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ferrara's guilty protagonists are consigned to death no matter if they are victims or victimizers, they can't make up for what they've done or what's happened to them, the realization is too late, too little, and there is no satisfaction in watching them strive to do One Last Good Thing, the futility is not romanticized even if the characters see themselves that way, ferrara's camera is committed not to their damaged psychology but to how they are emblematic of a deeply disturbed and sin-ridden society, that their self-destruction is our own, that this film we are watching is a punkish, demoralized shout that's drowned in the din of a city where most people can't hear anything their neighbor says, much less their own inner-voice, as the radio static and television broadcasts and shouting and smog and steam rising from the sewers drowns any effort that attempts to integrate a pure form with this gross materia.

the way harvey keitel loses it in this movie reminds me of most people in my family, the deranged desperation, the choking desire for escape but not knowing if it's even possible, the unconscious suicidal behavior, the half-religious half-materialistic repeating of the same few compulsions, the idea that you hold on to a habit or an addiction to prop you up for years until it finally wears you down and you're in the middle of an ocean without any raft.

i think a lot about how tombstone only becomes a 'real' community in john ford's my darling clementine once there's a raising of a church, which seems to somehow preserve some mysterious hallowed essence of the city before it grows out of control into a modern metropolis of dizzying complexity. i don't like going to churches, but they're probably the only place where i would be confronted with my true thoughts in the echoing silence of the rafters and hallways and confessionals. this writing is my way of avoiding living and i can't hold a prayer to save anyone's life, especially not my own.

feels a lot like mann's sequel to ford's my darling clementine, where an ex-sheriff comes back to another town on the brink of anarchy, but this time has to his capacity for selflessness by training a newbie sheriff whose weakness is permitted by an over-civilized citizenry. like many of mann's films there is the violent decapitation of a father figure and a connection made between nature and virtue (key scenes with fonda's bounty hunter take place with fire, water and animals as the primary focus). the tin star might be the most 'straight' western mann did, this lacks the wounded psychosis of the jimmy stewart pictures or the elegiac self-critique of mythology in man of the west, it more than a little resembles the morality plays of delmer daves westerns, but emphasizes a broader mindset of justice gained at the price of adversity and pride. the black & white vistavision format suits mann very well as he strips the frame into shapes of crowds and pools of darkness, everything looks parched. the mob-mentality of the town connects mann with lang, but whereas lang ended his films in immolation, mann believes that escape must somehow be possible if one is willing to take it on the chin.

my sense of humor is pretty broad, so i ended up laughing at every single episode in this naruse comedy anthology, especially the second part, which uses the rhetoric of social restraint in a smart way that illustrates the typical naruse concern of the superficiality and hypocrisy of men. after a long drudge through his 1940s, it is nice to see that naruse really does begin to get back on his feet in 1950 with stronger material and a refined return to the neo-classicist style he began to create with the learn from experience duology -- and young toshiro mifune, well, what can you say? he is utterly mesmerizing, and hot.

Watched on Thursday May 22, 2025.

naruse doing a remake of capra's meet john doe is as insane as you might think: all the master's prosaic, detail-driven capacity for scrutinizing lower and middle class life put in the service of vaguely pro-democratic abstraction, with eisensteinian sets from ivan the terrible, rear-projections of angelic/demonic political ideas, an atmosphere of brooding self-hating hysteria, all for a critique of blind demagoguery sold to us with metronomic yelling. it is beyond awful, but also interesting as a historical curio, and as an example of an auteur being completely submerged in the demands of his time, in this case being the american occupation's dictates on what a post-war japanese cinema should or shouldn't be. i still need a wider perspective on this era to confirm this, but it seems a miracle that kurosawa's no regrets for our youth came out as cogent and confident as it did in this same year -- in the last moments of a descendant, where dreams and delusions are rejected in favor of 'bitterness', we approach something like naursean 'realism', but only just. the 40s was the artistic nadir of naruse's career, but this might be the strangest thing he ever made.

Watched on Thursday May 22, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 22, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 22, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday May 21, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday May 21, 2025.

one man incarnated in three bodies of differing ages: the young student, fearing age and pain; the restless disciple, ruminating on his past; the old master, reconciling himself with the external world and the wounds it has inflicted upon him, all who have left home to return to an eternal embrace, not in spite of their differences, but because of them, as each path is a tributary on the path-nature writ large.

holding onto a buddhist koan is similar to the practice of apophasis within the tradition of western esotericism, it is cultivating an awareness of contradiction and mystery that gives us a relation to the world without being caught in the trap of our language -- every saying becomes an unsaying, description becomes presence, not through the direct route of identifying words with their objects, but by signifying the singularity of a thing by negation, clarity via complexity, sanity via the sensory.

bae yung-kyun's film goes a long way to show how cinema can create the space for reflection upon the interconnectedness of this universe -- isn't that what each image, each sound is? when immersed in everyday reality, we take it as one giant 'blob' of experience, but in the arts, the fragmentation and heightening of certain elements grants us the ability to observe causal and causal linkages in an immediate way that we might not be able to in normal circumstances -- and because cinema is able to impress these on our souls with the age of time, we obtain a sort of meditative state, lulled into the peculiar rhythms of montage and composition. it is how i have come to see watching films, not just as entertainment or a way to '' time, but as a way to become more conscious of myself and the world around me, first through immersing watching, then through contemplation with writing -- above all, i am forced to reckon with a world that exists outside of my mind, a world shaded by thousands of different artists who each compose a collective apophasis, to weave together disparate elements by placing them in relation to a pluralist divinity that is all-encoming and not individuated.

fear smothering love, men who carve open their wounds before the enemy gets the chance, a company of soldiers in the solitary confines of a wasteland adored by bleached scorpions, the half-forgotten interzone of sternberg's morocco and hathaway's legend of the lost blasted into a parched hell where you are compelled to address the entanglement of your neglected emotions, your tattered rags, your bones, your futile history. nic ray directing war is a boy investing his doll soldiers with bruises, petulance, dark remembrance of an innocence antecedent of courage -- the horizon dividing the sky and earth is obliterated, grey bleeding on grey. we could all be saved by cowardice, if it wasn't for the man in the distance who watches us, who makes us become something else under the operating torture of his gaze -- but isn't that what we do as viewers of this film?

the central instability of ray's cinema only reveals itself under the auspices by which we fixate on him as the 'auteur of auteurs', the conditional relation of conditions as-such, the mental breakdown within the supposedly unitary persona of the director, because to watch a ray film is to experience a person shifting underneath his feet before he takes a first step, a presence that doubles-back, betrays, cries out, self-sabotages -- and if this also describes godard, it is because both him and his master saw cinema as a way of illustrating subjective contradiction within objective space. the sands of bitter victory are stones which remain 'modern', inscrutable not from an outsider's perspective but from the recognition that the terrain here is fluid and that all operates on the exchange of energies and identities.

only ten years into his white-hot career, ray reaches the point that ford did after six decades -- the medals they give you are an attempt to take the impossible problem of describing a person and by it by shaving off errant variables, pruning branches, and other metaphors for cultivating a relation to death -- print the legend, sure, but the legend needs the mausoleum of language alone, and the image belies that emptying-out, it ensures that the victory remains bitter by conceiving of its limitations before someone else imposes them -- so then ray is of a generation (aldrich, mann, minnelli, fuller, sirk, siegel, preminger) that speedily, and handily, became fully conscious of the price that cinema demands of its practitioners, and used his limited time to push his artform past all conventionality -- his glory is of a man who dared to map his own inner purgatory.

Watched on Tuesday May 20, 2025.

anthony mann doing a sam fuller korean war picture but without the grandstanding and sermonizing, no decorative elements, just men laboriously inching their way from one slaughter to another, being picked-off in a long march like napoleon's army in russia. in several ways it anticipates the tonal landscape of future vietnam war films, but shot with deep focus black & white mastery by studio pro ernest haller, who really brings out the dirt and dust and gives men in war an unbelievably rough texture. i liked aldo ray a lot in the raoul walsh films he's in, but his performance here as an instinctual survivor brings out his best talents, letting him be rough-hewn while still having understated intelligence. mann is well-known as a master of noir and westerns, but this amply shows that he wasn't limited to those genres, and it remains a taxing viewing experience that allows him to explore all his favorite themes of systems of authority, psychology, pain, and humanity's struggle to exist in a world that refuses to accommodate his private neuroses.

finding out that you're capable of anything, including guilt, including innocence, and that society nor other people have the means to quell the unrest inside of you, not through care and not through punishment. the doubling of murderers, husbands, and vehicles, all so easily disposable, preminger's lateral camera movement showing us every side of this house like a showroom floor, but without the r's motive to sell -- everyone here is so knowing, knowing that they've been damaged, that none of this will last, that it is simply a matter of who and what will break first, and do so willingly or unwillingly -- jean simmons' diane is one of the most complex women in the american cinema, a person with a cool, manipulative surface and roiling despair underneath. in a little over a decade, godard takes the leftover wreckage of angel face and refashions it into the four-color chassis of pierrot le fou, only to repeat the same suicidal act again, this time with no courtroom -- the joke is crueler, but the precise poignancy of preminger is still humming inside that engine.

the imagination opened up by transgression. it is one of the best works about the presence and absence of a father, the dynamics of a family where love can only show itself in tortured shouting and violence, love descending into control over someone who you think is an extension of yourself. we think of the family as this stable foundation of society, but sooner or later it has to destroy itself, children go away, parents get divorced, it is not stable at all but a transition in which certain facets are revealed through the pain of raising people into broken mirrors of who you are, just as your parents did for you. escape becomes the precious refuge, either into romance or friends or just being in another space, a place where you can situate yourself into a different order of subjective relation that is not determined by overbearing blood ties. what tolstoy said about every unhappy family being unique is so true, because we saddle so much upon the experience of love in our society that it can easily swing back to hatred when not gratified. human beings are doomed to always be capable of creating and living through unhappiness, but also cursed to dream of farther shores where that suffering might cease, even though we can never leave behind the scars that the past imparts on our minds and souls. perhaps the purest expression of love is the willingness to be without someone, knowing that if you spent a great deal of time with them, that familiarity would breed equal contempt in your heart -- how many movies and stories do we cherish about lovers who die shortly after meeting, or lovers torn apart tragically? we don't lionize the stable marriages that go on for decades, marriages which are more like friendships -- love, in a perverse sense, invites its own destruction, turning over on itself to try and become a transcendental force through death. i've told my partner too many times that i would die for them, and the scariest thing is that i mean it -- there is something terrifying in the human desire to crystalize our essence in a sublime moment, where love can be eternal and never face the cold hours of aching bones and senility -- we nurture this fantasy, and then go back to work, go for a walk, travel, do anything to occupy this deadness within. i think it is possible that we were made to experience happiness, but never to embody it -- the emotion always fades under the authoritative weight of time. better to let something go than to destroy it, because at least then you can go back to that memory in your darkest hours -- but then, all the hurt is ed as well. our living is a question that only has a single answer.

excellent working class family drama that reminds me a lot of edward yang and ozu, it is naruse operating in a very restrained that suits the impoverishment that these characters are trying their best to avoid while also looking beyond the borders of what the mother and father have been able to build for such a large family. it made me reflect a lot on how in the 20th century there really was this cross-social ambition in several countries that each generation could and would reach a higher economic status than their parents -- now that's basically gone i feel, you're either treading the water of where your parents were at or you'll likely never have the benefits and securities they had access to, our space of mobility within capitalism has shrunken, and outside of get-rich-quick schemes, i don't know of anyone who is able to articulate the choked-up hope that naruse is able to incarnate in these young men.

naruse doing a musical comedy of remarriage, punctuating ambition with his usual jaundiced view of masculinity, the individual talent (gained from a woman in the first place) leading towards pathetic solipsism. the weird non-ending seems to not resolve anything, even in of standard drama, but then again naruse plays his hand well in implying that men use romance to keep women dependent on them for self-serving reasons, that this film about a couple becomes dangerously unbalanced in favor of the lesser half.

right now i'm really thankful that i wasn't raised catholic.

i've tried to get into this one several times, and this is the first instance where i actually was able to enjoy it on its own -- the changes this makes to the overall story are fine and even occasionally interesting. tod browning's version is atmosphere-first, taking great care to slowly set-up a gorgeous gulf of fog and cobwebs, whereas terence fisher's update gets us right into things with barely any pretense, the vampire vs. the vampire hunters, we begin where the novel and the 1931 film end, and it definitely goes a long way to make things more intense and action-packed. this is a world where a knowledge of the supernatural is assumed, and van helsing is on a committed crusade against the unleashed sexuality and mania of dracula's curse; what suggestive power is lost in fisher's literalism is made up for in its intelligible morality and athletic pacing.

lugosi can't be beat as the ultimate rendition of the count as a figure of inhuman evil, but christopher lee is undoubtedly scarier, crazier, a stalking predator, he is a monster wearing the thin skin of a human shell, with him and his undead converts carrying a distinct look of bulging-eyed madness -- which makes me wonder why this film starts off with him wanting jonathan harker to sort through his library? is this a dracula who reads a lot in his study? maybe the future films in this series will help me understand this...

more than before, i appreciate the stuffy, theatrical quality that this film has, there is a comfort to the soft autumnal colors, the beautiful period costuming & production design, embroidery, candlelight, navy blues and frosted glass -- and peter cushing's performance as van helsing is assured and fatherly, really selling us on the grim seriousness of his heroism, he and lee are a perfect combination for this iteration because they represent diametric opposites, light and shadow waging an eternal war for the soul of mankind.

on the floor of dracula's castle and the site of his demise is masonry depicting the complete zodiac, at last bathed in the ashes of the morning sun -- what the film posits here is that the cosmology of dracula has links to the fatalistic astrological order of the ancient greeks and romans, a worldview where man's place was determined by stellar forces far outside his control. dracula, as a remnant representative of this pre-christian culture, is then finally vanquished by van helsing's canny use of the crucifix, where christ's sacrifice was meant to abolish the fixed fates of mankind's sinful nature and to reveal a divine redemption that byes the circuitry of the stars and planets illustrated in the zodiac.

something i think that's lost today in the proliferation of post-anne rice vampires, who don't fear crosses or garlic or any of the usual banes, is precisely this religious/spiritual/metaphysical dimension of the vampire as an archetype -- the vampire is a creature who is stuck between the world of the living and the world of the dead, between the real and the ideal, he is both a shambling corpse and an abstract symbol, so what is most interesting is when you explore these contrasts instead of simply ignoring them, as they allow the vampire to help us understand our place in a complex universe.

the plot itself is very sirkian and overblown, but this two-parter sees naruse finally settling down from his wilder 30s films into a more stout formal mode that he'd become very comfortable with in the future, shades of the era's popular poetic realism and even a bit of blonde venus too. i like the wacky camera movements, eyeline fuckery and weird elements of his initial period, but it is clear that this is naruse finding his groove, becoming considerate of the overall stylistic premise of the film instead of trying to maximize every single shot's potency in a curtizian fashion.

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 16, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 15, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 15, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 15, 2025.

a film which dreads the violence of sound, tchaikovsky's swan lake whittling away the hours in the deepest caverns of the hollow earth where vampires call home. to criticize browning's vision as 'stagey' or 'static' rings false, as the film features plenty of gliding camera moves and impressive crane shots thanks to the genius of karl freund -- the tall-tale of early talkie cinema being entirely bound to tripods and sound-booths just doesn't function as a theory when confronted with the facts of a work which exceeds all expectations and boundaries.

dracula's use of sound is highly advanced and selective even today -- browning doesn't slather every scene with marching music in the way that would become standard for hollywood films, using tunes to 'fill in the gaps' of images. instead, browning permits so much of the film to be 'silent', with many many disturbing moments where there is nothing but the demonic, unspeaking visage of dracula, an open window violated by the suppressed flapping of a bat's flight, or the camera floating through a seemingly infinite tomb. and even when there are 'regular' conversation scenes, they are constructed to emphasize off-center reactions, with the characters held at a considerable distance in long-shot or barely medium two-shots, with close-ups almost entirely reserved for lugosi glaring straight into the viewer (or, in a key shot, when mina harker is on the verge of devouring her fiancee in vampiric lust) -- all of this alienates us from the action, forcing us to 'lean in' to the film and take participatory responsibility for co-creating its gothic majesty by using our imaginations to detail the pitch shadows. browning was a pioneer and veteran of silent cinema, and more importantly a connoisseur of stage magick and the carnivalesque, he didn't make these directorial choices on accident, he knew that if this film couldn't be explicitly horrifying in the way that post-hays code horror became, then it would have to depend entirely on the implicit conjuration of an all-consuming atmosphere that would wrap its leathery wings around us and never let go.

the eerie 'creakiness' of dracula has more in common with freud's notion of 'the uncanny' than it does with the blood & guts that horror is now identified with -- this is a sound film which formally integrates its moment in cinema history, with the unfathomable 'silence' of dracula's feudal nightmare in open conflict with the 'sound' discourse within van helsing's modern london of beeping cars, opera, and parlor conversation -- the 'uncanny' of eternal supernatural life existing in spite of the secular modern age, that is the key to bram stoker's amazing novel, and it is something this groundbreaking 1931 rendition does better than any of its children, because browning takes great care to show how the vampire is a quintessentially cinematic character -- it is the 'deadness' of the image we are seeing finally speaking to us as a dead image, a dead man speaking and moving, how movies infuse a false life to generations long gone, and in theory we all are aware of this, but only in the figure of the vampire does it attain its own perspective -- in short, dracula himself is the empty body in which cinema has built a narrative out of a dark past that it wasn't there to document. inside dracula, we feel the hand of deep time reaching out and scratching us with its decrepit claws, a memory that insists upon not dying, which lives only by imposing its will on those who are hypnotized by it -- this is a core mythology of the cinema as an artform, a story which explains and explores the allure of dead images.

"the strength of the vampire is that people will NOT believe in him" = the strength of a film is that people don't believe in it, they deny its fictive power even as it shapes their consciousness in unknown ways, that they are held inside the dark theater, awake but not aware, trapped in the coffin of the old world. we might think we are finished with the past, but the past is never done with us, it always enacts its revenge on the realm of the imaginal.

and lugosi -- i am always awestruck by him. when he speaks his name here, it is of a man possessed -- he IS dracula, there is no doubting it, no debate, his image is supreme, etched into the fabric of the medium and the minds of millions whom he stands as an unconscious totem of darkness. i cannot exist outside my own experiences and impressions, no one truly can, but seeing dracula at a young age did more than anything to make me believe in the tangible power of the occult, the supernatural, the paranormal, and i think it did so because browning was a sort of half-skeptic, a man fascinated by the grotesque and bizarre, but that also enjoyed the art of making something impossible look convincing to his audience, who then took the vampire away from a folkloric fairy tale and gave it weighty substance (murnau's nosferatu, which i also adore and respect, is archly fabulous by comparison, it is more like a grim storybook from hoffmann than a full-throated depiction of this creature). so what we get here is classic cinematic realism, but a realism profoundly weirded by obscuring smoke, darkness, ellipsis, cut-aways, and other 'tricks' of browning's trade.

this is a movie perched on the threshold of transcendence and damnation, a work of beauty that i cannot look away from -- to see it, to believe it, to be held underneath the black velvet cape of bloodthirsty antiquity, to be faced with the strange reality of good and evil on an inhuman cosmic scale, the dark romanticism of the 19th century expressed with the cold, convulsive oblivion of 20th century art -- i love this film and everything it does.

the mystery of greatest hits in a minor key, a porous acceptance of color, prop, remembrance and ignorance, that weird french bossa nova heard only in your heart. it is one of rivette's more balanced films, always with a baseline of spontaneity but able to lapse into more vigorous sequencing when required, featuring almost all his fixations and motifs while still feeling fresh. it is a three-hour proof that the secret essence of the freed unit hollywood musicals was never the expensive production design, nor even the professional polished tunes -- it was the willingness to treat song as an emergent phenomenon, harmony that would radically blossom from walking down the street in the rain or inside a musty house, that the camera could help coax out this hidden happiness that gave dignity and dynamism to daily life, if only for a few stanzas -- the musical which gives us back our capacity to wonder aloud in candid reverie, a fragile sliver of light and sound shared between friends and lovers.

very cold, laconic, every performance either quivering or deadpan, so demonstrative that we are actively drawn into the detective's investigation with little effort. it is easy to understand why the french jumped for joy over preminger, with his ostentatious & lyrical dolly shots, chessboard blocking and tasteful disdain for sentimental close-ups. preminger uses dana andrews in the same way that lang later would in the 50s, his stony surface might give us hidden desire when granted suggestive power by the filmmaker's eye, and gene tierney's after-image has the same potency as in stahl's leave her to heaven. i enjoyed this plenty but have to be honest in saying that i'm not quite sure it ever reached that pitch of ecstasy which i'm always looking for, the construction of the film is so even-keeled and caustic that it overall seems mannered, even though i can see how and why it proved influential for solidifying several early noir motifs, especially the voyeuristic territory that hitchcock would later redo in vertigo.

the decrepit house where your past thoughts grow wild in the poisonous garden, spiraling in thick vines around your ankles and neck, mundane malignance in not knowing where you are, what you've done, who is or isn't trying to hurt you, the world cut into hundreds of shadowy ribbons that take sinister shape whenever you try to focus.

in the wake of citizen kane, rebecca and other memory palaces of the early 40s, there emerged several proto-gnostic domestic terrorizers: shadow of a doubt, my name is julia ross, gaslight, the spiral staircase, hangover square, secret beyond the door. what george cukor brings to this sub-genre is an acute awareness of how sanity is partially a social phenomenon, earned and lost by consensus and proximity -- the small, temporary utopias dreamed-up in his earlier films like sylvia scarlet and holiday are curdled here into their shadow-side, where a masculine demiurge undercuts his wife's sense of self by reconfiguring the space of her home like puzzle pieces and then denying her any outside context. cukor usually finds much joy in depicting subjective digressions and collective delusions, indulging his protagonists' imaginative freedom while still having the camera firmly planted in reality, but he flaunts his mastery in gaslight by being aware that these fantasies are only fun when they're motivated by our speculative volition, not imposed on us by hostile patterns and compulsions; at points, the film seems almost convinced that bergman really is losing her mind.

my mother was gaslit by her family for years, and it is disturbing how easy this can happen, the perpetrators acting with an unsaid understanding and trapping the victim in a bubble that, if prolonged enough, is something they can never quite leave -- even today, mother still regularly doubts her everyday experiences, always asks me if things did or did not happen, begging for someone to tell her she isn't deluded or hallucinating, all because she was raised by two narcissistic parents who wanted their daughter to be sick so they could control her, that she would be forced to be dependent on their help because she was too weak to trust herself, and because of that, myself, my brother and my sister were all by proxy infected in different ways by this contagion of madness. i think it is a great tragedy that this happens all the time to so many people when it doesn't have to at all -- the gaslighter exerts an exorbitant degree of social effort just to leave someone helpless and damaged, it is one of the cruelest things you can do. i know that's never stopped someone before, but it does make gaslight an experience more horrifying to me than most horror pictures, because i've seen it play out directly in front of me and i know the devastation it leaves when it goes unchecked and unquestioned -- if only we all had a joseph cotten to storm the reality studio and sweep us off our feet.

there is a patient ponderousness to this george stevens film that seems somewhat out of place in the brisk studio stylistics of the 1930s, but it is a flaw which also serves as the strength of alice adams, clearing out a great deal of breathing room for kartharine hepburn's fragile performance as a social-striver whose wide-eyed self-delusion evokes a fierce pity from the viewer. stevens does well by tarkington's talent for depicting a precocious small-town americana that is now more or less lost and was already endangered by the time that this and other capra-esque films were lionizing it. the movie suggests an emotional depth at the expense of complexity, with all the plot threads being handily resolved by the characters just talking plain to one another once all the pretenses have dropped -- it is a precursor to what is now called 'cringe comedy', but stevens and tarkington have the decency to give us a happy ending after all the high-wire stress.

Watched on Wednesday May 14, 2025.

the pride of two professionals in a repudiated profession. it is an underreated text to help us understand naruse's dramaturgy -- each half of the horse costume is like the classical cinema, where separate components combine to give the impression of nature's unobtrusive unity. if the result is not perfect, it can nevertheless be animated by the spirit of strong conviction and practiced talent -- the greatness of this comedy is the uncanny gap that all performances must cross, which is helped by our willingness to participate in the creation of a world that is briefly elided by the camera -- in the suspended guise of acting, a true essence emerges which requires fakery to express its inner nobility.

we will be seen as The Old Ones to a future species that lives long after we have been consigned to the exegesis of time, so then of The Old Ones belongs a ruin and a summoning that collapses the waveform of perception, shifting through the color spectrum with iridescent radioactive particles that kill you via instant exposure -- we fill our mundane vehicles with the inanimate oil made of millions of creatures whose names we will never know, and as we speak they are having their revenge, terraforming this planet back to a prehistoric temperature that will annihilate everything we've ever known over the next dozen generations.

lovecraft wrote the dark dreams which lurk behind the anthropocentric lie, against his materialistic dogma he beheld the truly expansive and deep fathoms of a cosmic vantage, a point of no return where we will finally give up our heuristic hobbies and instead choose to blindly dance to les baxter music on the rainbow-hued sea-cliffs as the sun burns itself out and we drown our consciousness in blind, instinctual ritual, a spiral which crudely mimics the gradual unraveling of universal entropy, the small greyish pebbles on a beach which were once the cyclopean marble columns of great cities sunk beneath aeonic waves, microbiological strains in our water supply that dictate our pithy actions in accordance with ancient plans whose makers once devoured stars and we too shall live to see an ascension beyond our comprehensions, a hunger to at last molt off this superficial mammalian shell and once again merge with the sapient mineral substrate.

learning to live with the tragedy that has become your reality. for anyone who has lost a loved one, naruse's final film cannot be more relevant to the inexpressible emotions that are felt when the past reemerges within experiences of the present, water rippling outwards across the entire history of the human species, the correspondences that remind us that the dead never fully leave our sides, we carry their ghosts inside of our souls and nature reflects them back at us in an infinite variety of symbols.

and yet, if there cannot be lasting peace, we can become more acquainted with these feelings, to settle into the future that finitude has imposed upon us, and we do this by reconciling ourselves to the people and places we are the most eager to forget, to forgive others and thus forgive ourselves -- for naruse, people can never find true happiness in one another, there is always an irreducible friction that divides genders, classes, time and space that cannot be bridged. but by becoming aware of this distance, we can negotiate our actions so as to stay closest to our inner truth -- if humanity is cursed to be a social animal who cannot create the perfect society it desires, if we live and die alone, as autonomous beings, then there must be a way to comport who and what we are so that we can help others on their path -- the clouds may scatter, they may evaporate, but their unique transience is something that will forever affect the past and future, a recursive instance of eternal activity, amor fati.

often with an older director's later movies, we feel the strong presence of death, dissolution, decay. with mikio naruse, it is not so -- scattered clouds is the closest he comes to a utopian vision, where men and women are fully-actualized persons, each granted subjective grace, not unbound by their actions but not damned by them either -- naruse's reputation as a 'pessimist' misses the point here, he is ultimately a realist, but a humane one, trying his best to articulate the problems of a japan which went through two different modernizations over the course of his career, and to document this split which was felt in every corner of his culture. if his early films are stylistically 'progressive' and avant-garde, and his later work is 'neo-classical' and in some sense conservative, it is because he was actively always changing his style to suit the challenges of what he was portraying, to meet the essential challenge of this era.

naruse's filmography is haunted by 'doubles' -- two women divided by class, two men divided by mortality, 'two in the shadow', again and again we are presented with the idea that nothing exists fully unto itself -- for every established notion, there is a lively undercurrent which bubbles up to meet its sister on the field of contradiction. what naruse exemplifies is how cinema must be aware of what is not shown on screen, that women's pictures must be informed by unsaid patriarchal norms, that melodrama, the foundation of filmic storytelling, is at its best when restrained by an elliptical point-of-view which calls forth the internal world of emotions with the simplest gesture of the body -- a wife, a widow, a geisha, a daughter, a mother, quickly glancing away as the camera cuts to her reaction. naruse mastered the tempo and compositional power of classical visual narrative, and understood through his experiments how to color outside the lines without any ostentatious movement -- because of this, no matter when or where he worked, he made films that were honest about economic precarity, that directly confronted women's issues, that were rarely sentimental, and to also do all this in a populist, accessible form -- not an easy thing to do, but he made it look so.

naruse's world is quiet, unassuming, modest; the depths persist, the waters flow, and his shadow grows long.

Watched on Sunday May 11, 2025.

ignored by the heavens, these woman are thrown under the wheels of profit and propriety, left with the dire options of death or madness. naruse is uniquely suited to noir in that he cares way less about the act of violence and more about the way that such acts shape the broken lives they leave behind, how social problems reproduce their own conditions, that suffering begets more suffering -- moment of terror reaches back to the semi-surreal dramas of 30s naruse, where the speed and intensity of modernism can engineer the shattering of human sanity and empathy.

it is the plot of a late lang domestic noir but done in the typically laconic naruse style, so the film feels like a disionate document of a non-event like in the works of antonioni or hamaguchi. if we conceive of a director's later works as embodying a sort of disintegration or complication of a previous unity, naruse's 60s films seem to be the return of his 30s experimental attitude but within the disaffected 50s formalism, so the thin line and other movies of this era are simultaneously retrograde and postmodern, lacking a certain strong literary centrifuge that naruse relied upon, but also venturing into genre territory and more abstract horizons of action -- the dim lighting and dostoyevsky-esque point-of-view here indicates a willingness to move outside of the realm of subjective autonomy and emphasizing the camera's distancing effects, we are alienated from the characters but they are also alienated from the causal network of their own actions, so rather than the usual track for naruse of 'persisting against despair', here we are left with a woman burdened by her recognition of the truth.

aldrich ensures that every inch of this is suitably unpleasant and miserable and you come away with the impression that its astringent, dry presentation owes more to hitchcock's psycho and wilder's sunset boulevard than the idiosyncratic careers of davis and crawford. this isn't really the gothic melodrama that i had assumed it was, because there isn't a transcendental dimension to anything that occurs -- baby jane instead wallows in the tangled family psychology that denies all parties a chance at happiness, and evokes our pity more than the pathos of genuine tragedy, because already from the start it is evident that these two are victims who have victimized each other for decades and decades. aldrich is usually good at giving us something more propulsive or explosive, but the sadness proves too much here and blankets the picture in an interminable atmosphere that hammers the same message into our skulls with unrelenting tenacity. usually this is the sort of film i would easily enjoy, but i must it to finding this inexplicably dull.

our houses of worship are always built at ley lines of power so that they can channel the potent desiccated energies of other dimensions and project them outwards into the consciousness of the faithful, who then pay service and tribute to dark gods that they do not know the true names of. the alchemists were persecuted and destroyed for knowing the secrets to constructing and directing desire on a mass scale, and now their teachings are badly abused and misunderstood by academic historians and architects who wish to paper over the mindless slaughters that feed the demons once sealed-away in ancient tombs and now running free inside our homes and cars and computers. we are victims of a campaign of mass censorship and only by following the path of fulcanelli and the rosicrucians can we even begin to fight back against the sinister forces which we breathe inside us like toxin oxygen.

a superlatively handsome sea tale more than worthy of jack london's literary pedigree, where each performance is calibrated, cynical, charming, and the foggy semi-expressionist atmosphere is to die for. david thomson writes about how in the late 30s and 40s, the career of michael curtiz at warner brothers seems to reach a specific harmonic resonance, a combination of a director at the height of his powers working with the greatest production talent that the studio system had to offer, and when watching the sea wolf, it is hard to disagree with thomson's assessment that this was the sort of film that embodied the best of what old hollywood could achieve: smartly written but accessible entertainment, acted with conviction, lavishly made but not overproduced, unblinking violence accompanied by a strong moral center, a perfect balance of all the qualities that this era could strive for.

curtiz is an under-sung artist even today, lost in the shuffle of directors with more neuroses and bigger personalities, yet look at the results of his labor: this blows most similar movies out of the water with its clear-eyed character study shrouded in the shadowy wrapper of adventure fiction, calculating its anti-fascist philosophical underpinnings in degree with its ability to express them in simple, direct imagery. it is a work where the internal forces inside each of its central characters play out in unexpected but satisfying ways, where action and rhetoric dance a beautiful duet aboard robinson's ghost-ship, each threatening to overwhelm the other, a symphony of reason and instinct -- combining the broad sensibility of hollywood glamour with the precision of a novelist's pen, the sea wolf is a hell of a good time.

a side note: the warner archive blurays are always pristine, but this one seriously takes the cake, it is one of the best looking films i've ever bought, and also features the full, uncut version of this with restored footage. i cannot recommend it enough if you're even vaguely interested in this era of cinema, i blind-bought it just based off of this movie's reputation and i am so glad that i did.

adventure, it is found with the friendly amazonian sell-sword who accompanies you on your quest, her formidable skills empowered and bedazzled by golden eyeshadow, and also with a tiny black bear who scampers as fast as his little legs will carry him through sun-dappled meadows, the cold breeze in your hair and silver wind-chimes singing your legend throughout the ages -- against the cult of the spider-god, heroes rise to the challenge and save the day through a judicious use of mirror shield, an indispensable +1 magick item for kombating giant arachnids and their sorcerer-servitors.

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

we shouldn't be exploring other planets, if we do we will infect them with our diseases and destroy their pristine mineral silence with the madness barely contained inside our bleating skulls. maybe earth is a cosmic mutation that would prove malignant if it had license to spread too far, our turmoil slathered across the inviolate oceans of ganymede and other stellar bodies whose circular tides pull us past the point of reason's fictions. whenever i'm near a body of water i feel this impulse to walk into it and be consumed by whatever is underneath the waves and as the oceans rise to erase our wafer-thin civilization we will all be gradually absorbed by the unconscious of this dreaming magnetic sphere, evolving back into reptiles then fish then amoebas then microscopic particles barely animated by occasional thunderstorms which sweep the blistered surface of volcanic lakes.

every time someone's posted a clip from this film on social media, i've felt less and less compelled to revisit it -- could my instincts have been that wrong? -- but this time i decided to take the plunge into that cold water, and i've ended up mixed rather than fully disappointed.

as a historical object about the 1920s and 30s, it is basically worthless and superficial, circularly spinning its edgy-but-energetic setpieces while not going anywhere meaningful, addressing the rudimentary notions of this time with a clumsy reverie -- the stuff about race is particularly bad, where i had once thought it 'bold', it is such an afterthought to the larger story as to be insulting. after watching more films in general but especially from old hollywood, it is clear to me now that chazelle wasn't so much making a film about the past as the anxieties of his present.

and looking back on myself, i think much the same. this movie came out right when my mother had been diagnosed with cancer and was enduring a hospital stay, and i crying in the theater in a way that i probably would have with anything. this was released at peak 'are movies dead' post-COVID backlash where it seems that an entire year was spent thinking that movie theaters were dying, and that even a relatively cynical movie like this being a sort of love letter to the medium was exactly what the doctor ordered when i was sitting alone at the opening weekend wondering if my mom was going to die. thankfully, they caught the cancer early for her, and movies haven't died yet three years later, but in 2022 i projected whatever i was feeling onto babylon and saw what i needed to see about the importance of life and art and whatever.

what still matters to me today in 2025 is nellie, who barely seems like a character and is more the articulation of a set of garbled impulses that chazelle threw into robbie's corner. the scene where nellie is at the party of east coast elites and is trying to affect a posh attitude, only to then have a terrible vomitous outburst at them, is something i feel deeply, this bubbling resentment against people you hate and don't respect but to whom you're expected to conform your identity to and 'perform' being higher class -- it is the one time where the vagaries of the picture harden into something specific and sharp, this idea that the soul of hollywood was fought between the itinerant circus freaks of the west coast and the monied sophisticates of the east coast, which if you read any history of the medium is a dynamic you can see played out over the course of the 1930s to where movies at the beginning of that decade feel raw, scrappy, perverted, uncensored, and by the end of it the studio system has become so slick and professionalized and 'tasteful' -- i wish babylon was more about this class war aspect, because it's something that still feels relevant in the american cinema of today that is so starkly divided between indie and corporate cultures.

i also wish i still liked this as much as i did once, but as with a lot of these films that reflexively depict the business of american filmmaking, i am just tired of the romanticized showbiz cliches, the stuff that was already half a joke when busby berkeley was doing it, this desire to want to tell stories about storytellers reads false to me now in the same way that i can't stand to plough through any novel about a novelist, the meta rhetoric is so heavy-handed and cartoonish and self-involved and plainly works better in a straight essayistic form like in godard's historie(s) du cinema.

Watched on Friday May 2, 2025.

a surprisingly routine hagiographic biopic about one of naruse's favored novelists, it addresses her poverty and feminism in a detailed way but then vaguely elides her political involvement even though that's theoretically the most interesting aspect of her life, how this self-made woman would then become cold and indifferent to the poor underclass she emerged from, and also how she enthusiastically participated in japan's militarist war effort as a war correspondent in manchuria and elsewhere -- once you realize that the film is cutting around these later portions, it seems quite hollow and more than a little whitewashed, serving to remove us from the reality of this complicated female author by emphasizing the nobility of her suffering, even as we avoid the implications of her own agency. formally it's one of the more interesting naruses of the 60s, interspersing hayashi's poetry, prose and narration in-between melodramatic moments, but given the deep ambiguities that this director was able to achieve when adapting hayashi's floating clouds or late chrysanthemums, you'd wish for something more nuanced here when dealing with the authoress herself.

top 50, not ranked, one film per director.

subject to change at my arbitrary whims.

[1/21/23] update: expanded the list from 50 to 75 entries, same rules still apply. will continue to expand as i see a wider variety of films.

[12/27/23] update: expanded the list from 75 to 100 entries.

[5/14/24] update: contracted the list from 100 to 30 entries.

[1/5/25] update: expanded the list from 30 to 40 entries.

[5/14/25] update: expanded the list from 40 to 50 entries.

1. The Mothman Prophecies
2. Blade Runner
3. Conan the Barbarian
4. Excalibur
5. The Alchemical Dream: Rebirth of the Great Work
6. Bronco Billy
7. T.R. Baskin
8. The Other Side of the Mirror
9. Heat
10. Only God Forgives

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"Art's like a shark. If it stops swimming, it drowns. So I like to put myself in places of insecurity. It's learning to trust your judgment. I'm now full-bore intuitive. You have to be."

1. Blade Runner
2. Kingdom of Heaven
3. The Counselor
4. The Duellists
5. Alien
6. Napoleon
7. Thelma & Louise
8. Legend
9. The Last Duel
10. American Gangster

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

in tangier in 1960, the beat writer william burroughs met a sea captain called captain clark, who boasted to him that he had never had an accident in 23 years; later that day clark's boat sank, killing him and everyone on board. burroughs was reflecting on this, that same evening, when he heard a radio report about a plane crash in florida: the pilot was another captain clark and the plane was flight 23. from then on burroughs began noting down incidences of the number 23, and wrote a short story, 23 skidoo.

burroughs's friends robert anton wilson and robert shea adopted the '23 enigma' as a guiding principle in their conspiratorial illuminatus! trilogy. wilson apparently went on to study the number more closely, and discovered that it seemed to occur more often than circumstances called for, although he itted that "when you start looking for something, you tend to find it."

letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/pd187/list/is-the-sun-conscious/

• Skyfall
• Pearl Harbor
• 23
• A Beautiful Mind
• 23 Blast
• 23 Skidoo
• The 23
• Julius Caesar
• 23rd March 1931: Shaheed
• 23rd Psalm Branch

...plus 80 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"A movie is a series of reveals, essentially, and then you're supposed to sit in a room and tell someone what it all means. That goes against everything that I just worked for. So I have no interest in summing it all up. It's all out there."

1. Showing Up
2. Meek's Cutoff
3. Night Moves
4. First Cow
5. Certain Women
6. Wendy and Lucy
7. Old Joy
8. Cal State Long Beach, CA, January 2020
9. Then a Year
10. River of Grass

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"First, I'm not really and never have been a director for hire. I don't make other people's movies. I make my movies and that's pretty much been my entire career. I don't feel like I'm on a lot of lists to do such and such movie because people don't feel I'm particularly interested in that. I've written and directed everything. That's the way I work the best and that's how I like to work."

1. In the Lost Lands
2. Resident Evil: Retribution
3. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
4. Event Horizon
5. Monster Hunter
6. Pompeii
7. Resident Evil
8. Mortal Kombat
9. Shopping
10. Soldier

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

films that display a genuine understanding of occult/paranormal concepts, intentional or not, allowing said esoterica to leak into the mainstream. these are works which teach the supernatural, but also selectively filter out the uninitiated using genre frameworks and/or hiding it within non-occult language. basically gateway drugs into ritual magick, gnosticism, cryptids, UFOlogy, and assorted forteana.

avoiding conspiracy as much as i can here, because filmic conspiracies, like most IRL ones, are often dog whistle distractions from the real threats out there (i.e. 'bad apples' spoiling the safe 'democracy').

the rules:

/// 1. no d&d magick, wizards throwing fireballs, harry potter casting magic missile, all that bullshit.

/// 2. no 'we thought it was supernatural, but it's actually just mundane technology!' twists.

/// 3. no overly-objectified portrayals. films made by hardcore monotheists tend to paint magick with a broad brush of EVIL, without the detailed invocations, sigils and knowledge of the field, and films made by hardcore atheists tend to treat magick as nothing but stage tricks and slight-of-hand. this is the in-between.

/// 4. ontological ambiguity is welcome. the line between 'it's all in your head' and 'this is material fact' is always being blurred in the case of UFOs, paranormal creatures, and magickal results. there are different levels of manifestation depending on what plane of reality you occupy -- symbolic truth reflects other corresponding layers of truth across sympathetic lines.

will be updating as i continue on my journey. any suggestions welcome!

• 23
• Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe
• The Alchemical Dream: Rebirth of the Great Work
• All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
• Alternative 3
• And We All Shine On
• Angel
• Annabelle Serpentine Dance
• Artemis '81
• Ash Is Purest White

...plus 182 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"Our civilization is moving away from the visual toward the auditive. The visual is the only sense that gives us detachment, objectivity, rationality. All the other senses are irrational, discontinuous and disconnected, especially sound."

1. Moonfleet
2. The Tiger of Eschnapur
3. The Indian Tomb
4. Die Nibelungen: Siegfried
5. Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge
6. Rancho Notorious
7. You Only Live Once
8. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
9. M
10. Secret Beyond the Door

...plus 32 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"Like a man says: where the wind blows too hard, the trees gotta bend."

1. Bird of Paradise
2. 3:10 to Yuma
3. Cowboy
4. Dark age
5. The Hanging Tree
6. Jubal
7. The Last Wagon
8. A Summer Place
9. Broken Arrow
10. Destination Tokyo

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

“Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. 'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the living past. 'Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.' Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.”

1. Chimes at Midnight
2. The Lady from Shanghai
3. Citizen Kane
4. The Magnificent Ambersons
5. F for Fake
6. Macbeth
7. The Other Side of the Wind
8. Mr. Arkadin
9. Othello
10. Touch of Evil

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

the rise and fall of analog anti-naturalism: beginning in the late 70s, many films, especially hollywood genres, began to move away from the focus on verisimilitude and location-shooting that became prominent in the 50s and fully flowered in the early 70s. neo-expressionism fully became the default style of many famous films from 1983-1996. it faded in the mid-2000s, as greenscreen began to replace sets and lighting in the american cinema began to flatten and resemble television. tim burton, alex proyas, russell mulcahy, early ridley scott, and clive barker are the masters of neo-expressionism.

the essential characteristics of neo-expressionism:

/// 1. the embrace of artifice. these are films which no longer pretend to be set in our own world, but instead inhabit a constructed dream-world of sets, matte paintings, and often special effects.

/// 2. the post-MTV/commercial hyper-aesthetic. liquid lighting, wet streets, reflective surfaces, strong monochromatic colors, hard shadows, weather effects, gauze, lens flares, dutch angles.

/// 3. subtextual horror/noir. many neo-expressionist films are visually oriented in classic horror/noir plots, often featuring monsters, detectives, killers, and assorted goth trappings. even if the film is not a noir or horror story, it is constructed using the classic visual grammar of those works.

/// 4. decadence. these are films which prioritize a visual experience over narrative cohesion or the minutia of plot, as opposed to the more actorly/scriptural focus of new hollywood films. the actors are here to be in harmony with the overall aesthetic, not to showcase their talents. the scripts are often full of dead-ends.

/// 5. practical effects, first and foremost. some later neo-expressionist films utilize advances in CGI, but everything is always first grounded in real optical effects, whether that be constructed sets, matte paintings, gels, smoke, stop motion, suitmation, or compositing. the CGI is used to augment the practical effects, never to replace it.

there's a million hong kong films that have this aesthetic, so let me know if i forgot any. i'm also largely avoiding horror films that don't have the liquid lighting look, or that mostly are shot on-location.

• Suspiria
• Exorcist II: The Heretic
• Alien
• The Execution Game
• Inferno
• Kagemusha
• Xanadu
• Flash Gordon
• Thrilling Bloody Sword
• Excalibur

...plus 161 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"I make movies for teenage boys. Oh dear, what a crime."

1. Ambulance
2. Bad Boys II
3. Transformers: The Last Knight
4. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
5. 6 Underground
6. Pain & Gain
7. The Rock
8. Transformers: Age of Extinction
9. Bad Boys
10. Transformers

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"In my career as a director, there’s always been some point where you get halfway through it, or three-quarters, and you go: ‘What is this thing all about, and why am I telling the story? Does anybody really care about seeing this?’ At that time you have to say: ‘OK, forget that and just go ahead.'"

1. Bronco Billy
2. Letters from Iwo Jima
3. The Bridges of Madison County
4. The Outlaw Josey Wales
5. Unforgiven
6. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
7. The 15:17 to Paris
8. Cry Macho
9. Million Dollar Baby
10. Escape from Alcatraz

...plus 54 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"I am an artist whose art-form is making cinema for a group of people to watch together. That's what I do for a living. The exploitation of that is unending, but that isn't what I do it for. That's not the artist that I am. Someone who makes TV shows is a different kind of artist. The experience of being in a room with 500 people is different; you literally share points of view when you watch together."

1. Knock at the Cabin
2. Signs
3. Glass
4. Unbreakable
5. Trap
6. Split
7. The Visit
8. Lady in the Water
9. Old
10. The Village

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"I think, in my own films, the rhythms come from life. One of the reasons I love Hou and Ozu so much is the way their films match the rhythm and emotion of Chinese people’s lives. I think anyone’s film technique stems directly from the way he views life. In my long shots and long takes, my goal is to respect the viewer’s agency, and even to give my films a sense of democracy. I want audiences to be able to freely choose how they want to interact with what’s on screen."

1. Ash Is Purest White
2. The World
3. Caught by the Tides
4. Mountains May Depart
5. A Touch of Sin
6. Unknown Pleasures
7. Platform
8. Still Life
9. 24 City
10. Pickpocket

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

“Since I think of everybody as a friend, because I really appreciate everybody that likes me and my movies, I just wanted to let everybody know a little bit more about me. Actually, I’m really a peaceful person, and you know, I hate evil and I hate all of the dictators in the world and I hate war and I usually hate people killing people. So in my movies I always use the stronger force of justice to fight them back, to hit them hard.”

1. The Killer
2. Hard Boiled
3. A Better Tomorrow II
4. Bullet in the Head
5. A Better Tomorrow
6. Hard Target
7. Last Hurrah for Chivalry
8. Windtalkers
9. Red Cliff II
10. Mission: Impossible II

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"In fact, I prefer not to have a very concrete script before I start to shoot a movie. The reason is, until the moment I shoot, I still want to introduce some new ideas. Maybe it’s true that I don’t think thoroughly in advance, or I couldn’t come to a final decision. However, I love this production environment. I don’t want the script to limit my instant creativity."

1. Exiled
2. Romancing in Thin Air
3. Throw Down
4. Vengeance
5. Election
6. Triad Election
7. The Mission
8. Life Without Principle
9. Fat Choi Spirit
10. Drug War

...plus 39 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"What film captures is the world of humans, the human condition, and to capture the changes in their emotion, their conflicts and the obstacles they face. How you understand it depends on your own perspective. What motivated me to make films was how I saw these obstacles. Everybody grows up, everybody has their own life and experiences, but what sets someone apart is the ability to observe it from a distance. Then, you can really see yourself. You might begin by watching others and then reflecting on your similarities and you can eventually really see yourself as an outsider. Your expression will then be unique. You can observe the things that happen around you with your own perspective which is not like any one else’s.”

1. The Assassin
2. Flowers of Shanghai
3. Millennium Mambo
4. The Puppetmaster
5. Daughter of the Nile
6. Good Men, Good Women
7. Goodbye South, Goodbye
8. Dust in the Wind
9. Three Times
10. A City of Sadness

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

BUSHIDO / CHIVALRY / STOICISM ; men and women who live by a strict code of honor in a world of violence and treachery.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXRxRTW6nXg

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zqoGDVed8A

suggestions welcome!

• Le Samouraï
• Drive
• The Killer
• The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
• Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
• Exiled
• Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
• The Mission
• Pale Rider
• Ronin

...plus 126 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"I always get criticized for style over content, unlike Ridley’s films like Alien or Blade Runner or Gladiator that go right into the classic box right away. Mine sort of hover. Maybe with time people will start saying they should be classics, but I think I’m always perceived as reaching too hard for difference, and difference doesn’t categorize you as the ‘classic’ category."

1. The Last Boy Scout
2. Man on Fire
3. Crimson Tide
4. Déjà Vu
5. Domino
6. Top Gun
7. The Fan
8. The Hunger
9. Unstoppable
10. Enemy of the State

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in cliches. That doesn't make them laughable; it's something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach what's most personal about them, they could only come up with what's most public."

1. Song to Song
2. Knight of Cups
3. To the Wonder
4. A Hidden Life
5. The New World
6. The Thin Red Line
7. Badlands
8. Days of Heaven
9. The Tree of Life
10. Voyage of Time: Life's Journey

"You cannot have a story that has any validity, or that the audience can empathize with, until there is a challenge. Arguably, life is about the presentation and transcendence of challenge. Everyone’s obsessed about taking challenges away from people, but you have to realize the very foundation of evolution is based upon a challenge. So if you took away all the challenges and made the world perfect, where does that leave us? While we’re sort of all trying to get rid of challenges, in the interim we should just enjoy the fact that challenges are there in order for us to overcome them."

1. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
2. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
3. Snatch
4. Revolver
5. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
6. Sherlock Holmes
7. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
8. The Gentlemen
9. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
10. RocknRolla

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"I think I just have a natural operatic aesthetic. I can't help it."

1. Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire
2. Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver
3. Sucker Punch
4. Watchmen
5. Zack Snyder's Justice League
6. 300
7. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
8. Man of Steel
9. Dawn of the Dead
10. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

slowly converting my massive DVD collection into a blu-ray one; progress will be made.

• The 15:17 to Paris
• The Adventures of Robin Hood
• The Adventures of Tintin
• Alien
• Alien Resurrection
• Aliens
• Alien³
• American Gangster
• American Psycho
• Andrei Rublev

...plus 288 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"Shadow conceals—light reveals. To know what to reveal and what to conceal, and in what degrees to do this, is all there is to art."

1. The Scarlet Empress
2. Morocco
3. Anatahan
4. Dishonored
5. Shanghai Express
6. The Devil Is a Woman
7. The Blue Angel
8. Blonde Venus
9. The Salvation Hunters
10. Jet Pilot

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"All this stuff that’s imprinted when you’re very young, you don’t want to divest yourself of it. I think one of the most important things as a filmmaker, at least of the kind of awe-and-wonder-type stories that I'm attracted to, is to stay that kid. Part of that means fighting off the natural urge of cynicism as we take everything in. It’s a battle."

1. Minority Report
2. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
3. Raiders of the Lost Ark
4. Jaws
5. Jurassic Park
6. Catch Me If You Can
7. War of the Worlds
8. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
9. The Adventures of Tintin
10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

...plus 26 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

a year of embarrassing riches.

1. The Killer
2. John Wick: Chapter 4
3. Napoleon
4. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
5. Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire
6. A Haunting of Past Ink
7. Knock at the Cabin
8. The Wandering Earth II
9. Ferrari
10. Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms

“I’m, first and foremost, a student of old-school filmmaking. I like practical action and I like clarity in geography and my action sequences. I feel a lot of action has lost that… Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it."

1. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
2. Jack Reacher
3. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
4. The Way of the Gun
5. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

“It’s quite fascinating because prison’s a laboratory. It’s all compressed and when you compress the human spirit, the psyche, the human soul, geographically, into a prison, it does not diminish. What happens is that the expression is amplified. It’s human nature that if we can’t express ourselves by going out to a bar and having a good time and telling a few jokes, it’ll manifest in something else . . . it’ll become the sharpness of a seam or something ironed into someone’s jeans or tattoos.“

1. The Last of the Mohicans
2. Public Enemies
3. Miami Vice
4. Heat
5. Blackhat
6. Thief
7. Collateral
8. Manhunter
9. The Insider
10. Ali

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"There are some things we do for ourselves, but there are some things we do for others. I am here because when I was young, I wanted very badly to be a writer, I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I couldn't find anyone like me in the world and it felt like my dreams were foreclosed simply because my gender was less typical than others. If I can be that person for someone else, then the sacrifice of my private civic life may have value." - Lana

"The way a film can change over the generations . . . You watch a movie when you're 20 years old, and you see the same movie when you're 35 years old or 40 years old, and something happens. The movie changes, because we change as individuals." - Lily

1. The Matrix
2. The Matrix Reloaded
3. The Matrix Revolutions
4. The Matrix Resurrections
5. Bound
6. Cloud Atlas
7. Speed Racer
8. Jupiter Ascending

"The cinema began with a ionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings."

1. Casino
2. Taxi Driver
3. Silence
4. The Last Temptation of Christ
5. The King of Comedy
6. The Wolf of Wall Street
7. The Departed
8. GoodFellas
9. Killers of the Flower Moon
10. The Irishman

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

"I'm not a reactionary—I'm just a right-wing extremist so far beyond the Christian Identity people like that and stuff, that they can't even imagine. I'm so far beyond that I'm a Maoist. I'm an anarchist. I've always been an anarchist. Any true, real right-winger if he goes far enough hates all form of government, because government should be done to cattle and not human beings."

1. Conan the Barbarian
2. The Wind and the Lion
3. Big Wednesday
4. Extreme Prejudice
5. Red Dawn
6. Apocalypse Now
7. Rough Riders
8. Farewell to the King
9. Geronimo: An American Legend
10. Motorcycle Gang

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

barbarians at the gates, atavism, infantile (often racist) anxieties about the waning of empire, the insistence of decorum above empathy, fears of 'impurity' and decadence, a civilization's corruption and decline.

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of ionate intensity."

• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
• Apocalypse Now
• Atlantis: The Lost Empire
• The Blood of Fu Manchu
• Bram Stoker's Dracula
• The Canyons
• The Castle of Fu Manchu
• Contempt
• Doctor Strange
• Dracula

...plus 59 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

my submission for the 2023 poll, which requests great films that received no votes on the 2022 sight & sound ballot.

1. Resident Evil: Retribution
2. Excalibur
3. The Canyons
4. My Name Is Julia Ross
5. Eden and After
6. Only God Forgives
7. The Boy Friend
8. Kingdom of Heaven
9. Exiled
10. Lucifer Rising

alternative sub-societies, time-capsule worlds frozen within the deterministic boundaries of their creators, autonomous structures that exist with or without humanity, the Inter-Zone of psychological warfare, above and below and without.

beware of the fake nazi/theosophy UFO shit and stick to your neoplatonic readings of real lost civs/journeys through inner states of being, and keep abreast of the contemporary traces of imperialist underground shelters/tax havens/nuclear silos/private space ports. these are isolated hangouts for ritual activity by the US/EU/china, functioning both as vacation spots and interdimensional transport hubs. the dinosaurs are the smokescreen atop the trillions of dollars of automated cities and black-budget laboratories/testing grounds. the earth contains many islands which allow isolated experimentation for left-hand path occultists and so-called 'mad scientists' -- every james bond villain is the 'hero' in langley. per proclus, the neopagans and the hermetists, if you occupy the internal spaces of an existence, you control their corresponding outer planes. humanity's mind is thus colonized by its geographic double.

"A term first coined by UFO researcher, Richard Dolan, back in 2010. The term is his description of a particularly wealthy and powerful sub-set of the human race whom he believes have been secretly amassing for themselves exotic and highly advanced technology. Via this hoarding of high tech for themselves (and by keeping it from the rest of the world) these highly-placed elites actually live secret, hidden lives of extreme opulence and leisure. He has even postulated that via this advanced tech, they have built separate cities for themselves, located ether in remote places (such as underground, or on the ocean floor, or within the mountains of Antarctica, etc), or even off world."

"In one of his lectures, he defined a breakaway civilization as 'a radically advanced and increasingly separate structure that has access to classified science and data denied to the rest of us.'

In After Disclosure he described the Breakaway Civilization as follows:

There is a clandestine group that possesses:

-- Technology that is vastly superior to that of the 'mainstream' world.
-- The ability to explore areas of our world and surroundings presently unavailable to the rest of us.
-- Possible interactions or encounters with the Others who are here in our reality.
-- Scientific and cosmological understandings that give them greater insights into the nature of our world.
-- A significant 'built-off-the-grid' infrastructure, partially underground, that affords them a high degree of secrecy and independence of action."

~///\\\~ FURTHER LINES OF RESEARCH: ~///\\\~

letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/pd187/list/how-old-is-the-earth-the-trouble-with-scientific/

letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/pd187/list/the-amish-atlantis-connection/

letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/pd187/list/the-sibylline-key-comrade-yuis-esoteric-serials/

letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/pd187/list/the-cottingley-fairies-were-real/

letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/pd187/list/early-20th-re-hippie-mystical-esoteric/

www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_cayce_3.htm#Edgar%20Cayce%20on%20Atlantis%20I

www.bibliotecapleyades.net/atlantida_mu/esp_lemuria_2.htm

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dellschau

www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia3/ciencia_flyingobjects186.htm#Dark%20Fleet

www.bibliotecapleyades.net/offlimits/offlimits_dulce01.htm

www.bibliotecapleyades.net/marte/marte_basescolonies17.htm

www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_mindcon06.htm#DEEP%20UNDERGROUND%20MILITARY%20BASES

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IB8p-YpXwA

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXgr_YErHDE

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWXBHdTsAZQ

www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0Ir058iHlM

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst

i.imgur.com/hYGibpe.jpg

i.imgur.com/MTuFTxw.jpg

i.imgur.com/WQ7v7QJ.jpg

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tashirojima

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashima_Island

sealandgov.org/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Weather_Emergency_Operations_Center

metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/Mother_Base_(Caribbean)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Detrick

thediplomat.com/2017/03/chinas-most-important-south-china-sea-military-base/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwajalein_Atoll

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_Rock_Mountain_Complex

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_fort

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rathcroghan

letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/cache/epub/55505/pg55505-images.html

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperborea

www.sacred-texts.com/ufo/irl/index.htm

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromboli

letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/files/37775/37775-h/37775-h.htm

letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/files/3007/3007-h/3007-h.htm

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toten

i.imgur.com/XyupdU7.jpg

i.imgur.com/GHI7RrA.png

www.theharvardadvocate.com/content/down-by-the-piraeus

www.worldhistory.org/Amaterasu/

www.sacred-texts.com/ane/ishtar.htm

img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1456/99/1456994336282.pdf

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katabasis

• Inherent Vice
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
• The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Journey of Radiance
• Aleister Crowley: The Other Loch Ness Monster
• Aliens and Atlantis: Stargates and Hidden Realms
• Alien from L.A.
• Andalusian Superstition
• As Above, So Below
• Atlantis Rising
• Atlantis: The Beginning of Civilization

...plus 118 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

“In of the ultimate reward, listen, man, when I was a kid, when I was 8 years old, I wanted to be a movie director, and I got to be a movie director. I lived my fucking dream, you can’t get better than that. That’s the ultimate. I don’t need anything.”

1. Big Trouble in Little China
2. In the Mouth of Madness
3. Vampires
4. Assault on Precinct 13
5. Escape from L.A.
6. Escape from New York
7. Prince of Darkness
8. Halloween
9. They Live
10. Christine

...plus 11 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

i almost never watch horror films so this is the time to purge my cinephile sins -- all killers, no filler.

1. The Guardian
2. I Walked with a Zombie
3. Goth
4. Bloodstone: Subspecies II
5. Bloodlust: Subspecies III
6. Subspecies 4: Bloodstorm
7. Vampire Journals
8. Subspecies V: Blood Rise
9. Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter
10. She Killed in Ecstasy

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

movies where westerners go to the east, or easterners come to the west. typical culture clash, might include a dollop of racism or paranoia, orientalism aplenty.

suggestions welcome!

• War
• American Samurai
• August Moon
• A Better Tomorrow II
• Big Trouble in Little China
• Black Rain
• The Bridge on the River Kwai
• Crying Freeman
• Empire of the Sun
• The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

...plus 53 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

“Hide the ideas, but so that people find them; the most important will be the most hidden.”

1. Four Nights of a Dreamer
2. Lancelot of the Lake
3. Diary of a Country Priest
4. The Devil, Probably
5. Mouchette
6. A Man Escaped
7. Pickpocket
8. L'Argent
9. Au Hasard Balthazar
10. A Gentle Woman

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter."

1. Witch's Cradle
2. Meshes of the Afternoon
3. The Private Life of a Cat
4. At Land
5. Ritual in Transfigured Time
6. A Study in Choreography for Camera
7. The Very Eye of Night
8. Meditation on Violence
9. Ensemble for Somnambulists
10. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"At my age, I don’t really care. I enjoy every day. I’m 75 years old and it’s good to be alive. My movies seem to get better with repeated viewings. There’s a lot going on in my movies — and a lot of movie history in my movies. So they’ll be writing about them for quite a while. How many books have been written about Hitchcock? Now they can write books about De Palma and Hitchcock."

1. Carlito's Way
2. Femme Fatale
3. Scarface
4. Blow Out
5. Mission: Impossible
6. Snake Eyes
7. Dressed to Kill
8. Sisters
9. The Untouchables
10. Casualties of War

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

actor jury duty and easy paydays

• Fast X
• The Flash
• Shazam! Fury of the Gods

post-2018 movies about the CIA/FBI/military which are in some way ed or facilitated by people involved within america's intelligence apparatus. it's no longer enough to make 'somber' films about america's imperialism in other countries, now these works also have to be 'funny', quirky, heartwarming, and above all, built for constant streaming. indeed, after the MCU's peak years of 2018 and 2019, we are seeing a huge surge of actors involved in comic book films now moving into the space of playing CIA agents and ambiguous soldiers. as american culture drifts towards right-wing militarism, its expensive entertainments are following suit -- no longer burdened by semi-fidelity to reality and emboldened by the american forever wars in afghanistan and elsewhere, the 21st century propaganda film loudly asserts its identity as an entertainment machine which gratuitously inserts ideological beliefs directly into the brains of half-asleep netflix-and-chillers, amazon prime subscribers and apple fanatics. they will never call this a 'cinematic universe', but there is no doubt that the CIA/military's fingerprints are all over these things, using narratives of 'flawed-yet-likeable' heroes who kick ass and tell ironic jokes to justify interventions in america and abroad. when they see it on the same TV which tells them their news, the difference between fantasy and reality is obliterated, and resistance becomes impossible.

not on letterboxd:
Amazon's Citadel, produced by the Russo Bros.
Amazon's Jack Ryan.
MGM+'s A Spy Among Friends
Paramount+'s Rabbit Hole

note: tom cruise vehicles are obviously meant for theatrical distribution first and foremost, but afterwards they play on streaming just like everything else does, and contain the same propaganda.

• Top Gun: Maverick
• Extraction
• Extraction 2
• Red Notice
• Ghosted
• The Gray Man
• Cherry
• 12 Strong
• Greyhound
• The Tomorrow War

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

crossing the threshold between the analog fukuyamaist 20th century and the all-digital 'frictionless' capitalism of the 21st century -- 2012/2013 was the tipping point where there was no going back to a flip-phone/blackberry system, everything now was touch screened and intuitive. the occupy movement was crushed by despair and dispersal, obama gets re-elected, we think business as usual. vaporwave begins to signal this entropic decay, as does the burgeoning culture war bullshit which begins on 4chan/tumblr/reddit and then spreads like a virus to every corner of the internet -- no one in america stopped being poor after the 2007/2008 crash, poverty just got transferred to the gig economy, to indiegogo and patreon and monetized videos and personal 'branding' -- now everyone had to exploit themselves as a personality and image on the internet marketplace of ideas. capitalism copies itself into the virtual world fully with a flood of custom advertising, which is now able to intimately overhear your daily conversations and mold itself to you -- spielberg's minority report predicted this in 2002, and now we take it for granted that we're always being listened to, which we only really discovered the extent of via people like julian assange and chelsea manning who were persecuted for years and years after people stopped giving a fuck that google and the FBI knew what they ate for breakfast every thursday and how incoherent their politics are.

the trump ideology was in nascent form -- the '07 writer's strike made hollywood pump out hundreds of reality TV shows, of which jersey shore took pointless trashiness and made it the top priority of what the american dream could look like: be a loudmouth loser and act like the world doesn't deserve you. conspiracy theories began to be less associated with fun kooky area 51/knights templar stuff and became more invested in mainsteam politics -- suddenly it was okay again for senators to pretend that they were underdogs against the hydra of the deep state instead of being implicated in its every move. the difference between resistance and complicitness evaporates, and any revolution otherwise gets pushed out as a wave of neo-reactionary right-wingers (many of whom are schooled in the esoteric and the occult) begin using social media as a way to create innumerable mini-cults of isolated voting blocs and brown shirts who can be controlled, and of course all these groups are infiltrated & manipulated by the FBI.

the sandy hook and aurora colorado shootings were shocking, and even worse were the warning shots in what has become the new normal for america -- there's a mass shooting nearly every week, it's been normalized by the culture and is barely talked about with a fraction of the coverage that sandy hook received. all the daily terror we experience is simply seen as 'how things are' -- the new nihilism, as nietzsche predicted, has fully crept into every segment of america and europe. everything is fake and performative, no one really cares all that much about potential nuclear exchange or the long-term effects of viruses -- russia annexes crimea in early 2014 and leads to the mess of a war that's been going on today, yet it's handled aesthetically by the media conglomeration as cold war 2.0, even putin's hyper-capitalist russia gets lacquered with nostalgia for a time when political multi-polarity existed. everything is okay and nothing is okay, history has returned with a vengeance yet we're all waiting for something to really disrupt the system -- america is already a totalitarian state, it's merely a soft one where you can make a movie about the world ending but you can't make a movie that breaches copyright law -- 2012/2013 felt like the afterparty of capitalism surviving yet another crisis and clinking glasses of champagne and laughing and saying 'this is it, there's no other alternative for you guys, and with a programmable society, we'll eventually reshape history and delete any suggestion that the present wasn't forever and inevitable'.

we then become nostalgic for a world which never existed before us -- the human being becomes a tabula rasa whose main purpose is to feed AI algorithms with data and consume enough Content™ to keep the engine of the god-machine running. 12:13 was the dangling precipice of the volcano pit -- we are now cellular glands in the body of an unknown dragon who keeps us locked up with it in plato's proverbial cave of the national security state and forever-viral kkkulture, bereft of daylight or context -- no one left to steal the fire from heaven.

tim leary's infamous 'find the others' quote was an injunction to 'escape the self' -- but where else is there to go?

letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/pd187/list/popaganda-the-dawn-of-obama-2009s-weird-multiplex/
letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/pd187/list/9-11-synthetic-terror-made-in-usa/
letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/pd187/list/1999-the-gnostic-multiplex-the-formulation/

• Assault on Wall Street
• The Bling Ring
• Byzantium
• The Canyons
• Children of the Stars
• Citadel
• The Congress
• The Conspiracy
• Cosmopolis
• The Counselor

...plus 42 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"Take comfort in knowing that you never had a choice."

1. 2046
2. Alien: Covenant
3. Angel Heart
4. Army of Shadows
5. Arrival
6. Back to the Future
7. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
8. A Better Tomorrow III: Love and Death in Saigon
9. Blade Runner
10. Blow Out

...plus 100 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

lucas should have made one, too. then again, thinking about that scene in return of the jedi's special edition... maybe not.

• At Long Last Love
• Bird
• Jersey Boys
• Nashville
• New York, New York
• One from the Heart
• Phantom of the Paradise
• West Side Story
• Popeye

i wanted to have a record of what my dad's cinematic taste was, and as he obviously doesn't use this website, i'm posting it on his behalf. he showed me so many great films at an early age and was really the catalyst behind my cinephilia. when i asked him for his top 10, he took it very seriously and a lot of his favorites are reflections of my own taste as well. i really do love him and am so thankful for all that he's given me... thanks dad.

his honorable mentions:
gladiator
braveheart
300

his comments on each film are in the notes.

1. The Warriors

   "It kicks ass. It takes place in New York, but this is how the streets really are on the South Side of Chicago. You gotta find your group who respects you and stick by them, these kids got nothing else. The cops won't help 'em."

2. Running Scared

   "There was a lot of yada-yada Mel Gibson, fake friends and cool guys who are goofy as hell, this or that, you gotta that Running Scared was the first and the best. Well, 48 Hrs. was actually the first, but Running Scared is real Chicago tough guys, so my heart goes there. This is real friendship, not that fake movie bullshit. Billy Crystal could make people laugh and you felt like you weren't giving him your laughs, he took them from you!"

3. The Running Man

   "You gotta kid that no one was bigger than Arnie, he was everywhere, real-life superman, and he was funny! Running Man is a dark film because it told the truth and Arnie saw that the future was coming, now you've got deepfakes and that jackass pretending to be Tom Cruise. That was Jesse Ventura in this movie! Arnie knew something that the rest of us didn't. This shows you that you should never trust anything you see or hear and always make up your own mind. María Conchita Alonso was a total babe, I loved her in this and that Walken movie, it's called McBain, no one's ever heard of that one."

4. Demolition Man

   "Wesley Snipes was the only guy I ever thought was as tough as Stallone, Snipes was a real karate master and you could tell by the way he moves, he's an athlete who just happened to be a movie star. Stallone is a boxer, he hunches his shoulders and tries to be big even though he's short, but Snipes is crazy, he'll just kill you with one kick and that's that. Demolition Man is another film that predicted the future like Running Man, but they know how to make it funny instead of serious. Jesse Ventura was supposed to be in this movie but they kicked him out because he thought he could beat up both Snipes and Stallone, and I'll tell you, he probably could!"

5. Rocky

   "Growing up with nothing, you gotta work your way to the top, never stop trying. That's what Rocky is, it's simple. He and Arnie made me want to work out, get my aggression out in the gym instead of on the street. It's a movie about a man's health."

6. The Lords of Flatbush

   "This is a sentimental favorite, don't cry on me now. The Fonz, Stallone, the leather jackets, I wear a leather jacket to this day because of this movie! It's like The Warriors but in the 1950s."

7. Apocalypto

   "This is the most realistic movie ever made, it's about my real ancestors, who stays on top is the strongest, the law of the jungle, you know? It's tough to watch but you gotta know what the real struggle is."

8. Death Wish

   "Another realistic movie, I relate to Bronson because I've been robbed and beaten and it's important to know when enough is enough and how to defend yourself, no one else is gonna defend you unless you start with yourself, you gotta be a tough guy in this world. Taxi Driver is also good, but De Niro is a bit too crazy in that one, it's too goofy for me."

9. Above the Law

   "A Chicago classic. Seagal got goofy later, but this is him before that stupid ponytail and whatever, he just looks great here. And you get Sharon Stone and Pam Grier here too before they blew up, so you get a lot of good early fun."

10. Conan the Barbarian

    "I read the Conan comics as a kid, the black-and-white magazine, and then read the books and they all kick ass, I basically taught myself to read with them, no joking. Conan is the ultimate underdog who you don't wanna mess with but people mess with him anyway because they're dumb and he gets to go to town on them, and I can relate to that. Arnie is great in the movie, he's the perfect guy to get for the part, but I wish they made it more violent like in the comic, he was gutting people alive in that and it was just crazy! But for Hollywood, this is good."

• Annabelle Serpentine Dance
• The Pillar of Fire
• The Kingdom of the Fairies
• The Infernal Cauldron
• The Mermaid
• Tit-for-Tat
• The Butterflies
• Métempsycose
• The Red Spectre
• The Pearl Fisherman

...plus 1907 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

“I look for things that haven’t been done. I like finding that gap between everything that hasn’t been done and what I think can be done. Everything I’ve ever done has been based on that little gap: every expedition, every piece of robotics that we built, every camera system, the deep-ocean stuff – it all falls into that same pattern,”

1. Aliens
2. The Terminator
3. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
4. True Lies
5. Avatar: The Way of Water
6. The Abyss
7. Ghosts of the Abyss
8. Expedition: Bismarck
9. Aliens of the Deep
10. Xenogenesis

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

the closest i'll get to a top 10 (or so); films i love and have seen so much that it feels somewhat redundant putting them on my 4 current favs. i like to cycle through films to judge whether or not they'll be on the personal canon; these are the ones which have stuck around the longest, to the point where i don't need to show off how much i love them, they're just the background radiation of my taste. i'm always on the lookout for new favs, but this list is the veterans that mean a lot to me and that i feel like i'll enjoy forever.

• American Psycho
• Morocco
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part III: Rebellion
• Chimes at Midnight
• Heat
• Predator
• Millennium Mambo
• Rio Bravo
• Miami Vice
• The Mission

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

“The type of woman who I’ve used on the screen has been a rather straightforward, honest person. It isn’t the girl who meets other girls and has cocktails and plays bridge and things like that. They like to ride and hunt and shoot, do things… they don’t usually like other women, they prefer to be with men. If they don’t like something they come out and say it. The kind of person that I like.”

1. Only Angels Have Wings
2. Rio Bravo
3. The Big Sleep
4. Hatari!
5. To Have and Have Not
6. El Dorado
7. His Girl Friday
8. Twentieth Century
9. Bringing Up Baby
10. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

...plus 23 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.