the best pairing in the film just drives me batty! Let some of them be gay so they can also have gay sex, every character in this friend circle has such cumstained energy there's no way in hell they wouldn't give it a go.
These writers need to nut up or shut up with these movies where every relationship is an example for why you should simply never get married. Why do Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell even like each other? Because they laughed while having sex? You should always be laughing while having sex. Why are we so fucking mean to all the other women in Charles's life? They are literally all so gorgeous and have so much more distinct character personality compared to Carrie, they do not deserved to be trash talked so much! Another thought: how the fuck are Charles and Scarlett besties and flatmates? You see that When Harry Met Sally, this is how men and women can be friends: by never existing on-screen at the same time for more than 30 seconds at a time but everyone just acts like they're friends. Show me why they are friends! They would be cute together as friends! Let me see that sweet platonic goodness! That one time Scarlett brings him tea is so sweet and begs the question, what does Charles do for her? Does he bring her food, does he bring her laundry to the dry cleaners, do they watch movies together? How the hell are they friends, and do they stop being friends when Charles and Carrie are not-married and having a baby together? What happened to Henrietta was sad and I'm glad the wedding was called off because that was even sadder, but then to just throw a polaroid on screen of her being married off to some other random bloke and be like, "everyone was happy again!" is such bullshit! She also deserves to learn that marriage is stupid! What other lesson could you possibly learn from being left at the altar by the most bumbling and unreliable man you know? She should be radicalized by the experience so she can start a relationship anarchist commune with poor pining Fiona. Or become a political lesbian, I dunno.
Ugh god why did they have to kill off Gareth, Simon Callow you are just the most delightful British man in every movie I have ever seen of yours, is that what you are like in real life? Please god tell me that is just you being yourself, no script or anything just purely vibing with your good posh energy. There were gay men in this movie! You had to sorta read between the lines because they never kissed or fucked or even faded to black in the bedroom while getting undressed like all these stupid random other couples do, but they existed and got to be confirmed without a doubt once one of them had fucking died. And It's played like this, "oh wow the 2 people we knew who actually had the best relationships AKA the ones who were legally excluded from marriage were the best couple" it's almost like you can have beautiful and heartbreaking relationships without marriage.
Like maybe you want to give this movie props for having the main couple not get married at the end, but when they are surrounded by relationships that look exactly the same but are all married, the audience gets the message that, ultimately, marriage is good. Marriage is good for people who want to be married, and people who don't get married are in good relationships as long as they basically look like married ones. It's not subversive, it's the definition of using the form to reinforce the dominant culture.
What is killing me about this movie is just like, how much I want to love it in spite of these things. Maybe it's because I never go to bars anymore so now I have to people-watch through movies where British people act like space aliens. Every time a cis woman in my life has talked to me about relationship things I have always said "just break up already" and I have been right so many more times than I have been wrong, that is to say I have never been wrong in my entire life! Now cis women don't talk to me about their relationships and maybe that's for the best. And maybe what I don't want to admit is that I was getting something out of being the gay trans bestie who they would ask for sage advice even though my only qualification was being so mentally ill I had been in therapy since before it was cool to make movies about therapy. Maybe I like being given an opportunity to judge hapless white cishet relationships. Maybe this is what I needed. Ah, fuck it, I'll give this one a like, like a sucker.

Revolution+1

2025-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Masao Adachi</li>
Released in 2022</li>
Runtime 75 minutes</li>
Watched at The Beacon Cinema</li>
Final feelings: it didn't have to be a movie, but now it is one.</li> </ul>
It's very rough and, at times, hard to watch. Like, I think I am capable of lowering my expectations for a quick, low-budget film, but even still the rain-overlay in post on top of footage of obviously-recently-showered young man sitting on his bed got pretty repetitive. Worse was the soundtrack which had moments where very high-frequency tones would play and it just drove me a little crazy. Even those moments I kinda get, we're watching this guy hurry up and wait to shoot the former prime minister so of course the music should be annoying. But overall, the movie is not really good enough to feel like it deserves that kind of discomfort from me.
What is cool, or at least neat, about this movie is that it has small moments where characters speak candidly about their motivations and their political beliefs. And that's ultimately why I'm at a movie named "Revolution+1", I want to hear a motive for the guy who did this thing. I want to know what the people around him thought of him before and after he assassinated someone. I wanted to hear what the filmmaker thought of these things, which would be a product of all these other characters' statements in the film itself. In its 75 minute runtime, which feels agonizingly long, there is a solid 20 minutes of stuff that is what I actually wanted. Most of this film is relatively tiresome character voice over, but my favorite example of this was the sister's narration after Abe gets shot. She asks, "what's next for me?" which seems like a natural question that comes from all lone-wolf assassinations. She asks what sort of strategy she should have to continue on with his struggle, and even states that, "if the Unification Church were to be destroyed, we'd have to get rid of all of the politicians". In my head I was like, yeah girl suit up, it's a long fight ahead! It's just a concise statement from the character that puts her in relationship with her brother and it's instantly relatable and relevant to the audience. I genuinely thought the movie would end at this part, with this long shot held on the sister bicycling up a hill to seemingly reach out to her imprisoned brother. I was wrong about that, unfortunately.
Ultimately, I get why this is a movie and why Masao Adachi felt compelled to complete this as soon as possible. Movies are not like video essays, because they have characters that can embody the stuff that would otherwise simply be exposition. Our perspective when interacting with a movie, even a bad one, is not the same as when we put a video essay or podcast on in the background while we do the dishes. So, I don't hate that this movie exists the way I hate most bad movies that I end up watching. I wouldn't go so far as to say it is revolutionary, because revolution as a concept implies a mass collective of resistance. Maybe it's trying to show how one urchin of society was able to gain consciousness on his own to be the "plus one" to the collective urge towards revolution, but it's not coherent enough at expressing the motivations of these characters without just telling them to you straight-up to be a good example of that.
On the other hand, how many times have I felt the urge to create something, only to fizzle out once the enthusiasm yields to the unbearable wall that is actually taking that first step? Maybe it's better to make something in 8 days (the soundtrack that annoyed me so much took 2 hours to make! I don't know what that means but it definitely means something) and just get the expression out of the body and into the work, than to agonize over the details. If making a movie means shooting a ton of footage in poorly lit bedrooms and apartments and then recording V/O for the whole script, it's still a fucking movie.

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?

2025-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Ron Ormond</li>
Released in 1971</li>
Runtime 52 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: I would 100% trade evangelical christianity for communism in this country, easiest deal of my life</li> </ul>
I literally picked this movie because of the runtime. I will say, obviously the original intent of this is to be a kind of propaganda/exploitation type deal, which makes it the perfect kind of movie to be really funny in retrospect, but for me personally, it just brings up a lot of the vibes that I got from the pastor at the megachurch that my mom would drag me to growing up. A deep, dark seriousness about the necessity of the word of Christ, while at the same time demonstrating a complete willingness to manipulate and contradict those values to get closer to pretty women. The son of the pastor back home was in my grade in school, and by graduation the church gossip was that he was having to make child support payments to 2 different families. Better get your tithes in!
If there's anything intellectually interesting here, it's mostly just to watch a documented voice-over of exactly what kinds of reactionary thinking were in vogue at the time. Everything in that first 20-ish minutes, where it's really about the signs of impending communism, is completely indistinguishable from the things conservatives/evangelicals say now. We just say Tik Tok instead of TV, dating/hookup apps instead of dancing, "woke" and DEI instead of communism, and, well, the public school thing is literally exactly the same. Another fun exercise for me was to not get too wrapped up in rebutting a lot of these random claims because like, they don't care about the truthfulness of anything they say, which was true then and is true now. I'm sorry but suggesting that before the cultural revolution there were over 500 million Christians in China is the kind of statement that makes me want to hand you a blank map and make you point to me where you think China is. And all of the feared punishments from the communists are very funny to me, since some analog of almost everything they described exists today, usually just not affecting white people.
I guess it really goes to show that the people most obsessed with violent extermination truly are the fundies. This movie was like a refresher for me for that one time in my twenties that I went to the Chinese evangelical megachurch with my mom (she was making it a Problem if I insisted on not going with her). I sat in the english language auditorium and the title of the service was "How to defeat Satan in spiritual combat". After watching this, I'm just sad that preacher hadn't seen this movie, or didn't have a new, updated second edition of this that was about the Chinese government's Tik Tok plan to teach your kids to hate America. I sat through this whole movie and walked out of that guy's sermon after 5 minutes, where I then sat in the women's bathroom and texted a friend while reading and re-reading the totally-not-conversion-therapy poster they had stuck to the stall door. You truly never know what you'll experience in the name of Jesus Christ.

Yi Yi

2025-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Edward Yang</li>
Released in 2000</li>
Runtime 173 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: my favorite movie</li> </ul>

"Movie's are so lifelike, that's why we love them."
"Then who needs movies? Just stay home and live life!" </blockquote>
When I first watched this film I was obsessed with all these shots through glass, where the combination of the reflection and transparency of the window obscured the audience from the suffering of the characters. I now, almost conspiratorially, believe that these shots are also to make us see that this story is happening in a space that has been replicated with precision all across the environment. Every time you see through and out a window you are met with a high rise, an office building, or some other part of the urban landscape. You are dared to wonder if this story is happening at the same time somewhere else, somewhere that might even look identical to this place. I have never cared about extras in scenes the way I found myself caring for them this time in Yi Yi. By constructing drama from the organic connections that tie each person to people in their environment, one-half of a story at a time, you get the sense that everyone could be a subject for this film, including yourself.
We feel so fucking alone. The structures of our modern world loom over us and suffocate us. We are just getting by from one day to the next, and then when something happens that is supposed to matter, we find ourselves hollowed out to what it all means. The path forward, as Ota says himself, is not a magic trick. It is looking into the screen and seeing ourselves. It is looking at each other and seeing ourselves. It is recognizing that every person we are antagonistically forced into financial combat with in technological capitalism is looking into us as we look into them. What is Ota's great innovation in this film? It is not being a good worker or a dedicated employee or an ace game developer. It is, in fact, refusing to even seriously discuss "business" with NJ and opening up to him instead. "We are alike. We cannot tell a lie." And even still, Ting-Ting's conversation with Fatty at the cafe is Edward Yang acknowledging the futility of this art form to alleviate our suffering so long as it can only fixate on depicting violence, while also recognizing that violence in the world is a necessary precondition for violence at the movies. In a reference to itself, when the movie decides it both needs to depict a real-world lashing out of violence and doesn't want to fetishize it, we get maybe the funniest cut in the whole movie.
This time, Yi Yi feels deeply like a defense of empathy for ourselves when we cross the line, when we make a mess, and when we fail. Yi Yi is in love with the movies as much as it is wracked with frustration towards them. Yi Yi makes me feel old, and makes me feel rejuvenated. We cannot will our problems away, not even with hindsight, and probably not even with a second chance. But we can make music with strangers, we can invite each other back even after things end, we can do anything because every day is the first day. In this broken world that seems to be unending and beyond our ability to control, we are still alive, and no movie has made me feel more grateful for that than this one. It is my favorite movie, without a doubt in my mind.

A random aside that didn't fit in the above review:
Since this most recent viewing, I have found myself interacting with a few people who happen to ask what's a good movie I've seen recently. I tell them the name of this film and then am at an impasse. How do I describe Yi Yi in a way that will make it seem interesting? What's the elevator pitch to sell this movie to my girlfriend's girlfriend, who is not a big movie person? How would I pitch a 3 hour long foreign language film to my dentist? Well, I got an opportunity to try both cases, and somehow I was most successful with my dentist! I wish I could remember exactly what I told her, but I am sure it was a combination of both my enthusiasm and my actual words that made her say she wanted to watch it. And yes, I mentioned it was 3 hours long. Maybe she was just talking me up while waiting for the lidocaine to work its way through my mouth, but she both practiced saying and spelling the name of the film and expressed a lot of interest to me and kept wanting to talk about movies, even after the weird rubber tarp thing was in my mouth and I couldn't talk. I will have to update someday to hear what she thinks of it, if she gets around to watching it. It was not the typical kind of movie she watched, it sounded like, but I am hopeful and curious as to what will happen in the time from now until my next appointment.
Also, I saw a reddit comment (I know) that really challenged me, where someone dismissed this film as regular 'ol bourgeois cinema that's meant to placate people. I have been thinking about it on and off for a while, and I think it's silly I even feel compelled to respond, but I'll say that on some level I agree there is a bourgeois element that cannot be separated from this film. Not just in the situation of the family that is the subject of the film, but in the political origins of the Taiwanese new wave and Edward Yang's career and just the nature of Chinese nationalism that is a fundamental part of Taiwanese history. For me, that's what actually makes this movie, and all of Edward Yang's movies that I've seen so far, feel so compelling to me. Here he was making a film that was deeply about Taiwanese life specifically, but because of the time period in which it's taking place, it transforms into something that is more universally about globalized capital as a whole. The reason I as an immigrant to America relate so much to the tension between tradition and capital for these Taiwanese families is because a similar alienation was happening with my Chinese family. And on some level, this movie is not trying to reach for solutions to these things, but rather is like bringing yourself closer to your own situation by having you relate to this specific story. I guess since I brought it up I have to have an answer, maybe the answer is, if you consider exploring the alienation of life in late-stage capitalism (perhaps in anticipation of its digital excesses, since this came out in 2000) to be placating, I would love to know what your favorite movie is!

Wild At Heart

2025-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by David Lynch</li>
Released in 1990</li>
Runtime 124 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: I loved it, a great intro to the director's work</li> </ul>
Rest in peace, David Lynch. I'm embarrassed to say this is his first movie I've ever seen, but I'll make up for that in time, I'm sure.
I really enjoyed this. The whole runtime felt like this was a sort of vernacular surrealism. So many elements of American culture are present here, but we don't see them like artifacts inside a glass case. Surrounding all of these things is the howling, moaning, gasping, panicked vitality of youth. A lot of times the writing feels over the top but what I was delighted by were the ways that important moments felt so grounded in life. I have been Nicholas Cage standing around regretting everything and saying "what am I doing here" more times than I can count.
I'm going off of this movie plus a couple hours of Twin Peaks I watched two years ago for this next part, but my intuition says I'm probably right. David Lynch's combination of writing and directing feels completely one-of-a-kind. His character placement and dialogue feel like pure impulse in a way that you couldn't imitate if you tried. People talk and then suddenly scream with emotion. Characters who would be silently parroting speech in any other film get speaking roles and movement that elevate them to the center of our attention, sometimes for mere seconds. Lula asks sailor if they can be in love forever, a common idea in all romance stories, and sailor responds with something to the effect of, "wow peanut, your mind is really something else." It all just feels painfully genuine. Maybe it's just because of this day, but it felt like I was plainly seeing how David Lynch saw the world around him. Every person contains the possibility of becoming known to us, even if it's just so they can ask a clarifying question and then be on their way. Nothing here is manufactured.
I listened to this talk</a> he gave on YouTube today because i wanted to participate in mourning someone important to so many people I love and one of the things he stresses here and in other places is the value of intuition. Intuition, for David Lynch, drove every single part of the filmmaking process, from casting to rehearsal to editing. The reason he doesn't explain away his own films is because he doesn't want to deprive the audience of their intuition about the film. Maybe it's confirmation bias but I deeply feel his intuition in this, in the ways people talk, in the kinds of people we see, in how the pieces are all put together. He's not following formal rules, forms, or patterns. He's taking the road trip, The Wizard of Oz, and young love, and merging them all together like the riffle shuffle of a deck of cards. What comes out has both the feeling of alien mimicry and the sense that all these pieces are undeniably human. If the movie lives forever, then David Lynch seemingly has good reason to be immortalized in American cinema. It felt really good to watch this today.

The Velvet Vampire

2025-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Stephanie Rothman</li>
Released in 1971</li>
Runtime 80 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: oops I forgot to log it!</li> </ul>
Oops, somehow this was on my list to review and then I just forgot to. I didn't have much of a reaction to this film in the moment except for the critical shocking moments. The guy getting impaled by the pitchfork, the fact that this vampire has a dune buggy, the crazy mirror! Oh wait it's coming back to me.
I think if I was watching more exploitation films I would have lots of feelings about this. As far as the pastiche of vampires go, this one is really quite fun and a great example of how we understood vampires to be deeply sexual. And the MIRROR! I fucking love that prop and its use in the different sets in this film. You really can just be hard-carried by one very great piece of architecture in a scene.
I'm realizing now that it might have been fun to do a little compare-contrast with Nosferatu to this film, since this one also has a woman protaganist who is primarily relating to the vampire. Maybe I'll come back to this and more of Stephanie's work someday!

Love and Anarchy

2025-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Lina Wertmüller</li>
Released in 1973</li>
Runtime 120 minutes</li>
Watched at The Beacon Cinema</li>
Final feelings: A film that's afraid to lean in to all the big pieces it's utilizing for entertainment.</li> </ul>
The blurb on the Beacon's website sold me and a sold-out theater on this as the greatest anti-fascist sex-worker romcom I've never seen, and with that level of specificity I think even with all my misgivings about this movie, they were right. Love and Anarchy promised me boisterous and brash humor with some truly iconic-seeming depictions of the workers at the brothel. The set-up was so good: a solo anarchist, radicalized by the death of a comrade, takes up arms against the fascist state and has to go where he has never gone before: a fancy house in the big city full of cocky women. In the beginning, this film establishes a network of characters, lies, and deceit that truly make it feel deserving of the label. By the end, brutal contradiction leaves everyone unsatisfied, both on and off screen.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing this film is the need to marry the continuation of that romantic introduction (in the sense of emotiveness and culture, not just the utilitarian romance between people) with the revolutionary and radical current hiding beneath the wide-eyed gaze of Tunin, our main man. The progression is, in my opinion, sloppy. While the film is able to coax passion out of Tunin about his desire to be an anarchist and to be the guy to kill Il Duce, the literal romance cannot keep up the same consistency and intensity. For me, a lot of that has to do with how separated this film actually is from the brothel. We see it as a grand set piece, it bookends the film, but at all times in between we're using other locales and settings to build up the character relationships. In that way, it doesn't feel that different from more conventional romcoms, and the romance between Tunin and Tripolina just feels hurried in an ordinary way.
None of that would matter that much if the movie concluded with courageousness. The specific subject matter means there can be no doubt that this seeks to be a deeply political film. But the climactic ending (or, perhaps, anti-climactic) is probably the least coherent place things could have gone. At least, it's incoherent if the filmmaker is trying to suggest to the audience that she is ultimately sympathetic with an anti-fascist cause. Instead of allowing Tunin to follow through with his agency in his decision, we are instead shown how the two women, Tripolina and Salomè, argue in the middle of the night over playing their part in facilitating the man's near-certain death. Salomè, after previously failing to talk Tunin himself out of his plan, is talked into taking on a motherly role for the misguided bumpkin by new beau Tripolina. She doesn't wake him the next day, Tunin awakens realizing all his internal preparation for his death is for naught, and, exploding in frustration, rage, and despair, ultimately still tries to do something. In a sense, he still gets what he wants: a death befitting an anarchist at the hands of the fascists.
Even if the romantic connection between Tripolina and Tunin was perfectly executed, this would still feel so anti-climatic, and not in the way that First Reformed</a> was trying to be. In that film, the agent of self-destruction is truly ideologically alone. He is radicalized by someone who he himself then talks into suicide, and from that point on there is no tether between Reverend Toller's ideological justification for murder and any community in his life. In fact, it's the opposite arc over there: we see Toller find, for just a moment, a way to continue onwards, to connect with the possibility of intimacy again to resist his self-destruction. Now Wertmüller's turn: Tunin is a single man who had comrades, who watched comrades die, who took up the novel stance of truly being an anarchist in light of that death, but sought refuge and training from a whole organization of anarchists before connecting with Salomè. And Salomè herself is completely complimentary to that idea, she is posted up in this brothel for strategic purposes, and thus while acting alone, has a sense of purpose that does not purely come from an internal and personal struggle. The two characters even share that and take solace in that community together, in the ways that they can.
So, when Salomè turns to betray Tunin of his self-commitment, it feels like a cheap shot against all of anarchism and even the audience. As my girlfriend quipped, it's not really love and anarchy, but love vs. anarchy. Salomè learns to love Tunin by way of Tripolina, and in doing so condemns him to betray his one commitment that, for better and for worse, we have all come to accept as real. The film tells us, in no uncertain terms, that the idea of total abstinence from violence is persuasive and accurate. Why, by merely playing at this weak woman's heart, they can go about saying that revolutionary struggle is no different from being a soldier in nationalistic war. Did Italian anarchists see themselves as an oppositional resistance, or as an embarrassed nationalist movement that just needed to be able to draft enough men to stand in all these boots? I mean, I think I know the answer, they are called anarchists after all, but I don't know enough context to be certain.
Maybe that's why the film puts in a quote from Italian anarchist/socialist Errico Malatesta right at the end, to give legitimacy to the impassioned Tripolina and the capitulation of Salomè. I have no idea how Malatesta felt when he uttered or wrote the words that appear on screen, condemning the political salience of assassination, but I wonder if he would agree with how they were used here. As it is, we didn't even get an interesting reversal of agency from the man to the women in this film. With his violent outburst and subsequent death, I thought maybe Tunin was meant to be an exposé on a toxic lone-wolf masculinity underlying wannabe assassins. When he finally snaps and beats the women who have cared for and betrayed him so much, I figured the idea was that this was underneath his bravado all along. I still think there is text in the movie that suggests that might be a part of his character, but unfortunately for me he is far too well-connected and specific in his motivations to feel convincingly like a true edgelord. His violence at the end feels pathetic even though it is cruel, not like the breaking of a seething man but like the exuberant defiance of a child.
At the end of all of that, one thing this movie did bring was a source for a lot of great conversations. In my review process I mostly try to crystallize some thought or opinion that feels like my reaction and understanding of a movie by my own observation. I try to reserve the peeping of other reviews until I at least feel confident in a direction, so that what I'm committing to the page is uniquely of me. At this point, however, I have no idea how much of the review above is truly "mine" vs me in tandem with others, especially my girlfriend, discussing what we saw. It was her who offered up a really justified perspective to see the whole film as an almost farcical misogynistic caricature, not just of the main characters but even the other brothel girls who exist one-dimensionally as combative and rambunctious entertainers for the audience and nothing really more than that. On that specific issue of the sex workers I've come around to a somewhat similar conclusion through different means. I really wanted to be seeing a lot more of this film through the life of the brothel. Instead, Wertmüller had a more atomic approach to character and storytelling, and so while the characters say that they are all parts of varying communities, we don't actually see enough to feel that it's true. The ideology is not an ideology but a prop to this film, and that's a shame because it could have moved towards more revolutionary ends. When the credits rolled, I realize now I was just like Tunin: unsatisfied, but ultimately experiencing the ending I originally wanted. --- Unmarked footnote here to try to preemptively clarify how much of this review is mine. Had I written the review the same night I saw it, it would have focused a lot more on the masculinity and femininity at play in the film, like I mention about Tunin. I felt frustrated immediately after the movie that women took on such great roles in the film as long-term agents of a broader movement, that had the consciousness to even offer that up to our lone-wolf-type men of action, but then could also be so easily persuaded to discard those beliefs in the name of love. That frustration situated itself in a feeling that the stuff outside those pieces was still entertaining and interesting. I think now, while I don't fully agree with those who think all of this is caricature, I see that the attempt to make this about romantic love has diluted what I really wanted, which was an examination of lived anti-fascism. I think that examination is still there, but it's all going to this point where it has to enter into rhetorical combat with "love". As if those committed to violent revolutionary struggle don't or can't have love in their lives.
God, now that I think more on it, isn't it just weirdly demeaning to depict a woman revolutionary who is exceptionally competent, is able to extract information easily from the head of the police, who is deeply committed to the struggle, and then show her realizing she needs to abandon her comrade's intentions through the power of motherly love? For a movie that is "about" an assassination attempt, the great twist at the end has absolutely nothing to do with the political value of assassination. I just still don't understand what her realization is, that he is misguided? Well, then the comrade who's death radicalized him must have also been misguided, as was the entire org backing them! Like, this is what I mean by it being an incomplete story, because there is an external organization of anarchists outside of Italy that are coordinating and organizing these characters into meeting. The infrastructure exists for this to be about anarchism! Instead its just turning up the stakes on a romance story to an anarchic high. God, I know exactly one person who is incarcerated who has been on a hunger strike before and the idea that I would try to stop her from doing so as an expression of my love for her is maddening.

Dracula 3000

2025-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Darrell Roodt</li>
Released in 2004</li>
Runtime 86 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: bad!</li> </ul>
The most consistent thing I have noticed between all the exquisitely bad movies that I watch with my bad movie group is that the worst ones are all so nauseating with their camera movements. They communicate nothing at all and you are just left twisting and whirling in the frame purely for the sake of it. Holding the camera steady would not have made the content of this movie any better, it just would have made watching it less physically uncomfortable. So, I resent the creators of these movies for that.
It totally makes sense that this was a made-for-tv collab between Germany and South Africa, for something set in the distant future it has zero desire to separate itself from the most overdone racial and gender humor from this time frame. I get that the bar is on the floor for TV-movies but stuff you watched on TV in 2004 was still sometimes good! Maybe I should have added in ad breaks between every scene transition. That probably would have helped. Also, how is this the movie that teaches me that Coolio had a career in film?

Nosferatu

2025-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Robert Eggers</li>
Released in 2024</li>
Runtime 132 minutes</li>
Watched at the Pacific Science Center IMAX</li>
Final feelings: torn in half by dread and rumpus, it was fun but maybe not that much more for me.</li> </ul>
Ended up watching like 3 vampire movies on the week that I saw this so my thoughts have been going back and forth on some things. My immediate reaction inside the theater at my first IMAX screening in forever was that this movie is just plain well-constructed. If The Lighthouse was photographic in its standpoint, Nosferatu feels "cinematic" by comparison purely in the ways that it has a deeply consistent visual language for movement. I genuinely felt like every camera movement in the first half was deliberately tuned to be just a bit too slow and held for just a bit too long to really sell an atmosphere of dread. It was almost visceral, and I got giddy when it felt like characters on-screen would move at the same pace, reinforcing the inevitability of doom that was the monster vampire.
Where things kind of blow up, not necessarily in a bad way but just in a contradictory way, is when the movie turns into an adventure film that truly feels akin to all the best and worst modern horror films since the original silent feature put the vampire into our collective psyches (I'm saying that as a statement of fact even though I myself have not seen the original). I think Willem Dafoe is the best example of this, I thought of him as like a socially acceptable Nicholas Cage for being too over-the-top and too uncontrolled in his enthusiasm to feel in line with the rest of the tone of the film. That joke about Isaac Newton was awful. And I did laugh! I laughed quite a bit throughout the second half, just not always in ways the movie probably wanted. I found myself holding back laughter all the time when wet, wet Thomas would impotently wander around. While Ellen contorts and writhes and dreams of blood, Thomas just sorta tails the other boys like a sad dog. He is probably the greatest change from the source material and on the one hand, that means Ellen gets to be the focal point of the film. But on the other hand, it makes a lot of the focus on the sanctity of marriage feel like a prop rather than anything serious enough to match the energy of the first half.
I wonder how much of this ties back in with the one part of Nosferatu that I truly just do not give a shit about, which is the "authenticity" of it all. In fact, I find it very telling that a movie that gains so much praise for the accuracy of its accessories is also made by someone who has no interest in explicitly engaging with the consequences of that accuracy:

There are such layers contained in this question Ellen asks: “Does evil come from within us, or from beyond?” Given that “Nosferatu” is set in 1838, before Germany was unified into a nation-state, I’m curious to what degree you considered that anxiety of emerging national identity and this fear of “the Other,” in this case Eastern Europeans, within your adaptation.
[long pause] My works tend to be less intentionally politically charged, and that was also something that was not necessarily front of mind for me. I think there’s a lot of criticism about “Dracula” and Murnau’s film, about this Other from the East coming in. But that’s not what excites me about the story.
Robert Eggers in an interview with Isaac Feldberg at RogerEbert.com</a> </blockquote>
I don't know how much to read into this quote since it was for a quick 15 minute interview and I don't really subscribe to the idea that the authorial intent can ever really outweigh the impact the images themselves have. But I also think it's a funny sort of fetishization to want your period horror film to look absolutely pitch perfect and then when asked if that meant anything specific about the real history of the time, to say "That's not what my work is about, I don't want my movie to be intentionally political, and if there are political elements to be considered, that's not what I care about. Please let me segue into the fun stuff."
Honestly, this maybe is the thing that actually most authentically ties this remake to the original source text. Dracula has always been a story carried by ethnic stereotype and prejudice. Bram Stoker never visited Transylvania and took his descriptions of these faraway people straight from British colonial officers and soldiers that were helping to stoke the fear of these foreigners.1</a> And now, after decades of spinoffs and remakes where we fixate on the fun stuff and say forget all the icky stuff, we have a movie with a modern budget and vision that can make exquisite dioramas of a place in time completely absent from the meaning of that timing. If the interviewer above wanted to examine historical German identity through the lens of the vampire story, they might have been better off just reading the section on the original movie's links to antisemitism on Wikipedia</a>.
Nosferatu is at odds with itself and has therefore created its own kind of vacuousness in its imagery. It's why the only stuff that stands out to me in the days following my viewing are mechanical, related to the craft of specific moments. Damn, maybe this is photographic after all, just not in a way that felt completely astonishing like in The Lighthouse. The more I think about it the more baffling it is that all of these parts are in the same movie. I never finished the original book, and I would like to do so now, but the vibe I remember was much more inquisitive. In this movie, von Franz knows most of the answers, knows where to look to find all the ones he doesn't, and has a kung-fu sifu level of raw proficiency to convince the necessary people around him to do what he wants. Is he a mad doctor, or is he a time-traveler from the future? The way he exists now, would we be able to tell the difference? If what Robert Eggers wants to explore is the relationship between Orlock, Ellen, and Thomas, he has a Dafoe-sized grin blocking our view, making the dynamic deeply one-sided, counterbalanced not with interesting and engaged opposition, but scrambling and disconnected posturing. Hmm...that almost sounds kinda political...
All that is to say, I had fun watching this. My criticism is my real thoughts, but I can't deny that after the movie I felt like I had a lot of fun. I might even like to watch it again someday. At its highest points there is artistry and intention in the craft of the film itself that can't help but make me feel excited. At it's most pedestrian points, there is a lot of running back and forth to places to make sure certain things are spoken out loud to the audience. Is is horrific entertainment or entertainment masquerading as horror? I think I'd have to ultimately say its more the latter, but then again, I've never seen anything that would make Isaac Newton crawl back up his mother's womb. --- 
^1A pretty easy and interesting read is Stoyan Tchaprazov's article</a> "The Slovaks and Gypsies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula : Vampires in Human Flesh" from the journal "English Literature in Translation". Reading it myself gives me the sense that the original text, more than simply passively reflecting existing prejudice at the time, actively sought to single out a contemporary Other that the British were already in military conflict with (the Slovaks), and then exploited the image of the "gypsy" in order to make both seem barbaric and classically Oriental. I'm sure there is tons of scholarship out there supporting and contradicting this framing, and art can be about multiple things, but one thing that will betray a reach for "authenticity" is a refusal to engage with the critical dimensions of the source of the pastiche. </div>

Kin-Dza-Dza!

2025-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Georgiy Daneliya</li>
Released in 1986</li>
Runtime 135 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: koo! (this is so fantastic!)</li> </ul>
Ok so my girlfriend and I messed up and watched disc 2 of the 2-part DVD instead of starting at disc 1. In my defense I just kinda figured maybe it was a purposeful thing to have an opening "credits" that just is a bunch of loose translations of fictional alien words.
We did watch the first half eventually, but I'm kinda thinking maybe just watching the second half is the way to go? I want to run a social experiment where I get one group of people to watch this film normal and one group to watch it silly-style and compare the 2 group's average feelings of this movie. If you start from the top, Kin-Dza-Dza! is a comedic science-fiction film where our hapless comrades ultimately find themselves in a deeply sick world that is obsessed with arbitrary ethnic hierarchies and wealth accumulation. And if you watch just the second half, Kin-Dza-Dza! is instead...a comedic science-fiction film where our hapless comrades ultimately find themselves in a deeply sick world that is obsessed with arbitrary ethnic hierarchies and wealth accumulation.
The difference is that, by watching just the second half, you are not told these facts explicitly. I figured out all these themes by the end, but the first half of the second half is so abstracted from language that it is maybe the most alien an alien species has ever felt on screen. This knocks the jizz-wailing cantina creatures out of the park. The alien language is so sparse and you learn of it so quickly in the first few minutes (of the second half) that everything feels right in that liminal space between understanding and pure linguistic chaos. I truly felt like a xenoanthropologist, slowly putting together these social cues in tandem with our intrepid humans.
I have no idea if this strange accident of mine has been discussed by previous viewers of this film in history. For me, it still felt like a totally complete experience, and by the end when I finally saw the denizens of Pluke for what they really were, I felt like a mad genius. Maybe the most emotional part for me is when Uncle Vova leaves the ship and sits on the ground of the lifeless, de-oxygenated planet between Pluke and Earth in protest. He would rather suffocate to death than participate in the colonization and exploitation of this faraway place, and it's not long before the violinist joins him shrouded in blue.
Of the pair of Mosfilm productions</a> that I've seen they have both given me this deeply humane sense of empathy with the characters and with my fellow humans, and this film astonishingly accomplished that with a limited vocabulary and deeply abstracted environments. That first scene with the faraway balloon looming in the distance with the big pipes going into it left me awe-struck; I will be thinking of that image specifically for a long time. Science fiction feels unstoppable when viewed like this because the genre becomes a vessel for pure imaginative impulse. It's why I just didn't care about the Dune</a> remake</a>. Are we here to perfectly recreate the most marketable faces and weapons on the screen to make things feel "real", or are we going to risk baffling an audience using what is within our reach to get to a meaningfully alien place? All I have to say about that is koo!

Cruising

2024-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by William Friedkin</li>
Released in 1980</li>
Runtime 102 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: homoeroticism from the closet</li> </ul>
It's both delightfully horny and deeply ambiguous. If the closet is self-loathing, Cruising paints that emotion with every unflinching stare into the abyss that Al Pacino makes as he tries, and fails mostly, to integrate with these leather-strapped kinksters. Just like the gay communities know that the cops don't really care about our deaths, a closeted fag cop gets to learn the hard way the price of selling out for his advancement. Amazing that at the end of this film you are not informed of anything, you don't know for certain who killed whom and while to me it felt clear that the implication was that Steve killed his neighbor and closest gay connection, Ted, it's presented to us simply as the continuation of violence that has always been there and that will continue to be conveniently ignored.
It's interesting considering the differences between the modern and contemporary audiences of this film. I can totally understand a desire for thematic restraint that some, or maybe many gay people felt about this movie at the time. How much of the backlash was from fags who wanted to keep their culture on the down-low? How much was from respectable queers who didn't want to have the hypersexual superstition further applied to them in their everyday lives? One idea that seems unquestionably backwards to me is that this movie would have inspired people to murder gays in the same way. Having grown up in the casual homophobia of the 90s and 00s, I'm certain the desire for violence and murder was already there. I for one am glad this film still exists even if a lot more footage ended up being lost over time, because within its voyeurism lies a specific kind of restraint which is responsible both visually and narratively for getting Steve read as an outsider, a wolf in sheep's clothing. Through that view we end up just watching a lot of footage of gay men existing in their sexuality and their kink. It's almost objective, in a way, how we look at these scenes filmed in real leather bars with real fags, and then cutting to Al Pacino standing awkwardly in his leather jacket and false yellow hanky, or moving recklessly and awkwardly on the dance floor. Friedkin is comparing gay performance to genuine gay sexuality, and is using footage of the real deal to sell the latter such that you almost have to do nothing to describe the former. A more cowardly movie would try to do too much to manufacture with magic what already existed in the real world, and it is us future generations who truly reap the rewards of that bravery.
Gay and queer sexuality still exists, but it doesn't look exactly like this anymore. With the efforts towards assimilation that is the predominant focus of the mainstream LGBT rights movement, there's probably plenty of gays who would still reject Cruising for its "unnecessarily sexual" emphasis on gay life. Precisely for that reason, it feels powerful to me to still have these images and these memories of that bygone time. It seems ever relevant that art must be made and experienced to resist the cultural forces that wish to separate us from our sexuality in order to make us better fit for mass market appeal. The tyranny of the family will not be expelled purely through bloody raunchy leather boys but god damn it I'm going to enjoy it when I see it!

Watermelon Woman

2024-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Cheryl Dunye</li>
Released in 1996</li>
Runtime 84 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: begging for Asian American cinema to take a page out of Cheryl's book here!</li> </ul>
Watermelon Woman is obviously low-budget and has some roughness, but it tries (and succeeds mostly) to reach so much further than I was expecting. The fiction within the fiction about Fae Richards, supposing that she was real, and the quest to find a history that no one else seems to care about, interspersed with very down-to-earth Black lesbian life, interwoven with the still-true-to-life tension and drama between different groups of queers and our failures at combating anti-blackness ourselves is just really amazing to watch. Perhaps frustratingly for the original creators, Watermelon Woman still is so relatable and, at-times, so scathing in its criticism, that it doesn't feel like it's missed a beat when watched from the 21st century. Some of the practical trappings are different, sure, but I was not prepared to feel so implicated when Cheryl visits the Center for Lesbian Information and Technology, only to run into an org more focused on gatekeeping via strict adherence to its own myopic values than actually supporting the work of others. Some things never change, it seems.
It's worth still celebrating this movie even now because we still want more of what this has to offer. Every dimension of marginalization wants more "representation" in our stories but here we are being demanded to go one step further. Representation doesn't mean shit when you don't have permission to be anything else but representative. Deeply racist and hateful periods of our history had "representation" in their art and movies that existed just to reinforce the existing hierarchy. Watermelon Woman had in 1996 what plenty of "representation"-focused productions now are sorely lacking: a desire to do more than simply litigate well-known social differences to appeal to white audiences. This movie has hostility towards whiteness, this movie lives confidently in the virtue of its own being, and it's not at all interested in talking down to the audience and saying, "isn't it so hard to be like me?" Instead it plainly declares the source of the problem that faces its main character: an entire history of erasure, institutionally and interpersonally, mostly enforced by white people. Honestly it is divine perfection that this movie took out the credibility of the National Endowment for the Arts after its release. Of course even our beloved arts funding institutions are not safe to reactionary mouth-frothing at the most straightforward depiction of queer pleasure, all from a movie that's begging to be made irrelevant. A lack of budget does not have to mean a lack of ambition! I am so thankful Cheryl Dunye kept the ambition and balanced it with a great sense of humor to make such a profoundly earnest film. The fact that it ends with zero resolution is just so great! It feels so true to life! Sometimes your projects and your friendships just end up in limbo. Sometimes you come up against the wall of history and still make something anyway. Sometimes it feels like your work doesn't matter but you keep going in the hopes that this time, it might!

First Reformed

2024-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Paul Schrader</li>
Released in 2017</li>
Runtime 113 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: profoundly relatable in ways I was definitely not expecting</li> </ul>
A friend suggested this film as a topical viewing given the recent assassination of a healthcare CEO, and while I do see how this movie is obviously connected to those events, I was kind of stunned in the first half that so much of the establishing of Pastor Toller as a character was about his unrequited desire for creating art. I felt, in his words each time he judged his own writing, a connection to my own writing. The judgment that comes before, during, and after one has written something down on the page was something I was deeply struggling with just a couple days earlier about these reviews I write. When I'm really in the weeds, I think of writing as an expression of pure arrogance, and that standpoint can only exist when I am deeply self-critical and self-loathing. It was unbelievable at first that First Reformed would make its main character so familiar in this way, knowing what I knew about how things would progress. But then I watch the film and the idea becomes clear: our most self-destructive impulses can also be dangerously tied to our most (self-)righteous ones.
Visually, I am a big fan of the narrow and static view of this film. There is hardly any camera movement. The shots hold still, the shadows carve through the composition of the shot, the characters are orchestrated and placed so that the visual matches the emotion of the dialog or the narration. I'm thinking of the placement of Reverend Toller on the diner seat when he has his awkward conversation with the big men in town that he is unfortunately forced to interact with. I'm thinking of the way the trip to Mary Mensana's house is filmed with a static view that puts the front door, the car, and the sidewalk and neighboring houses in different arrangements and orientations depending on what is about to happen in the house. And I'm thinking of the flooring in Toller's little house, and the long dark shadow that cuts through the back of the floor when he has his first moment of physical intimacy with Mary. Images that stick out in my mind like photographs, because they are philosophically photographic. There's many great lines in this film where the good Reverend relates himself to darkness, and that feeling is unflinchingly correlated to what we see on screen.
But I will say, First Reformed is challenging me a lot on its implications and conclusions. In my own head, as a joke, I have starting thinking of First Reformed as an edgelord movie for me and my internal edgelord. Reverend Toller is my Joker, I guess. And if I identify so strongly with a self-hating and self-critical character who is spiritually drowning in his own guilt so much that he has to physically do so with alcohol, what does First Reformed have to offer me? At the end of this movie, I wanted Reverend Toller to die. I wanted him to strap up, walk in, and be a hero. I was in so much denial about how this was going to end that when it all finally cut to black, my friend snapped her fingers dramatically and it was like a spell had been broken. Even after that sound, a part of me was so unbelieving in the film just ending that I remained clenched for a few moments, before exhaling, feeling like Paul Schrader had blue-balled me. As yet another entry in the list of films that implicate the audience's participation in the violence, I was bloodthirsty. I saw Toller's struggle and radicalization as like my own, I saw his turn for towards violence as an unequivocally positive force in his life, and I don't want to write on a public review how much of that was because I felt a certain envy that I hadn't yet destroyed myself in a similar way. I was so excited for Toller to die because then I could see him as a successful example of the move towards violence we need if we are to change things.
But he does not perish. He does not become a martyr for a cause we might see as just. What we do see are connections between the ultimately failed self-detonation and so many other kinds of isolation and self-harming behaviors in the pastor's life. I think my favorite example of this is how argument and debate is depicted in this film, in yet another thing that is so fucking relatable to my life experience that it feels a little spooky. The first time Reverend Toller gets into an argument at the diner, he tells us in narration that the silent ones always seem wiser. He laments his failure to adhere to his own advice, and the conversation that ensues is unsatisfying and violent. He raises his strong questions, but he is in an environment where no one around him wants to hear what he has to say. His questioning is therefore meaningless. Those of us who have tried to be like the Reverend in these conversations intimately know that in order to genuinely persuade another person, that person has to already be doing a lot of work to have a curiosity and openness to the point of persuasion. It's why debates and the marketplace of ideas have never, in my experience, actually convinced someone with any lasting effect. The arena simply provides rules for judgment, but no one involved fundamentally changes. Certainly I have found it is better shut up and spend time with my radicalized friends than to verbally spar with strangers in bad faith.
In fact, you can see just how effective spirited debate is in this film right at the end, when Toller argues with his benefactor, Pastor Joel Jeffers, about his environmental concerns. This is the most engaged the debate over this topic ever gets for us in the audience because the participants are all speaking the same language. Toller and Jeffers are both able to quote powerful-sounding scripture to justify their points and while we may believe one side over the other, the only judge who could cleanly resolve their theological questions is god, and he's not in the room right now. The debate gives neither Toller nor Jeffers any peace, nor does it lead to Toller getting the upper hand for the rest of the conversation like he may have wished. We are often lead to believe that through proper and thorough conversation, we may usurp the power of those that loom over us, but it fails pathetically here. Only the vest remains.
First Reformed is a movie that I am seeing and writing about during and in-between my own depressive spirals, and probably that's why it's hitting me so hard days and weeks after. It is, to me, a meditation on insecurity and guilt as it relates to our desire to live artfully. The hollow spirituality and discarded journal pages are extensions of the same unfulfilled desire which is the burning root of our shame. The vest and all of the factual exposition about impending climate catastrophe are just props to evoke our own sense of righteousness and defensiveness, so that we may come closer to the Reverend's ailing and decaying body and partake in his delicious self-destruction. That it doesn't happen, that instead he returns back to the one positive human connection he has, and lets go of his own mutilation for even just a moment, is unsatisfying to me, and that feeling worries me. It's one of the most personally challenging films I've seen this year.

Tibetan Music Festival 2005

2024-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Gonpo Gyaltsen?</li>
Released in 2005</li>
Runtime 195 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: a small slice of history that sparks curiosity</li> </ul>
When you find a live music concert DVD in the wild for an event you've never heard of, with a signature on the disc, and with no ISBN or other marking to help you find it online, you eat the $1.99 or whatever they're charging for these things at the Goodwill and bring it home. Tibetan Music Festival 2005 took me down a couple of rabbit holes online before finally finishing the movie and writing this review.
I guess I'll start with the perhaps least interesting part to me, which is the actual 3 hour runtime of this movie. It's basically a slightly-edited taping of a large concert that was performed in South India by dozens of Tibetan artists, dancers, and musicians. Unfortunately for me, I do not speak Tibetan (I don't actually know that it is Tibetan being spoken in most of these songs but that is my contextual inference). For most of the songs, I can't understand the words that are being said, which is my loss. What is even worse, however, is the heavy strobe lights that are present in almost every single act in this 3 hours of concert. The camera setup is not equipped to handle this, so there is just a constant blinking of extremely bright light that makes most of these acts impossible to look at directly. It's just unfortunate because if it wasn't so hard to watch, I could still get a lot out of watching the artists on stage and vibing with the music. Plenty of people vibe to music in other languages, so I was a little sad that it hurt me so much to focus on the images here.
However, this does mean that when the strobe stops or when the words are in English, you really notice and pay attention. There was this rock band of younger guys that had this amazing act that started in English briefly. First, the bassist/singer yelled into the mic at the audience, "DO YOU LOVE ROCK AND ROLL?" The audience response was not mic'd up, so I am not sure how enthusiastic they were, but that didn't stop our singer from shouting the phrase a few more times. Then they started playing with a totally different energy, like a low-tempo rock/blues type song, but the lyrics were still all shouted into the mic:

I LOVE ROCK AND ROLL I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S CALLED I LOVE ROCK AND ROLL I DON'T KNOW WHERE IT'S FROM </blockquote>
That was worth the price of admission alone.
I tried to pay attention in particular to the names of the individual acts to see if any were from the United States. Early on in the concert, a young man appeared on stage with some traditional instruments that I don't yet know the names of (though one of them looked very similar to the erhu, which is a Chinese fiddle played sort of like a cello). He had a very strong and evocative voice (and also no strobing lights). The caption popped up on my screen and said, "Techung, United States". I jotted down his name and looked him up afterwards and saw that he was still performing and was active on Instagram. I was able to reach out to him and he actually responded, which was very generous of him.
I didn't speak very much with Techung. After all, I am not any kind of real journalist with institutional backing. I'm just some lady who watched a DVD from Goodwill. He did tell me that Gonpo Entertainment was founded by a man named Gonpo Gyaltsen, who actually passed away a few months earlier this year. I had tried to look up Gonpo Entertainment, and while the site exists on the Wayback Machine, there isn't much information to figure out from the archive itself besides that Gonpo had multiple projects lined up filming other Tibetan music festivals and events. Apparently, from Techung's voice messages, he was very charismatic and had a strong business presence in the Tibetan community in South India. I tried to ask if he had any specific memories about being in the concert, but our conversation fizzled out shortly afterwards.
Afterwards, I looked up Techung on Bandcamp and snagged a couple of albums. I was amazed that the very first track I listened to was an original song written to the tune of a very famous Japanese song from the 60s, Ue o Muite Arukou (also known as Sukiyaki in the United States which is a real Japanese word that is not related to the actual song at all). Ue o Muite Arukou, translated to "I look up as I walk", was the output of the grief and frustration lyricist Rokusuke Ei experienced after the failure of the Anpo protests to stop the US-Japan Security Treaty. Incredibly, the song has reached far beyond the specific boundaries of the time that it was written, as it became popular enough that it charted in the United States (with its stupid food-based name), and then covered with original lyrics in English as well. I know the song because it features prominently in both Yi Yi</a> and in my favorite Studio Ghibli film, Only Yesterday.
Techung writes in the info blurb</a> of his song:

This beautiful melody of this song is Japanese. The story behind it is that in the early 1970s, a group of young Tibetans were sent to study auto mechanics in Japan. When they returned from their training, they often sang this melody with romantic Tibetan lyrics. I was in my teens at the time, yet I have never forgotten how beautiful this love song was to me. </blockquote>
It was a really moving experience to go through all these different pieces and come out the other end listening to a new version of a song I already knew, completely by accident. The artist also writes about this particular album that he made all these songs in 1999 on a TASCAM Portastudio multi-cassette recorder, and that he only now published the works after feeling for many years that they weren't worth showing off. For my own singular experience, I'm glad he did.
When engaging with artistic works from around the world, even semi-professional recordings of concerts that I otherwise would never known existed, it's important to have a consciousness about the context that influences the creation of the media. Tibetans living in exile today are the product of the Chinese state forcibly attempting to maintain control over those lands through many mechanisms that Americans might be familiar with. Bogus treaties, contested negotiations, military violence and political repression, all of these mechanisms of domination that we are familiar with have been set upon the native Tibetan peoples. The material result of this is often exile.
I think leftists can sometimes feel in conflict when considering how to feel about the struggle for Tibetan independence, because we see that it is something that the United States fundamentally supports as it seeks to counter rising Chinese power and influence around the world. It feels weird to me seeing the following that the Dalai Lama has had specifically with American celebrities and it feels weird to support a liberation movement that, while the United States probably doesn't materially support in any deeply substantive way, is aligned with U.S. foreign policy interests.
But this is why it's important to me to remember that, first, China is not my friend and they are not my favorite sports team in global matters. Having anarchist tendencies might inoculate me, to some extent, of coming up with rationalizations for why the state of China is somehow more virtuous or correct in the way that it represses the people who live there. It's important to understand the fundamental right of self-determination, even for people who we might not agree with, even with people who might be opposed by the enemy of my enemy. When double-checking my work about how I felt about Tibetan liberation, I read a lot of Wikipedia articles about the original treaty negotiations and the historical context for why the Communists wanted to keep this territory so much. I also read this article from 2008 by Charlie Hore in International Socialism</a>, which was contextualized in terms of then-current protests happening in Lhasa for Tibetan independence. I won't claim to be an expert, and if you're reading this then don't take my words as replacement for your own effort, but for me it has been enough to validate my sense that self-determination is a good enough of a reason to support Tibetan liberation, just like I support liberation for minority Uyghurs in Xinjiang, just like I support Palestinian liberation.
And so, even though I didn't watch a concert movie that I particularly understood, and even though I didn't really learn that much about the specifics of the DVD's production, I still made some new connections and developed a better sense of my own worldview about a specific and important issue. While the actual movie might have felt amateurish, I'm really glad I scooped this DVD up and I hope this will not be the last time I get to play investigative journalist over a movie.

Funeral Parade of Roses

2024-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by</li>
Released in 1969</li>
Runtime 105 minutes</li>
Watched at The Carport</li>
Final feelings: so good you'll even love watching it at a makeshift outdoor theater</li> </ul>
I swear to god one day I will watch this movie under normal conditions. The first time I was at a screening in a tiny theater on a busy street corner with no air-conditioning, where it was so crowded and hot that the whole theater immediately rushed to the exits at the film's conclusion. It was sweaty, uncomfortable, and I couldn't really read the subtitles very well, and I came away thinking this movie was a masterpiece.
This time, I watched in a masked screening outdoors 1</a> where a friend projected the film onto a big screen that was corded taut across the whole wall of their outdoor carport. There was wind that blew the screen around a little, it got really cold the longer we sat there, the audio was really quiet because there wasn't a functional speaker larger than the onboard speakers on the projector, and I still left the screening thinking this movie is a masterpiece. Even as a pseudo-silent film, the interviews visually interrupt the chaotic visual movement of the story, and the dramatic changes in sound become much more noticed. The speakers sounded almost blown out during the really loud musical sequences with the comical clown music, even though they hardly produced enough volume to sound throughout the carport.
Maybe most importantly, this screening I was sitting with a group of friends who had various accessibility needs to see the film. I suspect, for at least some of the audience, this was a movie they wouldn't normally be able to watch in a theater screening where no one is going to discuss content warnings and the like before the film, or warn the audience during the film when it was time to step out of the theater. I will admit, I had to resist a desire to defend the artistic decisions of Funeral Parade of Roses because it's easy to make a lot of assumptions about a person's reasons for needing content warnings ahead of time. I'm not certain I even fully stopped myself from asking a pointed question or two about the need for essentially spoiling the most thrilling part of the film ahead of time. But I got over myself, because the alternative for someone who is in this position is that they just simply never see the film. And that would be a shame for a couple of reasons.
First, Funeral Parade of Roses does not reserve all of its best moments for its most gruesome. In fact, so much violent conflict in this is abstracted, in a way I sort of describe in my first review</a>. When the film needs it, violence simmers and seethes and lurks, breaking the surface on occasion when it decides it's really critical. So much of this movie lives within the vignette and meta-vignette of the daily lives of queer and trans people 2</a>. The environments of these vignettes are steeped in the atmosphere of political violence that surrounds the particular historical moment of the film, but that setting does not subsume the human and the humane. While I do believe the film is clearly a more complete artwork without omitting its most violent endings, it still can have something to offer to the viewer up until those points.
Second, the movie actually acknowledges its own horror and this was made so comical given the specific context of this viewing. After the big reveal happens at the end and necks are slit and eyes are stabbed, the film hard-cuts to a man in a chair who faces straight ahead towards the camera and says something to the effect of, "phew, that was awful. I hope the next movie is a little bit nicer :)". The movie has been playing with the combined forces of narrative verisimilitude and meta-narrative tricksterism for the preceding hour, so of course it would apply this push-and-pull on its most dramatic and horrifying image at the end. Honestly, it felt so playful. Admittedly, I have the benefit of having seen the movie before and not feeling the same need to have strict boundaries on certain subject matter, so maybe it wouldn't have felt playful for those who did struggle with that. But for me, I was astounded because it truly took me by surprise. It's like the film is perfectly crafted to conceal this little joke to maximum effect, even for someone who has seen the film before.
Really glad we got to watch this again even in less-than-ideal conditions and perhaps with more distinct requirements required for the screening than usual. I am trying to refuse the call of the void that is preemptively writing a defense of stuff like content warnings in media. I don't know that I would be super excited to go through this kind of process in a public screening, but I think movies at home with friends is maybe the perfect place to speak candidly about these things and normalize the practice of talking about access needs.3</a> For the detractors, I will simply point to the fact that I was not the only person who sat through the entire runtime outside in the cold to watch this screening, and certainly some folks got to watch more of this movie than they would have otherwise. If we were talking about Die Hard 5, I would guess it wouldn't be worth the trouble, but in my opinion it definitely is worth it for this film, and I'm glad I could participate in this little carport screening. 

^1
If you're curious about why I would bother watching a movie outside while wearing a mask, it's because COVID is still real! The viral load that we see in wastewater data, the only data we have left to track this stuff, is at the same volumes that we had pre-vaccine and pre-"end of the pandemic". If you're curious I invite you to read this article from the South Seattle Emerald</a> about being COVID cautious even in 2025, or this very thorough and excellent zine</a> as a starting resource. We keep us safe, which means it's on us to build resilient communities of care, and that means taking reasonable steps to protecting ourselves and our loved ones from a viral respiratory illness (of which vaccination alone is insufficient). </div>
^{2
I know they are referred to as gay boys in the text of the film, but everything about what these gay boys describe in their interviews resonates so deeply with me as a trans woman that I don't think anyone should be surprised that I'm calling them trans in my interpretation of the film.
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^{3
I acknowledge by saying this I might piss off both people who don't want anyone to ever see anything like a content warning anywhere near their favorite movies and also people who want actual theaters to start doing something like this to make films more accessible for more people. I used to put content warnings in my reviews for movies that seemed like they obviously needed them, but I will say even doing that got a little confusing because I became uncertain on when something warranted a content warning. My gut instinct is to have deference to those with the accessibility needs. Something I am constantly reminding myself is that needing content warnings for, for example, suicide in films is not necessarily because the person thinks its immoral to depict suicide in film. Rather, in my experience it just means they know themselves and know that seeing suicide on screen is liable to bring up a lot of bad feelings specific to their experience in life that makes the film unpleasant or even not worth seeing. I honestly don't know how to argue with that and don't really want to. Maybe the issue would be more pressing to me if all the theaters around me started doing content warning disclosures before screenings, and I will admit I would probably choose a screening without content warnings because I don't have those kinds of needs and would still prefer to not really know ahead of time too much about the film. Ah, I don't know, I'm sort of rambling down here but I guess I'll just say the intention of my original statement was more to be in relationship to the status quo, where basically none of the screenings I've seen in theaters really said much of anything about content warnings before the movie.
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Drowning By Numbers

2024-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Peter Greenaway</li>
Released in 1988</li>
Runtime 118 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: inscrutable for the first half but I warmed up to it at the end.</li> </ul>
As much as I love Peter Greenaway, I will admit I spent more time than I expected in this just being baffled at the comedy and the editing, and I said to myself, out loud, on multiple occasions, "good god, english people are fucking space aliens". What a weird feeling when the same construction and detail that goes into these dramas that I love is made humorous? The characters feel just as over-the-top as in other films, but my dumb American brain needs to hear a laugh track to cue me in. Also, I didn't realize the numbers were counting up to mirror the very long counting scene at the start until we were in the 20s. That's embarrassing.
Honestly this feels very similar in tone to The Draughtman's Contract</a>, but I admit that Smut (the character, there is a child in this movie named Smut who is amazing) really steals the show here for me. He's the diegetic force behind most of the numbering in the film, and we understand that it is tracking grisly death and yet we can't be bothered to really examine closely each enumeration in any given shot. For something so comedic and which feels quite slow, at times, the numbers give a sense of urgency and dread that it will all lead to something quite unfortunate.
Honestly this is probably something that a better film-viewer will see as genius. There's so much information packed in each shot and everything feels interwoven in a really satisfying way, all while these British folks have the driest and most serious conversations about the virtues of drowning husbands and covering up their murders. Will definitely have to revisit again when I'll not be blindsided by all these children saying out-of-pocket things and seeing my liege King Theoden being the most doormat lawn game aficionado in film history. When someone I was watching with pointed out that the game rules were all obscenely complicated until the final game, which was an actual real, simple game of tug-of-war, which pairs up with Madgett's final resolution to actually take a stand against the women who had been using him, I realized there was probably so much to this I was just completely missing. I don't know how to defend myself, it's not like I hate British comedy! I just think maybe my brain was absolutely cooked when the movie opens with a little girl in a princess dress counting to 100 and naming the stars while jumping rope. Really surprised that I am continuing to feel like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover</a> is Greenaway's most accessible film?!

The Substance

2024-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Coralie Fargeat</li>
Released in 2024</li>
Runtime 141 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: Go figure, body-horror Barbie is an unsatisfying experience.</li> </ul>
It's flashy, it's nauseating, and it's also annoying. For all the great effects work and powerful visuals, this movie still talks at you like a kid's TV show reminding the audience when an important clue is appearing on-screen. The absolute worst for me was towards the end when Elisabeth is begging for Sue to wake up, and she says, "you have to succeed because you're all that matters, because I hate myself!" or something like that. I literally laughed when she said that in pure incredulity. Is there any doubt for anyone watching this movie that Elisabeth hates herself? That the entire fulcrum of this story hinges on self-hatred? The Substance dresses up all of its dramatic build up in the most hyperrealistic viscera possible, and then when it matters most it puts a big sign on the screen that says, "THIS IS IMPORTANT. THIS IS THE MORAL. THIS IS THE REASON WHY THE BAD THINGS ARE HAPPENING. REMEMBER, YOU ARE ONE". God, how could I forget!
Honestly, I find it a frustratingly shallow narrative for how painstakingly detailed they made the monstrosities. I'm sure other trans women can relate, but the framing of self-love vs. self-hate for body modification is so damn tired and so limiting for how we relate to people who, for one reason or another, want to change their bodies. I have stopped talking to cis women about this stuff but back in my early 20's when all I wanted was to be included by the real girls around me, any conversation about my desire to change my body to look more feminine was met with, "oh but sweetie, you don't have to do that! You're already so beautiful! Of course you do you, but don't feel like you need to change anything, you don't want to really get into that stuff, I actually really like how you look." The implication was two-fold. First, if I learned to really love myself the way all beautiful trans people should do, I wouldn't need to change anything about myself because I'm already perfect. If I do change myself, that means fundamentally I'm doing it to be seen by others in a different way, and that means being motivated by pleasing others and that's not very self-love of me. Second, it was clear that I was not a real woman, so I could opt out of the beauty standards that caused so much harm, while the participation and enforcement of these standards by the cis women around me was always a foregone conclusion. That part, where I can choose but cis women cannot, has always annoyed me.
In The Substance, it is a foregone conclusion that the evil beauty standard exists and is inescapable. You cannot defeat it, so you cope in solitude, privately managing your relationship to it as best as you can. Your failure is preordained, and the way we are meant to confront this destiny of failure is through the heartbreak of a wealthy and established woman in the thinness sales industry losing her job. What Elisabeth experiences is nakedly discriminatory and misogynistic...but it is also something that she loves participating in. She wants to go back to this job working for the big bad shrimp man because she loves being a symbol of thinness, fitness, and feminine success, and essential to the functioning of this film is that this part of her is never questioned. If we frame this woman's subsequent reaction, decision, and escalation to annihilation purely in terms of self-hate (which, again, the movie is extremely purposeful in reinforcing), we can just cast this wealthy, powerful white woman who has everything as the ideal and most profoundly relatable victim of misogyny and sexism.
I am frustrated at how much movies like this and Barbie</a> leave me feeling like those conversations I've had with the women who are, I suppose, the target audience for this (or at least the primary source material). If I can only understand Elisabeth the character through her own self-loathing, then I am narratively compelled to empathizing with her. But in reality, I have a lot of critical thoughts towards wealthy and successful white women who appeal to emotions to maintain their status and power. And I don't believe that just because someone in a position of power is of a marginalized identity, it's therefore more important to be mindful of their identity than critical of their power. If I look at Elisabeth purely as a font of self-pity, ultimately made manifest with a grotesque, hyper-exaggerated interpretation of transforming into an old lady, it is harder to see that the omnipotent beauty standard is something that she really wants. She does not want to stop, she wants this. A better movie that cared about that might interrogate why she still wants it, why she can't see Harvey or the board of trustees or even her neighbor across the street as a better target for her hate, why she can't even let go of this job and this career she's made out of her desirability.
It all just reeks of that liberal ideal of private, anonymized violence that I ranted about in Juno</a> as well. It's people like Elisabeth who are instrumental in peddling the beauty standard down to the rest of us. I know lots of regular-ass people who will come out of this film and say, "this is exactly what being a woman feels like", but it's not! What we go through is actually way worse because we don't have nearly the power or security to insulate us from harm. We don't have penthouse suites filled with accolades and name recognition, there's no sidewalk star for the average old, fat lady who can't get a doctor to believe her about her symptoms to save her life, and I've never met a trans woman who was dying to have someone from 10th grade recognize her and call out to her on the street. But go watch this movie and you can see a movie star commit self-harm for 2 and a half hours to really hammer home how fucked up it is for wealthy, thin white women. There is no solidarity amongst women in this film, there is no way to be critical of the actual source of Elisabeth's suffering, there is no room to even be critical of Elisabeth herself. Self-love is when you gracefully accept the verdict handed down to you by your sleazy boss, self-hate is when you radically alter and destroy yourself to try to go back. Self-love is when you say no to the Cronenberg juice, self-hate is when you say yes.
This is the foregone conclusion. In a liberal fixation on privatized misogyny enforced through self-hate/self-care, we never experience a fundamental break with the mindset of misogyny. In other words, the framing of this movie makes its own reproduction of misogyny inevitable. After all, isn't the horror being directly connected to aging kind of misogynistic? The punishment for misusing the substance is...you get older faster. What will we tell all the old women in our lives, and how are they meant to be an audience for this film? Really how is anyone who can't identify with and empathize with thin whiteness supposed to engage with this film? How does a fat person watch this film when so much of the monstrosity comes with getting bigger, when so much of Elisabeth's decline is tracked in terms of her ever-increasing desire to eat? What is up with French women and fatness and food? They have such a damn complex about it, I should have known a French woman made this.
It is kind of batshit to watch this movie right after my facial feminization surgery recovery. I took the Cronenberg juice to get bigger tits, to shave off my eyebrow ridge, to plump the fuck out of my previously pencil thin lips. I used to grow a really patchy goatee and pseudo-beard on my face and with the power of lasers I melted those hairs right off, and the smell is so memorable I've been getting flashbacks while I'm having my ball hairs zapped off so I can hot swap my junk for a designer pussy. Do I hate myself for doing all this, just to meet a beauty standard that shouldn't exist? No! Through the framework of bodily autonomy, we can actually access something more connective and empowering than "self-love", and we can get to more critical questions of motivation. If we acknowledge that Elizabeth and I both are in choice when we change our bodies, we can immediately follow up with examining the conditions that motivate those choices. How convenient for this movie that we never have to consider how this character is situated. The rest of the unfolding horror can almost be entirely dumped into a bathroom. As gross as some of these flesh-rending visuals are, I just feel worn out after a while because it feels like pure spectacle. The substance never has to interact in conflict with any of the forces that demand its creation.
As it is, I wonder if this movie would have been better off with no dialogue at all. No exposition, let the viewer figure out all the rules of the substance through pure inference. The visual design of this is so striking it probably totally could have worked. When things are ambiguous, the viewer can read in whatever framing they want. When so much is just declared, like assumptions in a math proof, I feel no choice but to believe what I'm told. Maybe a lot of this criticism is just wanting the movie to be a different movie, but I guess I feel happy to do that as long as these "feminist" movies being released and promoted are movies that don't have the guts to show anything radical about femininity. I'm on the substance right now, it's called estradiol valerate, and it fucking rules. Being a woman fucking rules, and when it doesn't, it's in relationship to things beyond just my self. It is not my responsibility to love myself enough that I can just power through the worst of the patriarchy and go back to work. I get that we love the idea of a woman having some feral energy to unapologetically unleash upon the world, but I guess I just have to admit that once again making the story about culturally iconic, well-resourced, and well-platformed elites feels less like relatable fairy tale and more like propaganda to me.

Castle In the Sky

2024-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki</li>
Released in 1986</li>
Runtime 124 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: Missing some of my corny jokes from the dub, but still fantastic.</li> </ul>
As a child, I adored this film. I remember as a kid that I was specifically obsessed with the ending song of this film and "memorized" most of the lyrics (not the meaning, just the literal phonetic sounds). I loved that it was adventurous and charming, but also depicted two characters who's heroism came from their willingness to sacrifice themselves. I know for a fact that I cried the first time I saw this.
But, like every other Ghibli film I saw as a kid, I only knew the english dub. I didn't even know that there was a controversy with the soundtracks not being the same as the original Japanese, which I only discovered after not-so-legally downloading the soundtrack (I preferred the english dub soundtrack as a kid, as well). This time, I watched with the original Japanese audio and am once again struck by how much more empty space these films have. In Princess Mononoke</a>, I was immediately convinced that the added flourishes and comic relief in the dub were straightforwardly worse than the original Japanese. Here, however, I was missing some of my favorite joke lines ("scary ride!" is something I still quote to this day, and I hear "make your shirt explode" in my dreams).
Admittedly, this feeling is probably entirely nostalgia. Without that, the mood of this movie is so much more consistent in Japanese. Even the whimsical parts feel bittersweet, like you notice in a profound way how much distance there is between all these characters. The thing that stays constant is Pazu and Sheeta's relationship. In my Summer Wars</a> review, I mentioned how Miyazaki is just doing it better with his boy-girl character relationships, and I probably should have mentioned Pazu and Sheeta as well (and they are perhaps more applicable in that review's case than, say, Ashitaka and San). It feels like Miyazaki is riding the line as close as he can here with depicting adolescent characters who are expressing love towards one another without having anyone ever say they are in love. When the two children first land on the gardens of Laputa, they cheer and twirl around each other while being tied together by rope. When they finally separate, they fall to the ground and look at each other...before finally collapsing in laughter. This moment, which was just preceded with both Pazu and Sheeta sitting together in the crow's nest of the ship, talking about their fears, their hopes, and their friends, is the culmination of an entire first-half of developing friendship and care between the two. It is a deeply intimate moment that feels so sweet and innocent that it doesn't need to be named at all. By the time the two kids land on Laputa, they seemingly laugh at the audience themselves for expecting or hoping for anything more. In Castle in the Sky, we recognize love through its action in the world and need nothing else.
This is not the strongest movie that Studio Ghibli ever made confronting topics of empire, war, and the desire for power and domination. It's not the best on-screen love story in their films, either. But it remains a beautiful film to me in large part because I think the character relationships are so earnest. Oh, and this rewatch reminded me that the ship designs are astounding, I totally forgot about the little glider plane thing and honestly it feels like Studio Ghibli could have made a big splash just designing airships like this for a tabletop setting[^1] or a serialized TV show (actually, how much money did those actually make in Japan in the 80s?). The beauty of this film, like all the best from this studio, is the profound worldbuilding and storytelling that is imbued into each element of the film. Maybe the only part that strains credulity, given what we know historically, is that any empire of Laputa's power would have voluntarily ceased to exist for any reason. With that framing, the film is able to isolate Muska as a uniquely megalomaniacal individual even amongst the existing military forces that want this legendary power, and turns our image of the floating city from a bloody graveyard into an empty and abandoned tomb. With weapons that can cause nuclear-level explosions, it is just a little too fantastical to me to imagine a whole population able to exert domination on that scale all just being wise enough to put the guns down and come back down to earth, with Muska a seemingly isolated incident of future generations forgetting prior wisdom.
Still, it's a great film that, in Japanese, doesn't even sound like a "kid's movie" the way that the english dub does. And the original soundtrack is much better, I was a fool as a child. A rewarding film experience, I think this one is great!

Ginger Snaps

2024-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by John Fawcett</li>
Released in 2000</li>
Runtime 108 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: truly iconic teen goth imagery!</li> </ul>
Watched this before The Substance</a> but am only getting to this after that monstrosity of a review (heh heh). While not directly in conversation with that film, I am surprised looking back at how many similar elements of that movie are in this one. Ginger Snaps features body-horror esque transformation of a girl that is narratively coupled to her femininity, in which the subject undergoing transformation experiences a vacillation between shame and unabashed pleasure in the effects of her transformation. It is likewise also set in a vague cookie-cutter recreation of an isolated, car dependent locale (obviously not Los Angeles, but this movie looks like it could be set in any small midwestern town or exurb). The critical difference is that Ginger's situation is contextualized with her devoted younger sister Brigitte, and the film sets the two forces against each other to show us a really unique and engaging rival-but-loving sisters story.
I think if I want to write more about the specifics of some of the conflict in this film and what it might say about the relationships girls have with each other, I will want to re-watch this. I'm still learning how to manage writing such try-hard reviews for major films while still having the energy and memory left to also do justice to these other random movies I watch in the meantime. But I just really loved this because it's honestly kinda The Thing</a> like in its aesthetics? Ginger Snaps is extremely goopy. The appearance of the doglike monster as being exceptionally fleshy and wrinkly while also being concealed among the general public is very reminiscent, as is the slow disappearance of all the pet dogs that keep getting eaten. And the whole transformation of Ginger is done with practical effects which is a delight to watch. The film even ends on a Thing-like feeling of ambiguity, of whether or not the monstrosity will continue to spread after the fateful conclusion.
It's also not a perfect movie. I think the name is a little goofy but more importantly, the extension of the plotline with respect to the antidote for the transformation disease gets quite contrived and long-winded by the end. But it has a lot going for it both visually and narratively, and it's I think tapping into the spirit of feral womanhood unleashed upon the world in a way that doesn't cast its monster into isolated martyrdom, severed from any of the forces that contributed to her downfall. God, I just love that this film has the perfect suburban mom character who is baffled and then heartbroken and then resolved as she learns more about her daughter's misdeeds. Literally she is so perfect, maybe I just imprint onto mom characters too easily but I think it's amazing that she's trying the, "let my teen daughters sort out their problems on their own without my proactive intervention", and even though that results in a truly catastrophic outcome, it isn't played as a joke on her bad parenting. I think there's really a lot more going on here than a low-budget monster flick might lead you to assume. I could see this being a certain type of queer or trans woman's obsession and honestly, I'm here for that. This one surprised me in a very good way!

Crash

2024-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by David Cronenberg</li>
Released in 1996</li>
Runtime 100 minutes</li>
Watched at a friend's</li>
Final feelings: I am living this movie</li> </ul>
Another</a> rewatch</a>, this time on a couch full of trans women after a delicious meal. We may or may not have been mirroring some of the energy on-screen during the film. We may or may not have gotten distracted. Pretty sure this is what life is all about. I did uh make sure to focus at the end when Vaughn tries to crash into Catherine before dying and then James gets his car from the junkyard. Yeah pretty good movie no notes to offer here.

The Hobbit

2024-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Rankin and Bass</li>
Released in 1977</li>
Runtime 78 minutes</li>
Watched at a friend's</li>
Final feelings: Deus ex Gandalf</li> </ul>
Wasn't really paying attention to this, we just put it on as background noise while eating/cleaning up and hanging out on the couch for friendsgiving. Gandalf please teleport into my life and help me hang up this shelf. Seriously, the maiar with the hat was popping in and out constantly to save everyone's sorry asses, and I cannot remember at all how true that is in the books (I do remember the eagles, though). Best part of the movie was the amazingly prolonged tumble into the black hole that Bilbo experiences, like divine intervention to screw him over.

Amadeus

2024-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Miloš Forman</li>
Released in 1984 (Director's Cut in 2002)</li>
Runtime 180 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: To be determined because of recuts and post-release edits!</li> </ul>
This is not going to actually be a full review of the contents of the film, Amadeus, because I have learned that every digital version of the film you can see is a director's cut with 20 extra minutes added on from the theatrical release. Before I can understand what parts of the movie are what, I want to watch the theatrical release since that is the way the film was originally distributed and celebrated, though it is bananas learning that the theatrical cut was PG rated while the version everyone else watches has full-on tits and a nice, salacious R rating. Truly, the movie ratings system in America is functioning perfectly1</a>. So, in a few days my VHS tape will hopefully arrive and I will watch this movie in all its PG glory on a CRT in my bedroom as God intended.
Here's what I am going to rant about: classical music is silly! It's silly and it's so strange and I'm not saying that it needs to die, but maybe we need to let it live at its means and maybe we need to re-evaluate some things. Is this just going to be my Tár</a> review all over again? Maybe so!
I want to be very specific which is that I am actually pretty divorced from the "art music"2</a> world, and I was never that involved in it beyond being conscripted at childhood to learn piano and then cello, which exposed me to the messed up world of hierarchy that is classical music culture as it has been applied for children. I developed a full-on inferiority complex through this stuff that probably persists in messed-up ways to this day. Am I therefore exactly like Tony Salieri? I'll let you be the judge.
Maybe this is just my adult resentment talking but I think it's funny that for all the uptightness art music people have about other forms of music 3</a>, they functionally do the same false mythologizing about the composers that this movie is doing. My girlfriend called Amaedus "real-people fiction written about people sufficiently distant that we think it's true", (in comparison to real-people fiction about current day NHL hockey players which is apparently a big thing). And we do think it's true! This movie is based on an 1830 drama by Alexander Pushkin, which composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a favorite of mine, actually adapted as a one-act opera. Amadeus is in a geneology of real-people fiction that has a genuine historical through-line. Antonio Salieri was a well-respected composer and teacher who, because of this hundreds-year-old tradition of making shit up about old guys, has a tiny bio in Britannica.com</a> of which about 1/3 of it simply denies the long-standing rumors of his evil misdeeds.
The music world is obsessed with this entrenched narrative of great composers that goes far beyond these pseudo-pulp stories. When I was a kid, I was told to buy expensive editions of all these pieces that were the "original" text, as opposed to the cheaper versions of the books that sometimes had additional editorial marks from a music editor at the publishing company. I think the idea was that, as a student, I should learn Mozart and Beethoven and Bach through the raw source material, unblemished by modern eyes and brains. By sticking to the original markings, I would, I guess, absorb through osmosis a more authentic and pure understanding of the music of these great men. Someday maybe I would become a piano performance major at a small arts college and only then could I start to learn the process of interpretation of these pieces.
This is a critical form of gatekeeping in art music in general. Who does the interpretation? There's a reason this is Lydia Tár's catchphrase when she does her work. As a student I was taught to follow the urtext markings as a best practice and I followed those rules uncritically. And when those assumptions were broken, it was kind of mind-blowing. I remember my senior year at the local piano competition, I met a guy who was a trained jazz pianist who was fucking around in the more formal western european musical tradition. I have no idea what he played, but I remember being dazzled with how free he was with his interpretation of music he was playing. I remember it was so evocative and strange to me that I asked him afterwards how he learned to play this piece like that, and he gave me a confused look and said, "I don't know. This is just how I play music." Maybe he was bullshitting me, but I felt embarassed; embarassed that I asked the question, embarassed that I assumed he would have this heady response, and ultimately embarassed at my own parroting of these editorial marks that the original composers probably modified, changed, and improvised on all the time.
So this is what I mean about Amadeus and western european art music afficionados being related to each other oppositionally. Obviously we have lots of evidence to know some of the finer details of Mozart's life, but music before the invention of recording as a technology is a vast space of possibility.4</a> As the years went on, the habits of western european musicians did get looser. We know Lizst was a furious improviser, just like we know Mozart was too. But we don't have recordings of Bach or Handel or Haydn or Mozart or Beethoven actually performing or conducting their music. We actually have recordings of Brahms, which are so noisy that a musicologist referred to them as requiring a "pathological imagination" to glean any musical value from them. Here</a> you can even read an article where they denoised the horribly noisy sound clip into something barely less noisy, and then through thorough and painstaking aural archeology, parse and attempt to understand the sound that was captured on this cylinder. This is what it takes to get even a sliver of an objective measure of how any of these great 17th-19th century composers actually performed their craft, and the results are, to me, unconvincing. My point is that actually, it feels to me like modern classical music lovers are making an awful lot of assumptions about these dead white guys and their music that have not been justified, or if they are justified, have not been disseminated to the public in a convincing way.
I refuse to believe that the striving for "accurate" interpretations of these pieces out of some deference to the composer's greatness is anything but self-serving mythologizing. I'm not saying they are exactly the same thing, but so much Baroque and Classical era music was commissioned to uplift and serve these huge institutions of power and wealth, which this movie faithfully depicts. Maybe our closest modern analog today is the musician conscripted to writing an ad jingle. While obviously not the same, is it not possible that maybe for some people at the time, classical music was as frivolous, shallow, or blatantly trend-chasing as an insurance company theme song? Perhaps even to the composers or musicians themselves? While some works are amazing and stand the test of time, some are formulaic and hard to distinguish. Is the fact that music was longer, more "complicated", and less accessible back then enough to really separate the past from the present? Can we truly assume universality to music commissioned by extremely wealthy patrons, who got their wealth not from honest labor but from mass exploitation throughout the whole world?
And what of our own music today? As long as you have functional hardware, you probably won't have the same noisy cylinder experience as Brahms. But will they have CD players in 200 years? Will they still be using Spotify? Will the archived music files on the hard drives of digital pirates the world over still be accessible, readable, playable? In 200 years will they look back on our obsession with money and capital and advertising and think the words, "Nationwide is on your side" was a religious theme, which they will make variations on with reverence for our bygone age? We are not in control of how the future will look at our labors, our productivity, our work.
Furthermore, the selection of which works get to become the pinnacle and representative art for an era deserves interrogation. I did a whole project in my junior year of high school on women composers because it was a specialty of my piano teacher.5</a> I have one theory on why lil' Amadeus was such a prodigious child pianist: he had an older sister who herself was also a child prodigy in piano! Little Wolfgang Amadeus got his start from imitating Maria Anna during her piano lessons! But the difference between the two is that while Wolfie continued to be showcased and uplifted for the rest of his life in music, ol' Nannerl was actually forced to stop being a part of those tours because she had reached a marriagable age. While Wolfgang's works have been kept, preserved, and catalogued for future generations of Chinese children to be compelled to play (I am not bitter), Maria Anna's works, which she continued to write even after her marriage and subsequent historical relegation, which were praised by Wolfgang himself, do not exist anymore and are forever lost. They are simply unimportant to us. The music we don't know about is as fleeting as the music we do, and we would do well to humble our expectations of the fragments we have in their ability to achieve some higher class of meaning or merit.
Who are we to claim any control or expertise in the exact desires and expectations of some random men in 1770 of their work for their jobs? I basically learned most of my classical music as a secular experience, but the music itself was often made to be explicitly Christian, so where's my Lutheran church service to start my Bach piano recital? Some of these musicians have more in common with those rock bands at the non-denomination church concert every Sunday than we want to admit, and if we did admit it, maybe it would be more obvious that the musical value was not as universal or noble as we believe.
I guess my conclusion from all these questions is this: it may serve a particular kind of interest to separate a specific tradition of art so much from the uncomfortable truths and unknowns surrounding it. And doing so may mean the peddling, at best, of a kind of modern liberal bourgeois class signifier that is far more hollow than its stated artistic principles. At worst, it becomes a tool for pure reaction, to point at this made up thing and say, "look at how noble our society and our people used to be!" This obsession with this made-up version of "art" music expresses itself not only in the music, but in the audience and atmosphere it cultivates when it eventually makes its way outside of the world of "music" and into the general public.
To that idea, one thing I can say about Amadeus, even without watching the theatrical cut, is that I'm glad it is doing its part to break down the pedestal of not just these musicians, but the narrative surround the art form in general. My dad respects classical art music because he knows it's great, even though he doesn't know anything to justify that belief. The mythology is enough to convince him of their greatness. It's enough for most people, I assume, which is why seeing Mozart's great operas as being embroiled in frivolous and petty ethnic squabbles and base financial despondence is so refreshing for me, let alone his awkward and cringe-worthy personal character. Sure, Salieri's main angst comes from the perceived greatness of Mozart's music, but also, he's the most annoying religious person in the world! That's what it takes to appreciate this stuff, you have to believe in god so deeply you will take it personally when he makes a boy who is both good at one thing and is also a twat. It's good that Mozart is a twat in this film, it's good that Salieri is the most annoying Christian man you know. Fabiano Caruana is too highly ranked to be a perfect analog for Salieri but if he accidentally hit send on a draft tweet that was like, "I am going to physically torment and destroy Magnus Carlsen because he's proof that god hates me", we might see chess as a little more deranged and a little less like a game that proves you are a genius. I don't know who needs to have their mind changed about classical music in the same way but damn it all I am here to change your mind!
By the way, I don't want 18th century western european music to die completely. I don't want to never be able to listen to Beethoven again. I like listening to classical music. As I get older, I feel less willing to experiment with music and I just go for stuff I know and like and feel comfortable with. A lot of that stuff for me is classical music, even if it wasn't something I chose for myself as a kid. I just don't think we should culturally elevate it as the pinnacle of the universal human expression of music. I don't think you are higher class for listening to classical music now, and I don't think this specific art should be propped up for high class pandering. We should think you are a little silly if you still listen to classical music, and we should give the musicians the same luxury. Maybe if we were a little less clingy to this false idol of greatness, we could try out some new things in our concert halls. Brahms felt the long shadow of Beethoven being cast down on him, which is why his first symphony wasn't made until he was in his 40s. Today we are pushing up the corpses of these two dead men back onto their thrones so that their bones may yet again overshadow our own possibility. At Carnegie Hall, the most performed orchestral works are by Beethoven and Brahms. And when I looked at the next 2 months of symphony concerts in my home town, I see Beethoven and Brahms (and Handel's Messiah which is a Christmas staple).
I know it's a question of economics. I know the conversion of art music into a tax deduction expo for wealthy elites is just the art form staying close to its historical roots. The difference is that while the patrons of old paid for compositions to be dedicated in their name and glory, today's patrons pay for convincing role-play. Make sure not to clap between movements, and in return the conductor will direct the performance to be as close to our collective hallucination of period-accurate as he can, with his own tasteful sprinkling of personality. Meanwhile, every millionaire donor who's name is printed on the back of the program at the symphony is a chump, and they are directly represented on screen in Amadeus as the Emperor Joseph II, of the terrible sight reading and even worse musical taste.
If doing something new means letting the old die, then I say shoot the zombie in the head. It's valiant that in those Beethoven and Brahms concerts on the local symphony calendar, they've got some lesser known guys to pad the runtime. Poulenc for one, and look! Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is in one of these, and he's a mixed-race British guy! But then again, why does the diversity effort in my symphony program feel like those trainings I do at my big corporate job? Is it maybe because big corporate suits buy all the box suites at Benaroya? I know if they put Samuel Coleridge-Taylor as the headline instead of Johannes Brahms, ticket sales will drop 50%. And if none of the concerts in the next 6 months had Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, or whatever other household name they are spiritually obligated to tithe to, the donors would make a fuss and ultimately the show would be closed. But how can we say that this scraping by on imitation powdered wig is a real, living art form? How can we say this performance, which only serves to give class credibility to the people in attendance, is even art? Does art come from the transaction between patron and employee, or does it come from the generating of new work? Is art meaningful when it is disembodied? Is it great if we cannot articulate the context from which it was created?
This entire screed is for my dad and boomers like him who think of old white things as inherently good, for the small-town classical music communities I grew up with that insulated themselves from the material conditions of the rest of the world in part through their own in-group of 18th-century european music performance, for the big-money donors and the arts commissions who fund these art LARPers, and for parents who carry the myth that classical music training is uniquely good for your kids. I'm yelling at a cultural myth I was embroiled in as a child but have no idea if it's still present today, though I have a suspicion that it does, if you ask the right people and go to the right places. My final thought is this: art should not be self-satisfied by its own longevity. 

^{1
I realize now that PG-13 was introduced in July of the same year that Amadeus was, but it still had a PG rating on its release in September. I guess murderous scheming and crises of faith are for the kids!
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^{2
Because one time at a high school debate tournament a kid yelled at me and said it was pretentious to call classical music "art music", I am now contractually obligated to state that I don't think this kind of music is the only kind that's art. Art music as a term exists to describe music that is considered "high culture", as opposed to vernacular or popular music. It's an equivalent term to "Classical music" for westerners, with a small caveat. "Classical music" is usually used to refer to composers spanning hundreds of years of time. For music history people, "classical music" is therefore ambiguous; there are multiple defined eras of western european "classical" music, and one such era is named the "Classical era", which starts roughly the middle of the 18th century and ends sometime at the start of the 19th century but you can check my math on that. Mozart is a Classical era musician, as was Beethoven. I use "art music" because it's shorter, more annoying, and avoids this ambiguation. I don't know why I explained all that but this is knowledge that has been drilled into my skull over the entirety of my youth so it just kinda spills out of me.
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^{3
I was the one kid in a cello sectional in high school who disagreed when the section leader said off-hand that there is no rhythymically interesting music made in the modern era and everyone looked at me like I was crazy so I laughed and played it off as a joke and it totally worked but I'm sorry I was thinking of the song Walking On the Moon by the fucking Police when I disagreed so was I really doing god's work like I imagined?
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^{4
Hell, music even in the world of digital recording technology is full of mystery and incompleteness, save for the occassional posthumous release of demo tapes and forgotten songs the original creator probably didn't want released.
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^{5
I'm sorry Judith for losing your out-of-print book, I still have stress nightmares about that.
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True Stories

2024-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by David Byrne</li>
Released in 1986</li>
Runtime 90 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: Talking Heads teaches you the myth of Americana</li> </ul>
Vignettes of stagnant American mythology that we have both long since moved beyond and also still remain under the shadow of, True Stories has some interesting things to say. But after the movie, my friend played Once in a Lifetime on her phone while getting ready to leave and I realized this whole movie is just that song but 90 minutes long.1</a>
David Byrne is tapping into something real here: the unspoken and unacknowledged ennui of the American dream. Did people in the 80s think this felt hollow? By being so descriptive, the movie feels like it can take on any number of roles depending on when you watched it. There must be people who saw this upon release who just felt that this was a pretty nice and sweet town, and John Goodman heroically got the connection he wanted. What really strikes me in 2024 is the feeling that I'm still living in a world where most of the people who have power look at this myth of small-town America, with its polite conservatism and subtle segregation, as a spiritual guiding light with zero irony.2</a> To them, all those weird sounding Talking Heads songs are probably pretty catchy and worth playing at the campaign rally to score "grassroots" donors. I guess I'm just saying there's a political vacuousness to the visual and narrative landscape here that is both fitting and immensely tiresome to me.
John Goodman is perfect in this. He's the perfect approachable yet charismatic dude. He's the perfect teddy bear of a man. He's the perfect harmless looking fella, and the closest thing we get to narrative tension and release. He literally sings a song about not wanting freedom or justice, and instead just wanting a person to call his own...and then he marries the most shallow and advertising-pilled woman in the whole damn town. If that's not just the most on-the-nose analog for the entirety of American culture, for virtually everyone living in this fucked up country, I don't know how to say it any more plainly.

^{1
I am not a big Talking Heads girl, not from a lack of interest or desire but just because I am bad at listening to music. I recognize that probably a huge part of David Byrne's whole schtick is putting the hollow American Dream on display in his lyrics. I acknowledge this film is just a continuation of the stuff he was already doing, once he had enough success with Stop Making Sense to fund this film.
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^2Time for cringe, in 2016 after Trump won the election I also jumped on the bandwagon (which the Democratic party has largely refused to leave to this day) that the problem was that the dems had ignored these exact people, these rural and small town voters. I thought we did not understand them, I did not understand them, and that was the problem with liberal political strategy. Countless books and New York Times articles were written litigating this fact, which is why we all had a collective hallucination where we idolized that stupid book, Hillbilly Elegy (check out my review of Gummo</a> where I also bring up this book a little bit). </div>
I think in light of this attitude, this implicit worship we culturally accept over a caricature of a tiny fraction of the population living in this country, Sam Levinson's Assassination Nation</a> would be a thematic double feature with this. Compare and contrast how liberals depicted and understood small towns in 1986 with 2018 when the full capabilities of the microprocessors being made in the humble state of Texas are realized in the form of the modern surveillance state. Both movies are unsubtle and preachy in their own ways (though obviously Assassination Nation has got this film beat by a mile when it comes to anti-subtlety). Both movies are trying to relate to American conservatism, but one is fueled by the psychosis of the Trump administration while the other is living under the homely roof of the Reagan administration, perhaps the precursor this country needed to make a TV star and (failed) real estate mogul into its president. All American small-town movies are in conversation with each other in some way, they are all responding to a fundamental contradiction between ideals and lived experiences, but these two feel like they might be an interesting contrast just from the films I've seen, where I think there are elements major and minor that are mirrored between them.
And it's probably hyperbole to say this, but maybe Gummo is something of an antidote to both those films. I think I'd rather watch Gummo now than Assassination Nation in response to this. Maybe the triptych is True Stories, Assassination Nation, Gummo. Maybe I'm just drawing lines between all the small American town movies I've seen in the last year.

Peking Opera Blues

2024-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Tsui Hark</li>
Released in 1986</li>
Runtime 104 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: operatic gender transgression fun!</li> </ul>
Peking Opera Blues is a delight and a surprise. It starts out as a ragtag team hijinks story full of jokes and gags and goofs, but looming in the background is the revolutionary instinct against the corrupt warlords and their militias. Situate that around the setting of the Chinese opera and specifically the gender performance of the opera actors and the characters themselves, and you have yourself a really special film.
Every escalation of drama, tension, and violence is connected back to the performance of gender. Cross-dressing heartthrob Tsao Wan is the most obvious example of this; she is the daughter of the powerful general who has assumed control of the town, and she secretly works in shadows to undermine his rule. She explains that she dresses like a man purely because it is useful to her, because it lets her move about unnoticed. In this way, She is the most directly like the dao ma dan1</a> of the theater, perhaps even surpassing them. Because she has an assumed "real" femininity to fall back on, Tsao Wan can use gender purely as a tool to her pragmatic ends. She is empowered by her ability to cross-over into anonymous masculinity, and then in the presence of her father she can return back to the safety of her role as beloved daughter.
On the other side, the actor Fa experiences an inversion of Tsao Wan's genderplay. A minor character in terms of runtime, Fa represents the whole cast of actors in the theater which exists as the fulcrum of this theme of gender subversion in Peking Opera Blues. A skilled actor, Fa is referred to both as she and he in the English subtitles, depending on who is talking to or about her. Are these actors mere women-impersonators, or are they perhaps women themselves? At all times when she is on stage, the dao ma dan crosses over into becoming a woman in the eyes of the audience. However, when the commander of the police force takes an eye to Fa and sends her a command to marry him in 3 days, she cannot escape by declaring that she is man, nor can she escape by saying she doesn't want to be married or that she prefers women. Unlike Tsao Wan, her performance has deadly consequence, her transgression is not effortlessly removed, and no one in her life has the power to make Commander Liu stop. Her only recourse is to literally flee, which allows the third piece of this gender-confused puzzle to finally enter the spotlight.
Bai Niu is the daughter of the opera house owner, and she is forbidden from performing in any plays. Even going in blind, you come to understand that her tension with her father and the actors is of the same thread as Tsao Wan and Fa. She is woman, and not a skilled woman-impersonator, and so she cannot take a place on stage. She is instead conscripted to clean and watch from afar, until Commander Liu's "offer" to Fa causes the lead actress to opt to flee "to a small town" somewhere, she hopes. This failure of safety, the failure of Bai Niu's father to protect Fa from the powerful forces that seek to exploit and degrade his workers sets in motion a series of events that ultimately catapult this movie beyond swashbuckling farce into a daring treatise on power, resistance, and camaraderie in the face of overwhelming oppression. As Fa embraces Bai Niu and leaves through the window, she gives verbal permission to the woman to put on the makeup and become an actor. The consequences of this empowerment reverberate throughout the whole film and reoccur as performed femininity becomes the site of exploitation and of resistance over and over again.
From this standpoint, Peking Opera Blues springs to life with gay over- and undertones, with humor, and always returning back to the arena of gender performance, subversion, and defiance: the opera house. Something about that scene where two cis women who are impersonating as women-impersonators take turns on stage declaring themselves as real while the other is fake, all while a male actor properly fulfilling her role as a dao ma dan grimaces to her boss and the audience because she's the only one who is supposed to be on stage just kinda blows my mind? I think this movie is worth seeing even if you know nothing about Chinese opera, but now that I have read just a little bit more about the history of the setting and the theater2</a>, I eagerly await my next chance to watch this again. Plus, the song interludes slap.

^1
the original Chinese name of this film is 刀马旦</a>, literally "sword and horse role" (though I have seen the third character dan also translated as diva in some of the Chinese language youtube videos I have been watching about Peking opera), which is the name of one such role in Chinese opera of a young warrior woman that was, traditionally, always played by men. Feel free to do as I did and fall down the rabbit hole a little bit into the history of Chinese opera. Put this as another item on the list to motivate me to pick up Mandarin Chinese again! </div>
^2If you go in blind like I did, you may be tempted to believe that the revolution represented by Tsao Wan is the Communist revolution, but this movie is not set in the right time period for that. Instead, Tsao Wan's revolution is the revolution against the dynastic rule over China that was led by the first iteration of the Guomingdang, or the KMT, which in its early days had both left and right wing factions within the organization, before ultimately becoming the nationalist faction that you might recognize from films like A Brighter Summer Day</a> after they lost to the Communists in the civil war and fled to Taiwan. Tsui Hark made this movie as Hong Kong's return from British rule back to mainland China was imminent, which as Toronto film critic Rachel Ho explains in an interesting essay for The Asian Cut</a>, puts the old city in upheaval in the film directly in relationship to the current one on the mind of every Hongkonger contemporary to the movie's release. </div>

Summer Wars

2024-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Mamoru Hosoda</li>
Released in 2009</li>
Runtime 114 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: all style, no substance</li> </ul>
Learning afterwards that Belle</a> is a spiritual successor to this movie makes so much sense, both in terms of the content of the films and in my distaste for both of them. I think I just don't mix well with these virtual world anime movies. Or maybe specifically with Mamoru Hosoda's version of virtual worlds. Maybe Sword Art Online has killed my ability to accept these game-world isekai stories with any grace or humor, I just find them annoying and facile. I get frustrated because we do live in a hyper-connected digital world, but the ways in which we're connected online is fundamentally distinct from this oversimplified universal-Second Life style setting of both Summer Wars and Belle1</a>. At least in the digital world of Digimon (the TV show, haven't seen the movie in many years), the virtual space is embodied in a way that makes it feel more complimentary to the interpersonal drama of the children and their lil' guys.
Summer Wars feels like a movie that's set in two separate lanes and is just swerving between them with reckless abandon. On one side there are these rather lovely and multifaceted characters who comprise the big Jinnouchi family, who are all gathering to prepare to celebrate grandmother Sakae's 90th birthday. Maybe it's obvious, but I enjoy the film most when we're exploring this part of the story. Big family dynamics are my favorite. The very first scene at the big dinner table was the most visually engaging and beautiful part of the movie for me. I love when characters all have to sit and eat together, and it's cool to see an animated version of that. I think there is very strong characterization that helps distinguish all these people, which takes skill to do. Every scene where we got to see the family drama play out is enjoyable to me.
On the other side is OZ, a digital world where you can have your digital avatar and do digital things with your avatars. And also, apparently OZ is the same place where every government and municipality connects every part of their civil and military infrastructure all in one place. I do not like this side of the movie. Maybe it's just my work life creeping up in weird ways, but this feels like such a contrived system to make up that is so stupid and bad that my brain can't turn off the part that's like, "if you hired a single security engineer to look at this system they would say it was a bad idea". Everything in this part of the film feels contrived, like just a giant hook yanking you from place to place. Suddenly the bad guy is doing this, suddenly the bad guy is doing that. Both this movie and Belle have these big climactic sequences where everyone comes together to support the hero in defeating the force of evil, but they happen in a digital world and so the magnitude and scale feels hollow and cheap. I just don't give a shit about colorful little digital avatars saying, "use my account!" against a plain white background. That is the definition of all style, no substance to me.
Ultimately this is just a classic shonen-style anime wish-fulfillment fantasy for young boys. There's nothing wrong with that. It's probably a pretty good version of that genre of film. It's just not very interesting to me anymore. I don't think it's that special to make a movie where playing video games is uniquely virtuous, where the most popular girl asks you (because this movie is about you, young teenage boy in the audience) to pretend to be her boyfriend only to totally genuinely fall in love with you. I don't think it's very fun to let your cop and U.S. military-informant family members enjoy the festive fun of saving the world when it's the U.S. military themselves who should be held responsible2</a>. The most fun anyone is having in this movie is the auntie watching high school baseball and I wish that I had watched a character drama about this woman supporting her kid in the baseball tournament. Japanese baseball is fucking awesome. You play baseball in the summer and it's a contest, that movie could totally still be titled Summer Wars.
My final thought is this: Miyazaki is just doing it better when it comes to the depicting romance and love in his films. This movie is constantly telegraphing and pushing for a specific outcome in the relationship between Kenji and Natsuki and I think that's boring. I don't think it's sweet when grandma looks at the camera and says, Kenji you better take care of this girl, because I don't see any reason why either character should give a shit about the other. I'm a humorless scrooge, I don't enjoy most relationships in these shonen anime because they are all the same kind of wish fulfillment. In Miyazaki's films, he has a sense of balance and mutualism between the two characters to make it clear to the audience how each person grows to appreciate and love the other through complimentary acts of care, service, and devotion3</a>. That's why Sophie and Howl are memorable, why Chihiro and Haku are memorable, why Ashitaka and San are memorable, and why these two placeholder high-schoolers are not. Maybe if this movie didn't have to be constantly telegraphing that romantic point, it could have done something interesting with its core characters. I thought Kazuma was a girl in the beginning and hoped for a subversive connection there (everyone thinks he'll end up with one girl but actually it's the other girl who wins because they have a common interest). Then when it was revealed that he was a guy instead, I wanted Kenji to have a gay summer fling with him while trapped in this big drama house. They are cowards for denying me this!

^{1
To elaborate on this point (which I also kind of do later in the review), in real life all of these systems are deeply compartmentalized. Hospital and health care systems actually do get hacked all the time, but they don't live on the same places as the servers that run public libraries or local governments or online multiplayer video games. That simple fact defeats everything about the premise of the "evil AI" antagonist in this film, which means it is operating on a fantasy that is so far gone for me that it's hard to care. And the reason why OZ is constructed this way goes back to wish fulfillment. If video games are happening in the same places as actual important civil infrastructure, we can have space to imagine that our idle gaming actually matters. God, it's not even that I hate online video games, but I guess my frustration comes out because it just feels silly to me to want to hero-worship through them? And I bring up Sword Art Online because that is an evil piece of media and it's doing the exact same thing. Maybe there's no consequence to making art like this, but anything that reminds me of Kirito is just gonna piss me off.
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^{2
The movie does very briefly mention that the U.S. military needs to be held accountable through a single line in a TV broadcast in the background of the concluding scene, which seems fine, except that it also says that there were no casualties for this mistaken AI-gone-rogue. Which we already know is false! There is at least one casualty of this hack! It's grandma! Her heart monitoring tech was hosted on OZ for some god-foresaken reason and it obviously failed during the big hack and then she literally dies the same night. I don't care that the doctor son is like, it was just her time to go. How could you be sure if the monitor that was keeping her alive failed the same night? Just another frustrating hand-wave to make everything seem good and happy at the end.
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The U.S. military killed you, Sakae. Pile your corpse on the mountain of bodies in Japan that the United States is responsible for, not even your own movie could acknowledge the real entity responsible for your death. Ugh, this is what I'm talking about with the no substance thing. We can't even talk about the consequences of the random plot points that are critical to the conflict escalation of the movie. Why are we even watching this? What for? To see what kind of cataclysm this family can resolve through the internet that will set up two idiot high schoolers? Shonen anime must be stopped!}^3
I'm paraphrasing Miyazaki's own words from his book Starting Point 1979–1996, which have been quoted often, such as in this Medium article</a> that I found via web search. In my experience with anime especially, romantic plotlines feel egregiously formulaic, which I acknowledge might totally just be a feeling I have based on watching way too many of these shonen shows and movies for most of my 20's. It's the fact that every boy character has to have the same haircut to flag that he's an unkept loser nerd and every girl has to be perfectly cute and secretly also such a loser that she can't find any other more interesting boys to have in her life that gets to me. Natsuki is functionally a demigod in this film going back to Mount Olympus (Mount Fuji, more likely) to meet with the family deities to pay her respects and she has no reason to actually care about these boys that she recruits. And nowhere in the film does it suggest she secretly already has a crush on Kenji, she clearly has the hots for her own uncle (which as far as I'm concerned is perfectly fitting for this mythological pantheon of gods metaphor I'm working with here). </div>

The Gleaners and I

2024-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Agnès Varda</li>
Released in 2000</li>
Runtime 82 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: I am in love!</li> </ul>
Gleaning Agnès</h2>
You might be like me, and watch this film for the first time to learn what gleaning actually means. Yes, as it turns out, gleaning is not just an abstract synonym for learning or discovering something. To glean is to engage in a physical and historical act, to take from bounty, to skim from surplus, to reclaim from what is left over. Humankind's first experience with bounty was from the earth itself, so it makes sense that our classical western depictions of gleaning are paintings of</a> women pulling</a> leftover sheafs of wheat</a> from the remains of the harvest in the fields. The Gleaners and I is deeply interested in drawing from this historical thread to the present day, and in doing so begging several questions. Are there modern-day gleaners? Does global capital have room for such a taking from the earth? And what other excesses of our technological future might there be a bounty waiting to be reclaimed?
Inversely, I am left pondering a few unanswerable questions myself at the conclusion of the film. Something I am struck by is the perfect timing of The Gleaners and I, which released at the turn of the millenium. By filming a documentary with consumer handicam technology, Agnès is inexplicably signposting a huge turning point in our relationship to cameras, media, surveillance, and technology. She is right in that sweet spot where digitization has started dramatically improving the accessibility of filmmaking and photography, but before the great forces in our world have fully exploited that technology to insidiously invade every moment of our private lives. Did Agnès know the future? Could she see how the year 2000 might imminently precede an inflection point for criminality and securitization in western society1</a>? Could she guess that such a change would have been uniquely enabled by the very technology she held in her right hand throughout this movie?
I'll never know for sure, but I have a suspicion Agnès was not the type of woman to arbitrarily express herself through novelty. Watching the film, I get the impression from her narration that she must have been an art curator, or otherwise formally educated in fine art. Several times during this film, she recognizes and recalls artwork from the canon of art history and uses that knowledge, which is perhaps likely to be esoteric to the audience, to elevate the deeply humble handicam footage we are watching. At the same time, I get the impression that she must have been a fine still photographer herself. The way she declares formally the separation between herself behind the camera and her limbs and vision in front of it is the kind of sense one can only get from practiced photography.2</a> Ah, there it is, a quick check of Wikipedia shows both suspicions are true.
Contradictory Forms</h2>
The Gleaners and I is a perfect title for this film because it encompasses both axes that motivate Varga. We are floating through layers of memoir and essay in this piece. It is informational, yes, but always returning to the creator herself and her relationship to the unavoidable forces of age, decay, and death. Today we might call this a video essay à la travel vlog, and categorizing it that way might make this seem mundane. But what Varda constructs here is a magical little contradiction. Portable digital video recording technology was just starting to take off in the late 90s and early 2000s. My family took all our home videos on a camcorder just like the one she uses here. In contrast, we're all carrying around machines in our pockets that record video footage in orders of magnitude higher resolution with infinitely larger storage capacities. And so from this standpoint, I watch this movie and feel deep inspiration. I already have all the tools at my disposal to make a movie like this. I could do this! I've got things to say, I've got a camera beyond the wildest dreams of Agnès in 2000, I should get out of my house and start filming right now!
But at the same time, there are some really beautiful and moving images here, images which do not simply fall into the lap of anyone behind a camera. And the editing in this surprised me and often delighted me. The lens cap sequence is so silly, it really is Agnès gleaning from her own wasted footage. The rap voice-overs are both funny and pointed. There is an overall sense of composition in the image and the edit that makes this flow3</a>. Gleaners is a well constructed piece of cinema, and it's deeply personal, which means it is truly one-of-a-kind. It is more aspirational than inspirational because underneath its certain lo-fi veneer is the foundation of monumental artistry, of which there can be no substituting with novelty or aesthetic when making one's own imitation. I actually think a great point of comparison here is with the character Thierry from Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop, who inversely has such an abundance of amazing footage of street artists in France, shot in the exact same time period on a similarly cheap medium. But there is obviously no comparison between Thierry and Agnès Fucking Varda, who with 1/1000th the amount of taped footage is able to actually build something astonishingly beautiful. A poser like Thierry can only con his way through advertisement, and as I noted in my review of that film</a> a while back, the rest of Exit feels appropriately shallow in relation.
Gleaning and me</h2> And what of the gleaners, you might ask me. Well, I'm happy to report that although this movie is too beautifully personal to truly feel like an achievable point of inspiration 4</a>, the information you learn about gleaning as a whole and its relationship to industry and excess is downright exhilarating. I have always had a bone to pick with modern thrifting culture and its transition into yet another source of untapped value for capital extraction (think of those infuriating furniture flippers, think about how every Goodwill sucks now and all the good stuff goes up for auction on eBay to maximize revenue, think about how you're paying markups on stuff people got rid of for free)5</a>. So much of the anti-consumption culture in my life has been fundamentally reformist in nature, and upon closer inspection obviously fails to meet its own aspirations. "Reduce, reuse, recycle", sin taxes on plastic bags, recycling as a concept in general have all completely failed to actually deliver on substantially reducing waste, decreasing consumption, or any other goal in service of "saving the planet". It's just like the plastic reuse exhibit at the children's museum in the film itself. In the status quo, we do not have the imagination required to meaningfully relate to our own waste. Even our recycled trash must first be curated, polished, and refined before it is fit to be seen by children and families. Can we say that any of those plastics are even trash anymore?
Learning about gleaning and its expressions in modern day dumpster-diving, salvaging, reclamation and street hauling therefore feels like a breath of fresh air. The radical break lies in the refusal to ask permission. Instead, it is enough to simply pick, pluck, and take from excess, whether that's food dumped in a field or produce tossed in the dumpster. Whether it's rotting floorboards repurposed for art or broken refrigerators hauled in and repaired from the street, in all cases, the bounty is intended to rot and decay, its continued existence as an acceptable Object is impermissible. To glean today is thus to awaken from the mirage of scarcity. Critically, it is Varga's genius to produce these images in such a vernacular form that compels the viewer to place herself amongst these beautiful people. Indeed, Agnès opens by positing that gleaning comes from the pose, the very physical stance of stooping over to grasp from the ground. This posture replicates itself through paintings both beloved and forgotten, and then continues through generations forward to these strange and carefree acts of repossession. How could I not think of myself, my own gleanings past, my own future defiant bend at the waist and reach of the arm?
As the credits rolled I was reminded of this past summer when my parents took a big trip to Japan and China. Before they left, my mom insisted I send her a gift wishlist, and I, feeling clever, asked her to send me her ticket stubs. That way she could save her money and spend it on herself to go visit places, and I would get a little memento in exchange. I was thrilled that this idea satisfied her and waited expectantly. Imagine my surprise when I received a letter in the mail several weeks later containing a bunch of paper receipts from 7-11's, train stations, and grocery stores. Instead of romantic stubs that could go in a scrapbook, I got faded thermal paper scraps that looked like they belonged in the trash.
In retrospect, maybe I should have clarified on what a ticket stub meant, or maybe the plight of digital-only ticketing has hit Japan as well. I laughed then and I laugh now, only now I see that this, too, is something my mother has gleaned for me. Perhaps my father's insistence on buying cheap film SLRs at garage sales is a form of gleaning. Perhaps, when I rummage and pack some of those cameras in my suitcase to take home, I am gleaning from the end of his harvest. My heart swells with a feeling of connection to this gesture, this pose, this act, which has always been there for me. There is always something within reach to be gleaned, and that is a beautiful thing to learn.
Now that you've read this, have you gleaned something from me?

^{1
Maybe this is a place where my Americentrism shows up, I don't actually know the extent of how 9/11 and the War on Terror changed France the way it changed the United States. But I know that all these nations share intelligence and all their mainstream political parties champion similar kinds of securitization. So, I think it's fair to say that the date of this film does still carry significance, and that watching this film now might elicit similar feelings in a French audience that it does to this American viewer.
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^{2
All traditional photography involves some kind of self-alienation. Probably until the advent of selfies and fully-articulating LCD back-panels, photography has traditionally meant the loss of one's self in one form or another. Any good street photographer will tell you that you can't take good photos while moving self-consciously through a public space. If you consider the form of the large format camera or the film SLR, there is no way to take a portrait of yourself that both lets you see behind the viewfinder and in front of the lens at the same time. Even if you take a picture in front of a mirror, you either obscure your face with the camera, or abandon its viewpoint completely by guessing while holding it at your waist. Even with a waist-level viewfinder, you still need to choose where to look at the decisive moment the shutter is fired. Try as you might, you necessarily gain a sense of your self-outside-yourself behind the camera. Every shot of Agnès filming her left hand while holding the camera up to her eye with her right feel so deeply photographic in essence. She may be experiencing a digital novelty, but she is expressing a fundamental anxiety that comes from the production of the Image.
</div>}
^3This seems to be as good a place as any to just say that both this film and Fat Girl</a> have sequences about driving around big rig trucks on the freeway, but in this film we are left to distantly empathize with the plight of the driver as a worker, while in Fat Girl we are meant to see the truck as an intrusion of domineering patriarchy into the very roads we drive on. Both interesting ideas, though I know which sequence and which idea I enjoyed watching more. </div>
^{4
Here I go contradicting myself because obviously this film inspired me deeply. I started drafting a zine about this movie, I'm launching this site and announcing it on letterboxd because of the review for this movie. But also at the beginning of this film I had a sense of, "I could make a movie like this", and by the end my thought was, "this movie is so profoundly beautiful it is inimitable", and that is what I am trying to highlight most here.
</div>
^{5
Buy Nothing groups seem better on instinct, but in my experience it depends heavily on the established culture within the group. In groups coming from already well-resourced and well-connected networks, the buy nothing group functions really well. People are eager to both give and take from the group. In my case, most groups I can access are either so big that there is too much overhead to easily give and take from the group, or the groups are small but don't have an existing established culture of connection. I have stopped posting in buy nothing groups altogether because too many times the unpaid nature of the exchange means people have no commitment to actually following through. In any case, my narrow experience so far indicates that something like buy nothing only reifies the existing communal character of the group that is engaging in it. It also bears mentioning that these groups being exclusively online exclude people in a way that something like gleaning inherently does not.
</div>}}

Ocean's Thirteen

2024-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Steven Soderbergh</li>
Released in 2007</li>
Runtime 122 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: I had fun!</li> </ul>
This was truly an amazingly well-constructed send-off for the series. It all comes back to labor. It all comes back to honor. It all comes back to shaking Frank Sinatra's hand. Danny Ocean ascends beyond the mortal realm of set-ups and con-men and becomes a fully-realized demigod of poetic justice towards cowards who hide behind money, riot shields, and artificial intelligence. And it's still funny and still got the juice for those fast back-and-forth moments where these fake terms-of-art are just tossed around without a care in the world, though it's not always as tight and as clean as in the first film.
It's funny how things go in circles. The super-phone being a gaudy gold-plated nokia-style cell phone instead of an iPhone is hilariously dated, but the casino staff being boxed in as a consequence on their over-reliance on an "AI" system feels right at home with today's big security outages that cause hundreds of thousands of people to be stuck in airports for multiple days. From now on, I'll just imagine it's the patron saints of inconvenient technical and natural disasters that are the reason for my growing queue of security-related work items at my job. Will definitely be coming back to this one in the future, it's just too much fun not to.

They Drive By Night

2024-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Raoul Walsh</li>
Released in 1940</li>
Runtime 93 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: I was intrigued.</li> </ul>

"I like you. I like the way you fill out your clothes. I like everything about you. Are you glad you ran on to me?"

"Yes, you're a nice guy. But you've got to remember that nice guys always leave when ladies ask them to."

"That nice I ain't" </blockquote>
Not to write about a completely different movie for this review, but I am retroactively giving props to Fat Girl because there is a dynamic between Ann Sheridan and George Raft in this film that just gave me the willies after watching Fat Girl a few nights ago. As annoying and French as that movie is, one thing it does evoke incredibly well is the horror and fear and rapeyness of a man constantly pushing a woman (a girl, in that movie's case) for a little more and a little more.
Watching that gave new clarity to how gross the dynamic in this movie feels. A pivotal part of this film is the romance between Cassie Hartley, played by Ann Sheridan, and Joe Fabrini played by George Raft. In the part of the movie that is meant to introduce their romance to each other, Joe literally rents a hotel room for Cassie and then invites himself in, trying to push her into saying she likes him and to stay up talking to him, all while she is deftly and masterfully parrying his advances and telling him to be a good boy and leave so she can sleep. Oh, did I mention that at this point of the story, Cassie is unemployed and homeless after quitting her job where her boss would constantly try to grope her?
The scene ends with Joe actually climbing into Cassie's bed before she can claim the space as hers, but because he's a trucker he is always sleep-deprived and he just passes out before she can even lay down. This is supposed to be played as like, a kind of oafish working-class romanticism, but it's just brutal to watch now. I probably would have hated this dynamic even without Fat Girl, but by having seen that movie so recently, all I could see was Fernando doing the same verbal sparring and prodding with Elena in that movie, except this time Elena is a child and not a character written to exemplify perfect moderate femininity, so she isn't able to just deftly deny this man's advances. Besides the settings, the two conversations and the two scenes share the same soul of misogyny and rape culture, but it's celebrated with mundane expectation in They Drive By Night. I appreciated that Fat Girl could give me that insight.
Ultimately, this film is interesting but mostly as a kind of sociological exercise. I'm glad I watched it, it's an interesting setting, and it feels very right for the time and the place it was made. Would be cool to remake this where Lana Carlsen gets everything she wants instead of being written to go crazy after doing the deed. I guess what I'm saying is if you murder your husband I think that's pretty cool.

Fat Girl

2024-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Catherine Breillat</li>
Released in 2001</li>
Runtime 86 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: I made it through.</li> </ul>
probably not a good choice for a watch while recovering from FFS/while coming down from painkillers. Will have to revisit again but my thoughts on choosing this was basically, "this is probably going to be French as hell in an annoying way" and I was right about that.

Polyester

2024-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by John Waters</li>
Released in 1981</li>
Runtime 86 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: I had fun!</li> </ul>
It's hard not to admire John Waters in how he makes movies. Even this being a more mainstream oriented film, Polyester still contains all the snark and sacrilege that are essential to the director's sense of style. Honestly, it's incredible that his career has spanned so much filth and earned so much vitriol that people can even describe this film as "mainstream oriented". I guess it's about "normal" people, though the beauty of what Waters does with his recurring cast is that he instantly colors that normalcy in a way that makes it obviously about the freaks (I say this with adoration).
I feel like I missed out because my copy of Polyester did not come with the odorama card and it seems like that would have been an essential part of the experience! Until I watched the bonus feature I actually thought the whole skit in the beginning about the cards was just like an elaborate long-form gag for the entire movie. We have been deprived of so much in our movies since then, imagine Silver Lining's Playbook with an odorama card! I want to sniff the football, and the dance mat, and other smells that I'm sure were present in the movie!
I have no idea what else to say about Polyester. I laughed a lot! It was a lot of fun! It was also a lot of wincing and grimacing as the movie just kept pouring on onto Francine. And it ends so abruptly, I was screaming and pretty bewildered about that. Just pure melodrama and farce, a classic John Waters film. Based on the content of the bonus features I understand that this is a film that is in conversation with a lot of older films from the 50s and 60s. I am just ignorant of a lot of cinema from that time period, so I will abstain from reckless free-association (I could stand to restrain myself like this more often). I will say lots of parts of this felt like a kind of suburban horror film, so embedded within the culture of the nuclear family that it doesn't even need scary music to be scary (yeah it's Halloween and here I am shoehorning in Divine as a house wife as being vaguely topical). Not sure there's anything else I really feel about this, though. I think it would be fun to watch again with friends.
Oh, no, I forgot. The Criterion Collection of this has the best bonus feature ever, which is a no smoking in the movie theater PSA featuring a young John Waters being hot and cool and hilariously coy, as he smokes a cigarette and tells you not to smoke.

Silver Linings Playbook

2024-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by David O. Russell</li>
Released in 2012</li>
Runtime 122 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: Deeply annoying.</li> </ul>
OK I do think they are playing with interesting ideas in the first half of this. Bradley Cooper certainly acts familiar enough to me as a fellow bipolar disorder haver (of a different category), and his family doubly so. I think there was an opportunity for the relationship between mental health, policing, and carcerality to be explored because unless you interact with those systems, you really don't know and understand how impactful and intrusive they can be.
Once we introduce Tiffany to the mix, though, the direction of the film gradually takes more obvious and less interesting route, and I think that's a shame. At some point Pat figures out Tiffany faked the letter, and we don't get any acknowledgement until the end. Maybe it's just me but if I was going crazy about an ex (which has happened before in my life though not for a while), I would read that as a sign that Tiffany was part of the broader plot to keep me separated and it would make me question every interaction I've had with her. And that interpretation would be totally justified too, since turns out Tiffany was plotting with Pat's parents the whole time! But whatever, stupid shit like, "I knew I was in love with you when I first saw you" is good enough to douse any actual consequence of having a bipolar main character.
Like, I added this movie to my list because of a reddit post that was like, "Silver Lining's Playbook is the bipolar disorder movie rep", and I guess that person only paid attention in the first half, just like DeSean Jackson stopped paying attention at the 1 yard line that one time in 2008. Now that I've segued into football, I just want to make a quick sidenote that it's cute that this movie so conveniently writes the therapist into the house during the big betting scene so that he can ask what a parlay is on behalf of the audience, because it used to be that if you wanted to do shit bets like that you had to have a bookie in your rolodex to write your gambling fan-mail to. Now I can't take a shit in the morning without getting a draftkings sponsored lunchable ad on my e-sports highlight reel youtube video to help me wake up for work in the morning, I can't watch a single televised sporting event on the planet without a little betting line dangling in the corner like, "yeah you're a fucking sucker, you idiot, bet on this game in a 25 way clusterfuck, you little bitch", and every single clip of the most mundane shit in baseball has 100 comments of absolute bozos saying, "you didn't average 3 pitches per AB and didn't wear the red socks that day and FUCKED my parlay, bitch!"
What I'm saying is that I hate gambling and I hate that it's in sports and I'm not saying it's this movie's fault that it got to this point but what I am saying is that gambling is a fucked up way to interact with your children. I don't think it's cute or fun or funny, and I hated that Pat's first heart-to-heart with his dad was actually about superstition about betting on the game, and I'm supposed to just be like, "ha, what a joker that dad fellow". Gambling does not save lives, and I am happy to be completely humorless about that fact in this film, because I am personally aggrieved by the current state of gambling integrating with the things I love.
Honestly this is just such a weird film to me. I guess it makes sense why people adored it. Going in blind for the first time ever, though, this just feels like a waste of a perfectly good mental illness. Also every single one of the marriages on screen in this film should get divorced. Oh man, yeah that's another annoying thing, which is that Pat just says something to his friend Ronnie and suddenly their marriage is fixed at the grand finale of the film. That's why people like Pat are fucking annoying, because that shit never happens and it never works, but you can put it in a movie and people will reference it in therapy sessions to say why positive thinking matters.
Maybe my whole screed here can be summed thusly: this is a movie where the most annoying children you know also intimately know the DSM-5. I can see where it's a good rom-com but this is not for me.
(God, Maybe I am a rom-com hater...but I'm not a reactionary hater! My problem with rom-coms is not that there are women in the movies. My problem with rom-coms is I think the relationships in them are bad. I'm a relationship hater, not a rom-com hater at all!)

Face Off

2024-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by John Woo</li>
Released in 1997</li>
Runtime 139 minutes</li>
Watched at The Beacon Cinema</li>
Final feelings: I'm gonna take my face off!!</li> </ul>
Put this on at the Beacon for a themed celebration. This is an all timer for me, I just love this so much. It's obviously too long. But also would it really achieve greatness if it was perfectly cut and executed? By the end the narrative arc of each man demands interest. Castor as Archer wanting to have the comforts of the big bad government only to realize it's boring as shit is not something I appreciated enough on my first watch. Dude tried to sell out and still didn't have it in him.
Nick Cage is definitely stronger for me than John Travolta and it just works. That boat stunt made me crazy, it's still so good. Thank god they made this movie. Thank god for John Woo.
This is a Chinese film by the way I will not elaborate.

Under the Skin

2024-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Jonathan Glazer</li>
Released in 2013</li>
Runtime 108 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: empty.</li> </ul>
While I loved the visual language of the first half of this film and found ample room to find transness in the vague vibes of it all, the ending of Under the Skin did not do it for me. Structurally I suppose it makes sense in that 90% of this movie is "the female" having random encounters with men. She learns some degree of self-consciousness from her encounter with "the deformed man" (that's how he's named in the credits), and on the flip side she meets her ultimate demise to the logger. But in terms of content and what it's saying, this ending is a sudden wallop to the head after 90 minutes of vague hintings toward connection, humanity, and the struggle to communicate.
There are pieces of a narrative puzzle that I feel are unanswered. The amber lights that culminate in this montage of ordinary women spending time with each other and being together, all to crescendo into Scarlett Johansson's face, read to me as like the blossoming of the desire to be a woman. But the movie never gives any time to actually show our main character having any interactions with other women whatsoever, even failed ones! And with the way it concludes, with a hypnic jerk of overt sexual violence, the fable instead becomes cynical and bleak. "To be a woman is to perform endlessly for men, whom you will never surpass and are so vulnerable to that any random man could annihilate you on a whim. To be a woman is to be eternally vigilant, even if you wish to slaughter men you must have a fortress from which to do so. The moment you leave your car, your van, your house, you become a target. You are alone. Know how to defend yourself, or perish."
I think a certain subgenre of trans woman will find this film deeply relatable, and I think if you do not see a transgender story in this, you're liable to respond to those women with a typical, "welcome to womanhood!" at the end of this film. To me, the only good reading of this movie is a transgender one. The female's rehearsed and stilted dialogue with the men in her van, her need to only express herself in specific contexts where it's safe, her total and complete isolation from other women, her anxiety and fear about her body and what it might reveal, all of this is easily read as a transfeminine experience. And in the transgender reading, we can fully alienate the female and annihilate her in the end and it is even justified to a lot of people in this world.
But the movie can just as easily be about the dangers of promiscuity, the world of violence that awaits you when you leave the safety of your personal vehicle, the threat of strangers lurking about in the world who will rape you at a moment's notice. (And this reading is especially pernicious since an overwhelming majority of sexual violence is perpetrated by people the victim already knows, both in Scotland where the film is set and in the United States where I'm writing this. Going from pure probabilities, the man who kills the female at the end should have been the nice guy at the bus stop who took her in!)
Vagueness is a double-edged sword. It can buy you interpretive freedom and creative expression. It can also reveal what you see as being beyond the fog, being solid, concrete, and undeniable. The movie did not have to end this way and I realize the futility in writing a review that's just litigating what you wish happened instead of what did happen. But the problem is that by being so disjoint, with so much negative space in the editing, writing, everything, Under the Skin feels random. And it ends at random, too. Instead of coming together in any form, which I think it absolutely had the ability to do, a random act of violence snuffs out a glowing, amber light that has been driving you through the first 90 minutes. From the ways I was wanting to interpret the beginning of this film, I felt really let down, so much so that I actually rewatched this movie a week later to confirm my feelings, to really understand if I was crazy or not. But I've seen it a second time for this review and I have to conclude that this movie is, at best, a cheap thrill for me.
Other thoughts</h2>
I wrote so many words for my attempts at reviewing this movie. I think this is also going in the essay bait bucket, not by itself but in an essay exploring and really considering vagueness in movies. I think on the whole I have a chip on my shoulder regarding interpretive vagueness in films; if you give me space I want to be able to run. My biggest struggle with this review was trying to run with the negative space, of which the beginning half of this film has in spades, only to always run into the brick wall that is the ending. There's no room to consider anything else in this story because of how this movie ends.
I also think I have some thinking to do about science fiction. Recently I put on a movie for a small group of friends for a celebration and I talked about science fiction and the tiresome use of speculative fiction for allegories for existing social ills. (We watched Face/Off that day and that is in no way an allegory for anything.) I was probably thinking of this movie when I wrote that because I had been starting and restarting this review for a week or so. I guess I don't think fable and allegory are bad, but especially in this movie it feels weirdly limiting. All of this silence, this playing in whispers, only to be drowned out by a very conventional idea that isn't even necessarily proportional to it's existence in real life. Did we even need the science fiction to say this much?
I keep wanting to write about this film because I just feel so unsatisfied and for some reason I really wanted it to be satisfying to me. I was really grooving with the beginning of this, ya'll. Shots where 90% of the screen is inky blackness and a tiny dot of light flies around, whooshing trees and natural beauty filled with these scenes of strange death and light. I wanted to love this, it just did not come together at the end for me, and the more I thought about it the more annoyed I got.

Cure

2024-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa</li>
Released in 1997</li>
Runtime 111 minutes</li>
Watched at a friend's</li>
Final feelings: Haunting and compelling to its core!</li> </ul>
Cure is another one of those movies that simply tells you textually everything that it's about. At the same time, it feels mysterious, alien, and unknowable until at some point, the pieces all come together and you see yourself in the film. You see your own rage at the injustices of the world, the injustices that have been put specifically against you. You feel the weight of every personal grievance and structural illness that just grinds the you out of your body. We live in alienation. We live in constant groveling with our jobs, our landlords, our families. We're all teetering on the edge of something unspeakable.
What if someone, living in such a world, finally woke up one day and lost themselves? And could articulate that kind of nihilism in such a way that it seemed convincing, even natural, to you? (To me?) What would it mean to be pushed to the boundaries of polite society by the very politeness you need to be adhering to? And what would happen if, one time, you stepped over the line?
Cure is operating on so many different levels and it excels in all of them. This is a movie that succeeds in being about everything because it's seeing the connections between all those things to make them whole. It seamlessly mutates itself around all these broken pieces of modernity. When it needs to be, it's about marriage as a completely broken institution. When it needs to be, it's about the complete failure of capitalism and bourgeois professionalism to make us happy, or even avoid traumatizing us. When it needs to be, it's about the pure malice of psychiatry as a profession, of the idea of pathologizing behaviors as a means of maintaining some kind of order. And in my first viewing, it always comes back to the endless gravitational pull of reactionary violence.
Because ultimately that is what Takabe is. More than anything, he is a reactionary. He has a broken marriage. He feels deep resentment for the constant care that his sick(?) wife demands. He has a shit job that takes everything out of him for no reward. He is so delusional about where his problems lie that he thinks by separating his work and home self completely, he can alleviate his suffering. I know this because the movie literally tells me that he feels this. And when faced with this adversary who simply refuses to engage with him on his terms, who will not simply cooperate with his own criminal conviction, who refuses to let society walk all over him for a convenient resolution to horrific crimes, what does Takabe say?
"It's all your fault! If you weren't here, everything would be good!" In this singular moment, Takabe reveals himself as motivated purely by grievance. Even the grisly murders he is trying to solve are not moral crises that weigh on his conscience, they are mere inconveniences at work that are overstaying their welcome. He is enraged because they should be gone, they should be fixed, someone should be locked up! He has the guy in front of him! The guy he knows killed those people, somehow, with some method he can't replicate and has never seen, but he knows. He is a microcosm of the whole world he embodies. He's the perfect little worker, he's the perfect silent husband, he is the perfect cop, and he is smoldering with rage. I think one valid interpretation of the ending is that Takabe proves himself correct.
The use of perspective in this film just fuels every aspect I've written here. The murders are always distant in these wide-angle shots. You see every step leading up to the faithful pull of the trigger. Your perspective is objective and calm because the people on-screen are objective and calm. This is not something they are deciding to do. This is the natural conclusion of the way things are. There are multiple lines of dialogue in this film that support this idea that the violence is a consequence, it is not a choice, and therefore the targets and victims are natural, as well. The camera is not your ally in this film.
Nor is the edit! There is this particular moment at the end that uses the edit to sort of flag the complete downfall of Takabe and I thought at first it was a skip in the movie?? I'm still learning to notice/observe editing in movies when I watch them for the first time, I tend to get lost in the writing, the characters, and the camera on my first go. But this movie does do so much with duration, with empty time and space, with gradually revealing things. What you see of each murder slowly increases, and as it happens you start to notice more and more the textures of ambient noise that are just a little bit too loud. I actually thought of Jacques Tati's Playtime after watching this, as both films pay special attention to how noisy modernity is. Where Tati approaches with a reticent playfulness, Kurosawa grinds you down mentally, as if to say, "you cannot escape this noise!".
This feels like a movie you can watch forever. Cure is speaking to nearly every single component of our modern civil society. We are all struggling day-by-day to maintain a status quo that is not real, our lives dominated by decaying institutions that have been built up over generations. Maybe someday we will live in a world where Cure does not resonate with us, and thus terrify us. Someday, we may live in a world where Mamiya is lost of all his power. I suppose you can say that by then, we will have been cured, of what I am not sure. Until that happens, this movie will always be there to haunt you, and invite you in, with greusome clarity.
X

Ocean's Eleven

2024-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Steven Soderbergh</li>
Released in 2001</li>
Runtime 116 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: So fun and so dated, a time capsule of a film.</li> </ul>
Watched this on repeat at some point in my adolescence because I desperately wanted to believe there was a type of man I could be that was cool and desirable. Turns out, outside of the writer's room it's really hard to communicate with silence and cool looks. I did practice eating cheeseburgers like Brad Pitt does in this film and maybe that's why I've got TMJ problems now.
Jokes aside, this is still a banger, even though it feels quaint watching it in 2024, like I'm looking in a beautifully engineered diorama. Ocean's Eleven doesn't feel especially novel (probably because everyone is still imitating it), but it does still feel tight and precise. The characters are memorable and while the distribution of screentime isn't shared as equally as the take is, every moment with each person uses its time well to make all these guys distinct (maybe with exception to the acrobat, Yen, who just stands around looking Chinese a lot of the time). Terry Benedict is maybe the most understated version of the antagonist in this film, but I think it's fine here. Let the little convicts and con-men have the glory, and the villain can just smolder to himself and his own ego. It's fun! These guys are fun!
Not just fun, these guys are cool. I feel like a lot has probably been said about the writing in this film, and the extremely minimal forms of communication that are used especially between Rusty and Danny. When they're listing off all the archetypal con-men they'll need and its all just a bunch of famous names in cinema and music, it feels so cool. Like, you don't need to know what all these terms of art mean, it's actually because you don't know but the characters speak with such confidence about them that makes it cool. Linus being the new guy is fun and it works because he's never played up as an audience surrogate. Again, the movie is good because it doesn't explain to the audience until right at the end. Letting things be undefined, unknown, and maybe confusing, until you finally understand in the final flourish of the film. That's how you get actually memorable cool-ness. It can't just be quips and snark!
I do think there's a future essay maybe not only about this film but including this film that charts the progression of how surveillance was imagined/depicted in mainstream action/neo-noir type movies in the 00's, from this to The Dark Knight and beyond. This movie plays up the surveillance aspect as a novel thing, which it probably was at the time. 20+ years after the Patriot Act and now surveillance is so normalized we put it on our front doors by default. Everyone is constantly being policed by home surveillance that is directly accessible by your local police department, every phone is a built-in surveillance machine sending you targeted ads and containing backdoors for the Feds if you ever support the worng people or make the wrong kind of noise. But in 2001 you could make a movie where 90% of the heist is enabled by one guy routing one cable through a middleman and it was incredible. The convicts are using the house's tools to steal from the house. There was a world of possibility for "hacking", stealing, crime, in the era that made this movie. If the right people did it, if the right people turned the cameras on and used it to take down one dude, if the right people broke the rules, it wasn't just good, it was good fun!
But that has now been co-opted. In today's world Danny Ocean is not a criminal, he's not a convict, he's a guy in an office in Virginia sorting through petabytes of surveillance data to add names to the no-fly list, to take down pro-Palestinian activists, Black Lives Matter activists, and so on. Maybe what these movies really did was just normalize that if the target is right, the surveillance is alright, and 20+ years of marketing means your favorite police department is Ocean's 11, and the wrong people in your neighborhood are Terry Benedict. I don't even think this is a stretch, this is just what mass surveillance is literally for now, and in a way movies like this in the post 9-11 era played a part in normalizing that idea.
Anyway, the dudes in this movie should have been gay for each other. Is Ocean's 12 the one where they introduce the concept of homosexuality to the team?

Son of the White Mare

2024-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Marcell Jankovics</li>
Released in 1981</li>
Runtime 86 minutes</li>
Watched at The Beacon Cinema</li>
Final feelings: cinematic anthropology on a monumental level.</li> </ul>
Watching this feels like an anthropological experience. If you've ever marveled at cave art from early humans and felt a strange connection and alienation to this seemingly universal desire to represent the world around us, Son of the White Mare will feel eerily familiar. All the vivid colors, the striking and evocative shapes and sounds, the images derived from the pure expression of the human body unburdened by shame and respectability, come together in a way that feels like watching the continuation of the cave wall, as if the pictures sprang to life before your eyes.
As a collection of pure images, this movie is just unworldly. Like shock therapy to the modern brain that has developed a sensibility of privacy, everything is radically exposed here in a way that sparks feelings of embarrassment and delight. There is a visual language established beneath the cacophonous eruptions and pulsating births of the first 20 minutes, and that's why the introduction works with so little narration. Yes, it is confusing and strange to see so many colors and tendrils of heaven and earth. I myself felt lost and anxious, my mouth agape with awe. This was supposed to be a folk tale, perhaps the simplest of all narratives, and yet it felt so beyond my comprehension. All of sudden, whirling across the screen were the faces of the 3 dragons and I just about lost my shit. Instantly I knew I needed to see more of these characters, whose designs were so out-of-place they stuck out to me even in those fleeting moments, even though I did not comprehend what they were at all. From that point on I was totally under this movie's spell, even though (or maybe because) I hardly understood a thing I was seeing.
I think it's amazing that through the use of shape and contrast, this movie eliminates the needs for shading entirely (and outlines, as my friend pointed out). Pure shape and color is able to communicate so much, if you try to pause on any frame of this movie and just look at the image you will understand that a message is being made. There are no throwaway frames in the film. Like, it's just so cool that the movie matches the simplified narrative of the folk tale with simplified parameters for the images! And that even in these simple terms we can create complex, riveting, arousing and arresting scenes. If there is a trend for all movies today that I want to bring up, it's the prevalence of over-explaining things, to resist the possibility of truly baffling or challenging an audience. Animation, in particular, can often feel bound to formulaic rehashing of well-trodden forms (just to throw a name out there, Makoto Shinkai makes beautiful movies that all feel the same to me). In contrast, Son of the White Mare explains borderline nothing in both its writing and its illustration, and yet you can still appreciate the feelings of motion, color, and sound when watching. The ethos of allowing the audience to be confused is a big risk, but when paired with a strong direction it can make a huge impact. It certainly did on me.
I'm rambling but I think Son of the White Mare is brilliant. This is the power of animation! Instead of increasing the budget and the technical prowess to better mimic real life, we can instead lean in to the gap that exists, play within the restrictions of the medium, and create something that feels both alien and human. When you watch this film you are watching mythology. Whether or not it's what the people who originated such myths envisioned in their eyes is inconsequential; the visual language conveys myth, conveys folk tale, conveys fable, and so it is both universally applicable and so abstracted it confounds the first-time viewer. A movie like this continues. It starts anew each time you watch it, and it closes each time with a whisper of a promise of its return. It pulls at the rope of history to bring these forgotten tales to an unforgettable place, it dedicates itself in the opening seconds to the historic peoples of the Eurasian steppe from whom the tale derives. It is thus both of this world and beyond it. Illustration and animation are boundless in possibility, and it feels so good to watch a movie that really exercises that fact in a way that I've never seen before, all while being set to the most humble of stories. In short, Son of the White Mare is magic!

The Baby of Mâcon

2024-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Peter Greenaway</li>
Released in 1993</li>
Runtime 122 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: I feel messed up by this.</li> </ul>
I find this movie so hard to write about! I've been putting off this review because like. I did not have fun watching this. I was having fun at first, but there is a thing that happens right at the end that was so hard to watch (and warrants a content warning check if you are the type to not want to watch movies with certain kinds of violence in them) I wasn't sure why I kept the TV on (more on this later). When the movie finally ended I felt like I just bore witness to some human tragedy.
But after the fact, I keep thinking about this movie and it just seems brilliant to me. Brilliant both because it's doing something very clever with the play-within-the-movie idea, and because it's so obviously about the modern construction of violence as entertainment. The Baby of Mâcon is ostensibly about a play. It feels very narrow and strange at the beginning once you realize you are watching a filmed play because like, this is a movie. It's a movie set in a specific historical period, filled with lavish costumes and strange, circus-like performers. The immediate experience is alien and disorienting, what is the movie about if it's about watching a play? Like, you wanted to watch a story about some mythical baby in a town, but actually that story is, in media res, a fictional story taking place in a performance?
And if you're clever you will then go to the next follow-up which is, where is this play being performed? And for whom? When I go to see a play in real life, I am sitting amongst a bunch of people who all paid money to see theater. Where is the audience of this play? And the movie quickly answers this for you by showing you that yes, this play that you think you're watching is actually not for you at all, it's for these people all sitting in these seats over hear, and they are the ones watching the play, and actually therefore it's not really accurate to say that you're watching this play. After all, you never had any intention of watching a play, you were intending on watching a movie, and this movie is about an audience that is watching a play that you also watch since it happens to be there.
Can you see how this is starting to be cool? At least to me, this is so cool. This is blurring the lines that are so essential to the idea of a movie that we normally take them for granted. Add one extra layer in there and suddenly it's real weird. Like, if the movie is about the world of the audience who happen to be watching a made-up play, what happens when something extremely fucked up happens in the play? What happens when the image you see on screen is telling you "the movie is about this thing right here, it's about this horrific and violent birth, it's about this powerful and pathetic little baby being exploited over and over again, it's about the powerlessness of women in society" but it's all happening in a play? This shit isn't happening for real, it's just acting. I mean, it always is just acting, if Julia Ormond is in a normal movie and her character experiences these things, in real life she is acting. But now she is acting as an actor, so the horrible things are happening to this actor, so, how horrible is it?
Have I lost you yet? I hope not, because I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this. Maybe my favorite play-within-a-play is in A Midsummer Night's Dream, mostly because it's so damn funny and feels like a perfect comedic capstone to a play that is otherwise a lot of typical Shakespearean romantic hijinks. But using a play-with-a-movie like this, to really zoom in on our relationship with violence, made me deeply self-conscious as an audience member. I think other movies have done that on accident, usually by being so bad I feel ashamed to be watching them, but in The Baby of Mâcon it is clear and purposeful.
This is a movie designed to incite reactionary condemnation. That was my response to seeing it! And then I started thinking and wondering like, how do I categorize or understand my reactions to this film? At the beginning I thought the violence was happening to the actor within the play, so it was fine. It was fine that this man got gutted by a bull, it was fine that this baby was having his bodily fluids milked for money. Like, why was that fine? Why am I fixating on this thing that happened at the end as being unforgivable and none of the other violence?
And what's crazy is my initial response to that thought was, well the sexual violence is way more visually graphic, so that's why it's inherently worse. But that's actually not true at all! Like, when I think of literally the images I saw, and try to remove Julia Ormond's screaming from my memory, the images are just as obscured, the violence is just as implied (in fact the most graphic violence is probably the gutting by the bull). And the screaming! Is she screaming because she's an actor? If the character in the play says it's real does that mean it's real? Where does the performance end? I know IMDB says Julia Ormond hates this movie but those facts never have any source but I do wonder how she feels about the movie and what it was like to act in that scene.
Finally, let's talk about the director himself. Speaking of those unverified IMDB claims, I found the actual source</a> of the supposed claim that he was responding to public outrage over an advertisement and it's much different. Here's the actual context, with a quote from the director himself in 1994:

The inspiration for "The Baby of Mâcon" came in 1992, when Mr. Greenaway saw Oliviero Toscani's photograph of a newborn infant -- wrinkled and bloody -- in a Benetton publicity campaign. Like most of Mr. Toscani's work, the poster of the infant produced equal amounts of adoration and outrage. "The photograph reminded me of the many traditional 'Nativity' scenes, the paintings of the Madonna with Child," Mr. Greenaway recalled. "It was as if that photograph was the essence of all those paintings, stripped of their esthetic dimension. It was the Nativity in its purest state. And the use of that photograph for publicity started me thinking about the exploitation of children, and of people." </blockquote>
Reading this, I feel like there's something earnestly challenging about The Baby of Mâcon. These horrible things we see were inspired by an advertisement. My guy saw “Newborn baby” by Oliviero Toscani in an ad for a multinational clothing brand and made this movie. In essence, the two pieces mirror each other, but where one exploits the child for a form of edgy brand activation, the other shows what a world which empowers such things would actually look like. It would be a world filled with exploitation and violence, it would be filled with powerful institutions extracting wealth whenever possible, no matter the costs. It would be a world where those entities with hegemonic dominance over the culture and morals of a community would be able to propogandize their own extractive efforts.
As the director states himself: "My film shows a reality in which the good are not rewarded and the bad are not punished, and in which innocence is always exploited."
So, I think this one is very cool. I love Peter Greenaway, I feel like every film I've seen of his has pushed boundaries and made some really incisive jabs at whatever is the target of his vision. The Baby of Mâcon is not subtle. It's not nice. And it's also not stupid. It's purposeful. It's not trying to make violence cool or exciting. Watching this is maybe a kind of self-harm, so I can't say I recommend it to anyone, and you should make your own best judgement on if you actually want to see this. But also, as someone who went in blind and did watch it and did hate it initially, I have come to appreciate what it was trying to do, and I think it is doing something very unique.
P.S. I forgot to mention this when originally writing this but I just have to add this, this movie is very funny at times and it feels crazy to say that. In particular I have the "These are the fluids of my body" stuck in my head. And the "VALUE" guy.

Gummo

2024-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Harmony Korine</li>
Released in 1997</li>
Runtime 89 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: defiant low-class cinema anarchy</li> </ul>
Ok yeah there are some really amazing images in this. There's a real anarchy to everything about this film in its structure, its environments, and its characters. The interior shots of all these homes just filled with stuff is the clearest indication we have of the impact of the tornado that is initially narrated to us, and from there we can understand the various degrees of eccentric, barbaric, and apathetic behavior of these people as also being an extension of that disaster.
I was struggling with this movie right after finishing it because I kinda hated seeing the worst parts of people in this film. Something about this felt exploitative to me, like "hey look at these fucked up hicks aren't they so fucked up and dirty and nasty, I'm going to record these white people saying racist shit and doing heinous things to cats and people and you're going to watch and feel grossed out!" I saw in the wikipedia article for Harmony Korine that he made a company named EDGLRD and I was like, ah, this guy sucks.
But then I read that he grew up from Nashville, where this is filmed. I learned that there's a lot of interest from Nashville about this movie, where people are excited to see different parts of their city on screen. I learned about how a lot of the cast were first time actors hired from the area. I think there are cynical ways to read or speculate on all of these things (filmed in Nashville because he didn't have the connections in Xenia, Ohio for his story, hired first-time local actors to avoid paying them very well, etc.) but I don't know the truth about anything about this movie. I don't know communities like this, I'm not from an area like this. I don't know anyone from Xenia and the one girl I went on a few dates with from Nashville regretted that she moved to Seattle. In fact, the movie has a character for people like me. It's the hotshot journalist in the car who picks up those 3 girls looking for their cat Foot Foot and then tries to grope one of them. He's the wealthiest, most cosmopolitan looking guy in the whole film and what does he say? "Dumb hicks! It's nothing you don't know, you dumb hicks!"
It feels weird to feel compelled into researching questions like, "Do people from Xenia, Ohio like Gummo". Like I'm trying to access this movie from a different angle (the angle of someone who knows intimately whether its images are truthful or not) because from my own standpoint I just feel uncomfortable and gross. But then again, we're now living in the Hillbilly Elegy era of American politics, which is the latest distillation of the general American contempt for poor people everywhere. Maybe it's nice to feel a little fucked up instead of having to wade through all these disingenuous fascists pillaging the image of rural people in order to mask over their self-serving agendas.
So, while I would like to rationalize the images of this film in some way, I don't think I have enough information to really do so. All I'm left with is the pure images and my reactions and my emotions to them. Gummo really surprised me!
edit: reading a couple other reviews reminded me I never even touched on the queerness in this film, I saw it in my watch but didn't really focus on it. Note to self: second watch of this movie, try to suss out how queerness/transness works in this!

Princess Mononoke

2024-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki</li>
Released in 1997</li>
Runtime 134 minutes</li>
Watched at The Beacon Cinema</li>
Final feelings: beloved, complicated, enduring.</li> </ul>

"We're still alive." </blockquote>
Put this movie on the list of "Movies I will eventually write a big long essay about hopefully". For Princess Mononoke the subject will be, "this is a bad "environmentalist" movie but it's a good movie about human suffering and endurance, and also Ashitaka is trans". I think watching this subbed totally renewed my love for this movie in an unexpected way. Don't be fooled by my essay title, I have always loved this film since I first saw it as a little pre-teen, it was my first Ghibli film and I related so much to Ashitaka wanting to just hang out with the girls all the time and didn't understand why I found that so interesting (I learned eventually).
The thing with the sub is that while there are many performances/individual lines I love in the dub, on the whole I see now it is just plain overacted in a lot of ways? Like, the direction of that dub was playing up the comic relief nature of Kuroku, Gonza, and other characters that in the original is just not there as much. And also, the subs show how much more contextually Japanese this film is. The word "shogun" is nowhere to be found in the dub but it is right there towards the beginning of the movie in the subs. Maybe another hot take for the future essay but the dub of this movie has influenced the English-speaking world to think of this movie as far more universal than it actually is.
In my adult life I've struggled with understanding the "message" of this film because I just don't think in actuality the exploited victims of industrialization and modernity owe anything at all to the perpetrators of their suffering and annihilation. If it's an environmentalist story, it feels vaguely "both-sides" in nature, which is what will happen when you don't have a strong critique beyond pure environmentalism. But with this viewing in the sub, I was able to see it also as a story of enduring catastrophe, and for everyday people how valuable it is that they live. If you are alive, you can live to learn the truth about why you are cursed. If you are alive, you can live to help your neighbors and resist against the things that you know will bring forth continued destruction. "So you say you're under a curse? Well so what, so's the whole damn world", and Jiko's right for saying that. At the beginning, those words are dismissive, but at the end, they offer the chance for cooperation, improvement, and maybe even solidarity. As much of a liberal girlboss as Lady Eboshi is, I don't usually feel very convinced that her experience actually convinces her to change her worldview the way she seems to do at the end of this film. But maybe I can see it now as a change for the subjects of her rule, that they might live in a better way.
For me, I leave this screening of Princess Mononoke feeling determined. I've mentioned in the last couple of reviews that I recently had a mental breakdown/crisis, and it's been difficult in the months after I left my intensive therapy program to maintain stability. I wasn't expecting for this movie to teach me something about myself, I wasn't expecting to see myself in Ashitaka again like I did as a child, and this time I wasn't expecting to feel him speaking to me. "We're still alive". We're still alive, and that is everything.

The Cranes are Flying

2024-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov</li>
Released in 1957</li>
Runtime 97 minutes</li>
Watched at The Beacon Cinema</li>
Final feelings: Heartbreak healed with solidarity.</li> </ul>

1. Visual
I have mentioned this before in previous reviews, but I am a black-and-white film photographer on the side. I have very little experience in taking color photographs besides using a point-and-shoot to document travel and vacations and that sort of thing. When I am trying to do a more formal "project" with my photography, I have always chosen black-and-white, and the reason is because I find dealing with the dimension of color to be uniquely distracting and challenging (no shade to color photographers of both the analog and digital variety, what I'm describing is a limitation I have because I'm not very good at this sort of thing and not a normative statement on photography in general). Unintentionally, this practice has given me a really strong appreciation for black-and-white movies! I feel very in tune with the directorial vision of a film when it's in black-and-white. I notice interesting lighting more often and in more subtle parts of the film when I'm watching something in black-and-white, and I appreciate shot composition a lot more easily as well. Thus, I felt right at home here in The Cranes Are Flying. 
I think a particular favorite sequence of mine is in Siberia, when Veronika runs away from the hospital overwhelmed with guilt. There's these sequences where she's running alongside this railing and it creates this visual effect where the environment around her is frantically moving, and then it cuts and the camera is suddenly pointing down to her legs and you just see them flailing about as she sprints away, and then we cut back to the more observing camera angle where now there's dead winter trees meshed with the railing and then cut back to the angle where now it's looking straight up at Veronika's head instead of down to her feet, and you see the fingers of the dead branches above her head.
Another stunning visual, Mark carrying his prey over a floor covered in broken glass after surviving the air raid. The air raids in this movie are intense and horrific in different ways. The first time, we only see the aftermath as Veronika scrambles to go home to check on her parents, who stubbornly refuse to go to the subway shelter together. This is one of many moments where I was begging to know how they made this sequence. Did they build a set of a neighborhood somewhere and blow it up themselves for the shoot? It's haunting and dramatic and looked so real to me. Later on a second air raid happens, but this time it's Mark and Veronika who are inside, and what transpires is somehow even more sinister. I think there's something here about the value of closeness when it comes to depicting warfare and mass destruction and death. I've seen so many superhero movies where assumed-empty buildings are leveled on the streets and they have never had the kind of impact this movie will have on you when a screeching loud air siren blasts through the theater, and then the glass explodes on the windows and in the middle of it all a man is trying to coerce and overpower a woman while they both cling to each other to survive the blasts. 
Most impressively, however, is these shots in these huge, dense crowds with tons of people moving around frantically looking for their loved ones. I don't really know the details of making movies, but how do you even block these kinds of scenes? Maybe it's easier than it looks, I don't know, but the movie is book-ended by these two enormous scenes where at the beginning, a huge crowd of people is massed together trying to say goodbye to the young men who are about to march off to their likely deaths in war. At the end, we have a similar crowd greeting the victorious living as they return home from the front. In both cases, we follow one character, Veronika, as she weaves and wades through this mass of people to try to find her love, Boris. I think it's stunning when movies have this kind of visual poetry to their composition and to their sequencing, and it was something I was able to notice in this film.
2. Character
It makes sense that this movie is an adaptation of a play, and a good play at that. All the characters are immediately well-defined in multiple dimensions from their first introduction in the film. Boris and Veronika are lovers, the established nickname that Boris has for Veronika immediately tells us they are deep in their love, but the sneaking around at the beginning also tells us that something is holding them back from just getting married. Mark, Boris's cousin, is introduced to us when he goes to meet Veronika in Boris's place after the war and the impending draft is announced. He casually lays his hands on her, and with a little ego announces to her that he will be able to avoid the draft. Everything that follows between Boris, Veronika, and Mark is laid out in these introductory moments.
Perhaps the character with the most ambiguity is our dear Veronika. We know in the first 10 minutes that Boris works at the factory, we see how he is beloved by his comrades and has a strong sense of duty and loyalty. Mark is doomed to be despised by the audience as it is exceedingly obvious that he views Veronika as a prize to be claimed, with no respect for her as a person. Both these types can find a way through war. Boris volunteers for combat, and fulfills his duty to nation and people. Mark gets an exception (the details of which we will later learn about) and connives his way to coasting through at home. Veronika, however, is flitting and capricious and playful. She has a personality that seems unfitting for the hardship and danger of wartime. And this manifests in her missing both the goodbye dinner for Boris and missing him at the square to give him his goodbye present (a bunch of cookies and sweets, perhaps the reason why she was late to dinner in the first place). so we have our central drama and tension. Yes, the movie is about Veronika and her struggle between loyalty and resignation (represented by Boris and Mark, respectively), but it is primarily a movie about a woman's struggle with herself. Well, it's about that and one other thing...
3. Communism (and an argument with my dad)
Ok this is the part of the review essay where it gets maybe a little silly, but I'm going to have a pretend argument with my dad here. My dad is a Chinese immigrant from Communist China. He was born basically right at the end of the Cultural Revolution, and he left his family and his community to become a civil engineer in the United States and to raise his family here. I feel like maybe I'm going through a dad crisis or something with my movie watching because I've been thinking about him a lot with a lot of movies I've seen, but this one definitely brought up a specific thing from my dad, which is his extreme suspicion of all art that is produced by communist countries as being propaganda.
And I want to be clear, I don't agree with my dad on this thing (we disagree about most things). I think if movies from communist countries that have censorship boards and script oversight should be written off, so should basically every American made movie be written off when they fellate the U.S. Military so they can put big ol' airplanes and guns in their films. (This is why Moonfall was sick, because it was an english-language film where the Chinese Space Agency saves the day. That's the kind of selling out we like to see!) There is no pure or apolitical movie. Movies that come from a system of capitalism will normalize and uplift certain assumptions that are not universally neutral elements, but are actually intricately tied to the system itself. I don't want to write off any movies just because they aren't some fantasy of pure, unadulterated human expression. Unless the movie is made by 1 person who is directing, acting, and doing all the lighting and all the other jobs on set at the same time, no movie exists that wasn't part of a process of some kind of collective transformation, that probably involved some level of compromise.
4. Communism (and the ending of the movie)
So in the spirit of trying to understand this movie politically, let's contextualize it just a little bit. It stands to reason that The Cranes Are Flying was probably revelatory for an audience that was only a couple decades removed from the end of the Great Patriotic War, and only a few years removed from the death of Stalin himself. That little fact alone is probably critical to understand this film politically, as Stalin's death resulted in immediate changes to much of Soviet policy both foreign and domestic. I'm not a historian so I don't know enough details to make definitive claims in this review, but it would not surprise me if this movie was something that could not have existed in this form in the Stalinist regime (and I found a quote from Russian movie critic Victor Matizen that this film in particular annoyed Khrushchev because of Veronika's decision regarding Mark</a>).
All that is to say, I find the ending of this film to be profoundly beautiful. It's the part of the movie that reads as the most aspirational for the spirit of socialism. For the first 80ish minutes, our view of the conflict and turmoil is narrow and small. When houses are blown up, we are moved because it is Veronika's house, specifically, that has been reduced to rubble. When all the men are marching away to become soldiers in this horrible war, our feelings go towards the one woman who is so close to saying goodbye to one man as they are together surrounded by dozens of people crying, hugging, dancing, cheering, yelling, screaming, sobbing. When we hear about the hurt and rage of these injured soldiers who have come home to discover that their loves have betrayed them and married other men, we feel that sting with one woman in particular who is hearing their stories, whose sense of guilt is building and building and building.
But at the end, when the survivors jubilantly arrive home, and the woman of our attention is walking through throngs of people overjoyed with relief, herself tensed and wound like a spring, hoping for one last chance to see her beloved, a chasm opens underneath her. Boris is dead. Stepan, another soldier from the factory and a friend of Boris, is the one who resolves the mystery. She knows with certainty now. What was the point of her life, up to this point, then? What was the point of these optimistic flowers in her hand, mocking her for her arrogant belief that she might reunite with her love, like so many people around her?
But before she can run away to the oblivion she once wished for back in Siberia, she is interrupted by a speech from Stepan, vowing to the crowd (and to the audience) that they shall never forget the dead and never again allow such a grief as war. Afterwards, a friendly older man turns to her and asks, "Why stand there? Give your flowers to whomever they're for." Veronika's gaze turns to the people around her and suddenly our own consciousness opens up to the surrounding people.
She starts by handing a flower to the old man.
There is so much life that exists in the background of this very intimate character drama, and the brilliance here, the "revelation" that the curators at the Beacon Cinema might have been thinking of when they put this movie in the calendar to end their Pillars of Beacon program, is that you don't really understand it until this moment right at the end. Veronika's story suddenly becomes one stitch in a tapestry of suffering, hurt, loss, and finally, reconciliation. Nothing happened to her that wasn't also happening to women all around her, just like nothing happened to Boris that wasn't also happening to all the men around him. For the last hour I had been watching a movie about one woman and these two very different men in her life, and in the last minutes I felt as if the world opened to me. We are not just lonely ships at sea! We are not alone in our suffering! The death of a single man, the heartbreak of a single woman, they weigh on the whole community surrounding these wretches of fate. And thus our return home, our reprisal, and our reconnection must also be communal. 
At this point Veronika starts walking again, but this time to hand out flowers to all the people near her. People who are hugging and kissing and laughing with overflowing abundance are surprised with a gift, and they smile warmly in thanks. Veronika even starts to smile back. I remember thinking to myself, "oh, she is handing away her grief, one flower at a time." Then, someone calls out, and we finally see the cranes flying over Moscow. Boris’s father meets with Veronika and they look to the sky as the camera pans up, a mass of people all together in bittersweet happiness. Fade to black. Roll credits.
This movie is monumental. It so clearly demarcates a specific place and time and also transcends those boundaries with ease. I cried multiple times while watching this movie, and parts of this review made me cry to write! It’s a powerful story, with powerful images, with a deeply empathetic soul that reveals itself masterfully to you in its final 5 minutes. I loved this movie so very much.</div>

Exit Through the Gift Shop

2024-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Banksy</li>
Released in 2010</li>
Runtime 87 minutes</li>
Watched at a friend's house</li>
Final feelings: politically vacuous on every level.</li> </ul>
I have historically not been a huge documentary person, so I was pleasantly surprised by just how funny this was. Thierry suits the role of a bumbling clown falling up into success perfectly for this story. And yet, I am left with a nagging skepticism over so much of this movie. Firstly, the film never actually tries pin down why people make street art in any specific way. that's a critical omission for me, because as much as it plays up the increasing stakes of Banksy's artistic escapades, we never get any sense of why he's choosing his subject matter. Painting a window in the apartheid wall in the West Bank and setting up a blow-up doll of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner at Disneyland are deeply political statements, and yet this film doesn't really offer a hint of where anyone's politics lie. Maybe the art is meant to speak for itself, and I think it could when viewed simply as art. But we're watching a movie and we're hearing this voice-changed version of Banksy telling his story through much of this film. Instead of any artistic coherence, Banksy comes across as just an English thrill-seeking bloke who kinda fucks around with remixing whatever big-deal stuff he can think of. As a consequence, all this work becomes colored as just the vain expression of some guy, falling flat of the highs any individual art piece might elicit in isolation.
And then, in light of that, what do we make of Thierry's failing into success at the end? To me, it feels like a self-own on street art, at least through the lens of this movie. If even the most prolific and mysterious street artist is just kinda winging it and riffing on hardcore subject matter and putting it on the street with no coherent politics to articulate about why he makes the artistic choices he makes, how is Thierry doing anything different? Yes, the capture of street art in the art establishment is a reason why we should mock the art establishment and dismiss it as the money-laundering prestige farming bullshit that it is, but maybe street art (or the street art of this film) deserves some of our scrutiny as well.
Maybe I am predisposed to skepticism. I have never been particularly interested in Banksy's art. But I think this movie is just a little incoherent when viewed as a whole. Also, I kept thinking about F For Fake while watching this movie. It doesn't cover the exact same things, but I think it's a much better exploration of the commodification of art and the boundaries that exist to separate "real" art from "fake" art.

Funeral Parade of Roses

2024-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by</li>
Released in 1969</li>
Runtime 105 minutes</li>
Watched at The Grand Illusion Cinema</li>
Final feelings: a hot and sweaty masterpiece</li> </ul>
Hurriedly typing this out before bed. The theater was hot. It was too crowded to easily see the subtitles. The girls were out in force and I'm pretty sure there was a hot date happening in the row right in front of me. And after the credits started everyone dashed out of the theater to get some cool, fresh air. With all that being said, Funeral Parade of Roses is a masterpiece. Even as I craned my neck to read the subtitles at various points in the film, I could feel myself being pulled into the hedonistic magnetism of the imagery of this movie. By the end I was stunned and, if I could have, I would have screamed with a cheer.
I don't think I can actually write anything about this movie that the movie itself doesn't already tell you within its own text. I will say two things that I loved. First, the editing in this is mind-blowing. I was reading Eddie through the first half of the film as like, an interdimensional being, with the way that scenes would end with hazy looping camera movements and Eddie spinning, falling, turning, and then magically it would transition into another scene in another point in time. I did not know where things were going at that point and was just kinda experiencing the vibe and thought it was so visually interesting. I love the interviews interspersed through the film which offer like, a mid-movie spoiler that didn't make sense until the very end and that was insane to me. The editing in this thing is genius. One of my friends was watching with me and it was his second viewing and you could hear him going, "ohhhh" all through the beginning of the film.
Second, I really latched on to the monologue that is happening in the background of the art museum and how it relates to the final quote at the end of the film, of individualism as an act of pure negation. When we get to the art museum for the first time you see Eddie look at disturbing and grotesque art of people's faces while a voice tells you that everyone has an infinite layer of masks that make it impossible to objectively say when the mask ends and the person begins. And I kept thinking about this line as all the weird like, movie jokes and shenanigans happened through some very serious parts of this movie. This movie has complete clown energy through so many sequences, particularly violent ones, where the footage is sped up and goofy music is playing atop the visuals of people fighting with exaggerated movements. In those moments I thought, "oh this isn't a movie that's showing me what's really happening, I'm seeing a 'mask' of it, a layer of abstraction on top that is the thing called a 'movie'". I have no idea if I am articulating in a way that makes sense, I guess I just was really moved by that part in the art museum and kept thinking about it.
When the closing moments of the film revealed the mid-movie spoiler to me I was blown away. I feel like you could write a whole book on the ways transness elevates the source material of this film and the cultural and political commentary that it sits upon. This movie is magic. It expanded my whole worldview and understanding of what a movie could be. It's so damn ambitious. The blunt rotation in this is immaculate. Everything is about the mask. An insane movie to watch on the same day I applied to an intensive outpatient therapy program. I cannot wait to watch this again, but next time I will turn on my air conditioning.

A Brighter Summer Day

2024-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Edward Yang</li>
Released in 1991</li>
Runtime 237 minutes</li>
Watched at The Siff Egyptian</li>
Final feelings: dense with life, expansive in image, worth every second of its runtime.</li> </ul>
A movie that left me breathless and stunned. I am a believer in the power of the longer runtime movie because of Edward Yang. He is able to work with so many threads and so many characters because he is allowed to spend all the necessary time it takes to do these stories justice. Everything is densely arranged, so much so that I worried through the first hour that I wouldn't be able to keep up with such a large cast of children. By the end, I truly felt intimately connected to their stories and their environment, which made this movie's astonishing conclusion all the more heart breaking and jarring.
I keep thinking about how this movie feels intricately tied to empire and militarism. Yang sets the movie in an environment where the adults all feel a deep sense of insecurity and anxiety about their future and their safety. By arranging their communities according to their fears, these anxieties and pressures are foisted upon the children, who then replicate that violence and repression in their own ways. Throughout this movie, tanks roll through like taxi cabs might in other films. Children play with enough guns to make an American feel at home, they talk about atomic bombs and Disneyland, the boys' school uniforms look like military fatigues. The main character learns to imitate the cowboy heroes of American western movies and pretends to quick draw his pistol to shoot his teachers. Children are listening to Elvis and rock-and-roll music and are going crazy for these cultural signifiers of a growing relationship with the West. The eldest daughter becomes a target for jealousy in the neighborhood because she is accepted into a top-tier college that will allow her to go to America for work and study. For 4 hours, I was immersed in a community that was deeply in conflict with itself and also so tied to the American empire in which I live. It's one thing to know this relationship between America and Taiwan historically, it's another to see it so honestly depicted on-screen.
The tension that builds inside of such a setting comes at you so fast it feels, at times, like a nightmare. But something that I also felt in Yi Yi is that Edward Yang refuses to escape to the fantastical, he insists on contextualizing drama, violence, and conflict into the mundane everydayness of being. There is a massacre that happens in this movie and how do the characters involved deal with that trauma afterwards? By going to school the next day. It seemed so surprising and tonally abrupt in the moment, but aren't we all everyday existing in the mundane violence that is happening all around us? It is upsetting in A Brighter Summer Day because it calls our entire way of relating to our communities into question.
A movie about child gangs and youth delinquency is not normally in my wheelhouse. I had doubts about my interest as it dawned on me that I was watching a 4 hour long drama about boys in high school. After finishing this film, it became abundantly clear that this movie was about so much more. An excellent piece of cinema, of history, and of art. I will be thinking about this movie for a long time.
More specific thoughts that are probably going to spoil more details:
There is a shot in this movie that I am still thinking about, when the main character Si'r (si er, literally 4th child) is walking to the school infirmary because he knows Ming, the girl he has been crushing on, will be there. As the two children approach, the camera pans over to a close up of the door in the doorframe instead of at the children. For the entire conversation these two children have in this tender moment, you only see 2 faint shadows in the texture and reflection of the glossy paint on the door. You see so much so clearly in this movie, so the fact that these kids get privacy from us, the viewer, in this moment, feels haunting.
As a prison abolitionist, a movie like this makes me feel so much grief and also thankful in a way that it takes so much time to fully establish how a violent and repressive environment guides its children to violence. You see so clearly how Si'r is trying to find his place in the world. The movie tells you right at the beginning that children organize themselves into gangs to provide a sense of stability and security in such an uncertain atmosphere. Si'r is learning through the whole movie about what it means to be a man, to take responsibility, to be empowered to make decisions about his own life. He is learning through his teachers the power of violent authority over others. He is learning through his friends the social power one can gain from mischief and aggression. He watches his father fail to argue on his behalf and violently erupt at his teachers which leads to his first demerit from school. He is learning from his peers about the desirability of girls and how a strong man ought to relate to them.
And let's talk about the women and girls in this movie! Both girls that Si'r tries to talk into going out with him tell him off for his selfish and arrogant idea that he is noble enough to change them! Young girls in this movie are shown having their own sexuality, their own desires, their own autonomy, and also their own insecurities and fears that make them selfish and capricious. If the boys in this movie are surrounded by a kind of toxic and violent masculinity, the girls do not idly accept that reality but move through it, testing its boundaries and trying to get what they want out of it.
There is much less focus on the adult relationships in this movie than compared to Yi Yi, but even still, there is time given to Si'r's parents as they try to reconcile their different opinions about work and receiving favors from others around them. Si'r's mother, in particular, expresses her desire to have a kickback for her benefit instead of it always being about her husband. She left a teaching certificate behind in the mainland when fleeing to Taiwan, and is resentful that her husband won't include her work in the negotiations with a corrupt family friend who is also a political higher up.
There's so much going on in this movie, all these threads of people with their own desires and wants and resentments and regrets. Edward Yang is not content to make an extra of a single person in his films, it seems. I haven't even talked about Cat, the young singer boy with musical ambition and deep loyalty to his friends, or Little Ma, the son of a general who's family is so wealthy and powerful he just brings a sword to school sometimes because he knows he can't really be punished. There are no throwaway characters here, just human beings colliding into each other, often violently, every single day. How they reconcile and come back together when tragedy and loss strikes is what makes A Brighter Summer Day so incredible. While I do still like Yi Yi more (mostly for personal reasons), this movie is brilliant and epic and awe inspiring. I am so deeply thankful for a chance to see it.

Dune Part Two

2024-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Denis Villeneuve</li>
Released in 2024</li>
Runtime 167 minutes</li>
Watched at Pacific Place</li>
Final feelings: I just don't care about this.</li> </ul>
Felt exhausted after this film so for a review, here's a transcription of my text messages to my movie group chat that I wrote after seeing this:
I left the theater feeling really tired and exhausted. It's not a particularly beautiful movie to watch. I feel like the only thing i could get out of a movie like this is just to admire how big it all feels. That's what I heard other people talking about as I left the theater.
But I don't care about magnitude inherently, a movie this long (5 hours long if you count both movies together) needs to say something to me and i just don't think it's saying anything. People say that dune is a warning against the Messianic story of fanatical religious belief. Frank Herbert was so frustrated that people didn't get that from his book he wrote a sequel that should have just been titled Paul Atreides is the bad guy.
I don't think this movie adequately conveys that meaning either. And at that point, maybe we should question if this kind of story is really an effective way to warn against white saviorism and that kind of message.
Like, in this movie, I'm supposed to notice that Chani is skeptical of Paul's ascendance and she is supposed to act as the voice of reason against him. Which is great. Love that for Chani. I love that of the millions of Fremen on dune, there is exactly 1 who is willing to voice any resistance to the liberatory power of some white boy heir to multiple houses of power. That makes me feel like this is really a story about why it's bad to believe in a Messiah.
Idk I'm being flippant, but it just felt like. So much movie to say so little. At least they could have lit the damn thing better so I could see more shit.
-end message
Some additional thoughts: I really turned against this movie in that scene where gurney halleck gets his glorious revenge kill against the harkonenn guy played by Dave Bautista. Once he showed back up it became clear what the actual focus of this movie was, which is using the millions of brown Arab-coded characters as cool set dressing for a story of spurned and betrayed white people. The fremen have just as legitimate a reason to be motivated by vengeance and to seek to end the scourge of imperial control on their planet as the remnants of house atreides, but of course they ultimately become anonymized for Josh Brolin's star power.
Another thought, I have read dune before and remembered loving it when I was younger. Would I feel the same sort of critical feelings for the book upon re-read? I'm not sure. I think there is a specific way the movie feels like it knows about some of the criticisms of the source material but doesn't have the courage to actually make an artistic stance in any direction with respect to that criticism. I remember loving the world building of dune so much that I wanted to write my own worlds and stories, I felt deeply inspired by Frank Herbert's work. I feel no such inspiration from these movies and have struggled to articulate exactly why but I guess it's related to just how sterile and precise these movies feel. Anyway, I really gave dune a chance, we'll see if I have the endurance necessary to watch part 3 when it comes out.

Crash

2024-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by David Cronenberg</li>
Released in 1996</li>
Runtime 100 minutes</li>
Watched at a friend's</li> </ul>
Second time watching</a>, still great, also hilarious how much more i focused on/related to Vaughn as a character once I realized his workshop in his lil kink house is a darkroom and finally saw him for what he is: a film photographer who has a project idea that's actually good. Can't wait to see your portfolio at the next gallery day at the photo center, buddy.

Dune

2024-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Denis Villeneuve</li>
Released in 2021</li>
Runtime 155 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: frustratingly incomplete</li> </ul>
A visual spectacle, even when watching at home. felt like watching the end point (the first half of the end point, at least) of the cultural desire to slavishly obsess over how close to the original source material movie adaptations of books should be. (I guess on the other hand if you want complete movies nominally about dune you already have like 2 to see). I just think it's not really a whole movie by itself, and I was only able to watch it and not be annoyed by that fact because part 2 is already out. Also, for how groundbreaking this book was for science fiction, there are some tropes in this movie that are truly so tired to see now. I laughed at Dr. Yueh's Chinese existing in the same universe as all these fantasy languages. Did the Communist party of China get wiped out by the sardaukar as well?
Maybe that's nitpicky, idk, I loved the world building in dune the first time I read it and have slowly soured on the specifics of it's racial worldview since then, and I think I'm carrying that into seeing the movie as well. And yet, I put my knitting down to focus on watching this and now I want to see the rest of it, so I'll probably go to a big theater to do so at some point. Maybe what I wish is that they had been brave and put a 5 hour movie with an intermission into theaters instead.

The Draughtman's Contract

2024-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Peter Greenaway</li>
Released in 1982</li>
Runtime 108 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: Peter Greenaway is a little freak.</li> </ul>
I have now seen 2 Peter Greenaway movies and I think I can safely conclude he is a little freak. Another well-constructed visual artwork that I'm sure upon rewatch would readily reveal it's clues and secrets that the characters are only slowly discussing and understanding for themselves. There is a slow tension that builds in the first half that took a while to notice, and I think I lost some of the threads at the end to understand why the ending happened (I had to read about it in a Wikipedia article afterwards). A much more subtle movie than The Cook. Crazy that this was produced for British television!
The ending monologue by Janet Suzman is just superb in my opinion, at that moment I really believed Mr. Neville was going to die by the hands of the women he had been bedding and manipulating for the whole film. It turns out, much like in The Cook, that Peter Greenway is more interested in indirection and more constructed endings for his characters.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

2023-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Peter Greenaway</li>
Released in 1989</li>
Runtime 124 minutes</li>
Watched at home</li>
Final feelings: blew me away!</li> </ul>
Took a few days to digest this one, just a perfectly constructed visual and narrative experience. A movie like this immediately gives the viewer the impression that every single piece was meticulously constructed and justified. Everything has so much weight, so much intention, from the colors of the lighting and outfits to each crude and barbarous joke, the deliberate camera movements, THE PAINTING in the background of the restaurant that always gives the uncanny feeling of judgement, judgement from the ghosts of what we might now call elegance, or class, or distinction, which then become the members of the jury by which Spica is executed at the very end! By that point, my jaw dropped and I felt sick to my stomach. Disgusting, grotesque, beautiful, haunting, I just want to watch this movie for the first time again and again!
Random thoughts: I feel like I have seen lots of movies try to capture the alien culture of the upper class, to varying effect. One movie I was reminded of while watching this was Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which, with my modern eye, felt like a pretty shallow application of the "rich people do weirdo shit that's vaguely old world in origin in exclusive clubs together and its all sexual debauchery" aesthetic. The Cook et al., on the other hand, felt so much more graphic and grounded and it hit me so much harder for that reason. Maybe its just that I see a very horizontal set of an old style French kitchen and I kinda lose my shit.
Something I am still thinking about in this movie is how rage and anger flows through every fiber of the thing, like if I had it on a VHS cassette it would burn my hands to pick it up. Obviously, Spica is a raging abuser who needs no elaboration, his anger is the clearest and drives every other part of this story like a bloody, beating heart. Georgina (I almost typed Georgie, I'm so sorry) carries a deeply sequestered and cold resentment that painfully contrasts with the few instances of agency she gets to have as a character. But something I am starting to appreciate more is the hate and spitefulness the cook holds for his overlord. The futility of his situation leads him to feel so disconnected from his craft that he does nothing to oppose Spica even as his behavior directly harms the civilian bystanders (side note: Yelp would have destroyed this man's career). He merely offers empty verbal jabs, content to simply hold the thief in contempt, spurning the safety of the actual guests who ought to be his whole reason for existing. In this way, Georgina and Michael become a small act of resistance for the whole kitchen, which leads to what might otherwise be a comical hide-and-seek rom-com situation.
It all works because of how enormous and gargantuan a villain Spica is. In a vacuum, all the truly villainous shit this guy does might seem excessive to the point of pornographic in a movie (it had an X rating in the US? How did Americans even watch this thing at its release?), but having seen it, I don't think the final bite would taste as sweet without all the build up leading up to it.

Assassination Nation

2023-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Sam Levinson</li>
Released in 2018</li>
Runtime 108 minutes</li>
Watched at a friend's house</li>
Final Feelings: loud, stylish, unsubtle, visceral.</li> </ul>
Instantly iconic, with political salience to add some real substance to the style. Feels like the perfect encapsulation of the political wasteland that liberals were in post 2016 election. This movie incorporates so many themes that I just love to see in movies, the spectrum between nihilism and resilience that young people experience, the ways reactionary politics projects adult insecurities onto children, the inherent violence bubbling beneath the surface of American suburban life, and the ways that modern surveillance and technology exacerbate all of these things in uniquely hellish ways.
In the moment I felt the ending monologue was maybe a little preachy, but the real ending is the high school marching band from that "other school in the other town" that the principal was talking about in his speech, performing in the fucked up streets, wading through the mess that has been bestowed upon them. An excellent film!

The Thing

2023-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by John Carpenter</li>
Released in 1982</li>
Runtime 109 minutes</li>
Watched at a friend's house</li>
Final feelings: so goopy, so tight, so good!</li> </ul>
I do think I still like They Live more. But, this movie is fucking amazing. It's also so much fun to watch with other people who haven't seen it before to start the timer on how long it takes before they realize that it's amongus. And the effects in this movie are so good, I love like 80s meat and flesh effects, just so goopy and stringy and textured.
Now that I think about it, I really appreciate how constrained this movie is compared to something like They Live. Just the right amount of science-fiction exposition and speculation, then immediately into the consequences. I'm sure I will rewatch this movie again someday.

Barbie

2023-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Greta Gerwig</li>
Released in 2023</li>
Runtime 114 minutes</li>
Watched at The AMC Pacific Place 11</li>
Final feelings: white feminism super bowl ad</li> </ul>
Fun, visually appealing, stylish. And yet, I don't think this movie can escape the gravitational pull of the corporate white feminism that it at least partially lampoons/spoofs in the beginning. From the product placement, which is sometimes relatively subtle (the Birkenstock as a representation of enlightened femininity) and other times as loud as a car horn (Hello Chevrolet I see you have a new electric SUV to advertise) (seriously that car chase ended with a pull up that was only missing a giant "0% APR Financing" text on the screen), to the incoherent mess that is Will Ferrell's character and the executive board as a whole, I don't think Barbie has anything particularly revolutionary to say about womanhood or femininity that hasn't already been said in a few well-made, inclusive, modern TV commercials. In particular, I am pretty tired of white feminism's obsession with "voting" as the locus for all radical political engagement.
BUT, for a billion dollar summer blockbuster type film, it is definitely weirder than most, which makes it novel, which meant I had a fun time watching it.

Belle

2023-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Mamoru Hosoda</li>
Released in 2021</li>
Runtime 121 minutes</li>
Watched at a friend's house</li>
Final feelings: too precious, too boring</li> </ul>
Watched this for the grand return of my old anime club. Not good. It's too precious and too boring, and I hate stories where people are like super strong because they are abused or traumatized. Maybe the songs would be better in Japanese? But idk, not a fan.

Juno

2023-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Jason Reitman</li>
Released in 2007</li>
Runtime 96 minutes</li>
Watched at a friend's house</li>
Final feelings: "in an ideal world, there wouldn't be any abortions" as a movie</li> </ul>
what a frustrating movie. Frustrating because watching it now reminds me of how much of a stranglehold this had on me and everyone else in my grade when it came out. Frustrating because of how badly I feel the dialogue and aesthetic has aged. But mostly, frustrating because only now upon a rewatch in my 30s can I see how deeply infantilizing and conservative this movie really is. There is so much to dislike here. I can't speak for pregnant people as I cannot get pregnant, but I am reminded of a friend who once told me during her second pregnancy that going through the process was so challenging and scrutinizing that it radicalized her even more to believe that no one, nobody, should ever have to experience it unless they were 100% certain they knew exactly what it would entail and how much it would change their body and their life. And Juno conveniently never shows any of those critical elements of this life-changing process. Instead, it opts to simplify getting pregnant as getting fatter, larger, and more noticeable, which by the way any fat kid in high school could tell you about what that's like. At the same time, the abortion clinic protestor is simplified into one little naive Asian girl who is just earnestly trying to save lives outside a clinic that is staffed by people who are so dismissive and flippant about pregnancy that it borders on caricature.
It's all so convenient, isn't it? It truly reads like the perfect liberal ideal of what society ought to be like. Yes, of course, we are pro choice for all the poor sluts who make huge mistakes and just have no other choice but to become pregnant at an inconvenient time and therefore abort, yes that's obviously a woman's choice, but in the ideal world no one would ever get abortions, and if the protesters would just be a little less fanatical and mean about it all, wouldn't we all be for the better? It's the perfect manifestation of the liberal ideal that politeness and quiet, individualized suffering is the most virtuous thing we can have. Everything is flattened into the smallest, most chibi, most twee version of itself so that it can make sense for people to make unhinged quips and string along random words like an early Reddit post. Half this dialogue would fit perfectly on an Advice Animal meme.
And then as a consequence of this fateful first framing in the film, everything cascades into a heap of disappointing, unfinished, half-baked goo. Nobody talks to Juno like a fucking human being in this movie who has any agency! Even at the very end, her dad is comforting her after the birth and says, "next time you'll be here on your terms", as if the initial choice to keep the baby wasn't on her terms. But how could this be, if we are to believe that she chose to keep the kid, that she had a change of heart of her own free will, that the idea to abort was just as much of an external pressure as the idea of keeping the baby? Surely this cannot be!
But the thing is, the whole movie Juno dissociates from her body as she becomes more and more visibly pregnant. She becomes upset at Bleeker for taking someone else to Prom and feeling abandonded which is true! How did Michael Cera get any notoriety for this film when he is there for maybe 6% of it? He's not even the father and he is so absent, he has so little to do with anything in Juno's life beyond insemination and at the end, Juno apologies to him for getting upset.
It is honestly astounding to watch a movie where the manic pixie dream girl is the main character, gets impregnated, and still has seemingly no opportunity written for her to make any decisions about her life that are convincingly from her and about her. Even when she is being groomed, on screen, by Jason Bateman's character, there is 0 reckoning about that by her or anyone else in this movie. Nobody else knows that an adult, married man who was about to receive the baby from inside her body, just told her he was going to get a divorce and run away and thought that she would be excited because it would mean more fun hip hangout time with cute older man. It may seem like Juno is shaken up by this, but the thing she is most interested in afterwards is not the horrifying experience we all just witnessed her go through, but the sanctity and cohesion of Vanessa and Mark's marriage! She asks her dad to convince her that people can stay together forever, but what she needs to ask is why did this older man take advantage of me and try to get intimate with me, a pregnant 16 year old carrying ostensibly his baby.
By the end I regretfully have to believe the dad that none of this was on Juno's terms. And that sucks.
This is all why Allison Janney's character is the moral center here for me. She is the only character who sticks up for Juno when people are judging her, she talks back at the ultrasound tech, she is straight up with Juno about how weird and inappropriate it is to spend an hour with a married man while his wife is not home as a 16 year old girl, she is the character I am most convinced actually has Juno's best interests at heart (I love you JK Simmons but that last line from you was the final nail in the coffin for me).
At this point, I don't know if its possible for people to try to write movies for 16 year old girls and succeed. We don't even need to talk about Nicholas Winding-Refn's The Neon Demon (yes he said in an interview that he made Neon Demon because he felt it was time for him to make a movie for 16 year old girls), but Juno I had higher expectations (hopes?) for. But of course in our culture young girls are a demographic that we feel the most paternalistic to, their innocence and purity is used as both a bludgeon and a shield when convenient for conservative and reactionary ideas, while the actual needs of young girls are constantly ignored, belittled, and shamed, especially with respect to their sexuality. Of course the movie with the greatest impact in my lifetime depicting teen pregnancy was a fantasy, where pregnant girls are tough little soldiers that are trying desperately to selflessly make the best decision for everyone else, putting their own bodies on the line for wealthy suburbanites to maintain their quirky tomboyish charm.
Maybe the only redeeming or interesting thing about this movie is that Elliot Page's coming-out as a trans man has recontextualized this movie from the future. All of Juno's disassociation with her body, her failure to understand her own girl-ness, takes on a new meaning today. I can't say I have seen a lot of movies that have that kind of effect. But the foundation for this film is too weak to make those parts anything more than a passing note in an otherwise frustrating and upsetting film.

Crash

2023-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by David Cronenberg</li>
Released in 1996</li>
Runtime 100 minutes</li>
Watched at a friend's</li>
Final feelings: North America's violent infrastructure distilled</li> </ul>
Good God I love this movie. Time for my way-too-serious analysis of a film that was pitched to me as "the one where those people can only cum during life-threatening car accidents".
Firstly, this is a movie that could only be made in north America. As the public consciousness about the failings of car-dependent infrastructure grows, a movie like Crash feels like a sign from the 90's we didn't know we needed. Could you imagine the Dutch making their version of this film with people getting off from bicycle crashes? You can only make this movie when you live in a society that completely numbs itself to the insanity that is not just being surrounded constantly by cars, but accepting the mass death and injury that comes with completely orienting everything about ourselves in the name of the personal vehicle.
I love, for example, that the movie starts out with Catherine getting hot and horny during her flight class at the airport, and that planes are lightly sprinkled into this movie. The fact that so much happens on the way to the airport, coming back from the airport, literally inside the airport garage, but importantly, always in a car. Even when we fly, we are obsessed with cars. Our airports are surrounded by giant parking lots to park cars, parking lots to rent cars, shuttles to take us from one lot to another that are also cars. Of course a movie about the alien sexualization of car accidents would at least partially center an airport!
We have to drive everywhere, everything is about the car, we fetishize cars, we sell cars by appealing to sex, masculinity, desire. Why do you think the most common new car purchase today is a light truck/SUV that stands 8' tall, with a square front grill that emulates police and military vehicles? Crash is absurd and extreme, yes, but it gets to that point through the backdrop of the absurd and extreme lengths we go to connecting all our mobility and independence to the car. I haven't seen other Cronenberg films but I do suspect that much of the transgressiveness of Crash comes from the seeming mundanity of its origin.
This was a fucking insane movie to watch the day after I almost got into a car accident. I have a dashcam, and I ended up rewatching the footage multiple times over the next day and a half. Something about the thing James says, about the relief you feel after all the car safety stuff actually comes true and you actually get into an accident, really struck me. I found myself noticing way more just how many cars there were around me right after my near-accident situation, much like how James obsesses over highway traffic on his balcony, wondering if it's real or imaginary that the traffic seems much worse. And just like James, while I abstained from driving for a day after my near-miss with injury, I found myself getting into a car much sooner than I thought (or wanted). That's just how our lives work. We have to be in a car.
Then there's the allegory within the finger fucking and cock stroking of Crash that feels very related to bodily transformation-qua-disfigurement, and specifically, feels very relatable as a trans person (maybe this is a stretch but I don't care this is what I was thinking during and after the movie!!). The characters in this movie deliberately injure themselves, break themselves, and take pleasure in their scars and deformities in their bodies, and find a perverse and freeing pleasure out of pushing their bodies further and further, even towards death (this reminds me a lot of Lee Edelman's book, "No Future" as it pertains to futurism and its failure as a framework specifically from a queer and gay perspective, but I am not a queer theorist and only have surface level understanding so I am probably inappropriately connecting these two things). As the magnitude of the accidents increase, more and more collateral damage is incurred to the cars around them. This violent assertion of self (destruction), of fulfilling the self as far as possible, even if it means death, even if it means total annihilation of the world around you, makes me think of every trans person who gets their phalloplasty and vaginoplasty and orchiectomy knowing the risks such procedures might entail, while transphobes scream about how we are mutilating and destroying our bodies, destroying our ability to secure a next generation, destroying the very foundation of our society that requires fixed gender binaries.
Will I start pursuing car accidents to get that sweet, sweet orgasmic release? No. I hate cars, and I'm terrified of them, and I resent that I have to drive them. But Crash was, for me, a radical expression of self that surprised me in its relatability to my own personal experience, wrapped up in a big, absurd orgy in the backseat of a car. Extreme, yes, but worth watching.

Tár

2023-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

At a glance...

Directed by Todd Field</li>
Released in 2022</li>
Runtime 158 minutes</li>
Watched at The Regal Meridian 16</li>
Final feelings: a comedy where I'm the punchline!</li> </ul>
I don't think I laughed through the whole movie and then the last 60 seconds were so funny I think this film might be a comedy???
That's mostly a joke, Tár covers a lot of dark themes and Cate Blanchett delivers an all-time great performance that made me feel truly disgusted for 2 1/2 hours. Maybe that's why I laughed so hard at the end, I felt like, "oh yeah, she deserves this".
But then I think about the messaging in the film around music and musicality. The fact that Lydia starts rehearsal at her new job with the same question of interpretation, and that she still gets nervous before her cue to enter the stage. The conversation at the beginning of the film between Lydia and Max about how to value music from people we can more openly say are despicable, and the surrounding question of when do we get to say no to art from bad people. This obsession with "selection", in the players, the score, the interpretation, that (in my own lived experience, limited as that may be) is so essential to the power dynamic of the world of classical "art music".
It all comes together at the end like a big joke, like the movie is laughing at me laughing at the movie. I instinctively give Mahler, Bach, Elgar respect, by listening with intention, allowing myself to be moved by the snippets of music shown in the film (sidenote: I was a very bad cellist in the youth symphony as a kid, and I will never hear the Elgar cello concerto the same ever again). My dismissive reaction to the music from the monster hunter video game franchise is so predictable, the movie doesn't even bother to give me a dramatic cut to Tár gesticulating seriously with swelling strings in the background, even though I've played monster hunter and I know there are parts of the soundtrack that could fit that shot. I just think it's funny that the conductor and the musicians all take their work seriously in both cases, and they each garner enthusiastic audiences, but I don't give equal, or even comparable respect.
And then you think about how alien the conversations in the movie between all the classical music people are. How everyone around Tár is willing to look the other way or enable her abusive behavior, how they all still want to be chummy with her. No one sitting next to Lydia in the board rooms and fancy restaurants is innocent.
All these details highlight how niche this movie is, and within its niche it's yet even more niche, even to someone like me, who has spent at least a lot of my childhood involved in the world of classical music performance. I guess my point is that this is a movie that points a deeply sardonic light at our way of thinking about music, especially classical music, especially among people who have a more serious relationship with classic music.
(Another sidenote: I'm reminded of an episode of This American Life where they interview members of the pit orchestra for phantom of the opera. The indifference and disdain many of these musicians feel towards the music they perform for thousands of people a week is shocking to hear.)
Finally, Tár herself feels like a joke of a character. She is so weighted with shame and fear that she can't sleep, she uses her status and power to take advantage of people in a way only an experienced abuser can, but she's also a germaphobe, insistent on keeping up the illusion of cleanliness and purity, and that need brings her a great deal of anxiety. She's a caring parent, although she is way too willing to cross the line and literally intimidate a child at school, again, like only an abuser could. At the end we even learn her birth name is Linda, making her own professional alias seem like a complete fabrication.
As I watch her sit in front of the old family TV, wearing a childhood medal and crying while watching a VHS of Leonard Bernstein (probably the only way she could have "studied" under him), I feel an inkling of pity for her. Lenny waxes poetic about the way music can make you feel, and she cries because she so wants to live in the fantasy that those feelings are the only things that matter, and that all of this will go away because she can make great music. Maybe the fact that she can still get a job and work with musicians and play to a full audience at the end means, on some level, she's right.