“i like to say that iranian cinema emerged from a thousand years of poetry and winnipeg cinema emerged from fifty years of kern hill furniture commercials” — matthew rankin, during tonight’s post-screening discussion.

hooting and hollering every time a winnipeg landmark appears onscreen as the visual gag accompanying a joke about how everyone who lives here is accustomed to patiently enduring an unremitting torrent of indignity and despair. i truly could never leave this place. there is such beauty here 🥲

maybe i’m just extremely impressionable, but this movie made me want to smoke a bunch of cigarettes & get in a fatal car crash

cronenberg dres vincent cassel as himself to play act a deranged fantasy about maintaining possession of his wife’s body even in death, fucking his sister(-in-law), cucking his brother(in-law), being cucked by his wife’s former lover, inventing cockamamie stories about a shadowy cabal of villains and how they’re in league with this other shadowy cabal of villains. a man who can only picture his late wife naked and disfigured, deflowered, the missing flesh now owned by the other man. there must be a kernel of desire underneath this perverse display. politely applauding my self-aware king

awful

that’s the fucked up thing — you need bike to get job but first you need job to afford bike! going to the market, to be surrounded by this commodity you need, once had, and yet cannot have? torturous! the pawn shop bit was an excellent tone-setter: i felt so queasy watching the clerk scramble over rows of shelving stacked floor-to-ceiling with pawned bedsheets