4o3v2h

Constantly calls attention to its being a cinematic construct in a manner that flattens its multitudinous genre mirrorings and its medium/production/audience relationship. An overwhelming amount of pastiche and iconography imbricates its subplots with these callbacks (the jitterbug contest what I feel is a hilariously perverse refraction of The Wizard of Oz) as a certain kind of phenomenological recount of Diane's life through cinema, stitched as if her life has going through editing. Finding a satisfying weight to lend the symbolic is hard because at the same time these cinematic gestures make themselves obvious do they also refuse neatness (I'm still not sure what exactly to make of the bumbling assassin subplot, as hilarious and essential as it is) and certain moments even feel extradiagetic (“No hay banda!”), making these identifiably reflexive but rarely more than that. I think there certainly is a neat way to map everything out so that the film and its constituents represent something, but I can’t say I’m particularly interested in that nor do I feel it’s the dialectical endpoint we should even be working towards. Club Silencio continues to be what feels most compelling about the film, a collection of scenes that display various tricks on the audience that, while certainly could be mapped onto a metaphor, remains so enigmatic because it is where the relationships between ontologies is flattened the most, a certain kind of time–space compression that obviates the use of maps and metaphors to begin with.

Jeffrey Beaumont’s first encounter with something simultaneously terrible and beautiful sparks a process of self-transformation, that enigmatic outside object a confrontation as much as what we come to realize is an interior enigmatic. Whether the subject creates alterity or alterity subjectivizes itself within that subject, it’s this encounter of an aesthetics of the terribly beautiful that threatens a certain kind of ego encounter that defamiliarizes and dysregulates us from the usual ways in which we engage with the world. For Jeffrey it is so terrible as to be shockingly repulsive, being forced by Dorothy to look in spite of his will, yet, despite never getting a good look (him resisting her as much as possible, the will resists “grasping” what it is forced to endure) he cannot get what distorted image he retains out of his mind. That terrible and beautiful compels us in a way that both pushes away and pulls us towards looking, ing, retaining, precisely because we struggle to integrate it with a prior libidinal economy.

Despite never really seeing clearly that terribly beautiful, Jeffrey (and we) continue looking not to glean some unmissed detail but because he feels something roused within him previously unknown, and hereafter the rest of the film is his eavesdropping on his own dispossession. Of course, narratively it is about more but the film serves towards an audience doubling in its rousing, our viewing of and alongside Jeffrey in his own gradual integration of that object of enigma (and presumably taking home some of that compulsion to continue looking even after the life of the film) until what gets aroused becomes the perverse and the subject becomes an alterity, another enigmatic object to be encountered by others. Blue Velvet is so unnerving not because it invokes fear, rather, of how it is so irresistibly compelling to unearth a subjective encounter which continues to rouse more and more in spite of our inability to know what it will produce. We remain responsible regardless.

Stages its own effacement towards a narrative and literal vanishing point that promises to contain what was lost in the fugue, recoiling upon itself in a way (shifting POV, difference and repetition, self-reflexive dialogue, etc) that charts its own inward collapse. Many of these are found elsewhere with Lynch but the manner of which Lost Highway stratiates itself proves far more self-annihilating than his other films such that the devastation of the site of narrative replicates itself beyond and into the structure, viewing experience, and audience memory. This has always been a film that's stood out to me and one I consider in standing to be Lynch's greatest work for these reasons, that what the experience of the film does to us operates on something extra-filmic, spectral. Noir as a mode of art is more than a collection of tropes and must embrace this self-effacing spectrality to leave its distinctive indelible lightness (affective) within a darkness (scenic) that promises transformative understanding—yet, like the horizon, continually recedes beyond the driver.

Watched on Thursday January 23, 2025.

Watched on Thursday January 23, 2025.

almost died watching this on NYE because halfway around the world a friend in the call made a stupid joke when i was drinking water

Monster want boing boing!

Watched on Thursday December 26, 2024.

Watched on Monday December 23, 2024.

Watched on Friday December 20, 2024.

Watched on Monday December 16, 2024.

Bareback fisting as an intimate act of corporeal integration, imploding the spacial relations of bodies until two-become-one and individuation explodes, expands, encomes, enshrouds: The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. An anonymous esprit de corps.

Asks us to re-consider our memories and what it means to transform and to be transformed by them. The traumatic irruptions experienced by Poppo and Tsukio are less factual re-presentations than they are mnemic traces, trajectories of thought full of radical potential. In re-experiencing an altered past in the present those traces becomes lived, live memory, altering present actions, expressions, encounters, and so creating new, conflictual future trajectories.

To pre-consider the erotic and what it means to love, to live not beyond the pleasure principle but alongside it. It is Eros that is beyond the death drive, and it is that drive to create by negating that which excludes and destroys that potentiates in erotic fractures which change, transform, revolutionize the world.

To truly consider what it means to be changed by what is new. How our sense of self, nation, and world contend with the violence of difference and possibility. That which is fascist fully demands annihilation, but resistance to and organizing against that is a futurity through negation (and not annihilation, death). Capacity, and collectivity.

“Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” The personal is political and the political is erotic.

“I was twenty-three years old when I enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy. Most of my classmates were teenagers who had just graduated from high school, and I was five years older. Unlike them, I had no time to lose. For me, it was the end of being carefree. For them, life still had all its freshness but I already felt old. In the evening, my favorite place to be was the study room where we could smoke. I would bring green graph paper and a pen, sit down, light a cigarette, and start to write. There wouldn’t be many people there, and everyone seemed sad. We were a handful of intellectuals experiencing hardship.

“My cheap pen would make its way over the green graph paper, and, little by little, I would lose myself in my imagination until I forgot who I was. To forget oneself is to want nothing—this gave me a vague feeling of what happiness could be. While my young classmates were having fun, I instead propelled myself into the past: every time I faced a blank piece of paper, my mind would escape to the region where I grew up, this faraway place called Fenyang—my helpless city, my homeland.

“I would cry whenever I was writing. I could hear only the scribbling of my pen, followed by the sound of my tears falling on the paper. This sound is familiar to me. It’s the sound of the first summer storm in Fenyang, the sound of water falling on parched earth—white and hard, it would become black little by little from the drops. It was the sound of a downpour hitting the branches of the apple trees in our garden. The rain would nourish the apple trees, making them grow and ripening their fruit. My tears fell on the blank pages of my notebook and nurtured my screenplay, aiding its development until it was done. Works of art need watering just as much as plants.

“It was the Chinese New Year, so everyone, even a penniless fellow like myself, headed home. The highway between Beijing and Taiyuan hadn’t been finished so it took fourteen hours to get to Fenyang by train. Upon my arrival, I was greeted by many large signs plastered to the facades of stores saying things like, ‘To be destroyed.’ Finally I reached home, to the delight of my parents. I sat alone, contemplative in the sunshine, while they were busy preparing food. That afternoon of smoke, steam, and fire coming from the kitchen is vivid in my memory. We sat down at the table in front of the family dishes that my parents had prepared, and I told them stories from the outside world. My father said: ‘You’ve come at a good time. The old neighborhood is going to be demolished.’

“I abruptly left the table and ran at full speed toward the city. I looked at the houses that were several hundred years old, the shops I had frequented since childhood. My heart stood still at the idea that all of this would soon disappear. Of course I knew I couldn’t prevent these radical changes from taking place. Everyone has their own mission in their time: the abortive Hundred Days’ Reform in the last years of the Qing dynasty, the Revolution instigated by the Sun Yatsen generation, the students’ May Fourth movement at the beginning of the Republic. For me, confronted with my old neighborhood as it was about to be razed, it became my fate to film the cataclysmic turmoil happening in China. This was the challenge I set myself when I was twenty-seven years old.”

—Jia Zhangke, “My Helpless City, My Homeland”

If I’m not mistaken... you’re not from around here, right? Would you like to have your fortune told?

“My cinema is my country, a world made up of modest characters and even insignificant things.”

Far more attuned to the elliptical nature of sexual development than first impressions give and refreshingly honest about the libidinal appeal of fascism, the ways in which we invest in and eroticize its fantasy of domination and transgression; but more often is this show bewilderingly tender such that it conveys a deeply comionate understanding of desiring queerly.

Watched on Thursday December 5, 2024.

Watched on Wednesday December 4, 2024.

It seems, whenever it is a question of image it is a question of both an activity or doing (a praxis) and a producing or bringing into being: a poesis. But what, in human life, is not an image? (Christopher Bamford)

Information and art are both emergent phenomena of the same underlying operations of difference—namely, of difference from context, and difference from expectation. The primary distinction between the two information modes is the duration of their difference, of how long they continue to shed difference into (or generate difference within) their context. While typical information resolves difference into the equilibrium of fact, answer, and knowledge, artistic or aesthetic information sustains difference, yielding focused indeterminacies that offer not answers but possibilities. By this effect we see how art is information as a process, rather than information as a definable unit or measurable thing. Information as process equals difference as process, and art's operation of sustained difference is why the richness of aesthetic experience feels so categorically different from other types of experience. It is the mystery that lingers, as the saying goes, and when we are unable to resolve a difference—as with an artwork that remains poised on the edge of resolution without ever going all the way—our attention is hooked by a perceptual or affective itch we cannot scratch, and it is this that keeps us coming back for another look. (Jason A. Hoelscher)

When technical images were invented, old image-beliefs were transferred onto them, projected onto them. These old image-beliefs came from the time before the era of “art,” when images were seen to be not representations, but emanations. This pre-art legacy of the acheiropoetic image (the image “not made by hand”) was picked up by technical images. Even as they lost their Benjaminian “aura,” they gained another, the aura of belief. (David Levi Strauss)

IMAGE:

A woman touching her ear
as if to say Speak to me
louder, I can't hear you, louder.
I am language already
I just need to hear you.

(See, sometimes an image speaks. Only a fool thinks images are silent, or are only images of seen things.)

The readily distributable aspect of the camera-phone image and the still rapidly evolving social media that allow for their communication show the new context for digital imagery generally and the further realization of the position of photography not only culturally but, as we shall see, magically; that is to say, ontologically. For if the camera-phones are our prosthetic cognitive organs, we ourselves become the sensing devices attached to the super-organic entities to which we feed our images, the specific social networks and the internet in general. Our images, fed to social media and gathered and studied by what I want to call “The Information Collective,” complement the publicly distributed images generated by such entities as governments, corporations, and news-media. The Information Collective: the Internet as increasingly commandeered by these super-organic entities is both a repository of the images we feed to it and the source of images fed to us. It has become thereby a space of full-blown quasi-sentient entities, whose sensory organs are ourselves, and whose business it is, through the study and distribution of images, to manipulate what we take to be real.

Of course language—speech both public and private—and the distribution of texts already involved the creation of pathways through a super-organic universe. But with the camera-phone, the communicability of immediate, cognitive events becomes virtually instantaneous. Cognition itself goes viral. Or manifests quite patently its generality. And of course, the machinations of a psychic unconscious—control, manipulation, suppression, repression—start to form as well. (Charles Stein)

IMAGE:

In an apartment building, on the eleventh floor, a
kitchen window is open onto an air shaft. A potted
geranium is on the window ledge. A butterfly of some
sort has just landed on it. Or moth. Who can tell?

(The precision of images is not the kind of precision that words know and can recite.)

What determines the way television closes in on and remediates an event? Television journalism's approach to closing events operates within a dispositif (an apparatus that includes desk editors, reporters, photographers, and so on) comprised of structured assignments, which are oriented toward commercial consumption. As a voice-over in the film says, “Nothing happens until it is consumed.” What is produced is “news” that results from a process of time-pressured production and circulation, and what emerges therefore is “by no means the property of the event” but is a function of how news sources are organizationally managed to compete in a situation of a need for rapid production and circulation in order to hold its viewers. (Michael J. Shapiro)

Like Plato, the Prophet Mohammed distrusted poets and painters. (Peter Lamborn Wilson)

The action of seeing is shaped differently in different epochs. We assume that the gaze can be a human act. Hence, our historical survey is carried out sub specie boni: we wish to explore the possibilities of seeing in the perspective of the good. In what ways is this action ethical? (Ivan Ilich)

As the condition of representation in all dioptric arts (theatre, painting, cinema, literature), the tableau realizes the most perfect semiotic enclosure. Everything outside its borders is cast into nonexistence; everything inside is made to share the privileges of light and knowledge—at least insofar as the composition falls under a single point of view and, as Diderot stipulates, its “parts work together to one end and form by their mutual correspondence a unity as real as that of the of the body of an animal.” It is this tableau that will eventually burst out of itself, engendering another shot in the articulation of the montage sequence. “The shot is a montage cell,” Eisenstein states; as such, it is ready to split and “form a phenomenon of another order, the organism or embryo.” Barthes’s essay enables us to see that this mutation will occur only after the shot has offered us the “perfect instant,” the moment possessing the highest concentration of intelligibility and intensity. What the “pregnant moment” holds in balance is not only the story but also the whole of history: past, present, and future, in a simultaneity that does not dismantle teleology but rather anticipates its fulfillment. It is as if the very process of “setting in motion” entailed a secret stillness, a moment of accord before the discharge of the explosion: a guarantee of the totality of both history and the artwork. (Domietta Torlasco)

IMAGE:

A pair of glasses, negative diopter lenses, strong, rest
on an open book printed in Pali script. Across the
room a parakeet, blue, is active in its cage, interview-
ing the little round mirror that keeps it company.

(It isn't that one wants one image or another. An image wants us.)

I became possessed by fantasies of a pan-continental dream-space of Indianess—1,000 miles as that damned crow flies—in which yagé provided the historical flux. We basked in the sunlit quiet.

Then he added, Yes! He had seen it all before when his father-in-low, an Ingano, like himself, had been accused of being a witch by another Indian who went to the Capuchin priest with this charge and, as punishment, his father-in-law had to gather stones to build the church in Mocoa. You could see them as we talked above the ruins of Machu Picchu, the father-in-law, his wife, and their small kid, one behind the other carrying stones to build the church that in that instant of storytelling and hallucinatory history became the city, the city on the hill.

After all, he pointed out, if you are having problems figuring out how those massive stones of Machu Picchu were transported and fitted so neatly into buildings—an endless fascination for archaeologists made much of as mystery by the Peruvian state—the answer is pretty obvious. Machu Picchu, he said, was not built by Indians but by the Spanish. The Spanish forced the Indians to build Machu Picchu.

Such is history. Such is the dialectical image. (Michael Taussig)

...whoever makes an image does so by violence, and makes it by conquering the substance of which it is made. (Picatrix, I/2)

My arm—the application of a force—a cracking sound; the line of the ulna, radius, or humerus presently running otherwise: my arm, now wrecked in its angular qualities of extensive armness, my arm denatured. Or, a field of monochrome (a swath of red, of blue, of black)—the application of a force (say, sudden new light), which intervenes into that chromatic system and wrecks, massacres the chromatic constancy in every direction, forces the intrusion of a visible difference, &c. This is violence too. (Eugenie Brinkema)

IMAGE:

Earliest morning
the moment when the grass turns green.

(An image is not only a what, it is a when. When is it, and to whom?)

Every day, a piece of music, a short story, or a poem dies because its existence is no longer justified in our time. And things that were once considered immortal have become mortal again, no one knows them anymore. Even though they deserve to survive. (Elfriede Jelinek)

IMAGE:

In a provincial Roman arena, a group of Christians
huddle together while lions approach them. There is
something in the sky, hard to make out. Is it an angel,
come to save them? A vulture come to feast on the
remains? Or just a smudge on the old woodcut?

(We know the dead do not wear shoes. We cherish every sign of life. Index of life. Only the living can see images. The dead become them.)

Samuel Beckett maintained the autonomy of image and sound, better said image to sound, sound to image, coterminal with absolute effect one upon the other. This causality, the concept I'm trying to get to here however abstrusely, has relevance because we as viewers/listeners infer a causality. This sound effects that action, this (my) thought has some relation to this (my) next thought, let alone yours, or this your thought followed by this my inaction or even action. And so on. (Peter Gidal)

IT (imaginatio) IS INSEPARABLE FROM THE
INDIVIDUATED SELF
what Western Magick calls the
True Will
—Diane di Prima

The filmmaker, if he is truly a filmmaker, looks at a film image on a table; a sparse table. He views by hand, using a small magnifying piece, a single frame, a film image. This constant instant of produces the undisturbed vision which becomes the meaning of the work. What is the meaning of the work? The Work Is The Meaning. (Gregory Markopoulos)

IMAGE:

A mechanic is working on the carburetor of an older
car. From his immaculate white shopcoat and the
neat necktie visible above it, we reckon the car a pre-
cious antique model. A little whiff of fine smoke
comes up from the device, as if alcohol had been
burnt there. Outside the garage a mountain is visible.
It makes you think of Mexico.

(The beauty of an image is how it sustains the lives of those who chance to behold it. Once seen, never forgotten. Or to put it more somberly, you can never unsee what you have seen. Or unhear the sound. The overtones never actually end.)

Armour's particular asymmetry as a landscape film conjures up that pre-Socratic rhuthmos, distinguished from rhythm in the former's aesthetic fluctuation, flowing, the particularities of its form by manner of that form as it takes place as opposed to the latter's adherence to unity and measure once Plato set rhuthmos to rhythm's order. The significance of rhuthmos as it pertains to Aguilar's film is in how Armour breaks away from the conventions of landscape film, and, if I can overstate a touch, film in general: it is not enough to say that image, sound, and text are simply deconstructed here (as Godard might have done in his 80's and onwards) nor that the film embodies a Deleuzoguattarian re-coding of the signs and senses (which it does) but that the very arrangement of its fragments is inseparable from the time of its appearance, existing beyond metaphysical measure due to its immanent potential both within and in excess of our perceiving, "becoming perception."

What is at stake here is a significant decoupling (as mcsil points out in her brilliant review) of play from productivity. The life and death of the images within demand more life, more play, more excess and even jouissance in its re/turning-in on itself, without end. The sudden molestations of lateral movement that happens midway was practically a joyous jumpscare to my friends and I as we were watching precisely because it broke away from anything the film had done before while also adhering to a certain intensity of rhuthmos; difference and repetition, repetition of difference. There is an indifference to a logic of exchange and equivalence that holds a possibility potential which never dissipates throughout its length, this indifference not arrhythmic but simply nonrecurrent modulation. This reconfiguring of form towards contingency is one of the most exciting things in art, and though I may have to think about it more I also believe what distinguishes a work from neoliberal assimilation. What does it mean to capture the very modality of being, especially when such instruments of capture are built to regulate and control the free-flowing (cameras, computers, metronomes, sightlines)? What makes Armour so alluring even upon multiple rewatches is in its refusal to do just this, that it is metaphysically not of metaphors but of metonyms. Play returns, an uncanny, unsettling play at times but 1. play nonetheless and 2. it is in its very ability to unsettle the strictures of rhythm that lend it its perceptual excitement.

The beasts would come to know your name.

How one regrets, and the way in which one has a much more meaningful relationship to regret the more one lives a full life. Who we are at the time and what decisions our past selves could make; regret then is always a reflection of the self. Although Fujino ostensibly has more going on in her life it is Kyomoto who's able to fully live, her own decision the impetus that causes the central conflict in the story but also one she fully owns, and lives, up to and so able to incorporate her existential freedom and all the responsibility that entails into her emotional life moving forward. Funnily enough it is Fujino who most confronts her regret and also struggles to reconcile it, despite the fact that she and her actions could not be conceivably seen to have caused said conflict. I think this is because she simultaneously avoids this emotion while also miring in it subconsciously, missing the wisdom that comes from making sense of our regrets: how to remedy wrongs, steer our behaviors, learn humility, and so on. Fujino's inability to live with her regret and so her inability to recognize both what it is she even should regret and what to learn from that is the central tension here, and it is a testament to Fujimoto's matured writing that this both has always driven her character while also being hidden as that primary and central force. There will always be factors both in and out of our control that inhibit us from living how we want to, and so every life will be filled with mistakes, regrets; to regret is to live. The problem is when regret is felt as a negative, something to minimize and run from, until the overbearing weight of all one's regrets finally sinks in and engulfs one in that crushing nihilistic depression. Unlife.

It is beautiful that it is Kyomoto's unabashed love of life in its entirety, regret included, that helps Fujino understand that she really has nothing to regret. Would doing anything differently really have changed the trajectory of their lives? Would she have even done anything differently if she could? The further we go into our pasts the more we become strangers to ourselves.

"Then why do you draw, Fujino?"

To do so without regret.

Insanely over-the-top tragi-porn overlaying convincing post-internet worldbuilding by way of creepypasta occultism as the means through which mahou shoujo tropes are doled out makes for a weirdly coherent array of contemporary fictional escapism and its discontents. I can't not think of Azuma's theories of narrative consumption in that it isn't just us as audience seeking to assemble a grand nonnarrative from the extinction of the transcendental but also the digital lifeforms themselves as they sift through the digital of their own in hopes of making sense of serendipitous fragments, and in doing so transforming the free-floating hyperreal into an internal database. What's so interesting is in the paralleled desire to invade these exogenous systems in order to extract useful information regardless of any original purpose; this can be said to be the very condition of post-modernity and is easily seen in related media (neo-noir, video games, multiverses, and of course fanfiction) but it isn't just that this re-appropriation of information suggests an agnosticism of purpose to begin with, rather, the very rules and ordinances we construct in order to make sense of disted nodes show the infinitely-overlapping nature of grand nonnarratives. What better example than the question of reality in of what these girls see, assemble, transform, and what we see, assemble, transform, less metanarrative than it is hypernarrative and less meaningful than it is sensible. Maho Shojo Saito is hardly the first to do it (the first and arguably best work I encountered that did this being Marble Hornets) but its remarkability lies in its own folding-in given just how derivative it is not only of its genre conventions but arguably a single influential progenitor (Madoka Magica) as well as in being an adaptation itself, adding on greater layers of seeing/assembling/transforming necessary to reach a certain critical threshold that takes this from derivatively living in the shadows of its constituents into being so derivative of so many things it actually ends up simulating its very own grand narrative.

Not sure what's aged worse, this or katy perry

No language. No limits / no world.

Watched on Thursday November 7, 2024.

Watched on Tuesday November 5, 2024.

Watched on Tuesday November 5, 2024.

Have a sinus infection rn and the graveyard scene is how it feels trying to breathe

[Verse 1]
初めてのルーブルは
なんてことはなかったわ
私だけのモナリザ
もうとっくに出会ってたから
初めてあなたを見た
あの日動き出した歯車
止められない喪失の予感

[Pre-Chorus]
もういっぱいあるけど
もう一つ増やしましょう
(Can you give me one last kiss？)
忘れたくないこと

[Chorus]
Oh oh oh oh oh…
忘れたくないこと
Oh oh oh oh oh…
I love you more than you'll ever know

Ridiculously perfect; a culmination of everything Anno's done up to this point and the greatest synthesis of animation and live-action I've seen in a film. Humor really differentiates this from the rest of his work and arguably makes the poignant moments hit even harder. There is so much love and fun and playfulness in every single frame it makes one question why cinema as a whole doesn't explore its more irreverent joys nearly as often; need more of Anno having fun.

The same way that transformative aesthetic experiences can inspire one to create can it also galvanize one to cut away at those ties that bind our creative energies away. Art is alchemical in that regard, and I'm forever thankful to Fujimoto and Oshiyama for helping me here.

Art as labor as the means towards sociality, a meaninglessness of work without not just purpose or drive but most importantly connection, companionship. This is also Kyomoto's story of the artist as prodigy but Fujino's reason for why she creates is hardly ever given the mytho-narrative of the latter in art itself; that the act of creation being a means unto itself dominates its representation makes sense given its self-selective nature (which works become notable, whose names become historicized) but the creative work that works towards reaching others is that beating heart. Everyone expresses both of course, my point just that the purpose of art can sometimes be too easily relegated to the realm of status and that art itself is just that creative work we all constantly undertake, status reifying it to that realm of "art." What really is the point of it all without sharing it with others? I sometimes forget. I thank Fujimoto and this movie for reminding me why.

Watched on Tuesday October 8, 2024.

This was someone's idea of a date movie. We no longer date.

Watched on Tuesday October 1, 2024.

Watched on Tuesday October 1, 2024.

Watched on Saturday September 28, 2024.

Watched on Friday September 27, 2024.

Watched on Thursday September 26, 2024.

Shocked at how incredibly this film handles the valence of (diasporic) race in such a profoundly non-assimilable way that is also so deeply inextricable to its trans reading to the point where I think the film is so very much about the ways in which trans being and subjectivity for racialized subjects within white cultural hegemony is so deeply complicated and contradictory and excised out of larger discourses of transness—discourses that, even as politically incisive as they may try to be, are schematized in a way to re-entrench white transness/normativity even while commentating on these very things. To the point where I'm actually like, Jane how do you not just know these things but also execute them in such a confident way?

My thoughts are rooted in a resonance with the vector of whiteness and in a more general phenomenology of trans-racialization that cuts to my own experience deeper than any other trans film or media or art period I've encountered (not speaking on the specifics of this film's relation to black transness), like white trans people are not ready to talk about how trans subject formation can (and is) spurred on by race and almost every white trans person I've talked to about this either had not considered this concept beforehand, finds it too difficult to engage with this discussion as an active participant (not necessarily malicious at least), or finds it too deeply uncomfortable to engage in at all, and I'm like. This was made by a white Boston U film grad?? How???

I take Mel Y Chen's definition of trans, being: "not as a linear space of mediation between two monolithic, autonomous poles, as for example 'female' and 'male', [...] rather, trans is conceived of as more emergent than determinate, intervening with other categories in a richly intersectional space. [...] Rather than a substantive core such as a noun, I wish to highlight a prefixal 'trans-' not preliminarily limited to gender." Transness, by this , is a "complex, multi-factored cultural contingency," opposed to its general lexicon as a bureaucratic structure towards gender/sexuality taxonomies. This is also why transness that does not adhere to categorical binaries is not readily conceived of within said general discourse, the purpose of labels again to mediate indeterminate terrain in such a way that is neatly understandable, indexical. These unknowns are undesired precisely because they cause problems, questions that question hegemonic understandings and so questions that must self-destruct by answering—the logic of the other demands it. It is not just a matter of that problem of race crossed with this problem of gender (even if it still demands intersectionality) but rather that taxonomical racial distinction instrumentalizes gender in its very circumscription, a border that must exist for corporealized colonization even when its very existence itself is impossible, a problem.

Transness beyond gender is then another of those problems. I am not simply talking about something like being transracial, though even in this case I am inclined to agree with Rebecca Tuvel when she says that you can use the same kinds of defenses that are used to legitimize transgender identities to also legitimize transracial ones, as well as Lewis Gordon when he responds to her by saying that identity is a matter of existential consciousness—that just because you are seen as one identity here doesn't mean you can't be seen as another elsewhere, and that living is living through the many possibilities of what we might be and through the transitions of that. What I Saw the TV Glow captures so well is the very problem of being a non-white existence within white density, of having no homeland to belong to, to the point where there are no other 'male' of one's raced category. Where, then, can Owen turn towards with sharing a raced consciousness? Of the three non-white others who exist in the film, all are women and only one exists in a possible relation of identification. I don't think it's a stretch at all to say that Owen's own transgendered consciousness is deeply imbricated and spurred on by the specific conditions of his racial consciousness, that he may envision himself closer to black womanhood when there is no space in white suburban america for black masculinity. That may feel deeply uncomfortable when the conditions of transgenderedness presuppose a specifically, and solely, gendered misalignment, but does that misalignment need not originate in another valence of being? It's very possible that he will be seen and thus be identified / identify with femininity here but with masculinity elsewhere (perhaps where black masculinity can exist); transness for Owen becomes more than just a matter of gender's problematizations, but that "complex, multi-factored cultural contingency" through which his raced existence re-instrumentalizes gender towards a certain "whole body alignment."

Needless to say I share certain personal feelings.

Watched on Saturday September 14, 2024.

Watched on Wednesday September 4, 2024.

A better film on social media childhoods than it is on its diasporic specifics, though the latter is not so much misplaced as it feels tragically underbaked. I really hated watching these kinds of films mostly because I feel they tend to approach asian diasporisms as problems, quandaries to broach and solve and put away by the end of the film, rather than dilemmas that perennially exist as existential forces. I tolerate them more now because I simply am just tired of hating so much without some recognition of love, that regardless of my feelings on his film I love that Sean Wang took his experiences and channeled them into a finished film. That whether his perspective of identity and identitarian issues aligns with what I feel is responsible, I recognize the love this film has for family diaspora. I do hope the film industry will have room for stories like this that are much less assimilationist in nature, much less focused on explaining the intricacies of its community's dynamics to outsiders (every time one of these asian-am movies hamfists a scene about east vs west a puppy dies) and willing to trust the audience with unresolved uncomforts (even if I don't think that will happen anytime soon, if at all); in lieu of that though, where does this leave us? Dìdi feels like a work a younger me might've made that would also be a necessary step towards a much more complicated understanding of my own diasporic identity, and I don't malign the existence of such a work (or, I suppose, this work) insomuch as I hate to see it be used as a checkbox of understanding, comion, that some non-asian diasporic leaves this film with the thought that these issues laid out are exactly as the film presents and that they too have become an honorary asian through "doing the work" (aka watching a 90 minute movie). No one actually thinks this explicitly of course but that's also kind of what I'm getting at, in that media like this can be unconsciously reappropriated towards a neo-colonialist, fetishistic objectification of outside cultures and communities without further reflection—even if at the same time this simplified gaze can promote cross-communal bonds and relations. I suppose it ultimately ends up a shared responsibility between art, artist, audience, and the repercussions that arise from any irresponsibility within that triad is simply an existential condition of my personhood.

Not really tapped in to online otaku spaces nor very knowledgeable on anime but I've heard this adaptation of Chainsaw Man has been criticized for being a poor one, primarily with its tonal shifting and emphatic grittiness. I don't really share those even if I understand where they're coming from and think the team behind the show did an outstanding job adapting CSM from pen and paper to the digital screen. Yuasa and his studio are what immediately comes to mind for who could make a more faithful adaptation wrt tone and style, but something I think the team did phenomenally is take Fujimoto's love for cinema and adapt that into the very animation—and I'm not just talking about its greater sense of realism but down to the infinite small (and sometimes big) liberties taken with the storyboarding itself.

I started out watching the CSM anime then read the entirety of CSM:P1 from beginning to end, before going back and rewatching parts of the anime. There's always going to be things lost in translation but a good adaptation is willing to cast away surface-level similarities in order to adapt the spirit of the original. I don't think this adaptation is necessarily perfect but I do think it's a bit of a pariah when the anime manages to beautifully awash core moments in the manga with such filmic affect they feel more true to what Fujimoto wanted to convey than the original scenes in the manga. Episode 8 in particular is one I feel very strongly about (perhaps another review) and I encourage people to go back and watch the episode while also reading the corresponding chapters and making note of how the anime team, while by necessity losing the manga format's ing structure and striking monochromatism, infuses the scene with a sense of melodramatic tragedy that is only possible because of television's properties of timing and editing and montage that cut great tears into me before bringing other tears out.

There are also a great many little moments the anime adds that the manga, in its incredibly-brisk pacing, is unable to dwell on, but what's brilliant is that that these scenes are never dwelt on. Many of them come during the opening and endings, something else that I really think shows the studio's dedication towards the IP given that each episode has a different ED with remarkably different styles and songs. What is otherwise an obligatory moment in an episode becomes one where the studio can inject a "lived-in"-ness to the characters that is completely unintrusive to the pacing of the plot, and these were so effective I genuinely thought they were present in the manga. I must have watched that last episode's ED at least a few dozen times for just how affecting it was for me, a little slice of mundane happiness that surely occurs for Denji, Power, and Aki but escapes narrative explication within Fujimoto's pacing. Yet, seeing that brought to life in the show's ED made me care so much more to these characters, their life and happiness and personhood: I care so much more about the tragedy that befalls them because I already care about them beyond tragedy. To that end, I think the team behind the anime has done a remarkable job.

Frustratingly elusive (though part of its allure), there's a certain mythic-making impulse that redoubles its own cosmological bearing by forcing our gaze towards its center of attention before turning us just out of view of its impending interpretation. The degree to which it works will depend on your endurance for the iconography of transgression and its cinematic discontents; at times I truly felt as trapped in the home :: film :: narrative as its characters :: archetypes :: roles and there is a certain sense of filmic transposition conferred especially given the implacability of when this movie was made (if you don't already know). To this it massively succeeds—Singapore Sling feels likes a cinematic artefact unwilling to be pinned down by any systems of classification or even understanding (its symbolic elements feel so evident beyond analysis they swing back to being enigmatic nulls) such that it becomes a better symbol of film than any canon classic precisely for its ability to encom all of film's territories while simultaneously eluding filmic territorialization.

love and war

[Verse 1]
I used to put my faith in worship
But then my chance to get to Heaven slipped
I used to worry about the future
But then I threw my caution to the wind
I had no reason to be carefree - no, no, no
Until I took a trip to the other side of town - yeah, yeah, yeah
You know I heard that boogie rhythm
Hey! I had no choice but to get down, down, down, down

[Chorus]
Dance!
Nothing left for me to do but dance
Off these bad times I'm going through, just dance
Got canned heat in my heels, tonight, baby

The Artist and the Pervert

Watched on Monday August 5, 2024.

media's acceleration, amplification, accumulation of information; future shock of infoglut that forecloses the possibility of being informed; technology not as teleology but rather deflections towards evolutionary contingencies that shape the ego; electronics as black boxes of power, control—influencing machines, transmuting and converting and binding energy and consciousness; power; "thought echoes"; the deluded technically and the technically deluded; schizophrenia as the condition of modernity, of the subject already constituted in a world full of meaning; the politics of psychosis;

a list of movies I want to watch ASAP, here as a reminder

• Dante's Inferno
• The Golem
• The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar
• Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler
• Häxan
• Michael
• Metropolis
• Red Heroine
• The Swordswoman of Huangjiang
• Mädchen in Uniform

...plus 760 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

the 🐐

1. Ruhr
2. Grand Opera: An Historical Romance
3. Small Roads
4. Four Corners
5. Landscape Suicide
6. BNSF
7. 11 x 14
8. From Bakersfield to Mojave
9. Sogobi
10. 13 Lakes

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Really rough rankings but anything 4 stars+ is something I loved. Some shows weren't on here so I used a movie of theirs to represent the show.

Anything that's a long series I just count if I feel like I've wasted enough of my life on it lmao

1. Cowboy Bebop
2. Mushoku Tensei: Isekai Ittara Honki Dasu - Eris no Goblin Toubatsu
3. Hunter × Hunter Pilot
4. Penguindrum
5. FLCL
6. Serial Experiments Lain
7. Samurai Champloo
8. Revolutionary Girl Utena
9. Neon Genesis Evangelion
10. DAN DA DAN: First Encounter

...plus 37 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

<just films>

• Cowboy Bebop: The Movie
• Look Back
• Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time
• Promare
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part III: Rebellion
• Long Day's Journey into Night
• Tropical Malady
• Melancholia
• Parasite
• Children of Men

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Sometimes I just need to feel again.

Not ranked, numbers just help keep track of pairings.

1. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
2. The Night Porter
3. Hi, Mom!
4. Pink Flamingos
5. Daisies
6. The Living End
7. Caligula
8. Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend
9. The Greasy Strangler
10. Trash Humpers

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Very underseen director, his best films are genuinely transcendent. Please check him out!

1. Silent Light
2. Our Time
3. Japón
4. Post Tenebras Lux
5. Battle in Heaven

Anything not hyperlinked means it's in-progress and in private.

---

Great Reviews from Great People

List of Lists

Immediate Watchlist

---

kai-core
my 100 | my 100 shorts

Years
2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022

Directors
Akerman, C. | Anderson, P. T. | Anderson, W. | Angelopoulos, T. | Anno, H. | Baker, S. | Benning, J. | Bergman, I. | Chan-wook, P. | Chang-dong, L. | Coen Brothers | Cronenberg, D. | Cuarón, A. | De Palma, B. | Denis, C. | Fincher, D. | Gilliam, T. | Godard, J. | Hsiao-hsien, H. | Iñárritu, A. G. | Jarmusch, J. | Joon-ho, B. | Lynch, D. | Kar-wai, W. | Kore-eda, H. | Kubrick, S. | Kurosawa, K. | Malick, T. | Miike, T. | Ming-liang, T. | Piavoli, F. | Ratnam, M. | Reichardt, K. | Reygadas, C. | Ritchie, G. | Safdie Brothers | Sciamma, C. | Scorsese, M. | Shyamalan, M. N. | Tarantino, Q. | Tarkovsky, A. | Tarr, B. | To, J. | Toro, G. d. | Trier, L. v. | Varda, A. | Villeneuve, D. | Wachowski Sisters | Waititi, T. | Weerasethakul, A. | Woo, J. | Yimou, Z. | Zhangke, J. | Zvyagintsev, A.

Misc
Anime Series | Studio Ghibli

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Myspace
Season 1 | Season 2 | Season 3 | Season 4 | Season 9 | Season 12 | Season 13

Japanuary
2022 | 2023

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Friend Recs
Abby | Agus | Amrit | Blake | buckett | Drew | Ethan | Evan | Gabriel | Grant | Grayson | Hank | Hay | Imogen | Jude | Jules | Leo | Lindsay | Louis | Margot | Penny | Reed | Sofia | Soupy | SupremeLemon | Wafflez | Waqar

• A
• L
• I
• S
• T

Wild at Heart is one of Lynch's best and there's a reason why it won the Palme d'Or.

1. Mulholland Drive
2. Inland Empire
3. Lost Highway
4. Blue Velvet
5. Wild at Heart
6. Eraserhead
7. The Elephant Man
8. The Straight Story
9. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
10. Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces

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

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my friend Wafflez!

---

To Do:

▹ Umberto D. (1952)
▹ Sound of the Mountain (1954)
▹ Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
▹ L’Eclisse (1962)
▹ Two in the Shadow (1967)
▹ We Won't Grow Old Together (1972)
▹ The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)
▹ Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979)
▹ The Aviator’s Wife (1981)
▹ Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)
▹ Trust (1990)
▹ Basic Instinct (1992)
▹ Showgirls (1995)
▹ April Story (1998)
▹ The Last Days of Disco (1998)
▹ Corpus Callosum (2002)
▹ Kannathil Muthamittal (2002)
▹ Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (2002)
▹ Shark Tale (2004)
▹ Day Night Day Night (2006)
▹ Halloween II (2009)
▹ Bee and PuppyCat (2016)
▹ Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
▹ The Cursed (2021)
▹ Dear Evan Hansen (2021)
▹ Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (2022)
▹ Oppenheimer (2022)
▹ Give me more, bitch

1. Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time
2. Serial Experiments Lain
3. Angel Dust
4. An Elephant Sitting Still
5. Stalker
6. The Long Day Closes
7. The Face of Another
8. Blow Out
9. Orpheus
10. King Lear

...plus 19 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The documentary, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, is very important!

1. Spirited Away
2. Kiki's Delivery Service
3. Howl's Moving Castle
4. Ponyo
5. Ocean Waves
6. Only Yesterday
7. Princess Mononoke
8. My Neighbors the Yamadas
9. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
10. Castle in the Sky

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Recommended to me: in notes.

---

Recommended by me:

Angel - Thief (1981)
Brian - Return to Seoul (2022)
Cece - Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)
Eve - Dance with Me (2019)
Jacob - Decision to Leave (2022)
Lindsay - The Love Eterne (1963)
Louis - Weekend (1967)
Penny - Sonatine (1993)
Q - Chungking Express (1994)
Rachel - Mulholland Drive (2001)
Sam - Lady Vengeance (2005)
Soup - The World (2004)
Todd - Silent Movie (1976)

• Shin Godzilla

  Recommended by Eve

• Terminator 2: Judgment Day

  Recommended by Lindsay

• Charisma

  Recommended by Penny

• Caché

  Recommended by Cece

• The Holy Mountain

  Recommended by Jacob

• Center Stage

  Recommended by Rachel

• Wild Things

  Recommended by Louis

• Dog Day Afternoon

  Recommended by Sam

• What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

  Recommended by Angel

• Bay of Angels

  Recommended by Soupy

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

It's time to it King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is good

1. Snatch
2. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
3. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
4. Revolver
5. Sherlock Holmes
6. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
7. RocknRolla
8. Swept Away
9. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
10. Aladdin

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my friend Louis!

---

To Do:

▹ All About Eve (1950)
▹ The Night of the Hunter (1955)

1. Funny Games
2. Malignant
3. Wild Things
4. Father Stu
5. The Great Dictator
6. On the Waterfront
7. The Cat Returns
8. John Carter
9. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
10. Unhinged

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my amazing friend Jules!

---

To Do:

▹ What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
▹ Carnival of Souls (1962)
▹ Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
▹ Shall We Dance? (1996)
▹ Sita Sings the Blues (2008)
▹ The Strangers (2008)
▹ The Incident (2014)
▹ The Breadwinner (2017)
▹ Quién te cantará (2018)
▹ Crazy World (2019)
▹ Seventeen (2019)
▹ We Are Little Zombies (2019)

🍊

1. Ponyo
2. Jack and Jill
3. Coherence
4. Bullet Train
5. Irma Vep
6. Singin' in the Rain
7. A Short Film About Killing
8. What's Up, Doc?
9. Thelma & Louise
10. Scream

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Recommended to me: in notes.

---

Recommended by me:

Amelia - Poetry (2010)
Angel - Lola (1961)
Brian - To Live (1994)
Drew - Thiruda Thiruda (1993)
Ethan - Taipei Suicide Story (2020)
Ethanjame - Farewell My Concubine (1993)
Heather - Wild at Heart (1990)
Jacob - FLCL (2000)
Jules - Stardust (2007)
Lindsay - Nobody Knows (2004)
Louis - The Train (1964)
Morgan - Big Trouble (2002)
Sam - Do the Right Thing (1989)
Todd - Devils on the Doorstep (2000)
Wafflez - Burning Snow (1988)

1. Ponyo

   Recommended by Jules

2. Angel Dust

   Recommended by Wafflez

3. High and Low

   Recommended by Drew

4. Peking Opera Blues

   Recommended by Lindsay

5. Kwaidan

   Recommended by Jacob

6. Alien

   Recommended by Sam

7. Ugetsu

   Recommended by Ethan

8. M

   Recommended by Louis

9. Tarnation

   Recommended by Ethanjame

10. The Naked Kiss

    Recommended by Angel

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my friend Drew!

---

To Do:

▹ The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982)
▹ A Zed & Two Noughts (1985)
▹ The Belly of an Architect (1987)
▹ Drowning by Numbers (1988)
▹ Center Stage (1991)
▹ Three Colors: Blue (1993)
▹ The Untold Story (1993)
▹ Three Colors: Red (1994)
▹ Three Colors: White (1994)
▹ Fat Choi Spirit (2002)
▹ Throw Down (2004)
▹ Diner (2019)
▹ Spontaneous (2020)
▹ A New Old Play (2021)

1. Dance with Me
2. High and Low
3. The Mission
4. Gunbuster
5. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
6. The History of the Seattle Mariners
7. The Bob Emergency
8. Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar
9. Mad Detective
10. Casting Blossoms to the Sky

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my friend Lindsay!

---

To Do:

▹ Singin' in the Rain (1952)
▹ Black Girl (1966)
▹ One from the Heart (1981)
▹ The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)
▹ Speed (1994)
▹ Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
▹ Clockstoppers (2002)
▹ The Hours (2002)
▹ Real Women Have Curves (2002)
▹ The Sweetest Thing (2002)
▹ Raise Your Voice (2004)
▹ The Island (2005)
▹ Atonement (2007)
▹ Hot Rod (2007)
▹ Winter’s Bone (2010)
▹ High Road (2011)
▹ The First Time (2012)
▹ Fruitvale Station (2013)
▹ Gangster Squad (2013)
▹ The Internship (2013)
▹ Spy (2015)
▹ Deepwater Horizon (2016)
▹ Power Rangers (2017)
▹ Bumblebee (2018)
▹ Gemini Man (2018)
▹ Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (2018)
▹ Little Woods (2018)
▹ The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)
▹ Rampage (2018)
▹ Robin Hood (2018)
▹ One for the Road (2021)

1. Do the Right Thing
2. Nomadland
3. Charlie's Angels
4. Peking Opera Blues
5. Tropical Malady
6. Nope
7. Men in Black
8. Happy Together
9. Before Sunset
10. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

...plus 41 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my friend Penny!

---

To Do:

▹ Touch of Evil (1958)
▹ Sisters (1972)
▹ Sarpatta Parambarai (2021)

1. Ambulance
2. Domino
3. Creed III
4. Love in the Time of Twilight
5. Unstoppable
6. Man on Fire
7. Bamboozled
8. New Jack City
9. Déjà Vu
10. Ley Lines

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Throughout my time on this site I've met a lot of wonderful people. Some close friends, some ive voices, some inspirational writers, some with exceptional film taste. And many a great combination of all the above. Here I try to honor them by highlighting just one of their many great reviews, and hopefully I get to keep adding more names to this list. Maybe you might find someone new to follow 🤠

— links to reviews are in the notes of each film, ordered alphabetically by the author's display name. constantly adding more to this list, constantly behind! —

• The Thin Red Line

  A_DZH's review

  A_DZH, I know so little about you but your writing is genuinely otherworldly. Some of the smartest, most insightful, most forward-thinking stuff I've seen on here, I've ired your writing from afar just because I feel too stupid to understand it sometimes yet I can't stop myself from reading each and every one of them. Please make a zine if you haven't already.

• Babette's Feast

  abby's review

  Abby, I love how much love you have for your favorite films and I'm so glad there's someone else who espouses the religion of Gore Verbinski. You have such a willingness to watch anything and everything and it's something more people should aspire to have. Thanks for picking my favorite film club movie.

• Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

  Adam_Davie's review

  Adam Davie, you are such an invaluable voice on this site and you deserve to be read by far, far more people. You have an ability to analytically explain the human interactions and social messages in the films you watch that is so enormously impressive and hard to replicate. I can tell you have so much wisdom to share with us and I'm thankful that I get to read that firsthand.

• Wavelength

  Adam Trainer's review

  Adam Trainer, it's always a wonderful time talking to you and hearing your thoughts as someone who has a lot more life experience than I but still not so older that I can't relate heavily. You mentioned before that you had many different digressions in life but always returned to film, and that's something that I think will be true of myself as well. All those digressions make for good life experience, and that in-turn helps us (you) talk more deeply about film. I hope you forever have fruitful digressions :')

• The Leopard

  agustin's review

  Agus, I'm so lucky to have run into you and your astonishing film taste. You are the best ambassador of 'niche letterboxd' I've ever met and can make anyone feel welcome about diving into the deep annals of obscure film. If only every other obscure film appreciator was like you.

• Chocolat

  alex's review

  Alex, you're an incredibly-insightful person and your reviews are fantastic. The way you evaluate and glean films is like few others, and I greatly ire the way you examine films from an angle that feels (unfortunately) fresh, not necessarily going against the grain but picking up on things that most others do not. I always look forward to reading your reviews.

• The Virgin Spring

  Amy Hensarling's review

  Amy, I really enjoy your diary-like take on reviews, in that you jot down your quick thoughts sometimes while also taking the time to carve out a paragraph or two (or more) on the deeper themes and greatness of a film. It feels like you pack in two reviews worth of approaches in a single one, and I really enjoy hearing these many different lens that you choose to write on.

• Asako I & II

  Andra 🦋's review

  Andra, how is it that I just discovered you recently? Such delicate yet thoughtful reviews, one where you guide us by your hand to the point you wish to make, yet none of what comes before any semblance of filler. Often it feels like I'm reading poetry that's taken form in prose. I can only hope that you gain more and more readers.

• They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

  Angel Goldstein's review

  Angel, I love that you are confident about what you value in film and has strong convictions about those values. I don't see that often and I love how strong of an identity you have when it comes to your film pursuit, never feel bad about that. Plus, you have an amazingly stabilizing presence w/o sacrificing any of your snark. I love that so much.

• Burning

  ashleigh!'s review

  Ashleigh, if you ever stop watching Fantastic Mr. Fox I'm pretty sure the world would end. Your ratings curve looks like a phone signal bar and that's what we should all aspire to be. You are an extreme film lover and you connect so much with so many different kinds of film. I can tell you're so giving and you care so much about people and I'm so glad I can get to know that amazing person.

...plus 140 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Please go back to making movies I can find online and not art gallery installations no one will see 🙏

1. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
2. What Time Is It There?
3. Sand
4. Days
5. The Hole
6. The River
7. Vive L'Amour
8. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone
9. Journey to the West
10. Stray Dogs

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

Theme: 110 min or less

Recommended to me: in notes.

---

Recommended by me:

Agus - Still Life (2006)
Amelia - Days of Being Wild (1990)
Julia - Crossroads (2002)
Katie - Starlet (2012)
Lindsay - Where Is My Friend’s House? (1987)
Margot - The Triplets of Belleville (2003)
Matthew - Bad Taste (1987)
McKenna - Angel’s Egg (1985)
Morgan - Shoot 'Em Up (2007)
Mungo - In Bruges (2008)
Rich - Chungking Express (1994)
Todd - Jiang Ziya: The Legend of Deification (2020)

1. The Grand Budapest Hotel

   Recommended by McKenna

2. School of Rock

   Recommended by Julia

3. Ride Your Wave

   Recommended by Mungo

4. Night Is Short, Walk On Girl

   Recommended by Amelia

5. The Temptation of St. Tony

   Recommended by Agus

6. Lake Mungo

   Recommended by Matthew

7. The Clock

   Recommended by Margot

8. Blood Simple

   Recommended by Rich

9. Stand by Me

   Recommended by Lindsay

10. Shiva Baby

    Recommended by Morgan

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

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my friend Reed!

---

To Do:

▹ The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
▹ The Goat (1921)
▹ Safety Last (1923)
▹ Metropolis (1927)
▹ Sunrise (1927)
▹ Un Chien Andalou (1929)
▹ M (1931)
▹ Le Corbeau (1943)
▹ Spellbound (1945)
▹ The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
▹ Late Spring (1949)
▹ The Third Man (1949)
▹ The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
▹ Singin' in the Rain (1952)
▹ Tokyo Story (1953)
▹ The Searchers (1956)
▹ Elmer Gantry (1960)
▹ Peeping Tom (1960)
▹ Il Posto (1961)
▹ The Given Word (1962)
▹ The Gospel According to Matthew (1964)
▹ Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
▹ Blazing Saddles (1974)
▹ Barry Lyndon (1975)
▹ Annie Hall (1977)
▹ The Last Wave (1977)
▹ Blood Simple (1984)
▹ Platoon (1986)
▹ Wings of Desire (1987)
▹ Cinema Paradiso (1988)
▹ The Wrong Tros (1993)
▹ Dark City (1998)
▹ Road to Perdition (2002)
▹ Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)
▹ The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
▹ Ponyo (2008)
▹ Starstruck (2010)
▹ Blue Ruin (2013)
▹ The LEGO Movie (2014)
▹ Slow West (2015)
▹ I, Daniel Blake (2016)
▹ My Life as a Zucchini (2016)
▹ Queen of Hearts (2019)

1. Collateral
2. The Matrix
3. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
4. What's Up, Doc?
5. The Squid and the Whale
6. Paprika
7. Mystery Train
8. Ghostbusters
9. Raging Bull
10. Amadeus

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

the end of angelopoulos

1. The Travelling Players
2. Ulysses' Gaze
3. The Dust of Time
4. Landscape in the Mist
5. Eternity and a Day
6. Alexander the Great
7. The Beekeeper
8. The Suspended Step of the Stork
9. The Weeping Meadow
10. The Hunters

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Promare
2. Parasite
3. The Farewell
4. Dance with Me
5. To the Ends of the Earth
6. 1917
7. 6 Underground
8. The Lighthouse
9. So Long, My Son
10. Vitalina Varela

Recommended to me: in notes.

---

Recommended by me:

Alan - A Touch of Zen (1971)
Amrit - Bamboozled (2000)
Angeles - Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (2003)
Blake - Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Eve - Vive L’Amour (1994)
Feldman - Paths of Glory (1957)
Grant - The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
Grayson - Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
Hay - Kung Fu Hustle (2004)
Jacob - Brazil (1985)
Jordon - Andrei Rublev (1966)
Laura - Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
Lindsay - Farewell My Concubine (1993)
Lord - Dolemite Is My Name (2019)
Margot - Fight Club (1999)
Micheal - Poetry (2010)
Sarah - Princess Mononoke (1997)
Soup - Secret Sunshine (2007)
Thorine - The Irishman (2019)
Todd - Shadow (2018)
Wafflez - Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001)

1. Do the Right Thing

   Recommended by Lindsay

2. Fireworks

   Recommended by Eve

3. Audition

   Recommended by Grayson

4. The Descendants

   Recommended by Alan

5. Attack the Block

   Recommended by Grant

6. Microhabitat

   Recommended by Angeles

7. Happiness of Us Alone

   Recommended by Soup

8. Happy as Lazzaro

   Recommended by Sarah

9. Killer of Sheep

   Recommended by Lord

10. Amadeus

    Recommended by Feldman

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

Recommended to me: in notes.

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Recommended by me:

Amrit - HyperNormalisation (2016)
Angeles - Ernest & Celestine (2012)
Blake - Ikiru (1952)
Eve - Leave No Trace (2018)
Feldman - Come and See (1985)
Hay - Why Don't You Play in Hell? (2013)
Jacob - The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008)
Jude - The Bad Batch (2016)
Lindsay - Family (2018)
Margot - Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Micheal - Gummo (1997)
Soup - Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
Todd - Police Story (1985)
Wafflez - Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018)

1. Kung Pow: Enter the Fist

   Recommended by Hay

2. Sans Soleil

   Recommended by Amrit

3. Safe

   Recommended by Micheal

4. The Taste of Tea

   Recommended by Soup

5. Water Lilies

   Recommended by Margot

6. Clue

   Recommended by Angeles

7. Ghostbusters

   Recommended by Feldman

8. Double Team

   Recommended by Todd

9. Widows

   Recommended by Blake

10. Beasts of the Southern Wild

    Recommended by Lindsay

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Recommended to me: in notes.

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Recommended by me:

Angeles - FLCL (2000)
Blake - The Last Picture Show (1971)
Daisoujou - Daughter of the Nile (1987)
Eve - Biutiful (2010)
Grayson - Kotoko (2011)
Hay - The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot (2018)
Jen - Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)
Jude - Nymphomaniac (2013)
Laura - Castaway on the Moon (2009)
Lindsay - The Duke of Burgundy (2014)
Maggy - Memories of Murder (2003)
Margot - Only Yesterday (1991)
Micheal - Fish Tank (2009)
Soup - The Terrorizers (1986)
Wafflez - Hero (2002)

1. Buffalo '66

   Recommended by Micheal

2. Last Year at Marienbad

   Recommended by Wafflez

3. 0.5 mm

   Recommended by Soup

4. Phenomena

   Recommended by Margot

5. PlayTime

   Recommended by Daisoujou

6. The Rider

   Recommended by Jen

7. The River with No Bridge

   Recommended by Maggy

8. Something Must Break

   Recommended by Jude

9. We the Animals

   Recommended by Laura

10. The American Friend

    Recommended by Eve

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

Recommended to me: in notes.

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Recommended by me:

Blake - Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
Grayson - My Blueberry Nights (2007)
Hay - The House that Jack Built (2018)
Jen - Autumn Sonata (1978)
Jude - Knife+Heart (2018)
Laura - Mother (2009)
Lindsay - Stoker (2013)
Micheal - Inherent Vice (2014)
Soup - White Material (2009)
Wafflez - Winter Light (1963)

1. Funeral Parade of Roses

   Recommended by Soup

2. Stalker

   Recommended by Wafflez

3. Melancholia

   Recommended by Jen

4. Santa Sangre

   Recommended by Grayson

5. Punishment Park

   Recommended by Jude

6. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

   Recommended by Blake

7. The Boy and the Beast

   Recommended by Hay

8. We Need to Talk About Kevin

   Recommended by Laura

9. Dazed and Confused

   Recommended by Micheal

10. Novitiate

    Recommended by Lindsay

Recommended to me: in notes.

---

Recommended by me:

Amrit - To the Ends of the Earth (2019)
Angel - It Happened One Night (1934)
Blake - Platform (2000)
Brian - A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
Drew - Legend of the Mountain (1979)
Ethan - Vive L'Amour (1994)
Evan - Bullet in the Head (1990)
Eve - The Taste of Tea (2004)
Grayson - Ride or Die (2021)
Heather - The Blues Brothers (1980)
Imogen - FLCL (2000)
Jacob - Rashomon (1950)
Lindsay - House of Hummingbird (2018)
Louis - Hard Boiled (1992)
Margot - Paterson (2016)
Micheal - The Long Day Closes (1992)
Morgan - Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (2002)
Penny - Devils on the Doorstep (2000)
Reed - Burning (2018)
Ryder - Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021)
Soup - Kaili Blues (2015)
Todd - The Train (1964)
Wafflez - The Bed You Sleep In (1993)

1. Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time

   Recommended by Wafflez

2. Maborosi

   Recommended by Eve

3. Heat

   Recommended by Evan

4. I Am Cuba

   Recommended by Amrit

5. The Mission

   Recommended by Drew

6. Collateral

   Recommended by Reed

7. Love in the Time of Twilight

   Recommended by Penny

8. Men in Black

   Recommended by Lindsay

9. Retribution

   Recommended by Jacob

10. Sunset Boulevard

    Recommended by Angel

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my friend Amrit!

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To Do:

▹ Godzilla (1954)
▹ Lola Montes (1955)
▹ Night and Fog (1956)
▹ Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
▹ Marnie (1964)
▹ The Great Silence (1968)
▹ The Wild Bunch (1969)
▹ Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972)
▹ 1900 (1976)
▹ Blue Collar (1978)
▹ Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
▹ Cruising (1980)
▹ Tik Tik Tik (1981)
▹ Live On The Sunset Strip (1982)
▹ Breathless (1983)
▹ The Keep (1983)
▹ The Fly (1986)
▹ Mathilukal (1990)
▹ The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
▹ Green Snake (1993)
▹ Little Buddha (1993)
▹ Irma Vep (1996)
▹ The Sweet Hereafter (1997)
▹ Hey Ram (2000)
▹ Aalavandhan (2001)
▹ A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
▹ Ghosts of Mars (2001)
▹ Minority Report (2002)
▹ Running on Karma (2003)
▹ Breaking News (2004)
▹ A Bittersweet Life (2005)
▹ George Carlin: Life Is Worth Losing (2005)
▹ Munich (2005)
▹ War of the Worlds (2005)
▹ Michael Clayton (2007)
▹ Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)
▹ Halloween II (2009)
▹ Robot (2010)
▹ Unstoppable (2010)
▹ Cosmopolis (2012)
▹ Eega (2012)
▹ O.J.: Made in America (2016)
▹ Shin Godzilla (2016)
▹ Dave Chappelle: The Bird Revelation (2017)
▹ 2.0 (2018)
▹ Dave Chappelle: 8:46 (2020)

1. Come and See
2. Hard Boiled
3. Possession
4. Cure
5. I Am Cuba
6. Dil Se..
7. The Devils
8. The Train
9. Tetsuo: The Iron Man
10. Death by Hanging

...plus 48 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Please go back to making movies

1. 2046
2. Chungking Express
3. In the Mood for Love
4. Ashes of Time
5. The Hand
6. Happy Together
7. The Grandmaster
8. Fallen Angels
9. Days of Being Wild
10. As Tears Go By

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

joseph anderson

1. There Will Be Blood
2. Boogie Nights
3. Inherent Vice
4. Magnolia
5. Phantom Thread
6. Punch-Drunk Love
7. The Master
8. Junun
9. Licorice Pizza
10. Hard Eight

Master list, by Ben. Please follow him, he's really cool 🤠

1. Vital
2. Andromedia
3. Madadayo
4. The Thick-Walled Room
5. Vibrator
6. Survive Style 5+
7. Hana
8. Like Nothing Happened
9. The Island Closest to Heaven
10. Mothra

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This guy is weird and I still don't know if I like him nor what his style is, but he made two of my favorite films so...

1. Blade Runner 2049
2. Sicario
3. Enemy
4. Arrival
5. Prisoners
6. Dune
7. August 32nd on Earth
8. Polytechnique
9. Maelström
10. Incendies

Chocolat is a masterpiece, please watch it!!

1. Beau Travail
2. Chocolat
3. The Intruder
4. Friday Night
5. 35 Shots of Rum
6. U.S. Go Home
7. White Material
8. High Life
9. Let the Sunshine In
10. No Fear, No Die

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my friend Margot!

---

To Do:

▹ Done, give me more please!!

1. Deep Red
2. Tomboy
3. Water Lilies
4. Phenomena
5. The Clock
6. Mrs. Miniver
7. Short Term 12

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my friend Grayson!

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To Do:

▹ Tenebrae (1982)
▹ The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)
▹ Wanted (2008)
▹ The Tree of Life (2011)
▹ The Equalizer (2014)
▹ The Shack (2017)
▹ The Square (2017)
▹ Wish Upon (2017)

1. Angst
2. Irreversible
3. Paterson
4. Sunshine
5. Mother
6. Santa Sangre
7. Paris, Texas
8. Shoot 'Em Up
9. Old Joy
10. Audition

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my friend Blake!

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To Do:

▹ Rope (1948)
▹ Zazie dans le Métro (1960)
▹ Donkey Skin (1970)
▹ Don't Look Now (1973)
▹ Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
▹ Gloria (1980)
▹ Ms .45 (1981)
▹ Catch Me If You Can (1989)
▹ Short Cuts (1993)
▹ Strange Days (1995)
▹ Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)
▹ Man on the Moon (1999)
▹ Scarlet Diva (2000)
▹ Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus (2013)
▹ Lost River (2014)
▹ Neruda (2016)

1. Spring Breakers
2. Crash
3. Two-Lane Blacktop
4. Theorem
5. Gummo
6. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
7. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
8. Certain Women
9. The Comedy
10. Widows

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

Master list, by Ben. Please follow him, he's really cool 🤠

1. Dersu Uzala

   Akira Kurosawa

2. Memories

   Animated Film - Not Directed by Hayao Miyazaki

3. I Wish

   Hirokazu Kore-eda

4. The Iron Crown

   Kaneto Shindō

5. Barren Illusion

   Kiyoshi Kurosawa

6. The Bird People in China

   Takashi Miike

7. The End of Summer

   Yasujirō Ozu

8. Conflagration

   Kon Ichikawa

9. Gemini

   Shinya Tsukamoto

10. Confession

    Nobuhiko Ōbayashi

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

If you've only seen The Florida Project or Tangerine and liked them, you really need to check out his other stuff! Except Four Letter Words, we don't talk about that one.

1. The Florida Project
2. Tangerine
3. Starlet
4. Take Out
5. Prince of Broadway
6. Red Rocket
7. Four Letter Words

The Matrix Reloaded is kino and everyone is just too afraid to it it.

1. The Matrix
2. Speed Racer
3. The Matrix Resurrections
4. The Matrix Reloaded
5. Jupiter Ascending
6. Cloud Atlas
7. The Matrix Revolutions
8. Bound

Good Time walked so Uncut Gems could walk at a slightly-slower pace.

1. Good Time
2. Uncut Gems
3. Heaven Knows What
4. Daddy Longlegs
5. Lenny Cooke
6. The Pleasure of Being Robbed

maybe the french have rights

1. Girlhood
2. Tomboy
3. Water Lilies
4. Petite Maman
5. Portrait of a Lady on Fire

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my friend Waqar!

---

To Do:

▹ Done!! Looking forward to any future ones 🙌

1. Hero
2. Raise the Red Lantern
3. Memories of Murder
4. Suzhou River
5. 3-Iron
6. The Lovers on the Bridge

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my friend Jude!

---

To Do:

▹ The Trip (2010)
▹ '71 (2014)
▹ Foxcatcher (2014)
▹ Revenge (2017)
▹ Thoroughbreds (2017)
▹ The Guilty (2018)

1. Something Must Break
2. Blindspotting
3. Punishment Park
4. Unfriended: Dark Web
5. Personal Shopper
6. The Strangers: Prey at Night
7. The Doom Generation

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my friend Grant!

---

To Do:

▹ The Doll (1919)
▹ The Oyster Princess (1919)
▹ Pather Panchali (1955)
▹ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

1. Sherlock Jr.
2. Vertigo
3. Andrei Rublev
4. Freaky
5. Leviathan
6. Silent Light
7. Attack the Block
8. A Separation
9. Weekend
10. The Conformist

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

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my friend Hank!

---

To Do:

▹ Lady Snowblood (1973)
▹ Death Wish (1974)
▹ Phase IV (1974)
▹ Fist of the North Star (1986)
▹ Good Burger (1997)

1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
2. Videodrome
3. All About Lily Chou-Chou
4. Phantom of the Paradise
5. Tokyo Drifter
6. Run Lola Run
7. Trainspotting
8. The 400 Blows
9. Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend

Although it is ranked, I've enjoyed all these movies and am so glad to have expanded my horizons. Thank you Film Club for being such a wonderful community!

1. Dance with Me
2. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
3. Mother
4. Starlet
5. Pain & Gain
6. Paterson
7. The Face of Another
8. Before Sunrise
9. American Honey
10. The Purge: Election Year

...plus 63 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A ranked list of movies I've watched, recommended by my friend Eve!

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To Do:

▹ Late Spring (1949)
▹ Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
▹ An Autumn Afternoon (1962)
▹ Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)
▹ Paper Moon (1973)
▹ Fox and His Friends (1975)
▹ Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
▹ Rumble Fish (1983)
▹ Devilman – Volume 1: The Birth (1987)
▹ Wings of Desire (1987)
▹ Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
▹ Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
▹ King of New York (1990)
▹ The Blackout (1997)
▹ Romeo Must Die (2000)
▹ Shanghai Noon (2000)
▹ In the Cut (2003)
▹ The New World (2005)
▹ Click (2006)
▹ Still Walking (2008)
▹ You Don't Mess with the Zohan (2008)
▹ Certified Copy (2010)
▹ 4:44 Last Day on Earth (2011)
▹ Shame (2011)
▹ A Most Violent Year (2014)
▹ After the Storm (2016)
▹ The Shape of Water (2017)
▹ Tommaso (2019)
▹ Transformers Franchise

1. Dragon Ball Super: Broly
2. Fireworks
3. The Red Shoes
4. t Security Area
5. Violent Cop
6. Our Little Sister
7. A New Leaf
8. The American Friend
9. Close-Up
10. Bad Lieutenant

More like "The Return" of Tarkovsky hahahahahahhaha okay

1. Leviathan
2. The Return
3. Elena
4. Loveless
5. The Banishment