"so fucking stupid it's unbelievable"
❤️❤️❤️
gfm 4 nathaxnne: gofund.me/aaf72d55
somber cryptically walking the depopped cs map industrial power station, heavy with its own remoteness, loneliness, frozen in time and no longer pulsing with an animating drone. bright concrete and bleach blue emptiness stretch from grass to desert. twilight blue and walls of rain elsewhere devour the earth, voiding, blanking it. but they don't come here. this place persists. metal nests high above concrete plains.
there is no one here. you can sit with your legs hanging from the metal…
FINALLY watched this and it immediately feels like the rosetta stone for hundreds of subsequent monster movies, moreso even than all of the universal 'originals'. it's all a strange goodbye, maybe because i have no history with it. my og monster mash was the groovie goolies, but if i had this as a kid, it would've been welded into my heart, i'm sure of it. at the same time, it haunts me.
franky has never felt so empty and so…
the near polar opposite of 'murders in the rue morgue.' here, abled white bodies are the chief villains. gooble gobble as the hocus pocus > hocus est enim corpus meum > this is my body of radically inclusive freak communion. moral comeuppance is not death, but transformation: made to know your own evil truly only by experiencing its effects firsthand - personally and embodied. radically anti-eugenic carnival, the mighty brought down from their thrones, exalting the lowly. topsy-turvy. suffused with life.
mean, nasty, vile & rotten to the core. choking to delirium on a suffocating atmosphere of 'scientific' racism. starts by parading you down the evolutionary ladder of dehumanized, racial Others in carnival, arranged for the white gaze's consumption. culminates in what is essentially a lynching, justified by Erik the ape's brutal assault of camille, its rapid cuts to erik's rhythmic movements implying rape, hideously entangling the movie in bald racist mythmaking re: monstrous sexuality. unlike any Universal i've seen in that…
Sixty in September: 10/60
There are so many things to be fascinated by in this beautiful, wild movie, but two things really stick out to me. Obayashi talks about them in the interview on the Criterion materials:
One is the war and the atomic bombings. Obayashi is originally from Hiroshima. He says, quietly and candidly, that most his friends didn't survive the bombings, as a child. The second is Obayashi's sense of how children view and experience the world. He…
Nicole Kidman descending the staircase,
carrying a gaslamp in one hand and
holding a shotgun in the other,
while the fog thickens outside.