4v291o

Watched on Friday May 23, 2025.

The people of Palestine must be freed.

Watched on Thursday May 22, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 16, 2025.

Watched on Monday May 12, 2025.

Certainly it hasn't half the venom of Nichols' bracing spectacle of social violence from which Leigh pulls so blatantly (there is even a reference made to Taylor and Burton's failed marriage at one point), but this is deliciously awful all in its own right. The dramatis personae is just so immediately gruesome: Beverly is teeth-grittingly, throat-slittingly priggish-pushy-posh; Laurence is at once perennially absent and homicidally exasperated; Angela is no less cloying in her domineering of Tony than she is in her overeager submission to the whims of Beverly and Laurence; Tony is somehow even more terminally not-there and totally disgusted by the world around him than Laurence is; Sue, poor Sue, is so sad, and so sickly, and would love for nothing more in the world than to indulge in the fantastic pleasure of Leaving the Room—one struggles to conceive of a world in which at least one of these poor sods didn't wind up dead by the party's end. This is the one thing that I would argue Abigail's Party has over Virginia Woolf: the domestic entropy does not erupt into great personal reckonings or revelations, as in the Nichols film, but into real, palpable, observable death. What might one watch such a film for if not the image of the corpse of the bourgeois host furnishing his own living room?

...And I hope that you dream about me. And I hope that you wake up screaming.

Immensely pleasurable, in the very same perverse sense as Lolita: we are privy to the infinite joys of the English language (in a tongue perhaps 30% more Joycean than Nabokov's, and no less entrancing) as spewed from the mouth of an incorrigible pseud rapist, and we are offered also the awful, abjectly juvenile enjoyment to be found in the imparting of moral judgement upon the worst people in the world. It helps a good deal that Thewlis gives in Naked what has got to be one of the greatest performances I have ever seen—his delivery of words like "prophesying" and "infinitum" must be heard to be believed—and that the film plays the old Alphaville trick on you in which the city it takes place in looks to be some sort of alien denatured Hell-world when it is in truth just a regular European metropolitan area. Above all else, I am impressed by Leigh's imagining of a guy even worse than Johnny in the "Landlord from Hell;" if ever Satan himself made an in-the-flesh appearance on celluloid, that surely must've been him.

Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 8, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 3, 2025.

There are, in my mind, four major films in Lewis' body of work as director. The Ladies Man offers a total view into the inner-workings of his mind - it's Jerry at his most psychologically tortured, and also at his most truthful. The Patsy is a moving testament to, at the risk of sounding trite or sentimental, Jerry's humanity; the façade is broken down, and so it is him at his most emotionally vulnerable. Three on a Couch prefigures the schizophrenic nervousness present in all of the films he would make afterwards while still maintaining a compelling linear structure; just for the balancing act he manages to pull off, it is him at his most impressive. Smorgasbord, though, prioritizes above Freudian intrigue and affective character work and white-knuckle-comedy-of-errors moviemaking The Gag; what else? It is Jerry at his funniest (in fact, I do not think I have ever laughed harder at any other movie), and therefore at his very best.

Watched on Saturday May 3, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 2, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday April 29, 2025.

Watched on Monday April 28, 2025.

In the apparently pivotal moment that Neil decides to go to the hotel, there is no literal fork in the road presented, no expository monologuing, nor any attention paid especially to it by the camera or the score; there is only a cursory shot of the vehicle swerving. I imagine this is because there was never a world in which Neil didn't make that decision. Mann is an artist of commendable economic sensibility; to lay formal or symbolic emphasis on the fatalistically inevitable would be to cheapen the picture, and Mann knows this, so he doesn't. One wishes more of his contemporaries would follow suit.

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

In William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, a work of literature that was produced nearly one-hundred years ago, Addie Bundren, wife to Anse Bundren and mother to a bevy of young, is dead. Her final wish is to be buried in a small Mississippi town called Jefferson, forty miles away from the roof to which the buzzards flocked when she breathed her last. Her family is tasked with this, and so they embark on the pilgrimage, bringing Addie's rapidly decomposing body along in a casket fashioned by one of her own, on a poorly-assembled wagon pulled by limp-legged mules. Somewhat predictably, a great many problems emerge along the way: the Bundrens engage in battles against the elements, in battles against God, and in battles against themselves, but they never falter in their determination; they soldier on in Addie's name—or perhaps in the name of distracting themselves; one cannot be entirely sure.

In Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, a work of literature that was produced just shy of sixty years ago, Pierce Inverarity, prominent California real estate mogul, is dead. He has bequeathed unto Oedipa Maas the task of executing his will; their relationship, as far as we are given to understand, does not extend much beyond a single phone call shared between them one year prior. She does not oblige him, and instead jumps into a conspiracy-rich rabbit hole that takes her all around the Southern California area, driving first from NorCal to the fictional city of San Narciso. She sublimates any and all depth of feeling emergent from having been left the decided dishonor of executing the will of an obscenely wealthy semi-stranger into a great big wild goose chase, through which she ends up being acquainted with a number of truths about the precise directions in which the world ebbs and flows (and the forces that compel such movement), but even more inquiries.

In David Cronenberg's The Shrouds, a film produced last year, Becca Relikh, wife to Karsh, is dead. Karsh, the Tesla-driving widower, is the head of the Toronto-based GraveTech, a burgeoning fascination of the tech world that makes capable the bereaved of observing the decay of their dead in real time via three-dimensional models of their skeletons displayed crudely on small screens attached to the headstones. Becca is buried underneath one of these headstones, and Karsh, still deep in the throes of grief, checks in on her excessively. He is in point of fact desperately, hopelessly, unhealthily obsessed with her (her body, more accurately, but this is a distinction germane to another conversation); his dentist tells him that his teeth are rotting because of his inability to process Becca's death. His stagnant grieving is interrupted by an act of vandalism carried out against one of the GraveTech gravesites: nine of the gravestones have been knocked over. When he learns of this, he refuses to lay eyes on the graves for fear of what he might find. He is eventually convinced by his ex-brother-in-law to attend the site in person, and so his worst fears are confirmed: Becca's grave is one of the defaced, and so he can no longer find solace in the image of her decaying body, for the screen has been broken, and the wires detached. He does his very best to shy away from the web of deceit and international intrigue being spun all around him in the following hours and days, electing often to duck away into the shadows of his notably modern and more notably sin-ugly studio. In spite of his best efforts, he gets roped into it—his AI assistant, programmed to crudely imitate Becca, taunts him into doing so—and his experience with grief only becomes more jagged, more severe, more desperate. He is afforded zero closure.

To reduce these odysseys—the journey to Jefferson, the running around SoCal, the meandering about Toronto—to mere manifestations of grief (just as certain Twin Peaks fanatics are given to hermeneutically sand down BOB into the “evil that men do”) would be to do a great disservice to each of these works. These narratives are grounded in reality; there isn’t any good reason to collapse them away into easy allegories. What can be seen plainly when drawing a throughline among them, though, is that as the landscapes shift, the times change, the modes of transportation evolve—from the humble mule-drawn carriage to the unshakably grotesque electric supercar—and the technologies skyrocket, the problems left to the bereaved by their dead become no easier to work through. If anything, such a process becomes more difficult: in our increasing alienation to one another and to ourselves (spurred on largely by these dispensable novelties in tech by which we are exhorted so loudly to isolate ourselves from the world around us), our abilities to deal with these burdens that we inherit have dampened. In The Shrouds, Cronenberg stares this disconcerting truth directly in the face, and in so doing composes a masterwork, for all time and for ours.

One wonders, as director-narrator Thom Andersen's disaffected droning chills the room, where Los Angeles Plays Itself is going. Aesthetically, the film is something of a marvel; for something so long and so committed to academic presentation, it is really a very accessible and pleasurable thing. Andersen makes you feel like a total rube for having ever mouthed or even thought an unflattering word in the direction of the city of Los Angeles (not, as Andersen distinguishes, "LA," for that is the language of the philistine outsider uninitiated to the myriad charms of the city;) he sells it to you, not as a place to spend a weekend—one must imagine he despises tourists—but as a sacred site of mythologies, dreams, culture, what-have-you, that really ought not be waved off by the likes of Woody Allen, nor Joan Didion, nor you. This, alongside most everything else that Andersen says in this movie, is frequently amusing, sometimes troubling (his offhand characterization of John Cassavetes's death as a final symptom of his belief in “happiness” seems to me distasteful at best), but always engaging. Despite this, the question of structure lingers, bouncing between back and front of the mind: where are we going?

Initially, for the first half of the movie or so, this question is kept at bay. Andersen waxes poetic and political about the City of Angels to which he is native; its problems; its architecture; what it owes to and is owed by Hollywood; etcetera. The manner in which he relays all this is discursive, to be sure, but the jumps he makes from topic to topic are mostly seamless, and a general focus on Los Angeles as center of the universe is maintained, so it all feels acceptably cohesive, even if it maybe isn't, really. I would venture to call this first half something of a small masterpiece unto itself: it is enlightening, enlivening, completely fascinating.

After the in-film intermission, however, Andersen veers his focus totally to the movies, which is a city he is rather transparently not native to. His observations, while ostensibly learned, are mostly insipid and boring. He talks at length about Chinatown and L.A. Confidential as products of the Los Angeles of bygone decades and as producers of the LA we know today. In so doing, he loses a certain venom present elsewhere in this documentary; his tone is exactly the same—a completely and every-now-and-then contemptibly flat affect, no more and no less—but a certain ion is lost. Eventually, in what is likely the film’s weakest segment, Andersen, in a sort of respectfully distanced but ultimately disinterested manner, explores the LA rebellion movement for fifteen minutes or so, and then the film ends abruptly.

And so this cumbersome question of structure is answered — we are, very simply, going wherever Andersen wishes to take us. This answer would not be perturbing were this movie not so thoroughly academic, but it is, and so I find myself perturbed. The conceit of this movie is about as easy as such a thing can get: Andersen talks about a movie, or perhaps a directly related idea, and a clip from the movie plays as he talks about it. When I use the word “academic,” I mean it in literal ; this film is made up entirely of its didactic dimensions, for the only use that Andersen finds for the images he presents is that of bolstering the ideas he offers in words. There is no intrigue to be found in the editing, either; the image, at every avenue, is supplanted by the word. To that end, this is not really even an essay film, as one might consider Godard’s Adieu au langage, in which a sublime dynamic between image and word is achieved, but rather a video essay, where the image is held in perpetual subordination to the word, acting as pedagogical supplement rather than its own source of intrigue. Considering this, and considering that the “video essay” as we understand it today occupies a space in the critical world so lowly and so grotesque that uttering the purely descriptive term out loud faintly feels like an act of reproach unto itself, one might expect that a given “video essay” fulfill the basest obligations of the basest essay, written on the lowest level of discourse, about the most insignificant topic conceivable: to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But curiously, Andersen does not achieve even this; he elects instead to meander about, wallowing in the shallow depths of his own ad-libbed philosophies. What we are left with, then, is a movie without a style*, and an essay without a thesis: a definitive failure, in spite of its pleasures.

*In her essay On Style, Susan Sontag contends that “Whenever speech or movement or behavior or objects exhibit a certain deviation from the most direct, useful, insensible mode of expression or being in the world, we may look at them as having a ‘style.’” In employing this framework, one can see that Los Angeles Plays Itself is the rare film bearing a total absence of style, where the only deviation from that base communication that can be identified is in the sardonic flavoring of the narration. But this, to me, does not constitute a style of film, for it lacks a transformative capacity in respect to the cinema: neither the content nor the form are meaningfully changed by such flavoring, and so the only thing bearing any style is the speech; the words. And words, famously, are not the movies.

Possibly the single most abjectly horrific thing I have ever seen in my entire life

Watched on Tuesday April 22, 2025.

Mr. Lewis, you are a complete nut.

The Keaton-adjacent rapid-fire anti-structure of The Bellboy synthesized with the fish-out-of-water, post-Chaplin metacinema offered by The Errand Boy into an all-time comedy tour de force: a tale of the bumbling arriviste tripping into success so absurdly romantic that it collapses under its own weight. This (manifest in its fourth wall breaking in its final moments) is not a matter of hubris, but one of ambition—Lewis searches only for the highest heights, the greatest rate of cinema per second, if you will, that he can muster, never settling for anything less. So what if he implodes the studio system along the way?

Watched on Monday April 21, 2025.

Harrowing—for every time I laughed, I must've grimaced three or four. A kind of deranged extension of Chaplin's Modern Times in which the workplace is transfigured into the film stage; it is not performance art as labor, but labor performance as art. Proletarian metacinema...Who knew there could exist such a thing? Leave it to Lewis to defy convention at all costs (and angles!), I guess. Somewhat relatedly, the only fully realized punchline in this entire movie is its production logo.

I wonder if there has ever been a movie more transparently Freudian in construction, and in perfect sequence, too: event of traumatic import, offhand diagnosis, repression, psychotic break (doll-house of psychotic women reflective of crumbling psyche of one man), revelatory insight, return to the real, maybe; probably not. None of this is to mention the fact that Lewis plays his own mother and manages to find comfort in her and her alone (and therefore in himself, perversely - it's all completely self-reflexive, which seems appropriate considering the movie's total insularity), the quasi-Oedipal implications of which I am unsure how to tackle. Not a normal movie.

Watched on Saturday April 19, 2025.

Cinema phenomena: of the eyes and ears!

Watched on Sunday April 13, 2025.

Watched on Saturday April 12, 2025.

Watched on Friday April 11, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 6, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 2, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday April 1, 2025.

Watched on Monday March 31, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 30, 2025.

Our great, Greek, farcical tragedy: perhaps all a man can do is not enough.

Countryside katabasis — reminds a great deal of Salò, and in more ways than one. I don't care much for Serra's metanarrative constructions in this, but most everything else is nothing short of extraordinary. Such rough, alien textures; such haunting compositions...A great film on the Enlightened animal: the pseud aristocrat who in one moment talks half-fondly of his old friend Voltaire and eats his mistress's shit in the next. At the risk of sounding trite, watching Story of My Death rather feels like staring directly into the face of evil: it shares this sinister-minded naturalism in common with the later Pacifiction, a film perhaps even more brazen in its contempt for social power.

I was very charmed by Serra's mumbling introduction in which he proclaimed this film to be his best one (because it's got "a certain something else...I don't know,") and that it represents an ideal (future) of the contemporary cinema. I'm inclined to agree with him on at least the latter front — at the risk of sounding trite once more, I feel the world would be a much better place if one-tenth of the films receiving wide releases these days were half as ambitious as this one.

Watched on Saturday March 29, 2025.

Watched on Monday March 24, 2025.

The better bits of L.G.'s oeuvre tend to emerge from his realizations of catharsis, whether via sex or death or both—his is a cinema of prolonged restraint followed by momentous release. Call Me by Your Name, however, bathes in its own dangerous fantasy for over half of its runtime, and its romance is a transparently phony one. The anticipation evoked, then, is strictly fatalistic: the relationship has got to die, and it has got to do so violently. It does, eventually, but this figurative death is also not catharsis, nor is the heartfelt conversation between Chalamet and Stuhlbarg that follows—this is simply not the way that Guadagnino fashions his film. The final shot offers a moment of release in a very literal sense, but it is filmically null: it is static; piling expressions of misery atop one another is not an emotionally complex or even vaguely affecting idea. There is no catharsis in the film.

My obsession with this particular framework as relative to this film might appear myopic (as auteur theory truthers are sometimes given to be), but what does Call Me by Your Name leave one with if approached otherwise? I fail to see much more than empty prettiness and stale gestures; as such, most of the film's charm falls away on second viewing. I don't think the question is "does this film glorify predatory behavior?"—to which the answer is no, for whatever it's worth—but instead, "does it attempt anything of interest?" to which the answer, most regrettably, is also no.

Really excellent moment when it cuts from Dylan shredding in the studio to Seeger tentatively strumming on his banjo and doing a Bob Ross impression. Lots of beautiful faces.

Watched on Thursday March 20, 2025.

Watched on Saturday March 15, 2025.

Watched on Saturday March 15, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 14, 2025.

Watched on Thursday March 13, 2025.

semiotic reconfigurations // western entropy // conspiratorial paranoia // distrust in objective truth // oddball singularity // tongue-in-cheek metaphysics // iconographic irreverence // forces beyond // contradictions in individualism // archetypal war-games // ascension-via-synthesis // cosmic idiot-losers // defiances against metanarrative

suggestions welcome

• The Hourglass Sanatorium
• Blow Out
• The Conversation
• The Unbelievable Truth
• Film Socialisme
• Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
• Hi, Mom!
• Weekend
• Dead Ringers
• Inland Empire

...plus 76 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Zardoz
• Manhattan
• Central Park
• Night and Fog in Japan
• Rachel Getting Married
• Zabriskie Point
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers
• La Roue
• Point Blank
• Céline and Julie Go Boating

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

...that i would like to see, at some point or another. for when in a pinch. authored by the obvious, semi-selectively compiled & edit(orializ)ed by yours truly.

• Welcome to the Dollhouse
• Totally F***ed Up
• The Flowers of St. Francis
• Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure
• Donkey Skin
• Red Spirit Lake
• Silver Lode
• Notre Musique
• The Restless Breed
• Céline

...plus 129 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

another great year at the movies!!!!

• Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
• The Conversation
• Blow Out
• Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
• Skinamarink
• The Young Girls of Rochefort
• The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
• The Green Ray
• Battleship Potemkin
• Mikey and Nicky

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.