Movies I Watched August 2025 - Greenfield Writes

Céline and Julie Go Boating - dir. Jacques Rivette

Never have I felt like more of an asshole for giving this 2 hours and being bored for both of them. I legitimately want to cry out of frustration, not because the film is horrible but because I as a person was incapable of being moved by its whimsy. So many people whose opinions I respect love this movie, and I thought I would too, and it makes me deeply sad that I don’t. The reasons they give for loving it make logical sense to me. This is about magic. This is about female friendship. This is about soulmates, about taking life by the horns. I can see that, yes. But I can’t connect. For the life of me, I can’t make that emotional leap. I’m going to give myself grace and say maybe it’s because I’m going through one of the worst depressive episodes I’ve ever been in. Put it on the docket for rewatch in 10 years.

Jaws - dir. Steven Spielberg

Saw this again in IMAX and lost my shit, especially at the first scene, which charts a macabre funeral for hippie kids on the beach. We never see these kids again, their free love is a drop of blood in the bucket, and soon thereafter the question moves on to how this carnage can be politicized.

There are islanders, and there are non-islanders, and this dichotomy is frequently emphasized (albeit in subtle ways, by background characters and chatter). There are the business owners who profit from the tourism and want the beaches to stay open and the summer visitors, whose lives are endangered by a prowling monster on the shores.

When the shark is killed, John Williams’ score isn’t triumphant, it’s melancholy. At least, that’s how it sounded to me. The shark forced these people to confront their own contradictions, and with the shark gone they will be left open-endedly fumbling for the truth of the universe. So many times throughout Jaws, characters undulate between ration and reaction. Mom says the boy will be fine in the boat, she opens the book her husband is reading and flips comedically to yelling at the boy to get out of the boat. When Spielberg teases the audience with the fake-out shark, he is consciously playing them like a fiddle, not for the sake of the prank but to expose the underlying contradiction of the reaction.

In cinema, we know what we see is not “real” but nevertheless we buy into it. In some way, is this not a similar fear to the fictional townspeople, who politicize the shark into a frenzy? Who refuse or agree to act? That is to say, do we not create our own monsters out of sensory input and sensational imagination? 8/10.

Friendship - dir. Andrew DeYoung

Feels like an overlong Quentin Dupieaux movie. The worst, least funny person you know is legitimately convinced it’s changing the game. Discomfort can only carry you so far.

Saint Maud - dir. Rose Glass

Faith for narcissists. If you want to really observe God at work, stop thinking about your personal relationship with HIM all the damn time, stop hyper-obsessing on how he’s treating YOU and start looking at other people, because God is not PTSD or OCD or depression or social anxiety or any of the numerous excuses losers use to justify coddling themselves and everyone around them to death but actually expressed through the world around you, nature, society, sex, etc. You and everyone else are manifestations of divinity, so this film to me represents a total misunderstanding of what makes faith so affirming to people. As far as I can tell there is functionally no difference between Maud and your average Taylor Swift fan, but at least the swiftie is getting laid.

I think the kneejerk response to the above paragraph will be “that’s the point of the movie” but I refuse that manneristic argument. It’s the same issue with The Substance, if this supposedly tortured existence is alleviated by God/The Substance, how come we never see the benefits? How come we never get the sense that Maud’s actually being liberated in some way by her faith? Glass is already framing the whole damn movie like it’s being projected out of her mind so shouldn’t she be doing more than just writhing around every few minutes? Shouldn’t the film be more beautiful when Maud’s belief is strong?

I hate movies like this so much. I swear I don’t want to be an asshole but this is absolutely the worst kind of horror movie. It does that A24 thing where it’ll have a droning pulsating synth score matched with rapid sensory cuts to mimic the feeling of a panic attack or anxiety (worst fucking 2020’s cinema trope ever, our decade of film would have you thinking every single person is walking around trying to order a drink without pissing themselves), then once shit promises to get interesting we cut to the next scene. I’m tired of it. Horror should be fun or at least spooky, not a failing simulation of mental illness. 3/10.

Zabriskie Point - dir. Michelangelo Antonioni

I can’t find the quote now, but Paul Schrader once talked about Mishima and why the movie was so Japanese in nature as opposed to his American self-destructive odysseys. Roughly, he says, that Japanese culture is older and more mature, so when a man is wayward from society he takes it out on himself (which is why Mishima commits suicide in the end). American society, by contrast, is immature, and so when an American man finds himself adrift without purpose and fueled by rage, he takes it out on everybody else.

This analysis felt relevant to Zabriskie Point, which sees Antonioni take the concept of America head-on, romanticizing the destructive futility of the mid-century progressive movement. The swinging sixties brought to a screeching halt, as sensuousness reigns supreme over politics, as the goals are brought to their heels by business and opportunity. The beginning of the film sees white perspectives surrounding black perspectives, and it is also the most directly political section of the movie. Once the white characters are isolated from the action-driven black voices, they are increasingly diffused of their motivation to act. Instead, their youthful immaturity comes to the fore.

Not to say that Antonioni is criticizing the kids, I think he finds romanticism in their sexual tumbling in the desert heat, just as he found beauty in the industrial hell of post-war Italy. What I do see when I watch this film is hopeless protest, fantasies of explosion. The film becomes a means of excoriating what cannot be done in reality. As our values become subsumed by our career and family goals, our only outlet for rage at our society is film itself, or fantasy. 8/10.

Distant - dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan

When Ceylan pushes in at the end it is an insistence on the inner psychology of the character, something he would grow more subtle with (for the better, I’d say) over time. I love slow cinema, but I don’t think Ceylan fully knows how to make it work here, and his skill as a filmmaker would only improve as he figured out how to infuse real drama into his narratives. This is an impressive early outing, though, and showcases the promise he had as a director. 7/10.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three - dir. Joseph Sargent

It’s alright, Walter Matthau is fun, but Tony Scott’s remake is a million times more interesting. 5/10.

The Gold Rush - dir. Charlie Chaplin

Curiously, not much of this film revolves around the process of panning for gold, and it also takes place in Alaska, not California. It would have been far easier to set this in a dry climate so I have to imagine Chaplin was already planning all of these snow bits, all the psychological impact seeing the tramp in the cold would have on the audience. And it works. I watched this with my parents and we got our feelings played with.

It’s a little bit too manipulative for me to fully love the way I did Modern Times. I found the whole romance Forrest Gumpy (poor guy gets his heart trampled by a dame who has his heart almost to an irrational excess) but perhaps the naivete of the tramp in pursuing Georgia is itself a statement on the optimism of the film. Thousands trot out to find gold with nothing but the clothes on their back and a dream. Who’s to say the world doesn’t belong to those fools, the tramps of the world? 8/10.

Ploy - dir. Pen-ek Ratanaruang

All of this film is the hotel, airport, funeral parlor. The places where transience occurs, life into death, one locale to the next, hallways between rooms of temporary occupants. Dreams into waking nightmares, transformations into murders. All captured with the same unrelenting quietude, some of the best the Thai New Wave has to offer. 8/10.

The Scent of Green Papaya - dir. Trần Anh Hùng

Slippery like the seeds of a papaya, with a residue that coats your fingers and leaves you groping for answers. What changed? How’d it happen? Was the web being spun as they spoke or was it always hanging in the background like a family heirloom?

The film is plotted around cages and containers. Beautiful objects left in tatters and shards, people living amongst the ornaments and becoming the ornaments. Cooking. Cleaning. Watching. Every character is on autopilot, slave and master equally stunted.

Ants struggling to escape the wax as it hardens around them. Crickets kept in a tiny cage. A lizard at the end of a string used as a mean-spirited prank. Food that tastes funny.

Don’t cut the papaya open. It’s not part of the process. 7/10.

The Naked Gun - dir. Akiva Schaffer

Gen X brainrot.

Some really funny bits, but this felt plodded. Not the same kineticism as Schaffer’s other comedies, which are like my favorite of all time. Are we drifting towards an auteurist understanding of Akiva Schaffer… I mustn’t. I did notice a couple of absurdist similarities to Hot Rod and Popstar. He might’ve been the right guy for this remake. I don’t know if they fully “get” Nielsen, though, at least from what I saw in Airplane. 5/10.

Weapons - dir. Zach Cregger

Virgin Suicides as outright horror, a monumentally good movie that is right on the pulse of the current moment more so than Eddington (I understand fully why people are drawing comparisons). I also get the Stephen King comparisons. The whole time I felt like this was if Stephen King made a Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie. It’s been a long, long time since I felt chilled to the bone by horror. When I was closing the blinds before settling into bed I had my ass puckered, which is the exact way you feel watching Pulse or Cure. Like if you stare long enough into the darkness something will move or flicker.

It’s the closest I’ve felt a studio formalist has come to achieving something bordering on avant-garde without losing themselves to self-indulgence and gratuity. Cregger plays in the sandbox of this self-contained town without getting sand all over the camera. We are pitched into the tune of these townsfolk as they navigate the web of deceit that their society is built upon. This can be a metaphor with countless possibilities, but I choose to look at it through direct lens. There is a town with stories that they keep under the rug because facing the truth means dredging up the muck and filth. It’s telling that the climax is punctuated with “the yard’s a mess!” Not the most subtle of “evil suburbia” allusions, not that I ever asked for subtlety. If I am entertained, I am entertained, and this was so thoroughly gripping I never could look away for even a moment. 9/10.

Only Yesterday - dir. Isao Takahata

I am not a fan of Studio Ghibli slice of life movies. Gimme Mononoke, gimme Ponyo, gimme Totoro, gimme Nausicaa, anything but Japanese nostalgia porn.

Identification of a Woman - dir. Michelangelo Antonioni

Nothing actually happens. Guided by conversation and movement alone, Identification ceases to be exploration and comes to a stop the way a train arriving at its final destination would, the hulking engines cranked to a halt.

As a final film for Antonioni it is strange and satisfying in a way that none of his previous work is. The synth score is exactly what I always felt would most suit his fragmented modernistic unrealities, it suits the alienated romanticism of his characters.

I want to rewatch his filmography from start to finish when I’m, like, 20 years older. Put a pin in that, call me back later. 8/10.

The Terminator - dir. James Cameron

Great fucking time with a killer score. A little bit too 80s for my liking unfortunately, like with most Cameron films it winds up being far too much about the execution of action than the sentimentality in between. This is fine when I am heavily invested in the exploration of an especially mind-bending sci-fi premise, not so much in an attempt to bridge a romantic gap between a consumerist present and a dystopian future. I have to admit I am also not a fan of the kind of time travel this film presents, it’s why Back to the Future never worked for me (grandfather paradox). HOWEVER this film is better in that sense because it’s implied throughout that the time travel is actually the very cause of the future that the time travel is trying to prevent, so it works in the end. 7/10.

Bullet Ballet - dir. Shinya Tsukamoto

Shinya Tsukamoto movies are stylistically anathema to my tastes. I’ve tried for the third time to enjoy them and I keep feeling like I’m hitting my head against a brick wall. The handheld aesthetic sucks. All his movies are tryhard shit. I tell you I WANT to like them. I WANT to be a fan of this noir-punk bullshit so fucking bad. But it just sucks.

Caught Stealing - dir. Darren Aronofsky

I’m still pretty drunk so this review might be a bit incoherent

Shit is gas, not sure what else to say…

I mean, look. I didn’t get the Austin Butler hype til now but he’s got great command of the screen. And this is what a classic, yknow, “good” movie used to be… an excuse for directors and actors to put shit together, make something happen… like, sure… story isn’t perfect. It doesn’t deliver a clean message or whatever. I get that. But here’s the thing… why should it? Does a movie have to deliver a message? I think if the vibe is compelling enough (here I feel it is) I don’t need it to give me a thesis statement, so to speak.

Howard Hawks said… “a good movie is 3 good scenes and no bad ones.” I would say this movie lives up to the Hawks standard. For the most part. If I am to nitpick I wish the ending brought it all together a bit more… feels like the character arc is unearned to a degree. He just keeps running away from his problems, and if that’s the “theme”… doesn’t quite stick the landing.

I also feel there is a deliberately oppositional framework Aronofsky builds by making the main guy this classic American type, you know, blonde and blue eyed and from a small town around the NorCal area. Put him in New York amongst the punks and the hot brown chicks and the crazy Jewish motherfuckers and the Cubans and the fucking Russians and shit, put him in there and shake him up. I actually like this idea, I just wish Aronofsky went the distance and delivered on something. Not sure what it is I would’ve wanted specifically, just… SOMETHING. I thought towards the end the idea was “get the goy to assimilate into Judaic wisdom” but nahhhh. Which is fine. I’m just saying, I kept thinking “this has to be going somewhere” and it never really went the somewhere I was hoping.

I still had a lot of fun. Sex scene was genuinely quite sexy. Love seeing good sex in my movies. I love sex. Austin Butler, you have my attention buddy. Zoe Kravitz whooaaahahhh. Need more Jewish gangsters. Audience also really seemed to enjoy this so it was kinda nice being alone at the theatre surrounded by people having a similar experience to me. I hope to find some movie buddies in this new city soon but til then I’ll enjoy the solace of the cinema on my lonesome. 7/10.

Splitsville - dir. Michael Angelo Covino

Defining the new man. Defining the new relationship. A raucous treatise on how insecurity breeds insanity and instability. This Covino guy has serious talent. He borrows a lot of tricks from Paul Thomas Anderson but he repurposes them for comedy and that makes them less grating. I like Kyle Marvin as a screen presence a lot. All four of these people are so fun to watch, Dakota Johnson in particular sort of surprised me! She excels at playing the straight man. 7/10.

Daniel Isn’t Real - dir. Adam Egypt Mortimer

I suppose I enjoyed the vaguely Lovecraftian angle this psychotrash sub-A24 venture took, it was a lot better than your standard “elevated” “psychological” horror fare. I still don’t find this kind of trauma-horror, guy goes totally batshit insane type thing very compelling. Not for me, I guess. 5/10.

9 Souls - dir. Toshiaki Toyoda

Into the purgatory we go. From the regimented to the free, for better and for worse. Reclaim the direction of your soul, or die trying. Mostly the latter. A penance for upsetting the scales. I watched this and fell in love with cinema again. As I move from one city to another and begin this next chapter of my life, it was somehow fitting that this movie snuck up on me as a suggestion by my dad and brother for the last movie night we’ll have together in a long time. I love movies, I love my family. 9/10.

The Wolf of Wall Street - dir. Martin Scorsese

I have never done cocaine but I imagine it must feel something like the first 2/3rds of this movie. Which is why it’s so sobering to see the last argument between Naomi and Jordan, it’s one of the few scenes that Scorsese plays straight.

The trick Scorsese pulls in almost every one of his movies is making you believe you are watching a character “arc” when in fact you are merely watching the illusion of power tear away at the facade of truth the character initially holds. Ray Liotta “starts” Goodfellas a “good-natured” kid and “ends up” a wife-abusing gangster. Quotes because it’s bullshit. Same with Casino, same with the Irishman, same with Taxi Driver.

Where Wolf of Wall Street differs then is in its methodology and relentless formalism. From the outset Belfort’s “humble” origin story makes us laugh. He shows up on a bus to New York and immediately gets a job on Wall Street. In the wake of the recession this is anything but sympathetic. His first wife is a footnote, and his rise to power seems completely inevitable, stripping it of any of the satisfaction we’d get from watching otherwise “normal” American immigrant types (non-WASPs) get their mitts on a slice of the pie. Scorsese doesn’t even highlight Belfort’s real-life Jewishness, as highlighting it would create a character where he deliberately refuses to. He does not want Belfort to be a fleshed out human with aspirations and relatable values, so any ethnic identifiers must be done away with.

Another thing I would like to note is Belfort’s fate, his ending, how the law deals with him. See, it’s not illegal for Belfort to be exorbitantly wealthy or to scam working class Americans out of their money, the American government isn’t acting out of some benevolent interest to their constituents; what’s actually illegal is that Belfort got too damn cocky doing it. A real oligarch knows how to keep quiet and exert their power privately. In essence Belfort is the opposite of the sigma male archetype his legions of cultists make him out to be, he is too loud and too brash to actually accomplish anything in a geopolitical sense.

What Belfort represents, then, is not the power brokers of America (your Koch brothers or your Lockheed Martins) but a way for the rich to placate the masses. Belfort is “one of them”, an American male who got everything he wanted and more. He is a facsimile of the American dream, a useful idiot who can be used to export an image of our values globally (which is why the last thing we see is a seminar in New Zealand. He’s really just an asset to the American government and their interests at that point. 8/10.

Tommaso - dir. Abel Ferrara

I feel like a spectator in the new city. I feel my shoes are too tight and my collar too loose. Staring too much, passed by glances. Out of place, out of time, out of touch. I miss the embryonic warmth, now the AC-less apartment chokes me, waking me earlier than I wish. The sunlight forcing me out into the streets. Like a vampire I crave the darkness of the theater, and there I shut my eyes and lull off.

Tommaso puts all his effort into upholding his newfound identity. He is sober now, not an addict. He is a teacher, an artist, a father, a husband. His outbursts increasingly vicious as the identity wears thin. Where does the energy go when it is not expelled oneirically? The filmmaker imagines things which are not there. Tommaso recounts a story in which he was beaten within an inch of his life, and to him it seemed like a dream. Our nightmares vindicate us of ourselves.

And yet the film contains a profoundly meditative quality, so totally transfixing that I felt through its tense rhythms I was exhumed of my own isolation. It is possibly Ferrara’s best work to date. 9/10.

River’s Edge - dir. Tim Hunter

Spiritual successor to Easy Rider, and by extension Out of the Blue. Boomer dreams of free-ridin’ explode by the side of the rode. Boomer hitchhikes to the next motel to start over. Comes back to the great suburbs. River’s Edge inherits this reality. Gen X displacement. The battle has been fought and lost. Mourn your dead friends under the sheen of alienation. Pick up the gun, put it down. 6/10.

Bad Boys - dir. Michael Bay

Michael Bay understands that the real appeal of a movie like this isn’t the action necessarily but watching two guys talk shit, so about 80% of this is devoted to that and the rest gets divvied up between action sequences and OTHER people talk shit. This movie has more sauce in its pinky than most modern action movies have in their whole body. People only hate on Bay because they don’t have sex. 7/10.

Sideways - dir. Alexander Payne

I like not what this movie says but how it says it, as it portrays a defeatist attitude to life that I can’t cosign by any means. I can only abide by so much hetero-nihilism until I crack, luckily Paul Giamatti is one of the greatest of his generation so the wine talk appetizes me intellectually. I appreciate his candor. Payne is one of the best American artists at capturing losers with humanity, even as his Gen X background tinges his work with inescapable nihilism. 8/10.

Taipei Story - dir. Edward Yang

In Edward Yang’s camera there is a sympathy that I don’t detect from other filmmakers of his ilk, a kind of tenderness that offsets his cold detached gaze that makes you question the objectivity of his frame. He gives the game away during that one scored sequence, with the tender piano requiem for the lost souls of his Taipei. Who was I? What am I becoming? To cauterize yourself with time. 8/10.

Limbo - dir. John Sayles

We’re standing at the edge of a riverbank lifted off the ground ever so slightly by the windings of history, documented in stone by the old settlers. We are a lost people. A broken family held together by weaving stitches and duct tape. The wharf we sailed from a memory. We don’t know how this ends.

I usually don’t like these kinds of movies, where the human drama takes center stage over the environment or the mood, but Sayles’ sensitivity and attention to the rhythms of the new Alaskan Americans, the canners and the fishermen, and the lounge singers, feels specifically cinematic and not stagey. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this, even then, until the very, very end.

The old dreams were good dreams. I’m glad we had them. 7/10.

Mahjong - dir. Edward Yang

Yang’s work is not parsable for me at this juncture. See, when I think about my favorite aspects of his work it’s not the rebellion or the violence that I crave but the passion and observance. Edward Yang is at his best when he is studying people going through the motions. Mahjong has these elements but it is beset with cold rage. I cannot meet it where I am right now, so I will leave it with 3 stars for the moment. 6/10.

Stranger Than Paradise - dir. Jim Jarmusch

When Jarmusch mines his specifically Eastern European lineage for theme and cultural setting it reminds me of Bela Tarr, who I am sure must have influenced this film. Long takes in black and white, scenes less connected by storytelling logic than by natural whim, a sense of personal displacement (less mired in rain and mud and piss and shit than Tarr, still dreary in a black coffee on a Monday morning sort of sense).

It makes me wonder how much of it centers around a longing for home, home being “anywhere but here”. I’m as American as you, says Willie, who refuses to speak Hungarian, only to follow his cousin back home to the motherland. Only now, watching Stranger, do I see this theme trail its way across Jarmusch’s filmography, this dead reminder of mid-cultured ennui taking place in the empty spaces smattered through America.

With Jarmusch, it’s difficult to identify the intentionality of anything. His work is Lynchian in that he’s more than happy to let subconscious mutterings take hold of his work and push it into unforeseen directions. Lynch wanted to sit with his work and let it get “dreamy”. I relate to this as an artist, I like to feel as if I am being pulled by the art, not the other way around. The best feeling is when the work escapes your grasp and you have to chase it down. 7/10.

Drive-Away Dolls - dir. Ethan Coen

Okay, so I’m simultaneously pissed off that I listened to the naysayers last year and didn’t watch this, but also relieved because I believe if I did, its appeal would have been entirely lost on me.

What makes Drive Away Dolls so special is in how unremarkable it is on the surface. It is basically a middle-stakes road movie where the focus is on following characters from A to B to C. Your enjoyment will vary based on how much you appreciate hanging out with these silly ass gay women and dumb goons. Personally, I had a great time.

I really hope when we defeat fascism in this country we can go back to getting movies like this, that aren’t so tied to spectacle or IP, but are simply expressions of minor auteur interest. Ethan Coen and his lesbian wife just kinda fucking around. I love it. Can’t wait for Honey Don’t. 7/10.

Poem - dir. Akio Jissoji

This is by far my worst take, but I must be honest with myself.

70’s Japan is some of the most unwatchable cinema there is. I absolutely loathe it. I cannot for the life of me derive any enjoyment from it. It takes staggering willpower for me to even get through it most of the time.

There are exceptions, but generally speaking Japanese New Wave is one of the worst film movements there are. Just excruciating. Anti-vibes, anti-character, anti-story, anti-fun, all political and philosophical allegory. The worst. The most turgid form of art house there is. HATE it. Thank god guys like Jun Ichikawa and Nobuhiko Obayashi saved us in the 80s.

I hope someday I’ll switch up or learn to appreciate symbolism more, but for now, movies like this are basically cancer to me.

Legend - dir. Ridley Scott

How the fuck does this only have a 3.1 on here. Genuinely one of the most beautiful movies ever made in Hollywood. Just exquisite. If any director made this it’d be their best ever but because Ridley Scott is so elite this is just cracking top 5. Cannot believe Tom Cruise used to do roles like this, wish he’d go back to just doing weird shit.

This was so spellbinding. Sensorily luxurious cinema. I wanna watch the theatrical release next time to hear the Tangerine Dream score. 9/10.

Together - dir. Michael Shanks

Unsuprisingly one of the worst top review sections on letterboxd right off the bat. This movie had a few things going for it. Supernatural cults. Well-executed body horror. It’s just a damn shame none of it coalesces into something material and identifiable. Actors are putting in passable work. The script is whatever. Characters don’t feel real, the setting doesn’t feel real. It’s all ideas and metaphors.

Movies used to put a lot of effort into making you believe in the artifice, even if they drew attention to the artifice. We don’t get that any more, we just get bullet points. One-dimensional mental health gestures, check. A few disturbing screen grab moments for the content mills, check. A marketable premise that warrants a cursory click (WHAT IF CODEPENDENCY…. WAS REAL…), check. I don’t really hate this movie, not at all, but do I love it? Do I even LIKE it? I guess it was fun to watch with my girlfriend. As long as we can still kill Tuesday nights, right?

I’m scrolling through some of the reviews and I can’t help but roll my eyes. A movie like this basically presents three options for response; you can treat it as a one-note joke and leave an unfunny one liner to farm likes, you can write a couple of paragraphs that essentially summarize the movie in text form (arguably the more worthless type of review as it is not only unoriginal, and impersonal, but also a gigantic waste of time) or you can do what I am doing and bitch about the state of cinema, which is probably the least productive of all. Take your pick because as far as contemporary film goes that’s the state of “discourse.” 6/10.

A Cure for Wellness - dir. Gore Verbinski

My first review of this movie is in contention for the dumbest thing I’ve ever written. Nothing about this movie is “A24” or “prestige horror”, it’s gothic, it’s folk, it’s something, but it sure as hell is not myopic sub-psychological trash about “trauma” or “grief” or whatever. If anything it is about the weaponization of grief, how buying too much into early onset worldviews leads us to mistaking evil for inner conflict. Sometimes the evil is real, sometimes you have to burn that motherfucker down and ride off into the sunset.

The scene where Volmer tries to make Lockhart think he’s insane by dredging up his trauma struck a chord with me. I am tired of this idea that in order to identify something deplorable we have to prove ourselves rid of the burden of trauma. Fuck that, none of us are defined by our psychology. We are defined by the five goddamn senses, and if something SMELLS like shit and LOOKS like shit, that shit is fucking shit, whether my parents got divorced or not.

It’s about a lot of other things too, which is why this movie stands head and shoulders over its contemporaries, for the mere accomplishment of leaving itself thematically open to interpretation while still functioning as a gripping experience in mystery and worldbuilding. Movies just don’t get much more fun than this, I easily could’ve spent another few hours in its world. 8/10.

The Prince of Egypt - dir. Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, Simon Wells

I am proud of being Jewish, and the cruelty of the Old Testament doesn’t bother me at all. I think the book is a spirited recognition of our world as it is, undergirded by violence, an unbent, unbroken admission of conflict as intended by God. Yes, to free ourselves from shackles we must be willing to commit great acts of violence. It is interesting that so many supposedly Christian Americans condemn protestors for their looting, for their burning, and for their assaults on police officers (not that any of those things happens very often in the United States) but praise the story of Exodus as inspirational. If seen objectively, the plagues unleashed on Egypt are atrocities on an unimaginable, nay, biblical scale.

Hence why reading history and mythology is important, it teaches us what our values are, why we have them, and what we do with them.

In freeing the slaves, Moses atones for his complicity in oppressing them. He sheds his gentility and becomes a Jew. In freeing the slaves, Egypt is punished as a society for the dominion of its leader. When we willingly participate in a cruel society, we are held responsible for it. The ultimate message of the Old Testament (or one of them) is that we are collectively responsible for all of humanity. The measure of God’s children is not the best behaved or the worst behaved, we are not separated into different levels of Hell or Heaven.

When the world is flooded, and God spares only Noah, it is not to “reward” Noah for being good, but to give him the ultimate responsibility of bringing forth a new humanity. God’s chosen people are not chosen because of their virtues, they are chosen to carry out the will of God, a burden that destroys them as much as it liberates them. Hence the tragedy of Moses severing his very real and sentimental connection to his older brother. In order to do what must be done, he must shed his previous identity. Christianity instructs its followers to save people for the metaphysical afterlife, Judaism instructs its followers to bear the moral burden of the world as it is in the material. Jesus died for our sins, Moses lived for them. 7/10.

Honey Don’t! - dir. Ethan Coen

Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke are still operating in a similar mode to Drive-Away Dolls, but Honey Don’t feels more in line with a Coens’ vision; smart nihilism for a dying empire. The left-field turn towards the end at first bewildered me, as I thought about it more I made peace with it. Honey is a hero not because she loves her fellow women but because she loves them unconditionally. We can’t let ourselves be molded by our trauma, we must seek to do good even when the waters are murky. 7/10.

Fresh - dir. Boaz Yakin

Ending damn near had me bumping the score way up. Christ almighty what a gut punch. It doesn’t feel saccharine or forced either, nothing about the movie feels sadistic by any means so when Mike finally breaks it’s so tough. You are reminded of his boyhood in an instant, and even his good for nothing father doesn’t know what to make of it. 6/10.

Atonement - dir. Joe Wright

I almost thought this was one of the few W’s in the history of British cinema, but rest assured Joe Wright tosses in enough gimmickry to make up for any perceived cultural talent.

I was a big fan of this book as a young teenager and I think on a certain level I relate deeply to Briony. I relate to Robby as well but mostly I relate to this difficult-to-parse idea of how old do you have to be to know the difference between good and bad? At what point do we hold people accountable? It’s tough for me to really say. Most would say around the late teenage years but, I dunno, I see a lot of 17 year olds who have, at best, a tenuous grasp on the implications of their words and actions. And even when I recollect my 18 year old self’s attitude, it feels foreign. Like someone else did it using my body as a vessel.

So point is I really get Briony. I get her guilt, I get her flights of fancy, I get her lying for attention, I get all of it. Seeing the numerous reviews dogpiling on her makes me sad, because yes, she IS just a kid, and yes, it IS tragedy but nobody deserves to be punished their whole life for a mistake. 6/10.

Searching for Sugar Man - dir. Malik Bendjelloul

I think most of the “search” is kind of boring, what I wanted from this film was Rodriguez talking his shit and basking in the beauty of his music (which my girlfriend showed me to get me to watch this doc). So the best scenes are undeniably the concert, or hearing the perspectives of his family members. What a soul, what an artist. I remember the first time I heard Sandrevan Lullaby I was awestruck. “Who is this guy?” I asked Masha. The more I get my answer the more music I wish he made. 7/10.

Relaxer - dir. Joel Potrykus

The poster makes this seem like a much wilder ride than it ends up being, which is just pornographic patheticism. If you like watching a dude rot on a couch for an hour and a half then this might be for you, I felt it could’ve been less faux-mumblecore and more psychedelic, or at least funny.

Personal Shopper - dir. Olivier Assayas

Yeah, I don’t know about this one. Don’t know about Kristen Stewart as an actor. Don’t know if it comes together in the end. Don’t know what the meat and potatoes of it all is. Something something grief. Something something THE UNKNOWN, DESIRE. I don’t really feel it, although it did have some terrific little moments and motifs. 6/10.

The Banshees of Inisherin - dir. Martin McDonagh

Martin McDonagh’s movies are like “Hey this isn’t too bad” but I cannot say literally anything else about them. Cute! Interesting! Says something about masculinity and death! 6/10.

The Motel - dir. Michael Kang

Cute, not sure how much I liked the dialogue. Felt like it was trying a little too hard. I miss this era of American indie movies, though. Lots of empty spaces and outsider vibes. 6/10.

Cape Fear - dir. Martin Scorsese

Features the longest second act of all time even if the payoff is De Niro losing his fucking mind and going full biblical southern portend of doom. Like with all Scorsese movies it’s about American society vs the American underbelly, this time he frames it through a sleazy paranoiac thriller about Southern values, totally psychosexual and totally batshit. 6/10.

Predator - dir. John McTiernan

When the jungle comes alive to kill the invaders. You’d be surprised how much this movie sets the blueprint for something like Tropical Malady. Most of it is literally just Arnold running around the jungle like a madman playing cat and mouse with the Predator, soaked in sweat and mud and blood. I recently had the opportunity to act in a horror film and it was a pain in the ass to get sticky fake blood on my hands. You end up feeling like you’ve actually been through some shit because over the course of a night all manner of debris will stick to it. So I can only imagine how rough Arnold must have felt doing night shoots covered in shit. He is a highly devoted physical performer, nothing but respect. 7/10.

AVP: Alien vs. Predator - dir. Paul W.S. Anderson

Ritual vs Chaos, or how violence across the universe falls into how delineated and regulated civilizations can make it. Early into the film, when our crew is wandering an abandoned whaling post they are frightened by what turns out to be only a penguin. The humans exploring the alien pyramid are much like this penguin, simple creatures wandering something they do not fully understand. And this, in my view, has always been one of the cruxes of “Alien” as a story, or more broadly, science fiction at large.

I’m a little shocked at how well PWSA understands the appeal of Alien. By my books he’s the only one who understands it nearly as well as Ridley Scott, and the fact that Aliens holds more esteemed a reputation than AVP is a crime. James Cameron never came even close to “getting it” and Aliens should be struck from the record as an example of how Hollywood tropes utterly fail science-fiction at every turn. You can’t just turn up the volume, it’s not just noise, sci-fi is more than just guns and setpieces. Sci-Fi is mystery, it’s exploration, it’s derelict ships and ancient civilizations, it’s the stuff we don’t understand, it’s everything AVP is; ritual beyond comprehension.

Ritual vs. Chaos, or why humans (cornered animals) recognize their best bet is siding with calculated violence (i.e. violence with a clear narrative) as opposed to unbiased, chaotic violence (the violence with no meaning, violence as an end to itself).

The xenomorphs are creatures whose sole purpose is to extinguish life. They lack sapience, and in that sense their understanding of the universe is purer than all other players in the film; kill or be killed. The hubris of the humans comes in their need to understand and to explore. A consistent theme throughout the franchise is that this is nothing but folly. Each and every time humans seek to understand or act on curiosity they are brutally punished.

The Predators are little better. They, like, the xenomorphs, segment the universe into a binary: predator or prey. It’s one method to ail your civilization of its misery in the deep dark but that’s all it is, a ritual, a method, a way to metaphorically hoist yourself above the waves and row your boat to safe shores. An illusion that they perpetuate through myth and through arrogance, so of course their final punishment is to have brought a xenomorph on board with them, and to have their backs turned as it’s revealed. In this universe, you are better off the xenomorph than you are as part of some self-deluded civilization that claims to have risen above the violent, unfeeling chaos.

In other words; you are better off the weapon than the wielder. 9/10.

Presence - dir. Steven Soderbergh

The world’s least scary horror movie smooshed together with the world’s least compelling family drama. What are we doing here? Why is the main villain of a horror movie a poorly written white kid? I thought maybe there’d be some reveal with the suspiciously nice dad but I suppose that would have been too interesting for a Soderbergh movie. The guy is the king of making you think he’s taking risks without actually taking any. Nothing here happens that could remotely disturb or unsettle anybody. It’s like America’s most boring studio auteur watched Kiyoshi Kurosawa and thought “yo let me do that.” How about don’t. 3/10.

Predator: Killer of Killers - dir. Dan Trachtenberg

I hated nearly every second of this–the medium, the approach, the dialogue, the storytelling decisions, legitimately nothing about this piece of shit works because it misunderstands goddamn everything about Predator. The concept, to me, does not work in animation because the appeal of the original Predator (and other takes on it like AVP) is that we are seeing real people interact with the uncanny. Worse yet, this movie uses the abhorrent Arcane art style. Everything about this movie screams reddit. Just awful. Awful, awful, awful.

Each character sucks too. From the stupid “generational trauma” angle of the viking to the stupid “pointlessness of violence/toxic masculinity” angle of the samurai, to the most pandering depiction of Latin-Americans I’ve seen since the Turbo gif of the guy making the worst taco you’ve ever seen in your life. Quite obviously written or at least focus group-tested by white people. Possible influence from ChatGPT? Hard to tell. It’s all so pedestrian. I hated it. Christ. Every action scene feels weightless and yet also convinced of its own gravitas. Deeply cringe on a level that resonates through my soul.

I think the fact that this has a 3.8 and AVP has a 2.6 is lowkey fucking disgusting. All of you are morons (you know who you are). I hate you all and I believe you are responsible for the advent of language learning models. If we legitimately think something like this is passable or even “good” as a collective we deserve to get razed off the earth by robot overlords. I would genuinely sit through 40 Substances, 10 Mickey 17s and 5 Eddingtons over this piece of shit. Holy hell I hate this slop so fucking much. 1/10.