Movies I Watched November 2025

It Was Just An Accident - dir. Jafar Panahi

It Was Just One Accident After Another

6/10

Keeper - dir. Osgood Perkins

The film industry is in a very, very, very bad place right now.

No vibes, no script, no characters, no horror, no intrigue, nothing. Just abysmal stuff. We need to place a quarantine on the horror genre for at least 10 years until directors learn how to tell stories without relying on cheap tricks.

Ban shallow focus cinematography.

Lowkey just ban Americans from making movies. We’ve been given Prometheus’ flame and we’re using it to burn feces as fuel.

Holy fuck man. Wow. 2/10.

The Big Sleep - dir. Howard Hawks

Noirs aren’t my thing because they’re a lot of “where were you” and miscellaneous facts being strung together. I also find Bogart really boring as an actor, that hasn’t changed since he made me fall asleep in Casablanca. This one is horny enough to work though. It literally feels like Bogart is playing a dating sim the way he enters a room and immediately fucks. 7/10.

Marie Antoinette - dir. Sofia Coppola

The last shot: a noble bedroom vandalized by the mob peasantry stirred into an outrage. When the people starve, they feast on flesh.

Coppola is a powerful filmmaker, one of the best of her time, because she views indiscriminately. She has Visconti’s lascivious appreciation for vice without his heavy-handed morality. The recompense comes from depiction rather than imposition, we are meant to identify with sociological reality of her characters without being parasocially invested in their baggage. Marie Antoinette thus is an avatar for many things; youth, womanhood, wealth, to name a few, and she oscillates within these roles as necessary through the film depending on what the story demands.

The damning thing about Marie is not really that she is innocent or guilty, it’s that she is a product of her circumstances as is anybody else, plebeian or patrician. There but for the grace of God go I. Sofia Coppola is the princess of a nepotistic line of Hollywood elites, a fact that many use as a derogatory cudgel, but this fact is also the reason she is able to empathize with the characters she does. She is also intelligent enough not to be swept away by their relatability. She indulges but she does not parade. The rich kids are just kids but they are still rich and this original sin will not be pardoned by their humanity, they will be eaten along with the rest.

7/10.

Greenberg - dir. Noah Baumbach

Just insufferable. There is little I want to do less than spend almost 2 hours following a character like this. 3/10.

Lost in Translation - dir. Sofia Coppola

Gonna try to interpret the racist moments in good faith because I have a lot of respect for Sofia Coppola as a director, and I trust her when she says her intention was to portray the beauty of Japan.

Towards the end when Charlotte asks Bob why Japanese people switch their L’s and R’s he says it’s a joke at their expense since they (Americans) can no longer make them laugh. It’s also harped upon that Bob is a washed-up loser. His glory days are long behind him.

The subtext is clear to me: Japan is the future, America is the past. And these two schmucks are on the precipice. She’s out of school with a useless degree, his career is waning. They’ve been lost in translation.

It’s a difficult read to argue for since their relationship is romanticized and we’re supposed to find empathy for them, but I don’t think this needs to be contradict the fact that they’re also the butt of a geopolitical joke. Yeah, the Japanese people in the movie get made fun of, but the fact is that Tokyo is way cooler than the US and the ending is a tragedy because neither of them get to find a place in that future. 7/10.

Hatari! - dir. Howard Hawks

Straight up nearly 3 hours of Hawksian magic. Life doesn’t get better than cozying up under a blanket in the dead of a Boston winter and watching a bunch of guys shoot the shit, drive around a safari while performing death-defying stunts trying to catch water buffalos, rhinoceroses, and giraffes.

Found out John Wayne was so wasted during production that he couldn’t even remember making it, and you can tell. This is a compliment though, the whole thing feels like Hawks and his team on creative autopilot. Playing the hits for an interminable series of gags, conversational setpieces, and action-packed spectacle.

And as always, I love Hawksian romance. 9/10.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant - dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Super impressive mise en scene, shame it’s wasted on a script that seems singlehandedly determined to convince me I’m watching the most boring play this side of Bertolt Brecht and not a movie with dynamism, wonder, expanse. 5/10.

Drug War - dir. Johnnie To

The most Bressonian of To’s cop films I’ve seen in its divorcement of professionals from any sense of personal attachment. All performance here is perfunctory to maintain the coldness of the apparatus and to advance objective. There is no fat or time for anything other than surveillance, pursuit, capture, and completion. 7/10.

Decision to Leave - dir. Park Chan-wook

Like if Hitchcock directed a Murakami novel. Film by motif. Romance by suggestion. Touch through the screen. I don’t entirely know how but I saw myself in this. 8/10.

Hail Mary - dir. Jean-Luc Godard

The appeal of Godard continues to elude me. 5/10.

White Dog - dir. Samuel Fuller

The more that I think about this movie after watching it, the more that I can’t get it out of my head, the more I keep circling back on its implications on the nature of humanity, the nature of the beast, the nature of this thing we call “power,” or “trust” or “truth.” I’ve gone through an ideological rehabilitation. I’ve talked about growing up a zionist Jew and emerging antizionist, how long this process took, how often it felt like shedding the skins of a cult.

Every now and then a thought haunts me–did I do it for the right reasons? There’s an inkling in the back of my mind that I am not “cured” of my mental disease. The fear of the other continuously lingers with me. I cannot pretend, if it came down to an Israeli or an Arab what would I default to? Who would I save? I know it’s an unrealistic hypothetical, but seriously, when I think about it, what the fuck am I if not a base response to fear, a pathetic sniveling troglodyte crawling out the wombs of the stone age with a rock aimed at the nearest neighbor–for fear.

But this, I recognize, is a dour thought spiral without basis in reality. The fact is that I can logically recognize where I erred. I continue to wrestle with the contradictions of what I am, which is, essentially, a colonialist Jew, whether I like it or not. That is why I kept my stage name Israeli. Not out of pride but as a mark; let people know who I am, for better and for worse. My parents are Israeli, I cannot hide that from the world. What White Dog by Samuel Fuller, understands then, is that there is absolutely no divine way to cleanse the living of their fear in totality. On an individual level, there is nothing I can do to repent from the fact of my existence. This is not an expression of white guilt, merely an acknowledgement of the truth of my life.

Another thing White Dog understands is the intrinsic similarity between animal and person, in that man and dog learn and internalize lessons the same way, only man is arrogant enough to believe that it can warp the animal’s natural response to violence around by structure and control. The white dog in this film is unnaturally intelligent, which works for the quasi-mythical horror quality Samuel Fuller imbues his otherwise “normal” melodrama with. It escapes its cage, it takes down trucks, it hunts Black people with the vigor of a Terminator robot, and in the end, despite seemingly reforming and sparing our two lead characters, it rips out the jugular of the big boss, the safari honcho. Fuller could’ve set this film about humans training animals anywhere, really–he chose a location where they take full-sized wild predators and treat them as if they are housecats.

We cannot control the beasts. We gave the wolf our humanity–for better and for worse. We gave the wolf our putrid, venomous tribalism just as we gave it empathy and compassion. It was arrogant of us, however, to assume the wolf did not impart any lessons on us. It was arrogant of us to assume we could fully turn the wolf into a person. Beneath every dog there is a fundamentally violent creature, just as there is beneath every person. The law of the universe operates at entropic violence, collisions of particles in the exponential infinitudes. What White Dog teaches us, then, is not to accept our violence, nor is it to deny our violence, but to take ownership of it. To recognize it, to look at it, and to one day, hopefully… discard it. 9/10.

Retribution - dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Part of that era of Kurosawa’s career where he was fixated on the emptiness of modern Japan. His depictions of the city are hollowed out, like a dead log that you can stomp into and expose starving colonies of termites chewing through the wood. This one gets a bit too in the weeds of “investigation” for me to love it like I did Cure or Pulse but it’s not bad at all, and mostly scratches that itch. 7/10.

A Warning to the Curious - dir. Lawrence Gordon Clark

Unfortunately, this seems to be a classic example of what I have deemed the British allergy to fun, which manifests mostly in the horror genre.

I wonder if I would enjoy MR James’ written work. This felt like it would have been more effective as prose than as film. Dry, saltine cracker stuff. 4/10.

City of Pirates - dir. Raúl Ruiz

Not my kind of movie at all. I don’t like flat out surrealism, I like it as an addendum to genre fare, like the dream sequences of The Sopranos. This is just boring.

The Second Night - dir. Eric Pauwels

The first half hour made me cry really hard. The part where he’s talking about that one painting and narrativizing it as if the mother is saying “you need to leave me so you can learn to love me” hit me like a punch in the gut. I never appreciated my mom’s cooking until I had to fend for myself. Every human on earth is trying to recover from the pain of being born. The first real traumatic experience is the second night, the night you spend outside of your mother’s womb and in the open world, vulnerable, cold and afraid. 7/10.

Veer-Zara - dir. Yash Chopra

Basically just Romeo and Juliet–but the basics don’t matter when you’re doing something this grandiose and beautiful. Just wow, to be honest. Had I known absolutely nothing but the image itself I would have assumed it to be a mid-20th century classic. It’s shot with sparing mediums, mostly wides, lots of detail scattering the background. The world here feels so lived in, vast, colorful. It’s like candied melodrama, so attuned to the emotions of its characters. The way they shot the interior of the prison takes my breath away. As far as pure beauty and joy is concerned nobody is doing it quite like India. Malayalam, Telugu, and Hindi cinema has been some of the most rewarding for me to explore.

Usually it’s difficult to recommend Indian movies to my friends because they’re turned away by the length of the film and the musical segments (Indian musicals aren’t really like American musicals; the song breaks don’t advance the plot or reveal a whole lot about the characters, generally–they’re more for the audience to revel in). I realized here that it’s fine to skip the songs if you’re not feeling them. I’m just not a fan of non-diegetic musical interludes. There were some good songs here though! I gave most of them a chance, and ultimately the fact that they’re optional additions to the film bears little significance to my rating. 9/10.

F for Fake - dir. Orson Welles

Orson Welles was one of the coolest filmmakers ever, and as his final film before his death, I find that the frankness with which it examines the contradictions of artistic creation to be an almost effusive self-portraiture of Welles’ ego. He was unrepentantly arrogant, his recognition of this made him compelling and, conversely–humble. The man just had it in him to be larger than life itself, until death invariably took its prize. 8/10.

The Lair of the White Worm - dir. Ken Russell

Kinda loses me with its foppishness. It’s very pretty but the atmosphere isn’t cloaked in anything specific, so it winds up feeling for me like a waste of my time. Little about the lore of this world feels important. 6/10.

Big Wednesday - dir. John Milius

This is the kind of movie that really speaks for itself. It’s so broad and youthful and goofy and melancholic that you end up projecting your own memories onto it, which is what I did. And as to where my thoughts drifted to? My adolescent years in Mallorca, Spain. Hanging out with my friends, going swimming off the coast, diving 15 feet deep to find sea cucumbers and purple urchins, then returning to the surface for some paella made on the spot with an improvised grill.

My friend Ben and I once swam from the beach to an island about a kilometer off shore. The whole time, I couldn’t see anything in the water, it was so full of kelp that even if the water was only 50 feet deep at most you wouldn’t have been able to see the bottom. I’ve always loved the ocean. I understand the fear but for me it represents pure freedom. Endless adventure.

The night I keep returning to, the night that has stayed with me, was one of the last nights of my life in Mallorca, when me and pretty much everyone I knew was at this one particular beach til… it couldn’t have been later than 10 pm. But it was late, the sun was setting. It was the same beach Ben and I had swam a kilometer away from not more than a year ago. I remember having this moment of recognition after this cute girl made eyes at me that I would remember this night for the rest of my life, that there was something important about it. I was too shy to make a move but I remember the way the moon shined off her sweaty face. I remember hanging out with a bunch of my friends for one of the last times. I remember feeling, for at least a few minutes, that life was perfect.

The beach has always been there for me, now that I think about it some more. My happiest memories are at the beach. The only real date I went on with my first girlfriend was at the beach. We took a bus out from our boarding school and headed out into the city as summer made its ascent. I moved away a month later. The ocean said goodbye for me.

Last summer, I fell in love even more with my girlfriend through our drives to Malibu. My friend Zarion brought his girlfriend Angela on a couple of these excursions. I have no doubt in my mind that I will never forget these for as long as I live. And as the pattern goes, I moved away shortly after, all the way across the country.

I’ll be back though, and the ocean better know that. 8/10.

SPL 2: A Time for Consequences - dir. Soi Cheang

The economy of bodies. Fittingly the intersecting storylines would require either a plot economist to keep track of. Cheang has zero interest in the script except as a vehicle to deliver action and sentimentality to our doorstep.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen fight scenes quite as good as what Cheang pulls off here and in Twilight of the Warriors, it’s genuinely mesmerizing how much he packs into single takes. The characters become like pain absorbent action figures, and the way they cross becomes choreographed chaos.

Louis Koo is pretty much unrecognizable here as the kingpin of a human trafficking operation. Speaking of which, this movie goes to some ridiculously dark places. It’s not gratuitous but it’s definitely like “whoah they really did that lol.” As far as Cheang movies go it’s kind of the meeting point between the noir-ish moral corruption of Limbo and the brotherhood beyond borders of Twilight. A brotherhood where bonds can be forged through the brutality of the inhabited space. 9/10.

Moon and Cherry - dir. Yuki Tanada

It’s supposed to be funny but the humor didn’t translate for me. I get that Tanada is probably trying to subvert pinku tropes but it’s not as aesthetically pleasing a film as its poster.

The Tiger of Eschnapur - dir. Fritz Lang

Literally one of the most breathtaking movies I’ve ever seen. Lang’s cinematic geometry clashes against the dripping wonder of the exoticized Indian landscape, an oriental tradition first established in Shanghai Express and continued in pulpy splendor here.

Racist, but well-intentioned–the idea of the Westerner finding alleviated spiritual folly in the East among the jungles and the big cats and the foreign women, among the temples and the leper colonies and the thousand year histories of power transferred from mahajarah to mahajarah.

Not one frame out of place. And yet within all of them countless microscopic movements break out of lockstep. The weight of the image is nothing to the weight of its inhabitants, who scramble amongst the stone steps and palace gates to fill the void with their hundred year presence. 9/10.

Splice - dir. Vincenzo Natali

Completely batshit insane, goes places no movie should go, and yet… I was invested from beginning to end, it’s a perfect example of a director taking a crazy premise and taking it seriously. The climax is very problematic but the first 2/3rds worked as a two leveled metaphor for scientific progress and parenthood. Really loved Dren as a kid, adorable/creepy is how I prefer my sympathetic “aliens” to be. ET is too cute, Dren was just endearing enough to tug at my heartstrings while still hovering over the uncanny enough to creep me the fuck out. Good movie, super flawed, but good. 7/10.

In the Tall Grass - dir. Vincenzo Natali

Natali is such an inconsistent and flawed director, but for every misstep his movies have they manage follow themselves up with something completely fresh. Here we oscillate between frustrating melodrama and eldritch grass people.

I can see why this flopped because it lacks the traditional horror structure to appeal to the broad horror-seeking audience while also neglecting a clear thesis statement that “elevated” horror fans need in order to latch onto a movie. It doesn’t say anything immediately apparent about their favorite themes like grief, or trauma, or guilt, etc.

I didn’t like it when I saw it a few years ago because the acting is awful and I was annoyed by its weirdness. Now I appreciate it. More casually cosmic horror of this nature, please. 7/10.

Bait - dir. Mark Jenkin

A cool experiment in analog film, not remotely engaging at all for me but I respect Jenkin’s vision. 4/10.

Vampyros Lesbos - dir. Jesús Franco

The sheer formal playfulness from Jesus Franco makes this such a delight to watch. Movies like these defy logic, the more film I watch the less concerned I am with tangible threads than with emotional bandwidth. What is expressed matters less to me than how it is expressed. I don’t need to know what the vampire had for breakfast, I just need to see the vampire seduce her hapless victim. 7/10.

The Way of the Gun - dir. Christopher McQuarrie

The most unsentimental of neo-Westerns. A drop of blood in a bottomless bucket of entrails and human offal. The only shred of warmth comes at the end of a barrage of carnage, and the answer is not found at the barrel of the gun but at the act of female creation, the divine miracle that is childbirth. The future redeems us but at the cost of seemingly endless carnage. Unbelievably cool movie, one of the last of its kind. 8/10.

The Driver - dir. Walter Hill

A cat and mouse movie that lives entirely in transitory spaces. The cops don’t do their work in a station, they interrogate in alleyways, after hour bars, and outside the backs of trucks. Meanwhile nobody has a name either, they are assigned by role only. The Driver. The Player. The Detective. Words are only spoken if necessary. Everybody is an outlaw. 8/10.

Bonjour Tristesse - dir. Otto Preminger

How much of the opulent European narcissism of the characters is merely a vehicle for Preminger to flex on us, we’ll never know, but the result is an astoundingly precise observation of how class blinds you to the world. The divorce between the audience and the melodrama is sustained for 90 minutes to gain the full periscopic view of these wretched rich fucks before ducking back down into the waves. I think everyone has a moment like Cecile where they’re confronted by the worthlessness of their life, only for a spoiled rich kid it happens later rather than sooner. 8/10.

A Bigger Splash - dir. Luca Guadagnino

Luca correctly recognizes around this point in his career that he was ill-suited for screenwriting, which is a respectable move that many directors ought to take. Sometimes you have to identify where your skillset lies, and this idea that’s been pushed in the industry that you have to be a good writer to make movies is part of the reason movies have declined in quality.

More auteurship does not necessarily create better work, part of the work of a director is script analysis, and it’s often a lot easier to analyze somebody else’s script than your own, which explains why a lot of the 90s guys (Tarantino, PTA, Wes Anderson) are a bit up their own ass. Back in old Hollywood, guys like Hawks and Ford never wrote screenplays to make ends meet, but they did amend the scripts they received to their own purposes. Guadagnino makes the script his own.

This quadruple screwball effort lays the foundations for several of his next movies, where he really started to come into his own as a director. This is a bit of a rough start, but it’s got a precociously bouncy energy that’s hard to argue with. Rich Europeans really do be living like this. 6/10.

Suspiria - dir. Luca Guadagnino

Quite possibly the longest movie ever made. 2/10.

Picnic at Hanging Rock - dir. Peter Weir

Moments of ethereal mystery interspersed with long periods of foppish Victorian bullshit. High points are high, though. 6/10.

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping - dir. Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone

I used to rap. Corny for a Jewish dude to admit but it’s true. And I took pride in it. I thought I was pretty good. I started a band with a few of my friends in middle school to impress girls, then at some point I got into hip-hop through my boarding school roommate Jay who put me onto a lot of the stuff that expanded my taste beyond the limited scope I knew. Soon enough I was taking influence from Kendrick, Earl Sweatshirt, Tyler the Creator, eventually I moved past the entry level stuff and became obsessed with Lupe Fiasco and a whole heap of neglected talents that made up the broader hip hop landscape. Beyond that music was my biggest passion by far, more than film, more than anything. I would listen to about 10 albums every day. I would catalog them and write reviews that I only shared with my friends. I would seek out the most obscure work I could find. I stumbled on rap albums from artists with less than 100 monthly listeners and I would try to share them with people. I wanted to not just be the greatest rapper of all time but also be the most knowledgeable person in the room at any given point on hip hop. I bought a massive encyclopedia from an r/hiphopheads user about 2pac. I joined discord servers to meet other rappers and rap lovers to collaborate and debate. To this day, some of my best friends are from these communities (including Cassie, the person I watched this movie with). I released like 5 mixtapes and have probably featured on at least three dozen songs.

But this all started with the Lonely Island. I never would’ve had any interest in creating hip hop, period, if it weren’t for them. It’s an embarrassing admission perhaps but it is the honest fact, and I won’t sugarcoat it: I wanted to be Andy Samberg as a teenager. This and Hot Rod changed 14 year old me’s life. I thought this was absolutely the funniest thing on planet earth and I have always been the kind of guy who likes to make people laugh. It might not shine through here because I’ve learned to delineate where I want to be “funny” and where I want to communicate sincerely but in my day to day life I am someone who really enjoys performing and getting a laugh out of people. So to me, the idea of melding musical performance with comedy was a game changer. A real revelation.

Fast forward to my 5th mixtape which came out when I was about 19. It was big and cathartic and I dropped it after getting dumped for the first time in my life.

In the 3 years since, I haven’t touched the microphone. I dropped the hobby like a potato sack. No matter how much I tried going back to it, it didn’t stick. All of my efforts felt forced. All my songs were about the same thing, girls and heartbreak. I did not want to be Taylor Swift as a rapper. Absolutely not. No way. So I quit. I moved on and I buried that hobby in the ground.

The emotional poignance I found in this movie this time around was the joy of finding lost satisfaction in creation again. I legitimately get teary eyed and emotional when Akiva Schaffer lets his stoic demeanor down once he hears what he’s always wanted to hear from Conner, which is “I’m sorry.” The two of them reconciled, they can go back to being friends and making music, which has always been the best part of making music for me; getting to fuck around with my little brother on Ableton or my friend Cassie or any one of my friends who I laid down tracks with in all those years. Maybe I’ll fall in love with it again soon.

10/10.

Black God, White Devil - dir. Glauber Rocha

Guy losing his morality to the landscape is kinda my thing this was just too abstracted and political for me to grasp onto. Happens frequently with Brazilian cinema. Lacks emotional tactility. 5/10.

Mississippi Masala - dir. Mira Nair

Really close to being great but I never bought into the romance. Didn’t seem like they were falling for each other. Yes they’re both attractive but that doesn’t mean there’s on-screen chemistry. I don’t think Sarita Choudhury was very good here, at all. That scene where she’s calling her mom towards the end is brutal. Her mom is just outselling her every time they cut between them.

Denzel is so smooth but I don’t know if he’s capable of falling in love on screen, it always feels like he’s got some sense of distance or superiority to Mina that alienates me from his emotions. It works when he plays people who are collected and badass, but love is often a very embarrassing emotion to witness inherently and Denzel never gets embarrassed enough for me to buy it. 6/10.

Winter Light - dir. Ingmar Bergman

Ten seconds into an Ingmar Bergman movie: This is the most boring thing of all time. 3/10.

What’s Up, Doc? - dir. Peter Bogdanovich

A movie about how Jewish women are agents of chaos who destroy everything in their path. Incredible, true, factual.

The car sequence is symphonic comedy. I was laughing less at the gags themselves and more at how insane it was. Budgets back in the 70s were nothing like they are now so the fact that they pulled it off is pretty spectacular. 7/10.

Be Afraid - dir. Drew Gabreski

One of the worst movies I have ever seen. The world’s shittiest TV pilot extended into a 90 minute feature film. Never before has there been a horror movie with zero scares and zero interesting ideas.

The premise is something I can easily get behind and I kinda wanna rip this movie off and do my own take on a sleep paralysis curse, but the execution is trope after trope after trope. There’s one actor here who is so laughably bad that it almost saves the movie–at least SOMEBODY is breathing life into the script.

The director is completely incompetent. No understanding of lighting, of how to set up good shots, no idea what works in the editing booth, no idea how to direct actors. A couple of times a good performance snuck through and you could tell it came at the expense of what was probably the worst directorial experience any of these actors had ever experienced. I have been on numerous student films with greater artistic vision and direction.

Embarrassing stuff. Not everyone is cut out to make movies, there’s no shame in disappearing into anonymity after you make something this godawful. 1/10.

Blue Velvet - dir. David Lynch

I discovered one day that if I stared at a woman long enough I could see her undressed. Mentally I could remove her clothing piece by piece until only her naked body remained in front of me. I was young when I discovered this. I can’t recall a specific age, but I was young enough not to seriously reflect on the hunger that gnawed in my organs when I stared at women. It was a hitherto untapped magical ability. I found that if I concentrated, I could imagine a woman on top of me, straddling my hips and touching my chest. I could even, if I was focused on nothing else and her naked body alone, imagine her kisses along my forehead, lips, chest, and stomach.

I discovered later in my life that if a woman laughed, I would laugh as well, and if she conscientiously made me break my solemnity then a damn inside me would break and I could cry instantly. In her arms. Without a hint of hesitance. This discovery shocked me. It was proof of the divine because nothing else could explain the magnetic attraction that would propel me towards a woman who held this kind of control over my senses. My question now is, at what point do you know you are in love with someone? At what point does it become clear that the thing you are mistaking for love is not in fact a possession of forbidden knowledge that you have peaked into and confused for sensory abandon? At what point have you missed the point? At what point is it a bottomless void in which you’ve tossed gravel hoping to hear the clacking that confirms you know anything? ANYTHING at all.

The tether expands as you age. I felt unexpectedly moved by the shot of Kyle Maclachlan looking at his father in the hospital bed. He comes home and everything is different. He cannot look at it the same way. His father is no longer a protective figure but another bag of meat who will be eaten by insects. Who will rot wordlessly in hospice until entropy claims him. Jeffrey continues his search for meaning at home by simply walking. In this ordinary act he has discovered things that would not be apparent to the standard suburban driver or occupant–that there is something imperceptibly wrong, and it all begins with an ear. A receptacle for secrets. A medium of voices. I didn’t get Blue Velvet when I first watched it because I hadn’t left home. I watch it now in a similar predicament as Jeffrey. A college student back home for break, feeling the sense that home can never be what I remembered it. My parents will never be able to comfort me as they did when I was a child. The tether to them I have keeps growing longer and longer as distance and time places boundaries on our relationship.

My dad has seen Blue Velvet about twenty times in his life, David Lynch very well may be his favorite filmmaker ever. He said to me that he’s seen it twenty times and come away with a different interpretation of it every time. Perhaps it is because of where I am in my life: I see it as the death of innocence. The moment where we discover that what we want contradicts who we “are”. The moment where an ordinary young man discovers, hiding in a closet that he is not supposed to be in, that he is attracted to the vicious, taboo sensuality he sees in front of him. The moment where a mother is abused for her vulnerability and allows herself to be abused to protect her child. The moment where you realize you cannot trust any institution, any individual, any society, any preternatural law of the universe to bend towards justice. Worse yet, you realize that the injustice does not repulse you. On the contrary, it excites you.

Once all of this is realized, you have a choice to make. You have seen a sliver of the “truth” and it is sickening. Do you succumb to it? Do you ignore it? Do you turn away from the light? Is this choice even your own to make? Is it a choice at all?

Honestly, I don’t know. I didn’t plan this review, I didn’t write an outline, I don’t have a thesis. Like all my reviews, I wrote what came to mind and hoped it would make sense by the end. I don’t have a comforting final sentence that satisfies me. But for all of Lynch’s weirdness, for all of his idiosyncrasies, the strangest thing about this film is not Dennis Hopper’s terrifying, psychosexual performance or any of the uncanny dialogue, but the bittersweet dance Jeffrey and Sandy share before the can of worms opens itself back up. It is strange because it is absolutely tender, which is not a word you would associate with a neo-noir erotic mystery thriller directed by David Lynch. Tender is not a word he is oft described with. But it is. It’s so tender that it hurts. The robins cannot eat all of the insects, but… you hope it’s possible. Maybe.

10/10.