**Not going to spoiler tag this because it’s more of an essay than a review but if you’re spoiler-sensitive consider yourself warned**
I’ve been watching a lot of Paul Schrader’s films over the last few months (including his recently released The Card Counter, which I wholeheartedly recommend). As always, Paul gets me thinking about how much narrative art is focused on people who make important, meaningful choices that (to them at least) give their lives and souls a meaning. This line…
I spent most of the soon-to-be-over summer reading. I got in on The Three Body Problem before the Netflix adaptation kicks into gear. I caught up on some old to-do-list books like The Magic Mountain, Midnight’s Children, and The Rainbow. But most meaningful was possibly my read of Yukio Mishima’s towering and tragic Sea of Fertility tetralogy. After finishing it I took the opportunity for a long-awaited rewatch of Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.
Schrader’s film is uniquely…
In the late 90’s early 2000s these types of “hyperlink movies” were everywhere. The young Americans were making Magnolia, Pulp Fiction, and Traffic. Crash (not the good one) won an academy award. In Mexico Iñárritu made Amores Perros, then 21 Grams, and then Babel, each time iterating on themes of connectivity. In 2013 the Wachowski sisters put a stamp on the trend with their woefully under appreciated Cloud Atlas. The trend provided an opportunity for ambitious filmmakers to tell huge stories…
Paul Schrader’s Hardcore is essential Protestant cinema. Catholics have a buffet: Scorsese and Fellini and Sion Sono’s Love Exposure and many more. Protestants must settle for less. Bergman, Herzog (but only viewed through a funhouse mirror), and most explicitly Paul Schrader are the titans of Protestant cinema, and Hardcore is one of Schrader’s finest.
Hardcore, on paper, is about a Midwestern businessman searching for his missing daughter in a world of porn and sex. But our protagonist Jake Van Dorn, played…
