4v291o

I had steeled myself for a tough watch given this movie's reputation, but I'm sorry, I found When the Wind Blows absolutely hilarious. The Bloggses are hysterical caricatures of genteel British puttering. They're fed into a horrifying genre, but since their fate is obvious from the outset and they are such overtly comical cartoons, it's like watching Mr. Bean or Wallace and Gromit meet the nuclear apocalypse. Crumbs!

That's not to say that the humor interferes with the horror, exactly. You get twinges of horror amidst the laughs. I think a confusing and unsettling emotional scouse is what the movie is aiming for, not the abject misery that makes up so much writing on the film. It's not listed as a comedy on Letterboxd, but that's certainly one of its main genres.

Mr. Bloggs's head-in-the-sand optimism and wishful mansplaining is a big part of the humor. He's outright delusional by the end. While the movie's not a perfect fit, the Bloggses' wilful ignorance is why I'm going to add When the Wind Blows to my list of movies about people desperately trying to stay apolitical in wartime. (One of my favorite genres. I've kept the list private until now, but I may as well make it public.)

This is the final film I watched for Ani-May 2025, making for 37 animated movies in all. I bookended the month with two movies about war tearing apart civilian life. (The other.) They were probably the best two that I watched.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

The sort of earnest and emotionally uncomplicated fare that is typical for anime and YA fiction. The characters are not without charisma, but they don't feel especially real: they act like they have no more experience than teenagers (identifiable for a young audience) but they nonetheless have adult agency and security and social standing (aspirational for a young audience).

The plot crescendos nicely. The virtual camera swings around a lot, and to make this animation complexity tractable the movie has an unusually low framerate, which makes it feel charmingly classical.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

I wish this nasty little cyber story put more of a hollow in the pit of my stomach. Just look at the Letterboxd description. That's one helluva perverse and existentially bleak Pinocchio tale, and it's only a description of the first third. Things get much, much more fucked up.

Conceptually, such lonely cyberpunk tentacle hentai should hit you with a wave of squeamish despair. I think that's its goal, but it's really hampered by the primitive CGI. You've never seen an OVA look more primitive than this. In theory, the creaky animation should add to the world's broken-down rustiness. It does make for a grimier, more distrustworthy artifact. But it also held me back from engaging with the movie at all. I think I'd be more repulsed (in an aesthetically good way) just by reading the script.

One thing the awful visuals do is ensure that the movie is never remotely sexy. Scenes are staged from a male gaze, but they're so unpleasant to look at that everyone will have the urge to avert their eyes. It makes the work a fascinating little package—like the makers were working in the hentai genre but knew that they could only produce repellant, antisexy images, so they doubled down on telling the most antisexy movie possible while hitting all the hentai tropes.

Or maybe people do get off on this shit. I don't know.

(The ethics of erotica is on my mind because I just read this post that floated through r/hobbydrama yesterday: "Is it uniquely unethical to mentally regress adult men into toddlers? Gay Spiral Stories discusses." Hilariously gripping stuff, top-shelf r/hobbydrama.)

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

An enticing premise squandered. That's not too surprising. I think it would be hard to do well.

I came for stop motion freakiness, but I got a conventional and unchallenging horror story. The protagonist animator is an outsider losing her grip on reality. We're supposed to understand that she's super weird because she's doing such weird stuff for her stop motion art, but I'm annoyed by how it's all stuff that titans of the medium have been doing for decades. Animating with raw meat? Surely she's seen Švankmajer before. Animating with roadkill? Lynch boiled or taxidermied anything dead he came across. The movie feels so normy when it points at things real animators have done and says, "Ew, look at what this freak is doing. That's not normal, right?"

Still, it's kinda awesome that this was directed by the Cat with Hands guy. I that short as a very early piece of internet weirdness that I ed into a treasured desktop folder of online esoterica. (To be honest, I'm surprised to see that it dates as late as 2001. In my memory, it's as old as the modem.)

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

It's been four years since any theatrical release got a G-rating. Cinema has abandoned young kids and left them adrift on the Cocomelon seas, so finding something for kids that is genuinely imaginative, lovely, and colorful, with the occasional gorgeous art-forward animation sequence, is such a salve! If you ignore Unico's gross monkey head, his movie looks amazing.

I'm surely overrating this bit of fluff, but wow, do I wish there were more movies like Unico. I've long wished that Miyazaki had made more fare for very young children than just Totoro and Ponyo (Kiki doesn't have anything too scary going on, but the themes aren't very interesting for the under-six set). Unico feels not too far from Totoro on the great animation family tree, though also on a branch a little closer to Saturday morning Care Bears junk.

Actually, the design reminded me a lot of Takahata's Panda! Go Panda!, right down to little girl and animal friends who make "plip plup plip plup" sound effects when they run. The difference is that it's a storybook adventure with the dreamy Wonderland quality of the best of Miyazaki. There's something new and strange around every corner, and the kid protagonists always confront the pastoral trippiness with pluck. You can see a little Adventure Time here too.

The movie was still a bit distressing for my daughter. The Puppet Master is scary—honestly, the movie might well get a PG for peril by today's standards. But turning people and animals into living puppets is a relatively light form of harm when I can assure her that everyone will turn back to normal at the end. She wanted to stop watching, but asked me to finish the movie on my own so I could tell her the plot as a story over the next couple of bedtimes. That hasn't happened before. Usually she just rejects scary movies.

I am sure we'll return to Unico. I ordered a couple of the graphic novels from the library; I hope they'll take. (The movie and the original manga are by Osamu Tezuka, the Astro Boy guy, and Scholastic just started up a retelling.)

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

Interface is much more plot-focused and engrossing than I'd feared it would be. I worried that it would be weird creepiness for its own sake like a lot of other shortform internet cult videos: a movie-length version of Salad Fingers or Skibidi Toilet. That ugly juggalo worm did not inspire optimism.

But there's a propulsive story and a mystery here. Interface was originally made as a series for online obsessives to argue over in the comments as episodes came out, so it's a bit too intractable for an individual viewer watching as a movie in one go. Think of it as communally appreciated art—New Weird fiction in the S Foundation vein, where the mysteries and oddities are so large that they can only be catalogued and grasped at the institutional level. Spending some time on the umami wiki is mandatory and part of the experience.

The lofi music and sounds are so cool, and the visuals and story are tightly interwoven with the beats like a music video; I'd often realize that I was gripped by the story just as the music was reaching a crescendo. It generates an interesting phenomenal feel: something like hypnotic wonder, or the sense of lucidity (not confusion) that comes from being stoned and swimming in your own thoughts.

I loved being surprised by how indebted the movie is to Montreal. It benefits from having an intimate knowledge of the city, I think.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

Cute, insignificant, collagey, an aesthetic mutt. All the different approaches to animation don't seem like they should mesh together, and they don't really, but that crossbreeding generates the movie's distinctively mongrel look. My favorite aspect is each human owner getting a different animation style. I was prompted to rank their styles, but then I realized that the first (the acrobat) was the best and then it was strictly a progressive slide downward.

I wondered whether the dog's first name, Neuf, was meant to be a rhyming pun on Wouaf. My wife thought I was hearing things but it seemed intentional to me.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

Oh good, yet another children's movie about parenting. Knock it off, animation studios. I have become so cynical about this stuff. The four most hackneyed and overdone trends in animated kids' movies are parenting, superheroes, robots, and generational trauma, and Ultraman: Rising checks every box.

This one gets the balance of adult drama to superhero action especially wrong. The movie opens with the hero hating and rejecting his dad's superhero job, so we spend almost the whole movie in the mind of someone who thinks being Ultraman is stupid. It is so boring. The action in the final battle is decently dynamic and fun, so it's a shame we spend an hour and a half with a whiny egotist instead.

And the art, which looks fine at Ultraman scale, looks appalling when applied to humans! These people are grotesque. You can tell that the artists took caricatures which might have looked good in 2D and only then modeled them in 3D. Those long necks probably look fine as a stylized affectation when flat and still, but when they're whipping around as big old tubes with textures and lighting and shadows, characters become giraffelike dancing balloon men. Such an ugly movie.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

Yet another giallo where at some point I thought, "man, I don't care to follow this plot at all," so I just let the funk music and the mod clothing and the lewdness carry me forward. The gang rape scene presented as sexually healing might be the most tasteless thing I've seen yet in a giallo. It's all tastelessness that looks tasteful, classlessness that looks classy. Edwidge Fenech's hair is a set decoration.

All the Colors is an obvious precursor to Suspiria, but this movie is considered a giallo exemplar while Suspiria isn't considered a giallo at all. It's mostly because of their differing focus on the supernatural. (There are some supernatural gialli, of course. Visions and prophecies are well-trod ground. Suspiria is too darn witchy to stay in the genre though.)

There are lots of movies where Satanists pose as kindly neighbors in order to prime their victim in some way, but in most (Rosemary's Baby, Hereditary, The Lords of Salem) the disguise is pretty good. The cultist in All the Colors has the least convincing regular-person disguise of all. Or maybe it's just that in the world of the giallo, all women have dresses this slinky, necklines this plunging, eyeshadow this baroque. "Come up for a cup of tea?" says the obvious vampiress.

The live-action bits with Antonio Banderas are something special. You can find lots of movies that get called live-action cartoons (Hundreds of Beavers, Inspector Gadget, Spy Kids, Kung Fu Hustle, Crimewave, Buster Keaton movies...), but they are all different from one another because there are many kinds of cartoon logic, and Banderas' Burger Beard lives in a recognizably Spongebob world. I'd watch a whole movie with Burger Beard on the high seas.

Spongebob and his buddies popping onto the beach in 3D is an awful portent though, because while it's very funny to integrate them with real humans, this is the fulcrum point when they shift to becoming CGI full-time in all future movies, even when underwater. It is a disaster.

I wish they hadn't done the superhero thing. This is the third movie I watched this month to feature shortform animated characters doing a superhero parody for their movie (after Masameer and Scoob!). It's so lazy—and even ignoring the laziness, the Spongebob characters are funnier in the real world when they're just four inches tall.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

The long opening flashback with Shaggy as a cute and lonely little boy really interferes with the humor in his being a fraidy-cat burnout as a teenager. Don't humanize my cartoon characters, you freaks! Let cartoons be cartoons!

When upscaling your TV characters to a movie, doing a superhero parody is the most hackneyed possible move. I've watched three movies this month alone that do this. Scoob! (ugh, the title) isn't as atrocious as I'd feared, but it's hardly trocious. Dick Dastardly (voiced by Jason Isaacs!) and Muttley are the obvious stars, but none of the slew of good guys is able to match their energy. You wouldn't believe what a bad job Mark Wahlberg does with his voice performance. Or maybe you would.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

One of the big three classic anime sci-fi anthology movies, along with Robot Carnival and Memories. Otomo, the guy who made Akira, is the common link, with a segment in each of the three.

The art and animation in the Alice-in-Wonderland segment by Rintaro is astonishing. I could take or leave the other two segments, but that Rintaro one is yowza.

All the shorts in this anthology are especially focused on the visuals, actually. There's very little plot to any of them—a single sentence would be all you'd need for summary. The only other Rintaro I've seen is Metropolis, and that suffered from too much plot when all I cared about was the art, so I'm happy to see him unbound here.

It works well to yoke these three plot-light animations together. A single plottier segment might change the way you watch by suckering you into looking for a story in the others. Still, it might be a fun exercise to imaginatively jumble those three anthology movies together then curate some different collections.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

"Superman III is the world’s first pure superhero film, untouched by ambition or artistry," Danny Horn writes over at Superheroes Every Day. He's right. As always, check out his blog for a compendium of well-aimed criticisms. It looks like he got waylaid partway through his write-up of this movie to start a podcast, and now both projects are abandoned. What a shame; I really dug his blog.

I hate this series of movies. (Still gonna watch IV though.) I won't reiterate all of Danny's observations, but I will say that you'd now have to work pretty hard to convince me that Richard Lester isn't a truly awful director. He constantly sacrifices narrative coherence for the sake of a joke but the jokes are never ever funny. The montage where Gus causes computer chaos across the world is just the pits.

Gus is a terrible, nonsensical character. The importance of his yo-yo completely ed me by.

My favorite joke by far, even if it's wrapped up in some "dumb blonde" sexism: Lorelei reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in private and saying, "How can he say that pure categories have no objective meaning in transcendental logic? What about synthetic unity?" and then immediately hiding the book and putting on a horrible squeak as her boss comes in. That question makes sense! It wasn't in the script; Pamela Stephenson came up with the idea of Lorelei's hidden genius on her own. They should've just given her the whole movie and let her riff.

Abstract enough to be a gallery work. Reminds me somewhat of Civilization, the Marco Brambilla piece installed at the Standard Hotel in New York. Dante-inspired vertical sci-fi always reminds me of that piece. (Interesting to note that I'm filling up that tag with animation. No live action.)

Actually, the artwork I was reminded of most often (during the non-diarrhea-based parts anyway) is Otherworld, the "immersive experience" built into some old strip mall in the awful borderlands of Columbus, Ohio. Picture something like Sleep No More or a massive escape room, but where the all the energy has been put into the environment instead of acting or puzzles. Kinda like forty Yayoi Kusama rooms strung into a maze, each with a different flavor of goth kid aesthetic. (Definitely go if you're ever in Columbus for some reason. Meow Wolf is the other immersive experience that apparently matches it in size and quality.)

That's sort of the realm that Mad God exists in: alien and ugly environmental tourism. It just has more of a Dark Souls medieval torture chamber look than Otherworld's phosphorescent mushroom look. (Garland should bring in Tippett for the Elden Ring movie.)

This is a real "stuff this reminds me of" Letterboxd entry, I guess. It happens with vibes-based movies. Not sure there's much to the plot. The end made me want to compile a list of cosmic and trippy universe-creating experimentalist video art montages. You've got 2001, Twin Peaks: The Return episode 8, Phase IV, Altered States, The Black Hole, Mad God....

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

They really go for broke on flaunting what 2D animation can do that 3D animation can't do, don't they? It's all so showy. I just love the way everything looks. Tiana's deb friend Charlotte La Bouff in particular moves with a rubberhose bounce right out of a Fleischer studios animation. She's a Kentucky-fried Betty Boop, a throwback to animation from the time period when the movie is set. And Dr. Facilier! In of pure animation, this movie is hard to beat. It might be the best-looking Disney movie since... Sleeping Beauty?

Truly weird race stuff. Nothing feels nearly as exploitative or stereotyped as movies like Aladdin and Pocahontas, but the movie still creates a silly storybook version of the South like Beauty and the Beast does to . There are multiple suggestions of racism but it all seems defanged (no one bats an eye at mixed-race romance, for instance). What does racism look like in this storybook world? Modern Disney would never dare poke at this topic. Is it successful? Not for me to say, but it sure is strange.

My daughter and I made a little stop-motion video afterward wherein her Lego Tiana figurine turns into a Lego frog. (Then Moana turns into a spider, then Wendy Darling turns into a crocodile and chases everyone away.)

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

The grimiest, smuttiest cyberpunk. All three stories are about nasty technoerotics.

One story is about a gynoid sexually obsessed with being murdered and rebuilt, so she hunts the streets for men who might assault and kill her.

In another story, a CEO is smeared by gossip that her productivity falls during her menstrual cycle, so she replaces her "womanly organs" with cybernetic counterparts. The reconstruction turns her into a serial killer.

In another story, the police force builds a Robocop out a fallen officer's brain and tongue. His scientific handler becomes obsessed with him and straddles his chassis in lingerie, constantly licking the tongue lolling out of his mouth because it's the one place where he feels sensation. It drives him crazy.

It's all stiff and slow and ugly and has the leering eye of a pornographer. In some ways that improves it as an artifact, making it feel like a VHS you'd buy at that stall trying to sell Deckard some robot snakes. Kinda repels me though.

Gave me some ideas to add to the random cyberpunk generator I made some years back.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

This feels like a perfect time to dive into the philosophy of Final Destination.

I love Final Destination. The first movie magically hit upon five or six independent innovations that interlock perfectly, and the series has barely needed to be updated since. You could remove any of the following unique aspects and still keep the basic shape of the plot and metaphysics:

📌 the Rube Goldberg nature of the kills
📌 there being no explicit villain, which is a perfect distillation of the slasher genre and acts as a metaphor for hopelessness and the inevitability of death
📌 the tone of sporadic absurdist cruelty
📌 little signs of death everywhere
📌 the movie's major setpiece coming at the beginning in a premonition and the rest of the movie coming from smaller reverberations of that event

The Rube Goldberg metaphor is the one that always gets mentioned, but it's hardly the sole source of joy. You could leave it out (some kills in the series do) and still have something recognizably FD based on all the other aspects.

On that point, I'm not sure that a Rube Goldberg machine is the series' best reference point for its convoluted mechanisms. An old-school Sierra or LucasArts adventure game is a better comparison. Rube Goldberg contraptions are funny because they're basically pointless, emerging from the befuddled mind of a crackpot inventor. This misses that there's something satisfyingly clever and puzzly about Final Destination's kills. You're not just watching a murder mechanism play out: in the run-up to the death and even as the trap is sprung, you're solving the puzzle alongside death, trying to figure out how springs and brooms and lamps might all be part of the solution. It implicates the audience a little. Death's playing Gabriel Knight 3, and you're in his Twitch chat shouting out inventory combinations to try.

The innovation I like most in the list above is "little signs everywhere." I think this aspect is less discussed than the others. After watching the first movie when it came out, my girlfriend at the time was completely freaked out for days, seeing little signs everywhere in the real world. Every drip of water from a leaky faucet became an imagined cascade of calamity. Even twenty-five years later, these movies affect me. When I left the movie theater after Bloodlines, a woman let go of a shopping cart as I was pulling out my parking spot and I watched it slowly roll toward my car. Impossible for me not to suddenly see all sorts of paths it could take that would end in my mutilation. That tree nearby suddenly didn't look so sturdy. That pigeon's beak came to a forbidding point.

I think this happens to everyone. Final Destination alters perception, and not in just the standard horror movie way of putting the audience in a scared mood. This series changes the way that you see the world.

But how, exactly? Let's go into the phenomenology. I recently read a couple of articles on attention in aesthetic experience, including this paper by Bence Nanay which argues that one important form of aesthetic experience involves focusing our attention on an object but distributing attention among that object's properties. He's pretty clear that there are many other sorts of aesthetic experience, so I've been thinking lately about other various ways that movies and art change our attention.

Final Destination movies, I think, make us selectively attentive to two different sorts of properties in the world that are somewhat opposed: causation and intention. These are very basic categories. We don't know them only through inference: we immediately see them in the world. They're what Kant called 'pure categories': concepts that we don't learn through experience with the world, but that are preconditions on our having any structured experience with the world at all. In grad school I took a psych seminar on innateness and we spent most of the course talking about these two.

When coming out of a Final Destination, we distribute our attention across all objects around us—anything in our surround could become part of the death-dealing trap—while also selectively attending to the causal properties of those objects. We see objects as physical forces, billiard balls clacking off each other. But then, overlaid on top of this purely mechanistic and Newtonian picture of nature, we see malevolent intention in the mechanism: Death's grand design. We focus on the causal properties that might be used by some invincible entity who wants to hurt us.

I say that these two ways of seeing are somewhat opposed because the first picture is a sort of atheistic and scientific one, positing nothing but atoms careening off one another in a void, but then reading the evil plans of a demon atop this realm of pure physics is manifestly supernatural.

It's actually pretty curious that everyone, characters and audiences alike, see the deathtraps as orchestrated by an intelligence. The first movie had shadows and other effects signifying a supernatural presence, and the second movie has a few inexplicable moments, but they wisely did away with those. Some people understood Tony Todd to be the baddie, a reading I never liked, but they yank away that interpretation in this send-off (I am very impressed with the story they found for him). It's moreover curious that everyone reads the intelligence as a personification of capital-D Death, not some other supernatural entity like a demon or God or what have you. (You could imagine a character in some sequel reading the destined deaths as part of God's plan.)

Personifying death is not required. The movies leave the supernatural intelligence not just unexplained, but usually completely unnecessary to explain the kills. Each kill obeys familiar laws of nature, and we often don't see any place an intelligence might intervene. A woman picks up a rake and places it in exactly the spot where it might fall and do damage. What did a malevolent intelligence do to make that happen? Nothing. It's just that the world was arranged thus-and-so to lead to an accident. Sometimes a gust of wind can be read as Death's intervention, but you never need to make that posit. The kills are not individually inexplicable or magical; the mystery is that they collectively follow a pattern and they seem to come from a wicked sense of humor.

The way I interpret the metaphysics of Final Destination is that there is no supernatural entity carrying out a plan. Rather, the characters live in a world where there is a natural scientific law that governs life and death. It is simply a law of nature that if lives are saved through premonition, those lives will soon be lost in a certain order. This law supervenes on physics and never contradicts physics, but it's a natural law nonetheless, like laws of chemistry, biology, and psychology.

To see what I mean, consider this: why are there multiple sciences? Why do laws of chemistry and biology exist? Why isn't there just physics? This is sometimes called the puzzle of the unity of science, or the puzzle of the special sciences ("the special sciences" are every science that isn't fundamental, i.e. everything that's not physics). This is obviously a big question and there's a lot of philosophical debate in this area, but one pretty common position (and the one I like) is to accept "supervenience without reductionism" about the special sciences. You can (in principle) predict and explain why any event results in another event purely at the level of base physics. Even the entire unfolding of the universe in explicable in physical . There's nowhere where physical law ceases to hold, and the special sciences like psychology and biology never contradict physics. But this is not to say that the special sciences can be reduced to physics. The universe is structured such that there are high-level patterns in the rules for how it unfolds, and the special sciences capture and describe those regularities, which are invisible from the perspective of brute physics. Biology deals with entities like eyes and lungs, but there are many different microphysical configurations for an eye or a lung, so there's no way to give a reductive microphysical law that applies to all eyes and all lungs.

Once you realize this, you might think, "Could there be higher-level sciences we haven't discovered yet?" Sure. Without contradicting physics or any lower-level sciences, the world could be governed by additional laws of nature—and perhaps some could cover death. Above physics, there's chemistry, biology, psychology, maybe sociology or economics... and perhaps: fatalogy. Why not? It's possible. The real world gives us no reason to think this is the case, but the Final Destination movies are situated in that possible metaphysics. We follow little clusters of teenagers who discover some really unfortunate regularities of nature that supervene on the rest of the natural order.

They, and the audience, all posit an intelligence behind the pattern because humans naturally see intelligence in regularities. It's been said that we are Hyperactive Agency Detectors, automatically perceiving reasons and intentions in purely physical processes—especially complex and patterned ones. This sort of overeager pareidolia is what leads people to see the work of a designer in natural selection. "How could a mouse emerge from just physics? It must be sculpted by God." The Final Destination movies uproot the Argument from Design, moving it from biology to the made-up science of fatalogy. Some theists see the hand of a creator in complex creation; Final Destination protagonists see the hand of destroyer in complex destruction. It's the same fallacy.

Seeing agency is an automatic perceptual process, but thinking that there is a personification of Death is a comfort to the characters. It gives them the hope that there is someone to defeat: a slasher to push down the stairs so they can be the final girl. Characters in these movies always talk about "beating" death, which only makes sense if Death is an opponent and not a dumb metaphysical law. For them, belief in an invincible evil is perhaps preferable to belief in hopelessness and meaningless. So, they embellish their conception of their villain. But they are wrong to do so: there's no one out there to fight.

What's worse? A universe of pain and suffering made by an evil god? Or a universe of nomologically-mandated pain and suffering with no further explanation?

That is a rich vein to mine, and I just love that the mode of perception that blossoms forth in the devilless hell of the Final Destination universe gets replicated in the audience, so we exit the theater and see the world as a bunch of physical forces caroming off one another and we hallucinate a hand of evil and malice behind it all. It wears off, but it's an interesting mode of looking to inhabit for a while.

You might think that now that I've written about aesthetic attention, Kant's pure categories, the unity of science, and the argument from design, I'd be done with my Letterboxd review of Final Destination 6. But no! I want to say something about how the movies instill these modes of attending into us. I want to argue that the way that Final Destination works is essentially cinematic.

The Final Destination movies make ordinary objects appear full of scary import. But the movie never shows them doing anything all too weird. They act just like ordinary objects. The whole point is that there is nothing supernatural influencing them to have a role in a deathtrap.

They gain significance and capture our attention not because of what we see represented by the camera, but because of how they are filmed. I recently watched Hitchcock's Notorious, and in my log for that movie I wrote that "Hitch has gone full-bore Hitch, using rack focuses and slow zooms to pump lethal importance into every wine bottle and key ring and coffee cup like it's a Final Destination movie." Obviously the chain of artistic influence runs in the other direction, but the point is that the cinematic conventions used in the two cases are very similar. The camera lingers on a lamp swinging, or does a slow zoom on a bottle of acetone: the cinematography fixes our attention on the object's physical properties. (If I had a Bordwellian amount of scholarly patience, I'd go through all the signs across the franchise and inventory the types of conventions used.) These lensing tricks imitate the fixing of attention in ordinary life, so when we enter back into ordinary life, we are disposed to fix attention to objects in the world in a similar way.

The movies even create their own conventions! A girl in the first movie gets pancaked by a truck out of nowhere (one of the deaths to not involve any real signs), and this creates a convention that gets reused as a (misleading) sign in Bloodlines.

Linking signs of impending death to the cinematography encourages metatextual interpretations, like reading the Death figure orchestrating all these murders to be the movie director. That's a fun way to think about things, but don't go too far—the content of the movie itself isn't metatextual. It's not true in the fiction of the Final Destination universe that the characters are in a movie (unlike a genuine piece of metatextual fiction, like In the Mouth of Madness). The cinematography lets us see the signs.

And yet, Bloodlines is the first movie to toy with the idea that characters in the Final Destination universe can read signs too. How do they read signs if sign-reading involves cinematography that doesn't strictly exist within their universe? I mean, it's partly just that the characters look for dangerous or unusual stuff in the environment, like we do when seeing signs. But I think it's notable that Iris walls herself up in a cabin that looks like it is filled with danger (unlike the guy in the first movie who tries to rid his environment of anything deadly). She's not worried about anything with the potential to kill because she can sense the signs.

She senses them so far in advance, in fact, that she draws pictures of them in her diary. Sign-reading in Bloodlines is smartly linked to premonition. The movie-opening premonitions have always been a little bit loosely connected to the rest of the FD goings-on, and this brings them in more tightly in a clever way. And this is also the movie that shows us that premonitions are quasi-cinematic in form for the person having the premonition. Consider that when we see young Iris's premonition, we see that the restaurant collapses because a kid throws a penny and it gets stuck in a fan blade. When Iris snaps back to reality, she says, "The penny!" and stops the kid from hurtling it over the edge. How did she know that the penny would be responsible for the disaster? If she had seen the premonition from her own POV, as you might have assumed, she wouldn't know this. But she does know it, because she "saw" essentially the same thing that we did: a penny bouncing into some especially cheap looking CGI fan blades. Characters capable of premonition appear able to intuit knowledge we are able to accumulate purely through cinematographic convention or camera placement.

You know, every horror fan likes these movies, but no one puts them at the top of their heap of favorites. Now that I've finally given myself the luxury of writing out some thoughts on the series, I'm emboldened. They're just the best. I didn't even get around to talking about how fun the movies are! Five stars for Final Destination: Bloodlines, no apologies, let this series continue forever.

(Whew. By the way, if you liked this, check out my Letterboxd entry for Wishmaster, where I really go overboard on philosophical musings about a horror movie.)

I enjoyed this a lot more than the previous movie. Instead of a bunch of vignettes, this is a single time travel romcom (one of my favorite subgenres).

A lot of the funny inventions from the earlier movie return to cause plot mayhem. There are so many time fuckery gadgets here. Doraemon wields:

📌 a time machine
📌 a TV that lets you watch different time periods
📌 a handkerchief that can age or de-age anything beneath it
📌 a body swap device
📌 a baton that generates amnesia
📌 a portable portal to anywhere
📌 a vacuum that can swap your current consciousness with the consciousness of yourself at a different age

Just think about how all those might interact. Add in shrink rays, invisibility cloaks, and working helicopter beanies, and you get a truly convoluted and hilarious time travel story. And it is, surprisingly, coherent! The movie's willingness to let this kid and robot get up to disastrous metaphysical wackiness reminded me of Sam and Max, and that's high praise. Maybe I will watch all 46 Doraemon movies.

I love that they show Osamu Tezuka's portrait on the 2000 yen note of the future.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

I've said before that I am trying to watch every movie that features an AI character or robot. That's obviously not serious, but hey, you can try to do impossible things. You can try to push over a wall that you know you can't push over. For exercise, for instance.

The thing is: I've tried making a completely inclusive list of every movie with an AI or robot in it... and the task is a lot more approachable than you might think. After 500 or so movies (and you've probably already seen a lot of them), you are really scraping the bottom of barrel. After 800 you'd be looking around wondering if there's anything else. That's a lot, but it's not un-doable.

Still, there is one immovable roadblock: a wall I won't want to push. It's not the barely-findable sleazy cyberpunk DTV movies from the '90s, nor the untranslated Korean sci-fi romcoms, nor the Black Mirror-inspired streaming service sludge. (That's all mostly TV shows, thankfully. If you include TV the task would definitely become impossible.)

No, the impediment is Doraemon, this dumb robot cat that barely reads as a robot. There are 46 Doraemon movies. I am not going to watch 46 Doraemon movies.

The reason is not low quality, I should say. This CGI reboot at least is cute and charming, with a strong Tezuka influence. It's very episodic, clearly cobbled from a number of previous stories. (At least six, in fact, drawn from across almost four decades of Doraemon works.) Doraemon gives a kid various inventions from the future to help him out in his school life, and they're all imaginative and funny.

I really hated the kid though. He's an unlikeable goon. They make him useless to show that he needs Doraemon's help, but they veer way too much toward his being awful. I think this is probably just a problem with this one movie. He's a lot more tolerable in the sequel, which I put on afterwards.

Doraemon hasn't really made in-roads into America like other classic Japanese children's characters like Astro Boy and Hello Kitty and Pikachu. I've seen him around but I never knew his deal, so I'm happy to have made his acquaintance. I get the popularity. But I still begrudge him his 46 movies.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

The things I watch because I see a robot on the box art.

I knew this would be bad, but I didn't know it'd be this bad. I'd have been happy with the lowbrow humor of Robot Chicken or Team America. They at least get what a joke is. Humor can push buttons, but button-pushing in itself isn't humor.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

I wonder how critical this movie is meant to be of Devlin. There's certainly a mismatch between the mores of our time and the mores of the movie's time: Alicia Huberman having had any sort of sexual past is treated as scandalous and character-destroying, and we barely blink an eye at that sort of thing any more. Has criticism of Alicia and criticism of Devlin inverted over time? I saw Alicia as blameless and read Devlin's upset as pretty childish. Is that just a modern perspective? How much would audiences in the '40s have read Devlin's rectitude as proper?

It can't be total. Alicia is the movie's main character and the movie empathizes with her greatly. I think it'd be hard for anyone not to see Devlin as being too square and buttoned-up and needing to express emotion. But it was hard for me to triangulate exactly how prudish and cowardly I was meant to take him to be.

Not that it matters much. The movie works no matter which characters you find at fault and how guilty you think they are.

It occurred to me that if you were to remake this movie today, you'd have Devlin refuse to it emotion because of his duty. Norms of professionalism have replaced norms of good girl chastity. But workplace professionalism is barely a consideration for this Devlin, who hungrily treats his charge to one of the hottest kissing scenes in classic Hollywood as soon as he gets her in Rio.

I was surprised how little the first half or so felt like a Hitchcock movie, and I see now that this is a common sentiment. But by the end, Hitch has gone full-bore Hitch, using rack focuses and slow zooms to pump lethal importance into every wine bottle and key ring and coffee cup like it's a Final Destination movie. This stylistic movement mirrors Alicia's descent. She didn't want to be in a Hitchcock movie; she just got slowly dragged into one by this square-ass spy acting like the butler from The Remains of the Day.

The story's skeleton is the same as in Moana 1, but the story's flesh and blood are a throwback to ye olde Disney Renaissance movies, having an end villain instead of a misunderstood antagonist and focusing on the destiny of an individual instead of the mythic past of a culture. Just to remind you that heritage determinism is still nu-Disney's thing, the first song is all about how Moana's island is back to where it's "supposed to be." Then, having saved her society, Moana sets off for greater personal transformation.

It's derivative, but hey, it's a winning formula. I guess that this sequel is cheaper than the first movie—the songs and the backgrounds are noticeably worse thanks to the movie's tortuous production history (though backgrounds don't matter for scenes on the ocean). But the first was pretty formulaic too, and it splits hairs to complain about the drop in quality between a fourth- and fifth-generation Xerox.

Moana stands out more brightly in my memory than other recent Disney princess movies. There are lots of little bits that make it appeal, and they're mostly present here. Something I like about the Moanas is the physicality of the characters. There aren't many (any?) other Disney princesses who are so physical without being fighters. Moana and Maui are nimble and always bouncing, and I especially loved the bat witch. Her movements felt like an animator's showcase. (The movie's biggest loss is not giving her the presence and story relevance of Jemaine Clement's shiny crab god, who she's subbing in for.) I think a lot of the movie's physicality comes from the animators "being inspired by" (aka thieving) Polynesian and Maori dance, which bring in rhythm and heft that are typically absent from the wispy and hollow bags of triangles that are CGI characters.

It still grates to see Moana conform to the dizzy and spunky SoCal teen personality type that almost all modern Disney princesses have. It's what really makes this movie feel like Disney is slapping Islander wallpaper up on a thoroughly Western product like a bunch of colonialist tobacco exporters. Imagine if they gave her and Maui a little dignity. Maui has become even more gentrified and Geniefied in this one, constantly breaking the fourth wall to deliver wisecracks. And in fact, the movie ends with Moana uniting human cultures across the seas and then ascending to demigod status, ing her all-knowing buddy who makes jokes about technology and Disney princesses. Moana's gone global, leaving behind the mortal world of her family and culture, a first-generation immigrant. Now her spunky American attitude makes sense.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

Gene Roddenberry pulled off an absolute heist when he made Star Trek. He pilfered everything from Forbidden Planet's general aesthetic to its story structure of handsome space captains having mythopoeic adventures with attractive women on alien worlds. One thing he could not imitate on a piddling TV budget was the breathtaking look of this movie. Holy smokes, that underground laboratory. That CinemaScope. Too cool.

While watching, I thought, "if you discount the visuals, this would be a pretty middling TOS episode." The tendency of early sci-fi to overexplain and preach is especially out of control. Dr. Morbius lectures for soooo long. But sitting down to write this entry, I think my first impression was not right. Star Trek delivers compressed, episodic fables with pretty clear morals and metaphors. Possibly because it's based on The Tempest, Forbidden Planet is harder to pin down so cleanly.

It's more of a web of characters than a parable. There are five agents: Dr. Morbius, his daughter Altaira, Robby the robot, the id monster, and the undifferentiated mass of horny earth soldiers. Each is a cluster of very different properties and signifiers. Whenever you focus on any collection of two or three, a different analysis emerges; you end up thinking about the story and the relationships in a different way.

For instance, if you look at just Altaira and Robby, it becomes clear that Morbius has been trying to sculpt Altaira to make her like Robby. She's quasi-robotic, without any real emotions or desires. She doesn't see sex or gender. (Is Robby male or female? "The question is totally without meaning.") The lascivious earthmen stare at Altaira as a woman for the first time, and like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, they make Altaira aware of her sex. She asks Robby to sew her an "eye-proof" dress: a fig leaf.

This picture of Robby and Altaira as prelapsarian figures is pretty neat to me, but it sort of falls away when you turn your gaze to another collection of characters: say, Robby and the id monster. They represent the two halves of the mind. Robby is pure rationality and is unable to harm; the id monster is pure emotion and is violent. Morbius and the Krell exalted the former and tried to banish the latter, which led to a civilization's downfall. Bring in the earthlings now. Are they meant to represent ideally disciplined emotion—a midpoint between the extremes of Robby and the id monster? Probably not: there's sort of a runner that they aren't that disciplined. They go all aah-ooh-gah when they see a hot space babe and that brings on some in-fighting. The cook causes problems because he loves getting drunk.

I struggled to bring all these relationships into a single cohesive take, and I think that's the point. It's a rich stew.

Is this the origin of the mad scientist in space with a robot henchman? It's copied pretty brazenly for The Black Hole, and if you squint a bit it's also in Saturn 3 and Silent Running.

Outsider puppet art about a puppeteer god whose mechanical creations betray him and attack an alien world of kung fu turtles and trickster spirits.

There's so much ambition here. You love to see it. The puppets are constantly made to do things that they are constitutionally bad at: spry flips and precise movements and weighty impacts. It always looks charming because it never looks right.

And you will not believe the amount of story they pack into this thing. The opening walks you through the setting in a head-spinning infodump, then summarizes an entire separate movie's worth of adventure, as if recapping the first film in a trilogy. The sci-fi world is a cool sci-fi world, but cool sci-fi worlds are cheap these days so it's tough to want to pay the attention it asks. I found myself having a good time when I watched through the pretended eyes of a boy who had this as one of the only DVDs available at a summer cabin and felt obligated let himself get invested.

The cast is stacked, but I feel they were chosen more for name recognition than for suiting their characters.

There have been a couple of times when I've put on a movie for my animation challenge because I erroneously thought the puppets would be stop motion animated. Some characters in Yamasong have animated mouths pasted on when they talk and a stop motion animator is listed in the credits, so I'm including it. Dicey though.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

Looks forward to the paranoid American crack-up thrillers of the '60s and '70s—you can see a lot of Dog Day Afternoon and the like—but it's unmistakably a piece of poetic realism because the gunman holed up is animated by good ol' French romantic desperation and good ol' French working class civil disobedience.

Movies about a lone gunman with a cause are much better when the criminal is opposed by a bunch of hapless pencil-mustached gendarmes than when opposed by a paramilitary force with SWAT gear and a battering ram.

The flashback structure is very much like a Hollywood noir (eg The Killers, Criss Cross). Gabin is great as always as a brooding, existentialist orangutan.

Ever hear that Paul F. Tompkins standup routine about the worst thing jazz bands do? They all take turns soloing, then the one guy who you expect to go BLARP goes BWOWMP and everyone on stage laughs and laughs. Now picture a movie where that happens but instead of people laughing, they gasp and the camera zooms in on huge shimmering anime eyes. An internal voiceover goes, "He's... he's the real deal!"

Blue Jazz mechanically follows the bog-standard shonen template du jour. A dumb try-hard at the bottom works with such determination that his unreal grit becomes a form of charisma and he wins all his haters to his side. It's One Piece with Luffy scooping up a jazz combo rather than a pirate crew.

Even if I didn't find this formula cheap and tired, there's something especially broken about the applying the formula to music. When you're making an anime about martial arts or piracy or basketball or tennis or whatever, you can show the underdog performing incredible feats. The speed lines and explosive effects make sense. The reaction shots of dropped jaws and hushed crowds make sense. But music in a movie isn't just a representation: the music itself is actually there. Our reaction should match the animated audience's reaction because we're hearing the same thing.

Of course, there's no way we'll match the hyperbolic heights of the anime crowd. Our jaws won't drop and our huge eyes won't go all shimmery. When you see this reception on screen, it feels false. Blue Giant shows us psychedelia as the saxophonist bugs his eyes and doubles his body over, but all the while, we're just hearing a Luffy simulacrum go toot tootle toot deedle blat blat blat.

Also (I might as well pile on), I did not care for the look of this movie. Anime that looks this expensive, with hyper-detailed city backgrounds in the Shinkai/Hosoda/Ichida tradition, usually have better art and much better animation. There are about fifty scenes of the characters eating because it's the most dynamic activity the characters get up to when they're not playing music, and the chewing animation is especially cartoonish and ugly.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

A few bright spots are more than counterbalanced by disastrous ineptitude.

The reason for the ineptitude (well, one reason) is very funny: Donner had filmed about eighty percent of the movie, but when the Salkinds fired him and replaced him with Richard Lester they learned that union rules required that Lester be responsible for more than fifty percent of the film... and none of that material could be reshoots! So they had to completely rewrite a third of the movie simply for the sake of rewriting. Also, Hackman refused to return out of solidarity with Donner, so they had to work around the footage of him they had.

Think about what a writing challenge that would be. It results in some real nonsense. My favorite bit sees Clark and Lois casually driving from the North Pole to an American diner.

Lester's involvement explains some nonsense but not all. Lester invented that bit about Superman inducing amnesia with a kiss and he improvised that goofy comedy routine where the Kryptonians blow a bunch of New Yorkers (sorry, Metropolitans) onto their butts for two minutes straight. (Here's a fun site that keeps it going indefinitely.) But Superman gaining weird powers like throwing out his logo as a clingfilm trap and the movie ending with him beating up a bully for very un-Supermanlike revenge are both in the Donner script.

The core problem is that the Salkinds had no grasp on the character and simply did not care. They just wanted bombast and they wanted it cheap. They drove away so many talented people.

Still, you can't deny the heights. Zod and Ursa are particularly terrific as bored and disdainful alien gods. And I like this observation from Chris Sims in this old Comics Alliance piece:

One thing about Lois and Clark at the Fortress that's really good: Lois asks "This is your home?" and Clark smiles and says "No, I actually live in the city about three blocks from you." It's a great contrast to the scene a few minutes earlier when Luthor shouts "this is his home!" It's a really great, subtle way to show the difference between how Luthor thinks of Superman and how Superman thinks of himself.

The Superheroes Every Day blog I linked back in my review of the first movie is worth checking out for its stories of this movie's calamitous production history. There are lots of non-calamity-oriented entries too. Here are three that I think merit a look:

📌 An oral history of what an ass Christopher Reeve was on set and how much everyone hated working with him (which is not his legacy at all)
📌A Freudian analysis of Lois and Clark's psychosexual love triangle with Superman
📌A look at the special effects and miniatures used in the Metropolis showdown against the Kryptonians

I had a feeling when watching that I'd seen this all before. Reflecting on this made me realize just how many animated movies from the aughts are based in a 1950s sci-fi American kitsch aesthetic. You've got Planet 51, Robots, The Incredibles, Meet the Robinsons, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Monsters vs. Aliens, Astro Boy, and Futurama to some extent. Peeking back a bit further into the '90s, you've got Toy Story and The Iron Giant, and if you include TV, Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls and Ren and Stimpy would count too.

And then, by the 2010s: poof, the movement is done. No more jokes about suburbia except for sequels to those established franchises.

I have three non-mutually-exclusive hypotheses for what explains this moment:

(1) Lead animators at this time were all baby boomers, so when making kid's movies they naturally looked back to their own childhoods in the fifties.

(2) Something about the American kitsch aesthetic was especially amenable to early CGI, so technology drove the subgenre. Pie plate UFOs have easy geometries.

(3) Everyone was chasing Pixar's success, so concepts and pitches that emulated their aesthetic tended to get picked up. Every studio wanted a Buzz Lightyear. (It's not just Toy Story... the '50s look is also the aesthetic of Pixar's early shorts like Tin Toy.) I don't think this is the whole story, but it's probably one prominent factor.

Of all the movies I listed above, Planet 51 might have the least personality. Other than the jokes about cops beating up protestors with batons, which left a terrible taste in my mouth, it's flavorless.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

Artist A creates a comic about fictional director B.
Director B creates a movie about fictional writer C.
Writer C creates a novel about fictional artist A.

This authorship loop-de-loop is what drew me to watch Zoom, but I worried it would be just a cute set-up for an anthology film of three separate stories. Would the movie actually use its cyclic premise to get metaphysically crazy?

Happily, the answer is yes! It gets metaphysically crazy! What a great climax.

Even if the movie hadn't taken advantage of its pomo structure, two of the three stories are fun in a cheap and tawdry way. They're lowbrow sex farces with a bit of surrealism, reminding me a little of Quentin Dupieux (the animated story shares a plot point with Incredible But True). The humor has a dorky and guileless deadpan quality that is clearly Canadian. Alison Pill playing a nerd who gets big fake implants and pops them out in a silly and failed bid to be sexy might as well replace the maple leaf on the flag.

Two stories are about body enhancement, but they say contradictory things about male and female bodies. The moral of Alison Pill's story is that breast enlargement is regrettable; the moral of Gael García Bernal's story is that bigger is always better. And yet, the movie plasters naked women up everywhere but you never see García Bernal's junk. I don't think this is commentary; I think the movie is just seeking easy humor, and that means following society's least challenging lines of thought into whatever knots they may lead.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

Jan Lenica is the Polish designer who has done all those creepy and mod movie posters you might have seen Patron Letterboxd s setting as their movie art. Adam 2 is the first of two feature-length animated movies he made.

You'd probably be better served by checking out his shorts first—the length, cryptic symbolism, crunching soundscape, and limited animation of Adam 2 make it a bit of a bore. (Because I've decided to not log shorts on Letterboxd, I've skewed my viewership habits towards features, creating a bit of a self-made problem when I do my animation blitzes. All the best experimental animation is shortform.)

There's also something about the tight and busy B&W background patterns that caused my head to swim when I focused my attention on the screen. It feels like one of those illusions where you're meant to uncomfortably stare at a focal point for sixty seconds in order to get an afterimage. I kept having to look away!

If you can get past the physical discomfort, eyestrain, and bone-dry patches of tediousness, there's style to be found. The movie is carved into little vignettes about the life of a boy, and some are very successful. (Again, animation does well with shorts.) I especially liked the section about his sexual awakening, full of visual metaphors that are abstract but unmistakable in their meaning.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

I completely buy Kaxbe's theory that Maxime, the villain voiced by Will Ferrell who has a vendetta against Gru for going on before him at his school talent show and stealing his act, is a reference to Despicable Me stealing Megamind's thunder back in 2010.

I don't really know what the writers were trying to say with this though. Kaxbe imagines a good-natured collegiate apology, and... maybe. But there's a scene where Gru smiles cruelly and its he stole the act on purpose, and I get a bit of a malicious kick out of thinking that the animation houses are deep enemies and Illumination is using Gru to gloat and twist the knife. It must further sting that Despicable Me 4 came out the same time as the Megamind sequel that Ferrell turned down.

(Did the studios have any idea about the looming conflict back before 2010? Was there hostile competition? Katzenberg always maintains that he greenlit Antz without meaning to scoop A Bug's Life's, but since he knew A Bug's Life was in production and he had the knives out for Pixar, no one believes him. Could something similar have happened with Illumination and DreamWorks? Or could Maxime even be Illumination's way of chiding DreamWorks for Antz?)

Despicable Me 4 does a bit more world-building by introducing the Lycée Pas Bon, a Hogwarty school where supervillains go to learn evil. It makes for an unusual fictional world: there are a ton of supervillains (it's a career path!), but they all feel like non-threatening failures, and there are no superheroes. Instead, the villains are policed by a bureaucracy of international cops.

In the commentary for the first movie, the directors state that the original antagonist for Gru was to be a superhero, but they decided it would be more interesting to have villain-on-villain conflict. This kinda makes more sense with Gru's character: he's more of Dr. Frankenstein or an Addams Family kook than a comic book supervillain like Lex Luthor. The mad scientists of Universal monster movies aren't defeated by superheroes: they are the agents of their own downfall. That's sort of what happens to Gru when his heart grows three sizes. It wouldn't really feel right for him to have a caped nemesis. But the comic book supervillain aspect grows larger as the series grows larger, which makes for a very chaotic and confusing world.

("A bunch of lame, failed supervillains policed by international cops" sounds a lot like the world of The Venture Bros. I got more of a Venture Bros vibe with each ing movie, but where The Venture Bros draws humor from trying to patch every continuity hole and overexplain the politics, Despicable Me just piles on the nonsense.)

The physical comedy in the action scenes has been steadily improving through the series. The action scenes are now good! "Double Life", which I know mostly from that viral TikTok video of a girl shooting Nerf darts at a mirror, is a bop. Pharrell's best DM song.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

I realized during this one that the Minions' comedic game shares a lot in common with The Happy Tree Friends. Both love putting themselves in danger while laughing mischievously, but as soon as something bad happens, they run screaming and flailing. I think they're in the same animation lineage. Before inventing the Minions, Pierre Coffin animated a bunch of shorts about adorable little penguin chicks getting torn apart, part of the same cutesy adult violence aesthetic that drove a bunch of Flash animation of the time. It seems like Coffin figured out that it wasn't really the blood and guts in these videos that was appealing, but the comedic beats that oscillate between snickering and screaming. Keep that tempo, and you can sanitize the ultraviolence while keeping the cartoons funny. A billion dollar idea, apparently.

These movies keep expanding Gru's family. He gets a new family member with each one, further entrenching him into the dad archetype. I cynically think this functions to appeal to parents, the ticket-buyers, rather than kids. We're meant to feel parental identification with this gargoyle. It's mostly just a hindrance to the Minions antics, but it's sometimes successful in a heavily manufactured way. In that respect, it's no surprise that the movie that adds a long-lost twin brother to Gru's family codex is the weakest. Who can identify with that?

(Tiny Agnes' antics often remind me of my daughter's antics; she is an especially well-drawn caricature of a cute kid. I don't like how manipulated I feel by experiencing parental warmth toward such a surface-level simulacrum. ittedly, she makes my daughter laugh more than any non-Minion.)

Since the series is so much about family, it's weird that they never really dig into Gru having a kind of family with the Minions. I think that might conflict too much with the story about the nuclear family he's building, so he keeps the Minions strictly as hired help.

Trey Parker voicing a mustachioed cocksure maniac makes it very hard to not read Balthazar Bratt as Stan's dad.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

I don't like Gru. He's such a mess of a character. Is he successful or incompetent? Is he lithe or clumsy? There's a lot of Charles Addams in his character design but no morbid humor. He has a reputation for villainy but he starts reforming almost immediately into the first movie so we never see real cruelty from him. Very little consistency to his person. (Who will Gru be tonight? That's the question.) He's ferociously unpleasant to look at, and I cannot stand that he's voiced by Steve Carell doing a funny accent.

cat_vs_kirk is one hundred percent correct in being baffled by how the animators could have perfectly nailed the character design of the Minions and then whiffed so badly on everyone else.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

Boy, my daughter did not appreciate that the little girl's stuffed unicorn was incinerated by a laser.

Gru reminded me an awful lot of an adult Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory, and the antagonist, Vector, is just like Mandark, Dexter's Eddie Deezen-voiced nemesis. I guess the Minions are Dee Dee?

Those little French cuties have obvious star wattage from the get-go. A flawless character design. (Given their French heritage, their name is a pun on mignon, right? Les mignons.)

I didn't realize that Megamind and Despicable Me coming out in 2010 was one of those moments of twin film synchrony. Both might be reformed supervillain movies, but they're very different in tone. I tried mentally replacing Megamind's lame David Cross henchman with the Minions and found it impossible.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

Unbelievably stupid (compliment) (also derogatory). I thought the severed vampire robot head that makes up the backdrop to this review looked cool, so I put on the OVA. There's no way I could have predicted what that head was attached to pre-decapitation.

(A topless motorcycle robot. Whatever you're picturing, you're not picturing it right.)

The movie's full of the most try-hard, bad-ass, over-the-top images of cyberpunk cybercool, and they always miss the mark in such a funny way. The hero wears a blazer and a skinny tie with no shirt. Cool? He's really good at cyber pole vaulting. Cool?

As a collection of concept art, it's very funny. You could slot this stuff into a George Miller movie and it'd be amazing. Too bad it's in such a stiff and lame anime instead of a real movie. A two minute highlight reel would be all you'd need to experience all the goodness of the full OVA.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

This is the only Bakshi I unreservedly like. Bakshi reined in by realism is one hundred times more appealing than Bakshi spilling out his dirty hippie fantasies or clumsily fucking up racial satire.

Like all true outsider artists, the man is a soft serve swirl of talent and ineptness, and here, for once, the ineptness doesn't get in the way of his unique voice. It's his only sincere movie. He's gonna show you exactly what he considers cool. He's gonna argue that all of American civilization culminates in the guitar solo of Free Bird. Rock on.

It's as if the cabbie who won't shut up as he drives you back from the airport finally hunkered down and made his multigenerational epic.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

A comedically stiff character doesn't seem like a good fit for animation—you'd expect the stiffness to look like an animation flaw—but Chomet makes everything else so fluid and natural that the illusionist's stiffness is an obvious choice. It makes his moments of light grace and legerdemain feel like real magic. Not just anyone could pull this off.

Lots of lovely little moments, but I think the movie is hampered by being a silent. I don't think I understand the central emotional conflict. The movie should not be obtuse at all, and yet.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

Something that has always kept me from wanting to be an artist myself is the extent to which powerful art demands strip-mining one's personal life and personal relationships for material to publicize. The "everything is copy" attitude that Nora Ephron describes, where life is seen as a repository of stories, has never sat right with me. There's nothing worse than talking to a writer and realizing that they're thieving little bits of your personality for their later use. It's pure objectification.

The exploitation of family is a special problem. The people you are closest to are the people you can render with the most detail, but they're also probably the people you owe the most to. So many artists dish out their family biographies with shocking candor—it always feels unthinkable to me. Spielberg had to wait until his mom and dad were dead before making The Fabelmans because he knew that telling the story was disrespectful, but even before he made his pseudo-autobiography his whole filmography had the world speculating about the lives of his parents.

I bring this up because Kill It and Leave This Town is the absolute endpoint of this form of artistic immorality: the vanishing point that all other art implicitly looks toward. When Mariusz Wilczyński shows his mother's aged corpse being prepared for a funeral, with a close-up of a plug inserted into her anus and some repellent animation of her vagina being sewn shut, I thought, "How could someone do this to their mother?!"

Disrespect is the point. Mariusz Wilczyński broods on his country and his family and his life with loathing and nastiness. I think you only make a movie like this if you hate your life. The title anaphorically refers to Wilczyński's own past, and this movie is an absolute massacre of his past.

I'm not scolding; just observing. It really is something else to see a work so thoroughly disrespectful of human existence.

Cool drawings too! I like the way he plays with size.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

I love that animation as a medium attracts outsider artist obsessives who toil away for years in private on their personal projects. Here's a case in point: after attending 3D art school in Europe, Alain Bidard returned to Martinique, a country with no animation industry, and created Battledream Chronicle on his lonesome from sheer grit. He did the textures, the rigging, the backgrounds, the editing. He voiced nine characters. He needed a score, so he learned to compose.

Letterboxd lists only thirteen feature-length movies from Martinique, and two of them are Bidard's. That's worth applause!

The movie's more handsome than the stills and poster would suggest. There's a simplicity to the cel-shaded visuals that is appealing. It reminds me a little of how the TV show Reboot looks in my head when I think back to my childhood (which is much better than how Reboot actually looks). Motion is often ponderous and sludgy though, making the movie a bit soporific. Characters blink veeerryy sloooowly. Even when they're on the clock against a ticking countdown, they stand around stupefied, taking ages to overcome their rest inertia. The story, a dystopian afrofuturist allegory about colonialism, has the overstuffed quality of a self-published sci-fi paperback: take a look at that synopsis on Letterboxd, now make it much more complex and add in a bunch of character names like "Kyzer Goonz." I couldn't always follow it.

Sports manga are popular because they're structured like shonen battle manga. The games are basically Dragon Ball tournaments. Every character has one clear specialty or superpower (so there's a character here who is good at rebounds but nothing else), the main protagonist must be a speedy little guy, etc.

The heightening of this basketball game into a martial arts battle makes it so fun to watch. The players don't shoot fireballs at each other, but they're portrayed with such intensity that they might as well be hadoukening. The animation is incredible. I'd watch more real sports if they had this level of cinematic dynamism and this much storytelling unfolding over a single game. Honestly, the in-game storytelling is good enough that I wonder what would happen if you took out the flashbacks.

The movie takes place over a single basketball game, with long flashbacks fleshing out the characters' backstories. I musing about whether this would have been a neat structure for Raimi to use in For Love of the Game. That movie was no winner, but even so, the out-of-game drama there was a lot more tolerable than in The First Slam Dunk, which is absurdly melodramatic and derivative. So much crying! So much brooding! I was tempted to look at my phone whenever the movie cut away from the court.

Because the movie adapts a manga series with something like 300 chapters, it can't include all the characters' backstories, so for one guy (the main protagonist in the manga, who is not the main guy here!), they discard the flashback and just zip through a fast series of images. We see hints of a romance, but that's it. So much better! They should have done that with all the characters and let us stay in the game the whole time. This is a movie ripe for a fanedit.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

I'm happy to have now watched a Saudi animated film and it's interesting to see Riyadh as a setting, but there's not much else here of note. This is a popular Flash-style webtoon expanded into a movie, and to go large it takes the boring tack of parodying superhero movies.

One of the main characters is so ugly I hated looking at him.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

What's up with the trend of adorable little French girls giving a [poof] of air from their lower lip to blow a strand of hair out of their face? I've seen it as a prominent character trait in Bigbug, Ma vie de courgette, and now Linda veut du poulet!. Seems like it's a trope signifying cuteness that is native to but that hasn't really escaped into the wider cultural ecosystem. What's the original source, I wonder? Good on for developing their own cultural markers instead of just letting Japanese kawaii signifiers take over as they have everywhere else.

A few years ago I wrote a review of Laudenbach's earlier movie, The Girl Without Hands, and in listing his cool animation techniques I described how they commented on the plot and the themes of the movie. In Linda veut du poulet!, there are some points where the format is semantically relevant, but it's now clear that these bright blobs of color spilling out of unfinished outlines just make up Laudenbach's personal style, and pretty much any movie he'd animate would look like this. I found that a bit disappointing.

Cute movie though! [poof]. I think it's funny that the welfare of the chicken is not broached even once. Nearly everyone is all too happy to butcher it, and those trying to protect it just care about it as a piece of property. Kids excitedly trying to catch a live chicken with a fishhook feels simultaneously very French and very Tex Avery.

Apartment block ensemble action-comedy is a good genre. This, Attack the Block, Kung Fu Shuffle, etc. Movies if you include non-comedies: Dredd, The Raid 2, Rigor Mortis, REC.... [scurries off to build a Letterboxd list].

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

Yuasa is the best stylist in modern animation, bar none. These visuals are eye-popping, experimental, and lush. Since Yuasa has a great eye for skipping frames and holding on frames to make physical movements punchy, it makes sense for him to animate a glam rock opera where his sinewy images can sync up with with a propulsive biwa beat. (Although, weirdly, I felt the animation was more stylized and interesting in the opening third before the songs started.)

It's just... I keep walking away from his movies thinking "I can't wait to see what he does next" instead of "I adore this and will watch it thirty times." I dig almost everything about Inu-Oh, so I don't know why. Maybe it's just that the visual genius is so face-forward that it makes it obvious that the songs and writing don't remotely reach that standard.

I'm glad that Yuasa seems to have gotten the pervy edgelord immaturity out of his system but is still able to make something so freaky and weird.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

Gaaah. This dumb movie. Why would I wait to watch it until exactly the point in my life when I have a daughter Setsuko's age? Just a few years in either direction would have made it less excruciating. Fuck war, man.

It seems that one of the debates that crops up around this movie has to do with the extent to which Seita deserves blame for all that happens. See Mike D'Angelo's review for a particularly aggressive and icy example. Miyazaki himself, looking over his shoulder at his buddy Takahata's masterpiece, couldn't help but criticize Seita's behavior as improper.

D'Angelo, incensed by Seita's actions, diverts his upset from Seita to the movie itself, thinking that it's an aesthetic flaw that the movie doesn't present Seita's actions as unconscionable. I cannot get on board with this. I don't think the movie is cloaking anything—I was all too aware during the movie that Seita was making colossal mistakes, and I internally pleaded with him to have less pride. The movie doesn't express explicit condemnation, but that's a virtue, not a failure.

The important thing here is to not commit the fallacy of thinking that asg blame or moral responsibility to one lessens the responsibility to another. This is sometimes called the "pie fallacy"—the fallacy of thinking that there's a fixed amount of responsibility to be carved up and served around, like pieces of a pie. I think you can see this in D'Angelo claiming that this isn't an anti-war movie because it's an anti-idiocy movie. Can't it be both? War is what diminishes Seita's pride so much that he feels he has to make whatever choice retains what little pride he has. War is what causes the emotional strain on his aunt, leading her to be terrible to her wards. War is what makes it so that Seita has to act as a parent even though he's still a kid. He thinks he and his sister can make a go at it being homeless, but that's a kiddy fantasy. We should also blame the aunt for letting a fourteen-year-old kid wander off with a toddler, but really, I don't think it makes sense to reduce the movie to a single locus of fault.

That's why I like that the movie does not effect a judgmental tone. It lets you zoom in wherever you want and find moral mistakes everywhere.

Apparently, Japanese audiences were more understanding of Seita's decision not to return to his aunt, while Western audiences have been more critical. Takahata himself has made some interesting comments on how cultural differences lead to this discrepancy:

Seita defies such totalitarianism and tries to build a 'pure family' with Setsuko alone. Is such a thing possible? No, it is not possible, so he lets Setsuko die. [...] But can we criticize him? The reason why we modern people can easily sympathize with Seita emotionally is because the times have reversed. If the times are reversed again someday, the time may come when many people have more opinions to denounce Seita than that widow. I find it frightening.

The movie does soften the novel quite a bit, and the novel softens Akiyuki Nosaka's real life quite a bit. We don't see Seita literally stealing his sister's food as her feeds her, for instance. And the movie does grant Seita the mercy of not having to live with his guilt. It's a bit of wish fulfillment for Nosaka. The movie opens by showing you it will have a happy ending: Seita gets to die.

There's a train to the afterlife here like in Spirited Away, which must be an allusion to Night on the Galactic Railroad, the movie that unlocks all anime. It had me expecting that the plot might conform to Galactic Railroad a little more closely, which made the scenes of swimming at the beach very tense for me even though I think they were supposed to connote peace and freedom.

It is wild that this was released as a double feature with My Neighbor Totoro. Fireflies is essentially a cursed palette-swap of Totoro: a tragedy instead of a fantasy. Seiko and Satsuki are both failed protector siblings with mothers in the hospital. If only Setsuko had a catbus.

────────────
Personal Challenge: Ani-May

The Vietnam war is receding far enough into history that I no longer flinch like I used to at the idea of watching a Vietnam movie. War movies are one of my least favorite genres, and my dislike usually corresponds to how modern the war is. I find modern warfare repellent; Vietnam movies less so; WW2 movies are tolerable; WW1 movies are actually a bit attractive to me; and I'll happily lap up a Napoleonic charge or a samurai battle or anything more ancient. It's almost like I emotionally treat a war's age into history as a age into fantasy.

Platoon is very much an archetype of everything I don't like about the genre: an unpleasant picture of the horrors of war where the unpleasantness is justified on didactic pseudo-documentary grounds, an ensemble cast of cannon-fodder guys in identical uniform who I struggle to tell apart, chaotic battle scenes that are tough to follow, chaotic politics that are tough to follow unless you come in knowing military history, pictures of gross machismo that waver confusedly between critique and celebration.

It's good and proper to watch movies like this every so often, and Platoon is well made. I respect it for presenting an argument that the US lost Vietnam when this hadn't been accepted by the whole country as fact. It's an interesting Best Picture win. But I didn't enjoy watching it.

I've been working for the past few months on a secret little pet project video series on film and the philosophy of AI. (If you've noticed that I've been watching a lot of terrible movies about robots and wondered what that's all about... that's what that's all about.)

I mean for one of the videos to build on the review of The Iron Giant that I wrote a couple of years back, so if you want to check it out, I'd really appreciate comments/questions/criticisms over there!

Missing a third act. Most of this movie is built from sleepy and snoozy discussions about robots and memory and personal identity and yada yada, but then it ends on a really fun and dynamic action sequence that opens up the world, reminding you that Director Yeon has personality. Where was this the whole movie? And then the credits roll. If the robot's inevitable escape attempt had been at the end of the second act, or even the first act, we might have had a real movie. As it is, the movie is truncated. It feels like a pilot to a series that was never picked up.

The movie is notably sloppy and inconsistent about whether ing a person's brain activity into a robot is a form of cloning or a continuance of personal identity, but that's a philosophically hard question and I think it's intentionally sloppy here. This is a dystopia where corporations want it to be totally unclear what you're g over when you agree to let them put your consciousness in a robot.

The idea that there are different tiers of robot you can be put into, so the most expensive ones are afforded full rights and the least expensive ones have no rights and can be copied by the company ad infinitum... that is such a good paperback sci-fi idea to explore, but we don't really get to see the social implications. Again, we need another act.

Great setting; great characters; poor plotting; poor script. A detective nun in a flooded convent is such a strong whodunnit premise (reminding me of The Name of the Rose at times)... why make it so obvious to the audience who the murderer is?

Some more red herrings, some more twists and turns, and a little frisson of danger would go a long way to making the movie something memorable.

Something this performatively debauched and edgy shouldn't be this boring.

I'm sort of mystified by the philosophical treatises and poetic paeans this movie inspires. Plenty of writers expressing smutty ardor for complete garbage.

There's probably a term for people like that.

The first big superhero adaptation, Superman is what you get when a movie's primary creative force is a moneyman who doesn't care at all about the comics and is just trying to hitch the biggest talents around to his project. It's how you get a screenplay by Mario Puzo that needed to be refined by more writers than could be credited by union rules. It's why there's a half hour on Krypton before baby Superman lifts even a single car: the brand was Brando, not Superman. Nearly every element was stirred into the project with no care as to whether they worked well together. Too many cooks spoiled the Supes.

Of course, the strategy of just buying the best talent you can does lead to piecemeal heights: Reeve, the John Williams score, the Krypton effects, Susanna York. But don't let yourself be hypnotized by that pendulous spitcurl: most of this movie is terrible. Thoughtless, inconsistent, personality-free junk. It's a harbinger of the soggy incoherence of the worst and most corporate superhero movies that the modern cineplex has to offer, like The Flash.

ittedly, incoherence forced by commerce is definitional of Silver Age comics—especially Superman comics—so it's easy to see the movie as keeping in line with Superman's heritage, much like Batman '89 throws back to Batman '66. Those Silver Age comics continually gave Superman arbitrary made-up powers, and this movie likewise introduces all sorts of silly nonsense for narrative convenience. Like the whole "spin the earth backwards to reverse time" thing (and only some events get reversed! Not all!), or Superman morphing into his costume when falling (maybe just a poorly done special effect), or Superman giving Lois a Wendy Darling power of flight when he touches her hand. I ittedly like some of the Silver Age wackiness, like Superman using his body as a train rail or holding tectonic plates together to try to prevent an earthquake.

The thing is: those Silver Age comics are bad! Entertaining as curios, but no one goes back to them except to mine them for imaginative ideas that can be made good. Superman aims for mythic grandeur, and it's most successful when it hits that mark, but the mythic grandeur is constantly undercut by the Silver Age comedy and bumbling henchmen and inconsistent powers and narrative contrivance and teenage poetry and sadly dated effects.

Some script choices are inexplicable. Lois gets crushed to death in her car! Even though the event is undone through magic, it's a disastrous idea. For some reason, Superman movies love showing Superman fail. That rarely happens in any of the good Superman comics, but failure is here in the first Superman adaptation, and it's copied in so many later movie installments.

Other notes:

📌 I like focusing on the metaphysics of time in sci-fi movies, and here they are especially nutty even if you ignore the time travel climax. How old is Superman? Lois asks him and he brushes it off in a way that makes me think it's supposed to be the movie's self-referential joke about the question being intentionally confounding. Jor-El tells us that he has been dead for thousands of years when Superman is a teenager. Time dilation? No, that doesn't make sense—without absolute simultaneity, time dilation only applies when two objects are reunited. If Kryptonian survivors brought Jor-El's coffin to Earth and they traveled at the speed of Supes' crib, he'd only be eighteen years dead on arrival. (The first thing baby Superman is taught in his space crib is Einstein on relativity... I have no idea how Einstein would be known on Krypton.) Also, Lex Luthor tells us later that Krypton was destroyed in 1948. It's hard to make sense of these timeline pins.

Does Superman enter a form of time stasis when in his learning bed? Jor-El tells him that "Each of the six galaxies which you will through contain their own individual law of space and time," so maybe. If there are two different speeds that time es, and time might differently during Superman's first training session, how about the twelve years that during the second psychedelic training session in the Fortress of Solitude? Does Superman abandon Ma Kent for twelve years, or is it just twelve subjective years that ? (Why are there two of these training sequences? Only to solve an immediate script problem in the clumsiest way.)

📌 I listened to some of the Richard Donner commentary track, and he mentions that he got the idea for the Phantom Zone effect from a cereal commercial. What commercial is he talking about??

📌 Looking for the answer to the above, I came across this blog about the history of superhero movies, with one hundred well-researched chapters on Superman alone! It's great stuff. I'm still working through it, but I can already recommend it highly.

This is a personal challenge to do a deep dive on five different directors. I must watch at least five movies from each that I haven't yet seen.

For this second challenge, the directors are:

🎥 Buster Keaton — COMPLETE — see closing remarks
🎥 Ingmar Bergman
🎥 Robert Bresson
🎥 Robert Siodmak
🎥 Park Chan-wook

Movies will be added to the list below as I complete them. When I decide that I'm done with a director, I'll give a short write-up here summarizing my experience with him.

Related movies watched for extra credit
All deep dive challenges

• The General
• Steamboat Bill, Jr.
• The Cameraman
• Our Hospitality
• College
• Sherlock Jr.
• The Navigator
• Go West
• Three Ages
• Seven Chances

...plus 64 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies with a title of the form "[Name] and [Name]".

Conjunction required. Sorry, Victor/Victoria.

No nicknames or epithets. Sorry, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

No extra words in the title. Sorry, Harold and Kumar. Sorry, Milo and Otis.

First names only. Sorry, Minnie and Moskowitz. Sorry, Burke and Hare.

Films only. Sorry, Will and Grace.

Feature-length only. Sorry, Antoine and Colette.

One entry per title. Sorry to all the Romeos and Juliets left unlisted.

• Jules and Jim
• Bonnie and Clyde
• Harold and Maude
• Mikey and Nicky
• Bud and Lou
• Willie and Phil
• Sid and Nancy
• Ginger and Fred
• Henry & June
• Thelma & Louise

...plus 258 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A straightforward sprint: I will watch at least 12 animated films this May.

💥 COMPLETED: 37 FILMS 💥

Previous animation challenges

• Grave of the Fireflies
• Inu-Oh
• Chicken for Linda!
• Masameer: The Movie
• The First Slam Dunk
• Battledream Chronicle
• Kill It and Leave This Town
• The Illusionist
• American Pop
• Goku Midnight Eye

...plus 27 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Characters who desperately try to keep out of politics by closing their eyes to everything going on around them. Head-in-the-sand optimism, willed ignorance. The urge to stay a civilian.

One of my favorite genres.

• The Shop on Main Street
• Shame
• Twenty-Four Eyes
• Closely Watched Trains
• Civil War
• The Load
• When the Wind Blows
• The Sound of Music

• Aar Paar
• Beat Street
• Big Rig
• Boogie Woogie
• Boy Toy
• BU・SU
• Bummer Summer
• Cellar Dweller
• Chop Shop
• Chop Shop

...plus 72 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies that are about food or that prominently feature food in some way.

Exactly what counts as a food movie is somewhat arbitrary. This is not one of Plato's natural kinds that carves nature at its ts. I try to require that food or something very food-related (such as kitchens or restaurants) is central to the plot. A movie with a single scene that prominently involves food (Hook, Se7en, American Pie, etc.) doesn't cut it.

Spaghetti-specific scenes found here.

• Tampopo
• Big Night
• The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
• Chef
• Flavors of Youth
• Jiro Dreams of Sushi
• Chocolat
• Babette's Feast
• Ratatouille
• Julie & Julia

...plus 322 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Cinema's most important spaghetti scenes.

YouTube links in Notes.

• Lady and the Tramp

  "This is the night, it's a beautiful night, and we call it bella notte."

• Tampopo

  *sluuuurp*

• The Killing of a Sacred Deer

  "Y'know, not long after my dad died someone told me that I eat spaghetti the exact same way he did."

• Gummo

  "Some dessert?"

• City Lights

  *chomp chomp*

• The Cook

  "The Italian national food: Spaguetti or tapeworm à la carte."

• The Count

  "Spaghetti."

• A Woman Under the Influence

  "Do they all want spaghetti, Nick?"

• What We Do in the Shadows

  "Nick. Do you like... bisghetti?"

• Blue Is the Warmest Color

  "C'est simple mais c'est très bon."

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

Films that feature a fictional architect.

Depictions of real architects don't count. Real architects in the cast don't count.

• The Architect
• The Belly of an Architect
• The House
• Mirai
• My Super Ex-Girlfriend
• Return to Me
• Housesitter
• Parasite
• The Night House
• Orphan

...plus 138 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• mother!
• Mother
• Mommie Dearest
• Big Momma's House
• Big Momma's House 2
• Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son
• Mama
• Throw Momma from the Train
• Momma's Man
• Mommy

...plus 198 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Great movies with fewer than 5K views.

(At the time when added to this list, anyway. Some have inched over 5K by now.)

• Casting Blossoms to the Sky
• Adama: The World of Wind
• Marquis
• Classical Period
• Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
• Rocks in My Pockets
• Freud: The Secret ion
• Any Number Can Win
• It Should Happen to You
• Phffft

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

I don't log shorts. I don't want to mess up my movie count, and there's too much vagueness about what should be included. I don't want to include every Silly Symphony or Criterion extra or YouTube explainer I've seen.

Instead, I'll add notable shorts as I watch them to this list. Occasionally I'll write something in the Notes field, but I won't be as assiduous with this as I am when logging movies.

• Thunder Road

  An attempted refutation of the saying "there's no wrong way to grieve." One of my favorite shorts. I should watch the full feature but I'm scared it'll dilute this thing.

• Touch

  A much more interesting look at cultural relativism than The Farewell. I could have done without the twist/reveal. The ethical dilemma was fraught enough without it. I can imagine this inspiring some intense debates in my ethics course if I were brave enough to assign it to undergrads (I'm not).

• Please Speak Continuously and Describe Your Experiences as They Come to You
• Being 97

  Herbert Fingarette wrote one of my favorite little philosophical monographs on addiction and self-deception. He ended up becoming a pretty strong opponent of Alcoholics Anonymous... I believe he even testified in Congress about thinking that it's a sham? That never comes up in this doc by his son, which is a super powerful piece about old age; it was shocking to see someone I know through text grapple with his frailty and mortality so candidly. I assign it to students in the segment of my intro philosophy course on death.

• Balloonfest
• Piper

  The best Pixar short.

• Burrow
• OowieWanna
• Treevenge
• Next Floor

...plus 137 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Ambivalent double features where the movie titles just don't agree

• Look Back
• Dont Look Back
• Pump Up the Volume
• Hush
• Stay Online
• Get Out
• Let the Sunshine In
• Embrace the Darkness
• Bury Them Deep
• Let the Corpses Tan

...plus 34 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Horror movies based in sound (or silence). Inspired by Tim Smartt's review of A Quiet Place. Suggestions welcome.

My horror subgenre lists.

• A Quiet Place
• A Quiet Place Part II
• A Quiet Place: Day One
• Hush
• Don't Breathe
• Pontypool
• The Shout
• Murder by Phone
• The Lords of Salem
• Tremors

...plus 30 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

An aggressive but short-lived poster aesthetic.
Bonus points to characters offering you a drink or a card.
The Swingers poster with Vince Vaughn offering you a martini counted in my memory, but the camera turns out to be positioned at eye level.
Some spillover into the 2000s at the end of list.

• Go
• Clerks
• Wayne's World
• Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
• Loser
• Dude, Where's My Car?
• Senseless
• The Pest
• Meet Wally Sparks
• Bulletproof

...plus 19 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Not really sure why I'm doing this! I'm opposed to ranking stuff by quality! This is impossible! It makes no sense!

1. The Apartment
2. No Country for Old Men
3. Casablanca
4. of Endearment
5. Schindler's List
6. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
7. The Silence of the Lambs
8. The Sound of Music
9. The Bridge on the River Kwai
10. The Godfather

...plus 35 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I aim to be restrictive with what counts as an Indigenous movie and permissive with what counts as a horror movie.

Restrictive with what counts as Indigenous because I don't want to include any old horror movie that tosses in a Wendigo, a Native legend, or a disrespectful trope. There must be a significant and respectful focus on Indigenous peoples in both the production and the plot.

Permissive with what counts as horror because horror is a vague category and there aren't a whole lot of core instances of Indigenous horror. I want to capture as many as I can, so I'm including thrillers and creepy sci-fi. That said, there needs to be at least a bit of genre convention. I won't include every of genocide, even though there's a sense in which a movie like Killers of the Flower Moon is a horror movie. The line between drama and horror becomes blurry at this point. Even historical documentaries have horror in them.

Feature films only. Happy to entertain suggestions and corrections. I haven't seen all these, so some might be off the mark. I'm more iffy about movies at the end of the list.

My horror subgenre lists.

• Blood Quantum
• The Dead Can't Dance
• Edge of the Knife
• Clearcut
• Don't Say Its Name
• Seeds
• Rhymes for Young Ghouls
• Older Than America
• The Dead Lands
• The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

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

Not really sure why I'm doing this! I'm opposed to ranking stuff by quality! This is impossible! It makes no sense!

1. The Florida Project
2. Ex Machina
3. Eighth Grade
4. The Lobster
5. Under the Skin
6. Civil War
7. White Noise
8. The Lighthouse
9. Uncut Gems
10. After Yang

...plus 28 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

It's time for a new Humiliation challenge!

I haven't seen a lot of stone-cold classics. I'm embarrassed not to have seen them. This challenge is meant to rectify that. I will watch 20 films on my private "Films I'm Embarrassed to Have Not Seen" list.

The title of the challenge, Humiliation, is the name of a game in a dinner party scene from one of David Lodge's novels. A collection of English professors challenge one another to name the book they are most humiliated to have not read. One says Middlemarch, and the others laugh and raise eyebrows. Then the most competitive young professor, dying to be a rock star, declares that he's won the game and proudly says Hamlet. The others cast their eyes downward. He has instantly cratered his reputation.

I plan to do the same. Movies will be added to the list below as I complete them. I knocked out most of the unforgivable and Hamlet-grade ones last time, but there are still a few Hamlets and plenty more Middlemarchs to go. My current plan is to watch two movies from each of the following ten categories:

🎥 Musical 🎥 Crime 🎥 Epic 🎥 Western 🎥 Prison 🎥 New Wave 🎥 Spielberg 🎥 Lynch 🎥 Italian 🎥 Silent 🎥

Reviews can be found here.

• Singin' in the Rain

  Musical

• The Sound of Music

  Musical

• Reservoir Dogs

  Crime

• Taxi Driver

  Crime

• Ben-Hur

  Epic

• High Noon

  Western

• Cool Hand Luke

  Prison

• Le Samouraï

  New Wave

• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

  Spielberg

• Schindler's List

  Spielberg

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

Films that feature a fictional philosophy professor or teacher.

Depictions of real philosophers don't count. Real philosophers in the cast don't count.

No TV shows. Sorry, Chidi and Dr. Nidaba.

• Losing Ground
• Things to Come
• Irrational Man
• Leaves of Grass
• After the Dark
• Another Woman
• Hit Man
• Gifted
• My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument
• God's Not Dead

...plus 33 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies with a split diopter shot where the split is a horizontal or diagonal slash through the screen rather than a vertical slash. Suggestions welcome.

• The Sugarland Express

  Top of screen is rear-view mirror, bottom is view through windshield.

• The Fury

  See comments.

• Brother 2

  During weapon-making montage. Head on top, close-up on hands in bottom. Hides split by having everything other than head and hands be pure darkness.

• Miracle Beach

  Bottle in foreground, scenery in background. See Callisto's review.

• Paris, Texas

  Includes both a horizontal and a (rare) diagonal split of shots inside and outside a car. Check Callisto's post in the comments for links.

• Bride of Chucky

  See comments.

• Batman Returns

  See comments.

• Kill Bill: Vol. 2

  See comments.

• Suitable Flesh

  See comments.

• Come and See

  See comments.

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

Horror movies titled ⌜The ϕer⌝ or ⌜The ϕor⌝.

📌 'The' required. (Ruled out: Shocker, Terrifier, Hellraiser, etc.)
📌 No plurals. (Ruled out: The Strangers, The Others, The Tommyknockers, etc.)
📌 ϕ must be a verb; the ϕer must ϕ. (Ruled out: The enger, The Stepfather, The Dungeonmaster, The VelociPastor, etc.)

Adjectives between 'The' and ϕ are okay.

My horror subgenre lists.

• The Mangler
• The Tingler
• The Mutilator
• The Cremator
• The Hitcher
• The Prowler
• The Visitor
• The New York Ripper
• The Babysitter
• The Body Snatcher

...plus 28 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

💥 COMPLETED 8/14/21 💥

Ever the renegade, I almost always choose to watch a director's lesser-known work instead of the one that "everyone" has seen. This anti-populist attitude is dumb and has left me with some huge holes in my cinematic knowledge. I haven't seen a lot of stone-cold classics. I'm embarrassed not to have seen them.

This challenge is meant to rectify that. I will watch 12 films on my private "Films I'm Embarrassed Not to Have Seen" list.

The title of the challenge, Humiliation, is the name of a game in a dinner party scene from one of David Lodge's novels. A collection of English professors challenge one another to name the book they are most humiliated to have not read. One says Middlemarch, and the others laugh and raise eyebrows. Then the most competitive young professor, dying to be a rock star, declares that he's won the game and proudly says Hamlet. The others cast their eyes downward. He has instantly cratered his reputation.

I plan to do the same. What's the cinematic equivalent of Hamlet? Probably Citizen Kane or The Godfather, right? Maybe Casablanca? Well, I haven't seen any of those. Humiliation, here I come!

Reviews can be found here.

• 12 Angry Men
• The Shining
• The Godfather
• The Godfather Part II
• Raging Bull
• Casablanca
• The Maltese Falcon
• The Graduate
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• A Streetcar Named Desire

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

I do this from time to time.

Video game adaptations excluded unless I write about games other than the adapted game.

Go into details view for names of the games-compared-to and links to the reviews.

• After Hours

  Lucasarts adventure games

• The Black Cat

  Fallout

• The Wolf House

  Indie horror games

• No. 7 Cherry Lane

  Walking simulators

• Pigs and Battleships

  Open world games

• Ghosts of Mars

  Doom and Duke Nukem 3D

• Collateral

  Hitman

• Toy Story

  Game remasters

• Nocturna

  Sidescrolling platformers and The Binding of Isaac

• Tokyo Godfathers

  Yakuza: Like a Dragon

...plus 70 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The top 10%

• The Shining
• Margaret
• Fanny and Alexander
• Metropolitan
• Pigs and Battleships
• The Piano
• 2046
• Thief
• My Winnipeg
• Jules and Jim

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

Wherein children undertake an adventure that is based on a childish understanding of how the world works and that the adult audience knows is impossible or improbable.

• I Wish
• Adama: The World of Wind
• Stand by Me
• Heavenly Creatures

Films at the end of the list have titles that work in their original languages but not in the translated titles displayed by Letterboxd.

• Acadia Acadia?!?
• Aku-Aku
• Alfredo, Alfredo
• America America
• Apolonia, Apolonia
• Author! Author!
• Autumn, Autumn
• Baby, Baby, Baby
• Bang Bang
• Bang Bang!

...plus 140 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Ranked in order of Christmas Spirit. Christmas Spirit, for me, is built upon family warmth, eggnoggy yuletidings, childhood imagination, and a feeling of being cozy and tucked-in from wintery winds.

Movie quality contributes to successful transmission of Christmas Spirit but doesn't fully determine Christmas Spirit. Personal nostalgia matters.

Note that list placement does not entail anything about "how much of a Christmas movie" a movie is. All of these movies are Christmas movies, including the entries at the bottom.

Films must be at least 45 minutes long. Otherwise, A Charlie Brown Christmas and How The Grinch Stole Christmas would rank highly.

1. A Christmas Story
2. Fanny and Alexander
3. Miracle on 34th Street
4. Home Alone
5. Little Women
6. The Nightmare Before Christmas
7. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
8. The Dog Who Stopped the War
9. Nutcracker: The Motion Picture
10. Edward Scissorhands

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

People get so hung up on not knowing what "elevated horror" means. It's not hard! It's a horror movie set in an elevator! Jeez.

Suggestions welcome. (Peripheral elevators, like in The Shining or Resident Evil, don't count.)

My horror subgenre lists.

• The Lift
• Down
• Devil
• Elevator Game
• Down
• The Elevator
• Hellevator: The Bottled Fools
• Blackout
• Elevated
• Elevator

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

[foghorn noise]

My horror subgenre lists.

• Tower of Evil
• The Lighthouse
• The Fog
• Lighthouse
• Half Light
• Darkness Falls
• The Shadows
• Behind the Wall
• The Lighthouse
• Annihilation

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

A straightforward sprint: I will watch at least 12 films from Japan this January.

💥 COMPLETED: 25 FILMS 💥

Previous Japanuary challenges.

• Mothra vs. Godzilla
• Atragon
• Dogora
• I Was Born, But...
• Evil Does Not Exist
• Twenty-Four Eyes
• Mechanical Violator Hakaider
• Look Back
• The Naked Island
• Dead or Alive

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

Omnibus movies that recreate the filmmakers' dreams.

(Movies based on dreams or inspired by dreams aren't close enough to be included.)

• Dreams
• Collective: Unconscious
• Dream Journal 2016–2019
• Gently Down the Stream

Mad doctors... of the mind!

It's not enough to be a weird psychiatrist to get on this list. The movie has to live in the mad psychiatrist's theory of the mind long enough for us to get to understand it, and we have to see some odd therapies, treatments, or prescriptions. They can turn out to be right about the mind in the world of the movie, but their theories must be considered outlandish by conventional science in the world of the movie.

Fictional psychiatrists only. Arguably, some actual psychiatrists could otherwise count.

Mad neurologists and non-clinical brain researchers (e.g. Altered States, From Beyond) not included.

Doctorate not required.

• The Brood
• End of the Road
• The Master
• The Face of Another

It's her thing.

• Teknolust
• Okja
• Hail, Caesar!
• Suspiria
• The Room Next Door
• The Eternal Daughter
• Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

The top 10%

• The Sound of Music
• A Legend, or Was It?
• Pontypool
• The Man Who Laughs
• The Master
• Seven Weeks
• The Elephant Man
• Battles Without Honor and Humanity
• Taxi Driver
• Hundreds of Beavers

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

A straightforward sprint: I will watch at least 12 Christmas movies this December.

💥 COMPLETED: 12 FILMS 💥

Put the list in detail view for links to the reviews.

All 12 Films of Xmas challenges.

• The Dog Who Stopped the War
• Scrooge
• Christmas in Wonderland
• The Santa Clause
• Female Trouble
• Noelle
• The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland
• The Santa Clause 2
• Carry-On
• The Holiday

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

Movies and shorts watched for extra credit during my second Directors Five Deep Dive challenge. Related to the directors' feature-length films in some way.

• The Great Buster: A Celebration

  A documentary on Keaton

• Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages

  Keaton parodied Intolerance for his first feature, Three Ages

• Maryada Ramanna

  A remake of Keaton's Our Hospitality

• Parlor, Bedroom and Bath

  A Keaton MGM talkie

• What! No Beer?

  A Keaton MGM talkie

• Speak Easily

  A Keaton MGM talkie

• The Saphead

  Keaton's feature film debut

• Film

  A short featuring Keaton

• Notfilm

  A documentary about a short featuring Keaton

• The Butcher Boy

  A Roscoe Arbuckle short featuring Keaton

...plus 45 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Small-time crook movies: they're an easy way for a young director to show off some emotion, some action, some plot twists, some youthful vibrancy, and a respect for cinema history. They let young renegades express themselves on limited resources.

The Wachowskis are probably the clearest example. They wanted to make The Matrix but were told they needed to prove themselves first, so they made an intimate caper just to get their careers rolling. Then, like many of the directors below, they immediately moved away from the crime genre.

There are two main archetypes: Bonnie and Clyde (two young criminals on the run), and Breathless (two young criminals disagree on how far to take things, with one of them basically having a death wish and the other wanting to pull back).

• Thief
• Breathless
• Shallow Grave
• Bound
• Shopping
• The Sugarland Express
• Blood Simple
• As Tears Go By
• Reservoir Dogs
• Little Odessa

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies and shorts watched for extra credit for my third Directors Five Deep Dive challenge. Related to the directors' feature-length films in some way.

• The Yakuza

  Written by Schrader

• Obsession

  Written by Schrader

• Cat People

  A movie later remade by Schrader

• The Curse of the Cat People

  The sequel to a movie later remade by Schrader

• Taxi Driver

  Written by Schrader

• The Man Who Stole the Sun

  Written by Leonard Schrader.

A challenge to do a deep dive on five different directors.

💥 COMPLETED 9/25/22 💥

🎥 Wong Kar-Wai — reviews — closing remarks
🎥 Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne — reviews — closing remarks
🎥 Jane Campion — reviews — closing remarks
🎥 George Cukor — reviews — closing remarks
🎥 Michael Mann — reviews — closing remarks

Related movies watched for extra credit
All deep dive challenges

• Chungking Express
• Fallen Angels
• Happy Together
• Days of Being Wild
• In the Mood for Love
• The Grandmaster
• 2046
• Ashes of Time
• As Tears Go By
• The Hand

...plus 52 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies in list ordered by Pygmalionishness.

What makes a George Cukor movie a George Cukor movie? His touch doesn't have many visible indicators. He didn't write his own scripts. He didn't hang out in a particular genre. He delegated his cinematography to others. Katharine Hepburn told him that she wished he would put more of his own stamp on things (but then walked it back, saying that quality was his stamp).

Was Cukor an auteur? The question always seemed to embarrass him. He'd mumble that he wasn't because he didn't write his own scripts. Andrew Sarris himself was flummoxed by how to classify him. He put him in the category of "directors who fall short of the Pantheon either because of a fragmentation of their personal vision or because of disruptive career problems," nonetheless itting that "George Cukor's filmography is his most eloquent defense," that he is "a genuine artist," and that "like Lubitsch, [he] is one of the best examples of the non-writer auteur, a creature literary film critics seem unable to comprehend."

You can reliably bank on two things when putting on a Cukor film. First, he cares about set design and costuming an awful lot. His sets are not so distinctive that you could identify a Cukor movie solely by look, but his sets look good. The second feature is more important. Regularly, the best performance in a Cukor movie will be given by the leading lady. The only counterexample I've seen is Edward, My Son.

Cukor was often called a "woman's director," sometimes affectionately and sometimes derogatorily. In truth, he was an actor's director. He had excellent professional relationships with men like Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant and John Barrymore as well, but it is so comparatively rare for a director to extend respect to women as well that it defined his reputation. He was not just professional on set: once a figure entered into Cukor's inner circle, he would take a great interest in their well-being and their family's well-being, becoming a fast and intimate friend. Befriending Cukor meant being invited to his exclusive Sunday lunches and even more exclusive Sunday dinners that were known through Hollywood for their intelligent, literate discussions and sumptuous food (but famously terrible wine, for some reason). And of course, because Cukor was openly gay, women never feared that his chumminess was a false way of making an advance.

I never found a way to put it in a review, but I was struck early on by an anecdote from Olivia de Havilland and I thought of it often. When Cukor was working on Gone with the Wind, de Havilland had to prepare for a birth scene, and Cukor demanded primary research since she knew nothing about giving birth. Dressed as a nurse, de Havilland sat by the bedsides of women in various stages of labor at a local hospital, watching their hands and faces during contractions. She got to watch a delivery, and she later recalled, "It was one of the most moving and awe-inspiring experiences of my life." When they shot the scene, Cukor stayed at the edge of the bed, out of frame, and twisted de Havilland's ankle every time she was to have a contraction. When she did eventually have a baby in real life, she told Cukor later that she imagined him there with her, helping her out.

How many directors get so intimately involved with their stars?! I found this story moving. (Cukor was eventually fired from Gone with the Wind, of course. Rumors vary, but one pretty common line of speculation is that Clark Gable forced him off because hated that he was making the women of the movie look better than him. And he rankled against Cukor calling him "darling" all the time.)

Let me swerve to discussing this short article by Mike D'Angelo. I read it when in the middle of this Cukor challenge and it made me realize how Cukor bucks conventional descriptions of what a director does. The article concerns an interesting topic: how do you assess the quality of a movie's direction separately from the quality of a movie? This is a bit reductive, but D'Angelo's advice is to use "best looking" as a proxy for "best direction." This commits what I think of as the unfortunate modern sin of giving the director all the accolades belonging to the cinematographer. There's a wider range of roles that a director can excel at. People tend to only focus on the visual aspect (or sometimes the writing, in the case of writer/directors). Cukor is a fascinating counter to this line of thought. His oeuvre has hardly any visual flair at all: what he has is incredible actress performance after incredible actress performance. That style of directorial mastery gets ignored now in favor of just having a heavy influence over cinematography.

I now think, contra D'Angelo, that it's impossible to assess a movie's direction by watching just that movie. You can't evaluate direction without having seen a huge number of movies in a director's corpus. Directors run movie productions, but most of their tasks are delegated. For almost every role that a director assumes, there's someone else on set who can take charge of that role. A cinematographer can choose a camera angle, a set decorator can design a look, an editor can piece together a story. But different directors choose to take control over different facets of filmmaking, putting their stamp in different places. Some directors edit; some write; some want to handle action choreography. The only way to really know what contributions are brought by a specific director is to see what regularly appears in their movies. (Though this isn't infallible: I mentioned in my Wong Kar-Wai postmortem that his movies have impeccable editing, but since he's worked with the same editor through his whole career it's hard to know where credit is due.) Cukor's talents are invisible in any particular film, but they manifest in his oeuvre.

All this being said... I'm not sure I like Cukor all that much. I soured on him. Knowing that he was gay and considered a woman's director made me expect a level of feminism and progressivism in his movies that isn't there. Right away, I was struck by the fact that he kept filming versions of Pygmalion, where a man tries to refashion a woman into something better: My Fair Lady, Born Yesterday, A Star is Born, The Philadelphia Story, A Woman's Face. Why the obsession with Pygmalion? (The movies in the list below are ordered by how closely they resemble the archetype. Open the list notes for discussion.) Cukor was a social climber who idolized the rich; there's probably something semi-autobiographical in his film's obsession with image and status. He wanted to fashion himself into a high society type. A Pygmalion story is a pretty natural template for a woman-led film that aspires to the values of the rich rather than challenging them.

I finally grappled with "The Cukor Paradox" in my review for The Woman: he's great at directing women, but his movies almost always want to state The Truth About Men and Women and the content ends up being thoroughly misogynist and ugly. At first I imagined that his arguments, though they seem retrograde now, were progressive for the time. By the time of reviewing The Women, I changed my mind:

My current view is that Cukor movies functioned a lot like movies like Crazy Rich Asians or Promising Young Woman do today. Those movies are similarly paradoxical. They are draped in the stylistic trappings of progress and empowerment, but they are ultimately conservative, presenting a world of only gender stereotypes. Their progressive appearance belies the fact that they are barely political, that they are completely anodyne and non-threatening, permitted and endorsed by societal powers-that-be as acceptable ways to declare a political stand because they do so without really advocating for any dangerous change. They do not agitate. That's a Cukor movie. A studio system movie unwittingly (or maybe even wittingly) engineered to defuse female empowerment by showing that what modern women really want is to be lightly subjugated. It's just easier to see the paradox from 80 years out.

Many of Cukor's movies are about living a double life, but they often have a moral that a double life, a false facade, and an existence of social conformity are worth it for access to status and riches. His movies examine authenticity and sometimes come out in favor of inauthenticity. (I'm not sure this is true of his earlier movies, before he was twisted by fame. There's a good Kazuo Ishiguro interview where he is mystified that the creators of something as feminist and progressive as Holiday could have made something like The Philadelphia Story, which he considers both terrible and terribly conservative.)

By the way, Cukor's name is pronounced 'Q-Kor', not 'Coo-kor'. I said it wrong nearly the whole time.

────────────

Links to reviews
Best reviews: Holiday, Gaslight, Little Women, Let's Make Love
Original Deep Dive challenge
All director commentaries

1. My Fair Lady

   Most Pygmalionlike

   For some reason, George Cukor was over and again drawn to Pygmalion stories. My Fair Lady is the central case, of course, but an awful lot of his movies share a family resemblance with its themes and concerns.

   The movies below are ranked by how near they are to the Pygmalion archetype. Is the movie about a woman remade? Is a man trying to change her character? Is the movie obsessed with class? Is it about pretending to fit into upper-crust society? Does someone have to pretend to be someone they are not? Are the men arrogant know-it-all assholes? And if so, is the movie kind of on their side?

   Not many Cukor movies have all of these features, but most of them have at least some. In the best versions, Cukor's leading ladies question their identities and discover they are malleable. In the worst versions, their confusion needs to be settled by a man of high society.

2. Born Yesterday

   As close as you can get to Pygmalionhood without being a direct adaptation like My Fair Lady. A debonair journalist is hired to teach an ex-showgirl how to be a classy and educated lady. She learns patriotism and how to recite the Second Amendment. A success!

3. A Woman's Face

   The sculpting of woman that takes place in this movie is not just metaphorical. A kind-hearted and moralistic plastic surgeon repairs a scar on Joan Crawford's face. Undeformed, she no longer has to live as a criminal running a debauched cafe where women dance together. She is raised to the ultimate position of moral good: caring for a rich child.

4. A Star Is Born

   Pay attention to how implausibly empty of ambition Esther is before she is discovered by Norman. Norman doesn't help her realize her dreams. She has to be given her hopes and dreams by Norman.

5. Rockabye

   A very early entry into Cukor's Pygmalioverse. It's unusual to find them at the beginning of his Hollywood career, when he didn't have as free of a hand in choosing his scripts. Rockabye takes place during a snapshot of the typical Pygmalion story, after the Galatea figure has been turned from "gutter trash" into a model lady, but before getting together with the Henry Higgins who remade her and has fallen for her (in this case, her manager). Interestingly, the Galatea character's mom hangs around posing like a grand dame but she has not had the Pygmalion revamp, so she is not at all convincing and still acts a louche and tawdry thief. The main theme of the movie is about how hard it is to remake yourself in the eyes of society because it's so hard to shake your past.

6. The Philadelphia Story

   Without the ending that pretty much everyone complains about, maybe this wouldn't rank so highly. But given the movie we've got, this is a movie about Katharine Hepburn constantly wearing a facade and putting on airs. She's very much Eliza Doolittle stuck between multiple masks. Just when you think that she might get together with Jimmy Stewart (the one person who can see through her airs), she dashes back to a life with arrogant Cary Grant. She's back to a life of wearing a false face.

7. Let's Make Love

   A high-status man and low-status woman collide, but instead of resolving the tension by having the man sculpt the woman into something better, Let's Make Love has the debonair man go through a Prince and the Pauper charade, pretending to be just a regular old Joe. He eventually reveals himself to be a demigod who can elevate her from her station, so in a literal elevator, Marilyn Monroe decides that despite all their deceit, the rich really are pretty great.

8. What Price Hollywood?

   In this precursor to A Star Is Born, the starlet-to-be is ambitious; she isn't reliant on a man sculpting her. When asked, "Why aren't you in the movies, dear?" she responds, "That's what I wonder myself." It's still quite explicitly about the creation of a double life even if the heroine is in charge of her double life.

9. Bhowani Junction

   Victoria is unsure whether to live in a manner more closely aligned with her Indian or her English heritage. She remakes herself constantly, trying on different identities to find a world where she feels at home.

10. The Women

    A movie about the struggles to remake oneself post-divorce, which could be an interesting take on the formula if it didn't advocate sliding back into comfortable gender roles. Entirely built on the notion that if your husband is stepping out on you, it's your fault and you need to change yourself to do better.

    The fashion show (the movie's highlight) is a lot like a statue garden come to life, so there's another Pygmalion link.

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Fargo
• The Snowman
• Four Brothers
• A Simple Plan
• The Nightmare Before Christmas
• Cold Pursuit
• The Long Kiss Goodnight
• Smilla's Sense of Snow
• Insomnia
• TransSiberian

...plus 48 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A straightforward sprint: I will watch at least 12 horror movies this October.

Focusing this year on the following themes:

🔪 Silents
🔪 Sound-based horror
🔪 Indigenous horror
🔪 Video game adaptations
🔪 Starring Lance Henriksen

Movies will be added to the list below as I complete them. Reviews are here.

All Spooktober challenges.

• The Phantom of the Opera

  🔪 Silents

• The Haunted Castle

  🔪 Silents

• Waxworks

  🔪 Silents

• Faust

  🔪 Silents

• The Man Who Laughs

  🔪 Silents

• The Cat and the Canary

  🔪 Silents

• A Page of Madness

  🔪 Silents

• The Hands of Orlac

  🔪 Silents

• A Quiet Place

  🔪 Sound-based horror

• Hush

  🔪 Sound-based horror

...plus 51 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Horror movies that assert their medium, break the fourth wall, and implicate the viewer.

This is a blurry category. There's a lot of horror about movie-making, there's a lot of horror that comments on genre tropes by playing on genre tropes, and there's a lot of horror about a monster thought to be a fictional legend turning out to be real. Movies at the top of the list are squarely metafictional, but things shade off into borderline status near the bottom.

Because it would otherwise swamp the list, I'm ruling that found footage is not in itself metafictional. The Blair Witch Project is included to represent all other found footage movies.

My horror subgenre lists.

• In the Mouth of Madness
• New Nightmare
• You Might Be the Killer
• The Final Girls
• I, Man
• Scream
• Scream 2
• Scream 3
• Scream 4
• Too Many Cooks

...plus 27 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A documentarian sets out to make a film about X.
The unexpected happens.
They release a film about Y.

• Exit Through the Gift Shop
• Gimme Shelter
• Lost in La Mancha
• Capturing the Friedmans
• My Kid Could Paint That
• Catfish
• 9/11
• Sherman's March
• Daughter From Danang
• The Queen of Versailles

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

Killer plants! Toxic flowers! Spooky trees! Zombucchini!

My horror subgenre lists.

• Little Shop of Horrors
• The Little Shop of Horrors
• The Ruins
• The Crawlers
• The Happening
• From Hell It Came
• Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!
• Return of the Killer Tomatoes!
• The Day of the Triffids
• The Day of the Triffids

...plus 86 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movie trivia. Buzz in when you know the answer. What character has been played by Cameron Diaz... Wallace Shawn... Alec Guinness... Alan Arkin... Bruno Ganz... Montgomery Clift... Viggo Mortensen... and Anthony Hopkins?

The film V13 will add Alan Cumming to the mix. It is not yet on Letterboxd. Also worth mentioning some notable actors with Freud as a TV credit:

📌 Max von Sydow played Freud in an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

📌 Nick Kroll played Freud on an episode of Great Minds.

📌 Taika Waititi played Freud in History of the World, Part II

• Freud: The Secret ion
• The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
• A Dangerous Method
• Freud's Last Session
• The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud
• Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
• Freud
• The Empty Mirror
• A Liar's Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
• Unconscious

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

One of the themes I pursued for Spooktober 2022 was Evil Genies. Here's the list of possibilities I drew from.

My horror subgenre lists.

• Wishmaster
• Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies
• Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell
• Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled
• Under the Shadow
• Djinn
• The Djinn
• The Outing
• Stranded
• Red Sands

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

Animated series and animated shorts watched during Ani-May 2024. (I don't log or write reviews for series and shorts.)

Animated features are listed separately, here.

• Patlabor: The Mobile Police
• Fantasy
• Mandala
• Solar Walk
• Concertissimo
• Parade
• Funeral
• Semiotic Plastic
• Zoon
• How My Grandmother Became a Chair

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A straightforward sprint: I will watch at least 12 animated films this May.

💥 COMPLETED: 57 FILMS 💥

Animated series and animated shorts I watched this May are listed separately, here.

Previous animation challenges

• Sita Sings the Blues
• Time Masters
• Your Name.
• Chronopolis
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
• Toys in the Attic
• Treasure Planet
• Lily C.A.T.
• Technotise: Edit and I
• Hundreds of Beavers

...plus 47 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A celebration of Mubi, the streaming service for festival films. This challenge will be complete once I've watched twenty movies: ten movies of the day and ten Mubi Releases.

This challenge was originally to watch twenty movies of the day, but Mubi discontinued the feature! The thing that made them distinctive! I had to swerve to a new challenge format.

💥 COMPLETED 4/12/24 💥

• Ghost in the Shell
• The Five Obstructions
• Dog Bite Dog
• Frank
• The Boss of It All
• Safe
• Searching for Ingmar Bergman
• Wittgenstein
• Contemporary Color
• A Dangerous Method

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