6u532b

Watched on Thursday June 5, 2025.

youtu.be/ktE_3PrJZO0?si=MicAaYam7iNdwwd9

An important watch

pickled radishes 🤤

at moments like this I think to myself: shouldn't all movies be Akira Kurosawa Shakespeare adaptations?

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

every Dystopia fan

better than playtime!

yeah i wish i directed this

there is even one who must become the tattered man of modernity

This review may contain spoilers.

Matthew Modine is like a 10% more evil Kyle MacLachlan. The sniper woman saying "shoot me" over and over makes the moral choice wayyyy too easy for Joker and co.

this is what happens when me and caelb are in the same room together

An exceptionally american movie. Every cut is a worth a lifetime.

difference and repetition

Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.

Watched on Friday April 18, 2025.

Its themes are blah blah blah but my god it is gorgeously shot and the soundtrack is to die for. Feels, at times, like a feature length version of Bong's Influenza. Would have liked to see more of certain characters (the screenwriter and professor's wives) and less of others. The first two sections end kind of awkwardly. I'm not usually bothered by explicit sex scenes but this was a little too indulgent at times. "learn to accept failure" lol

I always knew Wallace Shawn was the "my" of the movie but for some reason I assumed andre was andre the giant. Andrew was not that guy

skateboarding meets occult esotericism

youtu.be/lNTkP4rzUDk?si=dEd0t3Rnk582D6bl

a visceral commentary on contemporary models of desire. Just kidding, we made a movie because we felt like it

audiophile porn

Watched on Sunday April 6, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 2, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 30, 2025.

Wandering Joseon-era troubadours earn the King's affection through satire. The king gets way too into it and weirds everyone out. Tragedy ensues.

Speaks to the importance of performance and the entertainment industry in Korean culture, also the importance of homosexuality

those cricket fellows were gay, weren't they

Great sound design for fans of power electronics

inside you there at 18 mickeys. lots of people sniffing things and recording things. director bong has a preference for a certain kind of monster (he always works with the same monster design guy hahaha). felt like some scenes were a bit over long, but I was never bored. I was bored by the films copy and paste "anti capitalist" story in which the good guys win through the power of the constitution. I enjoyed Robert's voice, I don't know if it would have fit if another director did the movie. also nice elliott smith needle drop

Millennial is so fixated on the club that he can barely disguise his hatred for his daughter

Mississippi mentioned

Watched on Saturday March 1, 2025.

Watched on Saturday February 22, 2025.

yeah okay, try driving in dallas at 5pm on a friday, frenchie

Here's something I wrote about the film for class; excuse the embarrassing academic nonsense:

In a story called “The Dead Man” (1946), Jorge Luis Borges briefly summarizes the icarian rise and fall of a young man navigating the world of Latin American smuggling. The fatalistic themes of the story, which ends with the protagonist, Otálora, realizing “he was already as good as dead… already a dead man” (200) from the beginning of his plot to usurp his boss, the formidable but elusive Bandeira, parallel the all-for-nothing bleakness of the ending of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953). More than that, the short story’s treatment of a particular Latin American archetype–the gaucho–provides a uniquely fruitful lens through which to view Clouzot’s modern tragedy.

The task of transporting two tons of explosives across the Latin American countryside with two hulking, abrasive trucks as steeds already seems like a cruel, satirical caricature of the noble yet gruff occupation of those cattle drivers of legend. Mario, like Otálora, is “a sad sort of hoodlum” whose “infatuation with courage” (Borges 197) simultaneously dooms him and saves him throughout the film. However, where Otálora’s naïve bravado stems from a genuine sense of wonderment at his expanding surroundings, Mario’s cynical bravery is necessitated by his ever-contracting environment–represented not through claustrophobic closeups as one might expect, but through establishing wide shots which emphasize the enervating barrenness of Los Piedras. Jo, too, seems like he should be the film’s equivalent of the short story’s formidable gaucho-boss Bandeira, known to most “by reputation” alone (a phrase which appears in the text of the film and the subtext of the story). It is Bandeira’s reticence that gives Otálora the false sense of confidence which encourages him to betray his mentor, who tortures his unwitting apprentice via “the art of progression humiliation” (Borges 199). All the while Otálora thinks that it is the other way around, that he has the upper hand; by contrast, the film makes it all too clear from the start of the treacherous journey that circumstances have the upper hand on Jo, and it is his own bad conscience that unravels his facade of indifferent machismo. The dark cowardice within Jo is visually externalized by the end of that journey in the gruesome image of Jo completely blackened by oil (the same oil for which the men willingly give their lives) and literally crushed after a final effort at maintaining his dignity.

Even though the protagonists of both “The Dead Man” and The Wages of Fear meet with terrible, apparently unavoidable fates, Otálora is at the very least afforded the venerable title of gaucho. Perhaps it is the four nitroglycerin couriers’ violent aversion to and desperation to escape rather than embrace the Latin American countryside that precludes them from the title. Then again, one can hardly expect the oil mercenaries to appreciate the scenery when that very scenery could prove deadly at any moment. Whereas Otálora lives “a life of vast sunrises and days that smell of horses” (Borges 197), even the audience of Clouzot’s film forget to appreciate the scenic canyons and can almost smell the sweat, blood, and oil as all attention is focused on the smallest of movements thanks to Clouzot’s precise framing. No, the four transient Europeans are not herding cattle and there is no honorable pastoral mystique in their quest. If anything, it is our four would-be gauchos who herd each other like animals “with whistles and shouts” (Borges 197). Each cut between the man performing an action and the man directing him reminds us of the link between the men’s fates. Our participation as viewers in that cinematic process further implicates us and asks that we question our role in the bastardization of an entire archetype under imperial capitalism.

Certainly, Borges’ story also comments on the false consciousness which drives men to betray their fellow workers (demonstrated in Otálora’s contempt for “these Uruguayans” [198]), or themselves, in hopes of taking up ranks among the capitalist managerial class–only to be humiliated and brutalized by that very class into which they wished to assimilate. It is the American oil baron Mr. O’Brien who takes the role of Otálora’s killer–not Bandeira, but his lackey, Suárez, who shoots Otálora, “almost with a sneer” (Borges 200). Unable to follow any code of conduct other than the will to profit, William Tubbs is easier to laugh at than hate in his role as he sends the men off to die not so much with a sneer as with a dumb smile. If Borges’ story was an adumbration of the deadly consequences of false consciousness in the coming century, then Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear is a long, hard look at those explosive consequences. What Pomerance states is true–the explosion has already happened long before the film begins; everything we see, including the rending of the gaucho archetype, is ground zero.

Watched on Saturday February 8, 2025.

ghosts are only real if you believe in them. read The Jakarta Method

Watched on Friday January 24, 2025.

"징그러워"

he had to go all in

the napoleon statue in potters office is so funny

Watched on Saturday December 21, 2024.

woody stressin me out in this movie

films directed by guys named Caleb >

there's glass in my eyes!!!!

Watched on Sunday November 24, 2024.

if a 2000s movie has a scene in a restaurant it HAS to be a japanese or chinese restaurant

what a joy to wathc movie on the tv

Weird Lamp 2 is weirder, longer, and better than Weird Lamp. The sound design is better. The shots are better. The story is better. I am so proud of weird lamp 2! Watch it on youtube if you please: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpkFZ4aheb4&t=1s

your grandpa got big

he zapped himself

destroy seattle

weird lamp 2 coming soon! meanwhile refresh your memory of weird lamp: youtu.be/R0AM15ght3c?si=Phe5JwdY516OSSZ5

beautiful 35 mm colors in Seattle repertory cinema!

I would become a toilet cleaner too if this happened to me

favorite books:

Blindness - José Saramago
The Sympathizer/The Committed - Nguyễn Thanh Việt
Kafka on the Shore - Murakami Haruki
The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño
The Jakarta Method - Vincent Bevins
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Wall - Marlen Haushofer

• Decision to Leave
• Rushmore
• Evolution of a Filipino Family
• Cure
• A Brighter Summer Day
• Burning
• Fallen Angels
• The Double Life of Véronique
• Yi Yi
• Memories of Murder

...plus 26 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

youtube.com/@calebjenkins546?si=vz9WPaVfAneoa3uZ

• Because I felt like it
• weird lamp
• Weird Lamp 2

• Monster
• Welcome to the N.H.K.
• FLCL
• K-On! The Movie
• Haibane Renmei
• NANA
• Cowboy Bebop
• Berserk
• Revolutionary Girl Utena
• The Tatami Galaxy

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Taking this challenge as an opportunity to watch a few classics I've had on my list for a while as well as a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film that's been sitting on my external hard drive for months now, and a few extras

Original list

• Charisma
• Rampo Noir
• Battles Without Honor and Humanity
• Spirited Away
• Tokyo Story
• Godzilla
• Golgo 13: The Professional
• The Machine Girl
• Tokyo Olympiad
• The Legend of the Stardust Brothers

• Instrument
• Widespread Panic: The Earth Will Swallow You
• Heaven Adores You

my favorite genre

• The Cherry Orchard
• Drive My Car