4v291o

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday May 14, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday May 13, 2025.

I’m thinking about changing the trajectory of my life, is all

Ridiculous but has such a sweet centre thanks to Anna Farris - it’s a little rote to point out her genius now but she really is so so great. 

Love that her character Jane  is always trying to do good but just keeps fucking it up, but keeps on persevering. I would have just slept all day. It’s probably a better move but it wouldn’t have made for much of a movie.

Anna told Vulture recently she doesn’t think Jane  is lonely in the film, and I guess that’s maybe true - she’s kinda putting off those bigger worries about direction and community and purpose for another time, when she’s older. But there’s this quiet discontentment humming underneath all of this - maybe that’s just the sun-bleached, over-exposed LA sun, eating away at people’s features in frame. Perhaps I’m projecting, but I liked that for as silly as this is - and it’s dumb as hell - there’s a bit under the hood.

Gregg Araki hot famous love him forever!!!

Watched on Saturday April 26, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 17, 2025.

damn that's some good australian film!

funny, sharp, incredible performances (who knew luke jacobz had all this in him? maybe you did but i certainly didn't).

in convo with eugene kotlyarenko, jaochim trier - very clever satire, feels really contemporary. similar to friends and strangers, too

will return to this later and write something proper but really really hope to see this get picked up for proper distro.

Watched on Wednesday April 9, 2025.

Watched on Monday March 31, 2025.

Watched on Thursday March 27, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday March 26, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday March 18, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 16, 2025.

okay but don’t they need male models in space because he could have signed up to do that instead

(any movie that’s part starship troopers is a great movie. even similar mother bug design/interactions!)

edit: lots of talk of mark ruffalo but not one mention of him slipping into a lisa barlow lilt multiple times... let's wake up!

this happened to me once

This review may contain spoilers.

absolutely gorgeous.

so much to love about this. lots of praise for fernanda already but those child actors are incredible - this doesn't hit anywhere as hard without the family's chemistry and these small moments of love between them all, little jokes at the dinner table.

the family's home/life is built up with such tenderness in the first 30mins. there's that early scene where a group of teens are having a great time singing along to songs in a car, someone's got out the super 8 and we see the footage as they look soooo 'cool' smoking and having fun, but that cinematic bubble is burst via a military car stop and you suddenly wish for the cliche that maybe before felt hollow or too practiced, because of course it is, but not because of the film but because we were watching teenagers try and be cool and evoke images of teenage freedom! and you wish for it back but it didn't ever really exist.

so many bubbles and so many bursts throughout. makes you understand -without ever truly fully explaining - the family's need for its sanctuary of wealth and connections and how even that can't always save people (scary!). what great, patient film-making, a quiet script where others would make this so didactic.

really didn't expect much from this/to really connect with it beyond its obvious weight as a true story but lots more to this film than the words "political biographical drama" might make you think if you're like me and that slots this into homework territory. i know that's kinda terrible but also so often they are well-reviewed for their content and not any sense of craft/as a film. not the case here!

loved the end section's time jumps and shift between film stock/turn to digital. makes the contemporary era feel so cold and 'uncinematic'. lets the final lack of resolution not just come across montenegro's face as she watches the tv (that glimmer and then fade of recognition) but bleed out across the whole scene. it asks: what true justice? what impact was really made, if we let this all happen again in another name, in another place? is this film you're watching right now not eunice still advocating via her son's memoir - his writing keeping his parents's bubble of hope and a dream of a better word alive? (and THAT'S how you make something with true political weight).

had tickets to the near 3hr count of monte cristo movie at the french film festival (not by choice) and we went to the wrong cinema but this was playing at the same time

probably better and funnier i think

not alone in saying this but keke palmer STAR (and sza great!!!)

i think every movie should have a character played by bette midler repeatedly emphasise the decade that the movie is set in. it’s the 2020s for christ’s sake!

delightful footage and some nice interviews with friends and collaborators (and liza herself!), but quite poorly made. it's constantly interrupted by ~10 separate interstitials with quotes, for no real reason other than it was the easiest way to cram everything in without any real thought. bizarre and lazy structure, which also comes across in the edit and camera work in modern scenes.

still, there's something nice in how the film devoted so much time to the friends and lovers liza credits as making her - the through-line of her interviews. sure, a 5-min mini-doco on halston or charles aznavor feels a little random (there are a good 2-3 mins where liza isn't mentioned or seen on screen during the halston section, and the aznavor part comes right at the top of the film and feels like we've clicked a link on liza's wikipedia page we didn't really need to) but it's a mirroring of the narrative the doco is selling, that she brought people along with her on the way up and always let them shine. it doesn't really work/isn't always enjoyable, but it is very sweet and made me want to be a better friend, which is how i want to leave most movies feeling.

ultimately it's a hagiography co-signed by liza, which means no friends really want to speak about anything liza wouldn't, but there are some interesting cracks in there (loved that anecdote where a collaborator (fosse i think...) reportedly told a sore and tired Liza she needed to she was "a figment of [his] imagination". damn.) plus mia farrow features prevalently and, like all liza's friends, is filled with awe and love for liza. how gorgeous to witness.

wish this doco matched her genius and charm in its style instead of being so ugly and rote and slow at times.

BUT the footage is so wonderful and the person at the centre so endlessly beautiful so it doesn't really matter and i would strongly recommend this despite all the very obvious youtube-essay-esque flaws.

ultimately zero stars for the darren chris sneak talking head, even if the anecdote he offers is actually quite beautiful. kinda crazy that straggot features and the film doesn't touch upon her gay fanbase once? how can you include it all, sure (and the film homes in on the 70s, even if it jumps around), but also, how do you exclude that!

okay let’s just get two faces in focus at the same time at least once wow why is this film out of focus so so much

my friend thought that maybe shelly was hallucinating all the other characters which would have been stupid but at least it would have been something

god what a miserable and sruface-level script, filled with cliches and no real love for its world. performances add life otherwise this would be zzz

and all the shots of shelly on the streets as if this was the music video for bounce by calvin harris and kelis ugh

(this would be an amazing music video. how does 88m feel so long?)

in the first 20m i realised hannah horvath nachos sally bowles blah blah and then it became the most upsetting film to watch in feb 2025. sorry to lib out!!

Watched on Tuesday February 11, 2025.

wow this is the best movie i’ve ever seen

one of the most three star films of recent memory (which means i really liked it btw! not a slight!) 

really enjoyed how the fairly full 9.15pm cinema session had waves of whispers as people asked someone to explain who was voting for who, what was happening or what certain words meant

i’m a real sucker 
for fate unavoidable
at the moment :)

just a freakkkk yeah!

Watched on Sunday January 19, 2025.

disappointing. there’s an inherent dramatic flaw with this film’s plot, surrounding the furore over dylan going electric: we all know it worked out more than fine, so the stakes aren’t there. 

maybe if the film went more granular, it could work but that isn’t true to dylan, a fairly mysterious figure who withholds (loved Timmy’s unfocused eyes in this, like he had a glazed window between him and everyone else, the music the only thing that could push through). 

learned very little. something like i’m not there works much better - interrogating dylan as a self-made myth, splitting his persons up. 

Then again, there were multiple people in the row in front of me at the premiere googling Bob dylan, Joan Baez and johnny cash throughout the film, so many they’ll enjoy it more as an introduction? (These particular people did not though, checking emails and texts throughout. If i was more immersed in the movie, i would have said something - but it was kinda boring!) 

enjoyed the musical numbers a lot. he has hits, and the close ups on the performer’s face (again, timmy’s gaze!) captured that shift from joy to resentment across this period of dylan’s career 

ps. why do i always think joan baez is australian? i feel like someone told me that when i was 8 and its settled as a fact, no matter how many times its proven wrong

unfortunately i did think 'body tea' almost every single time autumn moon was on-screen in his super tight, usually open shirts

i love da nightlife 
i love da boogie

During The Brutalist's intermission, you might be tempted to Google whether its bruised, brilliant protagonist, László Tóth, is a real person.

It's understandable. This fictional figure — a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor played by Adrien Brody — is as monumental, singular and striking as the concrete behemoth he builds throughout this three-and-a-half-hour film.

We meet him in 1947 as a weathered shell of a man arriving in America alone, with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and orphaned niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) stuck in Europe, the two forcibly separated from him at some point.

He dreams of a second chance, which arrives in the form of a commission from Harrison Lee van Buren (Guy Pearce), a wealthy industrialist with a large plot of land atop a verdant hill in rural Pennsylvania and a desire to make his mark.

Van Buren also extradites Tóth's family to the US, holding this — and other so-called acts of kindness — above the architect, creating an uneasy power dynamic between artist and patron, both of whom need each other.

The public building — a high-ceiling, moody space intended as a church, civic centre and gymnasium — may be named after van Buren's late mother, but it is more a tribute to and display of his own wealth, success and taste. After all, he rejects Tóth's pitch of a pool with three simple words: "I can't swim."

The Brutalist is, like its central building, unashamedly grandiose, with an immense thematic and visual scope. It's a film that tackles, among other things, the exploitative promise of the American Dream, diasporic trauma and how ego both necessitates and corrupts art.

---

review continues via the link but in short i really loved this and its bathos-as-hell end"
www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-28/the-brutalist-review/104851204

Watched on Saturday January 11, 2025.

1.5 stars for all that Emilia’s been through, and still singing

— 

there were moments of brilliance (karaoke! the performances! that bizarre three-way phone call where two characters are stuck in some kind of video game pixel haze character selector?!) and wow those performances.

had me from about 15m-1st hour (the semi-infamous gender confirmation surgery song is quite funny and self-aware stupid imo, also love that they get a [redacted] doctor to do the surgery and he doesn’t care about the cartel involvement bc his riches are also fundamentally corrupt and bloodied. Not his first time at the rodeo!). Lost me with Emilia’s NFP turn. What a complex protagonist - a person who should be irredeemable, but is given a new chance to make amends. But she is rendered into mush by this script 

this is so ill-researched (basic trans 101 stuff about HRT that it misses, really doubt it nailed much about Mexico either given Emilia is told she smells like
Guacamole in one of the sweetest, genuinely touching parts of the movie)

The laziness of writing betrays this isn’t really about  an epidemic of missing people or trans hardships, but the idea of caring about and making moving art about big topics. complete lack of empathy to actually learn anything or consult the communities it depicts. Felt very hollow, even with the cast giving it so much more than it deserved.

Script had so many logistic issues that are boring to complain about (wouldn’t Jessie’s return raise suspicions etc), and suspension of disbelief comes with the genre, but felt emblematic of a lack of care. 

loved this approach to songs on a musical level, found their deconstructed/deboned versions really moving (wish the characters had an ounce of interiority so didn’t just sing every feeling but that comes with the genre)

will say i was pretty intrigued and enjoyed it as a ride until the last quarter or so where it built to a pretty boring end despite the life-threatening escalations 

trans green book!!

it’s ultimately very funny Netflix bought this purely for star power of Zoe and Selena, and might have accidentally locked in a best picture win in the process just because it’s what most people have watched and the brutalist is 3.5 hours long and they can’t really give it to wicked can they?

anyway literally whatever

so gently and deeply upsetting.
gorgeous, understated, what a debut!

Watched on Monday December 30, 2024.

so sweet so fun sooo 90s

Watched on Thursday December 19, 2024.

Watched on Tuesday December 17, 2024.

Watched on Wednesday December 4, 2024.

Watched on Tuesday December 3, 2024.

In the 1985 introduction to William S. Burroughs' semi-autobiographical novel Queer — which he wrote 30 years prior, but hadn't been published until then — the author reveals that the book's core reason for being is an "event that is never mentioned, in fact, is carefully avoided" throughout its pages.

He's referring to his allegedly accidental, fatal shooting of his wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951, supposedly part of a William Tell trick gone wrong. Not only did her death shape Queer, he writes, but his entire career (his debut novel, Junkie, came out in 1953): "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death."

The ission isn't necessarily new information, but it's the counterweight that Queer protagonist (and Burroughs' conduit character) Lee fails to float away from because he can't name it, even as he attempts self-obliteration and distraction in Mexico City.

Without spoiling specifics, Burroughs' book ends abruptly. There's no great release or even much of a plot. Nor is Queer a love story between him and Allerton, a young man also aimless, having recently been discharged from the US Navy. Instead, it's a high-frequency howl of desperation, loneliness and self-loathing, one that puts hairs on end, even if we can't always hear it directly.

Queer, then, is intriguing fodder for Italian director Luca Guadagnino, a filmmaker who specialises in transformative, all-eclipsing desire. (The throbbing Italian summer romances of Call Me By Your Name or I Am Love are the most immediate examples. But irresistible desire also runs underneath the supernatural awakening of Guadagnino's Suspiria remake, Bones and All's gory cannibalism, and the frenetic love triangle that pushes Challengers's tennis players to glory.)

Unlike previous Guadagnino films, Queer is about a failure of transformation — as Lee's alcoholism, heroin use and unknowable feelings about Vollmer's death make for an unbridged barrier. Here, Guadagnino's ability to create gorgeous, intoxicating worlds of vibrant colours and ions only underscores Lee's emptiness.

At its centre is Daniel Craig, whose Lee is removed from Peter Weller's dead-eyed version in 1991 film Naked Lunch, a hallucinatory adaptation of Burroughs' novel of the same name. Craig's Lee is pathetic: A man whose bruises are only all the more obvious in his attempts to hide them.

Jittery and ever looking for the next hit of attention, he peacocks at bars late at night with rambling monologues on history and gossip.

His need for attention renders him a clown in a white linen suit, but there's genius in Craig's lightning-bolt blue eyes. He embodies the charm and cruelty of an addict — the intense, flattering focus that diminishes as you realise how you could be anyone. (See also: Ryan Murphy's season of Feud about Truman Capote, another queer mid-century writer, raconteur and addict.)

---

Full review on ABC but TLDR; feel like a bit of chatter glosses over Burroughs as a figure/that this is an adaptation. the movie does address Vollmer overhanging the film (no spoilers here or in review) in a bit of a weak way, but i also like that it's a bit weak. no resolution.

www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-07/queer-review-luca-guadagnino-daniel-craig/104894422

Watched on Friday November 29, 2024.

swept away by this!! 

(kinda forgot that i saw this on broadway on a trip to america when i was 14 and bought the ost, with that the the Juno soundtrack the only two albums i had on my new ipod touch so these songs are ingrained in me…)

sure the cgi can look bad and it can be a little washed out and lazily lit at times (isn’t Oz kinda THE technicolor fantasy world?) but all the lead performances are so good and the musical is so well-written that it doesn’t really matter (yes it’s long and drags a little but again, who really cares) 

have loved ariana for ages but wow, what a complete star

not to be that person but also completely forgot this is kinda about fascism, propaganda and how people abandon principles for power, which feels… not inconsequential… for right now as a movie that’s obviously going to make 100000000000 dollars and be seen by everyone in the world. idk I’m a fragile man and it stirred me (especially that dance scene)

BUT every jeff goldblum role should be played by steve buscemi. i do not like that man (which, yes, works here)

Watched on Thursday November 21, 2024.

they call martha blonde and beautiful so many times

repetitive and those god-awful illustrations hurt to look at but who really cares because martha!! Run-of-the-mill doco with a wonderful funny weird subject. love her!!!

Watched on Tuesday November 12, 2024.

Watched on Wednesday November 13, 2024.

Watched on Tuesday November 12, 2024.

• Tinā
• Warfare
• Moonrise Over Knights Hill
• Small Things Like These
• Good One
• Sinners

not ranked

• Civil War
• Late Night with the Devil
• Dune: Part Two
• Priscilla
• Housekeeping for Beginners
• Challengers
• The Sweet East
• Femme
• Companion
• Love Lies Bleeding

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

what i saw, loosely ranked

• Balomania
• The Seed of the Sacred Fig
• A Different Man
• I Saw the TV Glow
• Stress Positions
• My Old Ass
• Flathead
• Dahomey
• The Substance
• Crossing

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

• The Cement Garden
• The Nightingale
• 20 Days in Mariupol

Basically love everything above barbie

• The Zone of Interest
• Poor Things
• Anatomy of a Fall
• May December
• Oppenheimer
• Killers of the Flower Moon
• The Holdovers
• Barbie
• Maestro
• Past Lives

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

• Aftersun
• All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
• Oppenheimer
• Bad Behaviour
• ages
• I Like Movies
• EO
• Theater Camp
• Rotting in the Sun
• Talk to Me

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

• Friends and Strangers
• Red Rocket
• Benedetta
• Vortex
• Jackass Forever
• Spencer
• Elvis
• Actors
• Bodies Bodies Bodies
• Sick of Myself

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

• Bo Burnham: Inside
• Can't Get You Out of My Head
• Firestarter: The Story of Bangarra
• The Scary of Sixty-First
• The Nowhere Inn
• All Light, Everywhere
• Language Lessons
• Nitram
• Dune
• Parallel Mothers

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

The best of

• Vox Lux
• Us
• The Final Quarter
• In Fabric
• Varda by Agnès
• Pain and Glory
• The Nightingale
• Gloria Bell
• Velvet Buzzsaw
• If Beale Street Could Talk

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

best of, also just a public note to say 'honey boy' was TERRIBLE

• The Invisible Man
• Never Rarely Sometimes Always
• First Cow
• Little Women
• The Plagiarists
• And Then We Danced
• Ema
• Da 5 Bloods
• Babyteeth
• Monos

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

feel like i've seen lots, feel a need to catalogue them. can only think of two right now but i will add more

• On Body and Soul
• Killer of Sheep

• Beginners
• BPM (Beats per Minute)
• Her
• s Ha
• Call Me by Your Name
• The Rider
• Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
• The Favourite
• Annihilation
• Hereditary

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.