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What did I just see?

Sublime. 

We’re never ready to hear a message that could change the world.

Twenty-eight years and still no complaints.

The basic conceit means it can sometimes default to a kind of theatricality. This can help or hurt depending on viewer readiness for something a bit more experimental.

Serviceable and twisty.

One of many long-held Capra blindspots corrected.

What I loved were the little lingering spots of silence where the camera stopped recording action and just witnessed humanity. (There’s a better way to say that, but I’m not sure what.)  There is, for example, a long look down the hallway of a swanky house, and the frame is filled with the faces of hungry Depression-era farmers. They fill the frame; your heart drops. Because Capra has already shown you this procession of need from outside the house, you know that it spills to either side of frame out on the sidewalk. There is more need than you can count. Over and against a basic tale of greed and grift. 

With so many small glances adding up like this, you don’t watch the film so much as open to it as an emotionally-available experience.

This was on the syllabus for my undergrad film class in the early ‘90s, but what I mostly that I was pretty tired that day. A necessary rewatch and essential viewing.

Solid, fun, scary. Has a moral heart, too, amidst the carnage and jump scares. There’s an assured quality to everything, which helps you to know you’re in good hands and can let go a little, and just enjoy the ride.

This is a horror film wrapped in the most beautiful shades of pastoral innocence.

Above the waterline of this film there’s great skill and craft — acting, heart, imagination, construction. Below there is rich meaning to be plumbed from its depths. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while.

I’ve been an Episcopal priest for 20 years. This is how my internal monologue ran while watching this movie:

… he’s Catholic (but wearing clericals from Spirit Halloween)?

… he said he’s a priest, but the movie has pastor in the title, so —

… they have regular confession so they’re definitely Catholic

… but he wears a rosary around his neck in the pulpit? Who does that?

… they’re walking in front of a Methodist Church logo on the side of the church building

… wait, there’s a fake sign saying they’re Church of Christ?

… but they’re talking about the diocese? What are they, Episcopalians?

The main point — and this is easy to miss — is that this was made for $35,000.

Late-period Tarkovsky and all the tropes are in full swing. Yet I sense he is pushing away at us, trying not to let us in, until the last possible minute, when two important things happen. In the first instance, a man speaks of hope but only as an ission before self-annihilation. In the second, his proxy slow-walks through defeat to something like hope. Both end in death, but in the final glorious shot, only one is truly valorized.

Innocence was only ever an illusion as war dissolves into thanatopsis.

The idle rich and their spouses waste daylight and long to leave their ambassadorial postings in Calcutta and beyond. The stench of leprosy, mud, and death assaults their senses as they suck up incense and flowers to stop the onslaught; dance their long, slow dances; engage in nighttime dalliances; cheat emotionally on each other in front of massive mirrors; steal packed glances at one another. There is nothing else to do but go out and face reality, and even then, nonexistence might be preferred.

Diagetic and nondiagetic music flow into and out of one another, trading leads, dropping out then coming back, in a constant flow of conversation between the filmmaker and the filmed. All else is tightly controlled including the preponderance of red objects and red filtration, wrecking ball POV, and that Tarkovsky standard, water on the ground reflecting up and into the surrounding world.

Watched on Wednesday April 9, 2025.

Outside of his name being on the label, there’s honestly nothing here to indicate Kubrick — other than the yearning psychological hunger to be great someday that he shares with his subject.

I guess melodrama just isn’t my thing.

Brilliant, frothy fun.

Sought this title on the basis of its popularity on lists with no actual sense of what it was about – and was dazed by the vision of director Sarah Maldoror. The film is its own political creature, set in 1961 during the Angolan War of Independence, and follows nationalist revolutionaries attempting subterfuge under cover of work at a construction job-site. One identified as a leader of these rebels is entrapped, transported, beaten, and held. As violence begets further violence, his wife takes up a desperate struggle to find and extract him from detention. With each lonely mile she walks, her desolation compounds, until finally it explodes in grief.

Dreyer said, "Gertrud is a film that I made with my heart." His heart is all there on screen, but you might have to sift through a superficial listlessness to find it.

There is so much emotional honesty in these characters. Even when they lie, or omit certain words for the sake of conventional kindness, the truth hangs in the air between them. Words, spoken or unspoken, are what matter; everything else is simple chamber-play decoration, a little costume, a little makeup, a running camera without much movement. The one scene with any inherent kinetic power (marching youth holding torches and reciting poetry to welcome a hero back to his home) seems strangely out of place.

Inert greenscreen claptrap.

A technical feast riding atop a narrative behemoth. Like say The Magnificent Ambersons, it manages to be both wide-ranging and overlong but also constrictive at the same time. Maybe it's just my callous heart, but I'm less moved than I perhaps should be by Garance's revolving-door situation with her four suitors who are, in no particular order, (1) conveniently rich and powerful but a real drag to be around; (2) an artist on the rise who's his own worst enemy; (3) a thief on the edge of getting shivved; and (4) the world's greatest mime. (It's a French film.)

So I just have to settle for the indelible score, transcendent crowd scenes, lush lighting, and genius-level editing.

Beyond that, the first thing you really notice is the date on this film. 1945. The real and miraculous backstory of the production is propulsive and ought to be made into a movie. (Once finished, it would pair nicely with a showing of Inglorious Basterds as a different sort of meditation on filmmaking in Vichy .) How they made this thing (and peopled it with such colorful real-life folks) deserves to be told, especially with a newly-resurgent resonance over the question of how to tell disruptive stories about occupation while a bunch of Nazis are standing three feet away.

$320 million can’t buy you a comprehensible plot, or 3-D characters, or force you to care.

The diner conversations, the tough-guy rat-a-tat, the blue shadows, the “one last job.” Gimme gimme gimme.

Writer-director Lucretia Martel describes La Ciénaga as “an absurd attempt to find a cause and effect relationship between an event and the facts that caused that event.” Indeed, the chaos and confusion of that struggle is where we spend most of our time, where things are necessarily slippery, dangerous, multivalent, and twisted. In this swampy world of hormonal and boozy privilege, adults act like children and vice-versa; guns fire at random from kids bearing the scars of self-inflicted violence; people endanger and embarrass themselves; and the specter of death looms as large as the spectral pall of an apparition of the Virgen. Even the calm of the final seconds are broken by gunshots in the hills, and the terrible news of a death that has yet to be communicated.

A lifetime watching films with this as a major blind spot, so glad to check it off. But my gosh what a thing it is. Visual feast. Rich history. Beautiful places. And a terrible price extracted for bravery; bloodshed on the sand; and a fascinating and complicated central figure played with equal parts conviction and mystery.

“Control is the only true religion.”

“Everything you think is a choice has been dictated to you from the beginning.”

These are no big reveal to anyone who’s studied the philosophy of religion. But control (and the spilling of blood) is really just the outworking of a totalizing self-regard. We are fundamentally selfish. That, it seems, is the universal condition. And that, at the very least, is why we need healthy, mature, grounded, evolving spiritualities aided by healthy, mature, grounded, evolving religious communities of discernment and practice.

Otherwise we’ll turn our homes into houses of self-worship in which we hang mirrors and fashion ourselves the one true god, and “Thou shalt not murder” might be the first thing edited out of the holy text.

It’s something else until it’s not — and then whammo.

Look, I'm not saying anyone purposely set out to make a bad movie here. It's hard enough to get anything made at all these days.

Still, I mean. Wow.

“Some things matter more than one’s own skin.”

From the "German-Occupied" canon including THE BRUTALIST and SATANTAGO (Hungary) and COME AND SEE (Byelorussia), more screaming, relevant cautionary tales. The West thinks films are about entertainment, and that's partly true; but let us not eschew the moral exhortations. Cuz it's getting harder not to see the immediate value in all these messages. To turn away would be a crime, only more bread and circuses and "It'll never happen here" and "good people doing nothing."

So we have this one person who by just about any does nothing to advance the cause. Except he understands what it means to possess a conscience, and he thinks beyond himself, how to incept, plant a seed, stir a sleeping conscience. Does it work? I dunno. But it is really the only thing he can do, so he does what he can. Nevermind the enormity of the problem – he must do whatever he can. The effort becomes the mission. And a guy who was never much of a soldier performs his self-realized orders. After rising to the moment, what else is left but his ascension into another plane of existence? Well done, good and faithful servant.

Amazing aerial stunts. Fascinating story. A real sense of danger interleaved with real bits of fun. But also maximum male-fantasy aggro-dudery. These are cowboys of the air, where everyone needs a gun for some reason. And the women only matter here insofar as they can detach themselves from their partners and the rightly-ordered relationships they desire – or more accurately be willing to become abandoned anytime nature or the mood strikes.

This a vision of a warrior-tribe whose time is now over, or more accurately never was.

Still, there's something else at play – a larger living gestalt. It's about living so sparsely and temporarily that you have to borrow a match every time you want to light a cigarette. About being provided for by nature for just a few minutes at a time when nature is always indifferent and everybody knows it. About people fundamentally unable to care for themselves at a human level except as they do so for one another.

I don't know. I'll be thinking about this one for a while.

“If you’re not sure by now, telling won’t help.”

Combining the best (first half-hour) of WALL-E and what I thought THE WILD ROBOT was going to be (until the robot went into “learning mode”), FLOW is the natural world perfectly expressed as simultaneously at conflict and at harmony with itself.

A rich text.

Still a mess.

Until it devolves into common narrative tropes, it’s pretty great. Then meh. Remains lovely to look at throughout, however.

Second viewing — this time in Topeka. Still everything I like.

Watched on Tuesday February 4, 2025.

This is everything I like.

I cannot add even one helpful syllable to the dialogue at this point.

Eisenberg keeps the overall project grounded in reality as Culkin’s character’s complexity is made accessible through his need to be emotionally available to the world.

Everything has already been said.

Rewatched with kid 1. Top-tier in every way.

Inventive, recursive, retrospective

Covid Watch Part 2

“I do nothing, but I have a full life,” Alexandre says. He's a textbook narcissist with Seinfeldian levels of selfishness and conceit, and a healthy disregard for the interior lives of others that he masks as vague concern. He's not sure what he wants outside of sex, and even that has been waning lately. The items of culture in which he partakes (salon café culture, books, films, and older music) is the final outer layer of a persona trying to make itself presentable for the world but that in actuality doesn't contain anything of use.

In any event, it does not occur to him until the final five minutes of the picture that caring for people involves making room for them inside of his own messy life. So up until that point he plays everything to his convenience, tossing off bon mots like, "I can do what I want."

What he's actually doing, I think, is destroying his own life and the lives of two other people who care about him. So when the final curtain comes, it begs the question – Isn't it kinda already too late for this guy to change?

Many a war picture valorizes violence by calling it bravery, whereas COME AND SEE is a straightforward play to end the act of war. It demonstrates innocence being stripped away by senseless human greed and indifference. It systematically undoes our narratives about “accidental heroes” and how “In the end, it was all worth it.” It warns us to think for ourselves and learn to watch for the warning signs that come long before the first bullet. And it shows with terrible detail the way we obfuscate and deflect blame after the fact.

fatalism baby

"On this screen will appear an image of ugliness ... a vision of pain no caring human being should ignore. To wipe out this ugliness and to relieve the victims ... is the motive of this film and the hope of its makers."