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Beautiful, aching, dispiriting, enraging, empowering, makes you want to get off your ass and do something about it all type movie. I'm a sucker for this sort of gritty, poetic street level filmmaking and it's an especially good week to be hearing the cries of a movie like this.

Owe it to downing an entire bowl of ramen beforehand but it took a sleepy second or two to realize what 'the gap' was and, in fact, the entire throughline of the story... and once I did it all started to work on some small but sweet emotional level. It reads like one of the stories in his collection of Roald Dahl short films and in that light, I had a real good time.

My absolute favorite genre is "movies with train stuff" and this one does. not. disappoint.

The soundtrack to this one is just so darn good. Took them six movies to realize the one thing that was missing: pianos.

I'll say this, after a two week long Mission Impossible marathon it's fun to get back to watching movies where the mission (this couple getting back together, coming to with the effects of WWII, etc.) seems truly impossible.

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday May 14, 2025.

Watched on Monday May 12, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday May 7, 2025.

Makes me feel real good about hating Easy Rider at the exact age when it would have been normal for me to be high on its hollow "screw the system, man!" messaging. Currying favor with bullheaded by-the-books cop by bringing up Easy Rider, hilarious!

Something else I love is just how little grace it gives the two main characters-- not villainous enough to be read as straight caricatures and still their humanity doesn't seem to soften any of their airheaded solipsism. It's like if Curb Your Enthusiasm, a show about 'love to hate him!' comedy legend Larry David, was instead about some random idiot who was just like that all the time. The movie somehow gets by on straight spite and almost immediately giving up any notion that the two leads might actually find change or enlightenment-- I do love a good mean-spirited comedy!

It's refreshing to see a horror movie that's not just another collection of vague, portentious moods and inward facing sad-sacks staring out blankly into the middle distance-- instead we get a lively cast of characters, quippy dialogue, musical numbers, identical twins, color coded fedoras, fiddle playing vampires and, guess what, it's still loaded with a ton of meaning and importance and thought.

Digs into the almost stockholm-syndrome-like attachment and obsession developed toward even our most hated co-workers. Besides betting on each other’s sex lives, a fairly accurate representation of working at a movie theater.

"Hot dogs will always be here and that's a good thing" Truer words...

Perhaps now is a good time to start both furiously humanizing and being deeply troubled by the quiet normalization of treating anyone as 'the other' and letting the ungoverned detention of those deemed 'a risk' slip by unnoticed? I don't know, just a thought...

I'm a total sucker for Japanese rock and roll bands, Tokyo in the 80's, film restorations funded by Dolly Parton, etc.

It's like an Ocean's Eleven of all the pope-iest actors Hollywood has on offer...

James Franco presents a film starring James Franco based on a collection of short stories written by James Franco and unfortunately, not half bad-- though I attribute that more to the Coppola genes than the Franco side of things. Bit of a cliche machine but tonally it threads the needle pretty well, stops short of that schlock Requiem For a Dream nonsense, and despite its high key melodrama I saw more than a little of my childhood in each of these characters.

I'll say this too, half of the schmaltzy, hammy melodrama of a coming of age movie like this can be forgiven (or even put to good use!) if the eye-roll inducing lines and overall stupidity is representative of a cast of kids who are (as might be expected from a group of teenagers) fairly stupid and over the top themselves. It's often more the problem that kids in movies are not stupid enough, clearly acting like kids as written by adults. Brandishing a knife from their kitchen to make a show of ones emotions, not stopping a friend from doing something that might violate your probation, a total lack of sensible and direct communication-- it makes sense, I was a teenager once too!

My go to happy-sad movie and a January tradition it would seem. There's some awfully cheap airfares these days, it would be a shame to not take advantage of it...

That's the way I see it.

It seems too obvious to say this feels like a piece of animation but more than simply comparing it to Neon Genesis Evangelion it feels like the work of Masaaki Yuasa, its strange, hypnotic fluidity, jumping from POV of a bike to POV of a secondary character to a stray, unmotivated floor level shot. Its visuals are all at once flat, aesthetic, geometric and also somehow so spirited and narratively driven.

It's also got the gall to be incredibly funny, deeply nostalgic and truly upsetting to boot-- jeeze what a great movie!

Shot on infrared stock and created by placing a precise grid around the subject, shooting frame by frame at different lengths and exposures and throwing it all together to create this hypnotic, eerie rhythm... and a reminder that this was shot and edited on film too! God, I wanna make a movie so bad...

Fun fact: soundtracked by Toshi Ichiyanagi who also scored a bunch of Yoshishige Yoshida's stuff including Eros + Massacre... FUN!

Watched on Friday January 17, 2025.

It's Alright, Muad'Dib...

Between this Timothée movie and that other Timothée movie, Timothée being typecast as an awkward silent type not fit for the seismic era-defining job that destiny has chosen for him and also he's bad at maintaining even the most boring relationship.

In times of great desperation I'll Gromit putting his hair in a little bun after a shower like he has a towel on his head and it'll buy me another few hours, days, months even. 79 minutes and I don't think I stopped laughing once!

I've got a thing for movies that read like short stories and at just under two and half meandering hours this somehow manages to feel like one of those...

Is there a word for when you put on a movie knowing full well it's going to make you feel awful but in the best possible way? New York City has never felt colder and I've never wanted to be here more than I do at this exact moment.

Watched on Thursday December 19, 2024.

Hits different at 36...

Mr. Potter playfully telling George "why, you're worth more dead than alive," geez louise.

“I love you... I don’t understand you, but I love you.” Phew...

No cheeses for us meeces!

Three movies for the price of one (romance! screwball! drama!) and they're all excellent!

Saw this after a few weeks (!!!) of not seeing a movie in theaters, at the AMC in Time Square no less, and boy did I enjoy being back among my people--the moviegoers, the recliner bed bugs, the homeless people that supposedly live in the walls, the holiday tourists I had to fight through just to get to the theater itself. It's good to be back...

Been feeling down lately but for at least two hours this made me less down— this is my ecstatic five-star review of La Chimera, my absolute favorite movie of 2024.

On one hand I agree with what seems to be the overall opinion that this has zero nuance but far be it for me to criticize a horror movie of all things for being obvious— more to the point is that there's not a single ing actor that can deliver a joke, let alone meet the film and its two leads at their most upsetting. Other than being absolutely terrible it is, at its best, a fairly decent movie.

Played back to back with the '76 original this feels all at once like a kitschy (and fun!) homage to the franchise (paranoid priests! hair cutting! a dude with a weird 70's bowl cut!) and an earnest (and damn near perfect I'd say) realization of a certain over-the-top but still largely self-serious mood the original can't quite take over the finish line. Genuinely upsetting and despite them basically backing themselves out of it with a certain "cameo" I wouldn't be opposed to following this up with a straight remake... or not... this is just so good on its own merits...

The style's all there and it's got more than its share of those sometimes silly, sometimes gruesome moments that most 70's horror movies only have one or two of and still... it's something of a drag... and I guess that's not surprising, again, for a 70's horror movie but despite the plot being super fun (the church conspiring to deliver a demon child to a politician desperate for a child as a way of gaining power) still Donner can't quite get it to come together as a whole. I know nothing about the remakes but this is a movie that would, in fact, benefit from a remake!

Damien: "I'm the devil and I'm here to do some devil shit."

In which I my best friend and I recording exactly two episodes of a podcast back in 2007, planning out an epic (and heretofore unfinished) comic series based on our surface level understanding of the the Sumerian myth's we were reading in school, filming a skate video with 5 people skitching off the back of a bike that ended with the videographer (me!) severely scraping up his leg in service of a shot that would go totally unused, the only surviving remnants of the footage being a fading scar and pretty fun memory...

It insists upon itself.

Watched on Thursday October 3, 2024.

It’s a movie, in part, about putting on a festival, things not going exactly as planned, drinking a little too much, finding love and reaching the end with just enough time to appreciate the fall foliage.

In which Leos Carax does some strange, freaked out, self-reflexive take on Histoire(s) du Cinema— an absolute joy!

This is a pretty film that made me feel calm for exactly one hour and four minutes!

The world could always use a little more art. One of life's few constants.

The documentary that's being played alongside Scenarios acts a perfect supplement to a pretty chaotic 18 minutes: in it, Godard describes plans for an film by way of a scrapped together collage and seems less concerned with expressing some calculated thesis than following a curious and meandering path from painting to paper cut-out, from casual scribbles to Xeroxed photos, each idea and thought layered upon the other until director's intent becomes less important than a free-spirited conversation between artist, audience and film.

Its okay to appreciate a swing for the fences without gassing this up as some unfairly maligned late masterpiece, to point out its high highs without ignoring the fact that it often reads like a mess of half finished thoughts, to think its cool that Francis Ford Coppola used a few million dollars of his own money make his ion project outside of the Hollywood system and it the finished product doesn't always add up.

The premise is neat, the screenplay's sloppy, the art-deco-future visuals are fun and it's sincere attempt at reading like a warm letter to future artists is marred by messy if not ambiguous if not out-and-out ugly messaging. It is a lot of things which I like but not all those things work which I do not like. Ultimately I did really like it though so how’s that for a messy review— movies!

Watched on Thursday September 19, 2024.

Watched on Tuesday August 20, 2024.

Watched on Saturday August 17, 2024.

Second go around-- still a complete joy!

Beyond having a lot of the stuff that makes Tetsuo so fun and novel (I still see Tetsuo as something of a novelty) this one really comes together as something more coherent than Tetsuo without sacrificing that scrappy DIY attitude-- looks great, sounds great, totally great.

Gonna open a theater and screen this alongside Gun Crazy-- two glib, sarcastic, off the cuff punk screeds about guns and violence.

Sick, discomforting, totally deranged-- I loved it!

In one sense a simple enough (by Cronenberg standards) freak out b-movie about a sex crazed couple pushing their upsetting kinks to the absolute limit but once it starts throwing into the conversation things like near death experiences as some extreme means of connecting with one another; our inexplicable fascination with danger; violence, voyeurism, spectacle, celebrity all channeled into some upsetting form of art-- that's when it all really starts to truly hum.

Stellar neo-noir too, Holly Hunter and Elias Koteas can both be read as the femme fatale at any given point, both totally thrilling as maniacal out-there forces tempting the main characters closer and closer toward their possible demise.

To speak to "that character" if only because it seems to be the sticking point for a lot of negative takes: the most intriguing thing about the decision is how the tactless choice to recreate someone's likeness as a means of selling more tickets (as those screaming "fan service!" are accusing, at least) eerily fits into a movie featuring a large mega-corporation deg artificial humans expressly to feed their bottom line. I get it, the outrage behind the inclusion seems to come down to a question of ethics (art too depending on how convincing you think the final result looks) but lord if this "unethical" choice doesn't throw an interesting wrench into one of Alien's running themes: that in the eyes of faceless billionaires humans are nothing more than a dollar sign, ethics be damned.

In all that I wouldn't blame anyone for feeling a little turned off by Disney seemingly having its cake and eating it too but as much as the film isn't some radical anti-corporate inside job takedown I don't think Fede Alverez is shy about expressing these ideas either. The movie makes it incredibly easy to feel more than a little disturbed by the rapid, unchecked progress of AI and tech-assisted living, the boldfaced monopolies that engineer every aspect of our lives whether we like it or not and unlike Prometheus (a good movie mind you!) the villains here aren't strolling around twirling their mustache, they're an unseen and uneasy fact of life. If the Alien franchise is required to have any sort of through line (besides everything looking a little wet and phallic, I guess) it should be this.

On a simpler read: it handily works as the kind of rollicking action movie they don't seem make anymore, has fun setting 'em up an knocking 'em down, ten-outta-ten time at the movies.

1. Crimes of the Future
2. Trenque Lauquen
3. Three Thousand Years of Longing
4. The Banshees of Inisherin
5. Glass Onion
6. Turning Red
7. Everything Everywhere All at Once
8. Stars at Noon
9. The Bob's Burgers Movie
10. TÁR

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I get it, I seem to click the little heart icon on just about every moderately entertaining movie-- I clicked the little heart button quicker on these ones.

• 2046
• 20th Century Women
• The 400 Blows
• 45 Years
• Alphaville
• Anomalisa
• Badlands
• The Bakery Girl of Monceau
• Before Sunrise
• Before Sunset

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

Don't sweat the order too much. I'll continue to add notes for the both the benefit of my friends and myself...

• Youth might be the one on the list I can say I outright hated, it swings for the fences and ends up getting hit by the ball. Michael Caine is so good but most of it falls pretty flat.
• The Assassin's bound to go up and up, it's already happening. This tends to be the case when I rewatch the stranger stuff, my fault for overthinking things on the first go around.
• Let's talk about how everyone's wrong about The Hateful Eight. That's a joke... or is it?
• Maybe let's keep making movies like The End of the Tour? Straightforward but still assured and affecting-- screenplay driven movies are an underrated lot these days.
• Speaking of screenplay driven stuff, Steve Jobs is getting buried! I'm not sure if it'll get pushed out of my top 10 but regardless it offers too much to ignore outright.
• The Revenant: everyone seems to be making the same two points, that it's a filmmaking exercise and that Inarittu turned on his camera and pushed DiCaprio down a snowy mountain. First, I think Inarritu is clearly after much more even if he's failing & ignoring that isn't making for a particularly interesting conversation. Second, Lubeski, Fisk, even Inarittu are all doing astonishing work that, whether you think it's good or bad, deserves a lot more than bland dismissal.

1. Anomalisa
2. Breathe
3. 45 Years
4. Inside Out
5. The Hateful Eight
6. Steve Jobs
7. Carol
8. The Assassin
9. The End of the Tour
10. Ex Machina

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Filipino Directors
2. Taiwanese New Wave
3. Hong Kong (But Not Wong)
4. Japan New Wave
5a. The Beethoven Cycle
5b. Noir Remakes

• Norte, The End of History

  Streaming

• Big Boy

  Streaming

• Birdshot

  Netflix

• Kinatay

  DVD

• Tinimbang ka Ngunit Kulang

  DVD

• A City of Sadness

  YouTube

• A Brighter Summer Day

  Criterion

• Eat Drink Man Woman

  Stream

• What Time Is It There?

  101 dollar DVD

• A Borrowed Life

  , maybe??

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
2. Parasite
3. La Flor
4. Knives Out
5. Marriage Story
6. Uncut Gems
7. The Irishman
8. Under the Silver Lake
9. The Souvenir
10. The Lighthouse

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Body Heat
• The Postman Always Rings Twice
• Guncrazy
• D.O.A.
• Kiss of Death
• The Underneath
• Narrow Margin

1. Madeline's Madeline
2. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
3. Incredibles 2
4. Isle of Dogs
5. Drift
6. Her Smell
7. Nervous Translation
8. Lu Over the Wall
9. Night Is Short, Walk On Girl
10. Our House

...plus 9 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Never underestimate my ability to take an ostensibly fun thing and turn it into homework...

• Kaili Blues

  Kanopy

• Happy Hour

  Kanopy

• Poetry

  Kanopy

• A Touch of Sin

  Kanopy

• Titicut Follies

  Kanopy

• The Wonders

  Kanopy

• Hard to Be a God

  Netflix

• The Thin Blue Line

  Filmstruck

• Still Walking

  Filmstruck

• Stray Dogs

  Amazon

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Dust in the Wind
• Crocodile
• Time
• The River
• Stray Dogs
• Vive L'Amour
• Laurence Anyways
• Mommy
• Oki's Movie
• Ha Ha Ha

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Bronson
• M*A*S*H
• A Clockwork Orange
• Ashes of Time
• Manhunter
• Thief
• Le Samouraï
• Straw Dogs
• Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
• Hannah Takes the Stairs

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• the Titans
• Friday Night Lights
• Treading Water
• Brian's Song
• Leatherheads
• Rudy
• The Blind Side
• Jerry Maguire
• The Longest Yard
• Draft Day

• Please Murder Me

It's below freezing, I'm about to lose a few fingers, we're past the point of rescue and it's me or Benji...

• Air Bud
• Seabiscuit
• Kangaroo Jack
• Beethoven
• Marmaduke

"A stylistic Chex Mix of storytelling, satire, advocacy, and clip art."

1. The Big Short

I choose you!

1. Sicario
2. Güeros
3. Southpaw
4. Jauja
5. Spectre
6. Mustang
7. La Sapienza
8. Tangerine
9. Trumbo
10. Anomalisa