"If you can't fix what's broken, you'll go insane."
We can't return to the past; the Green Place we is long gone. We can't run away; we'll be hunted and haunted all our lives. We must face the demons who rule the world. We must fix what's broken.
Hello friends! Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t been watching as many movies in the last month and that when I have it’s been a…
watched with the wife, who's one of three sisters. was curious what she thought of the family dynamics; she mostly keyed into and identified with who and how they managed the tension in the room and de-escalated conflicts. for me, her presence really highlighted how funny and heartwarming it all is in spite of that tension and conflict. and that's just it right there, isn't it? that's kore-eda's portrait of family, of life. it's like ozu's "isn't life disappointing?" —…
Hong Binge: Part Five
"We all do what we can in life. We can't ask for more."
This is where Hong Sang-soo finally clicked for me. I'm sure it helps that I've seen five of his movies now (although a piece of me wonders whether this might have been a better place to start or if I only "got it" here because of the journey that preceded it and all the pieces coming together), but Right Now, Wrong Then isn't…
"The King of Kophen's bluebird failed to sing for three years. One day, the Queen remarked: 'Birds sing only to their own kind, set the bird before a mirror!' The King heeded her advice. The bluebird saw its own image, it sang of its sadness, it danced, until it expired."
Inertia. Indecision. Inaction. A sustained state of stasis. An imperial assassin rejects her mission to murder the leader of a rival faction not because she believes it's wrong to obey…
Kore-ecember: Part Two
"Mother–daughter ties are harder to break than marital ties."
Responsibility, repression, and resentment
It's interesting that Our Little Sister introduces us to the eponymous little (step-)sister Suzu Asano through the perspective of the two younger of the three Kōda sisters, Yoshino and Chika, because it allows us to meet Suzu on her own before introducing her to the eldest sister Sachi Kōda and thus to the defining thematic similarities between these two women.
Suzu and Sachi…
HoopTENber: reviews
Delightfully silly kitchen sink genre hodge-podge about yakuza vampires who can only drink civilian blood and who seek to avenge their murdered master by fighting (1) a coffin-carrying Django-esque spaghetti western cowboy, (2) a guy who has turned himself into a kappa like Justin Long in Tusk, (3) a guy wearing a frog mascot suit who is also a frog-man underneath the mascot suit and who has the power to summon a Godzilla-like frog mascot monster,…
"We only think we're fighting for the right side because that's what we choose to believe."
As a big idiot who treats movies like books and lacks a proper appreciation for the structuralist elements of cinema, I often struggle with the Mission: Impossible series because it's such a pure articulation of form over text with its emphasis on stunts and narrative and production design and the end of a different era of action-stardom. For this reason, I think a lot…
"Peach buns are white and tasteless these days."
Even in the nostalgic past of the film's narrative structure there is another further nostalgic past, a time when the peach buns weren't so white and tasteless, a fantasmatic fighter jet crashing into the apparent mundane tranquility of the present which is already relegated to the realm of history. History as a cycle of reincarnation, but in this eternal return we are always doomed to forget our mother's name, to argue with…
"As the world fell, each of us was broken."
"Where must we go, we who wander the wasteland in search of our better selves?"
Most Rewatched
Actual reviews here and here
Self-discovery running parallel to national mythology so that learning about yourself becomes learning about your people, your place, your history
Before the film becomes a more explicit form of mythological historiography in its final hour or so, there’s a throughline about oaths, rituals, and more broadly speaking, about cultural and historical traditions. Everyone has sworn an oath of one kind or another: our hero's adoptive mother Sanga swore an oath to Shiva that she would pray to him if he…