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While watching this movie, I couldn’t help but feel that almost every time a movie is filmed in Adelaide and doesn’t try to hide it, and it goes on to get seen by millions of people, it’s usually a film where a child is brutalised or mutilated. This shouldn’t bother me so much, I’m not a prude. However, it’s difficult for me to separate fact from fiction, given the reputation my hometown has as “the murder capital of Australia”. We aren’t; how can Adelaide be the murder capital when Melbourne has nearly four times our population? It’s just that we’ve had some crimes over the years that stand out for their brutality or unsolved elements, the latter usually involving children or adolescents. So, yes, as someone with somewhat of a fascination towards the morbid, it does make me a bit uncomfortable to see Adelaide (despite my love-hate relationship with this city) represented on a global level with these films where children get their faces cut up and knock teeth out, right as it felt like we were shedding the permanent marker tagging of “the city where the Beaumonts disappeared, and the Family Murders happened, and the girls disappeared from Adelaide Oval, and all these other times kids got killed.” But, oh well… I’m sure the government won’t be using this as “all publicity is good publicity.”

Removing myself from the local context, I feel this is objectively a good film. I have no regrets about viewing it. I was entertained. I was constantly invested in the story. I even had to avert my gaze from the screen more than once, which is a rarity for me, one that this movie really earned. But some of these scares, the ones that made me make a little quiet noise to myself, or wince and contort my face in disgust - on some level, they just don’t feel quite earned. They’re well-done, yet I can’t help but feel like they’re cheap manipulative attempts at scares. Much like the moment in “Talk to Me” that left me most disturbed, it’s children mutilating themselves. A once-off? Okay, that’s an interesting way to upset the viewer. We all hate seeing things like that happen to children. Having your two films each feature it? That’s an odd thing to recur in your films. By the second time it happened in “Bring Her Back”, I couldn’t help but feel I was being told “Look, here’s an awful thing to see that anyone in their right mind would be disturbed by. So that means we scared you!” Is it effective? Yes. But by now, one can’t help but wonder if it is a cheap tactic relying more on shock value to manipulate the viewer into a feeling of fright that feels more earned than it actually is.

The element of the film I have the least qualms with is Sally Hawkins, as captivating as ever. In many ways, I find many of her performances giving me a feeling I can only describe as “aunt-like”. I regret to draw any comparison between this film and “The Shining”, but I am reminded of Jack Nicholson. Both appear normal at the start, but on closer inspection, the warning signs are already there. Much like how Nicholson’s performance is aided by his scruffy appearance and “vibe” that just feels so American, Hawkins’s performance is aided by how real she looks. The combination of lightly messy hair, the wardrobe of a cool primary school teacher, and her sharp facial features all leave the viewer thinking how she just looks like a normal person, and not some false ideal of what we should try to look like. She looks like she could be one of your mum’s friends or (as mentioned earlier) your quirky aunt. And that’s what makes the performance not only more terrifying, but heartbreaking. As the film progresses, and we learn more about why, it is hard not to feel sympathy for her, as twisted as she is. And only an actress like Hawkins could handle such a task — a calibre of performance that is guaranteed to succeed in the hands of anyone from Mike Leigh’s company of thespians.

As for the technical merit of the film? I don’t know. I find it difficult to say nice things about the Philippou brothers. They aren’t monsters; simply grating personalities (and their comments about talking to Marvel, combined with their past comments on wanting to film all their projects in Adelaide, has me dreading the thought of an MCU film being made in Adelaide with Slimy Bastard-in-Chief/Professional Photo-Op Hound/Fake Populist Peter Malinauskas as our Premier - he would go on the most obnoxious cycle of PR stunts if that happened). Motormouths in a manner that isn’t charming, but frustrating. Their films are good one-time watches, but I feel no desire to revisit them. Could it be the tall poppy syndrome? I don’t know. Adelaide’s own Sarah Snook won a damn Tony this week and I couldn’t be happier, because she’s a fantastic actor. Kodi Smit-Mhee was nominated for an Oscar a few years back (and should’ve won, out of those nominees). It’s just that I know there are great Australian directors whose work probably won’t get much of an audience. Even the Philippou brothers had to go out to the US to make enough connections to get these movies made, and only once “Talk to Me” became a worldwide hit did the Australian film industry decide to try and schmooze up to them. I just think these guys are fine. Not the next best thing since sliced bread. If it can lead to the works of someone like Adam C. Briggs or any of this new generation of independent Australian voices finding an audience beyond the confines of this island, I’m happy. But I doubt that will happen, sadly.

I think Mel Brooks is overall a funny guy. I think Gene Wilder was a very funny man. Together, in 1974, they managed to put out two of the funniest comedies back-to-back, and that's enough to make them legends in my eyes. As for where their collaboration started? Well, not every film can be a gem.

As I watched this, the main thought crossing my head was simply variations of "It's inevitable that this ended up as a Broadway musical." Wilder is funny, but is it funny enough? Zero Mostel is funnier than Wilder here, and that's still not enough. The problem is the manner in which Brooks is directing them, one that clearly comes from someone used to entertaining a live audience. There's a certain element to both lead performances that feels deeply indebted to the comedic timing of the stage. Is it sacrilege to say I'll probably enjoy the remake/musical more? I don't think so. The neurotic yelps of Mostel and Wilder are hysterical if one imagines themself sitting in the nosebleeds, watching the duo treading the boards like a couple of termites, bickering with each other about Hollywood ing. If the main complaint about the remake/musical is that it feels too much like a pro-shot version of the Broadway hit, well that doesn't sound negative to me. Because I have more enough faith in the contagious energy of live theater. Because I trust Matthew Broderick to make the character of Leo Bloom more fun to watch and less of a pain (despite the chuckle-worthy literary reference of his name). And, perhaps most importantly for me, because I trust Nathan Lane -- a scene-stealing comedic presence whom I would gladly sacrifice a goat for -- to be the perfect fit for the manic hysteria of Max Bialystock. Perhaps knowing of the other film's existence is a detriment, as I did watch Mostel and find myself think "Wow, he's funny, but I bet Nathan Lane is a whole lot funnier."

Do I think the film is humourless? No. In of the Brooks films I've seen, "The Producers" can sleep at night knowing that it isn't "Spaceballs". However, it may be woken up by a nightmare branded with the reminder: "You are not 'Young Frankenstein.'" While the film peaks in the first 30 minutes with Mostel and Wilder's two-hander sequence, there are a few decent chuckles throughout. Unfortunately, Kenneth Mars is only funny when he is just doing facial expressions and not speaking -- which is unfortunate, as the film believes that his dialogue is far funnier than physical comedy could ever be. As for the hippie playing Hitler, the fellow who looks like Oz Perkins? He's funny, at first. But after his West Coast musical number (a hip tune that could likely get its performers booed out of Haight-Ashbury at the height of the Summer of Love), the joke wears thin. A lot of old comedy is built around jokes that aren't that funny overstaying their welcome. I think of Jerry Lewis, who relies on this tactic an awful lot, not because he thinks the jokes are funny, but out of a sense of wickedness towards the viewer, trying to test all the goodwill he has earned. When Lewis drags a bit out beyond the event horizon, it somehow makes us keep laughing: durational comedy. As for "The Producers", it's another case of bits that were likely knee-slappers half a century ago, but now just leave us checking our wrists (despite them being free of watches), tapping our foot from impatience, and emitting a clipped sigh.

The kind of movie to bring back memories of childhood insomnia and staggering out of bed in the middle of the night, awake physically but not mentally, and going into the living room and putting the TV on, only to end up watching some weird European drama (never a prestige arthouse film, always the “genre fare”) that I’d be left wondering how much was real and how much was my mind shutting off as I drifted off to sleep.

It’s a feeling I treasure. I love when a movie gives me that same feeling. It’s got so many things I love watching in movies that are always fucking awful to experience in real life: awkward dinner party, a relationship turning extremely volatile as both parties descend into their own madness, an implausible mystery that never seems to have an answer. The most French thing about this movie might be the bit where the main guy’s boss chews him out because our hero turned down the propositions of the boss’s wife, and his boss is annoyed that this underling didn't make a cuckold of him. As Orson Welles said, “Ahhh, the French…!”

Movies this reminded me of:
- Cache
- Lost Highway
- Alexandra’s Project
- Enemy
- Antichrist (if Charlotte Gainsbourg plays half of a couple heading to a cabin on the woods, weird shit will happen)
- Cul-de-sac
- Just Hitchcock and his weird hangups about voyeurism and cheating and jealousy. Nowhere near as chauvinistic as Hitchcock can get, it’s just that those themes are handled in a manner that feels a bit more tasteful, but still chauvinistic in the way that French films can be.

Just glad I finally got to watch this with my friend. I love my friends. I love watching movies with them, I love just talking to them about whatever, and I had a few really good and stimulating conversations throughout the day via messages with friends, and it got my noggin jogging. Like Dustin Hoffman says in Ishtar, “My life isn’t bad, I just have a lot of pain.” He’s right. Life isn’t bad. After watching this movie, I know my life isn’t that bad. Thank god I’m not a protagonist in a psychosexual French drama.

A film that I’m fairly ambivalent about. I like the first half just fine, but the second half comes around and, for some reason, I find myself thinking “I don’t really care.” It doesn’t feel right for the arrival of Christopher Eccleston to make me lose interest, but it’s the case here. Perhaps it’s because I really like Brendan Gleeson’s character an awful lot.

But really, my favourite thing about the film is the way it captures the tension of wandering an empty city and not knowing what’s happened. The quiet and “liminal” nature of it. How better to convey it than with a GY!BE needle-drop?

And I’ve never had a problem with the visual quality of this movie. It works well, for this rundown, dirty, hopeless world we’re observing. If you want it to be immersive, 4K isn’t going to make it feel immersive. The smeared SD quality of early 2000s handicams makes this feel more real than any professional-grade digital or film camera could. Not to mention how it helped them film it in a near-guerrilla way. 45 minutes in the morning to clear out a busy spot, make it look like the apocalypse, and clear it back to normal? It’s insane but they did it. I love that.

Even though I’m completely middle-of-the-road on my opinions regarding 28 Days Later, I’m honestly really excited for 28 Years Later. Is it just the power of a good trailer editor, or will it actually be great? What I do know is I’m now certain that Alex Garland’s screenplays just bother me for some reason.

I will go and say that this might be one of the most overwhelming (in a positive sense) viewing experiences I’ve had. I don’t really cry anymore at movies, but I do weep, and I wept plenty. In true Alex fashion, my heart contorted itself for these lost loves as much as it was awestruck by the camerawork. Every scene felt like it had at least one shot where I found myself thinking “Oh my god, that is perfect! How come more directors haven’t stolen this shot?”

Honestly, a moment came halfway through this where I found myself thinking “This might honestly be in my top 10 films.” I don’t come to such a conclusion easily. I may be hyperbolic aplenty, but there are plenty of things I don’t say lightly and such a proclamation is one of them. It’s the kind of movie that makes me feel okay to cry. It makes me want to write poetry and prose. The kind of art that life is worth living for, the same way that Veronica and Boris’s love is strong enough that it makes the agony of World War 2 worth it in the hopes they will be reunited.

Do I believe this to be a better film than “I Am Cuba”? Honestly, no. “I Am Cuba” is also a masterpiece in its own way. But “The Cranes Are Flying” is more my kind of film. I guess, as much as I hold my political views strongly, I will always hold love and affection closer. Some people will prioritise politics, but I’m a cynic and I know we need to focus on the community that is all the people around us. Forgive this crude analogy, but an “intellectual” would watch this film and be moved by the struggles of the Soviet people through World War II and their perseverance, while a “romantic” would be equally moved by all the shit about love. Neither are wrong; I just fall into the more idealistic latter camp.

Also, a shout-out to this movie and how it never shames Veronica for some of the actions she takes. While those around her are indirectly slut-shaming her, she tries not to cry and then tears fall from my eyes as she gives it all her strength to appear strong. Even if the men are suffering from shell shock and don’t know about her own life, it’s such a culturally embedded view that it doesn’t matter. But the movie never shames or criticises her. It doesn’t try to take the moral stance of “Look at this silly young lady” like an American film would’ve done. As heartbreaking and devastating as it is to see nobody in the film condemn this attitude, it’s equally satisfying to watch Kalatozov take the wheel as director and shame this shaming, without having to blatantly spell it out; just trusting the viewer enough to understand what he is conveying.

I’m floored by this movie. The kind of film that’s left me utterly dumbfounded. Desperate to go and watch more films, but also wanting to sit with this experience for a while. Oh my god. This is what the movies are all about.

If you're like me and Gabe, both of us thinking Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were in love with each other, then it makes sense to watch one of the duo's films for Pride Month. So when Dino has a bath with the door wide open for Jerry to come in and talk to him, I was thinking this all makes sense. Probably unscripted. In Jerry's defense, Dean Martin was a smooth son-of-a-gun, even if he talked like he was drunk a lot of the time. How can you not love that voice?

I'm really getting the craving to watch more Jerry Lewis. What a funny bastard. His stumbling deliveries in the nebbish, nasal voice. The almost paradoxical element to his physical comedy, in which he seems to have so much control over his body, yet also no control over his body -- it left me dumbfounded. The chiropractor bit is not only funny, but feels like a prototype for some of the bits from the solo Jerry films I've seen, where it's a simple joke that he tries to see how long he can drag it out until it just becomes absurd and chaotic. I feel like people associate him with "The Nutty Professor" as this clumsy fool, when there's a brilliant anarchic streak to testing the limits of viewers' patience when it comes to comedy.

That isn't to dismiss Dean Martin. Not only is he just endlessly cool -- even if his character is very much a 1950s leading man who doesn't understand boundaries re: women -- but he plays off of Lewis as a fantastic straight man. He's just charming. He sings and I love his weird, marble-mouthed voice. And then I how good he was in "Rio Bravo" (a movie I was asleep for half of, but he is what I most), and it doesn't surprise me. Everyone talks about Sinatra when it comes to the Rat Pack, and I get it. Sinatra has all the hits, he has the Oscar, he has arguably one of the great all-time voices (can't explain why). But I just think Dean Martin was funny and cool. Sometimes that's all you need.

It ends up being really funny that they got Shirley MacLaine to play the character obsessed with astrology and numerology. Again, how much was scripted? And, once again, Jerry Lewis shows that you can become an A-lister from a career of playing characters who probably don't know what sex is. Finally, of all the films to have a climax involving the Cold War, if you'd told me this was one of those films, I'd think you're joking.

There's a bit in this where Jerry Lewis gets dragged to speak at a conference about the evils of comic books and says, and I quote, "I almost became a dope from reading comic books and I now realise that is why I am a little retarded." Did not age well. Did I laugh from the shock of it, hearing it so casually 70 years later? Yes. Do I think there is a certain laugh to be generated from hearing a Jerry Lewis character say that he's "retarded" because he read too many comic books, in this day and age? Honestly, yes. I can't get offended by that, it's so absurd, it feels like something from a fever dream.

Sometimes you watch a film and it's not a perfect film (because so few are), but you think about it in the context of what niche sub-sub-genre it exists in and realise it's maybe a perfect entry to that collection of films, even if it's still an overall 4/5 film. I don't mean to say this is a bad film, I think it's actually pretty great, and an incredibly-paced thriller.

The type of film we don't get now because it would just be turned into an 8-part Netflix series instead, padded with unnecessary subplots. No, instead we learn just enough about all of the characters to make us enjoy watching them -- it's not that they're extremely complex characters, but they're just developed enough to make us notice the fact there's more to them than would be the case in most movies. And the way that information just gradually gets revealed. We keep going and learning more, and there'll be a twist or turn, but when we learn something new, we still end up feeling a bit confused, because there's always a piece missing. That being said, it all comes together in a rather satisfying way.

I read somewhere that the novel was originally going to be adapted for American audiences, but the author pulled the plug and let Guillaume Canet do his version because he was the only interested director who said that, at the core, this is a love story. And I was confused by that until the movie ended, and it hit me that, in a strange way, this is really about what people will do for the ones they love.

Plus, I have an odd affinity for movies in that area of "innocent person gets framed for a crime, and has to go on the run, while there's a whole mystery that has to be unraveled". It's strange because I have nightmares about that and if it happened to me in real life, I'd just have a panic attack and give up. But I sure do love watching it when it's someone else, especially French Dustin Hoffman.

"I once talked to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. He bought two Jesus statues from me. He's a hell of a nice guy. You ever seen that face on him? It was like a big apple pie."
-Frank Costanza, 1995

If I could ever pick a movie that makes me think of Manic Street Preachers' "The Holy Bible", it's this one. Just overwhelmingly bleak, but universal. The kind of movie that I am personally finding difficult to put into words without ending up on a watchlist. I guess I'll say this: I've always been intrigued by morbid parts of existence and humanity. That being said, I don't personally think films should be made about murderers, unless it is trying to say something. I think of a director like Justin Kurzel, where "Snowtown" and "Nitram" upset many people for their existence, which I completely understand and empathise with, especially the latter. That being said, I appreciate those films in of the filmmaking and how Kurzel explores the complicity of those in the environs of their villains, how there are those who kill and then those who are, in a way, just as responsible.

However, I think political assassins are more interesting to make a film about than those who kill innocents. It works as a way to shine a light on sociocultural elements, things that cause divides between us. Some people do it because they are just unwell and don't like a politician for being on the other side of the spectrum. Some come from a more personal place, like the subject of this film. He isn't being radicalised or driven to insanity. He has come to this decision himself. He isn't trying to make a statement or gain attention. It's as if, to him, it's two men out in a vista and no one will hear about it. All that matters to him is that he achieves the goal.

A lot more experimental than I expected, but I don't really know what I expected. I feel like I'd have absolutely adored this if it was full-on gritty, but I'm beginning to accept that visual grittiness in modern cinema is dead. In a world where everything is to be clean and polished and rely on digital technology, it makes sense to depict things through an HD lens -- not that I'm against analog, I'm pro-analog. But there are some films that, in the past, would've been shot on rough 16mm, and now it feels the most appropriate format is digital. But not even the professional studio cameras; it should be the slightly-rough, just-above-consumer-grade cameras, like what Michael Mann and David Lynch were using. Does it necessarily look great? No. But it only feels artificial because it's more like how we see the world. And for something so true and real like "Revolution+1", it makes sense to have it look as much like the world through our eyes. If this is to be the new "unpolished", then so be it. Who gives a damn if it looks kind of cheap and smooth and digital? That's what the world looks like now.

I truly believe that making this movie in a week and premiering the rough cut on the day of Abe's funeral is one of the craziest (in the "cool" sense) things I've heard of a political filmmaker doing. Hats off. I don't know too much about Japan, but what I've heard Abe, he seems like a dick, so that's a neat "fuck you" to him, even in his post-mortem state.

Is it a step down from "Asteroid City"? Yes. Is it one of Anderson's lesser films? Yes. But that says a lot, because it's not a bad film -- it's just that Anderson has set the bar so high in his filmography that even a film like "The Phoenician Scheme" can be viewed as lesser, despite my own 4-star rating.

Benicio del Toro is just a delight. His delivery that usually associates him with menacing, ambiguous characters ends up making him a perfect fit for a Wes Anderson protagonist. He nails the comedic lines and manages to make the character of Zsa-Zsa Korda such a delight, even though he is profiteering and riddled with flaws. But is he a bad person? No, in the same way Royal Tenenbaum isn't technically a bad person. They aren't good, but they have just enough redeeming qualities to really blur that line.

It goes without saying, everyone else is great. Michael Cera doing a silly accent is a delight. But this is easily the film where the ensemble cast really is one of the film's biggest weaknesses. Everyone is great, but in a way that leaves me wanting to spend a lot more time with most of these characters, time that Anderson isn't willing to give because he is fixated on his protagonist (which is fair, it's a great character). Perhaps it would be less distracting if they weren't all recognisable actors. If it weren't Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston as the Sacramento Consortium, two business partners who finalise contract negotiations over an intense game of hoops, or Riz Ahmed as Prince Farouk, the affable Middle-Eastern royal playboy. I think of how in "Asteroid City", all the characters on the ensemble got a moment where we understood them and felt they were a character. Jeffrey Wright's character in "Asteroid City" gets some small moments that make it feel like more than just a cameo; here, it's just Jeffrey Wright showing up for a scene to speak beatnik lingo and do a blood transfusion with del Toro. Also, no Jarvis Cocker, sadly.

It's consistently entertaining and hilarious, but I feel like Anderson needs to decide whether he wants it to feel like a cavalcade of cameos, or just be willing to branch out to some new blood so as not to distract the viewer from the focus on this traveling trio at the core of the film. That being said, the business negotiation scenes left me captivated. I never thought Wes Anderson would be the type to make an enthralling movie about businessmen trying to fund an infrastructure scheme based around "totally not the Suez Canal". But he did it, so I need to to never doubt him.

Wes Anderson is one artist I'm glad has a patron who will fund anything he does. He's just a guy making these beautiful films about family. And sure enough, I thought about it again. How our parents learn from the mistakes their parents made. How our parents will try to give us a better childhood than the one they had, but we won't realise until we're older. We'll be pissed off at them for certain decisions they made for us, but eventually we get the perspective where we realise they felt they were doing the right thing, and they ultimately did do the right thing, even if it upset us. And that point where we realise our parents are people, and we stop seeing them as just our parents, but as these complicated, flawed figures (or, in Liesl's case, seeing her father as a redeemable figure). And it's kind of terrifying because we notice these little sadnesses about them, and these aspects to their personality that piss us off so much now that we are becoming our own people. But we can learn from it to try and improve upon those elements, should we ever end up becoming parents.

Closing note: the most Pynchon-esque Wes Anderson film so far. I say this because I've been reading "V." and there's sections in that book that feel like they could fit in here. The whole thing of western intelligence trying to meddle with the politics and business of the Middle East and North Africa and influence it all. Different sides all with the same goal of infiltrating these areas and trying to covertly reduce them to nothing more than pawns in their strategy game. And I've loved those sections of "V.", where Pynchon will go back and spend 50 pages exploring these European agents crossing paths as they try to complete the same goal, with only their allegiances making them enemies,

"For those we know, and for those we never meet."

As a notable Tom Cruise cynic (for the record, I think he is a legitimately great actor; he just plays himself nowadays, doesn't take any risks in his choices, and has developed a most insufferable cult of personality following among online cinephilia circles), I adored this. I'm puzzled by the reviews citing the first hour as really not good. I get that it's kind of a mess, but I was expecting that first hour to be incomprehensible. Maybe it's because I've been watching episodes of the TV show lately and so these overly elaborate, nonsensical plots just fit. Today's episode had them sitting up a fake execution chamber in a prison to expose prison corruption, and Martin Landau had to go undercover to get a death row prisoner to confess, all so they could bust the crooked warden -- sounds ridiculous, right? But it's like "Yeah, I'm in." They'd do that shit if they could in these movies.

Watching this, I could only think "I don't know how they create suspense and tension in movies, but it's an amazing skill to reduce the viewer to putty in your hands." A full 20-minute sequence where I was willing to risk my adolescent back problems flaring up, just because I needed to sit on the edge of my seat from all the stress. I bit my fingernails so much. I should've bought gum instead. But Tom Cruise wanted people to eat popcorn, so I did.

I was expecting to be so bitterly let down after the generic disappointment of "Dead Reckoning", but I was just relieved it wasn't that plodding. Bringing in all these actors -- Holt McCallany, Nick Offerman, fucking Mark Gatiss (looking more like Kenny Everett each day) -- made me happy. I just love character actors, not that they're all technically character actors, but my brain loves seeing actors who show up and I go "Oh, it's (insert name here)!"

Made me think about the world. For every eye-rolling moment that's obviously there to feed Tom Cruise's messiah complex (one of them being a character basically saying "It was written that you would be the one to save us all" -- this is why you shouldn't commit solely to projects written by your enabling, yes-man buddy), there were things that made me reflect on the shit situation of it all. At its core, this movie's politics are kind of bland lib bollocks, too idealistic about the ability for people to come together and unite. And so I'm thinking about AI and all the shit being done in the world and how it's scary, but all I can do is just keep trying to do the right thing -- for those I know, and for those I never meet. Carrying the flame and all that, although I don't agree with this movie's take that the flame should be carried by Tom Cruise. Even though I believe all humans are inherently narcissistic to a certain level, he is at that level that I don't think should be responsible for anything.

On my way home, Spotify recommended I listen to English Settlement by XTC. Favourite band, great album I haven't listened to in a while. The back-to-back double-tap of "Melt the Guns" and "Leisure" just left me thinking "Fuck, this is the world now." Teaching us how to work, but not what to do when we're out of work. All the fucking violence -- the media will fiddle while Rome burns. Even "Living Through Another Cuba" (wrong album, but I don't care). Yeah, I'm scared. But I'm scared of most things and yet I'm still here; my life isn't horrible, I just have a lot of pain. And sometimes spite and stubbornness are the key ingredients to making you want to stay around.

I realise most of this has nothing to do with "Mission Impossible". Too bad. It's supposed to be a reflection of my opinion on the movie, and so that includes my disconnected rants.

"People think the writer's imagination is always at work, that he's always inventing an endless supply of incidents and episodes, that he simply dreams up his stories out of thin air. In point of fact, the opposite is true. Once the public knows you are a writer, they bring the characters and events to you. And as long as you maintain your ability to look and to listen, these stories will continue to seek you out over your lifetime. To him who has often told the tales of others, many tales will be told."

For some reason, I only watched the first of these when they all dropped. And wow, what a shock! I loved something by Wes Anderson. Who'd have guessed? (He's only let me down once and even then, I'll allow it.)

Impossible to review these separately, or even collectively. All I have are multiple stray thoughts. First, it makes sense that Wes Anderson loves Roald Dahl; there's that same sense of whimsy but aloof charm which always steps back to reveal a layer of darkness that rises to the surface, and yet it never feels jarring. I can't say I grew up on an intense diet of Dahl's work the way I recall some classmates having done, but I enjoyed the ones that I read.

Now onto the proper stray thoughts:
- Needed more Jarvis Cocker. That being said, I love him becoming part of Wes Anderson's repertory company. In primary school, we watched "Fantastic Mr. Fox" one day and I got really excited when stop-motion Jarvis Cocker shows up to sing a song and dance. In case you couldn't tell, I was a very precocious child, so it makes sense that Wes Anderson is my favourite director.
- Rupert Friend really keeps impressing me with his appearances in Anderson's films. I've enjoyed him in the other films I've seen him in (one of the few redeeming qualities of Companion, hysterical in The Death of Stalin, heartbreaking in At Eternity's Gate), but he's just shown up in Anderson's films and I'm at the point now where I'm like "Oh sweet, it's Rupert Friend!" In The Rat Catcher, his look reminded me of some '80s pop singer but I can't figure out who.
- Richard Ayoade is a perfect fit. At first, I was worried I'd only be able to see him as Moss, but I was relieved when he spoke in a less nasal voice.
- Seeing Ralph Fiennes work with Anderson again makes me so giddy. Gustave H. might be the best performance in the entire Wes Anderson oeuvre. Fiennes can't top it, but his soft posh accent is so comforting that it's a perfect fit for any role Anderson could give him.
- I want more Ben Kingsley and (honorary South Australian) Dev Patel. One of my favourite things about Wes Anderson is how every time a new actor comes along, I find myself thinking "I don't know if they'll fit", and then it's always just perfect. Obviously, they're all dying to work with him, but it probably helps that he really does have his vision, even down to the line readings, and I guess it ends up making every performance fit.

I'll end with this. I see discussion about Anderson becoming style over substance. It happened with "Asteroid City", complaints he got too caught up in the dollhouse aesthetic. I think it's always visually stunning, but it made sense there that such a nested story should be presented in a manner far more fantastical than the grounded frame story. And something similar applies here. When you're adapting short stories that are practically fairy tales, does it not make sense to adopt a more absurd, Brechtian visual approach? It does to me. When you have these stories read to you as a child, your imagination has no limits and you imagine something strange that couldn't be translated properly into a visual medium. But the artifice within the limitations of our imagination has somehow been perfectly captured on film by Anderson.

My final ranking of these:
1. The Swan
2. Poison
3. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
4. The Rat Catcher

The movie ends and I walk out to find it's been raining all night, and I just think to myself "How fitting."

As cliche as it is to say, it's true: they really don't make movies like this anymore. I don't care what people say, I have no objections to the wedding sequence going on for ages. If anything, that's what makes it work: you spend so much time with this community and these guys on the happiest day of their lives, the day mere existence peaked for them. (Side note: this happy day could've used a lot more Frankie Valli - I would not object to 20 minutes of them drunkenly singing along to Four Seasons tunes.)

I want to say this movie is beautiful, but that isn't the right adjective for it; I'm sure there's a more appropriate synonym, but it isn't coming to mind. I sat there for the first hour, thinking "I never thought I would find myself thinking Christopher Walken is hot, but I was wrong", and then the last half hour, it's like "Oh, that's the sinister, detached Walken that I'm used to." And then I felt like crying whenever John Cazale was onscreen. I didn't realise I'd be like that, but it happened. Any time him and Meryl Streep were in the same shot, I got all choked up. I feel selfish saying this, but it's a loss that he only gave five on-screen performances, yet it's also beautiful that in a handful of roles, he still managed to become one of the great ing actors in the pantheon of cinema.

I won't go so far as to say this is my favourite DeNiro performance, but it feels like *the* DeNiro performance, in the way that it brings together all the different types of characters that he plays so well, into this one complex performance. The perfect mix of grounded, more humanistic DeNiro and the chaotic, dark DeNiro, without anything from the last 25 years of "I need to pay my bills" performances.

Reminded me of the town where a lot of my family lives. It's a town I have a fondness for, but is undeniably kind of a shithole. Backs up onto hills and valleys, built around a now-dead factory, people the military in a desperate attempt to get out of town (case in point: my mother), and everyone bottles up their sadness whilst turning to the bottle to cope with the repressed emotions. A dead-end place where the men work, then they drink until the joking turns into primitive, childish violence that ends as quickly as it started.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I definitely feel like this isn't a Vietnam War film, in the sense that isn't all full of battles: it's about the war, but not in the usual way. It's less focused on the film industry's usual bullshit they do, where they try to spin any movie about Vietnam to make it look like it was a victory (or tie) for America. I can't believe this even got made in 1978, considering how it takes the correct stance that America's involvement in the Vietnam War was not just unnecessary, but only managed to make it worse. A movie that portrays America as a nation willing to send young men off to a pointless war, then welcome them back with the dichotomous mindset of wanting to treat them like heroes (they know they aren't), but also not wanting to acknowledge their trauma because they lost the war. In the end, Mike decides to go back to Vietnam to try and do something he considers heroic, but even if he succeeds, nobody in Clairton will think of him as a hero for it because it doesn't match what the culture has told them a hero does.

In the last 30 minutes, there's a shot of DeNiro in a tan suit, strolling down a muddy Saigon backstreet and stopping, while a car burns behind him, lighting up all the buildings in the alley. Not only is it beautifully framed and lit, but it made me go into mania brain and think "This shot kind of captures the military-industrial complex." He's dressed like all the other rich guys in Saigon, trying to find a game of Russian roulette where all this rich profiteers are betting on two men pulling triggers on a gun and one of them dying. He stands there in his suit, well-dressed and well-groomed, focused on getting to this spot, oblivious to the fact that all around him is the mess of the mud and the inferno of the car. Rich guys (war criminals) solely focused on how to profit off anonymous death in foreign countries, without a care about the mess they are causing and all the blazing destruction being left behind them. I'm probably ridiculously over-analysing this one shot, but I'm standing by it.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about this adaptation. I've read the play a few times and absolutely adore it, but I don't think it translates well to film, despite Friedkin doing a commendable job. I feel that the few Pinter plays I've read don't quite lend themselves to this form of media, that they are best experienced either by reading them or viewing a production (oh, how I would love to see a production of "The Birthday Party").

But there's still something here. The source material means it can't really be a bad watch, despite the overly smeared, glare-heavy "1960s British cinema" look that I'm not a fan of, in addition to terribly mixed, shrill mono audio that made me glad I'm a chronic subtitle reader. Sydney Tafler as Goldberg is exceptional, though. He perfectly nailed the sinister, all-smiles facade of the character in a way that comes through by the dialogue without needing to be in the play's instructions.

At the same time, there's so much to unpack here. Once one learns to embrace all the ambiguity and contradictions in dialogue, what's left is dense in of its scathing commentary on power and the Kafkaesque qualities of its abuse by the state. Goldberg gloating that he has always played by the rules and done whatever he was asked to do, that he will love his family and friends, but refrain from associating with anyone "lower" than him to secure a good place in the ladder. The smiling man who shakes your hand, while the other hand behind his back clutches a knife ready to stab you so he can secure your spot. We are thrown into Stanley's interrogation and the fear is palpable. The barrage of questions to overwhelm and trip you up. In order to keep power, those with the positions believe it necessary to destroy the individual and have everyone agree with what they are told. While I think hyper-individualism is becoming equally as responsible for the rapid downfall of civilisation, I still believe earnestly in the importance of individuality -- that one must have a semblance of agency, to think for themselves, to act for themselves. If you act solely based on what everyone else is doing, and just swallow everything you are told and accept it as the truth, the status quo will work to make you feel like the unstable one. In reality, it is those trying to silence and kill the individual, practically executioners, who must be judged harshly as questionable people. Fuck conformity: just be you! And Pinter climaxes the play by expressing the whole point of the play in one line of dialogue, a line that's as beautiful and inspiring as it is haunting. The kind of line that one should adopt as a life motto.

So, yeah, now that the tangent is done, of course I love a play that's blatantly and unsubtly anti-authoritarian. Who'd have guessed? But, yeah, this is still a stressful watch, despite my qualms with the audio and visual quality. There's a point where Robert Shaw is trying to smoke a cigarette and he drops it, and I gasped out of frustration. I don't even smoke and I sat there, thinking "Just smoke that damn thing! Meditation won't help you calm down in this situation!" That's a wonderful niche genre of art -- the art that is so overwhelming that it makes you crave some catharsis afterwards. I heard someone refer to one stressful film as saying it should have a disclaimer stating "Smoke if you do; if you don't, start upon finishing this." And The Birthday Party kind of fits that. No wonder the band named themselves after this.

It got me out of the house during horrible depression. Other than that... I don't care.

One of those movies that tries to tackle a theme (toxic masculinity), but the messaging is so muddled that it's difficult to figure out where it actually lies. Nicolas Cage just has everything go wrong in a way that isn't entertaining. The difference between a movie like this and a movie like "A Serious Man" is that the latter is using the derailment of the protagonist's life to try and provoke a line of existential thinking in the viewer. Here, it's just so we can spend the whole movie thinking "Is he being gaslit or are they tormenting him?" When the answer is incredibly obvious. I was sure they were going to go for a twist that they didn't go for and I was surprised when they didn't.

Nicolas Cage has a couple of freak-out moments that elicited a chortle from me. But this is the kind of movie that made me think of better movies I'd rather be watching. An American walking around in the sun in a tan suit -- yeah, I should be watching "Queer". Dude in expensive sunglasses and clothing losing his mind on the coast -- I should be watching "Pacifiction". A small community where the protagonist is prevented from leaving -- I'll just go play some "Silent Hill" instead. Honestly, the kind of movie that realises "Wake in Fright" is a heavy contender for the greatest Australian movie, and decides to mimic that. How I wish I were watching "Wake in Fright".

I always forget how shit Australian movies are (generally) until I see one that gets a wide release. The villain in this movie is a motivational speaker who gives talks to men who work in offices to teach them how to be alphas while navigating the "soft" nature of the modern workplace. Most of his dialogue is such groan-worthy alpha male horseshit. I thought "This actor's doing a good job at selling it," then I found out his dad was a PM for the Liberal Party (lost to Whitlam), and I'm thinking that maybe he wasn't acting. But then I see Justin Rosniak in this and I think about how funny he was in "Mr. Inbetween", which is a fantastic show -- so, of course, the Australian film/TV industry buried it on Foxtel and nobody really talks about it because it's actually good.

"It takes a lot of nerve to have nothing at your age."

I don't know what to say about this movie. Someone could do it better, but I don't want to ramble. All I know is critics are stupid and executives will throw a woman under the bus for making a fucking hysterical movie that had a troubled production. The sphere of influence in the arts has always been washed, to a degree. But thank god for Elaine May.

Who'd have guessed Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman could have such perfect comedic timing? Who'd have guessed that Warren Beatty doing a Texan accent would sound just like Owen Wilson? Who'd have guessed that I want to hear an "Ishtar" soundtrack, with full versions of those songs (bravo Paul Williams)? Give us an "Ishtar" musical. Farce is already the perfect subgenre of comedy for a musical, and "Ishtar" is just a prime farce. It's a movie about guys who are kind of pathetic, as much as it's about love and music... Prefab Sprout-coded?

This isn't a case of "This is a bad movie, but it's funny." No, I legitimately really loved this movie and never doubted it for a moment. I'm grateful most of my hearing about this movie was from hearing people defend it, and none of the thrashings it got for so long. Just watch "Ishtar" and spread the word. Yes, it's stupid, but it's the kind of stupid movie that only a smart person could make. All farce is stupid, to a degree. But it also reminds me of one of my favourite quotes about comedy, courtesy of the great Mel Brooks: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." And, in the case of "Ishtar", what could be funnier than two schmucks being used as pawns in their government's scheme to ensure that foreign relations and politics will continue to benefit the United States over everyone else? It's so horrible and dramatic (but extremely plausible), and that's what makes it funnier as Hoffman and Beatty just keep inducing more layers of misunderstandings.

"Life isn't that bad. I just have a lot of pain." -- my new life motto right there. You can't put a price on democracy; although, however much it costs to buy a Blu-Ray of "Ishtar" is a good start.

"I came to Berlin to find a rat, and I found two of the grandest people I've ever met."

A film I'd put off for a while, like so many great ones, because of the length. Not that I hate long movies, but I need to properly set the time aside to dedicate my attention to it. Now I'm just so glad I watched this, because I'd heard so much and it just moved me deeply.

I'll always sing the praises of a movie that celebrates the power of friendship. You may lose your wife, you may lose your job, but your friends (hopefully) will be there for you. It transcends nationality, rank, gender. Love and friendship are the most important things. Even if you're a silly old man stuck in the past, convinced that what worked 40 years ago is surely just as useful and relevant now, you still need a friend.

That Archers magic really is something special. Those matte paintings, that astounding make-up, the colours. The "time ing" montages. Anton Walbrook's quiet aura of being resigned to his fate for the entire runtime. It's a miracle that Powell & Pressburger made these movies, that not only do they look this good, but they're also just brilliantly written too.

A movie that managed to live up to all the hype (it probably helped I didn’t know a lot about it). So incredibly ambitious that it’s a miracle it even got made back then, doing the hyperlink thing in what should be the only acceptable way: just having the characters exist in a bubble where they scatter like particles into different corners that are the scenes of the film.

I can’t think of a scene that could be cut. It all contributes some development, whether it’s in the thematic element or on the level of the characters. There’s just a lot to take in and process, but it’s never overwhelming. The scenes are all slow-paced and kind of mundane but have so much going on at the same time, it ends up feeling somewhat paradoxical.

The whole time, I’m thinking “What is this trying to say?” I went through multiple readings in my head. I don’t have an answer, just many theories, something that normally frustrates me. Nashville is the exception, where the offering of different interpretations (aided by just the right amount of ambiguity) pleases me more than a single concrete reading. It’s definitely cynical about America, a country that pats itself on the back and believes Year 0 was July 4, 1776. From a foreign perspective, it nails the rampant jingoism that underlines so much of American culture. The way that the industries will spin the weak yarn of “the flag stands for THIS!”, but will jump at any opportunity to reduce it to its colour scheme to slap onto things and make a quick buck. This is happening in Australia now, and it pisses me off. Not that I have a lot of pride (for many reasons), but it’s just a cheap way to prey on people’s sense of identity and further divides.

I also appreciate that this is a movie that is blatant about the futility of being apolitical. Many people just don’t care about politics and I think that’s different, but the effort to avoid taking a stance and turning that into its own statement, it ends up becoming political. Barnett doesn’t want Barbara Jean to be associated with any candidate, which then just draws more attention to “Why not?”, and then the argument just keeps going. And Altman makes the beautiful comparison of politics and the industries of culture. The folks who make it far in both fields are bland and dishonest, and it’s all just a big smokescreen to dazzle the regular person, and the only way to get through is to play the game. People promise change, but their real goal is to just cause a deadlock that keeps things the way they are, because you can’t take a risk. But at the same time, they try to appeal to you in a dehumanising way. The celebrities in the film want to keep the same thing going because any change could put them out of work. They try to appeal to the “yokels”. Whether you’re a celebrity or a politician, you don’t want to rock the boat because change puts you out of work, regardless of it benefits the many people who are the reason for your wealth and higher status.

Altman knows it’s useless to ask “What is America?” All you can do is draw attention to what fuels everything: politics and entertainment. Scratch away and you’ll find some semblance of truth as to what America really is. But the closest he can get to a real answer is just kind of poetic: America is a giant car crash. When Geraldine Chaplin says it, it sounds pretentious, but it’s honestly an apt metaphor. All these different objects travelling down the same path and smashing into each other because of an obstruction blocking the road, and everything just keeps backing up because of this chaos and destruction. It’s just a great big mess that links everyone, the same way all our characters are connected to that random pile-up in the first half hour. As an Australian who has an odd habit of trying to find things that are true Americana, what is a proper “great American piece of art”, something that captures America, it’s that. Don DeLillo made a similar point in White Noise, that car crashes entertain us in movies and TV, and maybe it’s because the chaos and reminder of death reminds us of the constant unpredictability and lack of control in the real world, as well as our own fates.

Anyway, I just also had a blast watching this movie. The print sounded much better than I expected, and it was just the right level of scratchiness. When it went pink or yellow for a minute or so, I felt so happy. I shouldn’t because “it’s not how it’s meant to be watched!”, but it’s a New Hollywood movie. Watching it on a print that is clearly straight from that time, this entropy is beautiful to me.

I appreciate the small references to the Nashville A-Team. Shout-out to Pig Robbins and Karen Black practically breaking the fourth wall to introduce Vassar Clements’ fiddle solo. No reference to Bob Moore, which would’ve really only amused me for him being R. Stevie Moore’s dad. I’m mixed on country music, there’s some really great stuff (mostly back in the day), but even the generic songs they sing here, despite their tongue-in-cheek nature, made me think about David Berman’s love of mundane country music as the real folk music of modern working-class America. I wonder what he thought of this movie. No reference to Tanglewood. But it did make me think “Oh yeah, the pedal steel really is just such a beautiful-sounding instrument.”

All these actors are cooking. I can’t pick a favourite, other than the Elliott Gould cameo, because we deserve to live in a world where everyone gets starstruck upon seeing him. I’d never realised how much Ned Beatty looks like a really bloated, less bald version of my dad. He’s a slimeball, but at the same time, there’s a pathos to him, same with most of these characters, that made me think “These people are sad. I hope they find happiness.” Ronee Blakley and Lily Tomlin both broke my heart here. When Barbara Jean keeps rambling, I start off laughing, then cringing, then wanting to hug her. Keith Carradine is an old man now and still someone I can’t really hate any characters he plays, but then he’s such an asshole here and his charm is undeniable. If I was married to “country superstar’s lawyer who is distant and forgets that our children are deaf” Ned Beatty, I’d definitely sleep with Keith Carradine’s character, even if he is like “We need a fictional musician who could be one of the potential celebrities that Carly Simon wrote You’re So Vain about!” But then he plays I’m Easy and it’s so intimate and understated with those beautiful slow zooms, and it’s out of character for Tom, and he’s just a numb man.

Henry Gibson as Haven Hamilton, the almost has-been with his suits that make him seem like the country equivalent of Liberace, and his ridiculous toupee, and his complete lack of stage presence. Jeff Goldblum looking kind of like E.T., how do you hate that? And Geraldine Chaplin perfectly nailing that condescending ally feel. She goes off on these tangents where you can tell her character would probably realise five minutes later, “I could have phrased that better” — too relatable. Her efforts to seem comionate and definitely not racist end up making her seem more racist. I love that she is kind of just a crazy person wandering around, pretending to work for the BBC. She’ll say something so stupid and pompous that you could imagine it being said on BBC World Service radio, and it’s funny, never too cringeworthy.

I already really find myself wanting to rewatch this film. So I definitely feel even more confident about the 5-star rating. Usually I watch a movie and it fades from my memory after the runtime of the movie. It’s been 3 hours since the movie ended and all I’m thinking about is little elements that stick with me, and think “Dare I be bold and say it: masterpiece?” Yeah, I’m calling it. Not that I’m the first person to say this, but I’m very cocksure in calling Nashville a masterpiece, and that’s a word I am always so hesitant to ever refer to a movie as. A select few have gotten it, and this is now one of them.

Still an incredibly fun movie the second time around. For some reason, I do find myself a bit hesitant about the full 5-stars now -- was I too caught up in the adrenaline rush of the first viewing, or am I just being a bit overly cautious on the rewatch? I still think it's just two really damn good movies meshed together into a result that works way better when it has any right to.

So much blues music here, and it still made me grin like a man. I love a movie that focuses on it so much. I even got the feeling from one scene with Jack O'Connell that gave me the "mind blown" moment of being convinced his purpose as the villain is a commentary on the predominantly white music industry soon to come in and sanitise and commercialise the blues, to turn it from a genre that came from a place of generational and cultural trauma, and water it down to this bland thing that's on a level accessible to everyone, which just strips it of what made it so special. Am I projecting? Maybe.

I worried that the climax might drag a bit this time around. No, it felt like it went by much quicker, and kind of worked for me more this time. Knowing what was to come had me rubbing my hands, thinking "Oh yes, it's this bit!" It's funny to see this in a rather cramped, small auditorium because the cinemas are being told to prioritise the new Marvel slop/flop that no-one is watching, and yet there was still a huge crowd at "Sinners" who were so into it.

Calling it now that, come the end of the year, I will still be singing the praises of Delroy Lindo's performance. He gets plenty of throwaway lines that got great responses from the audience, but he also gets some real badass moments and his blooming relationship with Sammy is so sweet, to see him immediately jump into this mentor role for him. And that's without getting into his big but subtle moment, the monologue about his heyday as a performer, where he just tries to hide the pain and trauma by humming and turning it into a chant and singing it away. But it can't cover up the pain visible in his eyes, that despite his jocularity and loud nature, this is a wounded, haunted man. And from that moment on, you just can't ignore that pain from him and you sense how genuinely happy he is to feel like he's useful, with people recognising his talent and not treating him like a bum.

There was a moment in the end credits where nobody noticed the credit to Rising Sun Pictures, but then the sudden appearance of the South Australia Film Corporation logo got a huge "Huh?" from everyone, who got excited, and I found it amusing but fascinating that there was this odd sense of "patriotism" related to watching this movie and seeing a local connection get such a prominent spotlight in the credits. Probably amplified by the "Bring Her Back" trailer beforehand (I have no fucking idea what that movie's about, honestly).

"Nobody cares but me."
"That's you, Marlowe. You'll never learn."

Back-to-back, two Altman films have left me awestruck. Elliott Gould embodies so many different vibes here, and they all feel plausible to belong to the same character: the sly detective who's damn competent at his job, the post-'67 city slacker and flaneur, the jumpy paranoia of the Watergate era. All these elements meld into one, carried by Gould's charisma and smartarse snark.

I'm falling fast for the hazy look of Altman's films. In "McCabe & Mrs. Miller", it was the grim valley mist and the glow of the lanterns. In "M*A*S*H", it was the tropical weather of Korea. In "The Long Goodbye", it's the glare of the sun on the ocean on a warm summer day with not a cloud in the sky; it's the heat rising off of the road up ahead. Not only does it always look good, but it lends to the feeling of the films, so free-form. They flow at their own pace and don't care about traditional structure. They can be muddled at times, but if you actually focus hard enough, it all becomes apparent. And that's without getting into the camera movements, constantly drifting slowly through every scene, the same way our eyes scan a room and never stay fixed on one spot for the whole time. He really does treat the camera as what it's supposed to be: the audience's viewfinder. I just desperately need more movies with this vibe. Throw in the sunny retro California setting, and it's more of a bonus. The kind of movie that should have a full-on easy listening score, some proper Burt Bacharach-type music, some sunshine pop, psych folk-adjacent tunes. Honestly, when I finished this movie last night, I went to bed listening to my playlist of Bacharach songs.

Watching this, you can definitely see the influence on Paul Thomas Anderson. Not just on his adaptation of "Inherent Vice", but any of his Los Angeles films. 5 minutes in, I found myself realising that the influence of this film cannot be understated on PTA. He shoots Los Angeles the same way, he loves piping music in through the background, he lets the structure go loose and then fast. It's all about the feel. Besides, it's fitting that this has moments that, while I wouldn't necessarily call them Pynchonesque, remind me of elements in Pynchon's work. Taking time out to be with the characters, or stopping everything for a sequence that kind of doesn't really end up adding much but it's a 10-minute scene that's fun to watch. The opening scene, our main character trying to feed his cat, is like when Pynchon will have a character start talking about a story they heard about, and then he'll tell that story for five pages, and it adds nothing to the plot, but contributes so much to the atmosphere. It helps I've been reading "V." lately and so these things are fresh on my mind.

Closing all this off, I've found myself feeling haunted today by Philip Marlowe. A man out of time. As a wise director once wrote, "his world had vanished long before he ever entered it, but he sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace." He's a mouthy bastard and nosy, which makes him great at what he does, but it's as if he knows the code of honour he's living by is no longer relevant. He is of the noir era, but there's no need for narration, so he'll just mumble his voiceover monologue to himself as he staggers around. He isn't heartless, he does care about people and wants to help them. It's just a shame that he believes in doing the right thing, and doesn't see that he's in a world where everyone acts for themselves. He cares too much about things like friendship, and it blinds him to the fact that he's just viewed as a pawn being moved about to try and achieve desired outcomes from different parties. Sometimes the world feels like that; not that everyone is a selfish bastard, but that the majority are more selfish and have forgotten the importance of actual human connection. It makes me wonder "Am I out of touch? Is the human race just becoming more comfortable and tolerant of people being cold and selfish?" I don't know, because I do still see forces of good in the world, but I watched Marlowe and thought about trying to follow the code of trying to be a decent person when the world has moved on from that. It's really stuck with me, in a way that's thought-provoking but making me ask uncomfortable existential questions.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Shaking my head at my own foolishness for only watching "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" now. It's the kind of movie that you watch, only to realise you're watching a masterpiece, and you can clearly see the footprint it left in the world of cinema. I think it's a good rule of thumb that any movie that looks like this will be incredible. Goddamn, I'm in awe.

I'm glad I'm stubborn when it comes to using subtitles when watching movies at home, because I didn't realise it was going to sound like that. Years of modern surround sound mixing have spoiled me, and I forgot that an 8-track sound mix in mono is going to be as muddy as the environs of the film. Luckily, this is only really a problem for the first 30 minutes and most of the mumbled dialogue isn't important. Altman treats the film's dialogue in an economic manner, where he throws out the rule that every line has to be important. Instead, he makes sure you hear the bits that are absolutely necessary to hear, and anything else all blurs together. It's like a silent film with sound, which I realise is a stupid description, but it's the only thing I can think of.

Side note: I'm thinking about how it really feels like every movie I've seen Warren Beatty in, he's played a character who's kind of an idiot, or overtly sleazy (and that's the point), or a fool and the joke's on him, and he became a super-rich leading man and sex symbol because of it. The kind of A-lister we don't have anymore. Nowadays, the bankable actors don't like to be the butt of any jokes in their films, it's all pure ego trip. That's not to say Beatty didn't have an ego (you'd have to be blind to not see that), but that so many actors now seem to approach their work where they have to be the flawless hero who can never feel like a real person. Beatty was always playing characters that just felt real.

More westerns need to be this cold and miserable. The desert is a neat setting, but it fascinates me how "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" feels like a perfect western, despite refusing to conform to most of the associated cliches in the genre. Altman will let the camera drift and wander through a scene, lingering on background characters, and the end result is almost about trying to embed the viewer in the setting. To make the viewer feel the shitty weather, the scrappy living conditions, the emptiness that turns everyone to booze, opium, or gambling. Every road is just a path of mud and snow sludge. Everyone's clothes are tattered. They've all got nasty teeth. Nobody has any money. Very different in sensibilities, but it reminded me of the feeling I got when I first played "Red Dead Redemption 2", where I was thinking "This is what I've always wanted from a western."

And what makes this hit even harder is that 50 years later, the themes haven't gone away. The colonialist feel that always comes with westerns, but also the theme of big business trying to squash all competition, using their powers to obliterate the small companies. The reason: if they can't lord over the working classes with an iron fist to make their lives miserable, then no-one else should be able to do so. It's just a perpetual machine of consumption and greed. There's never enough money. You make a bunch, then you want more, like a gambling addict. And Altman is cynical enough to capture this in a way that reminds me of the hopelessness of the modern narcissistic corporate landscape; except he doesn't depress me. He just makes me think about how the world has deemed for centuries that the only people allowed to be evil are those with money, and the only ones allowed that much money are those who are evil. The poor stay poor, the rich get richer, that's how it goes.

Altman also predicted that the dread of capitalism would be soundtracked by Leonard Cohen. Except nowadays it's not the folk stuff. In this weird purgatory focused on the present and making unnecessary technological advances, we're all jamming out to the slick "adult contemporary", gravel-voiced Leonard Cohen music.

Two sleepy days back to back. Too tired to get into this movie as much as I’d have liked. Groovy fight scenes, though.
There’s a dude in this who looks like Mick Jones, Humphrey Bogart, and Miguel Ferrer. Three faces I’d never connected until today.

Hectic day, busy day, so I was zoning out and nodding off all through this. Doesn’t matter, I’d seen it before. I knew what was happening. So at one point, I just gave up on reading the subtitles and letting the feel wash over me.

One of the most beautifully animated films I’ve seen. Only men would spend five years making a movie that’s 90% masking tape, but it looks so damn good. I can’t understand how someone would come up with all the depth and perspective tricks that this movie pulls.  Somehow it blew me away more on this second viewing, because I knew it was going to happen and was able to sit there and imagine this actually being animated.

Got me thinking a lot about hauntology again. Not in the sense of “the past inside the present”, but in that way of something feeling like an artefact. The film takes the manner of its live-action animation (sounds weird, but trust me) and embraces the obvious nature of its construction, wearing these markers on its sleeve the same way that “hauntology” music embraces the crackle, hiss and tape flutter of its analog era being harkened to. While “The Wolf House” doesn’t present itself as an outwardly analogue film (in the sense that it doesn’t slap a VHS filter over everything), its nature within the film’s universe as an object, a propaganda piece, almost like the esoteric equivalent of a PSA to terrify children, makes it feel like one of those eerie “analog horror” series on YouTube, some series of “lost tapes” unearthed that feel sinister. Off the top of my head, it reminds me of Kraina Grzybów, a Polish YouTube series presenting itself as an uncovered old VHS-filtered educational series that feels off. That series reminds me of memories I have of childhood TV viewing, where my undeveloped mind would misconstrue things and this false interpretation would unsettle me deeply. I a Subaru ad where an unintentional Kuleshov effect reduced me to running and hiding in the corridor the moment the ad started, when I was 4 years old. 20 years later, I found the ad on YouTube and have no idea how my brain could’ve made the connection it did — but I was a weird kid. It’s that I Saw the TV Glow thing of media being scarier/more chilling the way you it, not necessarily how it is. It falls into the Lost Highway category of “I like to things my own way, not necessarily how they happened.” But the Kraina Grzybów videos work so well because it feels like “What if the media you probably as innocent, but still lives in your brain, is actually more unnerving as an adult?” And The Wolf House occupies a similar area, that being “What if something was scary/offputting as a child, and revisiting it without the analog filters just revealed it to be as terrifying as you , and that the child was right?”

In many ways, this is also making me think of AlanTutorial. But that’s a whole other thing.
Actually, a Moviejuice/Alan Resnick event would be insane. Lots to uncover with that man’s work, much like The Wolf House.

"You don't have to do this."

One of those movies that I think about how much I enjoy it and wonder if I'm over-hyping it in my memory, but then I rewatch it and realise it is just that good. I always this for all the Cormac McCarthy elements that I forget the little Coen Brothers touches; awkward, offbeat moments that ground the whole movie.

McCarthy's penchant for exploring the depths of humanity's darkness has always scratched an itch in my brain that I haven't really got from other artists. Maybe it's the way that he presents evil in the personification of an otherworldly, unstoppable force dropped into our universe (although I suppose "Twin Peaks" falls in that field, too). But then the Coens take that approach and use all their skills to enhance it into something so utterly immersive. Even on what's probably my fifth viewing, I still find myself ten at the same moments, despite knowing the outcome. The sound design that forces you to lean in to the movie, to listen and look closely, instead of letting a score tell you when it's suspenseful. How Skip Lievsay went home empty-handed that year will forever be a mystery to me (honestly, look at his filmography; this man has to be one of the best sound designers in the industry, so it's no wonder the Coens worked with him so often). And as much as I love "There Will Be Blood", Roger Deakins was just firing on all cylinders in 2007 between this and "The Assassination of Jesse James". I don't know how to explain what I love about Deakins' photography here. I would just point to the lighting during the nighttime scenes; it's not saturated, but there's details like the yellows being a bit strong, how we always recall them yellows in our memory -- and I feel like maybe that makes it more captivating, that we subconsciously make that connection in our head and link it to ourselves.

It goes without saying that Javier Bardem is a beast here. 2007 was such a stacked year for ing Actor (Bardem, Affleck, Hoffman, Wilkinson, even Paul Dano not getting nominated). I doubt another actor could have made Anton Chigurh as mysterious and instantly iconic than Bardem. So unreadable because there's almost nothing within him to read. And yet there's those few moments where he does emote and it's chilling. Strangling that deputy in the beginning with this wide-eyed grin, the desperation in his voice when someone refuses to call the coin toss, the fact that he gets wounded more than once, but he still manages to seem inhuman.

Now I'm thinking about this a lot. Llewellyn Moss is willing to kill Anton Chigurh in order to survive. Anton Chigurh is craving to kill Moss, because Moss gets away. But Chigurh sees him as more an inconvenience; the only target of his who could hold their own in battle, and he can't handle that. It shakes him to think that a regular person (code for "not a criminal") could put up a fight. The idea of a worthy adversary doesn't exist in Chigurh's mind. One could make a good reading about this being a Sisyphean story of Moss's hubris. Or even a more political take about the working class managing to, by happenstance, find a way out, much to the displeasure of the business class who use everything they have to trample them. How even though Moss tries to separate himself from the money and just let it be, these forces will not rest until he is gone once and for all, simply because he put up a good fight against them. And we all know that those in power hate nothing more than the people finding a way to take back the reins of their lives without having to exist under their thumb. Except Chigurh doesn't care about the money. He can't even say "It's just business." And that's what makes him so scary. We know that greed and capitalism are horrifying. But what really keeps me up at night is the idea (and fact) of people doing evil just because they can, because they like it, because it's what they do best. There's plenty of that tied to capitalism. Only there's no motive, justification, Freudian excuse, or ideology behind it for Chigurh. It's just what he does, his reason for living, with no emotion or thought attached.

And all through it, Sheriff Bell is trying to keep the fire. The times are always changing, I'm even starting to feel out of touch honestly. But Sheriff Bell is seeing so much more evil and unmotivated violence that it shatters his small-town worldview. And he still has that dream of his father, a sheriff before him, carrying a flame in a horn as they ride up a mountain. A flame to bring light and warmth to those trapped in the dark and the cold. It's a recurring image in McCarthy's work, and it's one that had a profound impact on me. The idea that when there's no hope and it's probably worth giving up, we still have to try and find that flicker within us to carry on through it all. And as the world gets more distressing with the news every day, I've been trying to follow that approach of "carrying the flame", trying to make and find my own happiness to keep my spirits up. Only during the most frightening and bleak times is optimism a must, in my opinion. To give up looking for so much as a single match is equivalent to waving the white flag and letting the darkness win. Take that match, strike it and celebrate the brief moment it lights up your surroundings and holds back the dark. And it seems that perhaps Sheriff Bell's idealism, as much as it ended up driving him to retirement, is the flame that the community needed to hold back the dark. Is the film condemning him for giving up? No. He's a man from a different time who doesn't understand the world he's ended up in. His flame is no match for what's on its way. Try as hard as we might, it's like Ellis says: you can't stop what's coming.

"If I don't come back, you tell my mother I love her."
"But your mother's dead."
"Well, then I'll tell her myself."

We need to bring back referring to films as “punk” and “rock ‘n’ roll”. Because if any movie fits those descriptors, it’s “Pure Shit”. This movie is the shit. Proper low-budget filmmaking, assessing what one has at their disposal and utilising it all to make a movie. It just starts up already at breakneck speed and never lets go.

80 minutes of four junkies going around Melbourne, trying to score heroin or get money. Claustrophobic framing, fast shouted dialogue, skeevy but insanely charismatic characters, frantic pacing, every idea constantly failing and causing more trouble: it’s sort of like the Australian answer to the gritty New York movies of the same era. And it’s an absolute delight.

Apparently the director was influenced by screwball comedies in of the pacing, both of the film and the dialogue, and it shows. It’s not as overwhelming as something like “His Girl Friday”, but it’s a delight to listen to these conversations and arguments unfold in a manner that feels so real.

A movie so low-budget that most of the actors were actually shooting up heroin when a scene required it, and spent the entire shoot hopped up on amphetamines (explains the fast dialogue). And a surprise appearance by a young HG Nelson, which genuinely shocked me. Between that and the soundtrack being by Martin Armiger (The Sports, Paul Kelly) and Red Symons, it was a real “Goddamn!” moment.

Something about this movie just worked on me. It says a lot that I am actively singing the praises of an Australian film. Usually, they’re another stain on our country’s already pissweak culture. But when you’ve got a movie about a hectic night for some junkies, and it’s paced like an episode of The Monkees, I can’t hate that. All sorts of ups and downs. Moments that make you laugh, moments that make you feel uneasy. It’s in the same field as Trainspotting, where it’s effort to portray the highs and lows of drug use ends up making it a more effective “Don’t do hard drugs” statement than a film like Requiem for a Dream. In fact, Trainspotting is another good comparison point, not just because of the heroin addict theme, but the storytelling is similar to the book, where it’s just a bunch of episodes in the lives of the characters as they go about doing their thing, but it ultimately tells a proper story by the end of it.

After the movie, we headed to the tram and some girls ran past in tracksuits, cheering and screaming that they had stolen a kebab (I thought they said “gift bag”), followed by one shouting “My brother’s going to be so mad at me for this!” And then they run off to North Terrace, under the Morphett Street over. It was another weird moment that made me wonder how real all this is, it felt too surreal, the kind of weird shit that makes me think maybe Twin Peaks isn’t so weird. But my immediate thought was “Those girls are having their own Pure Shit moment right now.” I think we all need a few nights like this. Not fuelled by heroin, but nights that are aimless and end up being an agonising voyage all around the city, with your friends, trying to achieve or complete some goal. Just roaming and letting things happen, and then ending up with stories to tell and hopefully some mistakes that are fun to look back on. I’ve had a few that I think fit that vein. Here’s to a few more.

A movie that has aged very terribly in many ways, but also feels somewhat prescient in its depiction of people using dark humour to try and keep their spirits up in the face of terrible times in the world. Nowadays, it feels as if most people in the Zoomer generation have adopted a dark, absurd, cynical sense of humour to cope with the disintegration of humanity and the planet. And here, the characters are always doing dry sarcastic lines and bordering on cruel with some of the shit they do. It's mean-spirited, that's the point, but it has not aged well in the sense of a lot of the jokes they tell. But it's integral and I feel like the movie, overall, isn't endorsing everything. It doesn't condemn the characters, but it never tries to make them out to be heroes. In fact, they're all kind of assholes. But when your leads are Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, you can't truly hate them, and it feels like Altman is intending that. It's difficult to compare them to the show's versions of Hawkeye and Trapper John, because the show is more watered-down. Sutherland and Gould feel more like a proper "bromance", whereas Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers really play it like a married couple and lean into the affection in a way that endears them more. I will say, Robert Duvall is a better Frank than the show's version. And Radar O'Reilly is literally me; just a short, stumpy little guy, wandering around and being real quiet with his weird hand and big glasses and dorky qualities.

A comedy used to just be a bunch of bits strung together by a thin structure, and that’s awesome. It was like “Here’s these funny people: watch them do shit!” And then they end it with a big football game, as you do when it’s 1970.

My dad said this movie is the one that best captured his military experience, the only differences being he wasn’t a surgeon (supply clerk) and there were no wars. Just being stuck at a base a bit cut off from everything (at least by 1980s standards) — a base that had instilled such little in the RAAF higher-ups that they had one small helipad and no aircraft, thank god — surrounded by Blue Mountains bushland, and everyone there was either painfully uptight or surprisingly easygoing, and all they really had to the time was their senses of humour, drinking, and getting up to hijinks in western Sydney. Sure enough, I could picture these characters being there in the stories my dad loves to tell. Elliott Gould looks like a slightly more lean and hairier version of a lot of my dad’s friends from that era, or at least the photos of them. My dad looked kind of like Bud Cort, but with Radar O’Reilly’s beady eyes.

My mum wouldn’t comment. She said the only hijinks she saw were when she’d be at the airmen’s club with my dad once they started dating. But she said “Yes, Alex. It was like MASH, but if they had more free time because there was no war, and so they were just trying to amuse themselves. And a lot more drinking.”

Astonishing minimalist animation that feels like going through a book of beautiful rough sketches that would be sullied were they to be expanded into proper art. There's this beautiful thing with these transparent 2D layers that, despite still being 2D animation, made me feel like I was watching it with 3D glasses on, and that kind of blew my mind. Won't lie, most of this movie, I sat there thinking "This is fucking depressing." I didn't know it was based off a Brothers Grimm story until the credits, and when I saw it was adapted from the original, it made sense. Before then, I spent a lot of the depressing part thinking how it reminded me of "Twin Peaks" and the way that everyone tries to mould Laura Palmer to fit an image they project onto her. But then I felt a bit weird for thinking that in-depth about a 19th century fairy tale. Grimm by name, grim by nature.

Afterwards, people wanted to hang out and I decided I'd tag along. Chaos reigns. Post-Moviejuice hangouts will be evenings I look back on fondly as an old man. Everything felt kind of cursed in the East End. The Cranker was some serious "Warriors"/"Escape from New York" shit, complete with a car being beaten to shit. My brief visit ended with what Daniel referred to as akin to a more comedic version of a moment from "The Turin Horse" -- soon to be featured in another Moviejuice production. The Exeter was so damn busy, and our attempt to try and snake out through the backroom led to us witnessing a couple's argument that felt like some "Twin Peaks: The Return" shit. We get outside and all I can do is laugh maniacally. What is happening? The Austral was empty. We sat and talked, but we were too tired to really do the usual rapid-fire connection of topics. I got home, wired and couldn't sleep. My brain is mush today.

When I got up, I saw at my dad's computer cabinet, and there's a little sketch I did when I was 12 (probably). I hated drawing because I'd press down too hard on the paper, but if it was sketching, I could be lighter for some reason. I did a sketch and it was in my book when I got home, and my dad must have kept it. It isn't a great sketch. I could argue it's minimalist a la "The Girl Without Hands", but it's minimalist in the sense that it was drawn by a lazy kid with ADHD and an overactive imagination. Incomplete. But he liked it enough and pinned it up to his corkboard. 13 years later, it's still there. I asked him about it, he said it made him happy to look at it, that it's rough in a way that makes it more thought-provoking to look at, because you fill in the gaps. I was moved, I shed a few tears. Things keep on coming back.

I will it, I haven't seen any of Ryan Coogler's movies and I wasn't really caught up with the hype about this movie until Saturday when every single person online was raving about it. I thought "Surely, this is a case of it's just a fine movie and that's what everyone is in agreement on." No, this is the real deal.

Even before all the horror stuff comes in, I was sitting there, watching the first half and thinking "This is easily the best movie so far this year." It could've just been an ensemble piece about these brothers trying to leave the life of crime to set up a juke t, with all these great characters around them, and I'd still have given it the full 5 stars. The perfect type of ensemble movie where all these characters either have a captivating story or performance that makes me think "I could watch their own film." And even then, there's still that feeling of "These two actors are so fucking good." I'm going to be ride-and-die for Delroy Lindo for the rest of the year. The kind of character where the moment they first show up, you know you're going to love every second they're onscreen, and I sure did. He gave a monologue that was almost the best scene of the movie. And the kid who played Sammy, I can't believe this is his first movie. I mean, holy shit, to give such a great performance and hold your own against all these other actors, and be one of the main standouts in your first film is just astounding.

I personally think it's so great that this movie has a scene that everyone is in agreement about being the best scene. Incredible music, then that scene gets going and my jaw dropped. When I realised what Coogler was doing and trying to say, I was just saying "Oh my god!" to myself. Not only beautiful on a technical level, but on an emotional level. I can't think of another movie that managed to capture the weird spiritual way (or, at least, my definition of "spiritual") that music, and art as a whole, can bring comfort and all sorts of other positive feelings, like empowerment, motivation, energy, distraction, catharsis, therapy, courage, confidence, and the like -- not just on an individual level, but in a cultural way too. Fuck me. It's true. I made some rough demo recordings of songs I've written and shared them with a couple of people, just to say "This is what I've done" and even before I hear back from them, I feel kind of invincible.

Coogler is balancing so much here, but it never becomes too much. All the themes, all the genre elements, just every single thing is at the level that it needs to be at. And the gatekeeper in me sure was thrilled to see a movie where the blues is so prominent and you can tell the people involved in the film really know what they're talking about. Ludwig Goransson laying down slide guitar tracks in the score that sound like some old Alan Lomax field recording. It's nice to hear white guys playing blues that isn't just an overdriven Stratocaster doing watered-down versions of "Crossroads" that sounds like the shit dentists listen to on their way to work. It makes me think about a problem I have with a lot of technically skilled guitarists, the shredders and virtuosos. They are skilled on the technical level, they can do a lot of things very well, but I find so much of it lacking a certain warmth, humanity, soul. It's impressive, but too clinical for me to connect with. It's such a stupid purist take, but when you listen to someone playing music, especially a genre like the blues, you want it to have that feeling of "this is a direct extension of the musician themselves", and it's truly captured here. And I'd honestly found myself thinking "Blues nowadays is just too weak," and it's never going to be as good as it was the old days -- when the big names now to come up when the blues comes up are Stevie Ray Vaughan and John Mayer (both very skilled), it's like "Well, that same place where the blues come from, I don't feel it with them." Not because they're white, but I never feel any of the hardships or anguish of blues when I hear them play. I know it's stupid for a white guy from Australia to gatekeep blues music, especially when talking about a movie from a black director, but it's a weird musical pet peeve of mine and I'm glad to have a movie make me think about it, instead of my own brain's randomly-generated patterns of thought.

I'm sure there will be great movies later this year. There's some I'm extremely excited about (there's no reason for me to dread a new PTA or Wes Anderson film), but I'm caught a bit offguard. I guess I didn't expect to love a new release this much so early into the year. The kind of movie where I had to actually go to the pub afterwards and have a drink and just sit and think about it for an hour or so, to process it all and think to myself "Did I just watch that? Because it feels too good to be true." Not calling this GOAT-tier: just a movie that hits every note really right and cast me under its spell.

Also, I like folk music, don't get me wrong. I mean, I was exposed to the blues way before I started listening to folk music. And I think that's why all the blues classics work for me, but all those old traditional Celtic folk songs, a lot of them just don't do much for me. So I'm quite amused by the surface-level take one could have that this movie thinks Irish folk tunes are evil. Nothing against the Irish -- going to do the cliche thing anyone with even the tiniest fraction of Irish blood does and act as if I'm a full-blooded Kerryman, even if I've never been -- but it's funny that the villain keeps singing proper old folk songs and all our heroes are dancing to resonator-guitar Delta blues. I approve of this.

The premise is great. I love that idea of “people having to get from Point A to Point B by a certain time and avoiding different factions” whenever it’s in anything, but it’s never executed right. I thought, since this is the classic example, surely it will be great. No, it’s just pretty dull 90% of the time.

Watching this movie, it makes sense why James Remar and David Patrick Kelly are the only ones who went onto achieve something close to success, because every other actor is so fucking bland. I couldn’t believe how many flat, wooden line deliveries there were in every scene. I just couldn’t bring myself to care about any of these characters, because there’s nothing about them to grab me. Luckily, Remar and Kelly understand that good acting, at its core, is about trying to give the viewer a reason to want to watch a character. I don’t know, maybe cast a lead with some charm because Michael Beck is awful. He just frowns the whole movie, looking like a dollar-store Harvey Kietel.

There’s a handful of scenes here where I was actually really enjoying it, and those are usually scenes without any dialogue where we don’t need to listen to the atrocious deliveries. That whole sequence with the rollerblade gang is cool, even if they all look like of a shitty Midwestern college rock band from the 80s/90s who would’ve had a video that got lots of airplay on “120 Minutes” but never translated to album sales or success beyond opening for Soul Asylum or some other bland alternative band from that era. Those guys with their denim overalls looked like their gang name would’ve been the Cornhuskers or some bullshit. The weird baseball dudes in face paint were at least intimidating.

Just one of those strange movies that will have a really entertaining 10-minute sequence then be boring as shit. A weird experience watching this in theaters, where a lot of the audience seemed to be middle-aged dudes who had come from work and were treating it as a male bonding thing with their friends, drinking beers and just talking and on their phones. A lot of laughter every time “faggot” was said, which was weird.

Shout-out to the Lizzies. They seemed cool, plus their sequence was probably the least “this movie really hates women” part of the whole thing. The Lizzies didn’t do anything wrong, they were just trying to rid the streets of New York of all these actors who can’t deliver a line to save their life.

Closing note: David Patrick Kelly's "Come out and play!" taunt really was giving me vibes of "This is the 1979 equivalent of Nic Cage's 'Let me in now!' singsong in Longlegs."

Overall, I'd say I like this film. At the end of the day, it is a pure vanity project where it feels like Alex Garland's presence was just slapped on because it doesn't have the smugness I haven't gotten from his other directorial efforts (I've enjoyed things about his other films, but they have a smarmy aura that kind of proves the auteur theory, to an extent). And it's an odd thing to make a vanity project about. I mean, if I had a friend who went through a traumatic incident that left them disabled and with no recollection of the events, I wouldn't make a movie about it so that they could see "their" legs torn to chunks. But that's just me.

There's an odd split in my head. There are things that I would prefer for the movie to address. Yet, at the same time, I get what the movie is going for, and to include those elements would feel really jarring.

I guess what I have to say is, in of its immersive elements, I enjoyed it. Fantastic sound design. I didn't know this was a real-time movie going in and so I wasn't expecting the first half to be so slow. It's good. Shout-out to Joseph Quinn making me wince every time he screamed in pure agony, which happens an awful lot and left me wondering how he didn't lose his voice.

In a weird way, my confusion about keeping up with everything once shit hit the fan, and trying to the names of the characters made this kind of feel 4D.

I dreamed about killing you again last night
And it felt alright to me

The story of a bankrupt, misanthropic, asexual WASP and the autistic botanist who inadvertently managed to match his freak. Sort of a proto-"Phantom Thread". And much like "Phantom Thread", it's hard to stress just how hysterical this is to someone who hasn't seen it, when it's all in the timing.

Walter Matthau is so Steven Toast-coded in this. Not just his deliveries, but a lot of his prissy attitude and moping, and thinly-veiled contempt for everybody around him. Elaine May takes a character that could easily be irritating if played a certain way, but makes Henrietta just adorable and lovable, even if she has the motor skills of a goldfish. I feel seen by this movie having a lead who is as fucking clumsy as I am, and just extremely oblivious and obsessive about hyperfixations. And Jack Weston, who I've only seen in "The Ritz" off the top of my head, was great as the sweaty, friend-zoned lawyer.

I always love movies about weird/fucked-up people finding each other and sort of enriching each others' lives, even if it's just in a platonic way. But this takes the cake. Pretty ahead of its time, in the sense that Henrietta could be played up as completely incompetent and a cat lady-type, but May knows better than to write her like that, and makes her a person who is intelligent, has goals and dreams, and is capable of living on her own, but just kind of needs someone there to keep her in line, to clean up the messes caused by her inability to mask. While the movie never diagnoses her as being autistic, finishing this movie on the day where RFK Jr justifies a measles outbreak by saying that it's better for kids to catch measles than get vaccinated because of autism, and then said people with autism can't work, pay taxes, write poetry, or use the bathroom by themselves... let's just say it made this movie feel really empowering. Here's an old-time improv comic proving him wrong 50 years ago: that many (in fact, probably more than half) of the people on the spectrum can be independent, but kind of need someone who will keep an eye on them. Sometimes, it's a good social network. But she knows it's better if it's because of love, and that there's nothing better than a love story about two fucking weirdos, even if one is plotting to kill the other to inherit their fortune.

So nothing could’ve really prepared me for this. My first Takahata film, and it definitely lived up to the expectations that had been set for me by my friend. I was prepared for cute animals. I was not prepared for it to feel like a dissection of all the different courses of action to take on leftist resistance. What I could never have predicted is that the equivalent of the militant leftists end up becoming eco-terrorists and fighting the riot squad by inflating their scrotums and hopping around like Randy in that one episode of South Park.

Honestly, I was so moved by this. There’s definitely the commentary about political factions, but I absolutely welcome the extremely (and necessarily) unsubtle, scathing condemnation of industrialisation, deforestation, and pillaging of the earth by humans. Oh, how it made me feel guilty. I left the theater abruptly to catch my train in time, but I said to Shea “They did the Killers of the Flower Moon ending!” They really did. And I’m not complaining, because Pom Poko did it first, and that’s honestly one of the best endings I can think of (both films to make this choice have left me wracked with guilt for simply existing in complacent societies). A final line right up with “There was no mention of the murders.” And then they do their dance. With the raccoons, it’s adorable. With the Osage people, it’s an attempt at resistance to keep their traditions alive for as long as possible.

Before that, I thought they were going to do the A.I. Artificial Intelligence ending where it’s beautiful, but also heartbreaking and haunting because it’s an illusion that ends up becoming a simulacrum. That ending would’ve devastated me in a different way. More “It’s beautiful, but so sad”.

I don’t have a lot else to say about Pom Poko. I had an extremely productive day, and I didn’t realise this movie was 2 hours long, and that kind of grated on me as it kept going on. But, in the end, I sat on the train and thought “I’m glad it was that long.” Just kind of feel like shit for existing: not in the individual way that comes with depression, but in the way that is only possible if you actually evaluate your position and mere existence as a human.

This is the kind of movie they should show kids in school.

Made me take for granted growing up close to lots of greenery, at the bottom of the hills. I realised how I’m so used to it because I’ve lived in this area since I was 7; before then, there was small parks and lots of gum trees on the streets. It made me think about how more cities need to go full-on with green-belt designation. One thing I love about Adelaide is the Parklands. I don’t actually love the Parklands, they’re dry and creepy. But it’s nice to have a metaphorical barrier between the CBD and the suburbs, even if it is superficial and the hideous residential buildings are starting to pepper the arterial roads into the city. One time I went with my family to Melbourne and we drove in to the city, and got lost because we were so used to the Parklands serving as a barrier, like a welcome sign of “You are now entering the CBD.” And you don’t get that in a lot of other places.

Anyway, now I’m thinking about that little commercial Jonathan Glazer did for Canon that’s just a bunch of deer walking through a British suburb at night and retreating into the woods. I always liked that weird thing in Britain of suburbs that blur the lines between being a suburb and being in the woods. All the greenery. Houses being on a normal street and right on the edge of a forest. It’s a neat little dichotomy. I welcome more of that. Since the blood money-sponsored LIV Golf is moving to the North Adelaide Parklands in a few years, how about they turn that shithole golf course at Grange into a nice little woodsy area. “Can’t have woods near West Lakes, mate! That’s a redeveloped modern suburb!” Fuck off.

I don’t have many photos of my grandmother left from how I her — old and wrinkly and craggly and liver-spotted, but still with a great mop of (dyed) orange hair. There’s one of her with my cousin’s son. I like looking at it because it refreshes the image of her in my mind, which tends to fade with time. I her voice — the distinct rasp from being a senior (in addition to years of drinking and smoking), the lapse into the Irish accents she grew up hearing among the diaspora she was part of, the hushed timbre somewhat (ironically) reminiscent of the clipped croaked accents of the English royals. I can recall her voice perfectly in my head, because she comforted me through so many bad times in my childhood.

I was atrocious at eye as a child. And I’m still not great at it, but I’m making progress. But I hate that it meant I don’t her face as clearly as I’d like to. There are some photos of me and her, but I can’t look at them. It upsets me too much. She gave me unconditional love that she struggled to give herself and most other people in her life, and she encouraged me whenever I expressed interest in doing something. She used to ask me to show her what I’d learned in guitar lessons when she came over on Sundays. When I said I wanted to do acting and my parents were against it, she told me I’d be a good actor and that I’d be good at many things and that someday when I became an adult, I wouldn’t have to listen to other people and I could just do these things and feel good doing them, and prove the doubtful wrong. On her deathbed, she was asking me if I’d been writing. She always encouraged me to write things. Basically, her unwavering (and uncharacteristic) is one of the reasons I never gave up on trying to bother with art, even when I felt like throwing those hobbies and dreams in the bin.

She died just after I turned 15, and it wasn’t a shock, and so I spent a lot of time with her in the last six months. I got to know a lot more about her and we realised there were a lot of traits we shared that the others in the family didn’t have. I listening to Death Grips after school when my parents and uncle called to say she had died just as they arrived at the hospital. The last time I saw her, I’d mentioned the weird music I’d gotten into. She said “As long as it makes you feel good, that’s what matters, dear.” She’d been in hospital for a few days. I wanted to see her and my dad refused. He said she wouldn’t me to her that way. The night she died, Mum said “She’s not in pain. She just looked like she was sleeping.” Dad said “It was the first time I’d seen her looking so tranquil and free of nerves. She looked like she was finally at peace.” That made me cry. The next week, at her funeral, I broke down. Her cousin/best friend and I were the two worst mourners at that funeral. I never grieved before and the whole experience, along with some other matters, kind of wreaked havoc on my mental health through a lot of high school.

This short made me think of her. Antonio’s craggly skin, the pride he demonstrates regarding his family, the singing. The image and sound are there, but the actual dialogue itself is separate. That’s how my grandmother lives on for me. Voice and appearance, but both are separate, never coned. I’m kind of a mess over this. I already cried (ittedly, a hectic day, which didn’t help), and I’ll probably cry again. I don’t believe in an afterlife, but sometimes she shows up in my dreams and it’s usually when I’m having a crisis on what to do regarding a situation. It’s the whole Paul McCartney “Let It Be” thing. It’s likely just my brain sorting through its archives and picking her to show up because she would realistically be the one to console me and give me the advice when I was a kid — pure conditioning, I suppose. But I like to think it’s her somehow sensing I’m stressed and wanting to try and help. It doesn’t make sense, but it feels like what she would do.

On my 8th birthday, she got me a Mario game for the DS and as I explained how it all worked, she asked to have a try. And she got through a level with her arthritic thumbs and was so proud of herself. She said “I wish we had games like this when I was your age.” I thought that was awesome. I still think it’s awesome. She also dropped a lot of inadvertently profound things that opened my mind up to existentialism without her realising. She thought archeology was a branch of medicine, so I’m certain she wasn’t schooled in existential philosophy. But, yeah. I guess she’ll show up in a dream soon and I’ll be happy to see her, even as a simulacrum.

Watched on Thursday April 10, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 10, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 10, 2025.

When I was a kid, twice a year, my family would go and stay with my aunt and cousins. They lived near the coast; in their town, their house was only a few blocks away from the beach. Even in the middle of summer, the exact position on the coast meant that there was a constant breeze. We’d go for New Year’s, and this was a thing we did for seven years.

It was me, my brother, and our cousins — three girls, all older than my brother and I. Tough, resilient, sarcastic, and we had very little common ground. But they adored me because I was the youngest and precocious. They were protective of me and wanted to spend time with me. The five of us used to go and do the grocery shopping and run errands along the main street, and that was our main activity for bonding. They’d take me to the video store and let me pick movies to watch in the back room of the house, and they’d sneak them as movies they were renting for themselves — this was how I first saw The Big Lebowski and Seven at ages way too young.

There was a fair that would be set up along the beach a few days before New Year’s. One time, my brother and I got into a fight, and my cousins were going to hang out with a bunch of their friends at the fair, and they invited me along, despite still being in primary school. Their friends all took turns buying me snacks and drinks for me, and competing on some of the games with me. I had a lot of fun that night. Realistically speaking, it should have triggered a massive sensory overload in me, but I was so happy spending time with them. And I just as I got really tired, all the lights blended together into these trails that streaked and glared in every direction, like a shimmering star amidst the vantablack nothingness of space.

This took me right back to that evening, and the hazy fragments I can recall, but especially those warm lights. And even in the humid conditions of this evening, I swear I could feel that sea breeze at the back of my neck.

Watched on Thursday April 10, 2025.

Dreaming is free

Minutes before this movie started, I was browsing Twitter and saw the leak about a new Thomas Pynchon novel. So nothing feels real right now.

Kind of like when a doddering older family friend is telling a story that goes on too long with too many false endings, and not in the captivating way. But if the equally fun guest (who was also part of the story) kept interrupting to add great details.

I guess what I’m saying is that this movie is slow and honestly kind of meandering at points, but I was so in awe of the visuals that I don’t care.

Spent the day trying to finish watching Le Samourai (long story), trying to sort out finances like a proper adult who is attempting to make more steps on their journey towards independence, and listening to Talk Talk and the same handful of Blondie songs on repeat and air drumming, and talking to Dad about when punk and new wave first hit the radio in Adelaide. So, a day that really needed to end with something that could lull me into a trance.

If more movies looked like this, I’d be a happy camper. Who needs drugs when you can watch this? An experience akin to watching Primer after wisdom teeth removal — who cares about understanding? Just feel the movie flowing through your bones. That’s cinema, folks!

Idris confided that the director was (is?) an Orban sympathiser and kind of fascist. I can see it. Lots of “back to the land” imagery and the men are just tough dudes who have medieval skills and the women just show up to be there and inspire them. The kind of folk movie that features quite a lot of vaginal imagery but only in service of the theme of birth and rebirth, that goes along with the thing about rebuilding and things repeating. The beginning is the end is the beginning is the end. Time is a circle, as many said about this movie. So women are reduced to maternal roles. But with no real commentary beyond “Women give birth.” It’s like when Ralph Ineson says in the UK Office “How can I hate women? My mum’s a woman!” But at the same time, I’ve come to realise anything deeply invested in folkloric culture and pagan-type themes will equate farming and toiling over the crops to birth. But time is a circle, and fascism was once creeping up, then it was a big no-no, and now it’s coming back, in a way that makes me really sick to think about.

SIDENOTE: started work on my first short film in the past few days, and I’m thinking about hauntology again. The past inside the present. “Ghosts are just old houses dreaming people in the night”? Nothing ever really dies, nothing ever ends. Everything that has happened will happen again, in the way where the monomyth makes sense if you strip every story down to pure barebones.

But honestly, a beautiful movie. Made me think about trying to find weird shit to watch in the middle of the night back in high school. Thinking about compilations I could put together to show people that would slap, in of cool weird shit, or neat horrifying double features. Productive week, good week for cinema for me. Great chat after the movie with folks. Old friends long since been apart, current friends, new friends, acquaintances, people who I’m pretty sure hate me but can’t be certain of. There’s all sorts of stuff. It’s all good.

Writing this on the train in the dark of night, listening to Julee Cruise. Autumn time, the silhouettes of the trees as I by, and all I can think is I really need to rewatch “Twin Peaks”. And now I’m home and thinking about the seasons of the year. Everything dies someday comes back. The leaves wither and then they bloom six months later, every year. This is one of those things that happens.

I have no idea what I’m talking about in this review, I’m just in a really good mood and so my brain is just slipping into “manic disted ramblings” mode.

Hands up, who wants to die?!
-“Sonny’s Burning”, The Birthday Party

Watching this, I couldn’t help but think of The Substance and Pearl, both recent horror movies about women whose desire for fame and recognition drives them to insanity, with idiosyncratic results. Both movies that really pissed me off, yet received mass adulation. They also wish they were like Female Trouble.

It’s noticeable that this is the same era as Pink Flamingos. But Waters at least now realises you can do shock value and have a story, instead of scene-after-scene of pure transgression. That the button-pushing works better when not resorting to the most offensive thing possible, but is better as just dark, twisted comedy.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t enjoy this as much as Polyester or Cry-Baby. But I’ve been struggling to watch movies this year, for many reasons, and this really sort of gave me the motivation again. Started working on my short film earlier today, excited to finish it sooner rather than later. If John Waters can make this for no money, we can do the same — and I’ve seen it done.

The reason I think I enjoyed this one is Waters actually lets the actors act. While Pink Flamingos suffers from a put-together amateur cast, there are a few saving graces in that: Divine, Edith Massey, and David Lochary. And Female Trouble seems to know that this unholy trinity each bring their own unique presence that just absorbs every second they’re onscreen. David Lochary’s garish outfits and villainous twirled moustache, combined with the posh delivery of every ridiculous line, makes him feel like if a Warhol superstar tried to as a jet-setter. Edith Massey just feels real and has great comic timing, as well as a warmth that’s especially apparent in Polyester, but it’s also the “je nai sais quoi” that makes her such a delight. Shea said she’s a queen, and I agree. Can’t put my finger on it, but she feels like a treasure, for some reason. And Divine — how can you hate Divine? An icon for many reasons, but what an actor. Divine could spit out all sorts of foul insults in the most venomous tones, he could excel at melodrama, and here, he shows he was also a great dramatic actor. The first two thirds are a damn enjoyable fucked-up comedy, and then the last third is just really heavy, watching this woman’s complete lapse into delusion and psychosis. And the arc feels so natural, it’s never jarring, and Divine doesn’t dramatically change the performance, but just accents more things to remind you that now it’s serious — but still funny — and sad. It ended and my first thought was “I didn’t expect that to be such a fantastic performance.” So much range, I’m kind of in awe of it. It’s to this movie what Marianne Jean-Baptiste is to Hard Truths: the broken soul of this character is hilarious until it reaches a point where it isn’t.

Also, a shoutout to Mink Stole as Taffy. Just ridiculous but in the best way.

During the intermission, some older guys in front of me were shocked at the massive turnout and how most of the audience were young people. One asked his friends “Is John Waters still really popular now?” and the other said “Nah, they’re probably all just uni students,” in a snide tone. I’ll it, it feels like over the last year — at least in the circles I’m on the periphery of — John Waters has become a big deal with a lot of young people here in the arts crowd. It sort of took me by surprise. But I thought about it while watching Female Trouble and on the way home, trying to figure out why his work is striking a chord with certain cliques of my generation. And I think it’s many things: the dark comedy, the satire, Divine’s prominence in the filmography (given the rise in drag and trans-people), and perhaps most importantly, Waters subverting expectations of what a queer director does. There’s this weird thing where people, usually in the industry and straight, seem to think a queer director can only make movies solely about the queer experience and that they are supposed to be slow and emotional and sad. Waters doesn’t care about any of that. Some of his movies aren’t even really about being queer. But he’s still making a statement about the “rules” trying to be placed on queer filmmakers, and that you can make whatever movies you want. His are about bad taste and having fun watching it. They get people going, they get people energised. They embrace camp and kitsch, but aren’t limiting themselves to such a narrow range of themes and topics. And I think his work is resonating now in an era where people are learning about queer being a spectrum with all sorts of elements and getting in touch with that, that there’s been this guy who spent ages saying “Don’t let them tell you what art you should be making because of who you are.” He likes shocking viewers stuck in a heteronormative mindset by not clinging to their beliefs of what queer art should be (which leads me to an eternal debate: is a piece of art automatically queer art just because it’s artist is queer, or does it have to have queer themes or subjects to be queer art?).

There are moments where something, or somebody, breaks through into the pop culture lexicon and it feels like it’s not real, like a tear in space. One of those is David Lynch basically being a household name. Another is that John Waters is a name enough people recognise, even if they haven’t seen any of their movies. People know what he looks like. He got studio funding. The man even got a special guest role in an episode of The Simpsons, and it’s one of the shows best episodes and he’s one of the best guest performances. Even my dad is like “Yeah, John Waters seems like a real cool dude, and Divine was fucking funny.” Somebody who makes art like John Waters gaining a place in the encyclopaedia of popular culture, it just feels uncanny. But I’m so thankful for it.

John Waters and David Lynch — two sides of the same coin. Where Lynch plays up the dark side of 1950s Americana for horror and dream-like aura, Waters plays it for the darkest and most twisted of laughs. Laughing so consistently at a movie in the cinema feels great, I forgot about that.

Waters trying to up the ante for how far to push people’s buttons, but in a far more entertaining way than Pink Flamingos. He knows that Divine is just so fun to watch, no matter what they’re doing, and it’s enough to have a whole movie be 90 minutes of Divine gasping melodramatically and panicking and having breakdowns, as her daughter dances everywhere instead of walking. Yet again, Edith Massey emerges as the MVP — her rustic folksiness is so great. She’s funny, but also the heart of the movie and the humour never comes from making fun of her, but of her obliviousness to the horrors around her and her nouveau riche attitude. She had me go “Aw!” at one point. How delightful.

Shea and I grinned manically when the “Frontier Psychiatrist” sample came on

"Teenagers everywhere, repent! Let Jesus Christ be your gang leader!"

Thinking I'm going to be more a fan of the camp, kitschy John Waters compared to the overly transgressive, shock value-heavy John Waters. Granted, I'm biased, I already love any movie that's a love letter to the 1950s Americana aesthetic. They weren't great times, but it's undoubtedly a vibe that I find irresistible, with all those cars and the rockabilly music, and how ripe it is for commentary and satire.

But on top of all that, it's just this movie is fun. Completely unapologetic in its being a love letter to all the teen melodrama cliches we associate with that era. I guess it makes sense, considering Waters grew up in that era, but he's not trying to do a reclamation of these tropes. His stance seems to be "But aren't these tropes just fun to watch play out?" And he's right. Some would call it predictable, but I don't care. If I watched this when I was in high school, I would have been so obnoxious about it, considering I was already listening to old '50s pop music all the time, and feeling nostalgia for the summer I spent as a 10-year-old watching an awful lot of "Happy Days" reruns.

There's some damn fine line deliveries here. I don't know how to talk about my enjoyment of this movie, it's just something I feel. John Waters put Iggy Pop and Willem Dafoe in the same movie, but it feels like he gave Iggy Pop the Willem Dafoe role, and Willem Dafoe got the Iggy Pop role... and it's perfect. Even if Iggy looks kind of like a cracked-out Ernest P Worrell in here. Joe Dallesandro as the local evangelical Christian, and Patty Hearst as the white-picket fence mother. Waters is a man who's in touch with pop culture in a weird way. When most people think about 1950s films, they would immediately jump to noir and sci-fi B-movies at the drive-in. Waters goes to the teen movies, the drag races and malt shops, "wrong side of the tracks" thing. Where others would get proper big names for their stunt casting, Waters relies on all sorts of figures whose names can be linked to bad taste or the underground counterculture. I mean, you know what you're doing when you cast Norman Mailer's son as the main villain in your film.

Also, there's that one musical number where the Drapes play as a band, and Ricki Lake is their Moe Tucker, and Traci Lords is their Bob Nastanovich. That's just awesome.

"Are you happy? You finally did it. You put your own mother in an iron lung."

Maybe I'm depressed, maybe I'm desensitised, maybe I'm just unable to focus on anything, but I really didn't give a damn. I get it. I'm not outrageously offended by it. I just felt absolutely nothing watching this movie, beyond honestly being kind of bored. For a movie that takes pride in how transgressive and in bad taste it is, I just found this awfully dull and boring.

Not as much of a "What the hell am I watching?" experience as The Beekeeper, but it's just serviceable. Statham drops the American accent thirty minutes in. There's a bizarre line about "I fought for Britain, the country of my birth, for 20 years", which is not how any real person would speak. Stallone's screenwriting credit means there are moments that feel like a '90s action film, but more in the Van Damme ilk. But if it was the '90s, the climax wouldn't take place in the woods in front of the biggest full moon, in a mansion with a giant gaming room where everyone is dressed like it's a deleted scene from House of Tolerance or they're at a Gatsby party, but every other room looks like the set of a Saw film.

At times, it feels like a long drawn-out section of a video game, where Statham is posing as a drug-runner and practically doing missions for a biker gang to pad the movie out to nearly two hours. At least he has some cool back-and-forths with the leader of this biker gang, with their Aggro Drift-looking hideout at the back of the country-and-western bar the Blues Brothers played at.

Half of the villains in this movie look like they're auditioning to play the Penguin, including the one guy I'll call "New Wave Caleb Landry Jones". One of them looks like they wanted Terence Stamp, but realised he's in his 80s and opted for someone who looked like Terence Stamp did in the 1990s. Statham's father-in-law shows up for two scenes and is extremely forgettable, except for his Fred Melamed-esque voice and the fact that he first appears wearing red circular sunglasses and a tall hat, which made my dad comment under his breath "Does this bastard think he's Jamiroquai?" I will say, shout-out to Emmett J. Scanlan for consistently showing up in what feels like every other TV show my parents have watched in the past six months, and proving once again in this film that he's one of those actors whom you should never trust when he appears in anything.

The film would've been a lot better if it was the whole QAnon-shit they had in the trailers, with Statham saying "This goes all the way to the top, beyond the police!" But none of that government trafficking stuff ends up in the film, and I was so prepared for that, because that was some of the best stuff in The Beekeper. I was hoping out it was a sign of a David Ayer-Jason Statham trilogy of action movies based around "what if the weirdest QAnon shit was happening and Statham had to put a stop to it?" I want to watch Statham scowl into a phone and tell a recognisable character actor on the other end that "the government and Hollywood are harvesting adrenochrome from detained immigrant children. I have to save them." Jason Statham, we need you and David Ayer to make a full-on Martin Cabello movie. None of that "Sound of Freedom" shit, just have Statham play an autistic guy with delusions that he was in the military to save trafficked children from the military.

“I always used to be an artist who never wanted to leave this world without saying ‘Fuck you.’ Now I’m an artist who never wants to leave this world without saying ‘I love you.’”
-Paul Schrader, 2022

This quote, which somehow feels even more haunting and beautiful than when I first heard it, was ringing through my head through the majority of Oh, Canada. It’s rather fitting for Schrader to do a 180 like this, his own version of salvation that his protagonists are always yearning for. Life imitating art, and all that. Schrader has spent decades depicting masculinity, warts and all, and examining in uncomfortable ways the idea of what it means, if anything, to be a man. His leads are almost always caught in an existential maze, trying and failing to find a purpose. They expect answers handed to them on a platter, and decide to create their own purpose through violence, in the hopes that these acts can redeem them in the eyes of whoever’s attention they so crave, believing it will justify their existence. 50 years after his screenwriting debut, Schrader has delivered a protagonist who has accepted the futility of the search for answers and understands that salvation and redemption can only begin with himself.

The increase in discussion of gender politics within the last 10 years has soured plenty of films from days of yore. Instead, the opposite has happened for Schrader. Now, his films feel ahead of the curve, a tapestry interrogating toxic masculinity and the entitlement and selfishness it instilled in its followers. Schrader has now garnered attention in many film circles, not just for his bleak existentialism, but also for his presence on social media as an old director espousing his takes on cinema and politics, often times as baffling as they are entertaining. The “memeification” of Schrader as the un-PC grandpa of internet cinephilia did bother me at first, but I’ll it it is amusing (in a cringe comedy sort of way) and it solidified a lot of my theories regarding him. That he is an artist who cannot be separated from the art, so much of it stems from the conflicts and dissonances within himself. The suffocating nature of his strict Calvinist upbringing resulting in a man with a pessimistic outlook, fuelled by the fear instilled in him by the nihilistic doctrines of Calvinism.

Only, now it feels like Schrader has made peace. The modern world seems to resemble those five doctrines he has battled with throughout his whole life. Everyone is guilty of sin, the world is full of scum, a select few achieve transcendence through the greed of capitalism, granting them eternal escape from punishment, and they either work hard until the world seems them worthy of rescue, or they are just born into it* (*wealth/affluence). He is now an old man terrified by the world he will be leaving behind for those who follow him, a world destined to be pillaged by the worst of the sinners, those who somehow manage to keep escaping any punishment for their actions. Reverend Toller, William Tell, and Narvel Roth marked the progression of Schrader's journey to balance his usual protagonists with this "new" world, from Toller testing himself to walk on the burning coals, to Tell finding redemption by sacrificing himself to save another, and Roth already having worked to better himself, but realising he needs to actually create love in order to achieve the redemption he wants.

It seems Schrader's desire to be one of the elect in God's eyes has led to him realising the selfishness of doing good to win favour from deities. That we must do good out of our own need to coexist. That we can only begin to truly seek redemption and salvation in the eyes of our fellow man by learning to forgive ourselves. Leonard Fife sees himself as a coward and has spent half a century filled with shame and disgust over it. Whether he really is a coward (or to what extent) is up to the audience's interpretation. But he isn't a loathable creature. At the end of the day, he is a Paul Schrader protagonist, which means he will search for something to justify his existence and feel he can be granted forgiveness. I feel Fife is not a good guy. He's a dick, he's a sleazy opportunist, but he is a man filled with shame. Impending mortality has left him realising he doesn't want to leave the world without itting his dissatisfaction with who he is, his feeling of weakness. I personally don't think Fife is a coward. I think he's a scared man, and he's been scared his whole life, and realises the only way he can forgive himself is to it how he has felt. The idea of a man whose mythology has been exactly like that, his own invention benefiting from his gift of the gab and charm, is deeply interesting to me. Artists generally are just as responsible for constructing their own mythology as those around them and those in the media that report on them. But everything is whitewashed, to an extent, and Fife's need to "clear the record" shows he is filled with regret over bottled-up self-loathing.

Fife is from the generation of men who still struggle to say "I love you". He can't say it to anyone. But the closest he can get is by baring his soul with complete honesty. The burden he has placed on himself is a whole other cancer stewing within him. Only once he spits it all out can he move on and be at peace with his impending death. He may not be able to leave this world without saying "I love you", but he's trying to find his own way. And that's what counts.

Schrader definitely wants to spread more love in these horrific times. I feel the same way. After spending so much of my life as a pessimist and cynic, I started the year realising that I want to try and be more optimistic and create happiness. It's difficult, but I can't give up and wallow in how miserable and doom-stricken the world is. If we can't find anything to be happy about, then what's the damn point? Schrader now seems to know how much he has taken for granted and wants to change the record on his persona. He seems fortunate for his late-in-life resurgence. Any interview with the man is fascinating and moving. His love for his wife and sadness over her decline in health, his own confrontations with death in recent years... it all leads to a man who has begun to realise the fragility of our existence and the need to say "I love you". That we shouldn't hold anything back. It's like how by the time we hit our 20s, we have begun to see the flaws within our parents that destroy the saintly image we had throughout childhood. We see these flaws and recognise them, but our parents are often in denial about it. We just want them to give in and it it all off-the-record, we hope they will have that moment of complete honesty about themselves, instead of being completely (sometimes brutally) honest to you when talking about you. Paul Schrader looks kind of like what my dad will probably look like in 15 years. It makes my heart tickle. I know both my parents have things they don't want to it, because of the British "stiff upper lip" nature that was still present in Australia during their youths. I just hope they'll finally sit down and it it, not just to me, but to themselves. Only when we've seen someone warts and all can we really know how much we love them.

"I know everything that I need to know about you."

Watching this made me kind of emotional and sad. Maybe because it made me think of “The Wizard of Oz”, and I got frustrated by that because “The Wizard of Oz” at least destroys me. On the way home, I realised it was because of the fact that it seems so common to have grown up with these Disney films as childhood staples, but I didn’t and that the media I consumed as a child was stuff that nobody I knew at the time would relate to. Made me think about how I was a weird kid and childhood was difficult and how I wish I’d been at least a bit more normal for many reasons.

Or maybe it’s just because I’m kind of sad. Left just before the Winnie the Pooh short. That’s fine. I don’t want to see Eeyore, he reminds me of me. A lot like how I relate to the tortoise — always lagging behind everyone, gets halfway there and then they all come running back in another direction and he has to head back there, then it happens again.

I relate very much to Goofy in this. The stress of modern life keeps pushing him to the brink, but something always manages to lure him back, leaving him trapped in a never-ending spiral of agony and suffering. His demise is lured in front of him like a carrot dangled in front of a horse, only for the rug to constantly be pulled away from under him. The ultimate cosmic prank. In a sense, Goofy is to Disney what Job is to the Bible.

There was a moment where I thought the bullets ricocheting off all the saws would have them each do little pitches like a melody, but they didn’t and I’ll it I was disappointed.

Made me think about the Three Stooges.

“You refuse to listen.”

Adam Briggs knocks it out of the park yet again. Boogie Bobby and Canadian Steve make for one of the most fascinating unlikely screen duos harkening back to the comedy acts of days of old; a smartass who never shuts up and his long-suffering friend who often stares at him with violence and frustration in his eyes.

Made me think of many friendships I had in the past where the other party had no filter and constantly embarrassed me, and you end up dreading being out in public with them. Unlike “Boogie Bobby”, I realised I didn’t need these people. Bobby and Steve need each other, they do genuinely like one another. The people we love are the ones we miss when they aren’t around.

Some truly heartbreaking moments here. You can just feel it all in Bobby Vagg’s eyes. What an absolute presence. Now I’m even more excited for “A Grand Mockery” and “Phillip Philadelphia”.

The first time I met Adam, it was a screening of “Paris Funeral 1972”. It was the day of the AFL grand final last year. He had his face painted white as the titular character of “Phillip Philadelphia”, before doing the Q&A in-character, despite not playing Phillip and Phillip not being in “Paris Funeral 1972”. After the movie, we ended up at a backyard poetry reading, then drinking at the nearby pub when it started storming. I had finished a 300mL bottle of soju and still had a six-pack of Coopers Pale Ale, which Adam tried to bring into the front bar, before hiding in a bush in the car park.
A month later during AFF, we all tried to go bowling, but it was league night, so we went to BWS, caught a group Uber, and drank and watched “Pacifiction”. Not a good movie to drink and watch. We all felt kind of numb afterwards.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that I’ve enjoyed getting to make Adam’s acquaintance for many reasons, but one of them is that every encounter does end up feeling reminiscent of a less dour sequence in one of his films. An absolute compliment, because he’s been very polite and kind and patient, but also because it’s like getting a faint window into the process that leads to these films.

Home is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there

The (almost) end of an extremely emotionally taxing/overwhelming week. By Thursday night, I felt sapped of my ability to communicate and function, completely burnt-out. I feel myself becoming distant from my friends, I'm scared this is just the way things are going to be. I've been depressed and every time I try to open up to someone about how shit I feel, just to talk about it, I sound unstable and can't communicate how I'm really feeling. I'm scared that the foundations of my world are collapsing and I don't know how to handle it, and I've been fighting off panic attacks pretty much every waking moment the past few days.

Last night, as I was trying to lull myself to sleep, "This Must Be the Place" came up on my playlist and I'd never quite felt the song as deeply as I did in that moment. So blunt and resigned, but filled with simple and profound lyrics that sound like falling in love. I thought about the aforementioned lyric at the top of the review. "We'll make it up as we go along" -- it's terrifying that's what life is like, I can't do this shit on my own, but everyone is busy and I'm the one person with too much free time and I hate myself for it. "I'm just an animal looking for a home" -- I hate being alone and I crave comfort and security and nurturing and I need to be kept under watchful eyes in case of episodes like this.

"When you're standing here beside me, I love the ing of time" made me think of one of my best friends. The type of friendship where you can listen to them ramble about something that you know nothing about and be entertained because of their ion, and you're just happy to be in their presence, that's what matters. It made me think of my parents. It made me feel lonely. Lately, I feel time either moving too quick or too slow. Never do I sit there and just ignore the pace of it all. I don't like this.

I told myself that I would finish my shift at work and watch "Stop Making Sense". It made me feel nurtured and safe and warm, and it made me cry. This movie has become akin to a safety blanket for me. I get to share the excitement of these brilliant musicians onstage. It makes me want to get back onstage, but everyone's busy and anyone I know who plays music is either busy or committed to multiple projects, and no-one needs to hear another white boy having to resort to accompanying himself with a guitar. Seeing these people in that moment just sync together. I think about all the ways art has brought me to meeting friends. Strengthening friendships at concerts, whether international artists or small local performances. Getting to know people by running into them at the same movies all the time. There's a weird version of this with Moviejuice, where I keep seeing the same people at all these places, but I don't know them and I don't know how to talk to people I don't know because I'm a neurotic mess. A friend said in a joking manner (one that I approved of) that when I'm really anxious, I become like a small, scared little mouse. It's true.

What I want in life is to have a moment where I realise I'm content with where my life is at, and it stays that way for the rest of my life. And to have as few enemies as possible. A friend said they appreciated my optimistic outlook, but that people should have enemies. It scares me that the world has become so miserable that I'm now having to try and be the optimist. I have a lot of love for a lot of people, sometimes I fear I've got too much love and not enough people to share it with. People are awful and miserable and cruel and callous and monstrous and beautiful and crazy and insane and fascinating and entertaining and funny and kind and wonderful.

There was a time before we were born
If someone asks, this is where I'll be

Plato's "other half" theory is some real good shit. I don't believe in Greek gods, but I think the hypothesis is absolutely beautiful. Doesn't matter if it's romantic or platonic, just finding a person who can go toe-to-toe in a situation in a way that doesn't piss you off, that's what counts. I don't know. It hurts to think about, but it's beautiful and comforting as well. Why am I talking about goddamn Plato in this "review"? I don't know, I'm just rambling, I'm surprised I even got out this many words considering I've barely been able to speak unless I'm dosed up on anti-anxiety meds. Fun times.

Gave this a 4/5 the first time around, then bumped it up to a 5/5, now I’m knocking it back down to 4/5. Still a damn good movie, but I was sitting there thinking of Almodóvar movies that probably maintain (or increase) their juice on rewatch. I really should rewatch “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”. Between this and “Bad Education”, it’s nice to see him handle sexual abuse in a way that’s more tasteful than “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down” and especially “Talk to Her” (easily the thing that drags that film down for me).

It should’ve been Penélope Cruz’s Oscar in 2006. Gotta love the weird relationship the Academy have with Pedro. Sometimes it feels like they love him so much, but then they think they need to prioritise American films. I should just be happy Cruz got the nomination when Carmen Maura didn’t even land one. Cannes had the right idea with their Best Actress award that year.

I reading a tweet where someone said that when you watch Pedro Almodovar’s movies, you can tell he’s a guy who has a good relationship with his mother. He makes movies about women that remind me of a lot of the women I grew up around, who had weird senses of humour and styles, but were proud of being themselves and managed to stay strong in the face of adversity and somehow found a way to cope with all the shit thrown at them. I learned a lot from that sort of environment, and now that I’m an adult and getting older, I feel like it’s paying off. I feel like they set a good example for me on how to be strong once you’ve entered the adult world and there’s no turning back. And I see bits of them in many Almodóvar movies. The whole sense of sisterhood, women coming together to help and each other and bonding through adversity.

Pedro’s a gay Spaniard who makes movies about how he loves women and hates men. And that’s awesome. He’s sort of like a bizarro Terence Davies. Both directors whose work seems to be centered around a reflection of how one’s upbringing can impact the way they process and deal with their sexuality. Whereas Davies’ abusive childhood and Catholic upbringing left him with a sense of shame and guilt (often reflected in the solitary and lonesome depictions of love and romance in his films), Almodovar seems to be ever paying tribute to the women whose presence in his childhood emboldened him to be proud of himself and their influence. Their styles couldn’t be more different, with Davies taking a more literary approach indebted to period dramas and British theater/cinema of the 1950s, while Almodovar has no fear of wearing his adoration of old Technicolor melodramas on his sleeve. But they occupy the same coin, like a yin and yang. Both incredible directors, and discovering them around the same time was a huge thing for me. Which do I prefer? Neither, it all depends on what mood I’m in. Someone better at writing about film from an analytical angle could construct and elaborate on this thesis in better detail and in a less messy manner than I did in this review. I hope I’m not the only one who sees this weird link.

• To Live and Die in L.A.
• Nosferatu
• Den of Thieves
• The Third Man
• The Magnificent Ambersons
• Galaxy Express 999: The Movie
• Casablanca
• The Brutalist
• Commando
• True Lies

...plus 77 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• 10
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• 3 Godfathers
• 42nd Street
• 5 Against the House
• $9.99
• Absolute Beginners
• Ace in the Hole
• Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
• Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls

...plus 416 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Your Fat Friend

   Tuesday, January 7 (10:30am)
   Friday, January 17 (2:00pm)
   Sunday, January 19 (1:00pm)

2. Last Summer

   Tuesday, January 7 (2:00pm)
   Friday, January 17 (10:30am, 7:00pm)
   Sunday, January 19 (3:30pm)

3. La Syndicaliste

   Friday, January 10 (10:30am, 7:00pm)
   Sunday, January 12 (3:30pm)

4. Aquarius

   Friday, January 10 (2:00pm)
   Sunday, January 12 (1:00pm)

5. All We Imagine as Light

   Tuesday, January 14 (10:30am)
   Friday, January 24 (2:00pm)

6. Boomerang

   Tuesday, January 14 (2:00pm)
   Friday, January 24 (10:30am, 7:00pm)

7. My Favourite Cake

   Tuesday, January 21 (10:30am)
   Friday, January 31 (2:00pm)
   Sunday, February 2 (1:00pm)

8. Better Man

   Tuesday, January 21 (2:00pm)
   Friday, January 31 (10:30am, 7:00pm)
   Sunday, February 2 (3:30pm)

9. A Real Pain

   Tuesday, January 28 (10:30am)
   Friday, February 7 (2:00pm)
   Sunday, February 9 (1:00pm)

10. Welcome to Babel

    Tuesday, January 28 (2:00pm)
    Friday, February 7 (10:30am, 7:00pm) - Q&A with Jiawei Shen and director James Bradley (10:30am screening only)
    Sunday, February 9 (3:30pm)

...plus 51 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• The 400 Blows
• The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
• 8½
• Ace in the Hole
• The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
• The Age of Innocence
• Akira
• Alice Adams
• Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

...plus 384 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Phoenician Scheme
• Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
• Sinners
• Boogie Bobby
• A Working Man
• Warfare
• Black Bag
• Malls
• Mickey 17
• Companion

...plus 742 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Puberty Blues

   Monday, January 13 (7:00pm)
   Tuesday, January 14 (11:00am) - The Iris Cinema
   Friday, January 17 (2:30pm) - The Iris Cinema
   Australian Mating Rituals

2. Winter of Our Dreams

   Wednesday, January 15 (7:00pm)
   Friday, January 17 (11:00am) - The Iris Cinema
   Tuesday, January 21 (2:30pm) - The Iris Cinema
   Australian Mating Rituals

3. Angel Baby

   Monday, January 20 (7:00pm) - Q&A with director Michael Rymer
   Tuesday, January 21 (11:00am) - The Iris Cinema
   Friday, January 24 (2:30pm) - The Iris Cinema
   Australian Mating Rituals

4. Love and Other Catastrophes

   Wednesday, January 22 (7:00pm)
   Friday, January 24 (11:00am) - The Iris Cinema
   Tuesday, January 28 (2:30pm) - The Iris Cinema
   Australian Mating Rituals

5. Peppermint Candy

   Monday, January 27 (7:00pm)
   Tuesday, January 28 (11:00am) - The Iris Cinema
   Friday, January 31 (2:30pm) - The Iris Cinema
   Memory, Meaning & Trauma: The Emotive Cinema of Lee Chang-Dong

6. Oasis

   Wednesday, January 29 (7:00pm)
   Friday, January 31 (11:00am) - The Iris Cinema
   Tuesday, February 4 (2:30pm) - The Iris Cinema
   Memory, Meaning & Trauma: The Emotive Cinema of Lee Chang-Dong

7. Poetry

   Monday, February 3 (7:00pm)
   Tuesday, February 4 (11:00am) - The Iris Cinema
   Friday, February 7 (2:30pm) - The Iris Cinema
   Memory, Meaning & Trauma: The Emotive Cinema of Lee Chang-Dong

8. Burning

   Wednesday, February 5 (7:00pm)
   Friday, February 7 (11:00am) - The Iris Cinema
   Tuesday, February 11 (2:30pm) - The Iris Cinema
   Memory, Meaning & Trauma: The Emotive Cinema of Lee Chang-Dong

9. Pusher

   Monday, February 10 (7:00pm)
   Tuesday, February 11 (11:00am) - The Iris Cinema
   Friday, February 14 (2:30pm) - The Iris Cinema
   Triple Threats: The Pusher Trilogy

10. Pusher II

    Wednesday, February 12 (7:00pm)
    Friday, February 14 (11:00am) - The Iris Cinema
    Tuesday, February 18 (2:30pm) - The Iris Cinema
    Triple Threats: The Pusher Trilogy

...plus 42 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Princess Bride

   January 6, 2025

2. The NeverEnding Story

   January 6, 2025

3. Commando

   January 13, 2025

4. True Lies

   January 13, 2025

5. Grease

   January 20, 2025

6. Saturday Night Fever

   January 20, 2025

7. The Seventh Seal

   February 3, 2025

8. Wild Strawberries

   February 3, 2025

9. In the Mood for Love

   February 10, 2025

10. Chungking Express

    February 10, 2025

...plus 70 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

   January 8, 2024

2. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

   January 8, 2024

3. Rebel Without a Cause

   January 15, 2024

4. East of Eden

   January 15, 2024

5. 10 Things I Hate About You

   January 22, 2024

6. Romeo + Juliet

   January 22, 2024

7. Say Anything...

   February 5, 2024

8. High Fidelity

   February 5, 2024

9. The Grand Budapest Hotel

   February 12, 2024

10. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

    February 12, 2024

...plus 69 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list inspired by all the times Marc Maron asks his podcast guests, "So who are your guys?!" when attempting to get them to namedrop their influences/inspirations.

Other than Wes Anderson being at #1, all the other directors are sorted alphabetically.

Also, I could never compile a proper list of my favourite movies, so I guess this serves as a good enough summation of my taste.

POTENTIAL ENTRIES (need to see more of their work):
Hal Ashby
Sofia Coppola
Jonathan Demme
Claire Denis
Jean-Luc Godard
Peter Greenaway
Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Michael Haneke
Hirokazu Kore-eda
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Fritz Lang
Ernst Lubitsch
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Jean Renoir
Whit Stillman
Wong Kar-Wai

• The Grand Budapest Hotel

  Wes ANDERSON

• All About My Mother

  Pedro ALMODOVAR

• Boogie Nights

  Paul Thomas ANDERSON

• The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

  Noah BAUMBACH

• Memories of Murder

  BONG Joon-Ho

• Bright Star

  Jane CAMPION

• The Thing

  John CARPENTER

• No Country for Old Men

  Joel & Ethan COEN

• The Godfather

  Francis Ford COPPOLA

• Videodrome

  David CRONENBERG

...plus 19 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. West Side Story

   April 25, 2021

2. Doctor Zhivago

   May 2, 2021
   March 27, 2023
   February 24, 2025

3. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

   May 9, 2021
   August 28, 2023

4. The Sound of Music

   May 16, 2021
   October 9, 2022

5. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

   May 23, 2021
   January 29, 2024
   September 29, 2025

6. Apocalypse Now

   May 30, 2021 (Final Cut)
   October 30, 2023 (Final Cut)

7. JFK

   June 6, 2021

8. Lawrence of Arabia

   June 13, 2021
   July 31, 2023
   August 25, 2025

9. Titanic

   June 20, 2021

10. Gone with the Wind

    June 27, 2021
    May 29, 2023
    August 26, 2024

...plus 36 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Strangers on a Train

   January 16, 2023

2. North by Northwest

   January 16, 2023

3. Howl's Moving Castle

   January 23, 2023

4. Princess Mononoke

   January 23, 2023

5. Galaxy Quest

   February 6, 2023

6. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

   February 6, 2023

7. A Streetcar Named Desire

   February 13, 2023

8. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

   February 13, 2023

9. Harold and Maude

   February 20, 2023

10. Barbarella

    February 20, 2023

...plus 65 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Evil Dead

   March 31, 2023

2. 28 Days Later

   April 28, 2023

3. Killer Klowns from Outer Space

   May 26, 2023

4. Suspiria

   June 30, 2023

5. Re-Animator

   July 28, 2023

6. The Thing

   August 25, 2023

7. Terrifier 2

   September 29, 2023

8. Friday the 13th

   October 13, 2023

9. The Return of the Living Dead

   November 24, 2023

10. Gremlins

    December 29, 2023

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Grand Budapest Hotel

   January 10, 2022
   April 4, 2022 (following The Royal Tenenbaums)

2. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

   January 10, 2022

3. Midnight Cowboy

   January 17, 2022

4. Blue Velvet

   January 17, 2022

5. Léon: The Professional

   January 24, 2022

6. The Fifth Element

   January 24, 2022

7. A Clockwork Orange

   January 31, 2022

8. The Shining

   January 31, 2022

9. Akira

   February 7, 2022

10. Princess Mononoke

    February 7, 2022

...plus 85 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Timbuktu

   Saturday, March 3, 2018
   Divided Worlds

2. The 3 Rooms of Melancholia

   Sunday, March 4, 2018
   Divided Worlds

3. Fire at Sea

   Monday, March 5, 2018
   Divided Worlds

4. White Material

   Wednesday, March 7, 2018
   Divided Worlds

5. The Sacrifice

   Wednesday, March 14
   Imagined Worlds: Tarkovsky Retrospective

6. Stalker

   Monday, March 19
   Imagined Worlds: Tarkovsky Retrospective

7. Mirror

   Wednesday, March 21
   Imagined Worlds: Tarkovsky Retrospective

8. Amarcord

   Monday, March 26
   Imagined Worlds: International Visions

9. The Turin Horse

   Wednesday, March 28
   Imagined Worlds: International Visions

10. Days of Heaven

    Wednesday, April 4, 2018
    Imagined Worlds: International Visions

...plus 59 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Last Year at Marienbad

   Monday, March 18, 2019
   Ming Wong + Melodrama

2. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

   Wednesday, March 20, 2019
   Ming Wong + Melodrama

3. Imitation of Life

   Monday, March 25, 2019
   Ming Wong + Melodrama

4. In the Realm of the Senses

   Wednesday, March 27, 2019
   Nagisa Oshima: New Wave Renegade

5. Diary of a Shinjuku Thief

   Monday, April 1, 2019
   Nagisa Oshima: New Wave Renegade

6. Night and Fog in Japan

   Wednesday, April 3, 2019
   Nagisa Oshima: New Wave Renegade

7. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

   Monday, April 8, 2019
   Nagisa Oshima: New Wave Renegade

8. Easy Rider

   Wednesday, April 10, 2019
   American Highways

9. The Rain People

   Monday, April 15, 2019
   American Highways

10. Two-Lane Blacktop

    Wednesday, April 17, 2019
    American Highways

...plus 67 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Total Recall

   January 11, 2021

2. Escape from New York

   January 11, 2021

3. Akira

   January 18, 2021
   July 19, 2021 (followed by Princess Mononoke)

4. Your Name.

   January 18, 2021

5. Blood Simple

   January 25, 2021

6. Knives Out

   January 25, 2021

7. Strangers on a Train

   February 1, 2021

8. North by Northwest

   February 1, 2021

9. Rebel Without a Cause

   February 8, 2021

10. East of Eden

    February 8, 2021

...plus 88 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Shining

   August 17, 2020

2. A Clockwork Orange

   August 17, 2020

3. Alien

   August 24, 2020

4. Aliens

   August 24, 2020

5. The Grand Budapest Hotel

   August 31, 2020

6. All About Eve

   August 31, 2020

7. Donnie Darko

   September 7, 2020

8. Parasite

   September 7, 2020

9. Spirited Away

   September 14, 2020

10. My Neighbor Totoro

    September 14, 2020

...plus 30 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Fall

   Friday, March 21, 2025 (9:30pm)
   Friday, March 28, 2025 (9:30pm)
   Friday, April 4, 2025 (9:30pm)

2. Turkey Shoot

   Friday, April 11, 2025 (9:30pm)

3. Relaxer

   Friday, May 2, 2025 (9:30pm)

4. Dead End Drive-In

   Friday, May 9, 2025 (10:00pm)

5. The Endless

   Friday, May 16, 2023 (9:30pm)

6. Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds

   Friday, May 30, 2025 (9:35pm)

7. Color Out of Space

   Friday, June 6, 2025 (9:30pm)

8. Nosferatu

   Friday, June 13, 2025 (9:30pm)

9. Deerskin

   Friday, June 20, 2025 (9:35pm)

10. Caligula

    Friday, June 27, 2025 (9:15pm)

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of Martin Scorsese's favourite movies gathered from various lists. Sorted by alphabetical order.

• 1860
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
• The 39 Steps
• 3-Iron
• The 400 Blows
• 42nd Street
• 7th Heaven
• 8½
• 99 River Street

...plus 1311 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Recently on Twitter, there was a prompt going around of people listing their Top 10 favourite directors. After scouring through multiple of these tweets and collating the results, these was the "final outcome", based off of how many of the tweets I was able to see.

1. Mulholland Drive

   David Lynch
   #1
   336 votes

2. The Wolf of Wall Street

   Martin Scorsese
   #2
   300 votes

3. The Shining

   Stanley Kubrick
   #3
   199 votes

4. There Will Be Blood

   Paul Thomas Anderson
   #4
   175 votes

5. Seven Samurai

   Akira Kurosawa
   #5
   160 votes

6. Heat

   Michael Mann
   #6
   146 votes

7. Catch Me If You Can

   Steven Spielberg
   #7
   131 votes

8. Psycho

   Alfred Hitchcock
   #8
   130 votes

9. No Country for Old Men

   Joel & Ethan Coen
   #9
   123 votes

10. The Searchers

    John Ford
    #10
    120 votes

...plus 151 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Brutalist
2. Nickel Boys
3. Pavements
4. Hard Truths
5. Queer
6. Wabi Sabi Rendezvous
7. Good One
8. Evil Does Not Exist
9. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
10. Sing Sing

...plus 60 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I don’t really scare easily, so whenever the question comes up of “Scariest movie?”, I’m usually at a loss. So, in place of giving a proper quick answer, I’ve put together this list of movies that either gave me the feeling that I guess counts as “being scared”, or just absolutely disturbed me and stuck with me in a way that almost felt scarring.

And, for the record, yes, some of these are stupid picks. But you know what? They scared me or gave me that visceral discomfort/terror, so they’re on the list.

• 8MM
• Alexandra's Project
• Alien
• The Amusement Park
• Antichrist
• The Babadook
• Bad Boy Bubby
• Birdie
• The Blair Witch Project
• Blue Velvet

...plus 96 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of movies Robert Eggers has namedropped in a positive manner from interviews, Q&As, and his Reddit AMAs.

TV SHOWS
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Curb Your Enthusiasm

• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• 964 Pinocchio
• Accident
• An Actor's Revenge
• Alien
• Alien: Romulus
• Anatomy of a Fall
• Andrei Rublev
• Andriesh
• Angels and Insects

...plus 186 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This is a list representing the aggregated poll of the top 250 directors on the "They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?" website, based off of the recent update. It is accumulated from data spread across numerous polls and list.

For each director, I have selected their most popular film on Letterboxd (as of this moment) to represent them.

NOTE: Despite listing 250 directors, this list only comes in at 249, as Michael Powell appears twice: once as a solo director, the other time as a duo with Emeric Pressburger.

1. Psycho
2. Citizen Kane
3. The Shining
4. 8½
5. Breathless
6. The Godfather
7. Persona
8. Seven Samurai
9. The Searchers
10. The Rules of the Game

...plus 239 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
2. The Tree of Life
3. Moonlight
4. Parasite
5. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
6. Melancholia
7. A Separation
8. Mad Max: Fury Road
9. Get Out
10. The Turin Horse

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. In the Mood for Love
2. Mulholland Drive
3. Yi Yi
4. Spirited Away
5. There Will Be Blood
6. Tropical Malady
7. The Gleaners and I
8. Caché
9. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
10. La Ciénaga

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Close-Up
2. Beau Travail
3. GoodFellas
4. Pulp Fiction
5. Satantango
6. The Piano
7. A Brighter Summer Day
8. Chungking Express
9. Breaking the Waves
10. Magnolia

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Raging Bull
2. Blade Runner
3. Fanny and Alexander
4. Shoah
5. Do the Right Thing
6. The Shining
7. Blue Velvet
8. Sans Soleil
9. Come and See
10. Once Upon a Time in America

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Godfather
2. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
3. Apocalypse Now
4. Taxi Driver
5. Mirror
6. The Godfather Part II
7. Barry Lyndon
8. Stalker
9. Chinatown
10. A Woman Under the Influence

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. 8½
3. Persona
4. Breathless
5. Psycho
6. Andrei Rublev
7. Au Hasard Balthazar
8. La Dolce Vita
9. L'Avventura
10. PlayTime

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Vertigo
2. Tokyo Story
3. The Searchers
4. Seven Samurai
5. Singin' in the Rain
6. Rashomon
7. The 400 Blows
8. Some Like It Hot
9. Ordet
10. The Night of the Hunter

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Citizen Kane
2. Bicycle Thieves
3. Casablanca
4. The Third Man
5. Late Spring
6. Children of Paradise
7. It's a Wonderful Life
8. The Magnificent Ambersons
9. To Be or Not to Be
10. Meshes of the Afternoon

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Rules of the Game
2. L'Atalante
3. City Lights
4. Modern Times
5. M
6. Grand Illusion
7. The Wizard of Oz
8. Bringing Up Baby
9. A Day in the Country
10. Gone with the Wind

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
2. The ion of Joan of Arc
3. Battleship Potemkin
4. Man with a Movie Camera
5. The General
6. Metropolis
7. The Gold Rush
8. Sherlock Jr.
9. Greed
10. Nosferatu

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Because I can't rank this many films (and I can't cut it down to 50), this is a 3-tier list, with each tier in alphabetical order.

Films #1-34: 5/5 (The films that were always going to end up on this list)
Films #35-61: 4.5/5 (The films that are just that slight bit off of receiving my full-on adoration, but I couldn't bring myself to place some over others)
Films #62-70: Likes (The films that I had incredible experiences watching, but managed to defy the star rating; some for positive reasons, some for leaving me puzzled, some for being simply overwhelming)

Consider all of these recommendations. I apologise for not having a neater, more polished list but I'm too lazy to put the time aside for that.

1. Aguirre, the Wrath of God
2. Alice in the Cities
3. The American Friend
4. Another Year
5. The Brutalist
6. Chungking Express
7. Collateral
8. Design for Living
9. Good One
10. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

...plus 60 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This is for the purposes of keeping a log of what I have watched, mainly because I end up forgetting what I watched. Due to the lack of TV shows in the Letterboxd database, the shows I have watched this year will be included in the description.

• Heat
• The Insider
• Collateral
• Ferrari
• Citizen Ruth
• Election
• About Schmidt
• Sideways
• The Descendants
• The Holdovers

...plus 303 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Badlands

   Monday, January 22, 2024
   Sofia Coppola's Collection

2. Sixteen Candles

   Wednesday, January 24, 2024
   Sofia Coppola's Collection

3. The Virgin Suicides

   Monday, January 29, 2024
   Sofia Coppola's Collection

4. Lolita

   Wednesday, January 31, 2024
   Sofia Coppola's Collection

5. Under the Skin

   Monday, February 5, 2024
   Sofia Coppola's Collection

6. Lost in Translation

   Wednesday, February 7, 2024
   Sofia Coppola's Collection

7. Lisztomania

   Monday, February 12, 2024
   Sofia Coppola's Collection

8. Valmont

   Wednesday, February 14, 2024
   Sofia Coppola's Collection

9. Marie Antoinette

   Monday, February 19, 2024
   Sofia Coppola's Collection

10. Gone with the Wind

    Wednesday, February 21, 2024
    Sofia Coppola's Collection

...plus 78 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of Quentin Tarantino's favourite films gathered from various lists and interviews. Sorted by alphabetical order.

• 10 to Midnight
• 11 Harrowhouse
• 1941
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• 3:10 to Yuma
• 36 Hours
• The 36th Chamber of Shaolin
• 50/50
• The 5-Man Army
• The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter

...plus 1282 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Napoleon

   Tuesday, January 9 (10:30am, 2:00pm)

2. The Narrow Bridge

   Friday, January 12 (10:30am)
   Tuesday, January 23 (10:30am)
   Tuesday, March 26 (2:00pm) - CANCELLED

3. Let the Dance Begin

   Friday, January 12 (2:00pm)
   Tuesday, January 23 (2:00pm)
   Tuesday, March 26 (10:30am) - CANCELLED

4. Revenge: Our Dad the Nazi Killer

   Tuesday, January 16 (10:30am)
   Friday, February 2 (2:00pm)

5. Saltburn

   Tuesday, January 16 (2:00pm)
   Friday, February 2 (10:30am)

6. Blue Jean

   Tuesday, January 30 (10:30am)
   Friday, February 9 (2:00pm)

7. Caravaggio's Shadow

   Tuesday, January 30 (2:00pm)
   Friday, February 9 (10:30am) - MORNING TEA

8. Next Goal Wins

   Tuesday, February 6 (10:30am)
   Friday, February 16 (2:00pm)

9. The Origin of Evil

   Tuesday, February 6 (2:00pm) - CANCELLED
   Friday, February 16 (10:30am)
   Tuesday, March 26 (2:00pm)

10. Country Cabaret

    Tuesday, February 13 (10:30am)
    Friday, February 23 (2:00pm)

...plus 83 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. La Jetée
2. Meshes of the Afternoon
3. Un Chien Andalou
4. The House Is Black
5. Night and Fog
6. A Trip to the Moon
7. Listen to Britain
8. Land Without Bread
9. Tale of Tales
10. Scorpio Rising

...plus 242 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Fountain

   Monday, March 24, 2008 (35mm)
   Memories of Things to Come

2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

   Thursday, March 27, 2008 (35mm)
   Memories of Things to Come

3. A Scanner Darkly

   Monday, March 31, 2008 (35mm)
   Memories of Things to Come

4. Inland Empire

   Thursday, April 3, 2008 (35mm)
   Memories of Things to Come

5. The Spinach Overture

   Monday, April 7, 2008
   Preceding Popeye
   Off Beat: Musical B-Sides and Rarities

6. Popeye

   Monday, April 7, 2008 (16mm)
   Off Beat: Musical B-Sides and Rarities

7. New York, New York

   Thursday, April 10, 2008 (35mm)
   Off Beat: Musical B-Sides and Rarities

8. All That Jazz

   Monday, April 14, 2008 (35mm)
   Off Beat: Musical B-Sides and Rarities

9. Singin' in the Rain

   Thursday, April 17, 2008 (35mm)
   Off Beat: Musical B-Sides and Rarities

10. Two-Lane Blacktop

    Monday, April 21, 2008 (16mm)
    Hellman & Oates: American Drifters

...plus 77 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Here is a list of the four trailers that were curated by Nick Pinkerton to play before the screening of "The Sweet East", all films that he said matched the tone/style and were somewhat influential on the film.

• Jobe'z World
• O Lucky Man!
• Viva Knievel!
• Medium Cool

Steven Spielberg's favourite movies, sourced from articles and lists online.

• 1917
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• The 400 Blows
• All the President's Men
• Avatar
• Back to the Future
• The Bad and the Beautiful
• Barry Lyndon
• Batman
• Batman Begins

...plus 118 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of Christopher Nolan's favourite movies gathered from lists and interviews. Sorted by alphabetical order.

• 12 Angry Men
• 1492: Conquest of Paradise
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Aftersun
• Akira
• Alien
• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Amadeus
• American Psycho
• Angel Heart

...plus 190 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This is a list of movies that Gaspar Noe has namedropped in a positive/neutral manner throughout interviews or various lists.

• 1900
• 200 Motels
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
• 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy
• 9 Songs
• All That Jazz
• Altered States
• Amour
• Andrei Rublev

...plus 253 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Crazy and Thief

   Thursday, March 14, 2013 (Digital)
   Cory McAbee: Crazy Spaceage Cowboy!
   Followed by live performance and Q&A with Cory McAbee

2. The American Astronaut

   Monday, March 18, 2013 (35mm)
   Triple Feature w/The Man on the Moon and Billy Nayer
   Cory McAbee: Crazy Spaceage Cowboy!

3. The Man on the Moon

   Monday, March 18, 2013 (35mm)
   Triple Feature w/The American Astronaut and Billy Nayer
   Cory McAbee: Crazy Spaceage Cowboy!

4. Billy Nayer

   Monday, March 18, 2013 (35mm)
   Triple Feature w/The American Astronaut and Billy Nayer
   Cory McAbee: Crazy Spaceage Cowboy!

5. Stingray Sam

   Thursday, March 21, 2013 (35mm)
   Triple Feature w/Reno and Fairy Ball
   Cory McAbee: Crazy Spaceage Cowboy!

6. Reno

   Thursday, March 21, 2013 (35mm)
   Triple Feature w/Stingray Sam and Fairy Ball
   Cory McAbee: Crazy Spaceage Cowboy!

7. Before Sunrise

   Monday, March 25, 2013 (Digital)
   Before Midnight Arrives (In Australia)...

8. Before Sunset

   Thursday, March 28, 2013 (Digital)
   Before Midnight Arrives (In Australia)...

9. Knife in the Water

   Thursday, April 4, 2013 (16mm)
   The Formative Films of Roman Polanski

10. Repulsion

    Monday, April 8, 2013 (16mm)
    The Formative Films of Roman Polanski

...plus 77 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This is for the purposes of keeping a log of what I have watched, mainly because I end up forgetting what I watched. Due to the lack of TV shows in the Letterboxd database, the shows I have watched this year will be included in the description.

TV SHOWS
Mad Men (Season 3)
Klovn
Succession (Season 4)
Barry (Season 4)
Jam
Brass Eye
The Curse

• Prey
• Bones and All
• Turning Red
• Fresh
• The House
• A Band Called Death
• A Man Called Otto
• The Fabelmans
• Tenet
• All I Desire

...plus 374 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. After Hours
2. All of Us Strangers
3. Apocalypse Now
4. Asteroid City
5. Bringing Out the Dead
6. The Eight Mountains
7. GoodFellas
8. Harold and Maude
9. The Irishman
10. The Killer

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This is a list of movies that have been namechecked by Ari Aster. All the information has been gathered from interviews, AMAs, articles, Twitter, etc.

I have also begun the process of trying to include sources for Aster mentioning these movies, as well as quotes from him about these movies, providing I can find them.

• 12:08 East of Bucharest

  When asked to list his favourite contemporary directors, Aster chose this as his favourite Corneliu Porumboiu film.
  -Reddit AMA (July 11, 2019)
  www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/cbxc8v/hi_im_ari_aster_writerdirector_of_midsommar_ama/etjqvgb/?context=3

• 3 Women
• 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

  "One thing you said that is absolutely right is that [Mungiu]'s indicting systems, never people. He's absolutely scathing in the way that he's taking on these systems, same with 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, same with Graduation. The periphery of this film [Beyond the Hills] and those is just littered with as many details as he can fit that illuminate just how horrible it is to live in the Romanian system of that time. And everybody kind of accepts these things as just par for the course. He's making sure to always comment, and yet he's so careful to be fair and invisible. But what he's doing is very forceful."
  -Criterion Channel (October 16, 2022)
  www.criterionchannel.com/ari-aster-s-adventures-in-moviegoing

• The 400 Blows

  Ari Aster selected The 400 Blows as one of his many honourable mentions for the Sight & Sound poll in 2022.
  -Sight and Sound (December 1, 2022)
  www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time/all-voters/ari-aster

• 45 Years

  "I think the last shot of 45 Years is one of the all-time great shots—I feel confident in saying that even though it just came out a few years ago."
  -Criterion Top 10 (June 13, 2018)
  www.criterion.com/current/top-10-lists/339-ari-aster-s-top-10

  Discussed in this article: filmschoolrejects.com/6-perfect-shots-with-hereditary-director-ari-aster/
  -Film School Rejects (June 14, 2018)

  "...The most shattering cut to black (and most perfectly curated end credits cue) in recent movies."
  -Twitter (May 29, 2019)
  twitter.com/AriAster/status/1133555557137342464

  When asked to list his favourite contemporary directors, Aster chose this as his favourite Andrew Haigh film.
  -Reddit AMA (July 11, 2019)
  www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/cbxc8v/hi_im_ari_aster_writerdirector_of_midsommar_ama/etjqvgb/?context=3

  "My favorite film of the decade maybe."
  -Twitter (July 13, 2019)
  twitter.com/AriAster/status/1149748988121423872

  "I saw that film [45 Years] for the first time at AFI Fest and I was so floored I didn't really know what to do. It has this perfect cut to black at the end. There's a long list of great cuts to black, and that, for me, is maybe 'the one'. And I just totally broke down when it happened. It cut to black and I just broke down crying. And I went to see it again, a couple of days later, and the same thing happened. And that is an exquisitely quiet movie. It's so quiet that it encourages the viewer to lean in towards it, so that, at the end, it's this silent moment and it's a gesture and it's an expression on a person's face, but because you are so drawn in, it was beyond devastating. If people haven't seen the film, you should."
  -Film at Lincoln Center (July 13, 2019)
  www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPGaPTdno10

  "Very few films have affected me as deeply as this one. In the running for the most haunting cut to black (and end credits cue) in all of movies."
  -Twitter (April 17, 2020)
  twitter.com/AriAster/status/1250862294289899520

  "45 Years is a masterpiece and I can't watch it without being broken all the way down."
  -Twitter (April 21, 2020)
  twitter.com/AriAster/status/1252278502889422853

  Ari Aster selected 45 Years as one of his many honourable mentions for the Sight & Sound poll in 2022.
  -Sight and Sound (December 1, 2022)
  www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time/all-voters/ari-aster

• 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

  "I’ve always felt that the first films [Haneke] made in Austria, especially the trilogy (The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments), were a little too academic. He really avoided performances."
  -Criterion Top 10 (June 13, 2018)
  www.criterion.com/current/top-10-lists/339-ari-aster-s-top-10

  "Michael Haneke was very, very important to me growing up... But his first films, they just call it 'The Trilogy' here, but I think he called it, in one interview, 'The Emotional Glaciation Trilogy' and I think he regretted saying that, so that's probably why it doesn't say it here. Haneke is always talking about Bresson being his favourite filmmaker and the only filmmaker he really cares about, and you really see that in these films, which are very Bressonian. The actors are basically functioning as models. The Seventh Continent is one of the most perfect films ever made and very upsetting. Benny's Video is a great film about Nazi youth. And 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance is a great trial run for what he ended up doing with Code Unknown."
  -Criterion Collection (April 21, 2023)
  www.youtube.com/watch?v=psV-DcsnU1Y

• 8½

  "...This film probably has the most athletic blocking and camerawork that I had seen in any film. A lot of my favorite filmmakers have stolen from this film... so much of their technique is derived from really just the playfulness of this film in particular, and whenever I want to inspire myself to play with the camera and to play with blocking and to try to go a little bit further, I’ll watch 8½."
  -Hereditary Director Ari Aster's Five Favorite Films, Rotten Tomatoes (June 11, 2018)
  editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/hereditary-director-ari-asters-five-favorite-films/

  "...8½ is [Fellini]'s most perfect while also being his most freewheeling and untethered. I watch this film before I make anything. It’s so alive! Even though it’s about a director experiencing a directorial version of writer’s block, it’s so inspired. There’s so much Fellini wants to jam in there. Everything is in there: his love of women, his love of the eccentric, his idea of life as a circus."
  -Criterion Top 10 (June 13, 2018)
  www.criterion.com/current/top-10-lists/339-ari-aster-s-top-10

  Listed as one of Aster's favourite movie soundtracks.
  -Reddit AMA (June 15, 2018)
  www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/8rbjj7/hi_im_ari_aster_writerdirector_of_hereditary_ama/e0q7wkq/?context=3

  "I think I'm most excited by the filmmakers that play with form. The most obvious thing I could do right now is to cite 8½, which everybody loves, but it is just so alive and so fluid, and what it's doing is so intuitive. That's a film I go back to whenever I'm making a film, just to remind myself that there really are no rules, as long as the impulse is tied to something real."
  -Criterion Channel (October 16, 2022)
  www.criterionchannel.com/ari-aster-s-adventures-in-moviegoing

  Ari Aster selected 8½ as one of his 10 picks for the Sight & Sound poll in 2022:
  "A work of total formal authority and absolute freedom. Fellini's camera - always dancing deliriously, always restless to top itself - was never more fluid or agile or attentive, his blocking of actors never more acrobatic. A work of supreme, swirling inspiration."
  -Sight and Sound (December 1, 2022)
  www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time/all-voters/ari-aster

• About Endlessness
• The Act of Killing

  Selected by Ari Aster as one of his curated selections for Alamo on Demand, with the theme "Nothing Means Anything!" (July 17, 2020)
  ondemand.drafthouse.com/bundle/ari-aster-six-pack-2/

• The Adventures of Prince Achmed

  Ari Aster mentions The Adventures of Prince Achmed serving as an influence for aspects of the play sequence in Beau Is Afraid.
  -GQ (May 1, 2023)
  www.gq.com/story/ari-aster-martin-scorsese-interview-beau-is-afraid-a24

...plus 581 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• 10
• 10 Rillington Place
• The 10th Victim
• 12 Angry Men
• 12 Years a Slave
• 127 Hours
• 13 Assassins
• 1917
• 20 Feet from Stardom
• 2001: A Space Odyssey

...plus 1369 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.