hi everyone fuming at roe v. wade being overturned (hopefully all of you)! tomorrow at 5pm PST, Lucy and i are introducing a virtual screening + watch-a-long of Portrait as part of a fundraiser with NEON, Kinema, and our dear friend Letterboxd. tickets are only $5, and NEON is donating all proceeds to local abortion funds via the National Network of Abortion Funds.
if you’re able to, please join — tickets available here! you can even buy a ticket as a donation and…
what upppp letterboxd i’m at MoMA learning about Man Ray. for instance, did you know he was an experimental filmmaker in addition to infamous SpongeBob supervillain?
Phil Tippett!!!!! Phil Tippett. Phil Tippett worked on Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Starship Troopers, RoboCop, and the Twilight Saga. this guy designed Jabba the Hutt AND supervised the CGI vampire birth scene from Breaking Dawn: Part 1 (two equally important cinematic events), and in between those ~30 years he was working on this passion project: an experimental stop-motion dystopian nightmare yuck-fest with no dialogue about the abject horrors of war, the body, and Eraserhead baby-esque creatures. to me, that’s one of the top 3 coolest things ever. Phil actually Tipped it that absolute Mad God hahahahahahaha!
“In October 1982, David Cronenberg was reading the daily paper when he stumbled across a Far Side cartoon called 'Cow Tools'. He was so perplexed and inspired by the enigmatic panel, that he decided to make a live-action feature exploring the psyche of a cow driven mad by a need to recreate the aforementioned tools. Realizing the difficulties of working with an actual cow, Cronenberg shifted the story to focus on a pair of twins (Jeremy Irons) who dress in…
as a Certified Cronenbabe, it’s gratifying to see the definitive king of body horror return to his old-school roots. reminded me of an amalgamation of eXistenZ, Dead Ringers, and his novel Consumed, which are my favorite works of his, so i was an automatic sucker for this. fantastic speculative world-building exercise, and even if the plethora of themes/ideas didn't fully coalesce in the end, its imagery and effects were so grotesquely unique that i have to admire it.
this one…
gay-coded pinocchio gets shot with a gun by a talking cat. it's no ratatoing but at least it's a true story
hypnotically rhythmic, like the slap of an oar against the salty sea or the cavernous echo of a bear’s death-knell roar. Robert Eggers takes a tale older than Hamlet and forges it in hot blood and magma, then soaks it in cold sweat and mud — i thought The Lighthouse was filthy (in more ways than one 😏) but he really dials up the dirt! my friend Grace tweeted it made her want to smash a rock open with her…
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor... and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite…
everything modern-day action blockbusters everywhere should be all at once: kinetic, daring, expertly choreographed, endlessly creative, laugh-out-loud funny, doesn't look like bland CGI shit, and anchored by a genuine emotional core.
finds balance in the chaos and chaos in the balance; a mess of contradictions that's actually not messy at all, because every detail in every sequence is discernibly crafted with zealous care. The Daniels also excel at proving that intelligent filmmaking and "lowbrow" humor are not mutually exclusive: butt-plug…