Honda has often mentioned in interviews on this film (and reiterated in the Q&A) that this piece exists more as process as result - whatever color timing tape came to her, however the resulting print turned out, it would have fundamentally been the same movie, even if it looked entirely different or ran an extra 20 minutes. As such, right off the bat we’re in the realm of conceptual exercise more than we are the realm of movie we watch as audience , although of course, it very much is that too. As a series of provocative questions raised about found objects, film production, film viewership and perception as well as a project in a sculptor’s body of work, I thought this was fairly extraordinary in ways that are ultimately mostly tangential to the experience of actually watching the specific film that’s on screen - yes, the experience of being in an audience is a big part of it, but I’m not sure how much the shifting in one’s seat or hearing the occasional walkout is connected to what color is on screen at any given time. Sure, the occasional quick color shifts start to encourage you to read shot-reverse grammar where there isn’t any, but that’s happening in our head, not the movie - we don’t get to know what’s actually happening up there! If you put all the extratextual gamesmanship to the side, there ain’t much left here other than some pleasantly vivid colors on 35mm, which ain’t nothing, but isn’t much to write home about on its own - I found this enormously rewarding and thrilling to wrestle with in the generous length of time it gives you to wrestle with it (and quite lovely to look at all the while), but it’s gotta be stressed, this is just about the outer limits of structuralism; more idea than movie, but couldn’t possibly be anything else! Reminded me, among a million other things, of this work with the Mp3 codec - here we’re watching the ghost in the optical printer!

Lots of good music and lots of very silly bits (Joe Keery unbelievable), but paradoxically, far too serious about Pavement - the joke of “what if we did this for a band like Pavement” doesn’t work if you actually feel Pavement are that important, that relevant, that deep. Can’t they just be a good guitar band? It’s not that interesting! The endless sloppy multimedia montage mostly just feels like Perry (how does he have the cultural clout or financial power to shoot star-studded 35mm for a fake movie about his favorite band that’s actually a joke in a real movie about his favorite band?) is the guy at the party explaining Infinite Jest to me, I am sure his 3 hour video essay on video store culture will drive me to drink

From Pat O’Neill’s personal 16mm print w/ an impromptu live score (by Matt Piper, Eli Balmer, Amy Zimmitti and myself) @ Pat’s home studio… high stakes way to watch the movie if you ask me!

Certainly very in tune with the dozens of reasons the Lopez case might fascinate a quarter of a century later - the shift in media/celebrity culture, the rise of men with video cameras addressing unknown audiences with their threats of violence and their reactionary motives, even harmless stuff like the ways in which people learned to use these newfangled portable video cameras in the home - but the first-person POV all but prevents the film with doing anything with those questions; there’s a dozen worthy research papers here, but at the end of the day, this is a found footage analog horror movie that uses subliminal frames of a real guy’s suicide tape to get the viewer in the mood and ends with the director’s name hitting the screen while we listen to a real guy’s blood pour out of his head and the audience applauds. Not sure I think that’s a worthwhile or incisive artistic project, I’m sorry to say!

In the Q&A, Landsman spoke of the earlier archival documentary made from this footage being exploitative, how she wanted this film to avoid that same fate. The earlier documentary, which I watched the other night to prep for this screening, opens with a title card informing us that we will not be seeing Ricardo Lopez’s suicide. Landsman’s film not only uses flash frames of the suicide tape (frankly insane to me that this doesn’t seem to be a dealbreaker for anyone else), not only rocks a stylized original commissioned illustration of his suicide as the poster art (ditto), but uses the suicide tape as the climax and deliberately plays when-will-he-do-it tension building games with the audience. In what world is that less exploitative? When I posed this question to her, it was dodged completely, like just about every question from the audience, all curious as to her feelings on Lopez - does she identify with any feelings he expresses? If he didn’t do it, what might his life be like today? Did her feelings on him as a person change over the course of making this movie? The answer to all these questions was a shrug, which begs the question, why make a movie like this at all if you do not care about the subject, his feelings or his victim (because lest we forget, this is a true crime, and there is a victim - her climactic appearance here fighting off invasive paparazzi is almost effective, but much too half-baked and crass to feel particularly empathetic) but also don’t want to make it into an exploitation/genre movie? And if that’s the case, why does this movie adopt so many of the structural tics of found footage squirm-in-your-seat horror yet also give so much time to Lopez frankly discussing his crippling insecurity (often in gendered , seemingly explicitly putting his feelings of failed masculinity in conversation with his violent misogyny)?

I can handle bad taste exploitation, I can handle disionate observation of deeply awful people (and let’s not complicate things, he’s pretty plainly a racist misogynist lunatic and not some wayward suburban boy next door who we all know dudes like) and I can handle uneasy sympathy for and perhaps even identification with those people, but this is by it’s very existence all three of those things at once and seems practically ashamed to be any of them - what exactly are audiences supposed to get out of a movie this surface-level? What is interesting here (not nothing!) is by and large what is interesting about the tapes themselves, and in lieu of the artist being willing to consider, discuss or present it as either ridiculously tasteless evil schlock or a deeply felt personal project (two things that are not inherently contradictory or necessarily anathema to good art; not to give props to another man who famously victimized Bjork - read the room, man! - but consider Von Trier), I struggle to see this as much more than an attention-grabbing stunt, the sort of thing placed in the halls of the Filmmaker’s Cooperative for the avant-garde cultural cachet the institution provides more than anything else, the sort of thing hooked on aesthetics (would this film exist if Lopez shot HD digital? I doubt it) without any interest in the interesting stuff. Pretty grim, if you ask me!

Watched on Friday May 9, 2025.

Had initially clocked this as very contemporary Internet-age surrealism, but I think that was a misjudgment on my part - this is a very small film (I’d say slight, but that sounds like, well, a slight!), and I feel like that compactness helps it feel like something that could come from just about any one of the last 50 years of video art; a lovely thing even if it’s not a piece that deeply speaks to me!

Ok look not to trust the government but it’s so funny how the incredulous and confused responses from the HAARP guys are given menacing zooms and scare chords to make their “what on earth are you even talking about, that’s not what radio systems do” type answers look like sinister evasion. This happens every 3-5 minutes here and it rocks every time!!!

This guy sucks!

I do not much like the digital collage aesthetic here I’m sorry to say

The Almendárez brothers are gonna be such major artists as soon as Francis figures how to communicate all these complicated ideas and connections that bounce around in his work without speaking at length about them without any distance or metaphor (although like any good essay, this has a heck of a “works cited”)

(I don’t particularly love Falling Down but it feels like somewhat sloppy scholarship to take it completely at face value when it plays with problematic stereotypes - we can and should ask whether it successfully subverts or defangs them but to start with “this movie is utilizing this charged imagery” without even acknowledging that the movie is even slightly about that sort of reactionary stereotyping feels incomplete)

Torn between loving this as a manifesto of a young artist working through concerns and aesthetics I share from a very different perspective and finding it kind of unbearably corny when you say this sort of thing out loud

Sure, I suppose it could get the point across in a fraction of the time, but it’s consistently lovely to spend the time with!

Do not really understand this as a triptych but found it very charming, especially parts 2 and 3

A+ high school cultural studies PowerPoint (which is a compliment, a lot of people can barely manage a B!)

Curatorial language surrounding this sort of thing is so ridiculous, it’s self explanatory you don’t need to tell the audience all the metaphors they could extrapolate. Let them do the work!

_________________________________
< life can be ugly sometimes \
 | but sins of the fleshapoids  |
 | is on tubi, so it can also       |
 | be beautiful too…!                |
 \_______________________________/

Honorary psychic detective movie

Scenes & Movements ass movie. Come see Kiss Hello at Harvard & Stone on May 26th

Happy National Poetry Month folks! I didn’t read much poetry in April; there’s a lot of bad poetry out there (lord knows some of it’s in this movie), and I it, I still haven’t quite found the taste for it - if we’re not counting the first 200-odd pages of Delany’s Dhalgren, which feature extensive discussions on the craft and interpretation of poetry but very little in the way of actual poems, the only poetry I read this month was earlier this evening with David Grubbs’ book-length first poem Now that the audience is assembled, which, despite my being one of seemingly few people who loves his lyrics (in both Gastr Del Sol and his solo work), I found largely unreadable when stripped of the gentle melodiousness of his singing, although the last 20-odd pages where he finally slips into a comparatively less affected (so many “poetic gestures” in the first hundred or so pages that fall flat!) first-person voice are fairly remarkable. I’ve also written some pretty bad poetry - this is the first National Poetry Month where I’ve had any semblance of actual poetic practice, which has been somewhat rewarding but more often than not very frustrating and confusing, and if you’ve been following me here for more than a year, you probably noticed that my usual pithy rhymes didn’t show up this year; yes, I take this stuff a lot more seriously now, and as such only wrote (almost) every Letterboxd review over the past month in iambic pentameter! Yes, only “almost…” I’ve got a lot to learn from The Four Horsemen about how to commit to a bit!

Anyway, this is a pretty excellent documentary - it’s certainly heavy on white guys and New York City downtown culture (it’s clearly trying not to be, which is irable, but it’s not doing as well as one might want it to), but it’s pretty broad with its working definition of poetry - Tom Waits is honestly a great pick, and I think conceptualizing what he does in those goes a long way towards making sense of his work - and terrifically constructed; I think we should have more poetry concert films like this one, actually, and I think they should all be this dynamically constructed and have this much of a sense of humor (lots of very funny cuts that, if not quite taking the piss, are certainly playing ball when it comes to interpreting and seriously engaging with the work without being too respectful to crack a joke).

Much like Dunye’s “Vanilla Sex,” I find that this is more idea than finished work - the title’s a real observation, but that’s just about the only thing that’s here.

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

Happy National Poetry Month, someone needs to release the Beflix source code ASAP

I think the print that screened was incomplete, we only got to see the drive reversed…

Unfathomably dumb last minute-plus, but pretty sharp until we get to there.

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

I can’t be scared of Burbank - sorry, Deb! I still think this is pretty undercooked.

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

Perfect level of ambient hostility and formlessness for a rock doc - kind of type 2, if you ask me. Am I using that right? I’m kind of new to phandom - I haven’t even seen these guys live yet!

Spiritually speaking, I believe that no movie belongs on Tubi more than Inland Empire by David Lynch. Until that day comes, this will have to do! An all-time cast of sleazy LA creeps!

A great director/writer/starring role for any filmmaker to give themselves - I’d say about 30% of this begins to qualify as “a real film,” but that 30% is pretty great!

RIP TOMONARI NISHIKAWA
A TRUE GREAT!

I think that when we ask for our auteurs to step back from the franchise film machine, you couldn’t ask for more “original” than vampire juke-t bluesical in which Michael B. Jordan’s double-cast as twins! The third act starts to lose me here and there (it sometimes goes too broad for what I’d like), but always manages to win me back.

Watched on Saturday April 19, 2025.

:)

Watched on Friday April 18, 2025.

Watched on Friday April 18, 2025.

The floral flicker film is nothing new - there’s Peter Rose and Rose Lowder, of course - but this is a damn fine example by someone without a floral name for once!