This review may contain spoilers.

I don't like to say people are "trying too hard" when they praise a movie like this, but the specific claim that this is somehow "exciting" or that the three hours "flew by" is not just disingenuous, I think it actively misunderstands what makes the film powerful. I'm someone who finds slow cinema mesmerizing, but by Day 3, the sheer mundanity and duration here started to test even me. That's not a mark against the film. It's supposed to. It's radical in the way it takes as its main aesthetic subject the mundane female labor of keeping up a house, bringing something that is so often in the background into the foreground, forcing the audience to live life through Jeanne's eyes for a duration that actually evokes that life in all its mesmerizing routine and boredom. We rarely see Jeanne's eyes, always trained downwards on a task. It never stops - she almost never gets a moment to herself. And almost everything she does isn't even for her, but her son, who hardly speaks to her, and certainly never shows her warmth or thankfulness.

The "rules" of cinema dictate that if we see a character on screen for an extended period of time, we should eventually be told or shown something about who they are. We are not given much here, concretely anyway. We can tell that Jeanne is very routine-bound, that she mostly lives for others. We become attuned to her in the abstract - the way she moves, her habits. She turns the light off when she leaves a room, unfailingly. Her movements are purposeful, never hesitant, indicative of someone who has been through this routine hundreds, thousands of times and knows it down to muscle memory. She is a sex worker, taking one client at the same time every day; her "meetings" are about the only thing Akerman cuts past, emphasizing their ionlessness, their status as routine. Naturally, watching this, we become curious who this person really is. The occasional small glimpses we do get feel seismic, like 45 minutes in when her son (at last, having an actual conversation with her) asks her how she met their father. But these glimpses are all too rare. Even the other housewife who visits her briefly (for a favor, of course) talks at length about herself, hardly asking Jeanne a question.

The absence, in the conventional sense, of the usual bits of information we're meant to in a film - story and character - puts us in a state of hyper-awareness about the minutiae of Jeanne's routine, so when the slight variations in it arise after her client on Day 2, we are attuned. Suddenly, there's something shaken about Seyrig's face. Her movements aren't as purposeful or precise - she seems to be applying more force than before, like her body is humming with an unexpressed frustration. She forgets to turn off lights behind her. She drops things. She enters rooms and forgets why she entered. She carries a potato pot into the bathroom. Even her son, who otherwise couldn't seem to care less about her, notices that she's forgotten to button her robe up all the way and that she neglects to turn on the radio. Something's clearly bothering her, but she still has to tackle the crushing mundanity of household life. This is not enough to distract a human mind. We feel this - this is why, here, boredom is productive. Our mind wanders - we can assume Jeanne's is, too. And though we can only imagine what happened with the client on Day 2, it's clearly brought up some feelings that make continuing this mundane existence impossible. After 200 minutes of this, the splash of violence at the end feels as inevitable as it does sudden.

This review may contain spoilers.

I have complicated feelings about this. On one hand, nobody makes an epic like Sergio Leone - few have a better sense of how to make landscapes look huge and all-encoming. Here, instead of the enormous vistas of the American Southwest, it's the towering brown bricks of 1920s New York City. It's extremely patient, spending plenty of dialogue-less minutes letting the viewer immerse themselves in the sights and sounds of that time and place, as well as contrasting those sights & sounds with those of the same city in 1968. Much of the poignancy here comes from the potent sense of regret and time ing, and a lot of that comes from simply observing these differences in feel. The flow is odd, navigating flashbacks and dreams through a nostalgic haze, with a surreal streak that I can think of almost no other gangster epic having; the incessant ringing telephone of guilt at the beginning, and the opaque, symbolic ending, where we’re not quite sure what the fate of Woods is (or indeed if he was even there), or the ghostly “God Bless America” procession. Such exquisitely eerie and mysterious gestures, particularly for the end of a mammoth four hour epic like this, and it's always nice when a movie goes out on its best scenes.

On the other hand... those scenes. I know there are some who feel movies shouldn't depict rape at all, that it's off-limits. I'm not there. Movies are art, art reflects life, and rape is an ugly, hideous fact of life. But it's entirely possible to handle it badly, and I think this movie does. Not by way of De Niro's character - there's an environment of aggressive, dominating masculinity bleeding into violent sexuality throughout the entire film that those scenes feel consistent with, these characters never getting past their adolescent sexual urges. And a major part of the film's ugly deconstruction of the gangster genre is Noodles looking upon the trainwreck of his life unrepentantly. But it's the handling of the female victims that rubs me the wrong way. The first one, Carol, is portrayed as enjoying the act, and the next time she shows up on screen, she flirts with De Niro and proposes a threesome with him and James Woods, then stays on through the rest of the film, sharing several scenes with De Niro, acting almost as if the rape never happened. The scene involving the other one, Deborah, is more overtly horrifying, with her begging De Niro to stop the entire time. Decades go by in-story before they meet again, and when they finally do, the tone of their interaction really does not feel like "rapist and victim" - more like "former lovers who had an ugly breakup." At that point, it doesn't feel like the movie is treating that horrific act with the gravity it requires, and to put it lightly, that's a pretty huge asterisk on the thing as a whole.

Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.

Revolution, war, and political upheavals come and go; the suffocating, empty opulence of the upper classes remains, sturdy as stone. 

Last 45 minutes of this consist of Burt Lancaster wandering around a gigantic party largely ignoring everyone and growing increasingly disillusioned and depressed. Relatable king.

[Extended Edition]

Looked back on my review from five years ago where I anointed this “plainly the best of the trilogy” and found that I now disagree with literally every single point I make in it lol. Opinions are funny like that. No, it does not have the smoothest storytelling of the trilogy (that would be Fellowship, a mean feat considering it's the one with the most exposition to hack through); no, it doesn't have the best character moments of the trilogy, at least not until the final hour; no, it's not the most visually polished of the films (it's actually the least so, I think, which makes sense given that it inevitably has the most CG effects: the best-looking of them, to my mind, is also Fellowship); no, it's not the one that makes the best use of Jackson's horror bona fides (as the only film in the trilogy without any scenes in the pits of Isengard, that simply can't be true).

Actually, this time I found myself agreeing more with my take from my first go round with these, at the age of 13: that the first half of this movie contains the trilogy's lowest lows, and the second half contains its highest highs. Not that there's anything actually wrong with the first half, it has its moments - the opening with Smeagol, the lighting of the beacons, the gates of Cirith Ungol - it's just overall a bit of slog. The second half basically consists of one battle after another - the siege of Minis Tirith into the battle of Pelennor Fields into the battle at the Black Gate - intercut with the final stages of Sam and Frodo's journey into the fires of Mount Doom. And the ecstatic emotional highs and sheer scale and spectacle here are about as undeniable as it gets. I mean, if "I can't carry it for you... but I can carry you!" doesn't make you feel like you're about to ascend straight through the roof of your house you are made of sterner stuff than I. This is where the trilogy starts to feel so huge and enveloping that trying to critique it just sounds facile, like you're critiquing a real-life event or something. Oh, Elijah Wood's delivery of that line didn't quite do it for you? Who the fuck is Elijah Wood? That's just how Frodo is. Oh, you think the Army of the Dead is a deus ex machina? Well, that's how it happened, dude. I dunno what to tell you.

One thing I do agree with my 2020 self on: Many laughs have been had over the endingS, and the way it keeps fading to black with what seems like finality only for it to fade in again with another melancholic scene. Well, I’m here to make my objection to this clear: the section after Frodo destroys the Ring is the single most important stretch in the entire film, probably even the entire trilogy, and the film wouldn’t have nearly the impact it has if even a second of it were missing.

Anyway, this is my third time through this trilogy, and I have officially emerged from each viewing with a different favorite lol (it was Two Towers at 13, Return of the King at 20, and now Fellowship at 25). Gotta love that. I wonder which one will break the tie next time.

[Extended Edition]

First and foremost, being that this is my first review since he announced it: fuck Donald Trump for his brain-meltingly stupid attempt to tariff foreign films. He’s blindingly incompetent and dementia-addled enough that the idea as put forth makes zero practical sense and is almost literally unenforceable, but the fact that a sitting president thinks foreign films constitute a national security threat is more than enough reason for anyone who loves the arts to be concerned. It’s now more important than ever to seek out and promote foreign cinema. Oh and fuck Jon Voight too.

A very different beast from Fellowship. The visual style is the most immediately obvious difference, with the bright, saturated, varied colors of Fellowship giving way to grays and browns as Sauron's influence spreads. But it's also the narrative, which does the classic trilogy middle-child gambit (which probably originates with Tolkien’s novels now that I think about it) - the previous film started with 1 or 2 characters and gradually picked up more as it went before finally fragmenting that group. As such, here, we have our characters separated, and spend much of the opening section hopping back and forth between storylines, something we haven't really had to do yet in this series.

Which is a long-winded way of saying the opening section of this movie feels like a bit of a slowdown from Fellowship. But once Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli's storyline resolves into what feels like the "main" story arc of this movie, the leadup to the battle of Helm's Deep, and we finally have a sense that we're really headed somewhere, we're able to relax a bit and appreciate the storylines of the hobbits, which are mostly water-treading character-building, much more. And ultimately, it all dovetails beautifully, into a much more focused - you will note that I did not use the word "better" - piece than Fellowship ever was. Not in the sense of the actual storylines intersecting, but in the thematic link that emerges. Everything is defined by the idea of hope - or, beyond that, serenity and acceptance - in the face of insurmountable odds and probable death, and the sense that evil and decay finds its way to everyone eventually, and all you can do is fight it. It obviously helps that the Battle of Helm's Deep itself, the climax of all this, is pretty easily the best battle in the trilogy; it's kind of an incredible feat that a battle that takes place in the dark and the rain with thousands of extras is so cohesive and exciting.

[Extended Edition]

I’ve never really written about these despite seeing and loving them twice each now, and I think the reason is that I don’t feel like I need to? These are kinda just like… self-evidently good movies in a way that it feels like people are born understanding. They are grand, epic, exciting, emotional, beautiful, all the good stuff. I can think of other blockbusters on this scale that I like as much or more as these (though not many), but I can’t think of many that get there in such a conventionally satisfying way. I haven’t read Tolkien’s novels yet (and so can regard the book-reader criticisms with nothing more than distant curiosity), but this feels like a good template for adaptations of such lore-dense source material: make it so that someone with no familiarity with the source can be moved by what they see, but strategically hint at the larger lore throughout, just enough to give the world flavor and make it feel lived-in without it feeling overwhelming or like understanding every little piece is absolutely crucial to getting anything out of the whole. 

But I think what really sets this and any sci-fi/fantasy series that blows up in popularity apart is the texture, the feeling that this is a lived-in world that we’re stepping into. This was true of Star Wars when it came out, in part because of budgetary limitations - never had spaceships and robots looked so dirty and used - and it’s true here, too. Everything has a texture, a tactility, a feeling that it’s actually happening there in front of your eyes. It helps that Jackson brings a scrappy try-anything feeling to it, likely from his days as a no-budget director scraping together movies with friends, never afraid to eschew the grand and regal for the grubby and filthy in his filmmaking gestures when the moment calls for it. Most specifically, these get an unfathomable amount of juice from his faculty as a horror filmmaker - I especially like the bits in the pits, Orcs and Uruk-hai bubbling up from the ground, all metal and hellfire. Contrast that with the soft open-heartedness of its main characters - I think everyone has a moment or two or ten in this movie that gets them, and mine is “…and I don’t mean to. I don’t mean to.”

Mind-blowing stuff - charmingly retro, but still some insane visuals for 1960. Also weirdly instructive about Douglas Rain’s HAL 9000 performance - I’d never heard his “normal” speaking voice before this, so it helps me better appreciate in what ways the HAL voice is a “performance”, if that makes sense.

[70mm]

For all their difference in feel, it’s not really a surprise that this was Kubrick’s next film after Dr. Strangelove. Both films are about Man losing control of his tools - it’s no coincidence that the very first “tool” we see used here is one that destroys and kills, and you can draw a straight line from that to the nuclear bomb. Within 2001, though, the tools we end up with aren’t tools of wanton destruction. They’re a little more insidious, destroying not our bodies, but our humanity. Kubrick devotes much of his runtime to simply showing us (not telling us about) these tools: a procession of rotating spaceships, blinking lights, computer readouts, humming machines, opening hatches, grasping mechanical arms. (One of the many, many reasons I love this movie is how relaxing I find it.) The slow, mundane reality of having conquered the stars. 

You’d think that having the mundane tasks of life automated by machine would give us more time to indulge our humanity, but Kubrick correctly predicts that the opposite is true: it’s more a parasitic relationship, with us ceding our humanity to our tools, becoming more soulless and clinical, and in turn trying to make them more like us. At the crossover point, there is violence, mutual destruction. The more A.I. advances, the more we see Kubrick’s instincts were dead on there, although I’m sure even he couldn’t imagine we’d be so craven as to let machines make art for us. 

But beyond all this mundanity, there is still the unknown. I can talk and talk and talk about it, of course, but what makes it my favorite movie is the feel of it, from its unnerving avant-garde musical compositions to its inexplicable visuals, its evocation of the overwhelming incomprehensibility of creation, of the mysteries of the universe. It’s a hopeful ending, at least from one perspective: For all our flaws, there’s something out there looking after us. Or are they? What do they want out of us? Maybe that transcendence isn’t as benign as we thought. Maybe it’s not a gift. Is the human really any happier than the monkey?

Top 2 Cronenberg honestly, and maybe better - I don’t know if I’m quite ready to put it above Dead Ringers, but it crossed my mind. One of the movies I think about unprompted the most (specifically, any time I see a new article about how microplastics are wrecking our bodies), but before we even get there, I just love the vibes of this. Dark, rotted and shadowy, yet somehow so funny, so twitchy and weird, so playful, so tender, so… sexy??? I’m afraid so. The central, cosmic joke here, that humans are both destructive enough to have created a hellish, crumbling world and too stupid and narrow-minded to allow our bodies to evolve to fit it, is so bleakly resonant. And the artmaking angle makes it so much richer and more playful. One telling detail is that several characters who are shown to be enamored with Saul’s performances (Timlin & Wippet, Router & Berst - some great duos in this!) are also active parts of the machine keeping people like him from embracing who they are. Said performances are based around un-doing the evolution Saul’s body has undergone, which Timlin (GOAT Kristen Stewart), in praise, frames as “seizing control” from a “rebelling” body. Saul’s irers, then, are deriving artistic/sexual pleasure and meaning (very POTENT meaning…) from watching someone “different” remove that difference, from their suffering rather than their truth. 

Saul is within his rights to be uncomfortable with what’s happening with his body, of course. But it should be his choice to make, and Mortensen peppers in indicators well before the transcendent final shot that he derives a certain pleasure from his body’s changes, and that his outward shunning of them comes from a self-hatred most likely inflicted by others. (There’s obviously a trans reading of this, which others have already written up much more resonantly than I could - one detail I will point out is the way the pro-evolution movement’s bodies behave like Saul’s not because of evolution, but because of surgery, alteration). And the painful, hunched, self-hiding frame with which he stalks through the movie, croaking out his lines, certainly does not give the impression of someone whose denial of his own body is doing him any good - though he’s certainly swindled himself into thinking that his body’s changes alone are responsible for his suffering, and not his denial of them. I don’t think this is a “horror” movie, but the pieces of set design that fit the genre (the weird organic looking bone beds/chairs) are machinery explicitly meant to violently, forcefully fit people like Saul into having their body function like everyone else’s. The fact is, it doesn’t. Our bodies are telling us we need to change if we are to survive the world we’ve created, and for Saul’s eventual acceptance of this, spurred on by witnessing the desecration of Brecken’s remains, Cronenberg reaches back through 100 years of cinema for an image of divine euphoria, repurposing it as an expression of ecstasy toward and harmony with one’s own flesh, one shot that feels like a payoff to the entire 40-odd years of Cronenberg’s career since his first declaration of LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH. The meaning behind that phrase has evolved a lot since Videodrome - there, it was human evolution by way of embracing the worst of our natures. Here, by adapting to what we’ve done to the planet, we’re not embracing those natures, but simply reacting to them, rising above. “Has it ever occurred to you that you might be interfering in a fantastic natural process that you should surrender to?” 

I really think Cronenberg’s most recent two movies are some of the most dense, intelligent, and bizarrely hilarious texts on living in contemporary times that the cinema has given us, and I love that such a storied filmmaker is looking so resonantly at the present and the near-future when so many other legends of his generation are retreating into period pieces.

Time to do some Wes Anderson catch-up before The Phoenician Scheme drops. He’s always been an up and down filmmaker for me: I don’t really respond to his dramatic sensibilities, so I bounce off his early films that lean harder in the direction of character drama, and gravitate more toward the later ones that can be more readily appreciated purely as formal objects and whose emotional impact comes from odder places. There’s a weird curve there re: my engagement vs how stylized his work gets - I walked away from this less annoyed than I was after Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums, and I think that’s because it’s less stylized (which isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of things here - music cues, dialogue, characterizations, bits of framing and camera movement, color usage - that are unmistakably Wes) and thus reads more as a typical harmless indie movie for most of the runtime, where the subsequent two movies actively grate on me. But then once you go way into the future and get to stuff like Grand Budapest and French Dispatch, where it’s so stylized that it starts to collapse in on itself like a black hole, I start to like Wes again. So I dunno. I either haven’t seen or don’t the movies in between the ones I’ve mentioned here, so I’m curious to see where I land on them, and what pattern emerges, if any.

This review may contain spoilers.

I think it’s part of the human condition to have some sort of fascination with death. We are alive and conscious, and one day we will not be, and many people we know and are close to will precede us in this state of not-being. It’s a weird thing to contemplate, and there’s no shortage of art that attempts to do so. Usually, though, it’s from a spiritual or emotional viewpoint, the loss of the incorporeal. David Cronenberg’s new film is the first one I’ve ever seen focus on one angle that I’ve always had a weird fixation with: Death from the vantage point of the body. Body is reality, after all - and the end of a body is the end of a reality. 

I’m lucky enough that in my life, I haven’t had to do a whole lot of intense grieving. I’ve lost both my grandpas, plus a step-grandpa, but as far as family go, that’s about it. And not to sound flippant, but I wasn’t super close with any of them, so I’ve never really had to grieve someone that I saw every day or had a long, close relationship with. I’ve always wondered what that was like, and this is gonna sound weird, but I’ve always had an odd… jealousy? Probably not the right word, more like an intense curiosity, to the point that I feel the urge to step inside the brain of someone who’s experienced that and see what it feels like. I don’t so much mean the emotional component of the grief, because the same curiosity applies to people who lose, like, a work acquaintance who they see every day. I’m more curious about how you live with the knowledge that a body you saw walk and talk and breathe regularly is now simply a cold, empty, rotting thing - or, even more strangely, a pile of ashes. That extends to watching films that star actors who have since died. Sometimes I’ll get really fixated on the fact that this body living, breathing and speaking in front of me is now inert and cold, whatever electrical impulses animating it gone. Sometimes I even catch myself morbidly wondering what they look like at the present instant. Are they just a skeleton? A rotting corpse? A pile of ashes? Whatever it is, that body is now an inert object. If you knew the person, how do you wrap your head around that? How does that sit in your brain? How does it intermix with your memories of them alive? I am enormously grateful to Cronenberg for making the only work of art I’ve ever seen that considers these questions. He explores some deeply ugly answers to them - the film seems to be his way of working out the most unpleasant emotions that have emerged from his grief at his wife’s death via an evil European tulpa, Vincent Cassel’s Karsh. Possessiveness, projection, conspiratorial spiraling. 

Karsh, who reads as part Cronenberg self-insert and part 21st century tech bro, has invented a novel interment technology: GraveTech. No longer is your visit to your ed loved ones limited to staring at a tombstone and old pictures of them. Now, you get to catch up with them in real-time: just fire up the GraveTech™️ app , and be presented with a real-time digital 3D model of your loved one’s decaying body, in 8K resolution, able to be zoomed and rotated to your heart’s content. I had heard that the concept was simply a camera that showed actual footage of the dead body; the truth rings truer. It’s not really your loved one’s body, but a digital facsimile. And all things digital can be altered. Cronenberg gets at how much of the world we experience through a screen; aside from the premise itself, so many major plot developments are via phone video or video chat. When Karsh’s cemetery is vandalized, he doesn’t even see the damage with the naked eye for quite a while, which Guy Pearce’s character points out. And living in a world in which so little is seen with the naked eye, one naturally turns to conspiracy. 

The movie’s form echoes the scattered emotional mess of grief; much of it takes the form of a talky conspiracy non-thriller where a new rabbit hole to fall into seems to open in every new scene, all concerning a nonspecific “They”, and which never really seems to resolve. That might seem like an odd form for this movie to take. But why is conspiracy so appealing to some? We live in a big, confusing world, and we love stories; inventing a story to explain everything allows us both to “understand” it in an instinctual way, and to feel smarter than everyone else. It’s a way of overcoming the complexity of the world without actually dealing with it: or, in Karsh’s case, the complexity of grief. It’s easier to make up your own story than to deal with all the unresolved feelings losing someone forever leaves you with. The actual facts are secondary. The scale of Karsh’s conspiratorial thinking narrows as this film continues from the international and political to the ugly and personal and jealous. Even in death, women can’t escape jealous men psyching themselves into thinking they’re cheating. 

This all springs from an ugly feeling of possessiveness Karsh feels over the body he lost, one that he had a long intimate relationship with, almost such that it became part of his, and what remains is falling apart without it. “Grief is rotting your teeth.” The idea that anyone else once had that body, the idea of anyone else being with it as it rots in the ground, drives him crazy. And it drives him so far down the conspiracy rabbit hole that he absolves himself from his own grief via the story he creates. Maybe that’s the only way for a guy like this to come to with grief. Bro got stuck in Stage 3; he bargained so hard he bargained himself right out of his grief and love for his wife. Through all of this, somehow one of Cronenberg’s funniest. 
 
One last thing: I get why some people have hated this, like, I really get it, but I’ve read a couple reviews that say something to the effect that Cronenberg is spitting on the grave of his dead wife with this film, and man, it is incredibly weird that anyone thinks it’s their place to say shit like that.

This review may contain spoilers.

One of those old movies that you almost can’t believe even exists because why isn’t everyone talking about this all the time? Hey what if there was a noir with the fucking demon core as its MacGuffin and it had the same ending as Raiders of the Lost Ark? Are you kidding me? And that’s just the ending: there is insane momentum on this from literally the opening seconds. Absolutely relentless first 10 minutes and it barely lets up after that until around the ~85 minute mark, where I started thinking “OK, at this pace, it’d probably be best if it were wrapping up right about now”. But then it hits you with the most insane final two minutes you’ve ever seen and all is forgiven. Mean and dangerous; noir for the nuclear age.

I have to say though - that clue where he reads a poem and somehow concludes from it that Christina swallowed something and the coroner has it is a strrrrretch, lmao. I hate to be a Plot Guy but that’s like the final clue!

This review may contain spoilers.

After Apocalypse Now last night, for today’s movie I decided it made perfect sense to finally hit another late-70s New Hollywood Vietnam War epic, one that’s been haunting my watchlist as long as I can (I saw the Final Cut of Apocalypse, so they’re even precisely the same length: 183 minutes. Synergy!). Well as it turns out, that was a terrible idea, because I just spent this whole thing thinking about how much better Apocalypse Now is. 

I mean, OK, let’s step back and be fair: they are doing completely different things. Like, the fact that they’re both nominally about Vietnam is pretty much the only thing the two films have in common. Whenever I finally get around to a long-enshrined pop culture landmark film like this, I always find it interesting to compare my telephoned expectations of what it would be to the real deal. All I knew about this was the opening hour dealt with a wedding or something and that at some point in Vietnam De Niro and Walken play Russian Roulette. My assumption from that was that the final two hours were all ‘nam, and that it all led up to the Russian Roulette scene. I ended up shocked at just how little of it actually deals with Vietnam: the Russian Roulette bit(s) are basically the extent of the Vietnam material, and most of it deals with the characters at home in Ohio*, before and after their experience in the war. None of that is a comment on the quality whatsoever, that stuff’s just interesting to me.

Anyway, as far as that opening hour, I don’t think it actually needs an hour and change to convey what it conveys, but when it’s outside of that goddamn reception venue, it’s pretty great. It wonderfully captures the odd beauty of small Midwest towns (they even got the train noise right - as someone who’s lived in a smallish Midwest town his whole life, I did the Leo pointing meme as soon as I heard that) and effectively sets up the idea of these insanely unremarkable guys who don’t know much about the world around them and whom God and country are bred into as abstract concepts gearing up to face the horrors of the wider world without really knowing it. (Maybe too effectively - after an hour plus of these guys’ deeply unentertaining banter I was starting to wish they’d just go to war already.) But there are few things I find less entertaining in movies than watching people dance at weddings (weirdly specific thing this movie made me realize) and there is a shit ton of that in this section of the movie, along with some really shoddy sound editing - feels like they didn’t really know how to manage crowd noise continuity so it’s constantly abruptly jumping up and down in the mix in weird ways. 

I like the sudden cut to Vietnam - there is no setup, it basically just drops you right into the thick of things. The first Russian Roulette scene is a pretty great piece of blinding, miserable intensity. And my own familiarity with the kind of milieu in the first hour makes the switch-up all the more jarring for me. Cimino’s scope is narrow, never very interested in the wider conflict, but only the war’s impact on American soldiers, and while this seems a bit irresponsible, I’ll also concede that it’s appropriate for his POV characters and their narrow worldview - as I mentioned, these are simple, unremarkable guys from the Midwest with a myopic worldview, as probably were a lot of the guys drafted into Vietnam. It’s worth sharing that perspective on its own, I guess, but it can’t help feeling incomplete. New Hollywood epics are usually my bread and butter, and this is pretty good, but it feels a bit thin, like it set out to be an Epic™️ first and worked backward from there.

*NEXT DAY NOTE: This morning, as I was sitting and drinking my morning coffee, I thought, say, where the fuck in Ohio is there a spectacular mountain range like that? I’m a Michigander, I feel like I’d know if there were mountains that nice so close to me? Well I googled it and apparently I’m dead on: No such mountains exist in Ohio, because the movie takes place in Pennsylvania. What the fuck. Why did I think it was Ohio. Is it because I’d just watched Apocalypse Now and Capt. Willard is from there? How did I get my wires crossed that badly?

“Who’s the commanding officer here?”
“Ain’t you??”

Cinema’s most hellish, surreally horrifying depiction of American exceptionalism - to my mind, the closest a war movie has ever come to being an actual straight-up horror film, committing fully to the intense disorientation and sense of new mind-melting horrors around every corner, or bend of river.

Saw at the Henry Ford Giant Screen. My letterboxd has essentially become an ad for LG with how much I talk favorably about my OLED’s picture compared to theaters, but this was absolutely worth it, not just for the massive screen (has about 10 feet on standard IMAX screens in height and width), but for the sound. Obviously the apocalyptic horror and destruction of the Ride of the Valkyries scene was completely overwhelming, but I’ve always loved the lush ambient dread of the soundscape as they float down that dark river - the constant buzz of the jungle, the almost omnipresent low bass drones, the ghostly guitar/synth lines. Just unreal. And as far as the Kurtz section goes, all I can say is thank god Marlon Brando showed up on that set fat - keeping him in the shadow with only his face and hands visible gives him such an eerie, mythical presence. When you get down to it, Kurtz is really no worse than the men who sent Willard on the mission, or Kilgore, or indeed Willard himself. He just has the gall to be direct about it, and we can’t have that, not when we’re trying to recruit an endless line of kids to die for a diffuse, indecipherable cause with a patina of operatic bravado and rock music and sexual teases. Only his method is different. “You have a right to kill me. But you have no right to judge me.” My favorite war movie, and one of my ten or twenty favorite movies period.

Y’all got any more of that late style

Digital late style on crack. Cronenberg has never been a visually flashy filmmaker, and that’s always been purposeful, always provides a compelling, clinical tension with his outré subject matter. This takes that to an extreme - it’s front to back televisual, with the stark, unflattering lighting highlighting every pore and flaw and flab in its actors’ skin, and much of the film consisting of weirdly mannered conversations that play out in sterile, unmoving shot-reverse-shot singles. But I’ll always defend purposeful visual ugliness, and IMO that’s exactly what the movie calls for. Actually, as much as people mention them synonymously, this is the only time I’ve really meaningfully thought of Lynch while watching a Cronenberg film: this seems to be doing the Inland Empire thing of attacking Hollywood via an attack on film language itself, by way of aggressively off-putting form. The results here are occasionally hilarious, but a little more self-impressed, and I must confess, it’s overall one of those digital late style pieces that I “find interesting” more than I actually like (much like Cosmopolis, tbh). Phenomenal Howard Shore score. Fork found in kitchen.

This review may contain spoilers.

Just such a cool fucking movie. “Ryan Coogler directs Michael B. Jordan in a dual performance where he shoots at vampires in the 1930s American South” is already a hall of fame better-with-every-word shut-the-fuck-up-and-take-my-money movie pitch, so it’s probably for the best that the marketing didn’t mention it’s also a Delta blues rock opera - as a huge Robert Johnson head, I would’ve chained myself to WB’s doors until they gave in and let me see an early copy. 

But the actual execution here goes so far beyond that “wouldn’t it be cool if…” elevator pitch. Vampires, like werewolves and kaiju and all manner of movie monsters, are so popular and enduring because they’re inexhaustible slates for metaphor. Coogler, irably, isn’t out to subvert the concept of a vampire here. He plays by the rules. They can’t come in unless you invite them. Garlic repels them, and a stake through the heart kills them. If not killed, they live forever, souls trapped in their bodies, unable to transcend to the next world. 

The metaphor he attaches to them seems, at first, to be a fairly simple one. Our main characters are opening up a juke t, which is effectively an oasis of communal safety and cultural expression for those marginalized by the America they find themselves in - most prominently, we have a kid, Sammie, who knows the blues. The Blues is an art form that’s more intimately connected than any other to the Black pain and sorrow that reverberated throughout early American history, and Sammie can play it with a power that reaches almost supernatural dimensions - in the film's best scene*, and one of the coolest ideas I’ve ever seen in a blockbuster, literally summoning the ghosts of the past and future, as if having tapped into a timeless vein of artistic transcendence and inducing a communion with Black artists from traditional African dancers to hip-hop DJs. So when 3 white vampires show up, say they dig the music, and ask if they can , the metaphor seems obvious. Take that authentic artistic expression rooted in your time and place and culture, and assimilate and dilute it for the sake of survival and for the price of your soul. 

The truth is much more nuanced. See, if the villain had been a Klan member, that'd be one thing. But in maybe the movie’s smartest individual decision, Remmick, the leader of the vampire gang that pulls up, is Irish. And that adds an interesting wrinkle, because in early America, the Irish were immigrants too, they were outsiders too, and just like the black people in the story, they've been through a whole lot, both at home and in America. Remmick is given just as much cultural specificity as the black characters, with the Irish music that he plays given just as much respect by Coogler as the blues is: traditional Irish folk music as well as some demonic step-dancing later on. So rather than a demand to assimilate and allow your culture to be subsumed into the dominant one, it becomes something more like a proposition between equals, from one marginalized people to another. Survive the racist hell of 1932 America - though, again, for the price of your soul and the purity of your art. 

All this in the context of an enormously entertaining horror-thriller blockbuster, with a top notch “getting a team together to do a job” first half followed by a full-on horror/thriller second half that played great with my theater audience.

*I do have one annoying gripe with this scene, though: I really wish they hadn’t run back the opening narration when it starts lol.

I feel like Viggo’s assailants in the bathhouse scene really put themselves at a disadvantage by wearing giant bulky leather jackets. Should’ve left those in the locker room. 

Like A History of Violence, a mostly conventional bit of business, but suffused with unmistakably Cronenbergian touches, most interestingly his attention to tattoos - enforcement of a power structure through bodily alteration.

The clean, buttoned-up existence we've carved out of this earth and the ancient call of the void that remains in its vibrations underneath our feet. They tapped into something cosmic here.

I don't like making sweeping statements like this because I don't know enough, but the score here, dominated by muted, ominous drones, feels way ahead of its time, nothing like other film music of the 70s.