Watched on Monday May 5, 2025.

Not much I can add to the conversation on this, but it is uniquely enraging to hear a gun-loving Texan dipshit wax poetic about the "depth" of his spiritual, 3000-year-old connection to "Judea."

Clever enough in moments, but the narrative fails to do anything remotely interesting after the first act turn. Mid Black Mirror episode-ass filmmaking. Sinners was fun and all but I am desperate for Hollywood to Make Horror Unelevated Again. Please, David Zaslav, hire a guy who makes neat commercials to do a PG-13 remake of Terror Train. I am begging you.

For a decade and a half, Kotlyarenko has been pushing cinema to acknowledge humanity's evolving relationship with screens and online behaviour. Where other filmmakers avoid contemporary life and the ugly, inescapable aesthetics of late capitalism, Kotlyarenko sees opportunity. The cameras get smaller, the phones become more powerful. These tools, not really meant for creating art, have created a new visual language of surveillance and new modes of performance that many filmmakers avoid, but Kotlyarenko's films embrace the madness.

Kotlyarenko pushes these formal experiments further than ever before in The Code, described as a "found footage rom-com." Celine and Jay, a sexless couple renting a Joshua Tree AirBnb during COVID, document each other, covertly and otherwise, with GoPros, spyglasses, phones, and even Tesla cameras, as they try to rekindle a connection that has long since faded. Despite the formal brilliance of the film, Kotlyarenko's virtuosic filmmaking never gets in the way of the sweet, funny, postmodern romance at the centre of the film.

Bleeding Edge and EH24 are presenting the Toronto premiere of The Code this Friday at Paradise Theatre. Get your tickets before they're gone!

I also talked with Eugene about the challenges of making a movie with these kinds of technologies, which you can read here.

Watched on Tuesday April 29, 2025.

Watched on Monday April 28, 2025.

Recently finished watched every episode of Star Trek and will now be transferring that energy to something even more annoying to bring it up in conversation.

Fun remake of From Dusk Till Dawn with Michael B. Jordan in both the Tarantino and Clooney roles. Introduces a bunch of characters, lets you hang out with them long enough to like them, then drops the hammer with some vampire stuff. Better as a hang-out movie than a genre film. The end feels scattered and rushed, but still enjoyable. I'm not above a bit of gratuitous cracker-killing, but I do think the movie is better than that.

Hilarious scene where the vampires act all evil and threatening while singing sea shanty-ass Irish folk music.

Kind of like a really precocious teenager making an intense face and screaming KAMEHAMEHA!!!!!! for 3 hours

(compliment)

Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.

Pretty good! Basically an exercise in ratcheting up tension as a Navy SEAL team waits to be evacuated while under fire from the enemy, and largely pretty successful at it. It often focusses in on an unbearable sense of boredom that settles in while the soldiers wait for this or that thing to happen, punctuated by chaotic and gruesome moments of violence. It only really gets authorial in making it clear that it's definitely NOT cool to get your legs blown off by an IED and maybe even less cool to be a commanding officer who has to the baton because he's too "fucked up" to remain in charge. Kids! War is bad! But we must still Respect The Troops.

As with Garland's previous film, Civil War, Warfare is resolutely "apolitical" when it comes to the Iraq War and the partisanship it inspired (maybe even more apolitical than Civil War, given that the heroes of that film were obviously libs, despite their veneer of journalistic objectivity). This is all right in a vacuum, I suppose, but it does make me wonder what was in the water in Hollywood when movies like Platoon, Casualties of War and Full Metal Jacket were getting financed... How is it that you were allowed to say Vietnam was bad and that some of the American soldiers in it were shitheads when Ronald Reagan was president? Maybe it was a fair trade for the insane right-wing fantasies like Rambo and Red Dawn. Furthermore, why must we reserve the sanctimonious attitude to war for the troops alone? What about the unfortunate Iraqi family that has their house destroyed?

While Warfare is well-made, highly engaging, and avoids some of the worst cliches of the genre, it is still a movie that presents American soldiers as of a sacred elite who float above your petty political divisions. Who knows? Maybe the platoon featured in Warfare really deserves this treatment, but this is basically the only way to make a war movie in the years following Iraq. In this type of film, the story of the Iraq War, the political schaudenfraude that led to it, or the poor Iraqi bastards who had their country turned into a Hieronymous Bosch painting, can never take precedence over the Beloved Troops Who Fought For Your Freedom.

3) What was the last movie that made you cry?

Olivia Chow: “Away from Her with Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie. It was directed by Sarah Polley, a er of mine.”

Doug Ford: “No movie has ever made me cry. But I found it very difficult to watch the movie Mississippi Burning.”

John Tory: “The Descendants.”

(h/t to Will for telling me about this)

Watched on Monday April 7, 2025.

Got an idea for a reboot (girl with four boobs).

Kind of like Trash Humpers.

Nice and relaxing.

Finally caught up with this and wonder if he went with the infrared gimmick cuz all the AI stuff looked like ass without it. Chuckled at the sparklers coming out of the strippers' pussies. Probably would have liked it more at the TIFF midnight madness screening or in a strip club.

Watched on Tuesday March 25, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday March 25, 2025.

A nice, sweet movie about hanging out with the boys. Never been a baseball guy (Irish/British parents), but it strikes me as a good sport to play if you don't want to spend the entire game running around, out of breath, mad at yourself for being out of shape (or being repeatedly tackled to the ground in the case of rugby, my adolescent sport of choice). You can chill in the dugout, crack a few cold ones, shoot the shit, etc. Maybe I'll a softball league. I wonder if English people have a similar culture for cricket.

Reminded me of all the friendships and acquaintances I've had with coworkers, writing group , improv classmates, etc. that fizzled out as soon as we were no longer mandated to be in the same room by some external force. "If you tear it down, they will leave," the filmmakers joked during the intro. Time marches on, insufficiently moved by our pleas to slow down.

Would make a good co-headliner on a New England double bill with Tetewsky and Pikovsky's Berman's March, whose protagonist could easily be a ball player on one of these teams.

There's a citation on the Wikipedia page for this movie that I ed reading a long time ago and I haven't been able to shake. Apparently paraphrased from Burroughs scholar Timothy S. Murphy, it's still there: "by using the life of Burroughs himself as a framing narrative, Cronenberg turns a fragmented, unromantic, bitterly critical and satirical novel into a conventional bildungsroman."

It's not that the sentence is 100% true (while certainly more cohesive than the "novel," the film has an elliptical structure to it which belies a simple coming-of-age diagnosis), but that it feels true. Burroughs was a genuine freak, the real deal. Addicted to opioids, murdered his wife, abandoned his family, engaged in a great deal of depraved sex with men and women. Cronenberg, comparatively, is a boy scout. Whatever freaky things come out of his imagination, his actual life appears to be that of a good family man. Attempts to replicate the opiate-induced mania of the book are doomed to fail on the grounds that noone can direct an entire film in the state that Burroughs wrote the book (except, possibly, Abel Ferrara).

This can be seen not just in the structure of the film (famously, the order of the ages in the book were the result of how they came back from the publisher, a forerunner of Burroughs' "cut-up" technique), but in the fetishism for writing, imagined as a form of international espionage in which typewriters themselves are bug-like handlers for nefarious international spy rings. It can also be seen in the depiction of Lee and his wife shooting up "roach powder," totally in line with Cronenberg's obsessions with the merging of man and machine, but comes across as a tad immature next to Burroughs' very real addictions to very real heroin. When two characters obviously based on Ginsberg and Kerouac show up in Interzone to reveal that this film is an origin story for the book (in which the author's famous "routines" are written--possibly by another presence in the Interzone--while he's under the influence), I couldn't help but think that surely, this kind of hagiography is not in the spirit of Burroughs.

Nevertheless, there's a lot to like here. One area of overlap between Burroughs and Cronenberg is a shared fixation on the absurdity of the human body and its functions, which culminates in the horrifying sexual domination-cum-death of a North African rent-boy at the hands of a European socialite played by Julian Sands. I was also tickled by the rhyming of scenes and moments between Cronenberg's film and Guadagnino's Queer. Both films feature Bill Lee, the literary alter ego of Burroughs himself, traipsing through a foreign land in a familiar hat, procuring drugs and sex, ruminations on what it means to be gay, young foreign sex workers with dangling centipede necklaces, and, of course, depictions of the infamous "William Tell" stunt, in which
Lee accidentally kills his wife by trying to shoot a glass from the top of her head.

Thirty odd years later it does seem crazy that tax dollars went into this.

Watched on 35mm at the Lightbox and was pretty bored this time around. Friend said some of the visuals look like DeviantArt and I can't get it out of my head.

Watched on Sunday March 9, 2025.

Always rolled my eyes at the liberal assertion that Trump is a "fake" billionaire, but I did buy the narrative that he was a showman pretending to be a big real estate developer rather than the genuine article. As I understand it, after Trump overextended himself building casinos in Atlantic City, his company rolled back its operations and, apart from key properties like Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago, largely confined itself to licensing out the Trump name to third party hotel developments across the globe. Meanwhile, the man himself furthered the Trump brand by writing bestselling books, appearing on Oprah, doing a cameo in Woody Allen's Celebrity, etc. Whatever. Show business is business and a billion dollars from playing a mogul on TV is the same as a billion dollars from being a mogul in real life.

The Trump I know is still the Trump of the 2000s, star of a cheesy reality TV show and huckster for various ridiculous consumer products (board games, steaks, higher education scams, etc.), a parody of a big businessman. But anyone who wasn't yet an adult by 2015 probably has more experience with Trump as a political figure than Trump as a mere TV star, so perhaps that's where a movie like The Apprentice comes in, which mostly ignores the TV star era of his career to focus on the initial successes that built Trump's reputation in the first place.

Despite being named after Trump's old TV show, this movie presents Trump not as a showman or a fraud, but as he would want to be seen: a ruthless businessman, a "killer" in the terminology of Trump himself. It's flattering to Trump to present him this way, but it's also kinder to the clowns (or "defenders of democracy") who keep losing to him at the ballot box. Despite the contradictions, I suspect this version of Trump will live on after he leaves office.

The film itself is structured like a Marvel origin story, with germs of Trump lore sprinkled in for the news junkies that make up its main audience (Oh! Now he's doing the diet pills! Now he's getting the hair treatment! She says his face looks like a big orange!), but it moves along quickly and effectively. Stan and Strong do the community theatre-ass actorly showboating that pops up in biopics about famous people, but they're fun to watch. While I'm a genuine hater of aspect ratio shenanigans (this is in 3:2 for some reason), I very much enjoyed the cinematography, at first imitating 16mm press footage of the 70s and switching to a faux-broadcast style, replete with blotchy scan-lines, as it gets into the 80s. The period details are great, even if it was filmed in Toronto.

As far as Oscar-bait biopics of 2024 go, this is, without a doubt, a much better movie than A Complete Unknown.

Clever premise highjacked by its own director so he can go off about animal rights again. Hard to really dislike because it's so obviously the work of an auteur, but the Mark Ruffalo-as-not-Trump stuff is pretty grating.

Despite working in England during the "Swinging Sixties" and being a contemporary of many international art house and New Hollywood filmmakers, Peter Watkins remained isolated from the counterculture, instead bouncing from nation to nation with his cap out, asking for funds to pursue his various ion projects. Indeed, in Privilege, he sees the dim-witted protagonist rock star as a tool for authoritarian, clerical (!) power and his fans as sheep-like followers, more-or-less equating youth culture with Nazism. One wonders if Watkins had a similarly dismal view of the London counterculture in Blow Up.

I found myself thinking about this during the many, many scenes of Edvard Munch, the great Norwegian artist, drinking and cavorting (or more commonly, sitting quietly in a corner while others drink and cavort) with his bohemian contemporaries of the late 19th Century. Is there a nostalgia here for an uncommercialized counterculture at the dawn of modernity? Or are these people the equivalent of Privilege's Steven Shorter? Poseurs unable to truly understand the genius among them?

It's not difficult to see why Watkins considers Edvard Munch his most personal film. The titular artist finds himself in exile from his homeland and unfairly savaged by critics and institutions. Given that Munch himself had a fairly long and storied career, one wonders if the negative reactions to his art presented in the film are a tad bit exaggerated. We never learn much about his personal finances, but it seems he was successful enough to keep a roof over his head. Perhaps the moments in which various critics directly address the camera with their scathing criticism of Munch (The Watkins' Special™) have more to do with Watkins' feelings about his own work and its reception, rather than accurately reflecting Munch's stature in the late 19th Century.

Munch's loneliness is more than professional here, it's existential: an inability to connect with his family, his fellow artists, the society that receives his work, or the various women he pursues. Only the married "free love" believer "Mrs. Heiberg" gives him a sense of real connection, but that connection is eventually severed, and it haunts him for the rest of his days.

For someone who routinely criticizes the lack of imagination or creativity in the mainstream "Monoform" of cinema, I find it ironic that Watkins only seems to have one formal idea himself: to shoot scripted drama as if it were a documentary. That being said, it's an effective way to contextualize an artist and his work, providing a natural bridge from the events of Munch's life to detailed analyses of his work to its reception.

Nevertheless, at 3 hours and 42 minutes, the complete version of this movie is... a bit of a chore.

Funny and sweet and lovingly put together, even if it feels reverse-engineered from a ChatGPT-generated premise for the perfect TIFF movie. Very amused by the idea of Winnipeg as a snowy, maze-like bazaar of blank grey (or beige) walls where one might speak of a "relaxing view of the highway." In Toronto I often chafe at the city's anti-fun politics, but the joke about needing a permit to "loiter" beside the no-longer-functional fountain of a dying shopping mall makes me think this might be an Anglo-Canadian (or Persian-Canadian in the context of the movie) phenomenon.

Have not seen enough Kiarostami to get the references. Maybe I oughta.

Twilight Zone-ass premise stretched out and padded with lifeless father-son bonding moments. Some laughs.

Watched on Sunday February 23, 2025.

Watched on Thursday February 20, 2025.

Watched on Thursday February 20, 2025.

Lacks the battiness of Privilege and the vérité verisimilitude of Punishment Park, but still full of Watkins' absolute spite for humanity.

Watched on Tuesday February 11, 2025.

Watched on Monday February 10, 2025.

A haunted house movie but instead of a house it's a jungle and instead of an array of contrasting personality types everyone is Rambo.

Kept threatening to turn into a mystery or genre film of some sort and to be honest I kinda wish it did. I dunno, maybe I would get more out if this if I was old and approaching death.

Some fun old man dialogue about buying "euthanasia pills" off the dark web.

the cinema of late capitalism

feel free to make suggestions

• Crank
• Enter the Void
• Gamer
• HyperNormalisation
• Rush
• Ready Player One
• Southland Tales
• Speed Racer
• Spring Breakers
• Tangerine

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

class, baby!

• Infinity Pool
• Triangle of Sadness
• The Menu
• Glass Onion

• Pumpkin
• Neo Ned
• Tiptoes
• Lars and the Real Girl
• Love Liza
• Dummy

good and chill movies set in warm, sunny places

• The Big Bounce
• Forgetting Sarah Marshall
• Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
• Aloha
• 50 First Dates
• Just Go with It
• Blue Hawaii
• Hard Ticket to Hawaii
• Snakes on a Plane

• Men in Black 3
• Gotti
• Aquaman
• The Fate of the Furious
• The Hangover Part II