old man at heart

I review movies and sometimes books. All movie posters sourced from TMDB. (23, he/him)

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Rewatched Blue Velvet

Maybe the only honest coming of age movie. The process of becoming in a world with evil and good. On second watch, spent the whole time thinking about the final scene. Is love really so destructive, even if the thing it destroys is twisted and wrong? Why does it feel so wrong to watch the robins do our work for us? Why does the world after pain feel so empty? Is salvation empty? Does Jeffrey feel the emptiness? Does Sandy?

They must. Salvation is death. The angels have gone away, until the robins come. And then all will be love. And then all will be over.

It’s a strange world.

[cinematicmasterpiece]

je, tu, il, elle (1974)

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Watched Je Tu Il Elle

In my first year of undergrad, deep in the COVID lockdown, there was a windstorm that ripped through Portland. For a few days, I would look out my window and see trees swaying, silently but with such strain that it seemed they would be pulled from the ground. Some were. The day after it ended, I walked outside into a still world. The feeling of quietude so overwhelmed me that I tried to elaborate it to myself in a piece where I compared the world to a snowglobe that had been shaken and put down, and was tinged in its stillness with the dreadful possibility it may never be picked up again. I rewrote that piece a number of times, I doubt if I'll ever share it with anyone. Soon after, I decided, with greater intention than it seems like most people require, to start making friends. And for a while, I didn't think about that feeling of stillness at all.

It snowed. I figured that, in any case, life had come to a halt … that nothing more would happen … and that I should wait for the snow to stop and then melt. It snowed for a very long time. Four days.

Then one day, it stopped snowing.

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Watched Masters of the Universe

Maybe bottom five worst scripts of any movie I've ever seen. A couple of shots where the choreo and cinematography work together and it looks like action figures fighting, and the first twenty minutes or so are almost charming, but the rest is horribly muddled.

Really sells the message that violent catharsis is an ineffective strategy by making 80% of the movie poorly shot fight scenes. Also by having him kill the bad guy in the end.

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Watched Mysterious Skin

A level of compassion and care I've only ever seen exhibited by Lynch. I didn't know anyone else was really capable of it, in this way.

I wish there was a movie showing right now.

Me too. A film about our lives. Everything that's happened so far. And the last scene would just be us standing right here. Just you and me.

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Favorite First Watches of May

Leviathan (2014) dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev

Bones and All (2022) dir. Luca Guadagnino

I Am Not A Witch (2017) dir. Rungano Nyoni

Funny Girl (1968) dir. William Wyler

Suspiria (1977) dir. Dario Argento

The Wizard of Oz (1939) dir. Victor Fleming

Some really tragic omissions here, including In Bruges, Mirror, and Savage Hunt of King Stakh. Great month, although I didn't make it to any new releases (all the good ones were too scary or too far away). Looking forward to traveling this month and getting out to some great indie theaters!

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Watched The Wizard of Oz

The most embarrassing movie I hadn't seen as a recently instated Kansan. A dream.

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Watched Leviathan

Krichman's landscapes are all-consuming. The players fumbling about on their stage are not separated from it. They are merely a small part. Ants crawling around. Dust. In their lives, the Leviathan looms large. The arms of the state, of the church, of human power, can reach into their homes and hearts and choke them. But what is human power? If the Leviathan is large, then what is the sea?

Of course it is absurd to build a life, to love life. But then how absurd must cruelty then be? Some day, cruelty will slow and stiffen, its meat will rot away and only the curious skeleton will remain. Perhaps the same will happen to love. And world will persist. Beyond even the eyes that behold its beauty.

Not enough of a historical perspective. Let them ripen on the wall a bit.

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Rewatched Asteroid City

I do want to write about this some day more seriously, but I don't think I'm quite up for it today. I'm sure I won't ever be able to convey how much this movie means to me. But, for posterity, here's a brief summary. I spent the summer of 2023 living in Helsinki, Finland, working on a math problem that my advisor solved last year using completely different methods. It was a fascinating experience. I was lonelier than I've ever been.

In Helsinki, there's one subway line that the city is built along, and at each stop is an enormous mall, so that during the winter people spend as little time outside as possible. Some of these malls have Finnkino chain movie theaters, where the popcorn is prebagged and kept in heated cabinets and there's more sparkling water than still. When I felt too lonely, too alienated, too envious of my friends living in Portland over the summer, I went to one of those theaters. And I fell asleep.

And once, early in the summer, I sat down to watch Asteroid City. A movie about a group of strange people from strange places who came together, without knowing each other, to watch something curious. And what they see instead is something extraordinary.

And I knew why I go to the theater.

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Watched Daisies

A void of purpose filled by indulgence, until the indulgence runs out and one must find real purpose. Chytilová's Maries are excluded from the framework of purpose, from the social scaffolding afforded men. They do not exist within the world of labor, and so they cannot be sure that they exist at all. Until they realize that their materiality, of which they are so conscious, is a social one, but it is too late. They cannot put the pieces back together. They never had a chance.

We'll be happy because we're hardworking

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Rewatched Singin' in the Rain

Plenty of movies make me cry every time I see them, but I think that this might be the only one that makes me weep in pure, overwhelming joy. There's something in their eyes. Something marvelous.

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Watched Amadeus

I feel a little bit like I'm going crazy. Obviously this is an impressive technical feat in terms of set design, costuming and lighting, and much of the sound design is interesting, but that's about it. Introduces a dynamic regarding the prodigy and the relationship between envy and mentorship that I desperately wanted it to explore, that it so easily could have teased something real out of. But instead, it presents a rote series of the same events happening over and over again with the same characters reacting with the same expressions in ever more elaborate set pieces. Abraham does his best with the material but there are only so many times I can hear him express exactly the same thought in exactly the same tone. Repetition is not interrogation. Interrogation would have involved anyone rebutting anything he or anyone else says, rather than each character just stating their opinions until they are no longer relevant to the drawn out plot. How long is it between the burning of the cross and the final shot? Could Forman not have done anything else with a self-identified antichrist? It's so tempting for me to read more into the psychological reality of the film, but that would be pure eisegesis.

The cinematography I don't want to harp on too much, because it's always annoying watching wide screen movies on my laptop, but frankly it was really boring. Like the rest of the movie, far too agreeable. The camera tries to immerse itself in the spectacle rather than reflecting it, and what we see is exactly what we get, there are never turns, never revelations, never curiosity. Only presentation.

Quite liked Berridge.

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Watched Funny Girl

Maybe things will look different from here

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Watched Mirror

A divine rhythm. Seems to me to be a movie that must be rewatched. I know the topography now, but I must search for the kernel. Perhaps the next time I will see my own reflection. Perhaps I will not. But I will know his all the more thoroughly.

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Watched I Am Not a Witch

Nyoni is solidified in my mind as among the greatest working directors. A sense of the frame like nothing I have ever seen, outside of her sophomore effort. Negative space that sticks in the mind. I don't know if I'll ever stop thinking about it.

Freedom will come. We must galvanize ourselves towards it before we lose any more.

You're really lucky. You have a long ribbon.

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Read The Passion According to G.H.

Perhaps the best of novels. G.H., you are realer than I. But you have made me realer than I was.

A thing exists that is fuller, deafer, deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Yet that thing too runs the risk, in our coarse hands, of becoming transformed into "purity," our hands that are coarse and full of words.

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Rewatched Near Dark

Lots of fun but this was even more conservative than I remember, and I remember the ending leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Obviously a metaphor for addiction, but such a wildly unsympathetic one as to make Bigelow's use of the vampire motif seem uncareful at best. She seems much more interested in affirming the anxieties of middle class Americans about addicts than understanding how reaction to taboo creates subcultures that are seen as frightening or dangerous. Made me want to rewatch The Addiction.