naruse doing a remake of capra's meet john doe is as insane as you might think: all the master's prosaic, detail-driven capacity for scrutinizing lower and middle class life put in the service of vaguely pro-democratic abstraction, with eisensteinian sets from ivan the terrible, rear-projections of angelic/demonic political ideas, an atmosphere of brooding self-hating hysteria, all for a critique of blind demagoguery sold to us with metronomic yelling. it is beyond awful, but also interesting as a historical curio, and…

one man incarnated in three bodies of differing ages: the young student, fearing age and pain; the restless disciple, ruminating on his past; the old master, reconciling himself with the external world and the wounds it has inflicted upon him, all who have left home to return to an eternal embrace, not in spite of their differences, but because of them, as each path is a tributary on the path-nature writ large.

holding onto a buddhist koan is similar to…

so alienated from the experience of lived trans identity that it gets many basic facts wrong, stuff that any trans person could tell you about (for one thing, emilia pérez wouldn't 'smell like a man' if she was on HRT, as hormones have a massive effect on body odor). but even disregarding that, this is yet another crash-esque panorama of trying to tackle every societal problem and then acting as if the mere effort of that attempt, rather than the…

god help us all.

these movies hope that if they crack enough semi-homophobic jokes at their own expense, if they give the manchildren enough corporate cameos, that somehow it wouldn't be exceedingly obvious that the only thing they are actually serious about is telling the lie that any of this stuff means something to begin with -- hey, look, it's the thing you , but not really, but sort of, but it's a reference, but it's a gag, but it's…