Movies I Watched December 2024

Deewar - dir. Yash Chopra

Ranted to my friend Diana a few days ago about how lacking in urgency mainstream American filmmaking has become ever since the 90’s onward, with no real ideology, and it is such a pleasure to watch a real filmic film, a movie with passion, purpose, and radical, cinematic joy behind it.

What I like about Bollywood and Tollywood filmmaking is that their runtimes, which may seem excessive at first, are in fact essential. Marxist, even, I would argue. They reject ruthless efficiency for true exploration of material conditions. I do not think every movie should be this long, obviously, but there is something to be said for a movie which allows us full scope to examine the lives of characters and their environments.

Deewaar handles moral ambiguity so well. I am struggling to think of a film that both manages to be a complete entertaining film experience while also maintaining an ideological framework through which it examines class. You just don’t get stuff like this, ever, but it’s clear that Indian cinema is exceptional in this regard. Characters can be both mythic and real, icons and people. There is no need to dilute one with the other.

Song to Song - dir. Terrence Malick

I hate that I can’t die at the end of every day. Why must my mistakes stay with me? Why must I be a product of all that has been?

I still see love wherever I look, under scrambled hands, chocolate bars, sunsets on skyscrapers.

I think it may be an illusion, like the money, the accolades, the zeitgeist. It’s not real.

I forgive my father.

And I also forgive my old self for giving this 3.5 stars. 9/10.

The Godfather - dir. Francis Ford Coppola

Bro I used to be so stupid.

8/10.

All We Imagine as Light - dir. Payal Kapadia

It’s hard to know where to begin when writing about this movie. I picked up hints of Claire Denis, a bit of Tsai Ming-liang, in that we are treated with impossibly rich inner worlds and then scoping these inner worlds out through the deliberation of their environment. We see these women as complete worlds in of themselves, affection becoming this magical touch of God that reverberates through the ether like some kind of divine talisman. That sex scene… my God! My God! Where to begin, where to begin???

Spoilers ahead.

I felt, watching this film, that I was placed under a spell. Bewitched, transported. My heart grew ten sizes.

I read this bell hooks quote recently which tore my heart out, because I think, like this film, it gets at the heart of a woman’s inner world in a way I probably do not do very often… I feel society programs us to view women as passive characters. Not to say I FEEL this way, specifically, but… you get what I’m saying. It’s feminist theory bro don’t get up my ass about it. Anyway, the bell hooks quote is this:

“Think of all the women you know who will not allow themselves to be seen without makeup. I often wonder how they feel about themselves at night when they are climbing into bed with intimate partners. Are they overwhelmed with secret shame that someone sees them as they really are? Or do they sleep with rage that who they really are can be celebrated or cared for only in secret?”’

Intimacy is such a key part of this film, absolutely fucking essential, really… woman, man, we need to feel that sense of physical connection, that alignment of the bodies and souls that happens sometimes… that’s called an ORGASM. And I don’t think this whole movie comes down to sex, definitely not, but it is about the repression AND expression of desire, specifically in women, and how society punishes them for both. It punishes them for not seeking out a mate, for not pushing themselves into love, for not entering the diametrically uneven agreement that is romance under patriarchy, and yet when women do, as humans do, seek romance, love, affection… they are shunned. Coerced. Frowned upon. Hurt. Intimacy, for a woman in this Indian context, is pain, and it is not easily sought. Especially for a woman who was given to an arranged marriage.

In many ways this dynamic is COMPOUNDED by capitalist forces, because not only must the woman think about how she is viewed under patriarchy, she must maintain her economic position as well. Her life becomes consumed by work, both in and out of the house. When she gets married, she will work 8 or more hours and come home to do the chores, to cook, to clean, to care for children, etc. So much of this movie is governed by labor, by time spent on mundane tasks. A surprise red rice cooker is enough to rock her world. The city, the industrial hub, it’s blanketed in light, but ironically becomes the place where our characters are at their most blind. Their bodies are constantly under illumination, being watched, being pried upon. Their living spaces are not self-governed. They work themselves to the bone, with no time or privacy for sex or affection. Light, in THIS context, becomes a tool for oppression, for control of the human body and soul.

Only when they escape to rurality do the characters find their purpose, find their love, find their intimacy. Prabha spends her life toiling as a nurse, but she finds no soul in the profession until she saves a man’s life to the adulation of the villagers. This film dreams of a world where our actions are not tied to money or to status but to each other, as human beings. It is a deeply humanistic movie, a film that loves people and sees a future where we express our sexuality and love in an environment that does not punish us for it.

Very well could be the best movie of the year. We may have a master filmmaker on our hands in Payal Kapadia, I pray to God she gets more opportunities. Do yourself a favor and watch this in theaters if you can. 9/10.

Sholay - dir. Ramesh Sippy

Insanely badass in so many ways. As I’ve heard pretty much the original forebear of Bollywood, huge for Indian cinema as a whole. But you already knew that.

Sholay is fucking awesome but some of its flaws really held me back from fully loving it. The romances are a huge part of the film and I found them uncompelling. The brotherly bond between the two protagonists is weirdly absent during much of the middle portion of the movie. At one point one of them is suicidal and the other guy doesn’t seem to give much of a fuck. That’s wild to me. I get that your homie is a drama queen. But cmon.

I can’t knock it too hard though because this is still a giant fucking banger. 7/10.

Om Shanti Om - dir. Farah Khan

This is 10000% not my thing sadly. 4/10.

Heat - dir. Michael Mann

There’s a really strong possibility that Michael Mann is the best screenwriter of all time, no cap fr fr. All of his scripts are so fucking vivid, he cuts to such laborious specificity that you fully buy into the professionalism of his characters. Even when he writes a scene where two guys talk about jazz in Collateral you feel like he actually delved into jazz history, actually spent time talking with people about jazz, to produce such an organic-feeling scene.

His films drip with cool but the dialogue still feels dense and human, it doesn’t ring as cool for coolness’ sake, or as “witty” in the Sorkin sense (bleh), it just has fucking aura, simple as that.

You can absolutely enjoy this film as 3 hours of aura, no doubt about that. But there’s more to it, of course, there’s the hopeless futility of masculinity–pursuing a goal for no end other than the pursuit of the goal. The chase is better than the catch. The hunger can only be staved off by staying on the move. Tony Soprano’s therapist likens him to a shark. He can only survive by moving. If he stops, if he stays still, if he takes the time to marinate in his thoughts, he will die. These guys are like that.

Obsession. Devotion to the craft. PROFESSIONALISM. Mutual respect. These dudes are trying to kill each other but they need each other. It’s so fucking cool and also gay as shit. Love it. 8/10.

Salaam Bombay! - dir. Mira Nair

I think what I see first, more than anything, is how almost everything is transactional. Krishna sells his time, his body, and his name, the clothes off his back, everything–he literally cannot afford to tell his mother he misses her because that sentence would cost extra. Almost nobody acts out of generosity, and the only guy who does is immediately robbed by the kids.

Kids singing loudly in the theater because that’s their one reprieve, a guy smacks one of them and tells him to shut up, and what’s the kid’s response? “I paid to be here!” Money is everything. 7/10.

All About Lily Chou-Chou - dir. Shunji Iwai

Hoshino’s heel turn is so eerie and fascinating to me, I can’t get out of my head how quasi-mystical it feels–the whole segment in Okinawa, really. Stolen money to purchase a vacation in the true origins of Japanese society (for anyone who doesn’t know, Okinawans are the indigenous people of Japan). They are continuously pursued by this creepy traveler, who describes a strangler tree, who gives Hoshino mouth-to-mouth, who takes away one of his lives… the darkness within Hoshino is seized and warped around him.

The whole movie is rife with these intersections of spirituality and social tragedy. It adds to the ethereal feeling, the experience of being a teenager, when the world isn’t quite as mystical as you imagined it as a child but not as concrete as the world of adults. Especially with how your reality is being substituted with the internet, like you’re no longer in control of what it even MEANS to be real. 9/10.

Million Dollar Baby - dir. Clint Eastwood

My face kept hitting the canvas, kept bruising, I kept getting back on my feet, kept taking the punches, kept losing vision, kept seeing red streaks in my peripheral, I kept wobbling my knees when I bent them, kept crumpling to the ground, kept throwing jabs out to the ether, kept winning, kept losing.

Hopefully you get to die doing what you love.

That’s all we really get.

Probably an essential film to understanding why Clint Eastwood will never stop making movies to his last dying breath. I wouldn’t be surprised if he keeled over behind the camera, and I wouldn’t pity him in the slightest. No actor has ever been able to do what he’s done, to pretty much control the fate of their own career.

I think it’s a movie about what it means to get old. It’s quiet. Draped in shadow. Full of love but bludgeoned with pain. Take your shot. Even when it will certainly kill you. 8/10.

Black Angel - dir. Takashi Ishii

Cool vibes but I just could not get into this at all. 4/10.

Multiple Maniacs - dir. John Waters

Not for me tbh.

Shoutout gay people tho. 4/10.

Shutter Island - dir. Martin Scorsese

Fascists had to come up with false realities to sell people on genocide, and Teddy had to do the same to wrap his mind around the murders he committed in the name of his government. Trying to follow the contradictions of the American Dream literally broke his brain, so in a sense this is probably the most direct Scorsese film, which are all in one form or another chronicles of descent into the bowels of the American mindset.

The main reason this doesn’t fully click with me is that just like Jacob’s Ladder it chickens out of following through on its conclusions by revealing the conspiracy to be delusion. I’m no conspiracy theorist but in the realms of fiction and cinema you have room to explore those ideas, and to me it’s cowardice to retreat to the safety of the psychological. Let’s really ham it the fuck up here, this is already pretty pulpy material. Might as well have some fun, toss in some insanely convoluted American conspiracy theory to brainwash mental patients into being overseas sleeper cells. I don’t like that everything has a neat and tidy explanation in the end, robs the fun out of it for me. 7/10.

Hard Boiled - dir. John Woo

Gun fights are just noise to me.

Hate to drop a nuclear shit take. Wanted to enjoy this, reeaaaaaaallly bad but it was a real endurance test. Can’t fully say I hated it because the music is awesome, but that’s all I got outta this. 5/10.

The Green Knight - dir. David Lowery

Pretty movie, but I didn’t feel much.

I fully get what it’s saying, but I didn’t really care.

Some dope fantasy ideas, but I’m just like whatever. 6/10.

Inherent Vice - dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

Johnny Appleseed for a counter-culture America, absurdism for a fraught nation, conquering fascism with the haze of drugs, the convoluted conspiracies only closing in until they have nowhere to go but outwards, you see the mist on the beach while you try to figure out where you last left your joint. On the dashboard of the old Volvo, parked to the left of the neon sex club.

Probably the best dialogue I have ever heard in my life? So specific, so philosophical, so unbelievably funny. My girlfriend and I were laughing nonstop.

I don’t think I fully got Paul Thomas Anderson until now. This is my favorite of his. I need to pick up the Pynchon novel asap.

I think what people may be missing here is that the plot is not the point, the details and the complete lack of grounding in truth or reason is, you’re supposed to accept it at face value and either laugh with it or lose your way. It’s not supposed to make sense, it’s supposed to be convoluted.

Lowkey… this is PTA’s Southland Tales.

Southland Tales for the 70’s?

A compliment of the highest order. 10/10.

Citizen Kane - dir. Orson Welles

YOOOOOOO

This is excellent.

Anything I say about it has certainly been said a trillion times before in myriad ways, still it amazes me how completely unique it is. To this day I haven’t seen anything quite like this. You can borrow ideas from Citizen Kane, I don’t know if it’s possible to recreate it.

Every single shot is so goddamn expressive. And Welles made this at TWENTY FIVE???

Sheesh.

Phantom Thread - dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

If Inherent Vice is PTA’s most American movie, Phantom Thread is the most European. Not a compliment.

Kind of a total waste of time. A very pretty waste of time, but a long laborious exercise in futility nonetheless.

100% made for the Cannes/TIFF audience. Again, not a compliment.

My issue with PTA is that he’s too competent. I know that won’t make sense to most people, but it makes sense in my head. Everything about his filmmaking is competent. And that makes it totally fucking boring. What makes Inherent Vice so good is that it makes no sense. Every decision is perplexing and bizarre. It doesn’t have that prestigious, hyper-competent stink that pervades the rest of his work.

The entire time I watched this, I wanted Reynolds to get hit by a train.

Spoiler alert, that sadly never happens.

Female Trouble - dir. John Waters

man… I wanna like John Waters but his movies are so grating to me. Funny at first but fuuuuuck they wear out their welcome. Constant rabble in my ears. I respect the provocation and the insanity but preferably from afar. 5/10.

Iguana - dir. Monte Hellman

The biblical quality of this film makes me feel as if I am watching something foundational, a pensive, nihilistic subversion of the Garden of Eden.

Really an incisive cross-section of what it means to found a civilization. I would say the film has a pretty grim outlook on the whole concept of human society, but somehow pulls off the magic trick of not coming across like an exercise in misery. It’s bleak, but there’s wonder and beauty in the rocks and the waves. 8/10.

La Chimera - dir. Alice Rohrwacher

Beautiful movie, love the way this is shot. And there are some really cool ideas too, ideas of displaced people and histories, displaced identities and drifting souls.

But I have to be honest when I say this didn’t really click with me at all. I struggled to care about the feelings as much as the vibes. 6/10.

Oh, Canada - dir. Paul Schrader

Aged past the veil, the drifting loner of Schrader’s cinema becomes mired by his own mythology, unable to transcend sin, unable to look death in the eye unless it’s recording. The camera picks up on everything, it is more objective than any human eye and it sees things in us that we do wish to bury. Under its gaze we are compelled to speak truth, to bear our souls.

Behind the camera, the filmmaker immortalizes the truth, whether they know it or not. Sometimes, by pure chance, due to wielding the camera, the filmmaker will stumble on a grain of human experience. This is what I have realized, upon directing my first short film, that I hope to achieve. I hope to accidentally stumble on something “true”. I don’t wish to engineer that outcome.

I think there’s something to be said about the way Schrader reframes Fife using his own fragmented perspective. His young self evading the war seems heroic in a vacuum but takes on a new sense of cowardice when contextualized with what we view of him. And yet he is still an unreliable narrator, so the “truth” for him may only be an emotional truth, not an objective one. The camera captures Fife as he is, but it doesn’t capture Fife as he was. Only how his “is” feels about his “was”. 9/10.

The Last Showgirl - dir. Gia Coppola

Super surface level. Does that indie movie shakey closeup thing that every filmmaker thinks looks “authentic” but just looks kinda shitty. Granted, there are some cool shots. I’m surprised at how uninterested the movie is in its own setting, though. That’s the problem with closeups, really, the limitation they place on setting and space. We don’t even see her perform the show that she’s devoted her whole life to, so how can we get attached to it? Idk. Like I said, very shallow. 4/10.

Red Rooms - dir. Pascal Plante

This obsession we have with true crime is a symptom of a deeply rotten society. On both sides. There are those who romanticize the perpetrators and those who romanticize the victims, and to me both are wretched.

It sort of reminds me of how the Roman Empire used the animalistic violence of gladiator fights to placate the masses.

Imagine you get killed by somebody and then your murder gets analyzed by 5 millennials who create content titled “DISTURBING UNSOLVED CASES PART SEVEN.”

Sicko shit.

The whole contentification of murder is appalling to me. It’s beyond sociopathic. I think becoming comfortable with consuming depravity as a culture is actually disturbing. If your comfort show is a nonstop deluge of serial killer slop you should probably seek help or talk to some people.

Whenever I accidentally manage to stumble onto true crime content (sadly that shit is put right next to the good paranormal stuff) I’m always weirded the fuck out by how they talk about the victims. “They were little angels.” “They had big dreams.” “They were loved by all.”

Uh, how the fuck do you know?

And then the murderer is always a “piece of shit monster” who should “rot in prison for life”.

This is literally how fascists talk. One party has to be completely innocent and pure and one party is demented and evil, inhuman and beyond saving. If you look at how Zionist media talks about Palestinians, you will see the exact same language.

The choice to make the victims here blonde and blue-eyed is very, very intentional. We are primed to view blonde blue eyed girls as the epitome of innocence, so it triggers an immediate gut response. The same kind of emotional logic has been historically used to persecute Black men. The innocent white girl vs the violent Black man.

I would argue that, as a whole, true crime pretty much only exists to perpetuate that fascistic notion. Only now we live in such a completely isolated society that it’s seeped into the mainstream. It has become casually acceptable to be like “oh yeah I love listening to people talk about gruesome crimes against children.” It’s all engineered to isolate us. To make us afraid of our neighbors.

Panopticon shit.

We’ve constructed our own hell.

I think I’ve made my perspective on justice quite clear throughout most of my reviews, but I guess while I’m on this subject, something I feel passionately about, I’ll elaborate a little more.

As far as I’m concerned, the severity of the crime should have no bearing on the “punishment” a person receives.

The role of the justice system should be only to isolate dangerous people from society so that they cannot hurt anyone else.

They should otherwise live completely normal lives.

This goes for pedophiles, rapists, serial murderers.

The idea that “bad people” should be “punished” is barbaric. Grow the fuck up. Stop expecting the state to exact your nasty revenge fantasies on disturbed individuals.

It’s unrealistic to expect perfect rationality from the justice system. But I think it is realistic to expect the justice system to not be mined for entertainment and turned into spectacle. 7/10.

Summer 1993 - dir. Carla Simón

I do not like how this movie is shot at all, but I can’t lie, this is still a really effective film. Handheld festival bait be damned, I teared the fuck up during many of the scenes in the last half-hour. Maybe it’s because I grew up partially in Catalonia. Maybe it’s the insanely nuanced child performance. Idk. Whatever it is, something clicked.

It runs a lot of similar beats to other coming-of-age movies of its ilk, sure, but there’s a real beating heart and soul and specificity that sets it apart. 7/10.

Polyester - dir. John Waters

I really tried with John Waters.

Not my thing.

Legit headache-inducing.

Shoutout gay people tho

3/10.

Black Caesar - dir. Larry Cohen

Dialogue isn’t slick enough, characters aren’t cool enough, I don’t get the point of this movie tbh. I thought the whole fun of Blaxploitation was for Black audiences to see themselves be cool as fuck and funny up on the big screen, but this movie just has the main guy come off like a phony gangster and a jealous boyfriend. Plus the movie doesn’t even look that good, so it doesn’t have that fun deep-fried vibe that a lot of exploitation movies have. I can sorta respect the vision tho so 5/10.

Bronco Billy - dir. Clint Eastwood

If you’d told me a decade ago that by far my biggest artistic and personal desire would end up as a fervent desire to live as a cowboy, I would’ve been amused at the suggestion. But now, watching this intensely romantic film, I find it makes so much goddamn sense. This whole image of America is so unbelievably appealing it’s no wonder we managed to export our culture globally. Even today I was talking to this German acquaintance of mine, and she tells me how she loves Los Angeles, how it’s where her cinematic aspirations can happen, how America is freedom and all that. The myth of America persists! Even though we know it to be dead.

My mom moved to New York in her early twenties. She was drawn to it as many immigrants are, and my girlfriend pursued her film studies here for the same damn reason. America is, as the myth goes, where you can be anything you want to be. And sure, Bronco Billy isn’t a “real” cowboy–the myth is, in fact, a myth. But in his performance he achieves something more real and heroic than any legit cowboys ever did. I knew within the first 5 minutes I was gonna love this movie to bits and I wasn’t wrong. It awoke a sort of melancholy optimism in me. A strange sense of national pride and sadness. America was never ideal, but it could be. Even if all that idealism is just performance. 9/10.

Rebel Ridge - dir. Jeremy Saulnier

Netflix doesn’t deserve this solid little banger.

Haven’t seen First Blood, but is this sort of a 2020’s era take on that idea? Anybody who knows more about film history, feel free to spit in the comments. Kinda Seven Samurai coded. Outlaw wanders into town and stirs shit up.

I feel it could’ve used more specificity, and the actual “look” of the film left a lot to be desired. But I was thoroughly entertained. 7/10.

Bicycle Thieves - dir. Vittorio De Sica

I’m glad I finally got around to watching this as it’s one of the most important movies ever made, maybe the most, and it spawned the genesis of one of my favorite types of film; the classic story of a working class person succumbing to desperation as their moral code gets trampled on by The Society. It takes a deft eye to tell this kind of story well, and De Sica has that eye. 7/10.

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies - dir. Pat Boonnitipat

A breath of fresh air to see a newer filmmaker use long takes and wide shots with blocking to communicate conversations, so technically this movie is a real step above the rest.

Kinda feels like a live action Pixar movie though, with the saccharine piano cues. I liked this but at a certain point I just wanted it to wrap the fuck up. 6/10.

The Fall - dir. Tarsem Singh

Holy moly. It’s such a shame Tarsem only made like 4 movies. This has got to be one of the best “odes to cinema” type movies I’ve seen. Watched with my parents while feeling hella depressed and felt like a kid again. No other movie has a vibe quite like this. Goes on a little too long but I was enraptured. 7/10.

A New Leaf - dir. Elaine May

I might be in love with Elaine May (platonically)??? And on the real this movie made me love and appreciate my girlfriend a little extra. Not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s because she’s nothing like I expected and yet every day I find myself more and more enamored with her, more grateful for her presence, more confident that she’s the best thing that ever happened to me. In a hilariously demented way, this movie about that. Falling in love with someone out of nowhere. 7/10.

He Got Game - dir. Spike Lee

You don’t become a man until you become a parent, and you don’t know what it means to be a dad until you’ve hopelessly fucked up your relationship with your son. Denzel forsakes his boy the way God did Jesus, but I think in some ways this is the story of a martyr who is unequipped for the role of martyrdom. Jesus lost in the world, Jesus unable to forgive, Jesus tempted by vices. Trying to do the right thing, sorta… fumbling around. Got love for the prostitutes, got love for the sisters, forced to be the tough guy when dad screws up his part.

Spike Lee + Denzel is a nutso combo. Probably impossible to fuck it up. I like that Lee turns basketball and father/son relationships into an impressionistic quest for spiritual truth. Even the music feels more apt for an epic than a sports film, but that’s what this is, tonally. A Biblical chapter. The Book of Ray Allen. 7/10.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer - dir. Tom Tykwer

LOL this movie reminded me of Pickpocket.

It’s less about the crime and more about the obsession and perfection of the craft. I really like this movie for not falling into serial killer formulas because ultimately this isn’t a murder mystery, it’s an elaborate display of sacrificing personhood to obtain essence. Reducing humans to their basest instincts and odors. Grimy but entrancing. Has a fairy tale sensibility that keeps it from feeling too much like dreck.

One issue I did have was that his targets were all attractive looking women. It would’ve been far more interesting to see a vast array of people, because fundamentally anybody can smell good. A missed opportunity that probably came about because Tom Tykwer clearly just loves redheads. 7/10.

Strange Circus - dir. Sion Sono

Nope. 2/10.

Days - dir. Tsai Ming-liang

They bumped into each other once. It wasn’t a momentous sort of collision, just a small exchange. A hand here, a word there. The only impression left of their brief dialogue is a song. And even this song is scant, it’s barely a melody, not even loud enough to avoid being drowned out by the cacophony of car engines. But the song still plays. The memories still flood back at the hint of a scent.

Deeply soothing. Tsai Ming-liang is a master. 8/10.

eXistenZ - dir. David Cronenberg

Mollifying the unreal by selling counterculture in the form of “realism,” the ambiguous corporation at the heart of this film’s mystery is nebulous at best and that’s how they want it. Those who partake in their product have no choice but to opt in; that’s by design, and it’s intentional to keep the waters muddied so that you can never tell who the real villain is. The plot doesn’t matter, all that matters is that you keep running, keep doing, keep paying the subscription fees, keep consuming the sensory stimulation.

Pessimistic though it may sound, I would still hesitate to call this a wholly anti-tech movie. In the beginning it shows the power of such technology to liberate us from archaic societal values. I mean, for starters, the whole first half of the film is heavily concerned with transforming Pikel from a man into a woman. The whole time he and Allegra operate in swapped gender roles. Pikel gets a pussy, Pikel feels anxious about having his new pussy played with, Pikel as a guy is freaked out about having this big opening in his body (“won’t it get infected?”…. “don’t be ridiculous,” the woman replies… LOL).

Here’s the thing, though, right… this is what I keep getting stuck on. Is it a good thing that we’re reliant on tech to deliver us from reality? Do we need VR to abolish gender? So the corporation still wins in the end… still profiting off of suffering, still poisoning the clouds so much that we are incentivized to turn to the digital world, funding our decline while selling us the rope. Bandaids for bullet wounds. Needles for decayed flesh. What we NEED is a factory reset. 8/10.

Dìdi (弟弟) - dir. Sean Wang

I’m such a sucker for this kind of movie. Had me tearing up a few times.

It’s flawed and feels unfinished for sure. I wish the ending was more interesting.

But it really did work for me, mostly. 7/10.

Field Niggas - dir. Khalik Allah

This is the art you’re not supposed to see. I think the title is obviously bold, obviously intentional. It’s not a title that’s supposed to be said by outsiders, even though Khalik Allah still ended up getting the film on Criterion. There’s some irony there for sure.

The title refers to slaves that worked in the fields. i.e. the slaves most divorced from the colonial domesticity. i.e. the white society. Keep in mind that most of the people Khalik talks to in this doc aren’t necessarily your average Black person, as far as I can surmise as an outsider. They are literally outside of the domestic life, shoved to dimmed streets and callously dismissed by the arms of the state. They are people without a home, without property, and so without property they are deemed worthless. They have even less value to the white supremacist apparatus than Black people who DO have property.

I don’t think this doc is perfect, but it is 100% worth watching if you are at all curious about people’s perspectives. I disagreed with like 50% of the shit I heard, but I still liked the perspectives. 7/10.

Love Lies Bleeding - dir. Rose Glass

Absolutely reeks of 2020’s era filmmaking. Obnoxious editing, forced genre blends, style decorated in shock value and anxiety-inducing “vibes”.

And yet, I see some merit to this. Sex scenes were actually erotic and not complete ass and since we are living in the most sexless era in all of human history you gotta give credit where it’s due.

This movie has nothing interesting to say and will probably be forgotten in less than a year, but I still enjoyed it. 6/10.

River of Grass - dir. Kelly Reichardt

Nuts to me that this is Reichardt’s first feature. There’s so much obvious talent and compositional skill. She clearly knows what the fuck she’s doing from the outset, and has only perfected her craft since.

What holds this back for me is the plot. Just not very interesting and overly detailed. It starts off simple and solid but overconvolutes itself, I feel? Not sure how else to put it. I just think Reichardt’s style works best with very simple stories. Light on plot, heavy on character. 6/10.

28 Weeks Later - dir. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Might just be on my hater shit. 3/10.

Nickel Boys - dir. RaMell Ross

Straight up insufferable. Had to leave the theater early. Who in their right mind thought making an entire movie from first person POV was a good idea? 2/10.

The Brutalist - dir. Brady Corbet

They don’t tell our stories. Which is a little funny, isn’t it? They don’t tell our stories, even though we built the industry that allowed these stories to be told. We built America. By “we” I mean Jews. And by “they” I mean Jews. We built Hollywood. We built the American superhero. We created the American cowboy in a laboratory, we made him white and protestant, and we allowed ourselves to be exploited so that the white man would finally accept us. We build monuments to our suffering under the noses of those who would want for our annihilation.

The acceptance of the Jew is conditional. The love of the Jew is attached to the worth of the Jew, the Jew’s contributions to helping maintain the white framework. We design the churches for Christians to pray in. We write the book their Messiah believed in. We invent the God they pray to. And they loathe us for it. They detest us. There is nothing the Christian resents more than the reminder of Jesus’ identity. The Jew cannot be converted because the Jew invented the Christian’s belief system. The Jew does not seek to convert others because the Jew is not motivated by imperialism.

And so, you say, how can this be the case? How can it be the case that the Jew is anti-imperial when, as this movie so often reminds us, the Jew sets up a colony on Palestinian land? How can Judaism contend with the fascistic tumor that is Zionism? And the answer is that it can’t. The long and short answer is that when we join others in the pursuit of empire building we have lost our way. The whites want what we have. They despise us for our values and our principles. Israel is us admitting that our oppressors were right. It is us admitting that to be Jewish is to be militaristic, it is us admitting that MIGHT MAKES RIGHT.

I hate to upset my Israeli friends and family, but I have come to believe that this is not the way. We are no more entitled to the land of the Palestinians than the protestants were to the land of the indigenous peoples of America.

What The Brutalist shows is the nature by which the American political project distorts the principles of those it exploits. It relies on their contributions but crushes them into line. In spite of this, however, we never give up. We carve our own identity. We win. 9/10.

The Count of Monte Cristo - dir. Matthieu Delaporte, Alexandre de La Patellière

Insanely badass. They don’t make em like this anymore that’s for sure.

Modernist sensibilities are hard to come by in contemporary cinema. This is one of the most satisfying movies I’ve seen all year. A breath of fresh air. A straight up banger from start to finish.

I like that Edmond is basically just a good dude from start to finish. Yes, he is tempted by the corruption the pursuit of vengeance inspires in him, but he always sides with the underclass against his real targets–the rich upper class.

I was watching this with my girlfriend in the theater and I kept pumping my fists and making faces the whole movie. I was a whole ass cartoon character. Pure cinema. 8/10.

Transformers - dir. Michael Bay

Waking up at 7 in the morning on a Saturday, beating my parent’s alarm clock, sitting my ass down in front of the TV with a bowl of Trader Joe’s Puffins in my lap and throwing on Netflix because my dad would never let us watch cable. I got like 2 hours until they get up and tell me to stop frying my brain and go outside, so what do I do? I watch some cartoons Netflix somehow had in their selection nobody has ever heard of now. Oscar in the Oasis. Street Sharks. Tuff Puppy. Pickle and Peanut. Uh. Pucca?

That’s how this movie makes me feel. Like I’m a sugar-addled kid watching cartoons and listening to Linkin Park. Michael Bay’s directorial talent is certified. 7/10.

Violent Cop - dir. Takeshi Kitano

I understand that this is intentionally dreary, but I’ve never felt that Kitano was the sort of director to revel in boredom. This is his debut film and in my opinion you can tell. The themes he explores here are done better in his later entries. I’m glad I saw this, because I love Kitano, but I would be fine never seeing it again. 6/10.

The Shadow Strays - dir. Timo Tjahjanto

Kinda just didn’t click with the story. Stakes are unclear. Great action for sure, though, worth watching for that at least. 5/10.

Boogie Nights - dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

Paul Thomas Anderson is beyond irritating to me as a filmmaker. Borderline completely insufferable. He’s like the film industry’s most competent moron. He has the technical knowhow to create respected movies but zero sense of nuance or taste. Every character is screeching constantly, the camera never sits still, there’s always something off of PTA’s shitty homage playlist humming in the background, every scene is at once self-aggrandizing in its melodrama but telegraphing its intentions to the audience with a wink. In short, his work is probably the single biggest influence on the current generation of American filmmakers.

I would characterize PTA’s filmmaking style as a complete misunderstanding of New Hollywood sensibilities. A pseudo-profound hipster’s interpretation of Scorsese or Altman. It’s pastiche, but unlike Tarantino’s pastiche it’s not fun at all, just grating. When Tarantino makes movies with zero purpose other than to recall his influences, he at least has the decency to make a fun movie, to make something with basic stakes, clever dialogue, and explosive payoff. It’s fun to hang out with the characters of Tarantino’s movies. Hanging out with PTA’s characters is like having your eardrums scraped out with no. 2 pencils.

I was laughing my ass off during that part where PTA intercuts between Dirk getting hate crimed and Rollerblades or whatever the fuck her name is beating the shit out of that frat guy. Lowkey one of the most pathetic moments of filmmaking I’ve ever seen from a MOVIE WITH A 4.2 AVERAGE. Hilarious. 4/10.

There Will Be Blood - dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

Monkey sees milkshake, monkey takes milkshake. This is the conclusion of PTA’s epic Western. Not too bad but I feel cheated. Surely there are more grand conclusions than this? Surely the most lauded film of the 21st doesn’t end with a half hour diatribe? I mean I know PTA is a self-conscious hipster who is allergic to sincerity but the recipe was right fucking there, man. Everything about the first half of this movie was perfect. So perfect that even though it completely shit the bed I’m still positive on it.

It wants to be Once Upon a Time in the West so bad. 7/10.

The Master - dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

For brief glimpses, I saw something of my father and myself in Freddie and Dodd, not in the demand of blind devotion but in the expectation, this earnestly authoritarian desire my dad always had for me to be better than my basest impulses, for me to live up to what he saw was the working ideal; firing on all cylinders, getting those A’s, spending none of my free time on useless bullshit.

More than that, Dodd’s inability to take criticism, his blustering, well-intentioned rage, gives me flashbacks to my dad’s propensity to fly off the handle when neck deep in one of our many arguments. Just like Freddie, much as I tried to be the ideal son I was too much of an animal to ever truly commit to that. Every time my dad would sit my ass down and make me rewrite an essay until the tears were flowing and I got the A he was after, I would regress soon after without his stringent efforts to keep me in line. Sending me to the strictest Korean math tutors, trying to get me into soccer, none of it worked because I was like Freddie. What I actually cared about was ridiculous. Girls and writing. Mostly girls.

All I really wanted was to live at my own pace, and now I’ve got that. I live apart from my parents, and it’s great and all…. but I’ve been missing the authoritarian hand of my dad. Wishing somebody could reel me in, set some damn limits on my freedom.

Freedom’s a complicated thing, because it doesn’t exist in any real sense but we pretend it does and we yearn for it and hate it at the same time. If you figure a way to live without serving a master, Dodd says, you’d be the first person in the history of the world to do that. It’s not about cults so much as it is about the relationship between purpose and authority, swaddling the soul with comfortable guidance versus the inescapable draw of individuality. You did your part for the country, and now it’s over… but don’t you wish you could have the country back? 7/10.

Mary - dir. Abel Ferrara

The editing in Ferrara movies is second to none, he makes these human experiences feel like elegiac collages of philosophical musing. He understands how much power film has in crystallizing serendipity. An image uncaptured on camera becomes lost to time, an image preserved on camera becomes immortal, totally immersive to any who come across it–in the right hands.

Film is also a paradox because despite how concrete it is–image wrought in detail–it demands faith, a temporary loss of self-awareness where you give in to the “unreality” of the image. This is impossible if you see yourself on camera, if you’ve trained your eye to see itself in third person, like Ted does, like most of us do now in the age of smartphones. We’re all painfully aware of how ridiculous we are, and that makes faith exceedingly difficult. It is when we lose ourselves that we are most able to see beyond the pale, and besides drugs and meditation, art is our most cogent interlocutor between the real and the unreal. 7/10.

Malcolm X - dir. Spike Lee

It’s the midpoint, the bisection of Malcolm’s life in the middle, between being a cartoon character, a parody of a Black man, and a full person, a real person, that gets me. The division line between a man living on autopilot and a man seizing his way to destiny.

There’s this dreamlike quality to the first half of the film that surges into a propelled thrust in the second, a clear demarcation in Malcolm as a figure. From the point in which Malcolm realizes his purpose, comes fully into his being after the pilgrimage to the Mecca, the film and Malcolm accept fate. Before he stopped flattening his hair, Malcolm’s courage in the face of death was a farce–the gun wasn’t even loaded. Now, having understood his purpose, he looks three men armed with shotguns in the eye and smiles, marching onward with his speech. 8/10.

The Novelist’s Film - dir. Hong Sang-soo

Today I turned 22.

As a little treat to myself, I put on a Hong Sang-soo film. Simple pleasures. Simple respites. A lot of people consider his movies boring. I can’t say I don’t understand, but I can’t relate. I don’t know if any other filmmaker has given me so much, personally. I would’ve never taken my first steps into filmmaking if it were not for Hong. His films almost dare you to call them insignificant. They don’t show off. They don’t have compelling narratives. They float by like cloudy wisps, like scents underscored by chatter.

I’ve been an artist for at least a decade, in one way or another. This wasn’t always the case. I wanted to be a scientist until I was, like, 10. I preferred nature documentaries to just about anything else. But I think this was less about wanting to pursue science and more a precursor to my love of observation. Hong Sang-soo makes observational cinema, and at the end of this film, he draws attention to himself as an observer. He tells his subject, Kim Min-hee, “I love you.”

Artists should be this way, I think. We should be enamored with the world. We should seek it out. We shouldn’t hide from it. We should pursue conversations. We should love our muses. We should DO things. Creation is an act of refraction. We absorb the world and all its intricacies and redirect it into our medium of choice.

It’s no coincidence my writing improves when I make the time to read a novel. 9/10.

Nosferatu - dir. Robert Eggers

Eggers has finally moved past dreary psychological literalism and into a tapped-in paranormal occultism that lives in the dreaded corners of men’s souls and women’s desires.

I adore the filmmaking on display; minimal cutting, elaborate blocking, nightmarish compositions. Art house horror at its best, when it’s not tied down to stupid pointless Freudian bullshit and can instead live in the Kiyoshi Kurosawa of it all. Whole-spirited rejection of modern capitalist mundanity which has charted and objectified the entire natural realm into obsolescence.

The darkness is real if you open your damn eyes. 7/10.

Drive My Car - dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Everything is unknowable, everything is waiting for you to discover it, life is an unmappable thing which begs to be explored, even if you can never explore it to completion. Love is the same way, you can love someone for thirty years and never come to a complete understanding of that person’s heart. This mystery can seem daunting but is in fact the reason life is beautiful in the first place.

Watching Drive My Car was like therapy for me. For three hours my heart was soothed and my brain was massaged. 9/10.

The Wife - dir. Tom Noonan

I can’t stand movies that feel like plays.

I can’t stand movies about upper class white liberal types.

Still, some fairly unique presentation from Tom Noonan. Watch What Happened Was… if you wanna see some underrated peak. 5/10.

Bamboozled - dir. Spike Lee

Turn of the millennium Spike Lee uses late style digital aesthetics to satirize and, hopefully, annihilate through sheer force of will the white corporate bigwigs who commodify the Black experience through shorthands and signifiers.

Unfortunately, like most Spike Lee movies, Bamboozled ends up being more prophetic than final. Nothing about the current media landscape suggests that we’re even remotely close to killing the exploitation of Black identities for entertainment. Given the advent of AI, we’re probably fucked forever. You ever heard of FN Meka? Good for you if you haven’t.

The way Delacroix has his identity used as a cudgel against criticism of his objectively racist show reminds me of the way conservative propagandists will use minorities to strengthen their arguments. They’ll pay a Black person ungodly amounts of money to come onto their show and defend police brutality.

I saw a play recently written by AI about Hispanic kids trying to convince their mom to let AI-assisted health professionals treat her and it was fucking dystopian. Stereotyping marginalized identities under the guise of inclusivity to push for hypercapitalism. Christ on a cross we’re fucked. 8/10.

Flowers of Shanghai - dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien

Warm, ebullient, fantastical, these are all words a patron would use to describe the arena of sensations that is the Shanghai flower house. They would coast drunkenly through the aromas of the women, the lavish food, the drinks, the opium. It would course through them, they’d make promises they couldn’t keep, the women adorning yearned glances to make their needs known to the patrons in the hopes that they would liberate them from their prison.

All the while, the camera lists from one end of the room to the other, or pushes in, so that we feel as if we are surveilling Hou’s painstakingly crafted world. We feel as if we are one of the customers at this flower house, at a distance from the girls but still enamored by their craftsmanship. This is the real power of filmmaking, more powerful than any other medium in its ability to temporarily displace you from time and place, and few take advantage of this truly magical power like Hou Hsiao-hsen.

The languid pace, slow, unfocused, tipsy; it dulls the senses so that the emotions become themselves dulled. At the end of it all, we cannot divorce ourselves from the transactional cruelty between patron and prostitute, no matter how skilled and devoted she may be. If anything, the more she devotes herself, the sadder we become at her fruitless efforts to break free. Butterflies trapped in cocoons, flowers picked but never watered. 8/10.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - dir. Michael Bay

Not as good as the first but still pretty fun. 5/10.