Movies I Watched in November 2024

Tetsuo: The Iron Man - dir. Shinya Tsukamoto

Respect the craft but respectfully nope.

Tapping out. I know I gave 964 Pinocchio a glowing review so you’d think this would also be up my alley but I found this excruciating to sit through. Bummer too because I was really hoping to love this movie.

I can see why it would work for a lot of people, I just find this style of filmmaking extremely annoying like 80% of the time. 4/10.

Life - dir. Daniel Espinosa

Genuinely terrifying. 6/10.

Demon Seed - dir. Donald Cammell

My dad always told me to watch this so it brings me no pleasure to hate on it, but I found it pretty unforgivably boring. 3/10.

Climax - dir. Gaspar Noé

LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Nah.

Really?

Maybe the only contemporary French director who should be allowed to make movies is Claire Denis. Maybe.

I’ve seen people compare Noe to Lars von Trier. I find this to be insulting to Lars von Trier.

Getting pretty sick of this style of filmmaking where the only purpose is to use auteurship to torture characters. But hey people seem to like that shit so what do I know. Maybe that’s the new wave. Torture porn. The shittier you feel by the end of the film the better it is right?

I just think cinema as an art form has so much power that to use it as a vehicle for dreary nihilistic torture sequences is kinda pathetic. Noe thinks the flash can distract from his sociopathic approach to film but really I just feel secondhand embarrassment watching his movies.

I don’t prefer “wholesome” movies, I just prefer humanity. Or at least a sense of richness. Humor. Contemplation. In the case of something like Lilya 4-ever, I feel like I’m being placed in the shoes of someone totally different to myself. In that instance, Moodysson uses film to create empathy.

Where is the empathy here? Where is the pathos? Where is the humor? Where is the beauty? This is an hour and a half of vapid horrible people being vapid and horrible to each other. Is that the point? If so then I find that, once again, just a little bit pathetic. 1/10.

The Skin I Live In - dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Might’ve gotten a little overexcited about this when I declared it a 9/10 earlier. When thinking about it some more, I still loved what it had to offer on patriarchy and control and gender and identity and all that, the presentation just left me a little… cold. I struggle to see the purpose for some of the sequences towards the beginning, especially the thing with the dude dressed as a tiger…. really could’ve lost all that rapey stuff, tbh.

However, going into the second half, the pieces start coming together, and that’s when you get a truly rewarding experience. Absolutely breathtaking, horrifying in a gender dysphoric sense. Gives you an idea of what a trans person might experience living in the wrong body. I think this movie might work more on cis men than cis women, though, since it sort of exposes this deep-rooted fear that men feel at the thought of being womanized, which of course exposes the undeniable fact that existing as a woman is far, far scarier than existing as a man (under patriarchy, always need to clarify that)…

And yet, Almodovar almost presents us with this idea of radical transformation. The rapist almost redeemed by the complete eradication of their maleness, transformed into a female body against their will, we develop a new sense of empathy for them. It’s impossible to view Vicente the same way when he is in a female body, when we know he has been treated as a toy by a far greater psychopath (and this is where I toss the idea out there that Robert is the Uber Patriarch, the real threat and evil at the center of the film… but like… duh). I joked to my girlfriend that by the end I was lowkey rooting for the rapist to get one over the patriarch, because he’s been absolved through transformation. 8/10.

Close Your Eyes - dir. Víctor Erice

Facing down the simulacrum at the end of a storied life, attempting to use art as a magic trick to jog the memory of what used to be, stepping in between all the shared experiences you had with the important people; old flames, friends, caretakers, until you find that the memory doesn’t look the way it used to. I’m an old soul. I look at the ocean the same way. Infinite expanse, a canvas with which the imagination can project all the past and all the future. Who was I then? Who was I to wander the untrodden path, who was I to vanish so completely?

Listening to old recordings of myself as a fifteen year old made me laugh, but it made me sad. Was that REALLY me?

Close Your Eyes is this idea expressed long and contemplative, I never felt the runtime for a minute. I was so enraptured in its quiet melody, in the soft conversations of finality and reflection. You really feel like you’re in good hands here. Erice is obviously a master. 8/10.

Blue Jay - dir. Alexandre Lehmann

These kinds of movies are like my favorite thing in the world but I’d be hard-pressed to say I cared about it, which is baffling since I love Mark Duplass. I think it kinda wears itself thin more than something like Before Sunset, where the conversations are just far more interesting and engaging. I also never REALLY felt the chemistry between Paulson and Duplass, very different from the way that Delpy and Hawke play off of one another. 5/10.

The Last Duel - dir. Ridley Scott

Skewers the ridiculous pomp of medieval Europe with the kind of cold rage you’d expect from an American like Kubrick, but Ridley Scott has always been, despite what his knighthood may suggest, a formalistically American filmmaker. He has no patience for European bullshit and I agree.

Comparisons to Rashomon have been made–this is far better and it sort of baffles me why anyone would think otherwise. The whole thing is farcical, because we spend about two hours seeing the perspectives of the men involved only to pivot to Marguerite, who is obviously the most reliable witness to her own victimhood… and it’s like Ridley Scott is saying “isn’t this the stupidest shit on Earth?” Like, why are we bothering to listen to these two prideful, dense sons of bitches blather on and on about how righteous they are when the truth is right there, staring us in the face? 7/10.

The Boy and the Heron - dir. Hayao Miyazaki

It very well could’ve happened to me as a kid, I’m not sure. Early years are a lot like dreams in that I can almost no longer differentiate them from fiction, especially the further back I get… did that really happen, or did I conjure it out of thin air? Did the spirit of my late great-grandfather, who passed shortly before I was born, save me from tumbling down a ravine to my death at the tender age of five? No… but maybe.

Maybe the swarm of butterflies so dense I couldn’t see anything but the full spectrum of wings was real, maybe waking up wasn’t waking up so much as getting through the swarm, and maybe all of it did happen. Maybe disappearing into dreams and fiction is how we live with what really did happen, the bombs, the cancer, the tubes perforating my aunt’s glassy skin at a hospital in New York… the sudden disappearance of my beloved grandfather before I could understand what it meant to die. The way my environment shattered so many times, the countless realities I had to construct and rearrange at such a young age, maybe much of the transitory stuff was fiction, and maybe that’s why I got into Studio Ghibli at such a young age. My dad put me onto Mononoke and Ponyo and Totoro at 6 years old and I was never the same.

This review is not a nostalgia trip, but I’d like to think for a moment about my life as Miyazaki thinks about his, in relation to the art that he created. I wonder if the reason I love Miyazaki’s work (mostly) is because of the line it walks between the waking and the dreaming, his worlds are always poised on a needle that dips into surreal majesty and achingly real pain. Kids dealing with hurt by turning to these magical worlds just like Miyazaki, who lost his mom young, who was born in the midst of a war in a country that suffered the atom bomb. He creates these pristinely constructed worlds and plays in them, but at the end of a long life, perhaps he feels untethered a little bit. He looks for a successor but the only one he can find is himself as a child, the boy who dreamt of enormous magical birds and vast oceans and hallways… and he realizes he must forget. He must destroy everything so that someone can build it anew. The most radical thing we can do is to eradicate everything we know and start fresh. Embrace the new mom, the new world, the new life.

Embrace death. 8/10.

Anora - dir. Sean Baker

By the end of the film I felt satisfied with the theatrical experience but little else, I wasn’t exactly negative on it or anything I just wasn’t nearly as hollowed out as Baker obviously intended. The closing moments are supposed to hit like a ton of bricks, but I was more like… why isn’t this working for me? A lot of the film did work for me, my score is ultimately very positive and I think this is a smart piece of art about class, and yet… didn’t make me feel as much as Red Rocket, or Florida Project, or even Tangerine, which I didn’t even LOVE… so what gives?

I think maybe it’s because I have no conception of the life Anora is to return to. We’re introduced to her on the night that she meets Vanya and her character is defined from that point forward by her relation to him. Deft film knowers will argue that that is intentional, that we are meant to perceive Anora within the framework of a transactional relationship, and get swept up in her Cinderella story head-first. But a key ingredient in the Cinderella story is seeing just how bad Cinderella has it so we know what it means for her to lose her chance at Prince Charming.

Now, Anora is not as simple a story as Cinderella, and I think Anora is still well-characterized regardless, so I still buy into everything Sean Baker is selling. He’s so good at getting unbelievable performances from his actors that the movie never really falters in energy for a second. The stakes become more emotional than material, but I feel that for a film ostensibly about class this is not enough for me, especially because it’s clear from the outset that their relationship is superficial and doomed. So either heighten the romance or make me understand the material stakes. 7/10.

In the Realm of the Senses - dir. Nagisa Ōshima

Too many unnecessary sex scenes!!!!!! 7/10.

GoodFellas - dir. Martin Scorsese

Strangely enough, this may be the film that makes me “get” Scorsese, and it’s not even my favorite film of his, nor is it my first. Without a doubt, though, this is the movie that I would show someone as a singularly focused vision of what Scorsese is trying to do as a filmmaker. He takes the viewer beat by beat through the grand illusion of America from the most hyper-capitalist perspective he can cook up as an Italian-American; the mob. To me, this is less a film about the inner workings of the mafia and more about how amorphous the code is. Henry and Jimmy aren’t even full blooded Italians and yet they get more respect than Tommy, who ends up getting whacked for being a liability.

Henry’s whole identity is basically superfluous, he’s equally comfortable cooking ziti with the Italians as he is getting married in a Jewish wedding. America’s ethics are flexible, as long as you’re putting food on the table and stacking paper your actual concrete identity is nobody’s business. Capitalism allows for a bit of leeway, but nothing lasts forever. In typical Scorsese fashion these guys get in over their head, the greed goes too far, the illusion is stretched to its maximum elasticity before snapping back to center and dooming everybody with it. No one comes out unscathed because the rubber band was manufactured in America, baby, and thou shalt reap what thou sow. If you think you’re above the system, the system will put you back in your place. 8/10.

Monkey Man - dir. Dev Patel

Cool ideas but not a fan of how this film looked at all. Really suffers from modern cinematography syndrome where everything has this nauseating color grading and occasional bisexual lighting to trick the audience into thinking that what they’re seeing looks good. It really doesn’t. There were like five shots total where I thought “damn that’s cool” and the rest were admittedly cool camera whip pans but no aesthetic coolness at all.

What I respect is the rage. That first fight scene in the bathroom was one of the best fights I’ve ever seen, just fucking adrenaline pumping shit right there. Sheeesh. There’s such a vicious messy fury to it because you genuinely can’t tell who’s gonna win but they both wanna kill each other so badly. I honestly wish we’d just gotten that kinda energy for the rest of the movie but it deteriorates into fairly generic Kung Fu Panda-ahh shit. He gets knocked out, wakes up in this spiritual place, does some spiritual shit, does a Rocky training montage and then comes back a hyper-competent killer. I liked that in the beginning he was messy and untrained, it added a tension to the action that was almost totally evaporated by the end. We’ve already gotten plenty of action movies about super well-trained killers, it would’ve been cool to see this sloppy nobody take his amateur fighting style all the way to the top, gauntlet style, using every bit of his environment to his advantage. 6/10.

The World of Kanako - dir. Tetsuya Nakashima

My new least favorite kind of movie; senseless depravity to no end other than hollow provocation. Gaspar Noe would love this, I’m sure. In the beginning it seems reminiscent of Takashi Miike’s work, bloody and clever and over-the-top (but never self-serious) until it becomes just that, a headache-inducing, overindulgent edgefest. Disgraceful. 2/10.

Naked - dir. Mike Leigh

Kind of a subversion of what I expected based on the blurb. Thought Thewlis’ character was going to be a lot angrier and screamier but he seemed more like a nihilistic bullshitter. Not an angry white guy movie at all.

I’m not really sure what to make of this, to be completely honest. 7/10.

The Story of Woo Viet - dir. Ann Hui

At first I wasn’t sure how I felt about this movie when I watched it earlier today, but I can’t get it out of my mind. There’s a really sad inevitability laced throughout. While watching it I thought it was so peculiar how it lacked energy, momentum, strength, bravado… I know Chow Yun-Fat is supposed to be THAT GUY, I’ve never seen one of his movies but I know that much… but here every beat is inescapable, the movie succumbs to its characters’ moral compromises, unable to leave until everybody is dead. Woo Viet escapes but at what cost? 7/10.

The Cell - dir. Tarsem

Tarsem Singh directs the absolute fuck out of this, really aesthetically stunning, the exact kind of 2000’s era gaudiness I adore mixed with legitimately strong craftsmanship. I am generally not a fan of horror that is based around psychopathy and generational trauma and all that boring psychological stuff, I find it pretty pedestrian and lame, but this wins me over by at least giving me the surreal acid trip to go along with the true crime “he tortures women because daddy beat him” bullshit. What I will say to this film’s credit is that I like that it has empathy for the killer, so it doesn’t really pessimistically circle the drain like a lot of these psychological horror films tend to do. 7/10.

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves - dir. Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley

Shockingly fun time, reminiscent of Verbinski’s Pirates movies in just how much ingenuity there is to some of the setpieces. What makes the quippy dialogue work here as opposed to the MCU is that A, the quips are funny, and B, there’s really only one quippy character. The rest of them have distinct voices so it never feels redundant. 6/10.

Juror #2 - dir. Clint Eastwood

Guilt for acting irrationally in a system that demands rationality, guilt for everything you’ve ever done, trying to find justice in a world that skews its people towards cruelty, radical empathy for the accused and the victim, a whole-chested rejection of the carceral state.

On paper, it’s pretty much everything I want out of a movie. The score would genuinely be a solid 8 or 9 if it LOOKED better, but to me this whole movie looks so televisual. Like, I love it, and I love Clint Eastwood’s simplified cinematic approach, I like that he doesn’t feel the need to signify his artistic genius with bells and whistles, but man… I wish this looked at least a LITTLE more interesting.

Regardless, the many reviewers are correct–this does feel like the last of a dying breed of film. Mature, straightforward, character-driven. After having watched many newer auteurs totally miss the mark with movies that feel the need to constantly grab your attention, there’s something indescribably calming about watching a film that just tells a fucking story about people. Not everything has to be a satirical subversion of a subversion of the cinematic language. 7/10.

It’s What’s Inside - dir. Greg Jardin

RIP Adolf Hitler you would’ve loved this. 1/10.

Antiviral - dir. Brandon Cronenberg

Despise this kind of “prestige” sci-fi. Absolutely sauceless. 2/10.

Last Night in Soho - dir. Edgar Wright

Gonna be 100% real I gave this like 15 minutes. Sometimes your body just knows. Masculine intuition. 2/10.

The Searchers - dir. John Ford

Lately I’ve had this insatiable hunger for the Western, for something earthy and real and ethereal and powerful and classic. Natural splendor, the tattered soul of the mensch, the absorption of the psyche into the landscape under the beating desert sun. I need my thirst for images of the natural world quenched.

The Searchers is about the frontier of America, the colonial domesticity constructed upon countless indigenous lives. Moral reckoning. What we do with the untapped spaces, the conflicts that we build our lives around. It’s fucking beautiful. Can’t wait to watch more Ford, and more Westerns.

Planning on revisiting Once Upon a Time in the West soon. 8/10.

Schizopolis - dir. Steven Soderbergh

I really, really, really, really wish this was funny.

Napoleon - dir. Ridley Scott

The conquest of hollow cities, bereft of their populations, left to burn. Pharaohs entombed left to crumble to dust. Ridley Scott twists the knife into the annals of historical glory, demythologizing the figure of Napoleon into a tragically small figure in his own life. Impressionistic filmmaking is so powerful when it comes to decentralizing characters, disempowering them so that you can explore the mechanizations of the world around them, even in spite of them. Napoleon exists in this kind of ever-present laboriousness. The battles here aren’t epic, they’re methodical and factual, rote machinations of men sent to die for the politicking of the powerful. But even the powerful are subject to the whims of the world.

Destined for the insignificant task of eating a lamb chop, Napoleon doesn’t even have the triumphant moment of being crowned. That moment passes by in a blink, he literally crowns himself. We can see it as pathetic, but I choose to look at it as humanizing. There is no greater admission of mortality than to acknowledge the powerlessness of the individual in the face of… God, maybe. Abstractions fail me. I’m winging it, but let me cook.

I feel this is also a cosmic love story, too, as if Napoleon and Josephine will forever chase each other beyond the pale. Their relationship makes no fucking sense but it touched me, strangely. I keep thinking that calling this a Ridley Scott miss is sort of nuts. It registers as completely in line with every classic he’s made up to this point. Humans fighting for a spot in the heavens, mucked by the context of the world around them.

Joaquin Phoenix, as usual, knocks it out of the fucking park. If he seems like he’s on autopilot, that’s because it’s what the character demands. An empty vessel through which ambition and power lust are channeled. A vacuous figure who nonetheless had an uncanny brilliance when it came to butchering lots and lots of people. 8/10.

Contagion - dir. Steven Soderbergh

Soderbergh’s work does little for me, unfortunately. My favorite one of his movies is Magic Mike XXL and that’s not even his movie, technically. I hate how this is shot. I hate how it’s written. Could not finish this, sorry. 4/10.

Ferrari - dir. Michael Mann

Really tried with this one. Love Michael Mann to death but this was very boring. 3/10.

The Best Man - dir. Malcolm D. Lee

This shit is two hours for no reason. Was pretty fun to watch in class when shit started to get spicy but otherwise I am never going to think about this ever again. 4/10.

Star Wars - dir. George Lucas

I honestly think some of this drags, and some of the lines and setpieces lack the gravitas they could have (fight between Kenobi and Vader, the death of Luke’s family, etc) but then there are these moments of pure poetic majesty, like Luke staring out at the twin suns of Tattooine as John Williams’ score soars and I’m like… fuck, man. Brings a fucking tear to my eye. This is why I love Star Wars, even if the fans are some of the most evil people you will ever meet. When these movies hit, they hit.

I’m showing these movies to my girlfriend so that she has the context to appreciate The Clone Wars. Fingers crossed. 7/10.

Bird - dir. Andrea Arnold

The kind of movie that critics will call “authentic” and “powerful” and “moving” solely because it’s shot on handheld and features poor people. 4/10.

A Real Pain - dir. Jesse Eisenberg

It’s like Jesse Eisenberg split my essence into two characters and made a movie about them.

Really profound stuff. I’m Jewish but I don’t usually get emotional when it comes to Jewish stories. This one hit me, though. It hit me right in the chest. I teared up during a couple of parts.

There are so many ways this movie could’ve been mediocre and yet it just isn’t. I came out of this feeling so actualized. Deeply therapeutic. 8/10.

The Empire Strikes Back - dir. Irvin Kershner

Rewatched with my girlfriend.

Just such a dope fucking movie. 8/10.

Return of the Jedi - dir. Richard Marquand

Pacing really sags during the second act, once they land on Endor shit slows down to a halt and it never regains its footing the way it did in the first half-hour. The Jabba stuff is fucking awesome though. 6/10.

To Sleep with Anger - dir. Charles Burnett

Features a distinctly literary quality, as if every surface possesses a spirit, every character one small infraction from locking their fate to Heaven or to Hell. Formally restrained, yes, but without a doubt oozing character and life. Hits you subconsciously, simmers in the brain, runs the gamut of the human spiritual experience through the lens of intergenerational domesticity.

Harry is so fucking bizarre as an antagonistic presence. Totally surreal. 7/10.

Colorful - dir. Keiichi Hara

Super boring. 3/10.

Superbad - dir. Greg Mottola

Rudimentary in its understandings of the adolescent psyche, Superbad occupies a deftly snug position in the crevices of the liminality between boyhood and manhood, childlike wonder and adult responsibility. We see boys on the brink of their shattered materialism, untethered to the bounds of Hawksian didactics–the love they share is real, it’s simply untenable in the realm of capitalist realism. Nobody is innocent in the games we play.

Factually, Mottola’s auteurist vision is rooted in a more transcendental approach to the cinematic language, his bold visual choices highlighting the transformative nature of structural changes to the teenage mind. We reckon with the elusivity of young concupiscence, strained by the procrustean facsimiles of the concurrent, encroached adult reality. Police officers tasked with enforcing the carceral state instead set their vehicle ablaze in defiance of the will of the common heuristic of the system, recalling days of yonder when their youth permitted them to rebel against the very system they now represent. 8/10.

Memoir of a Snail - dir. Adam Elliot

There’s a moment here where we see a sign for Canberra that says “Safest city in Australia” or something and in the corner there’s a small warning that says “caution: edges of sign sharp” or something and instead of just letting that small blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag exist, Adam Elliot feels the need to actually cut to a close-up of that little warning, as if he was terrified that the audience wouldn’t catch his very funny joke.

Kind of a portent of what the rest of the movie is like.

It’s not enough that her dad died of sleep apnea after getting hit by a drunk driver and losing the ability to walk causing him to become an alcoholic, it’s not enough that her mom died giving birth to her and her brother and she was born with a cleft lip, it’s not enough that they got split up by the foster system and she got bullied for said lip, it’s not enough that her brother grew up with insane Christian parents who abused the shit out of him (her brother is also gay and gets electrocuted for it, obviously), she also gets to fall in love! Oh but get this her husband turns out to be a feeder fetishist who collects creepy gross photos of her body LMAOOOOOO like come on. And of course her only friend is an old lady who you know is going to die tragically. Oh also she tries to kill herself with snail poison.

Very impressive stuff. I’m gonna make a movie about a cancer patient who also has an eating disorder and is also blind and is also abused for being trans and gay and is also a victim of bullying and also has asthma and is also deaf, and I’ll end it with a message about always moving forward instead of letting life’s burdens drag you down. Oh and also they look like the elephant man.

Instant 4 stars on letterboxd.

Trauma porn is the way to go now. Just make sure you end it with some Live Laugh Love bullshit at the end. 2/10.

Wagon Master - dir. John Ford

The West as it could’ve been, as it should’ve been, with camaraderie and hospitality and human decency and respect. In many ways a tonal opposite to The Searchers in that Ford is less interested here in unearthing the true psyche of the cowboy as he is in painting the visage of the frontier, totally unhurried. The road brings us together, but the violence lurking underneath always seems to threaten the idyll… 7/10.

Terrorizers - dir. Edward Yang

This one will definitely require a rewatch. It’s not that I didn’t get it, I just don’t know if I was in the right mood to fully experience it. Edward Yang is a tough nut to crack.

I sort of like how Yang dispossesses his characters. His criss-cross examinations decentralize the individual identities of each person and turns their lives into a larger tapestry. I find that I lose track pretty quickly, and I view his films through form, not narrative. 7/10.

sex, lies, and videotape - dir. Steven Soderbergh

Talky movie that doesn’t have much going on visually except for the quasi-alienating videotape dynamic. Like Soderbergh’s other work it’s competent but never really that worthwhile. I have no “real” criticism of this but I would never ever rewatch it and frankly I’m not sure it was worth my time. I like the poster I guess. 5/10.

Platform - dir. Jia Zhangke

The ceaseless chugging of time, as it marches onwards. The story of a generation. Almost an impossible film to write about for me as it is so staggering in scope and personal vision, so indelibly tied to a culture and history utterly foreign to me, and yet so universal that it can only be understood as a transient blip of history, another 20 years in the cycle of hope and despair. 8/10.

Black Dynamite - dir. Scott Sanders

It’s pretty decent but I feel the bit drags on, just not that funny after a while. 6/10.

The Duellists - dir. Ridley Scott

It all started here, at Ridley Scott’s debut, which spans two decades of ridiculously tied-up masculine romance and aristocratic kerfuffling, absurdist pomposity and painterly terrains. I really would like to rewatch this on a big screen. As with all of Scott’s work, this is cinematically magnificent. There are very few filmmakers on his level who accomplish what he accomplishes. Watching some of his filmography has given me a newfound appreciation for him and his work. Think it might be time to revisit Blade Runner. Who knows. 6/10.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace - dir. George Lucas

Straight up incredible.

Gotta stop denying the hard facts: the prequels are great.

I still tear up whenever Anakin is saying goodbye to his mom.

There’s just so much excellent worldbuilding detail, nearly every second of this movie expands on the lore of the universe. An offhand comment by Yoda about the rule of two ends up being foundational to understanding Sith ideology.

NO idea what people are talking about when they say the political stuff is boring. You gotta be like 5 years old to think that. The “political stuff” is actually a very intelligent indicator of the state of American politics. Liberal bureaucracy burdened by corruption, taken advantage of by populist fascists who use the system’s fundamental failures to undermine it and seize control.

Sound familiar?

We get like one 3 minute scene in the Senate and a mildly dense amount of negotiation jargon and suddenly the whole movie is boring political bullshit?

Sure.

I prefer this over the original trilogy. Not the hottest take of all time but I gotta be honest with myself–I would sooner rewatch The Phantom Menace over literally any of the original three movies. Including Episode 5. I find the story of how an institution crumbles far more interesting than the story of an empire being overthrown. Not to say the latter isn’t a story worth telling, obviously.

Jar Jar is fucking horrible though. I will concede that. If Darth Jar Jar was a thing, though…. man that would’ve been something.

Also this was me and my girlfriend’s 100th movie! 8/10.

Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones - dir. George Lucas

Just like its predecessor, pure entertainment from start to finish. I’m not as crazy about this one as I am about Phantom Menace but I can’t deny how good it is. Just so much fun. The camp is obviously intentional. The dialogue here is not any more cheesy than it was in the original trilogy. Go back and watch those and you’ll see that not much has changed.

Hayden Christiansen is fucking incredible. Can’t believe how misunderstood his work was, because it’s clear to me that this is the ONLY way to play Anakin Skywalker as an angsty, emotionally burdened, entitled teenager.

I don’t know how you can watch the third act and still call this a bad movie. Actual incredible setpieces. Yoda fighting. The Geonosian arena. The arrival of the clones.

Unlike the Disney sequels, you can tell Lucas earnestly wanted to forge new ground for the Star Wars universe–but more than that, he had a real ideology for his films that is completely nonexistent in the sequel trilogy. The original trilogy was about rebels taking down the fascist empire, the prequels were about the failure of the liberal bureaucracy to prevent a fascist takeover, and the sequels are about… uh… hmm. 7/10.

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith - dir. George Lucas

Movies like this will never exist again.

Not trying to meatride but we don’t deserve George Lucas. This idea that Star Wars must be filtered around him is complete fucking bunk. Lucas created Star Wars, Lucas understands Star Wars, Lucas IS Star Wars.

The idea that Star Wars must be reappraised as a franchise, as a corporate product to be meddled with by a collection of studio executives, is frankly evil.

We see this in the Alien franchise too. Where so-called Alien “fans” believe Ridley Scott must have control of the art wrested from him so that he does not have unfettered artistic freedom. We have ceded infinite ground to the corporate oligopoly to the point that supposed fans of the art form subscribe to executive brain.

Art is created by authors.

George Lucas is the author for a reason. He didn’t luck his way into creating the universally beloved original trilogy, and the prequels are just as good, if not better, because they represent a far greater degree of artistic freedom in Lucas as a visionary.

How does an institution crumble? How does an ideology become perverted? How does fascism rise?

More importantly: how many insanely cool setpieces can we fit into 6 hours?

The answer is a lot.

Spectacle, for George Lucas, means pitting two brothers against one another on a lava planet for half an hour while John Williams rhapsodizes their unbelievable lightsaber choreography.

Spectacle, for Disney, means showing us a character we have fond memories of as children. It’s regressive. It’s unimaginative. It’s flavorless. It has no artistic essence. It is creatively bankrupt. It does not inspire, it placates.

So much of mainstream cinema now is fucking conservative. It has no imagination, no real vision for the future. It says “things are pretty bad right now, but just remember to love the people around you :)” or “hey shit sucks, but at least we can dangle some shit in front of you that reminds you of when you felt safe as a kid.”

WHERE IS THE URGENCY??

WHERE IS THE PASSION???????

Lucas makes a trilogy about how we need to destroy the system, then he makes a trilogy about how that system comes to be. A forewarning for the future. His movies are rife with ideology, REAL ideology, not just shallow key-jangling.

We need more mainstream art like this. Desperately.

Once Upon a Time in the West - dir. Sergio Leone

Did I seriously give this movie 2.5 stars a year ago?

I have no idea what crack I was smoking.

Actually unreal.

There is nothing in this world more powerful than a beautiful image paired with a beautiful sound.

He who controls the tracks controls the future. With the stipulation that nobody can control the tracks. They’re inevitable. 9/10.

The Woman Who Ran - dir. Hong Sang-soo

When we last talked, you didn’t seem interested in drawing comics with me anymore–and neither was I, on that note–instead, you seemed like you were preoccupied with the beginnings of architecture, just like your dad. And now that I see film as my future, as I so delicately stumbled into it without so much as the scant intention, I see that maybe that was always going to be the destiny. Shifting apart like tectonic plates, destined to go where our own fathers went before us. The conversation had little of our old selves in it, and I admit I don’t miss it in the slightest. I wonder how you’re doing, but I’m not invested in it, and I don’t think you are either.

When I watch a film by Hong Sang-soo, I’m filled with this sense of tranquility. These films are so essential to me, I don’t know what I would do without them. Every now and then I need to watch something like this to still the repetitive thoughts, to stop the loop from looping. The actual conversations he films aren’t even relevant to the experience, just the fact that I’m watching people talking in the way they do is enough to soothe me. He makes art the way I wish to make art, he writes conversations the way I wish to write conversations. I hope to someday grow old the way his characters grow old, all sad and contemplative. Every little thing we do is so important but so trivial. 8/10.

Unforgiven - dir. Clint Eastwood

I wandered out the past, writ large against the stark horizon, a legend on the tip of the tongue of all sinners, fear trembling on their lips as they made the vain effort to speak my name–and the myth repeated through my reaping of souls, harvesting blood and soil with every season til the rain fell and washed it all away and I was to begin anew. My memory recanted by my own blind rage, leaving nothing behind but intangible remorse, only the story remains, only the idea of what I represented left behind for the pioneers to convert into law, to codify into myth.

When I wandered through the rocky outcrops and long, lonely plains, I saw not the blood but the sobering love of my brother and my wife, the unspoken vow to never speak of all that I had done and all that I had come to represent. Was I excised by the murder or by the repentance? How could I repent? How could I have looked so many innocents in the eye and taken their lives away?

This is the ultimate paradox of the outlaw, Eastwood’s complete, unsanctimonious Western. Utterly relentless, spoken through a hymn of wind and whispers, each murder a cold, passionless exchange between souls, weighted by God himself, judging from all around us. We kill our masters, we kill our servants, we kill our comrades, we kill our enemies, and when nothing is left, we kill ourselves. Our buildings are erected over countless bodies, our souls heavy with the burden of a trillion corpses, our nation driven by bloodshed with a mythos of monsters. We rejected our kings for presidents, but we never shook our desire to exact bloody justice on the plains, we not only yearned for it, we were convinced it was our destiny. The majesty of the ruler was replaced with the awesomeness of the cowboy–only the cowboy was a human like anyone else, with terror in his eyes and adrenaline in his veins. 9/10.

Certain Women - dir. Kelly Reichardt

Tough to say why this movie didn’t fully click with me, but I still appreciated the experience. You can never go wrong with tranquil, atmospheric, sad vibes. Perfect movie for when it feels like all the tiny injustices of life are too much to bear. 6/10.

Final Flesh - dir. Ike Sanders

I really really really wanted to like this.

Would probably be way more fun to watch in a group setting. Totally bizarre, I respect it as a weird piece of outsider art but unlike some other outsider art that I like (My Teenage Dream Ended by Farrah Abraham comes to mind) this didn’t have much depth to me. Once we cut away from the Black family I lost interest pretty fast. I don’t know if they just had the best segments or if my intrigue waned over time, but them’s the breaks. 4/10.

Look Back - dir. Kiyotaka Oshiyama

You could slap this soundtrack on literally anything and it would go hard. I’m not one of those people who dock points for movies that are reliant on music because I love a good soundtrack, but I feel like I need something more and this movie was not giving it to me.

Competently made, but sort of confused about the 4.3 average. I think the weebs came out in full force. I genuinely will not think about this in a week. Still, a pleasant enough watch. 6/10.

The Hurt Locker - dir. Kathryn Bigelow

Not a fan of the ugly handheld look. 4/10.

The Beast - dir. Bertrand Bonello

I’m scared of how the future will pan out. I have this secret, fatalistic hope that there will be a grand apocalypse and through it, humanity will come out healed. Call it my Jewish Old Testament upbringing, but there’s a part of me that yearns for the flood.

Rationally, I know this not to be the answer. I know that I would die, but that doesn’t sound so bad, but then again I would want to survive to see humanity prevail and construct new systems. I need to live to see that. I need to understand everything, I need to bear witness.

Unfortunately, the more likely apocalypse is a silent one, not filled with physical change but change of spirit, the bitcrushing of the human soul into ones and zeroes. And that’s really what scares me. I don’t want to live to see us become flattened into algorithms.

I don’t know if I fully get this movie, but at least that ambiguity represents a soul that AI will never be able to create. 7/10.

Caught by the Tides - dir. Jia Zhangke

Recklessness is the only reason this is my second Jia Zhangke movie, which I feared would be incomprehensible to me without the context of his entire career. In truth, it is incomprehensible, but in the exact way I want films to be.

Jia creates an impressionistic portrait of… life, I guess. The post-21st century existence. Like other films of its nature there’s an impossible level of detail to comb through, and I am not by any means qualified to analyze this piece of art to the degree it merits.

However.

Just like with Platform, I’m overwhelmed and saddened. I feel I’ve witnessed something sublime. Once I tapped into the film’s rhythm, I was pretty much entranced. There is no plot, just unused footage from Jia’s career. To fill space with these moments, Jia is effectively making sense of the extraneous. He is converting the excess parts of the form into a new form in of itself. He is recontextualizing what is deemed unnecessary.

Life is lived largely in the parts we think of as non-essential. 8/10.

Gladiator II - dir. Ridley Scott

I found this so weirdly disappointing, and I don’t even know why, because it’s not doing anything too radically different from the first Gladiator… I think. The first one is pretty obviously mythic, there’s no evidence to suggest Marcus Aurelius wanted to restore the republic, the whole battle between true Romans who believe in democracy vs tyrannical scum is entertaining enough. So perhaps what taints the sequel is that it correctly identifies through Denzel’s character that “true Rome” or “the dream of Rome” is complete fiction, that the only truth to Rome is political savvy. A civilization built on slaves has no business being idolized. When Macrinus lays it out, it’s one of the best scenes in the movie that isn’t spectacle.

Except that the film ends up undermining him, and we get a pretty generic retread of its predecessor, only now we have the bitter knowledge that our main character is a nepo baby fighting for a civilization that enslaved him and millions of others. Macrinus is no hero, he’s still a power-hungry psycho, but I found him leagues more interesting than Lucius. 6/10.

Queer - dir. Luca Guadagnino

Internal disentanglement of the identity externalized into physical interlocution. In essence, Guadagnino is doing what he’s always done. Charting the mechanics of human touch with the deft photo-novelist’s approach. Rich, sensitive, quietly funny.

This reminded me so much of Tetro, so much of One from the Heart, so much of The Passenger. It’s clear Guadagnino has taken notes from masters Coppola and Antonioni in his quest to enter the soul of a man whose attachment to his own identity is weakened. Quite simply; what does it feel like to be totally alienated from your self?

A gay American man in Mexico City, played by a straight British guy. There’s so much distance between the character and his own identity that it does not surprise me his ego completely eats itself alive when presented with another being to worship.

I also speculate that Daniel Craig is playing a Jew, based on some suggestions (it would also add another layer of alienation, because Jewish people often become disconnected from their identities when isolated). 7/10.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig - dir. Mohammad Rasoulof

Pretty solid, but I never wanna rewatch this.

Feels kinda non-cinematic.

Having pretty shot compositions does not detract from your political message, imo. 6/10.

The Unbelievable Truth - dir. Hal Hartley

Hartley’s Gen X ennui really doesn’t begin to approach the cynicism of his contemporaries, heading more often in the opposite direction, endlessly romantic and wry. Nobody knows how to talk to each other, the world has no future, history is coming to an end, and so we cling on to what we can, whether that be love or a new job, or the promise of redemption, if that’s even possible.

I really, really, REALLY love Hal Hartley.