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Watched on Sunday March 23, 2025.

fun albeit libbed out movie about the power of political assassination. Timely!

13th century Bohemia! Teutonic Knights! The peril and allure of religious fanaticism! Wonderfully period-accurate settings and costumes! Gorgeous cinematography! Weird medieval stepmommy stuff! An inescapable sense of dread! What doesn’t this movie have?

one of the best movies about how stopping fascism is lowkey more important than having sex but having sex is also very important. soft boi anthem tbh

Pope movies are second only to journalism movies for me in of “idc what it’s about im watching that shit.” Conclave to me is a film about political organizing dressed up as a pope movie. Much like the closed world of the sanitarium in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is a concentration of Europe’s political sicknesses prior to WWI, the titular conclave is very much a microcosm of our current debates about politicized religion in the smartphone age. Conclave boasts some of the best one-person distillations of our time — the tradcath agitator who can’t stop vaping, the cowardly liberal hungry for power but incapable of taking it and unable to actualize it if he did, the conservative ab whose racialized identity both brings derision and cannot shield him in the soon-expiring liberal mode, just to name a few.

At the end of the day, I think this is one of the most pro-religion films I’ve seen in years in a way that isn’t preachy because it comes off as justice in the end. The simple message of love conquering fear and believing in a global community under God instead of small minded fiefdoms may have seemed trite if released six years ago or so but I have to say it’s a breath of fresh air right now. Definitely a movie that will go into a certain “All the Presidents’ Men” rotation of mine that I turn on when I start to doubt anything matters.

I was literally the only architecture critic who liked this movie because I think it’s important to have a movie about how architecture sucks and is made by exploited people for rich people. However upon second watch I find the back half of this film almost unwatchably cheesy. Finding out that AI was used for the Biennale drawings (and that the ending wasn’t intended to be a commentary on how canonization is the last act of dehumanizing the artist) was a sucker punch considering this film is above all about exploitation. My original review was perhaps too positive about the film but I still don’t have it in me to hate it either. It was however fun to make all my colleagues hate me for about two weeks.

no wonder trump got elected look at what “liberal” filmmakers are making dawg

When I first watched Twin Peaks I was 18 years old, like most of the female characters are in the series, though I was in college at the time. I’d just fallen hopelessly in love with a man whose handsomeness and what seemed to me like worldliness (he was from Raleigh, I was from the sticks) put me into the kind of heady acceleration into adulthood I wished my mother warned me about. Anyway, he showed me Twin Peaks, which I didn’t finish because I wasn’t finishing anything save for what was left over in other people’s beer cans. I should have paid better attention. 

Twin Peaks is both naive and fanciful as a show because it exists in a world in which men care deeply about violence against women. There is endless violence against women in Twin Peaks but it’s okay because there shouldn’t be and everyone agrees on this. As a young person that violence unnerved me because it couldn’t be real. Of course it was real, and it was happening to me at the time, I just couldn’t see it yet because it wasn’t as obvious as a bar of soap in a sock. The controlling behavior, the constant onishment and humiliation, the screaming and inciting me to scream, the perverse use of love as a weapon which only worked because I believed in love above all else. Maybe my subconscious was the one who turned the show off even before we found out who killed Laura Palmer.

At any rate, I’m an adult now with a much more realistic if pessimistic view of the world and upon my first rewatch see Twin Peaks as a form of escapist fiction, fantastical and unreal for the reasons I’ve just laid out. Men put their lives on the line for women’s honor, women’s bodies, women’s love. They do this in this nagging good boy way of zooming in on Shelley Johnson’s face all dreamlike, a silent whisper of “can’t you see this is wrong?” In Twin Peaks, unlike the real world, there has to be a supernatural reason for violence. People, even abs like Leo Johnson have to be made whole through love. It is a cyclical whirlwind of wish fulfillment that, were it not for its experimentation, tone, and character development and its repeated brushes with the cliche and uncanny, both from the inside out, would be almost unwatchable. The miracle is that Twin Peaks is not only watchable, it’s good. I love it so much. I wish it were real.

reconsidering my desire to have children

This review may contain spoilers.

“We are all Archie Bunker at the theater, shouting out before Oedipus: there’s my kind of guy! There’s my kind of guy!”
- Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus