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Lots to savor here — and I also like how it just *ends*.

Having re-read the Vonnegut novel this year, and then enjoyed Richard Brody's full-throated defense of BoC in the New Yorker, I was primed to like this. I wouldn't say it was unwatchable; on the other hand, it did take me about ten sittings to get through. It's grim, depressing, obvious, flashy, over the top in sometimes interesting ways. It wallows in its critiques of a deranged America (a similar, even wilder vision would be on display in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy). Albert Finney makes for a nicely dyspeptic, addled, and humane Kilgore Trout, though I can't imagine anyone unfamiliar with the book understanding what he's doing here. It's supremely depressing—a Pyrrhic victory I suppose.

"Ambition—the moth of holiness"!

Watched on Wednesday March 19, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 14, 2025.

Unadulterated joy! Inane, insane, meticulously crafted, unturnoffable, HoB improves on its silent-film models and incorporates a videogame's logic patterns and slap-happy repetition...At one point I thought: Do the filmmakers know they don't have to try *this* hard to be entertaining? Every sequence is staged with love.

Caught this on TCM by accident — clips from Peeping Tom leading to a thorough look at their oeuvre. I watched about an hour. MS makes a strong case, shows scenes that inspired sequences in his own work. Pretty interesting! (I've only seen I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING! and PT; after a while, I stopped watching, convinced I should see more P&P, not wanting too many spoilers.)

Unbearably sad, at once elliptical and vivid—a horror movie in which the big bad is time itself.

Watched on Tuesday October 15, 2024.

Best title + killer opening sequence + I *don't* know where this movie is going + Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) is supposed to be 25 but looks 43 + Torquil (Roger Livesey) is effortlessly charming and mysterious + all the Scottish/Gaelic stuff is great + tertiary characters seem to have lives of their own and are on the same page, acting-wise + e.g. the colonel training an eagle to hunt like a falcon, which functions as comic relief but also (in its peculiarity) stands for the uniqueness of these people and their way of life + the legend / castle stuff is great (and downplayed till just the right moment) + none of these actors were familiar to me except (later) I discovered the altogether winning prim-nerd Cheril was played by a young Petula Clark (!) + the music is great = five stars!

Not a sequel or a prequel, TLVOTD is gamely spun off from the "Log of the Demeter" interlude in Stoker's DRACULA. Maybe there's not a word for such an expansion from within because it's too ill advised to warrant a category. DEMETER is a somber affair, and despite some diverse casting choices, it can't shake off the fait accompli-ness that makes most prequels such a slog. It's light on scares; if only the creators had gone for something wilder—on the order of, say, Lair of the White Worm.

Two native New Yorkers, Raft and Bogart, are well cast as the Italian-American Fabrini brothers (despite not being Italian) who eke out a living driving trucks, with the elder Joe (Raft) yearning to own a delivery fleet of his own, and Paul riding shotgun, often napping, wondering how to better provide for his wife.

Tonally this movie is interesting to track. A few minutes in, I worried this was a remake of the important but kind of tedious THE WAGES OF FEAR, though that would make no chronological sense; it does, however, convey the grinding mindset (and mortal challenges) of labor, as well as its more humane possibilities. (In this regard, I loved Alan Hale Sr.'s character, and not just because he's named "Ed.")

The tough-luck beginning seems to evolve into a screwball comedy, when the brothers stop by a diner to make an emergency call. A driver named Irish (Roscoe Karns) is addicted to pinball machine, while the new waitress (Ann Sheridan as Cassie Hartley) flings one witty barb after another at anyone who tries to get fresh. (E.g., “I always have liked redheads.” “You shouldn’t—red means stop.” “I’m colorblind.”) I assumed Sheridan would be the femme fatale, but the movie goes in another direction; the great Ida Lupino will fit that role, as Ed's posh, unsatisfied wife. (Hey now what.) With her appearance, some ways into the film, the noir elements at last cohere.

Riveting from the pre-title sequence (post-shower Evelyn Keyes screaming at the titular prowler spied through her bathroom window—i.e., screaming at *us*) to the reliably bleak finale. Joseph Losey (working with a Trumbo screenplay) tracks his doomed lovers (Van Heflin plays the cop turned ill-advised/mercenary beau, Keyes is unhappily married to a late-night broadcaster who presses his own shows onto vinyl) from LA mansion to windswept ghost town. A corrosive vision of sex, lies, and record albums.

Very sad :(

Wouldn’t you know it — after seeing A Quiet Place Day One and the original AQP, I watched AQP Part II. I can’t get enough of this series! When Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt talk in their one scene together, it’s like a warmup for OPPENHEIMER.

I haven't seen the original AQP (nor the sequel), though of course I knew the basic concept. I found AQPD1 unsettling at first, with its lower-Manhattan mayhem too glibly drawing from 9-11 image bank; the concession stand at the theater where I saw it still had the Twin Towers on its wall of New York decorations. (Also, since when does Chinatown have marionette shows, let alone non-Chinese ones?)

The alien marauders look too much like the demogorgon from Stranger Things — Joseph Quinn isn't the only thing borrowed from that series! — and at times the movie felt like an acting exercise: "Show us emotion without words!" But . . . the theater was pretty quiet, and abiding by the no-talking directive onscreen. Lupito Nyong'o is in every scene, her glowering offset by a very charismatic cat. And at 100m, it doesn't wear out its welcome—it stops on a dime.

Look for: Angie Kim's novel HAPPINESS FALLS on a cart outside the ruins of "Argyle" (read: Argosy) Book Shop.

I wanting very much to see this, seeing it, and then confusing it with Kentucky Fried Movie and the Groove Tube, which I saw shortly afterward. This was a long time ago.

A meta-movie masquerading as noir, a collision of coincidences, a novel adaptation in which a novel is adapted unfaithfully, a poem of doom.

Bogart is in every scene, and narrates as well, hat and cigarette and short yet cool-looking necktie, poking and prodding the underbelly of Gulf City, “the tropical paradise of the South,” though inferno is more like it. We don’t see much more than nightclub, casino, and one apartment that looks transported from an Astaire Rogers vehicle. One thug beats him as though playing music. Lizabeth Scott looks and sounds like Bacall but seems even deadlier. There’s a Yale angle. Exceptional noir.

Thought I'd try it for twenty minutes or so, but couldn't turn it off. Utterly compelling, strange yet grounded. What seems like charming whimsy on the part of Neddy Merrill (Burt Lancaster) masks something darker and sadder. Watch for cameos from Joan Rivers and John Cheever himself. (No spoilers, but the narrative strategy looks forward to Robert Cormier's 1977 YA novel I AM THE CHEESE.) / Update — I've upgraded this a whole star! / I revisited the original story, which is just a few pages — terrific in its effects, but also fascinating to see how the filmmakers expanded it so much (entire scenes/characters that don't exist in the book) while amplifying the theme, and ultimately landing on the same revelation. / There is an EYES WIDE SHUT vibe to the proceedings; later I learned that Sydney Pollack (who had a small but key role in EWS) had replaced director Frank Perry to finish the drawn-out production.

Watched on Sunday May 19, 2024.

Why did I just give this an extra half star?!

Watched on Tuesday May 7, 2024.

Charmingly acted, casually low stakes — and as perceptive an Asian-American movie as we have.

I first learned of Matt Farley’s ocean of music (19,000 songs and counting) about a decade ago, but I didn’t know he made movies until reading the recent NYT mag feature. I picked this title pretty much at random and enjoyed it over the course of three or four nights — the cinematic equivalent of Jonathan Richman at his faux-naive best.

Watched on Thursday February 22, 2024.

Does for subways what Jaws did for large bodies of water — a perfectly grimy New York nightmare, with Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw matching wits over the radio and a color-coded heist-ring naming protocol that prefigures Reservoir Dogs. Every detail pays off. An exceptionally pure ‘70s crowd pleaser in which the cross section of society crammed into the car might reflect the spectators in the audience.

I wish I ed this better.

For readers of Sebald's THE RINGS OF SATURN, Chris Reynolds's Mauretania comics, and THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY.

Another extended product placement, but that's the going ethos. Damon, Bateman, and Tucker are affable straightmen, Affleck (Phil Knight) and the guy playing the actual shoe designer are entertainingly eccentric, and Davis is humorless as MJ's mom. The big mystery might be why we don't see (or, until the very end, hear) MJ—at first it seems perverse, then knowingly hilarious, then just prosaic (i.e., likely the result of some agreement with the Jordan camp). I would have liked it more had, say, Affleck's Phil Knight started intoning Robert Burton's Digression of the Air (The Anatomy of Melancholy, Sect. 2, Member. 3), or if it had stayed in its temporal lane without so much winking at what we know to be everyone's fates. (I did recently get some Nikes, though.)

Jagged, bleak, fascinatingly structured — a sort of nightmare inversion of Past Lives. Comic relief arrives in the form of Park Sun-young of Crash Landing fame.

Built on a shoestring, Dark Star is the visual antithesis of the sleek, speckless THX 1138: everything is already falling apart, and the special effects dare you to complain. The ship’s pet alien is literally a beach ball with some feet. The storyline leads, languidly and amusingly, to disaster. Pinback confesses in a video diary that he’s actually a fuel specialist who boarded the ship back on Earth, after the real Pinback killed himself. We get a montage of his entries over the years, as his tone shifts from regret (“I do not belong on this mission and want to return to Earth!”) to delusions of grandeur (“I’m the only one with any objectivity on this ship and I should be the one assuming command!”). The stoner vibe reaches its giddy apex when Doolittle uses phenomenology to argue with one of the ship’s bombs not to detonate after a snafu. (The bombs on this ship talk, of course.) How does the bomb know that it actually heard the original order to detonate? Millions of miles from Earth, language itself remains a labyrinth....

More here!
www.criterion.com/current/posts/6773-the-labyrinth-and-the-plague

"As a piece of comic architec­ture, it’s impeccable,” Orson Welles said of Safety Last! (1923), Harold Lloyd’s best-known work and supreme achievement. He might as well have meant the film’s central structure itself: the fictional Bolton Building, home to the DeVore Department Store and sundry offices for everything from real estate to sport­ing goods. Over the course of seventy-three minutes, it becomes one of cinema’s great fun houses, every floor teeming with silli­ness and danger. The first half of the film takes us inside, to a frenetic vision of work­place hell. Lloyd plays a striver from the sticks, slaving behind the fabric counter at the aptly named DeVore, fend­ing off zealous biddies as he tries to get a leg up. For much of the second half, he clings to the outside, climbing up the treacherous facade, encountering a zany array of obstacles—from the believable (a flock of pigeons) to the absurd (a bton net)...

More here!
www.criterion.com/current/posts/2804-safety-last-high-flying-harold

....A gritty crime saga that can also be seen—even enjoyed—as an absurdist comedy of errors. Early on, what should be a sobering analysis of a murder scene turns into a train wreck, if not an ad hoc amusement park, as the police chief tumbles down a grass embankment, children frolic, and a driver blithely rolls over a crucial bit of evidence. “This is total chaos!” exclaims one detective. Your laughter keeps coming up short, however, every time you glimpse the body, bound and gagged and dressed in red—the reason for the whole performance, yet never the center of attention....

More here!
www.criterion.com/current/posts/7361-memories-of-murder-in-the-killing-jar

Bookended by aerial shots of Manhattan and a demented, wordless lullaby, the film unfolds as a malevolent fairy tale of New York. (Moral: Don’t get too close to your neighbors—let alone drink their smoothies.) Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse, transplants from Omaha and Baltimore, respectively, are a young couple with social and artistic aspirations. Guy (a tightly wound John Cassavetes) is a frustrated actor relegated to small theater roles; his biggest break to date has been a television spot for Yamaha motorcycles. Rosemary is bright where he’s brooding, a blonde pixie mixing elbows-out gawkiness with a posh elocution at once absurd and adorable. She’s the picture-perfect homemaker and every inch the ive wife. “He’s been in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross, and a lot of television plays and commercials,” she tells anyone who inquires. When unit 7E opens up in the legendary Bramford, she convinces Guy to move, despite the building’s disintegrating hallways and the apartment’s unsettling traces of the late former tenant, Mrs. Gardenia....

More here!
www.criterion.com/current/posts/2535-rosemarys-baby-its-alive

Teenage Ed was disappointed that there wasn't more R.E.M. (I was at the peak of my fandom—it would drop off sharply with the release of Green), but looking back I like thinking of the bands that left no impression on the culture: the Bar-B-Q Killers, Dreams So Real...Then again, I read that Jack White was used the stripped-down two-person setup of the Flat Duo Jets for the White Stripes. (What do I mean by culture?) The best songs were by the Squalls. I every note of "Na Na Na Na." Glorious!

I saw this in the theater in 87, revisited it last week for the first time. I ed the vibe, REG’s ramshackle Withnail, but not much else. I liked how *written* it was, in addition to the performances and the overall grimy look. (In addition to a patchwork of girlie mag pictures, a poster of Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock hands decorated their bathroom.) I forgot that so much of it took place in Uncle Monty’s cottage. (Indeed, I forgot about that character completely — his haunted presence says the unsayable about W&I’s domestic arrangement, even as the movie plays his queerness for laughs.). This time around I clocked the sadness of the ending; what happens to the Withnails of our lives?

Watched on Sunday January 7, 2024.

A Ballardian feel-bad movie, with some indelible scenes and a sharp ending.

Some might think this too gentle, too quiet, but that's Song's masterstroke here. Her chamber piece conveys the inarticulate longing of immigration, of any profound cultural separation. Or maybe I mean *of any past life*—we all get one, starting sooner than we think.

I watched the first half hour before the new year turned, and then finished it into the wee hours of January 1—this hinge feeling, a door opening or closing. Possibilities, dead ends. The movie begins in December 1970, and tips over into ’71; there's a Hal Ashby-era vibe, a soupçon of Dead Poets Society, a feint in the direction of The Breakfast Club. It moves from one kind of movie to another; there are more things at stake than we initially assume. A chamber piece with three filigreed characters (Giamatti, newcomer Sessa, Only Murders' Randolph) and any number of fleeting but memorable tertiary parts—you see someone once, don't see them again. Nonobvious, often very funny, lovingly lensed—Payne's best? (Why not?)

What Home Alone 2 could have been.

Somebody convince me this is better than my memory of it!

A few weeks ago, a friend asked if I knew of any movies that featured grocery stores. I immediately thought of the generic products in REPO MAN, a movie that set my brain afire in the 80s but that I hadn’t seen since. Flash forward a few days. I’m on a plane, and what do I see on the video menu? REPO MAN! What are the odds?! And as I came to the part where one character talks about the “lattice of coincidence,” it suddenly all made sense.

Pure cinema. Beautiful, horrifying, hilarious. It’s forty years old but still seems to have all the answers.

An interminable rom com that at a certain point feels written by AI. The one thing that spoke to me though was the fact that the leads both dislike mayonnaise. Why are they dancing to “Video Killed the Radio Star,” though? The AI hallucinates…

Such a good concept…could more have been done?

Mysterious and effective! I guess the poster gives away an early plot turn, but if you have 90 minutes, just go and watch it without knowing anything but the title...

Watched on Saturday August 26, 2023.

• Fort Tilden
• Coherence
• Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway
• s Ha
• Shirkers
• Mulholland Drive
• The Room
• The Disaster Artist
• Game 6
• Inherent Vice

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

I was asked to participate in Sight + Sound’s 2012 critics’ poll. Here are some of my all-time favorites, though I it a few were spur of the moment inclusions. Now I can't all of them. I'll add them as they pop into my mind...

• Barking Dogs Never Bite
• The Taste of Tea
• Eyes Wide Shut
• Eyes Without a Face
• Suture
• The Shop Around the Corner
• Synecdoche, New York

• Kramer vs. Kramer
• Harry and Tonto
• Q
• Serendipity
• The Royal Tenenbaums
• Splash
• Big
• Midnight Cowboy
• Saturday Night Fever
• After Hours

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

• Repo Man
• The Dead Zone
• Crime Wave
• Paperhouse
• Dune
• Blue Velvet
• Miracle Mile
• Cherry 2000
• Mad Max 2
• Brazil

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

Every ten years, Sight + Sound magazine asks critics to name their top 10 movies of all time. For this pandemic version, I restricted myself to stuff I saw (mostly new) streaming.

• Crime Wave
• The Steel Helmet
• Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes
• Coherence
• Fort Tilden
• The Black Tower
• Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway
• Asylum
• Paperhouse
• The Dead Zone

• Asylum
• The Wicker Man
• Magic
• A Boy and His Dog
• Logan's Run
• THX 1138
• Demon Seed
• Dark Star
• Soylent Green
• Rollerball

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

• Ode to My Father
• Memories of Murder
• Barking Dogs Never Bite
• Parasite
• Minari
• The Host
• Lady Vengeance
• Oldboy
• Take Care of My Cat
• Cloud Atlas

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

• Dark City
• The Matrix
• Gattaca
• Eyes Wide Shut
• Suture

66 or so movies with some connection to Buffalo, NY

• Buffalo '66
• Buffaloed
• Crimson Peak
• The Natural
• Vamping
• Best Friends
• Assault on VA-33
• Nightmare Alley