4v291o

My brief deep dive into Daily Wire land has reached here: its apex. It’s $7 million excursion into 2000s direct-to-video comedy. The most high-profile professional actor here is Lexie Contursi, of Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County fame. But don’t let that fool you: this is, at its core, a vanity project for The Daily Wire at its highest point of cultural cache. Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Sen. Ted Cruz, Riley Gaines, Jordan Peterson, Michael Knowles, Brett Cooper, Clay Travis, Seth Dillon, Andrew Klavan, and, in a particularly memorable turn as SJW stereotype Kris, Matt Walsh, this nearly 2 hour film is less an attempt at artistic expression and more just a long-form practical joke meant for the service’s monthly subscribers. Now, the movie is quite well-polished. Though it contains that pestersome harshly-bright studio lighting we all except from YouTube video essays, the production value here flexes its muscles to take on the skin of an “actual movie.” Its cocooned inside a hackneyed plot about a divorced dad (played by Daily Wire CEO and the film’s director Jeremy Boreing) trying to win back his wife and kids by doing one crazy adventure to get their attention, only to realize at the end that all his family really cared about was his personality the entire time. Call it the “Jim Carrey plot.” However, all of that fluff is just that: fluff. The real point, as you can expect from the title of the film, is transphobia and moral panic about “boys in women’s sports.” The jokes here are, about 45% of the time, the lowest-hanging fruit possible for transphobic humor mixed with the assumption that the viewer finds the very idea of a trans athlete intrinsically hilarious. But in that other 55% lies the thing about this movie I did not expect going into it: its utter venom and hatefulness. Of course the movie is a hateful object per se, don’t get me wrong, but for a movie that portends to be a call for sanity in order to protect women’s sports, it holds a particular level of mocking scorn for the very concept of women’s sports. The level of rubber-faced sadism leveled onto the movie’s female characters is shocking, and given total comic weight. It truly gets to the core emotional match of the transgender athletes issue: these reactionaries view women’s sports not as a noble pastime needing to be saved, but a feminist abomination which predictably led to its inevitable conclusion: through trans athletes, the ultimate abdication of womanhood itself. 

The movie is a vile, rancid, and unfunny object, but frankly it’s also simply boring. Other experiments in reactionary hellfire, such as Ron Ormond’s trilogy of films with Estus Pirkle, G. Edward Griffin’s Anarchy U. S. A., and the art of Jon McNaughton & Ben Garrison have much lower production values, but that meager verisimilitude makes them not only feel more psychologically honest but, most importantly, makes them interesting objects of analysis. They are so baked in conservative rage that the rage becomes the very paintbrush the artists paint with. That rage is still burning on in the embers of this flick, but that $7 million budget acts as a pacifier and not as tongs. 

Brett Cooper wears for like 5 minutes the most insane dreadlocks here

I watch conservative schlock all the time. It’s something I find both enjoyable but also personally illuminating. Experiencing objectionable or odious personal views is not a thing I’m inherently repelled by. But this, this might’ve been the most trying experience I’ve ever had with a movie. 

Walsh is such a contemptible host. His Michael Moore-style “just asking questions sir!” approach mixed with his hipsterish smugness and self-importance is a deadly cocktail that simply makes me want to barf. Somehow this made me miss the rhetorical flourish and intellectual heft of Ben Shapiro 

My favorite moment: “Why do people not know more about Alfred Kinsey?” (As in, people not knowing who Alfred Kinsey was, AKA one of history’s most famous social scientists)

The multiplicity of digital identity

Watched on Saturday May 24, 2025.

The most “boulevard of broken dreams” Wood ever got. Boring in that delightful Ed Wood way

The ultimate love letter to the filmmaking process. Alexander & Karaszewski write perhaps the great biopic script. when Tim Burton was a great craftsman?

Genuinely ingenious animation. Also got the 1940s patter down flat

I can’t recall a previous time where a movie made me feel homesick before, specifically for a place I’ve never even been to. Paris, Texas is a movie meant to exist stuck in a dream-time amber, where the only thing left untrapped are the connections we ourselves have made.

Watched on Monday May 5, 2025.

Watched on Monday May 5, 2025.

Kooky indie cartoon made on a shoestring budget. I liked it a lot.

Watched on Monday May 5, 2025.

Steve Miner, a guy who did not want to direct movies, somehow managed to shoot a more provocative slasher than most of any of the “elevated horror” films today. Or maybe I just miss that 80s style.

I thought Coogler was out, but he kept bringing me back in….

Southern fried gothic horror wherein everything, and everyone, is tortured by some base pain rooted deep in the Mississippi soil. The juke t in its own right represents less freedom and more just the fleeting nature of life itself. Michael B. Jordan gives one of the performances of the year, perhaps the decade. And that cinematography….

Yes, I get all the reasons why people believe this to be the best superhero movie ever made. Michael Chabon’s brooding, superfluous plotmaking, Raimi at is most Raimi-est, Alfred Molina & Tobey Maguire giving their best performances, and Bill Pope’s poppy cinematography. But, I don’t know, I think I prefer the Koepp-Raimi live action paperback better.

I like how low-key the stakes feel here, relatively. Of course those stakes still include saving the love of your life and rescuing a cable car of children and stopping a masked marauder, but compare it to the stakes of the MCU movies. No world-saving feats of strength, no apocalyptic turn if things go bad. Just a recent high school graduate trying to do what he can do after his father surrogate dies and after he gets bitten by a radioactive spider. Tobey Maguire will always be the best Peter Parker. I soyjacked when I saw Ted Raimi.

There’s something so tangible in Willis O’Brien’s creations, something so understandably tactile, that you immediately forget how dated they can look 90 years later. Cooper & Schoedsack’s journeymanlike direction can sometimes be off-putting (like in the first 10 minutes), but once they reach Skull Island, it’s all gangbusters from there. A rich text for Foucaultian sexuality critical theory.

TW: I slept through like 15% of this. Your mileage may vary. 

Grief as something totalizing and transmogrifying. Cronenberg takes his (in)famous technophobia and sex negativity to something new, something less horrifying and more piercing. The dialogue is stilted, pacing slow, the cinematography ugly in its digital sheen. But the human body and specifically its decomposition is exactly all of those things. Cronenberg puts his own physical weaknesses and neuroses right on display, asking you to gawk at his insecurity. A haunting bad trip of a movie.

“This doctor needs borders”

Watched on Monday March 31, 2025.

God, the 1960s were dire for Warner Bros Animation huh

Watched on Sunday March 30, 2025.

What if wartime Salvador Dali made a Looney Tunes film? This would probably be it

Watched on Sunday March 30, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 30, 2025.

My favorite Wallace & Gromit film probably

Delightful little film. Wallace and Gromit are the highest-ups in the Village Green Preservation Society.

The more I watch this movie the more I realize how much of a masterwork of technical craft it really is. Ralph Rosenblum’s editing, Gordon Willis’ cinematography, Juliet Taylor’s casting, the Woodman’s directing…..

It’s probably my favorite comedy

Terry Gilliam’s phantasmagoria of the Kafkaesque and sublime constructs what is truly one of the greatest dystopias ever put to celluloid. The British brutalism meets Steampunk meets Rococo environment feels tactile, real, tangible in its surrealism. The dream sequences give this very wry film a feathery touch, and the brilliant comic performances of Michael Palin, Jim Broadbent, Bob Hoskins, Ian Holm, Katherine Helmond, & Robert De Niro sell the witty yet unpugilistic nihilism of Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, & Charles McKeown’s script. 

The problems of the film lies with its politics. Like the other great dystopists of the 20th Century (George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guin) Gilliam uses the fantasy of science fiction to commentate on the happenings of the present, particularly in regards to stifling of individuality, consumerism, unfettered technological “progress”, and authoritarian government. But Gilliam doesn’t know how to commentate on these factors except to point at them with a yardstick and mutter “damn this shit sucks.” It’s neither a rightist or leftist film; a 1985 viewer could read the world of Brazil as a stand-in for Thatcher’s Britain or Stalin’s USSR and find fidelity to the text either way. Brazil’s antiestablishment politics end up being politically meaningless, just empty signifiers that only end up holding up the status quo it is supposed to critique. 

The scene where Helmond’s face is getting stretched to oblivion Hieronymous Bosch-style is iconic for a reason, though.

Watching to complete my quest of viewing every movie with a president in it

when Disney animation used to have imagination?

Neither can I, this was made 80 years ago

Gene Hackman as a wandering, listless soul, permanently disposed to only peering on the lives of those he witnesses, never *experiencing* these lives themselves. Walter Murch has never done better editing, and Coppola’s direction has never felt more mature. Rewatches will only reveal more both the film’s political and social contours

Unfortunate that the greatest animator in history had to end his career with these repetitious flops

Watched on Thursday March 13, 2025.

Watched on Thursday March 13, 2025.

Bong Joon-ho trades Hitchcock for Spielberg. While not as visually inventive as other Bong movies, I had a great time with this one. Bong crafts a tender black comedy where Robert Pattinson plays a debtor beta male and hitches himself to Mark Ruffalo (who plays here a cross between Elon Musk & Juan Peron)’s space colony mission to escape his Earthly debts. Pattinson is the highlight here, skillfully bifurcating his manic yet repressed personality into 2 clones in the best “man playing himself twice” role since Neil Breen’s Fateful Findings. While Bong reproduces his never-relenting craftsmanship here perfectly and seems to finally get English jokes to land without a thud, I found myself a little sad when the movie ended, missing the mournful pessimism & peevish social eye of his Korean flicks. I’m not one to dislike didacticness in my art, but the blunt force with which Bong delivers his allegory here can get a bit tiring in the end (I get it, scientific progress means nothing if it doesn’t serve human flourishing, and that the elites will always be believers in their hierarchical superiority)

But, these are minor quibbles for a great sci-fi blockbuster. Can’t wait to see what Bong does after this movie inevitably flops at the box office

The most warm and tender piece on ontology ever produced. Willis’ stuff here is up there with The Godfather

Edward Berger is the new king of Oscar Bait. No doubt about it.

A silly film that thinks it’s way more important than it is. The liberal homilies are eye-rolling and simplistic benedictions of faith, while the tradcath Tedesco goes on a bombastic and near satirical levels of ludicrous tirade against Islam just to seemingly prove his tradcath-ness. And the twist, well, it seems to exist to just be a twist ending. 

Still however, I enjoyed the movie. I love anything about the Catholic Church, Ralph Fiennes is terrific, and the cinematography feels lived in.

Watched on Plane

Takes away the master-in-training narrative of the first Drunken Master and instead makes it a general action romp. Thankfully, Jackie Chan is just so great that it works

Elegantly funny heist caper. Really enjoyed this one. Vittorio Gassman is a delight

So many thoughts, so many descriptions, so many Lynchian clichés and banalities exist which I could sputter about this wonderful film, and I desperately want to sputter them, but I will hold my upper lip to focus on the broad strokes. A feverish nightmare which you can never wake up from. Identity dropped and transfigured into some cosmic chasm of confusion. Cinema itself exposed as a culprit in its own misdeeds. Postmodern Americana. Don DeLillo meets James M. Cain meets Bill Viola meets Larry Flynt. Lynch always pats you on the back and reminds you: it’s okay to feel puzzled. 

I’m writing this on January 16th, 2025, the day which David Keith Lynch, aged 78, shuffled off this thin mortal coil. I only reached his cinema in recent years, but he has become an integral part of me, a man who fills the back of my head with queries and necessary, immediate images. We didn’t deserve you David. I can only wish you felt the love we all held for you.

Watched on Thursday January 16, 2025.

Aren’t movies beautiful :)

Not the best Chaplin short, and clearly the one where he finally got down the Tramp persona, but just an utterly delectable one. Could frankly watch every Chaplin short and feel happy at some point

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an action movie wallow in so much trauma and regret before. Yes it’s got that Shaw Brothers heightened style, but my god, the scene where Gordon Liu burns his head with incense is harrowing. Action here is meant as simple and ruthless vengeance, nothing more. It’s evil, odious, and brutish. This is the social contract between the warrior and the world. Martial Arts meets Hobbes’ Leviathan. 

The fight with the candles, my goodness. Lau Kar-leung is becoming one of my favorite action directors

Tex Avery tries his hand out on UPA-style animation. Feels vastly different from Avery’s house style, but I loved the visual puns here. The cat bit especially felt Avery-like

Watched on Sunday January 12, 2025.

Dealing with the death of innocence w/ bombast, repetition, epileptic seizure, & denial

Saw this with maybe the worst theatrical audience I’ve ever seen. Teenagers in the front row were shining their phone lights *at* the screen DIRECTLY. Miserable.

Really don’t get the Twitter discourse over Eggers. One of our best rising auteurs.

To get the movie proper, this was utterly fantastic. A truly devilish delight. In Eggers’ world, evil is a living, tangible thing. It exists and you can see it and smell it. Not many others can do the same. He really understands the philosophy of Murnau

A little bit of a snag in the beginning, but those training scenes, wow. Pure athleticism made joyous out of filmic simplicity. Can’t wait to see more Gordon Liu

• Manos: The Hands of Fate
• Glen or Glenda
• The Musketeers of Pig Alley
• The Lonedale Operator
• The Battle at Elderbush Gulch
• Big Business
• Bride of the Monster
• The Girl and Her Trust
• The New York Hat
• The Country Doctor

...plus 6399 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Batman Returns
• Pee-wee's Big Adventure
• Ed Wood
• Batman
• Beetlejuice
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
• Frankenweenie
• Alice in Wonderland

• Friday the 13th Part 2
• Friday the 13th

• The Lords of Salem
• 3 from Hell
• House of Usher
• Inferno
• The Mummy
• Dracula
• The Raven
• The Invisible Man
• Creature from the Black Lagoon
• The Devil Bat

...plus 372 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

• The World at War
• Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow
• Hollywood
• Orgy of the Dead
• Green Snake
• The Hourglass Sanatorium
• Heroic Purgatory
• A City of Sadness
• Turkish Delight
• Terrorizers

...plus 3676 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Fly
• The Shrouds
• Videodrome
• eXistenZ

• McCabe & Mrs. Miller
• Secret Honor
• M*A*S*H

not necessarily what movies are most important to QAnon. but what movies feel the most important to creating its worldview. a work in progress

• JFK
• First Blood
• Rambo: First Blood Part II
• Rambo III
• Eyes Wide Shut
• The ion of the Christ
• Ransom
• Conspiracy Theory
• Dances with Wolves
• Dirty Harry

...plus 55 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Godfather Part II
• Apocalypse Now
• One from the Heart
• The Godfather
• The Conversation
• Megalopolis

• Parasite
• The Host
• Mickey 17

• Annie Hall
• Manhattan
• Broadway Danny Rose
• Love and Death
• Hannah and Her Sisters
• The Purple Rose of Cairo
• Zelig
• Deconstructing Harry
• Rifkin’s Festival

• Blue Velvet
• Mulholland Drive
• Eraserhead
• Lost Highway

The great pop artist of Cinema himself, the Norman Rockwell of our time, in all his glory

1. Schindler's List
2. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
3. The Fabelmans
4. Raiders of the Lost Ark
5. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
6. Munich
7. West Side Story
8. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
9. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
10. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

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

• Do the Right Thing
• Malcolm X
• Bamboozled
• School Daze
• BlacKkKlansman

• Blade Runner
• Alien
• Thelma & Louise
• Gladiator
• Gladiator II
• The Martian
• Napoleon
• Exodus: Gods and Kings

• Trap
• The Happening
• The Last Airbender

• Amadeus
• The Firemen's Ball
• Ragtime
• Hair

• Kill Bill: Vol. 1
• Inglourious Basterds
• Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
• The Hateful Eight
• Django Unchained
• Pulp Fiction
• Kill Bill: Vol. 2
• Reservoir Dogs

This is the list of films from the Criterion Collection that I currently own.

• Seven Samurai
• Safety Last!
• Night and Fog
• The Night of the Hunter
• Videodrome
• Shoah
• Rashomon
• Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
• Amarcord
• Roma

...plus 181 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A Watchlist runs out, so I'm keeping it on here

• Outrage
• Straight to Hell
• Tammy and the T-Rex
• Venus in Furs
• Bloody Moon
• Daughter of Dracula
• The Girl from Rio
• White Cannibal Queen
• Golden Temple Amazons
• Torso

...plus 589 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Eyes Wide Shut
• Barry Lyndon
• A Clockwork Orange
• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• The Shining
• Full Metal Jacket

• Oppenheimer
• Interstellar
• Memento
• Dunkirk
• Inception
• The Dark Knight
• Batman Begins
• The Dark Knight Rises

• Zombie Flesh Eaters
• The Beyond

• Chinatown
• Rosemary's Baby
• Macbeth

• Run Hide Fight
• One Nation Under Trump
• Trump Card
• Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party
• 2016: Obama's America
• Death of a Nation
• Clinton Cash
• Sound of Freedom
• My Son Hunter
• Jesse Ventura: We Shocked The World

...plus 36 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• 8½
• Amarcord

• A Nightmare on Elm Street
• A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge

• Halloween II
• Halloween
• Halloween

• Hard Boiled
• Face/Off

• Police Story
• Drunken Master

• The Last Picture Show
• What's Up, Doc?

• Body Double
• Mission: Impossible
• Carrie
• Scarface

1. Raging Bull
2. Taxi Driver
3. The Irishman
4. Killers of the Flower Moon
5. GoodFellas
6. The King of Comedy
7. Casino
8. The Wolf of Wall Street
9. The Last Waltz
10. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese

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

• On Deadly Ground
• Hard to Kill
• Above the Law
• Marked for Death
• China Salesman
• Sniper: Special Ops

The Master himself

1. The Searchers
2. Stagecoach
3. Young Mr. Lincoln
4. They Were Expendable
5. Wagon Master
6. Fort Apache
7. Judge Priest
8. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
9. My Darling Clementine
10. The Long Gray Line

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

1. Vertigo
2. North by Northwest
3. Notorious
4. Psycho
5. The Birds
6. Marnie
7. The 39 Steps
8. Shadow of a Doubt
9. Rear Window

Includes solo directorial efforts

• Inside Llewyn Davis
• The Big Lebowski
• Barton Fink
• A Serious Man
• O Brother, Where Art Thou?
• Fargo
• The Tragedy of Macbeth
• The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
• Drive-Away Dolls

• Pierrot le Fou
• La Chinoise
• Breathless

American movies made from about 1966-1980 that focus on an appeal to the other side of the Generation Gap, that defend strait-laced good old American values from the godless, hedonistic hippies & peaceniks. A work in progress.

• Dirty Harry
• Magnum Force
• The Enforcer
• Joe
• The Green Berets
• Walking Tall
• Walking Tall Part II
• Final Chapter: Walking Tall
• Death Wish
• Death Wish II

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

• Avatar: The Way of Water
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day
• Avatar
• The Terminator
• True Lies

• Citizen Kane
• Chimes at Midnight
• The Magnificent Ambersons
• F for Fake
• The Lady from Shanghai
• Touch of Evil

1. Cruising
2. The Exorcist
3. The French Connection

Feature Films only

• Sherlock Jr.
• Steamboat Bill, Jr.
• The General
• Seven Chances
• College

Feature Films Only

• City Lights
• The Gold Rush
• Monsieur Verdoux
• Modern Times
• The Great Dictator
• The Kid
• Limelight
• The Circus

• Belle de Jour
• Un Chien Andalou
• L'Âge d'or

• The Royal Tenenbaums
• Asteroid City
• The Grand Budapest Hotel
• Rushmore
• Moonrise Kingdom

• Ebirah, Horror of the Deep
• Godzilla vs. Hedorah
• Godzilla
• Godzilla, King of the Monsters!

Including individual movies by Michael Powell and by Emeric Pressburger

• Peeping Tom
• A Matter of Life and Death
• The Red Shoes
• Black Narcissus
• The Thief of Bagdad

• Bulworth
• Stop Making Sense
• Saint Jack
• Risky Business
• Barry Lyndon
• Repo Man
• After Hours
• Point Break
• Strange Days
• Avatar

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.