Movies I Watched August 2024 - Greenfield Writes

Like Someone In Love - dir. Abbas Kiarostami

Slow

Powerlessness behind the lens of the camera, behind the glass, behind the reflections upon reflections upon refractions of ceaseless light. Kiarostami built his artistic oeuvre on the relationship between the audience and the film, Like Someone in Love puts that notion into a multicultural, multigenerational context. Abbas is no longer a young man, he’s old, and the only way he can understand these kids is by smashing the glass. There are no bells and whistles, there are only impressions.

Depression is in some ways like looking out of a taxi to see your grandma waiting for you in the cold of night. People who love you sit on the periphery but you can’t do anything about it. You can’t even say ‘I love you’ and mean it. Trapped in a box on the way to a job you probably don’t even want to do. Trapped in a relationship with a man who wants to control you.

I wonder how much of Kiarostami’s age factors into the cross-generational aspect of the film. Are there notions of spectatorship, in that the old are doomed to watch over the young while perpetually misunderstanding them?

It’s hard for me to write as of late. It’s like my mind is on autopilot. Films like this help. A little bit. 8/10.

Déjà Vu - dir. Tony Scott

Sci-Fi/Thriller

At times this reminded me of Interstellar. Tony Scott’s take on Interstellar? God what a loss. Makes me sad to think about how we only got four collaborations between him and Denzel. Three for three, and there’s no way Unstoppable is anything less than thrilling.

Deja Vu is just a phenomenal mindfuck of a film that never lets up kinetically. Words don’t do it justice. Tony Scott knows how to make a fucking movie, man. It’s that simple.

Fate, love, obsession. Despite being such a brash filmmaker, Scott is humanistic at his core. His films are more than exercises in style. They may be thrilling, but they’ve got a beating heart behind them. 8/10.

Mistress America - dir. Noah Baumbach

Coming-of-Age/Comedy

You can see on screen how much Noah Baumbach loves Greta Gerwig. It’s beautiful.

This is a film I find more relatable than truly moving, which is fine. I don’t hold that against it. I like the sisterhood, I like how Baumbach’s characters use words almost like motors to power themselves over the gaping chasm of depression. If they stop talking for a second they’ll realize how fucked they are, and they know this, so they don’t stop. 7/10.

Track 29 - dir. Nicolas Roeg

Melodrama

A movie that is probably more fun to talk about than it is to actually watch. 3/10.

Sunset Boulevard - dir. Billy Wilder

Black Comedy

Hollywood chews up its stars and spits them out. Women are disposable and should be expected to stay young forever, which is impossible.

I suspect everything I have to say about this film has already been said, but maybe one unique observation I can bring to this is that Norma reminded me of my grandmother in many ways, which made her 10x more tragic to watch. She’s a nightmare to be around but it’s not her fault. She was groomed from a young age to want nothing more than stardom. How can she be blamed?

The whole story is really about that LA desperation–the two central characters are doomed by their desperation, and the tertiary character (Betty) gets away by not letting her desperation get the best of her. She’s willing to adapt, going from aspiring actor to mailroom employee to reader to writer. Joe is desperate for money and ends up trapped in a loveless, claustrophobic dynamic while Norma is obviously desperate to reclaim her stardom, which literally drives her to attempt suicide and then into prison. 8/10.

Delicate Crime - dir. Beto Brant

Erotic

Way too boring. 2/10.

The Apartment - dir. Billy Wilder

Black Comedy

I love Jack Lemmon so much. I adore his screen presence. I adore how much he physically embodies his characters.

Billy Wilder hasn’t missed yet. This film is Dickensian in how it explores the tragedy of class but Wilder never fails to tonally blend comedy into it. He’s one of the few screenwriters to effectively walk the line between playful and earnest, tragic and punchy.

A film about seizing the day and standing up for yourself. 7/10.

Star Time - dir. Alexander Cassini

Surreal Slasher

Comparing this to David Lynch makes sense if you have literally never thought about a David Lynch movie for longer than 5 seconds. 3/10.

Choose Me - dir. Alan Rudolph

Romance/Mosaic

Watching this at 3 AM was the perfect call, it’s such a gauzy film. Reminds me of how picaresque a good kiss is, how much a good kiss will stay with you for life. People entering each other’s lives with earth-shattering kisses. Impulse and neurosis wrestling for our minds as we make sense of our lust, our need for human connection.

Double Indemnity - dir. Billy Wilder

It’s good, but I prefer Wilder’s funnier movies… or at the very least when he tempers his bleak outlook with humor. It also doesn’t help that Fred MacMurray does nothing for me as an actor. I just can’t abide by expressionless stoic performances that do nothing to service the themes and ideas of the film. I never bought the chemistry here once, sorry. This is why Jack Lemmon is so fucking good. I guarantee you this movie would be 10 times better if he was the leading man. 6/10.

Senso - dir. Luchino Visconti

Historical/Melodrama

I could’ve pause this movie at any moment and it would’ve been one of the most breathtaking shots I’d ever seen–ornate, expressive, rich, colorful… nobody does color like the Italians.

For most of the film, the plot didn’t speak to me, but the last fifteen minutes are such an emotionally devastating payoff that it worked for me.

Rich people deluding themselves with romance and melodrama, women having their romantic desires cruelly thrown back in their faces, it’s all very sweeping. Perfect melodrama. 8/10.

El Dorado - dir. Howard Hawks

Western

Shot like an episode of a sitcom. Has the vibe of a bunch of dudes playing dress-up. 4/10.

Sabrina - dir. Billy Wilder

Romance

Just not my thing at all.

There are some funny moments but I don’t buy the romance. Sorry dawg

4/10.

Gabi on the Roof in July - dir. Lawrence Michael Levine

Mumblecore

I have seen this movie many times before. 4/10.

The Last Stop in Yuma County - dir. Francis Galluppi

Thriller/Western

This is the movie that happens when an AI watches Coen Brothers and Tarantino and reduces them to bland aesthetics. Freaky lil movie in how artificial it feels. This is the future of cinema. 2/10.

Days of Thunder - dir. Tony Scott

Sports

If this constitutes a “bad” Tony Scott film then I’m afraid we may just have a GOAT on our hands. The man just knows how to frame a shot, how to earnestly convey emotion, how to capture the sincere bravado of maleness on camera, and above all else how to create a film that is entertaining from beginning to end.

This shit is exhilarating. It drags in the middle when we’re not watching Cole race but I love how sincerely Tony Scott explores his personal struggles, his need to control the uncontrollable. It never fails to amaze me how well Scott balances characters with action in places where most directors would fumble. 8/10.

Edge of Tomorrow - dir. Doug Liman

Action/Sci-Fi

Would’ve been way better if it was directed by Tony Scott.

Nothing to write home about lol and I am a gigantic unironic fan of Tom Cruise.

Third act basically ditches the whole gimmick and turns it into a generic war movie, at that point I checked out.

Movies like this really only work if they sell you on the emotion instead of the logic and the movie spends far too much time trying to justify its premise and not enough time getting me to genuinely care about its leads, which is why I reiterate that it would’ve been an incredible film if it was directed by Tony Scott. 4/10.

Witness for Prosecution - dir. Billy Wilder

Courtroom/Mystery

I have to admit, the twist did catch me by surprise, but I’m just not a fan of playwright’s cinema; films that read more like plays. At that point, you might as well just make this a piece of theatre because there’s no cinematic flair at all. 6/10.

The Cabin in the Woods - dir. Drew Goddard

Horror/Comedy

Just an insufferable movie lol

Despise “meta” cinema. Just make a fucking movie. 1/10.

The Lost Weekend - dir. Billy Wilder

Drama

It’s just really boring.

I’m realizing that I find Wilder’s films completely uninteresting when he’s not indulging in bleak comedy. 3/10.

Mirror - dir. Andrei Tarkovsky

Autobiographical/Experimental

Everything is an echo, nothing ever dies, we are all recreations of our mothers’ voices. And it’s not just us, not just us humans, not just us living creatures, but the wind, the rain, the rocks, the grass, it’s all simulacra of the woman’s will, the gentle press of life… raindrops rippling through a pond… we are the ripples, aren’t we? Dog barking into puppy birth, adulthood as a liquefied facsimile of childhood, oneiric images meant to be felt, not understood. I don’t think I breathed during the last twenty minutes of this film, and I don’t know if I could tell you why, but it was as if a million pieces came together in my head at once and I was finally bathed in the current instead of trying to swim it.

We are all echoes of our mothers’ voices, life is the sum of mothers’ choices. There’s a shot that trails its way from a living plant to a dead, rotting log, and then back out to reveal its place within all of nature. Life and death aren’t separate, they’re all part of the same construct. We exist in the context of everything, we are ourselves reflections of everything, mirrors that the universe uses to look at Herself, to gauge Her path. Never have I seen a film make the phrase ‘divine feminine’ feel so religiously pertinent… it’s odd how much faith in cinema moves me when I do not consider myself particularly faithful or even optimistic.

I am in love. My life is a series of gentle, yet formidable waves that I must embrace to survive. I will no longer fight–I will float. 10/10.

Stalag 17 - dir. Billy Wilder

War/Comedy

I must be missing something because this isn’t funny at all lmao. Not offensive or anything just seems like something a grandparent would find funny.

When Billy Wilder writes a truly knockout script like Ace in the Hole, it’s okay for the cinematography department to slack because the action of the story feels like dynamite.

When the script is lame and the cinematography is lame, you get an exhausting experience. If this came out in the 80’s it would’ve been forgotten on arrival. 3/10.

In Between - dir. Maysaloun Hamoud

Slice-of-Life

Tropes on tropes. Toothless “social realism”. 4/10.

Mr. Jealousy - dir. Noah Baumbach

Comedy/Romance

Pretty cute early Baumbach. You can tell he’s still figuring out how to play his characters off of one another. The rapid fire dialogue isn’t quite there yet, but it’s got a tender heart and sometimes that’s enough. 6/10.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy - dir. Ryūsuke Hamaguchi

Anthology/Slice-of-Life

So plain in presentation, but so full of life and humanity. A triptych which layers its stories like pages of a book, they feed into each other with sweet, minute elegance. Slices of life that appear mundane but peel themselves back to reveal kernels of human truth. Jealousy, love, regret, lust… proof that dialogue CAN be life-defining when it is framed well and written with aching sincerity. 8/10.

Leningrad Cowboys Go America - dir. Aki Kaurismäki

Absurdist Comedy/Music

Seriously not my cup of tea when it comes to comedy, but if you think Wes Anderson and Monty Python are the funniest things ever you will love this. 4/10.

Bell Diamond - dir. Jon Jost

Slow/Drama

Jon Jost tells stories of American inevitability. The characters and setting bleed into one another so that dialogue is often muffled and swallowed up. The edges are blurred and nobody has much power to affect narrative deviation. Nonetheless, Jost’s films are full of gentle love; a real empathy and care for his subjects and locale.

Watching Jost feels like listening in to adult conversation as a child. Soothing and a little sad. 6/10.

Ms .45 - dir. Abel Ferrara

Revenge

Exploitation turned into a religious story of rage, Ferrara elevates the schlock with real, earnest fury. The movie is over the top in its depiction of men as these evil, vile creatures but it never feels like an elaborate prank. It’s all played very straight. A woman pushed too far becoming the archangel of vengeance. 7/10.

If Beale Street Could Talk - dir. Barry Jenkins

Romance/Drama

How tf is your movie about jazz but features like zero jazz in the soundtrack

Lifeless, obvious white liberal pandering, there’s just no soul here. Shit feels like it was run through a suburban American focus group

Characters talk like symbols and not like people, conversations are stiff, every musical cue feels so overbearingly saccharine. 2/10.

Close-Up - dir. Abbas Kiarostami

Docufiction

It’s very interesting to me how eager the Ahankhahs are to believe that Sabzian is Makhmalbaf, how eager they are to believe that their favorite filmmaker, a man who (as far as I know from this film alone) captures the social realism of class in Iran, would want to use their home and their lives as the basis of his next film. It’s interesting because of their wealth and status in comparison to Sabzian’s.

Obviously, much has been made of Sabzian’s desire to transcend his stature, his identity, and his class, his yearning for the arts, but I believe this transcendence of identity is also true of the Ahankhah family, whose wealth makes them unable to fully appreciate the art of their favorite filmmaker. They wish to have their lives transmogrified into art just as much as Sabzian does. Makhmalbaf conveys his suffering back to him so that he can make sense of it, and in this sense, the film is deeply uninterested in pretentious intellectualism. For all I say of Kiarostami’s ability to stimulate my mind and make me think, his films are ultimately fundamental; you feel them, you don’t ‘analyze’ them. You don’t watch an ‘ending explained’ video, you sit with them.

There’s some critique of liberalism here somewhere, in that the wealthy family accepts and respects a poor man only if he disguises himself as a filmmaker they admire, a filmmaker who makes art about the very poor people they won’t accept. Sort of like how liberals will watch a Sean Baker movie about poor people and cry but then refuse to give a dollar to a homeless person because “they’re just gonna buy drugs”.

The longer I spent with the film, the more I fell in love with it. Listening to Sabzian speak of his motives, of his desperation to be heard and to feel important, of his admiration for art and for cinema, of just his… his LOVE. His LOVE was so powerful to me, but what was even more powerful was his resolution to live as himself. Kiarostami took a premise that I truly didn’t think had much to it and made it not just about cinema, but about the human need to love oneself. I came out of this movie feeling like I owed it to my soul to square all the contradictions in my open wound of a heart. To stop trying to be someone else.

I owe it to myself… to find joy in living as myself. 10/10.

Alien: Romulus - dir. Fede Álvarez

Sci-Fi/Horror

Last twenty minutes were pretty gas but it takes a while to get there.

Misfires all around the acting front, a serious lack of charisma from everyone but David Jonsson.

It’s wild to me that a film prominently featuring a digitally recreated deceased actor also makes the robot the most pragmatic and likable character out of the whole crew. What is this artificial propaganda dawg. Fuck off

4/10.

House - dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi

Experimental/Horror

I finally get it lmao.

Watched this almost exactly a year ago and thought it was annoying back then… I’ve changed just as much as my tastes within that year and while I still wouldn’t call this a masterpiece I found it a lot more enjoyable. Obayashi is one of the most fearless filmmakers in the world, wholly committed to maximizing the potential of his medium. There are many movies that could work as books or plays but House only works as a film. 7/10.

Simon Killer - dir. Antonio Campos

Psychological/Erotic Horror

Dope posters don’t necessarily make for dope films. 3/10.

Queens Logic - dir. Steve Rash

Hangout/Comedy

Cute, inoffensive hangout movie. Wish they still made stuff like this.

Tropical Malady - dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Romance/Magical Realism

Essential to my attitudes as an artist and my desire to capture environments through interpersonal relationships. Tropical Malady is magic–or, better: it seeks to redeify the world, reimbue the world with spirituality and folklore. The Thai jungle becomes its own arboreal realm, the tiger becomes a wandering, lustful, mourning spirit. The soldier sheds his humanity and becomes part of the realm. Nature reclaims us.

A must-see for lovers of the senses and for those who wish to rejoin the physical world, to transform it into something mythic; otherworldly. 8/10.

Showgirls - dir. Paul Verhoeven

Erotic Drama

It’s a little crazy to me that people will indulge Darren Aronofsky’s ham-fisted, faux-feminist Black Swan and treat it like a modern classic but reject Showgirls, a far more competent, emotionally rich, three-dimensional exploration of one, American capitalism, and two, the shape through which the male gaze forms its women, the way patriarchy morphs its constituents into beasts clawing to the top.

Showgirls provides an escape at the end, but it’s satirical… Nomi goes from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, and we are led to imagine that she will repeat the process of the hustle, taking her chunk of the pie after slaughtering the competition. Except maybe this time she’ll be an actress, taking Hollywood by storm and crushing her older peers.

I love films that live in their environments and imbue their settings with flesh and blood… Showgirls really inhabits Las Vegas, with all its neon-lit sexploitative skeeze. The story is fundamental and could be set anywhere, but the vision of the gaudy, ludicrously overproduced dance numbers will never leave my mind. The musical choices and choreography, the ferocity of every movement, it’s so fucking kinetic, raw. Showgirls is FLUX. The human body juxtaposed against an inhuman system that wishes to exploit it. She’s a dancer, not a whore, but Las Vegas turns her into flesh all the same. 9/10.

Inside Out 2 - dir. Kelsey Mann

Family

If you relate to this movie you have never experienced anything interesting in your life. 3/10.

Coraline - dir. Henry Selick

Gothic Horror

The middle section is the most boring thing of all time but everything else cooks. 6/10.

Alien³ - dir. David Fincher

Sci-Fi/Prison/Horror

I can’t believe there’s like 10 of these movies man they’re all the same

2/10.

Heavy - dir. James Mangold

Drama

I’M FAT, MOM

Actual line of dialogue

4/10.

Prometheus - dir. Ridley Scott

Sci-Fi/Horror

What if God was real and he fucking hated you?

I didn’t come up with that quote in reference to this film but it’s worth repeating because it’s the philosophical premise I kept in reference when I watched this film, and it made it a million times more rewarding.

Thirty entries into the franchise and by far the most inventive spin on the original is Prometheus, which dares to take the barebones premise into fascinating theological territory. The fact that Romulus is better received than Prometheus is proof that the human race is fucking cooked. We just want the same slop served up to us over and over again. I would argue Prometheus and Covenant are the ONLY essential parts of this entire shitty franchise (besides the original, obviously). Aliens might be entertaining but it’s laughably two-dimensional and completely misses the tone set by the first. Prometheus and Covenant took that original tone and extrapolated a different kind of existential dread.

If the xenomorph is a representation of the unknown dangers of space, of unfettered capitalism, of trying to control a monster, then the Engineers place it all into a theological context; the xenomorphs and humans AND androids all exist because the Gods are just as selfish and cruel as the creatures they make in their image. The way sons kill their fathers, creations kill their creators. 7/10.

The Living End - dir. Gregg Araki

Queer/Road

Queer-fried nihilism, blistering in the California sun. Intense 90’s vibes here. Even in the nascence of his career Gregg Araki creates such a remarkably specific aesthetic, especially impressive given the meager budget.

Love is better than life. 7/10.

Totally Fucked Up - dir. Gregg Araki

Hangout/Queer

Andy is me if I was gay.

Adolescence not as a period of growth but as a series of inconsequential mishaps; malaise and sex and TV, wanting for meaning but destined to wander a doomed wasteland, culture desecrated.

The burden of expectations, the feeling that you are not welcome in the world you were brought into, that there is no place for you.

Araki has such an appealing visual language. I adore it. 8/10.

The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice - dir. Yasujirō Ozu

Slice-of-Life

Women should just be satisfied with boring, passionless, mediocre arranged marriages that are forced upon them against their will, because at least their husbands are reliable?

A weirdly conservative film that has fleeting moments of serendipitous charm, but I despise the one-sided moral at the end. I’m not saying you can’t tell a story about shitty wives learning to be better people, but I am saying that if you make a film about marriage as this gentle, gourmand’s fantasy of harmoniousness, you should ideally have both parties learn a lesson by the end.

Also, like, is she even really a shitty wife? Classist, maybe, definitely a snob, but she was undoubtedly sold into the marriage against her will. To say she needs to learn a lesson about gratitude or appreciation is just straight up misogyny. You can’t end your movie like “see she just needed to learn to accept her husband to fall in love and be happy!” in earnest and expect me to buy into that shit. Fuck off lol. Mizoguchi should’ve directed this, he would’ve understood the complexity the premise necessitated. Feminist king.

Even more shocking are the countless reviews about how beautiful this story is, how healing it is, how optimistic it is, etc. This shit is bleak as fuck dawg. Divorce isn’t dystopian, if they don’t love each other then it’s not “optimistic” to suggest Stockholm syndrome as a remedy. A real optimistic ending would see them hash out their differences and realize that they’re not meant for each other and that the institution of arranged marriages is fucking dumb as shit. And don’t tell me divorce didn’t exist in 1950’s Japan because one of the characters literally suggests it.

This film is not about compromise or empathy because ultimately nobody shows any empathy or offers any compromise for the wife who, I must reiterate, was sold into the marriage against her will.

The more I think about this film the angrier I get. I’m shocked the same guy who made Tokyo Story made this. I intended to watch many more of Ozu’s films but now I’m not so sure. 3/10.

The Doom Generation - dir. Gregg Araki

Erotic/Black Comedy/Road

I fear I might be too old for Araki, which sucks because I don’t think I would’ve necessarily been crazy about him as a teenager, either. So I’m stuck in this weird limbo of loving his work, his aesthetic, what it represents, etc but not really connecting to it emotionally, not really being immersed in the realities of his characters. I can make these intellectual observations, like “oh this is a commentary on the nihilism of younger generations” and “oh this movie is about how society punishes homosexuality with death” and while those observations may be true, they strike me as hollow–I’m not in on the joke, and I think I gotta accept that. I can love the craft without being part of the club.

This is by far Araki’s most provocative piece of work I’ve seen yet, but I prefer the more earnest down-to-earthiness of Totally Fucked Up. I think its innocence captivates me, while the formalistic cynicism of Doom Generation makes me uncomfortable. It’s intentional but it leaves me feeling like I’m on the periphery instead of in the car with these teens. It’s sexy, colorful, evocative, but I feel like I’m at an arm’s length. Am I crazy, or is there some weird racial shit going on with the fact that A, they kill a Chinese shop clerk and that B, Xavier talks about brutalizing a Black policewoman? It’s strange to me how the film places these punks in marginalized positions against the racial minorities. You can make the argument that the film is about how America pits its most disenfranchised against each other, but the glee with which Xavier discusses grabbing the woman by her “kinky” hair and beating the shit out of her seems far too sociopathic to be a matter of survival.

As I type that, I realize that perhaps Xavier is in fact a symbol for that kind of misdirected impotent rage. After all, he is the one who commits the murders, not Amy or Jordan. Dispossessed and without direction, he exists solely to disrupt, to react, to fuck, to kill, to act on animal instinct.

Maybe.

I can’t fully convince myself of that read, but it’s a banger, I guess…

8/10.

Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury - dir. Luiz Bolognesi

Historical/Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Romance

Learning about Brazilian history was cool. I just wish the animation was worth writing home about.

Interesting premise but lackluster execution. 4/10.

Nowhere - dir. Gregg Araki

Experimental/Teen

“It’s like we all know way down in our souls that our generation is going to witness the end of everything. You can see it in our eyes. It’s in mine, look. I’m doomed. I’m only 18-years-old and I’m totally doomed.”

Pulsating, pulverizing, uninhibited Araki. Liberated from any semblance of taste, class, or formalistic expectations. Let’s lie together while the world ends. Araki at his most Araki, Araki squeezing the themes of the Teen Apocalypse trilogy through a meth pipe, and smoking that shit dry till there’s nothing but residue left. Overstimulation, legs bouncing, music pounding, sex, doom, despair.

Mel proposes the answer; fucking. I tend to agree, but it seems like a short-sighted response to a problem that developed long before any of us had the chance to attempt fucking as a solution. Pussy is powerful but is it more powerful than late-stage capitalism? I don’t think so. 9/10.

Mathilukal - dir. Adoor Gopalakrishnan

Prison

Adoor Gopalakrishnan finds tranquility in containment, almost illogical joy in the menial existence of the prisoner. If I am to compare this film to a recent meditative, humanistic film I’ve seen, Green Tea over Rice, I find Gopalakrishnan’s sociopolitical compromise far more enduring and touching. Ozu turns institutional prisons into morality condescending tales for women, Gopalakrishnan sees spiritual transcendence.

Each shot is exquisite, full of mirth and tragedy alike. Men smile and joke, but languish in their guilt. The banality of their day to day lives a peaceful refuge from the outside world’s political upheaval–perhaps even a chance to fall in love with a woman’s voice on the other side of the wall–but also a constant reminder of their sins.

The more film I watch the more I find myself smitten by beautiful, poetic images. 7/10.

Splendor - dir. Gregg Araki

RomCom

Super cute, sexy Gregg Araki romcom.

Abel kinda literally me fr.

I think if conservatives ever discovered Araki they would call his filmography the work of the antichrist. Dude is the antithesis of “Western values”. His films probably caused 9/11.

He’s not my favorite filmmaker ever but I’m such a sucker for his vibes. I would never be part of a polycule but this makes a pretty good case for the MWM three-way. 6/10.

Das Boot - dir. Wolfgang Petersen

War

War films are simply not for me lmao.

Extremely boring. Felt nothing.

I feel like I wasted almost 3 hours of my life. 4/10.

Mysterious Skin - dir. Gregg Araki

Coming-of-Age

Trauma is like an unpeelable epidermal layer of scum, catalyzing into a filmy crust, that one day you discover encases your whole body, an intrinsic part of who you are. The more you move, the more you feel it, the mysterious skin that grew around you to protect you from itself. Neil got molested as a child so his shell was a reclamation of his sexuality; i.e. I liked it. I liked that it happened to me. I want more of it. Brian got molested as a child so his shell was to forget it, to turn it into a mystery; i.e. the trauma was so inconceivable and mind-breaking that I turned it into something beyond reality to withstand it.

Brian does see an actual UFO once, with his mother and sister, and I would like to posit that the UFO in this instance represents his father, who was hinted to be an abuser as well at several points in the film. To Brian, UFOs are how he manages the trauma. It’s the skin that he wears for safety, but it’s that same skin that keeps him in the dark. The pain of ripping the skin and facing the trauma head-on is very real and very literal. Whenever he’s triggered his nose bleeds and he collapses. His body and mind are quite literally unable to face the trauma head on…. until he meets Neil, and together they are able to liberate themselves, confronting their memories honestly as kindred spirits. Only by ripping the skin in the company of a trusted person can you separate yourself from the trauma–never escape, but solace in separation, in knowing that the mysterious skin is NOT intrinsic to you.

I find real love in this film. Difficult to see, potentially unwatchable for some, but nonetheless quite uplifting in its attribution of trauma to the outermost parts of our bodies. The longer we go without acknowledging the skin of trauma, the harder it becomes to tear off, but it is never, ever impossible. Accepting the trauma to let it go. Holding each other so that we can do it together. You never have to go through it alone. 9/10.

Mundane History - dir. Anocha Suwichakornpong

Slow

The fleeting glow of a supernova, a baby being cut out of its mother’s stomach wailing and covered in blood and viscera, a paralyzed boy who had dreams of flight and of art, and the man who helps him face the rain.

When I tell you I was sobbing by the end of this film… I really shouldn’t have watched this in the living room. Roommate walked in like what the fuck. And I had to do my best to explain that I was crying at the artistic juxtaposition of birth and death.

Films like these come once in a lifetime. Anocha Suwicharkornpong is a filmmaker I will bear the cross for. Only a mad artistic soul could think that placing post-rock over a c-section would change someone’s life–and they’re right.

How do we recover from the very fact we are born?

How can our lives be so guided by grand, unseen forces and yet so mundane that we barely notice them passing us by? How can our flesh be made of the same particles as dead stars?

Humans belong to the cosmos. 9/10.

Closer - dir. Mike Nichols

Romance/Drama

Absolutely bizarre film. So much about this should not work but does. Films of these nature typically rely on the screenplay and thus appear visually uninteresting but there’s a real style and flair to the presentation that makes this a really rewarding film to experience. Like watching a soap opera play out in under two hours. Super fun movie to watch with friends, so much weirdness and strangely captivating drama at play. Just horrible people being horrible… REALLY reminds me of Ozon in that sense, the black comedy of sex and sociopathy. And yet there’s something human about it all? 7/10.

Kaboom - dir. Gregg Araki

Sci-Fi/Teen/Sex Comedy

Gregg Araki’s artistic vision distilled to perfection. Potentially his best for me, though Kaboom is in serious contention with Mysterious Skin. The latter is far more reserved, though, so much like its title, Kaboom is exploding with creativity. Almost an overwhelming film to write about.

Love the soundtrack. I can watch a million more films with psychedelic shoegaze indietronica vibes laced throughout and I will probably love every single one. I feel this film is tailor-made to my sensibilities. Araki’s college film, a spiritual successor to the Teenage Apocalypse trilogy. There’s a great review here that suggests Messiah (James Duval’s character) is an older version of his character from Nowhere. I could buy that. Thematically this deals with a lot of the same postmodern teenage angst, only transposed onto a slightly older demographic.

This would’ve been a straight up 10/10 movie for me if the ending didn’t let me down lmao. Pretty much my only criticism. I adore this film so much. Exactly what I wanted it to be, only better. Classic themes of destiny refracted through a digital, campy lens.

Gregg Araki is officially a top 10 director for me. Maybe top 5. 9/10.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle - dir. Peter Yates

Crime

Boring dialogue, boring characters, boring compositions.

If this was shot in digital and none of the characters had Boston accents this would hold a 2.5 average. I’d put money on it. 3/10.

27 Dresses - dir. Anne Fletcher

RomCom

Most Caucasian movie of all time, enjoyed it tho! 5/10.

Dance Party, USA - dir. Aaron Katz

Mumblecore/Coming-of-Age

Teenagers are mini-sociopaths and this film understands that.

I made some pretty bad mistakes as a teen and I related to Gus awakening to his own lack of empathy, realizing when Jessica calls him out that he’s living without considering consequences or other people.

Lots of really dumb reviews here as expected for a film that doesn’t outright condemn its problematic protagonist. Don’t think it condones him either. More of a third-person view of casual adolescent cruelty. 6/10.

Longlegs - dir. Osgood Perkins

Horror

A horror movie that is actually scary. God bless. A horror movie that isn’t “hey guys what if we used a ghost/demon/paranormal entity to represent depression/mommy issues/daddy issues/trauma/anxiety/mental illnesses?” A horror movie that has the balls to truly fixate on the paranormal, to acknowledge evil as a seeping force beyond iconography and symbol. A horror movie with excellent compositions and more importantly excellent vibes.

Raging Bull - dir. Martin Scorsese

Biographical/Sports

Pulverizing, relentless, animalistic masculinity. Some have compared Raging Bull to Rocky, for obvious reasons. Rocky views boxing as means for a man to reclaim his emotional inner world, but Raging Bull sees boxing as fury and flesh, a meat grinder that lets hollow men release all of their suppressed fury onto the canvas.

Robert De Niro is downright horrifying in this film, blood-curdling in the way he not only brutalizes his opponents in the ring but in how he takes those same relentless tactics out into the real world. Pure, unadulterated corrosive masculinity. Pound for pound one of the most unpleasant films ever made, and I mean that as a compliment. 9/10.

Between the Temples - dir. Nathan Silver

Comedy/Drama

Cute movie. Went to see this with some friends and they kept looking at me as the token Jew in the group. What’s funny is that I’ve never identified too closely with the Jewish label. It’s integral to who I am but a lot of the Woody Allenisms just barely escape me. It’s like I recognize the joke, I recognize some of it in my own family, but it’s more amusing than gratifying to see Jews on screen in the way they tend to be.

This is yet another movie that would’ve undoubtedly been a favorite of mine as a teenager. The overlapping, naturalistic dialogue and the obvious 70’s vibes–Harold and Maude but even Jewier, recuperating from life’s tribulations through the chaotic innocence of an elderly lady.

Kind of a random observation but I like that Benny is portrayed as desirable. Awkward, perhaps, but nonetheless desirable. There aren’t many examples of Jewish characters that are truly depicted as sexy. Jason Schwartzman simply has the Jew rizz… the Jizz, maybe. 6/10.

Copkiller - dir. Roberto Faenza

Crime

Kinda gay but ultimately nothing crazy. 4/10.

Sombre - dir. Philippe Grandrieux

Experimental/Horror

Succeeds as a completely stomach-churning, animalistic experience. One of the more downright avant-garde films I’ve seen in a minute. What’s interesting is that it still taps into the genre psyche, playing on the audience’s fear and dread, even if nothing truly disturbing is ever “shown”. The kids screaming in the beginning sets the tone for the rest of the film in that it instills an immediate sense of unease… you see kids, you hear high-pitched screaming, so your nerves are shot, but then as the scene lingers you realize the kids are… happy? Laughing? And based on what they’re saying, you can assume they’re watching a horror film, much like you are. And yet there is something discordant about it, something utterly repugnant.

I’m at a bit of a loss for “analysis” of the film. Best I can say is that I felt pretty much exactly what Grandrieux probably wanted me to feel. 7/10.

Them - dir. Xavier Palud

Horror/Home Invasion

Fun fact: after this movie came out, the Romanian government lifted their abortion ban.

Just kidding.

Pretty effective home invasion movie. Third act is where shit gets real. 6/10.

Welcome to New York - dir. Abel Ferrara

Drama

The rules of the game never changed, the aesthetics did. Monarchs used to be able to get away with anything at the expense of their subjects, and they still do, except now we call them capitalists and they have to endure some ineffectual backlash only to get away with their crimes scot free, bail posted, under the rug. You either have power or you’re at the mercy of the powerful, and no matter how idealistic one can be, power perverts.

Devereaux could’ve been a faceless, sordid animal, but Ferrara goes out of his way to establish his origins as a romantic liberal with political ambitions and a desire to take France in the right direction. And he tells us what happened, too. Devereaux saw power, saw its inescapability and used that to justify taking it for himself. When you have power, the rules just don’t apply to you. The rules were made for the subjects, not the monarchs. 8/10.

RRR - dir. SS Rajamouli

Historical/Action/Epic

Pure kino.

Rajamouli is back. I haven’t been this excited watching one of his films since I first saw Eega. His action films are more or less unmatched by pretty much anyone else in the game. Across those two films he’s just constantly finding ways to spin the fight scene. Man against fly, two superhuman Indian bros against an entire British army.

It’s just a joy to watch. I don’t know what else to say.

Vive L’Amour - dir. Tsai Ming-liang

Slow

It is impossible to isolate humans from the context of their environment, and as my girlfriend said while we watched this movie; the apartment becomes a getaway for our three miserable Taipeians to shed their old identities. Their lives outside the apartment are cruelly repetitive, drab, and lifeless, but within the apartment they behave audaciously.

Tsai Ming-liang is terrifically good at examining the relationships between souls and thee spaces they inhabit, almost all of his shots emphasize the lingering distance between their human subjects and their surroundings. For me it was often difficult to tell where a scene was taking place, such is the way Tsai fragments Taipei into a series of rooms and locales. His three central souls drift around, occasionally colliding, fumbling around their desires, mostly at the fringe of human experience. Workplace parties, gaggles of teens at shopping malls, the onslaught of illegal street merchants hawking their wares before the police show up.

Abbas Kiarostami once said that he preferred films that put the audience to sleep, films that weren’t so concerned with holding your attention but instead lulled you into slumber for you to reconstruct them later. This is how I feel about every Tsai Ming-liang movie. My attention wanders, my eyes are held ajar only scantly… but I have never managed to shake his films out of my consciousness. 8/10.

Jacquot de Nantes - dir. Agnès Varda

Biographical/Coming-of-Age

Agnes Varda is two for two on films I respect more than I actually enjoy. Jacquot is no doubt a touching love letter to her husband and fellow filmmaker, but I really felt every minute of this runtime.

That said, there really is a lot to adore about this artwork. I saw a review here once that said something about Varda’s ability to make filmmaking look approachable in an inspiring way and I certainly saw that here. This film made me want to pick up my phone and start shooting more. Let go of limitations and just see the world through the camera. Fuck my needlessly writerly brain and all. 6/10.

Manhunter - dir. Michael Mann

Thriller

God decides who lives and who dies and that power brings him joy. If this is the case, then are the police God? Does their ability to inflict death on those they deem deserving of it absolve them of their humanity as an institution? Ridiculous though it may sound, this film posits that yes, serial killers and the police exist in tandem. The carceral state perpetuates itself by creating deranged boogeymen that threaten larger society, and only the Gods in blue have the ability to protect you.

Manhunter deals in this psychological duality–and I like the word duality here, since Michael Mann seems to love it too. Cop against criminal. Two expressions of the same trauma. The desire to have power. Graham and the Tooth Fairy live out their fantasies through images, Graham bursts through the glass and is immediately killed, but in his last breaths he imagines himself with his family, who he pushed away out of trauma. He imagines himself as a man whose unfinished business is now finished, but the nature of crime is self-perpetuating, the nature of trauma is replicating and infectious so that by trying to cure it through violent recursion you inevitably displace it onto others. Graham’s boy will grow up without a father.

The Tooth Fairy, Francis, likewise envisions himself as desired and surrounded by love and affection. A demented lost soul seeking to repair trauma by violence. Graham is tasked with finding him and he takes the task knowing it will destroy him. Manhunter is self-destructive. It implodes on itself.

Pain & Gain - dir. Michael Bay

Action/Satire

Searing American satire, a version of Southland Tales under Michael Bay’s hypermasculinized, formalistic machismo. We’re a nation built on dreams of blood and power. You can supersize yourself with steroids but you can’t win the game of America without being a “do-er” and even if you “do” you can’t “do” too much for fear of upsetting the precious karmic balance of rich and poor. These guys made their way into upper suburbia but ended up failing because they got greedy and set their aspirations higher than that. The uber-wealthy tell you that you can be like them, but the most you’ll ever be is a blip. I truly have empathy for these three knuckleheads because even though they’re all psychos they basically represent the unfiltered materialism that Americans are all bred to thirst for. The frenzied desire to be like the rest–no, to be MORE than the rest. NOT like the rest, BETTER.

Florida is the greatest setting of all time if you want to tell a story about the philosophy of America and its national identity. You really can’t go wrong with waterfront communities and strip clubs. Everything is loud, sweaty, in your face, sleazy… America distilled to the finest essence. 8/10.

Collateral - dir. Michael Mann

Thriller

Debated strongly between a 7/10 and an 8/10, in the end I’m settling with a 7 because as much as I love the style, it feels almost like a lesser version of late-style Tony Scott. Mann isn’t as bombastic though, I suppose, and that’s okay.

The digital nightlife of Los Angeles looks textured as fuck. I wish the camera was less shaky at points but there were some shots that hit different. Pretty much everything outside of the taxi itself was fire. 7/10.

The Discarnates - dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi

Behind you is nostalgia, comfy and quaint, and you can lapse into it and lose track of the present if you’re not careful. Ahead of you is fantasy, seductive and invigorating, and this too can pull you out of the present if you’re not careful enough.

Obayashi’s sentimentality is contagious. I was wrapped in that cocoon with the protagonist to the point where I didn’t even see the final revelation coming. I wanted to believe in the nostalgia and fantasy, but you can only live and love life if you’re in the present.

A simple moral, but beautiful nonetheless. 7/10.