Watched on Thursday July 18, 2013.

Touching that perfect John Woo-ism of these male loves that are not consummated, done up by glass reflecting and the shared scars. By force of Hollywood ease is this story that Dark Knight Rises eventually apes, but is only mediocre for it. Mission Impossible 2, a direct abrasion, what should not be, and they're right. But everything is good, a first half built solely to rug pull, halo jump and Raiden mask reveals multi, so much I forget who Ethan is. And it fits, a visual metaphor occurs, two masks, two bodies, one is, one isn't. Convincing, messing with personality as the monster a week does, but it is the logic of John Woo, a wondrous logic that removes logistic. The visual level, that purity. The merging is too perfect that it is surrounded by derision, and held in snares in action. Two egos, behind a camera, what occurs is a myth, who cares to know. Gun from the sand, knife near the eye but doesn't cut, the motorcycle blows to even playing field. It is martial arts, respect, the relation of a fight, spread across globe-trotting romance, not involving the woman.

Much as Jacques Rivette had done, Trenque Lauquen is working within cinema as a successor of the grand novel. As that, Laura Citarella exceeds in bounds of carving out her film is a definitive portrayal of Argentina as Rivette did with Paris. This area is a felt place, related to an owned experience as the inhabitant. Primary level feeling of Trenque Lauquen is the extent, stretched feeling of a place's memoriam at the distance of recall. In recreation, it is a way of study, a consuming method that envelops place into shadows, that reaching of the sublime of an average. In location, in this mysterial exhibition, a more accurate capstone for this is Roberto Bolaño's 2666 It is much within the presented flow, the separation of chapter's altering location of what is portrayed, but it is also the lying beneath that is hinted at throughout. At the heart of all mysteries accumulated are organic things, be it people, stoic organisms, out to the idea of inhabitants unrecognizable. What becomes literalized is the most basic way of defining how search, mystery is represented by Citarella's narrative, being a state of altered consciousness that adjusts how all things are considered. It is most persistent outside of this show, however, for her camera follows each action, it follows each shifting face of what the people's actions are.

Not entirely blameable on the actors behind Ezekial and Rafael, but it is their myopic, masculine reasoning for their journey that harms much of the film. In rounded , it is a brilliant stroke, the estrangement they are are at for what is truly at center, but this detachment from the primary issues are why it's second half is so notably higher than Trenque Lauquen's first. Frustrating for the lack of answers, but it is because the film itself is providing enough material to weave conclusion. What Ezekiel and Rafael prepare the viewer for is the reality that the sewing threads don't have to cut off, lost within their experience of Laura, Rafael's plainly drawn by his age, arrogance and blitheness over subject outside of domestic object, is how the search for her is part of self-invention. In giving so much weight to men, Citarella can distort expectations, cause the male viewer to lose sight of the female-centered lens of the entire project. The grand romance supplicates the concrete one with Ezekiel because it reflects yet also does not their own experience. In the fantasized sequence by Ezekiel, it is made clearest, and this scene, what it says for both ends, is the basis of what his character entails as a figure. Ignorant masculinity not hitting the heart, scarcely understanding why Laura would be interested in a book about a sexually emancipated woman.

How these expectations contort is how this film hits another, especially different stride in its second half, one that overshadows the first in technique and intrigue. Quick, single object focuses building an electric system within image, continuing in insular, concise form from an opening air end to the first. In concluding the story through long process, in what is easily come to narrative answers of what is contained in Laura as a character, the excruciatingly effortful drawn figure that she is, it is the direct answer of what is completely. These only being first steps, the second half can be focused on its single, establishing arc that defines both disappearance and subjunctive reality, defining her developing feelings of Trenque Lauquen the place, cohered and small, and its contrasting of her home in Buenos Aires. The desert land, the ability for things to be hidden in a place that is not so exposed by information. In this area, things of extent importance, of subterlevel grand discovery are more able. The dust settled over books in a library, the knowing of everyone producing more that is unknown. Discovery makes of these things what that last monument, naturally amorphous, intestinally shocking. In a long effort, the heart of Trenque Lauquen is discovery, and finalization of this person. How this becomes an excessive process, exemplified by hard style shift stretching itself thin, is how it exceeds into a defining, strong document of this decade.

Watched on Monday May 19, 2025.

The old face in the mirror places what is at hand, it is detachment because you cannot be attached to a narrative that doesn’t stop extending. Tendon stresses, creases inside of the crook of elbow. Muscles atrophy; they go too long. It is a cinematic trick used without any camp; it is the truth of what will occur. Those same faces project from the mirror, it is daughters of daughters, daughters of a daughter’s daughter. This endless, unbreaking line is a cycle, existential reprisal at every corner. Of a temporal nature that has been refused to be ephemeral. These women are all covered in burka, but the summer wind whips around them, that always alive sense. Sand grabbing into the beds of feet, clinging, no matter how closely taught a fabric is. Heiny Srour’s way of the small, dull framing here is a separate portion of this expression, that way of resembling an everyday malaise that, on onset, refuses to directly affect. It is a jumping off point to what is needed, the events imbibing to generational bones, images found miraculously reminding of what occurs but can only be estranged. For it is the eminent effects out, those that still hit rocks and burst fresh bombs.

Yet, because of the distance of these present collateral conditions, Leila and the Wolves is of defining the distance itself, how it affects viewing of that which has occurred and continues to. Burkas and sand don’t resemble present reality, that of cold walls in London location, the struggle of land only a memory of somewhere else, fresh by images in new material that is the photograph. And it is by photograph that these memories become animate, just as filmic ways make the process in what is the clearest, most blunt opening portrayal. Not just the obvious of struggle, the dissidents shooting off guns, the men summarily executed in open ground. But in this basis of detachment, of what lies in the pain of women that are losing their husbands, losing their sons, the separation of how their relationships can act in productive levels. It is realized most when the revolutionary is a woman themself, that they fight on the ground rather than being the pointed of a failing race, the containing of what is lowering reproduction. Voices do not touch the lips, a woman cries but the weeping is dubbed over, her face in her arms only that, the face that is not attached to a microphone. It is this tension of lacking direct receptors that defines what is being left to smattering at the victim of Leila and the Wolves’ emotions. Separate of the central, external struggle already repressed and hidden is the cipher destructions in relations of men and women, how women fall apart in this relation inherently. It is the same motions as the modern instance of Nabila Zeitouni being harassed by her partner in curation, that women are nary shown and, therefore, nary acted in the moments. Heiny Srour professes into her film of the forced estrangement of the women from the men’s struggle, and how this perceived break is inherently contradicted by the exact bullets that arise from the struggle.

It is an inherent estrangement to presentation, how the colonizing moments are parallel edited over the burning of Jewish literature, the barring of the Nazi of those to later become invaders. Srour’s work here is in forcing the helplessness of the observer but suggesting the burning possibilities that lie beyond. Her white dress, sold as the most beautiful to the men who will see her, is also the way of the surveyor’s innocence. It is the public who watches without real skin, but for her the canvas that takes on all the spilled blood that leads in lines to the inside of her wrist. A panoramic scope of a small corner, the same as these short walls to take on Palestinian child drawings, old monochrome images of colorful time. Broken off into the present world, in baring soul, in thinning skin of age that does not witness an end. There is one bombed out staircase where a beautiful Lebanese woman descends unscathed, at its foot, center stage a weeping woman without the true object, and on the right the true desecrated corpses of that shrapnel that came. Decayed roads, you can’t help but dance with death.

An academic exercise which I could feel the age of its creator when the first dialogue was spoken. And let's see, that twenty nine is working hard for these shots, because they're beautiful. Really, it's the higher of the control that makes him impressive, not the ability of attrition - his own, not ours. Distortion that breaks car windshields as water spills over, the faux-philosophical dialogue stretching over focus from earth land, human bodies into the slats of the wall. The former is the spending of all of these Tarkovsky comparisons, throughout this whole movie is there not a second where I doubt his influences. Patrick Tam Kar-ming, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Jia Zhangke; these are all at the moment of a neon soaked microphone, when Lim Giong sounds start playing, doing the most to recreate Mysterious Skin, the sitting shots of Tang Wei swooning in disrepair. This controlled, mesmerized roaming, the crime infused with a detached sensibility comes from other places. Before it is required, the pertinence of time ing is pointed cleverly, how smoke wisps travel, the process of releasing from water. These concepts are enough on their own for his beautiful, beautiful technical methods, and it is increased by the first gnawing sense of the man child, but the narrative, giving to a narration, is rough. I can tell it comes from someone near my own age, and for that it is understood, but it is hard to see this as impressive with an extent experience of other mediums, more involvement in film itself.

But all that needs to be cared, apparently, about is that long shot, one that barely feels like a single shot. You know the process in viewing, but it doesn't increase a pressure. It is all of these things gone goofier, the sheer nature of dreams in their most unsettling. The nonsense of the sense, in these small bits that swirl out, how doors lead to places that should be somewhere else, the camera accentuating other dimensions behind a wall, transitioning by that material. It is all very impressive, these small character moments coned, separate of haughty ambitions, are the brightest moment of Bi Gan's writing.

Seeing this seven years after release removes me of its 3D intentions, and I am too poor to afford a TV of those capabilities. Imagining the spell, its effect is clear in its weight that pulls these moments in. Seeing it just for what it is separate of that involving layer, is the fact that it drives a surrealist idea of the dream that is disparate from what dreams really are, what they feel like outside of representation. In its essence as the moving, involving art, there is an opportunity in film to show it, an opportunity that has really been monopolized by David Lynch's more obscured work. It is in seeing Bi Gan's primary influence outside of film. The work of Marc Chagall, by his decree, though it has to be spread wider to the Surrealists themselves, points to the primary levels that Gan's dream sits atop of. The former is the ideal of what this work leads into, and the latter is a truth. There is an airiness, within the entrancement, the trap that is found around corners, that leaves the sensation of being dulled, grey even in its finest dark shades. His control of color is as strong as every other visual presentation, but I search for an affection that isn't there.

What is there to be said, this is every pop thriller pushed together, where I was hoping for the auteur eminence of De Palma is satisfaction in contorted shapes, that which pleases the average mind, for none of this makes complete sense, and it is fine because it is color and rapidity, though it could be more of the latter, muted more of the first, the NOC espionage scene being the absolute peak, I didn't look but why would anyone argue otherwise. Silence, the smallest sounds and non-sounds, what is in the room, maybe the roll of the projector, satisfaction to a goal I feel nothing for besides the tension, perspiration. This is thriller feeling, espionage invention as stealth is standing on edge, to be possible to fall over, this is what I thought I'd get into as the opening credits warped away from me, in those dutch angle closeups into Cruise’s eyes, shaking, poorly acted Kittridge smirking. It's not jingoist its just validation of institutional slices, spikes through the every day lives, it's shocking how little it has to say about this. All action movement, dramatic movements fine, this was my first Mission Impossible, I was too bored by Rogue Nation when I was a teenager, maybe they'll be better this time around.

A supposed return is a instinctual betrayal due to the his own destruction of that idea, that a film be twenty four frames of truth when here it is maintained in slow. This film is spit, to himself more than the medium, more than the idea of his narrative mode. Weekend never had a chance, and his trick here is to maintain the trick when every line of dialogue, where every movement is incentivized to maintain even more didact then his each slurred syllable in his primarily didactic works. In calling Godard pretentious is to act as if he is unaware of what he is doing, pretense requires an elevation of self over the presentation, ideas that are set for a specified "intellectualism." Savoir qui peut is not about being intelligent, it is the failure of his intelligent in life itself. A title as a notion, told to Isabelle's non-biograph yet self inside prostitute is told it by scab pimps. A linguistic term that is to entail selfish being twisted by selfish beings, and here is spite for the presented "Godard" of beautiful musician Jacques Dutronc. Holding on too long, near stalking his former partner, ignoring an old wife and misusing the idea of a "daughter's" sexuality. It is too bad how much of this is metaphor for its pertinence, Isabelle's shaping of performance that is largely non-sexual, Nicole Weber, the actor's experience, Godard the sustaining "artist" with art as the nourishment. This is narrative of a stripped bare Pierrot le fou, fifteen years has built more shame. In a method that narrative is indicative of the ideologue of a creator, when devolved into this way that might be indicative of the eighties then, the eighties to come, didact is the answer. Slow motion, the soap satire of sentimentalist, meaningless dream sounds.

Watched on Friday May 9, 2025.

Give me another watch but Horse Money is the eternal blank running past new high rises of Colossal Youth in their total verite, it is always a hint but in this fantasy is the true documentary. So much occurring of the great Prose artist with a gymnast’s camera, a twisting ocular finding the completeness of objects’ proportions warped through sight, through the subjective of their objective materials. As prose it is these shapes of a conscious that can switch mid-paragraph, the truly remote touching the dual subject becoming a coned without relation. The widower and the widow, completing these two sides without the one. A forest is as the one outside of the museum Ventura once worked at, but they are phantoms now, no stories to tell but be told. That youth is large because he is only nineteen and six months old, but shambles as the elderly.

To take the vast majority of David Lynch’s view into the Americana as an expression of the inherent female fear of it is a clear path to understanding. For that, Lost Highway is the final word he has of the male perpetrator, the male viewer that is not attempting to save. They have disappeared for Mulholland Drive, useless for Inland Empire. What comes in The Return is a total eclipse of everything he has. This is the definitive document of Twin Peaks’ Bob, of the witless sexuality in Blue Velvet. In Lost Highway is the love of the mystery, it is a noir whether it can be seen or not. What drives it is this tension, the disability of sight, what finishes is the realization of this violence, this cycle that comes. It is formulated at one time but is not baring until the end, what appears ambiguous is clearly not. Taking the energy of the 1990s, the American edge that is building, makes his most directly dark film. A goodbye to the age itself for a director entering latehood, being built by the 20th century, spending much of it reflecting the America he was raised in, how it is seen is reflected as the American Regionalists did the decade before his birth. Lynch is the baby boomer memoriam, Lost Highway the final word to this end, before it veers into, truly, pure auteurial iconicism.

American Regionalists are essential to see here, easy to grasp in the heart of what is akin to Edward Hopper, much regarding the “domestic” shape of its first half. In one man is the Jazz Age and its white adopters, reflected to the free, avant-movements of those that have lied for a while. It is deliberate how gratingly, ominously dull the interior of the Californian home is, a light in orange, the dark corridors. A study within itself of this one space, how it can extrapolate these distinct feelings. That domesticism is the exact breaking of being seen, a concrete-like exterior that obscures direct sights, why being seen within it is so intrusive. A protective, sound-proof space resembles the protection of the married unit, the idea that his erotic wife will stay at home so comic in paused motions. In itself is a dream, the dream of the male adventure and the wife at home, that this freedom is reserved for him. This is the leading theme of the self-experiential, male blindness of Lost Highway. That life can be so insular for one, while the other expresses Liberty. Beneath the contemporary dark neons, the abstract shapes found in a highway with these new, brighter headlights, is still the dream of the dedicated homely wife in a sex-driven discovery vixen, his dreams consisting only of her trysts. This tension is inherent to a soundtrack that rides against this, appearing, traditional way of living experience. Paranoia is a violent emotion, it is one of the settled, one of the Old that comes from this length in time. One told of many, many people in this current moment is how it spurs out husbands, boyfriends that make homes, that beneath it all, is an agent. And that agent is within their own home. Of course, “We met at your home, I am there now.”

And for that Old must be the Young. Nineteen nineties, this shifting time, a belief in a radical, new century. I don’t consider Lynch reactionary; it is a misunderstanding to see it at all. The decade that brings these morphic shapes of sound, the pure aggression of sexuality without necessity of care nor restraint. Much of the music Lynch chooses in this are from, personally, revolted artists, aside from those making their legacy in the decades before. It is deliberate, what is shown by Pete is a nascent form of what came before, the first love that makes the alienated. However, it is also this new experience of knowledge that creates the sight becoming in the woman before. She is of the rockabilly ideal, the code off from parents in blue denim, black leather, sat aside long-form consumerist propaganda in an old tube; before, that tube is unused, seen on modern-abstract blocks that hold it above. A sight of the classical, that not touched even by those traditional artists for the urban world is showing something new. The young is in a search, dirty motels, tearing bleached hair, that of the doll in an organic form. This is the walking dream itself, not jet black, not venom, but the possibility, light that plays off of a dull, eggshell concrete ground. To violate this form is a crucifixion, but it is not violation so easy. What is contended, refused and because aged, by this form is the abuse within pipes, the great land of wealth that is true doll woman, tossed around, manufactured into love. Even in fantasies spun is a truth of sexuality, bondage that is of a blitzing satisfaction. Liberation by this form, adverse to a masculine projection.

And this is why violence, why a house must be truly destroyed for the sheer catalyst of not simply fiction, but of the production itself. Nothing is produced by a fire but ash, therefore it is a cinematic trick of repetition in rebuilding, the slow production of something destroyed. As all feels in destruction, nothing is destroyed. It is an impossible imprint. In this high edged form is the thriller excitement, one of true filmic fantasy, but it is the continuation, a cycle of what is and what is seen lying past 1997. The song repeats again, a now dead voice in an edgy sonic context, and a road never ends.

Watched on Monday May 5, 2025.

The peace and the turmoil, it’s a slice of a life but it is the real. What comes in this life, is what is seen, what is imagined. The one who will be with me for life is a teacher, it holds a soft place for me. Trying to avoid but nearly haunted, building a life away that always reverts back. It’s hard, you dream of these kids, you feel guilty for staying away. It’s the same way of seeing life itself beyond, going home, ing but it’s not the same, empty and too obvious of an escape. Arguments with other adults, crushes of grown, grown men. These same responses, how men can throw tantrums like a boy, apologize with the same shame. It’s how life is, there’s nothing weightless here, I wake up to it every day. Beautiful photography of Paris, a close framing of intimacy, lovely.

Watched on Friday May 2, 2025.

Everything that is told of what this movie does for others is exactly what it did not do for me. What is not touched enough in how this film is considered is just how much of it is tied to its didactic nature, and this is because it is sorely, weightfully lost in its way of making substantial images. It's not exactly that there is nothing to grab at, to be a film of such acclaim, I feel there must be found something inside of its deeply popular aesthetic that can validate just how vapid, how without intention camera moves are, sequencing of cuts in a conversation, looks into the sky holding a transcendence in shape, in tone that are cut away from in seconds. In a film that is hinged upon you feeling true involvement in the situation, beyond its characters as the situation is that of further necessity in presentation, the situation itself needs to be articulating deliberate motions that truly hold something. When even stakes through the heart don't have that pressure, it leaves the vast majority of what is seen as lacking tension, and this especially applies to the most attentive moments, which are those at nighttime, held in a backlighting, a non-vibrance of clearly false light. These problems are in head during the scenes by day, but the lighting of a truly trained hand, one that renders these amazing shadows produced of light above and into black skin, there is a freshness that keeps it from exhausting. But it is especially as it reels out, moments in the final montage that make it especially egregious the alternation of cameras that is occurring. This moment makes clear a general glaring problem, that which the control of the film's presentation is skin deep, at will of what is most ideal to present as opposed to what is least artificial.

Let it be clear that that one scene that is receiving universalized attention is as good as people make it to be, it rinses away all these problems as it makes clear what is closest at risk. Black music, black experience cohered into one, that is filled of metaphors in dexterous execution, of the most excellent performance that is being called for in bright fields, plantation coins that are the control of slave economy. Even in a reprise of this motion it maintains power, that when the infernal, flexible movements of a blistering female-led soul performance on stage invite the peak of devildom at its most baring. It is because Sinners is so infatuated with its sound that it pulls this off, why that sound can lead to intense, swimming figures that raise the film into the cosmos it strives to achieve toward. This is because the internal message, beyond all intelligent complications, is one that becomes truer and truer as time builds its layers. A draw toward the black musical practice, the white-skinned need to commodify it and how it poisons the black man himself, symbolized by his metal, his paper that radicalizes value in the capitalistic world. How this leads into the supernatural of blood sucking is implicit within its very message, shown far better by its use of contrast within musical styles than within any image, any single person’s performance. When Remmick plays with his trio at the gates, this skimpy and sad song without a single bite, a single drop into beneath tone grunt that professes ion below, how this develops into the bloodsucking chant in a Celtic pub rhythm. Sound is the utter best that Sinners has for it, if it was perfect it would exceed everything else, but it is in the score that fails it. Best by movement within the scene, when it becomes focus, exposed for just how repressed, mannered it is.

Predictable, agreeable but lacking in its best, most affecting ideas. There is a real pull to be had by the desecration of this space into, annoyingly, brainless, hypnotized vampires that act as speaking zombies, tension handed by the performances bouncing off each other. Not Hailee Steinfeld who is lacking in anything beneath her actions, but how Jack O’Connell looks at Miles Caton, the sense of true love behind an irritating irony in the caring, sensual connections of Michael B. Jordan and Wunmi Mokasu. It is how these things need to be repeated, how the most basic motions feel necessary to be shown again so you can understand where the white men to be massacred appear from. I liked them being shot down, and I especially liked the resemblance of wartime foliage as Smoke appears out to them with his loaded weapons. This comic motion is what misses in the action against the vampires, becoming more and more weightless as they build. Every interesting part of this movie is the most underused, and this is especially apparent in the Christian faith of Sammie, and how this relates to Remmick’s Irish origin, how the European force of the faith disturbs, contorts it in force onto enchained peoples. There are deeper ranges to find within Irish-African relations, but, as much as they are pointed to, nothing in the soul of this movie feels the need for it to be brought up in criticism. It simplifies out to the white force, the hypocrisy of those oppressed whites furthering the suffering of these people and using background as an excuse. Irish beer, Italian wine, that’s all.

When it falls into the inner perspective, what is to be hit, it is about spleen, that spirit beneath. It can be said because Muhammad Ali won’t let his head be touched, but what is down there is the true spirit. That implicit, the burning soul that screams past the man’s words. What must be understood is the magnificent control, Will Smith does it well, but it falls too deep into a character from his throat. Thankfully, it is brilliantly held up, the poetry that brews in the head of Ali, that which comes from the beyond terrestrial, the human part that is able to grab upon what is not existent and make it into real. Fights, that relationship, as a womanizer, it is known even better. It’s a grab and a diversion, but what is really occurring is the closeness, whispers into the partner’s ear to permit the movements of a dance. In a whirlwind, that is the true control, that will decides fate because that is what must occur, the extraspirital being, in a swerving rhythm against a tide. He describes himself as into water, what must be focused on is the torso for it takes the bludgeons, those are the weights of the stream, and what stays above is the head. By taking batters of the spleen, the head is kept above, the communication that forms a perfect line, realizes the perfection of the form itself. Within this skin, within the blood traveling up the column, is history, resistance and the confirmed power coned. Fighter of the people, swarmed around and held above. On the street they try to fight him knowing he won’t beat them down, for he is of them, and the ring is a stage that creates the events of modern warriordom.

Muhammed Ali is not the Michael Mann protagonist in the true flesh, but it is not grand strokes that fit him inside. In other films, the choruses of Mann are taken for a European choral, the American church realized into the most dedicated. This does not fit the pure resistant, in his smallest moments of naming, to the divorce from the Nation of Islam that is rooted in Americanism still. Muhammed Ali is himself, it is the pure ego, a dedicator as for him and those tied to him. Critical, stoic, staunch. While it might not be the fallible truth, it is a construction that represents the myth and messiah that is Ali. Music gifted beautifully handed from Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke of Dead Can Dance can relate to the idea of the mystic Oriental, but it is to define that which flies away in transcendence of the man. What manifests is how the individual powers an entirety, arguably better than any of Mann’s other pillarful men. For it is the harder conflicts, stronger than even his other real subjects. The stories and flaws of Ali, all transfixed to the absolute that must be in boxing. And it is not this as a fight, it is the fight as a true realization itself. In the beauty of its rendered period, in its thorns that build, Ali is enough as a drama but this is only just sufficient to hold itself. Those greatly choreographed, the tracking cameras that realize as his head rises over a mass of African bodies as it does looking left hook as a combatant hits with their right, it is compiled by the man that has built into it. Relationships, trust, and always more the self, a Muslim, saved but more the savior, rooted towards a single need, that which must be done. Nothing more fitting, nothing more American.

Something bashful to see until the very moment it concludes, and at that point it is beyond realized the arguing that must be done. For The Shrouds is embarrassing, incoherent, disconcerting without the bodies that decay. Its concept lays as a trap mark to become engulfed in itself, while it is one of his most sexual films, the sexuality in this movie revolves to the entire ends of masturbation. There are numerous reasons we don't see Karsh and Soo-min consummate, and it warrants down to the simplicity of their tryst, the non-satisfaction that is only to sadistically stretch muscles, the only memorialized moments to be the most sickening. That is both the realized action of grieving hidden within tissues of refusal, and the excitement of a technological numbing. What is most attained in analysis is just how indebted The Shrouds is to David Cronenberg's own experience, and articulates what feels so flustering about it. Tesla as a symbol as well as a push into consumption, the same for the fine features of automation, the setting, the animated assistant unquestioning. Infantilizing, the hidden infantile that is hiding the part which curls in and weeps. Watching the corpse is as being unable to let go of mommy's hand, finding the reflective force that is as the Oedipus complex contorted by age.

Vincent Cassel as Karsh is Cronenberg in every way, what is articulated is the appeared and pathetic ease that is ignoring the decay inside one's whole system, how technology with make this easier and create a more pitiful class. The fact of the self driving, where the windshield need not be even seen, the easy, white twist into "comfortable," neo-Orient plushness that can be designed for and by themselves. The other reason why we don't truly see Soo-min in intimate lights, while Karsh says she's Korean, the actress is Chinese. A shroud, wrapping around, turning arms so what you must embrace is yourself, tying back into, protecting and rotting, sweat like mildew over the skin. Uneven script, generally poor acting, good movie.

Because Harmony Korine shows the feeling of 2010s Americana in this way is what made this film estranging on release, remaining estranged even as general opinion, as it should, leans more and more into its favor. It is far to say that media affects entirely the effect of being physically existent on the soil of this country, but it is more than enough to sever the mythology of psyche to the make of images and sound. Due to this, Spring Breakers is an assault in such a way to define cruelty in of pop. Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites its first step, scattering sounds and war blasts over molly-induced euphoria, eyes of mediocre white kids in dramatic low angle. These are the makings of decadent dream, the new form matched into the modern body. What incenses this action and the “mature” reaction to Spring Breakers is this moment of detachment, its garish abandon into sincere theater. The dual sides of such, idealism that attracts those wishing for it, and spitting those who reject it. A siren call of both, for it is least understood how the fictional presence requires both. In this is an implicit motion, what makes Spring Breakers truly excessive, and therefore abrasive, is how this is bloated by a greasy hand.
 
Erosion in Spring Breakers works because Harmony Korine’s horrible erraticism developing to this point manifests into its most stable manners. What will manifest in AGGRO DR1FT in worse form is much of what makes this movie work on its fundamental levels, by hand distortions, the constant in media res that only ceases when we’re put through exposition to give true reason to what is seen. In its most minor moments, Spring Breakers is a vile abuse of associative editing to the point where previous actions presented repeatedly lose their original meaning. While clearly part of the intention that is always present in the film, one where, as true for pause, an escape, the girls stagnate eternally, every action being impelled in myopic circumstances by single desires, or single aversions. Korine’s film is one rooted directly inside stereotype, productive stereotypes for their mode as canvas in an easily assumable personage. Reading from Evan’s review, Korine defines this film as a pop song, but every stylistic, and many technical methods, are rooted directly into showing a music video, climaxed, as with everything else, by the montage of Everytime. Cuts of focus, the crowd as Alien maligns forms of speech into verses, it is the mode of performance before crowd. These separate expressions of explicit harmony denote the primary modes Spring Breakers sits within and revolves between, both that tell of the primary representations of the world part of the elation of the 2000s recession ending. The fact that all felt it would end manifests in dark sounds in a blanket that burns in a sun baring into the camera, sunset being pink as it touches blue water, makes a sadness their pink baclava, synthesized ambience that will make A24 later an indiscernible pot.
 
What is to be said by these girls being nothing but stereotypes reflecting a comic truth of this young archetypes true, homogenized experience, ittedly taken to extremes, is seen in this baclava. It is the symbol that defines their senses of tragedy, those to be given a cold kiss of what is believed a corpse, leave with the sight of soft, skinny backs and string bikinis, frivolity in brutality. What is coming here gets to the factors of meaning within Spring Breakers, those which are low but by its presence it’s compelling to call to them. For this, there is the “real” broken from the scattering effects of its times’ mixtapes, that overlaid aesthetic feeling that is the true feeling beneath its whiteled, southern vocal experience. And this is because those two things are essential to the pop climate of its moment. From the first moment of a clamoring gun cock as a lighter is sparked to hit a bong in their dorm room, the transitions to a dread bared, white man’s interior in Alien, the minimal of anxious presence in the film. This is the presence of consumer within the active, Alien’s stuttering identity as the blank results of the girls unthought actions shows itself. Korine manifests ambivalence into the college girls as they remain unaffected from their events until it becomes something unenjoyable. A showcase of the isolated interior, that which believes a beach downstream of their college “another part of the world,” confirmed by Korine as he paints Florida in its merging pinks, the Girls Gone Wild grain distorting them, even the butchering red as his wife writhes on an oiled floor. Their character moments suggest everything about them, and they are silent. Faith leaning against a stone church wall, bored and illuminated by the stained glass, Candy and Brit’s immediate camaraderie in simple dull libido, shined by blue light, Cotty’s drunken and detached writhing in this moment. It is bits of modeling, much of the film is, pink bikini, swaying shorts pressed against a sports car, and it always speaks everything.
 
All an intellectual manner to define that this film is blistering and fantastic on a level of base experience, excuse all the perceived social content for in fact it is only there because it is. Everything stated translates to exactly what this processes as on an expressive level, it is entirely expression and its each moment, you can call Korine’s absolutely horrid and transcendent moments the same. By taking directly from the time, shaping in direct text, Gucci Mane is right there, gun shots that interrupt verse, the Spring breeeeak like the DJ tag, and that is James Franco even if he plays it usually clean with a sweaters. Spring Breakers is a simultaneous antique and emphatic relation. Lacking the technologic failures of young people now, of its own director’s middle aged reel into them, it does not properly define what they experience now, but the appearance of its “wonderland” is the same fantasy that plays in heads currently. The theme of Scary Monsters & Nice Sprites in an acapella piano, their backs upside down giving beauty and entertainment, within Spring Breakers is the insides of popular all-senses of the current pop age, all ecstasy and all vacuums in the head

Jacques Rivette is without peer in his strength of scope but something is amiss in L'amour par terre that is hard to touch on aside from holes. Air is let into these gorgeous shots, the anxiety of heavily layered room wallpapers, the shadows of windows against a door. While held together by a mystic femininity, as his work most proud, it is also debilitated in a lacking of its mystery, possibly caused by a screenplay that feels inaccessible in a manner that doesn't take me in to explore more. Remaining still are the schisms of the female and male, riding lower than L'amour fou the director as a master within the most discordant of productions, and it is likely thinking of that film that this falls flatter. It is beautiful, it's final day flies in such a showcase that it almost comes to be higher, the flatness in its last moments, thankfully, says me from overrating it. A wonder to watch them play inside, but being only sprinkled by his true great hand.

Watched on Tuesday April 22, 2025.

1950, Pius XII still in the Vatican. Years of a dead Mussolini, a rebuilding of spirit still going, and its still existing, more even. We are back in a time of Neo-Fascism making its head appear, not even is it to blame of the American powers-that-be but at a head due to a shared lacking of resistance. Today was the death of a progressive pope, one I can find my share of problems with, specifically as an estranged but still baptized Catholic, but it is the twist of the common hand that takes ion. It is a miracle in human form to find in such glorious estates, a sight to behold. Rossellini would dream of this in purer form, in a same place, for the material world isn't handing these values readily.

The Flowers of St. Francis is a cinematic of numerous parables, those that are composited separately but line by follies and ions of friars, held together by kind eyes in Francis himself. On the human level, it is not only the blanket of empathy but the true piety that maintains the dedication to cleansed teachings, light treatments of the human bodies themselves. In a hut adorned by the cross, taking in an old peasant drawn by what appears a true messianic sight, it is the universal attraction and realization of the holy cathartic, held in charity both personal and within ranges of faith. Human treatments are the language to understand as it is inclined within the natural world, it is the power that is able to make Ginepro respond to a tyrant in mechanic form by his own self ission, the ragdollian movements as he is tossed around by force outside of him the acceptance of a cleared spirit. This same emotion is what brings Francis himself, in a dark woods, into tears for the leper who he follows but only gives empty glances and continues walking. It can be witnessed as the beneath seductions of the Lord's history, and this is the posturing of his experiences in a true sainthood. Held tight to being outside of self, and it forms a swimming self as flowing floating vapor of sweetness and chill that manifests the fact of a notoriety in an isolated, sweat and effort home.

To animate this personage is the draw of the land itself, a belief of the land as that handed from God onward. To forget the birds, cut into from his face in response, ecstatic to witness and hear the natural song. An incense of the earth, pollen from springtime, water felt against their ankles flowing toward more land with smiles on their face. It can be taken as whimsy, the way they respond, but it is that of worshipful ecstasy, to be alive. A Brother Pig giving his own leg as the gift of a truly conscious being within God's world, the slaughter of a wrathful farmer and the fright they feel for a non-human animal. Blithe acceptance of floating ash as they approach a dark home, imagining bounty and worship from those in a decaying estate. Rossellini deals in events not abnormal to his neorealist efforts, maintaining these real world moments within parable contexts to represent how they can be manifest as basic lessons. It is a short piece to both entice reality to take these renders, as well as a simple way of relaying the simple beauty of human naturalism.

Watched on Friday April 18, 2025.

Boys love to dance together

New Literature, based around that of the space in extensive schematics, a dance surrounding obsessions that formulate to this one notion, the one Last Year at Marienbad encases, treats within itself. Complicity, seduction, entrapment, formed from a linguistic violence, Alain Resnais able to create this simply because Alain Robbe-Grillet had a kink that aligned to it. Robbe-Grillet, in his own filmic exercises, is attuned to true violence, real chains. But it is in this work with Resnais' subconscious substances which forms a congealed glossy image avoided by his very structured novels, of section and plannings plain onto page become layers and layers of a narrative, pressed together as sublingual radio transmission.

Stillness and the viewers are what make Marienbad a violent film, but it is the same which makes its fashion, the extension of why this stunning experience actually matters. King Ludwig I's castle, and most of all, a wardrobe designed by Nazi collaborator Coco Chanel. Beyond being the designer for the early twentieth century woman, it is also a profession within clothes of that message sending out, that of the folding beneath. She is a woman, she was in a tryst with a Nazi officer, the regime itself in person. This articulates the message of fabric: the message of a black in a rejection and the openness of a white, the crow of her final cape and the plumes rising in pleats over her neck, as a bird of prey. Place is a determinant of what is told to occur, but it is clothing that is a human concrete containing, the formal wear of statues looked off toward something alternative. Fabric is the hardest binds for it is formed a modern natural to wear but its structure is determining in how a body is presented, her arms kept to her sides, neither moving back or forward. Much of Marienbad lies within the ideas of a game, one played and one implicit by the frozen estate, but it is in these rules handed by the man that implies chess while having forgotten the rules. She is to be forced into remembrance and not move, but it is the Queen who is the most powerful piece in chess.

But it is the idea that this game holds any weight that actually defines what Marienbad appears as. It is plain as the first moments, becoming clearer as real places return back to only what they are and what they are lit in plans. It is trompe-l'œil in the moving art form. The place being non-descript in its excessive luxury due to the fact that it is only a formation of subconscious works, possibly that this place is simply bombed out and only ed are the remains. This is what s for much of the abrasive editing, the silent cuts into alternative interiors of completely ulterior motions, separate of the gothic organ breaking sprees across fragile walls, in complete white as purity, as light shining. Resnais takes the extreme precision and extends it by using planned architecture itself, and so makes that architecture a cinematic illusion. That the trees be planned exactly as the people are but it is only by the progression of what is seen first, that the chateau becomes new location for it is witnessed lied against by a performer on stage with a painting of its garden as a backdrop. Handing cinematic language enhances Marienbad's heights, it is extreme deliberation to create a disturbance that renders all seen to oscillating liquid.

Watched on Saturday April 12, 2025.

Watched on Saturday April 12, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 13, 2025.

The beautiful brightness of John Ford's America here is near cloying and gleaming, but I can't blame him in the spirit that is Abraham Lincoln, the only president that haunts my mind on a regular basis due to his role as the truest political icon in American history. It is hard to grab onto this, Pessimism creeping more now than the time where we were to touch our most ravishingly viewed victory in World War II, but what lies for a true way of reading is how heroism in the case of Henry Fonda's Lincoln is suffused into the mass and exactly how that is represented in shot. It is mass poetry that understands why Sergei Eisenstein would be envious of this film, the expression of a woman's tears in Alice Brady as Abigail Clay. How these bodies fill and how they experience classical unified events, town festivals, parades and mutual play conflicts. What is a Great Man accomplishing from small gaits becomes a personal showing of the people itself formed out of history in American Land, a didactic lesson of how we act and how they once acted similarly. A mirror of the brute and a reflection of how we cohere, the mass protests pushing for death but the power of the small-form mass itself in what occurs. Lincoln himself is given the highest touches of screened poetry, cleverest turns and nicest tongue in what will become a type in presenting American heroes, American authority onto the screen, and it is a both a way to believe and ingrain a man into event. At points dull and tiring, but a softness that reminds spirit of earth.

To make the distance of a recent history clear is the filmmaker’s gift, an ability of separation by the sheer notion of that retrospective inherently. Jia Zhangke begins in a 4:3, the idea of the 2000s as a visual medium, that way of seeing the fiction within. But to present the film as a historical document. Essential for its narrative continuation, improved and distorted for the sight of a viewer. In viewing Ash is Purest White, it is not presented as necessary to imagine that we are separating event, its basis in feeling and perspective, from the effect that it holds. It is western naivety to take the false naturalization of the film’s title onto its thematic elements but it is simple to see it as this: ash can be pressed into and rebuilt, a hidden nature of its traumas into the surface. Purest by the ability to be besmirched but still hit as the white is, ash is the memory and leftovers physically into Earth. Ash is Purest White does not consider the gun as a lasting effect besides its ability to alter lives as a whole in a way sans death, it is the gun within hands that create a severing of these beings and how the time ing perpetuates, how it leaves one as a victim and the other blithe and easy to live away from. Arguments of the woman that epitomize her disproportionate suffering to just get back and the male tripping over himself by his own hand.

Ash is Purest White feels a genre-moving simplicity of Zhangke’s general work and what it communicates, though it is a return to what he has always portrayed coming from the hyperlink, action painting formulation of Touch of Sin. There are touches that hit the moments of hyper-stylized Hong Kong cinema in the 80s, but it is this semblance of music, these performances punctuating the most essential movements by their visceral nature that match his semblance of the recollection, and imprinting of the lives present in this film. It is between the action taken of a woman and the man who folds as it is easiest for him, the repression of imprisonment that drives her out of the violence and into a suppressed self. Zhao Qiao is closest to the actress’ name of Zhao Tao because it is the presence of her that has been imprinted into the film canvas of Zhangke’s filmography and uses the present face of Chinese crime film in Liao Fan to be Unknown Pleasures play off her, that of Qiao San. This has been developed even farther as both of been used to make up the masterpiece of Caught by the Tides, but it is right here for the tensions present in the China of this screen is that same level of Zhangke’s own recollection. The woman a configuration of his childhood self, watching a gang leader as a role model fixated onto that of intimacy, the leading of a companion left at the lower will of gender. It is a dream portrayal for him, the development of what life could have been from this point, affected by the adjusting times of town and country spurred off from action. The imagination is one of quiet, the blast and a distorted framerate to a languid stretch of vapid discovery, and the human form’s inability of finality.

This is one of the best shot films of the current century, tones that could only be imagined in warmth of early digital into a modern context. Ravishing and emotionally tinted, extremity in high definition recognizing the human form in excruciating detail, the active way of that classic image: a woman with glassy eyes, a woman crying, as the audience member herself. Better than almost any movie this era, the highest echelon of contemporary filmmakers, is this camera that leaks the profuse affection and emotion of place and population in the very much now, while being so beautiful it is separate of our outside images.

Watched on Wednesday April 9, 2025.

Intuition and the exploration, that is being a voyeur and projecting process through the process of being eyes, the multitudes of layering and filter that take over experience. That there must be blood so there must be a tension, thrilling cut which produces action in a distant science of dissection, the hands against his belt taking a intimacy in self groping by the fact of its occurrence but it is only focus. Isolation, pulling apart of what are animal pieces reflecting themselves out to a viewer, what is grotesque becoming ingratiated into, holding a true corpse’s hand as never would a horror victim.

Watched on Saturday April 5, 2025.

Watched on Saturday April 5, 2025.

Watched on Saturday April 5, 2025.

The barrier breaking into a realm that is unfamiliar, unconscious as faith and restrictive for the entrance. Behind the hexed screen, inside what must be called a Cell as it is an inner where faith is all and faith is the non-choice. ings of the young girl’s guardians, the latter is to be the Lord himself, but the sight of the cross is less quantifiable than that of the others. A mother superior, the fellow sisters, an inside concrete, marble, wood making of minimum society, that of the to be kind in womanhood by immanence but given the possibility of transcendence, of the Lord before even if it is the hand of a patriarchal church, it is the self-transcendence, trapping away for personal journey, study as a bride, more study than the brides of society. In the system of conflicts between these women, is to be the degrading of their relations, those that do not match their qualities of what transcendence entails. Young woman, intoxicated by her disability to decide, decided by the rescinding of her abilities of choice.

While La Religieuse is heavily disparate in style, grit of his “developed” works, what begins in what is a comparatively early effort is the sensory of the entrapped, the fated of the woman and, by eventual point, how it will develop into the abilities of personage. For that, it is the reason of Suzanne’s unfinished and barred personage that develops the personality more, the incision of heavily barricaded societies and the hatred that comes of her perceived frivolity in destiny, in faith, as the choice is imagined to be lost to her, is the singular development of a person. As one kept to this specific situation, it becomes the realm itself and the imagination that makes the outside is just that, a projected image. One sold by those which are free, the men that visit her, the men who once saw it and now bring it down to the women in robes. Her unfinished rebellion of this station is what damns her in the sight of her sisterhood, a hateful matriarchy given their ability by the above masculinity, by the superior masculinity. The lack of a superiority for women in these lines are what lead to the abuse of the fellowship, giving right to a lower species as the Satan before them, handing purpose where it is otherwise lacking. Bland blue walls of concrete become a sick blue as there are no longer sheets to bounce off of, filthy rags that were once a habit dwindling down to make the same decayed area. It is stealing perceived power of this one girl that is the creation of power for those around, gurgling intestinal sounds and atonal bounces of sparse drums the burgeoning beneath. Fear and nausea birth the ability of control in woman, that they can walk over her sick body outside the altar she is forsaken is domination itself. And this reeling of power is an unstoppable force for remorse is not found within its contents, only power can answer power, and she is helpless. It is not about kindness, a simple foundation making basic systems.

Otherwise, it is Suzanne vulnerable to amorous impulses, which she had never felt, a shocking liberal reason for her chosen rejection of marrying, avoiding this fate of alternative womanhood entirely. Kindness in this instance is all of desire that which makes woman blush and glow, strawberry blonde en visage et cheveux, makes the man move lecherous as it is within his impulses to attain. Sensuality is liberating only as it raises the desired into an idol, an ideal manifested in sexuality and therefore an object. She is first a wretch and then becomes an object. Impoverished into prostitution, a hold of all personality as the fuel of herself that is mistaken for ability. Instinct teaches her that it is a simple move and not a solution to her deep desire for liberation, but it is also her idea of what liberation is that will leave her isolated. Rivette articulates steel walls that surround the woman’s life, creating quick motions that determine her path toward what appears as an abrupt finale, but is found within the logic of her existence, teaching experience. It is without beneath a simple sale that is a force upon her without the ability to consider paying.

He will get much, much better, so much better that this truly appears as a “minor” work when you experience what lies beyond. The harshest of his I have seen though there are major holes for me in his oeuvre. Interpretative notions lying beneath La Religieuse, growing canvases of its shots are to become a mode of material in extreme proportions as he develops his vision, but in here is a form where it is most easily consumed. Effective still, but linked towards a simple intrigue and entertainment, even as it bares upon and becomes more, and more chafing.

Idiotic and not Batman & Robin, beautiful. Schumacher believes comics are color and language from such, affection in vapid platitudes of vague heroism fixed to the American spirit, not much to question within for he is likely right. For comics are tiny pulps of American attacks, green bombs are customary, the vibrant violet of Harvey Dent, Tommy Lee Jones gay Louisiana gangster tone. Batman in a Spider-Man story, lines that will lead nowhere as this is only a small step in Schumacher's homosexual revision of what the Batman film is. For that it is minor, for multiple other reasons it is a loud stepchild of the superhero film. Camraderie in quips, the tense looks between, it is male led pornography, the action film, the musculature oiled, Nicole Kidman is an accessory. Misogynistic, easy to point into, but the hottest this character ever gets on film. Rest in Peace to Val.

• The Grudge
• May
• The Devil
• Piercing
• The Stepford Wives
• A Bay of Blood
• I Never Left the White Room
• Lost Highway
• Hellbound: Hellraiser II
• Pumpkinhead

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

• Doves
• Caught by the Tides
• The Beast
• Evil Does Not Exist
• Better Man
• Chime
• Perfect Days
• By the Stream
• Venom: The Last Dance
• Megalopolis

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

• A Brighter Summer Day
• Yi Yi
• Solaris
• Seven Samurai
• Ran
• Metropolis
• Magnolia
• An Elephant Sitting Still
• Love Exposure
• Out 1

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

by God I will watch these films

• Edward II
• Shakedown
• The Captive
• Blue
• The Angelic Conversation
• Women's Prison
• A Woman Like Eve
• Hunters' Sense of Touch
• The Other Side of the Underneath
• Sheer Madness

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

• Mouchette
• Diary of a Country Priest
• A Man Escaped
• Four Nights of a Dreamer
• Pickpocket
• The Devil, Probably
• Lancelot of the Lake
• A Gentle Woman
• L'Argent
• Au Hasard Balthazar

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

I generally dislike recent movies I want to see what I don’t

• Stray Dogs
• House of Tolerance
• Sorry We Missed You
• Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You.
• Liz and the Blue Bird
• The Image Book
• Climax
• Phantom Thread
• On the Beach at Night Alone
• Yourself and Yours

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Poor Things
• The Worst Person in the World
• Erin Brockovich
• Dogville
• The Red Shoes
• Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie
• Mommie Dearest
• Picnic at Hanging Rock
• The ion of Joan of Arc
• The Trial of Joan of Arc

• Angel Dust
• Rosemary's Baby
• Opera
• Juliet in Paris
• Blood for Dracula
• House
• Phantom of the Paradise
• Carrie
• Tenebre
• Raw

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Tetsuo: The Iron Man
• Bram Stoker's Dracula
• Ring
• Psycho
• Daughters of Darkness
• Dracula
• Ginger Snaps
• A Quiet Place in the Country
• Dead & Buried
• Faust

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Querelle
• The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
• Veronika Voss
• Berlin Alexanderplatz
• In a Year with 13 Moons
• Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
• Fox and His Friends
• Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven
• Lola
• World on a Wire

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

good director

• Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
• The Man Who Left His Will on Film
• The Ceremony
• In the Realm of the Senses
• Sing a Song of Sex
• Taboo
• Cruel Story of Youth
• Violence at Noon

• L'Avventura
• Summer Interlude
• Smiles of a Summer Night
• Early Summer
• Zabriskie Point
• Gregory's Girl
• 10 Things I Hate About You
• A Bride for Rip Van Winkle
• April Story
• Girl 6

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

• Mirror
• Project A-Ko
• Soylent Green
• King of New York
• American Gigolo
• Light Sleeper
• Southland Tales
• Annette
• Dark City
• U.S. Go Home

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

1. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
2. The Silence of the Lambs
3. Bride of Frankenstein
4. Titane
5. Prince of Darkness
6. Gothic
7. Audition
8. Jennifer's Body
9. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
10. Tales from the Hood

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Nothing I watch this month will be scarier than this year has been

1. Repulsion
2. The Tenant
3. Devilman - Volume 1: The Birth
4. Nosferatu the Vampyre
5. House
6. Shadow of the Vampire
7. Interview with the Vampire
8. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
9. Vampyr
10. Carnival of Souls

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