What history remembers.
What memory forgets.
Gone in a blink, in a shriek, in a step.
Legs apart,
Leagues apart
From diamonds, caressed
Abuse of adolescent dreams
And existential dread
Apparition is the natural state of precious few.
-
Picnic at Hanging Rock 1975
-
I'm Thinking of Ending Things 2020
I'm going to be revisiting this a lot.
This time.
Just now.
And last week
And a month before that.
But also this exact moment.
Typing away at 2:00am in an LA apartment.
I hear a distant train horn. No cars...I'm hearing the little song our dryer plays when a run is finished. But it's playing on loop and sounds far away and pounding at the same time. Nothing's in the dryer. Audio hallucinations. I've been hitting the pen…
-
Leviathan 2012
A completely nightmarish, disorienting endurance test. Watched this on 40mg of THC and struggled to keep my eyes on the screen. The sound alone was making my head spin. Groaning machinery, sloshing fish guts and the rhythmic crashing of a perpetually turbulent ocean.
As the title suggests, we're essentially riding the spine of a ravenous sea monster (a commercial fishing vessel) as it lumbers across a seemingly endless, sickly green aquatic hell. Fish eye lenses, long unbroken takes, distorted colors and unusual angles. Mesmerizing & horrific.
Take the plunge if u dare.
-
Rosemary's Baby 1968
All of them?
Conspiracy
The worst was yet to come
Inverted mend
Immune belief
And furiously young
-
-
-
The Wolf of Wall Street 2013
Endorsed by corruption & driven by bottomless consumption, this is what an American Hero looks like. The Wolf of Wall Street is a Fellini-esque avalanche of hedonist excess & scumfuckery that pursues its toxic protagonist with a bleary-eyed glee matched only by a nation drunk on capitalist myths, DYING to know the secret to success. The last five seconds says it all. A dark mirror.
-
The Killing of a Sacred Deer 2017
Still genuinely baffled about how to address or critique this movie. Few films are more curiously alien in their dramatic sensibilities. At the very least, it’s managed to draw me in more than once.
And it almost certainly won’t be the last time either.
-
Annihilation 2018
We can never be the same again.
You and I and all the rest are set to self-destruct.
Yet what if death itself were stopped?
And every thing kept dancing.
Swapping partners, spoken seeds and pregnancies advancing.
Known to be infinite.
Endless, Nameless.
Sound.
I lack the language necessary for the recollection.
A witness to the birth of stars may still reflect on clouds.
-
Phantasm 1979
I'm intrigued.
Phantasm is like a Goosebumps episode possessed by the imagination of Dario Argento. Hokey TV-movie acting and stiff dialogue repeatedly giving way to some mangled, yet internally consistent nightmare world. Genuinely haunting and disorienting, but only in the briefest of moments.
Despite being borderline incoherent, it casts a peculiar spell. Something really disturbing is going on here, but we're never directly told what it is. A wink. A nod. Instruments of mysterious origin and even stranger purpose.
Bewildering.…
-
Kiki's Delivery Service 1989
The first Ghibli movie I ever saw. Had it on VHS back in the day. Haven't seen it in ages. So much has changed in that time. Felt like I was watching my origin story, the parallels abundant.
It's been three years since I graduated college and moved 3000+ miles away from home to lay roots in Los Angeles (unfortunately, my skinny, little orange cat couldn't join me). I had no plan, only idealistic visions of what life as a…
-
Cats 2019
"We were somewhere around Burbank, at the beginning of Cats, when the drugs began to take hold..."
30mg
30 seconds in, I entered survival mode.Look upon these hollow homages to the physical form...these avatars of poor judgement, these sketchy, overeager, walking rough drafts draped in fuzzy, thriftless pixels... twirling effigies too prideful to self-immolate, pleading in earnest that you simply sing along.
Extravagant, sincere
Convinced they, too, were real
Real enough to be loved, at least...And what followed…