fav movie
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Patlabor: The Movie 1989
mechanical "Labors" aligned like pagan idols in an Ark who, its prow sloughed off, reveals itself to be another Tower of Babel, collapsing into the sea under the weight of capitalist, idolatrous folly. a man falls to his death, his demon soul attached to a red-eyed crow, and a flock of birds gathers to commemorate a second Fall not much later. computer viruses play the part of original sin, no trace of the holy to be found anywhere but in the exquisite aesthetics of oshii's elegantly orchestrated pageant, although who is to say what it all means, capital-M, in the end....not i, certainly
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The Sixth Sense 1999
a elegy on the inheritance and iteration of empathy, the most hopeful declaration in shyamalan's oeuvre that we can pass on so much more than trauma and dysfunction, that our own agonies can become sources of incredible love and caring rather than excuses for inflicting pain. our own ghosts are exorcised by faith and understanding, while this allows us to care for others in deeper ways than we could have ever imagined. a perspective that seems almost naive, were it…
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Fractals: The Colors Of Infinity 1995
ok what is there to say really....i'm excited about film which unsews the stitching of knowledge production, the boundaries drawn between science and art, and reattaches them in strange new ways....provokes the question of how organicity emerges, the levels unwinding themselves downwards like dna unzipping, waiting to encode grander designs, technology used to generate and resolve digital images the inverse operation of what the us government uses to observe and control us......the possibility of new worlds contained in the old,…
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My Soul to Take 2010
in an absolutely bonkers minor key, embellished with one of the strangest senses of space and interconnectivity i've seen in a slasher, and traipsing through an absurd wealth of thinly sketched but ultimately quite compelling ideas about trauma and masculinity and mythology, a solid late effort indeed. fractured identities flee into in the next generation, and, failing to escape their pain and guilt, one by one fold back into the lone survivor, as only the living remain to bear witness,…
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Toolbox Murders 2004
the history of brute power is plastered to the very walls, newspapers lining a moldering catacomb which is equally a shrine to the parasitic, quasi-sexual jouissance and vitality the demonic bourgeois of hollywood (in alliance with the military-industrial complex) derives from the pain and death of the poor. grimy, staged, and theatrical: this is a performance, through and through, although the irony of one of hooper's more workmanlike (if certainly not journeyman) efforts being named after its macabre, gothic perversion…
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She Dies Tomorrow 2020
seimetz's work is fleet and multivalent in its semiotics, not performing arthouse charlatanisms of vaporous suggestion but rather operating in a dialectic between the concrete and abstract realities of affect. this dialectic unfolds in outward-spiralling epicyclic transformations, prominently realized in the rapturous hallucinations that signal the onset of certain mortality for the quotidian maladapted. trauma exists as a half-spoken omnipresence, but moreso in the viscera and microbiome of the film's most aesthetically outre gestures than in its elliptical, temporally disjoint…
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Lot in Sodom 1933
in contrast to Kenneth Anger's Fireworks, which posits gay desire as flammable, incendiary, always ready to erupt in a burst of violence and be reborn, here it is fire itself, and, further, the fire which consumes itself. from below, from above, there is flame, consumption, destruction, sometimes avaricious and sometimes punitive, bodies melt and flicker, dreams bleed through reality and awaken the holy. the spectator becomes entombed through and for that very act, frozen in eternal contemplation of the spectacle of abject desire's abject end. wish it were more pornographic tho if we're being honest
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Let's Scare Jessica to Death 1971
begins so placid, with the approach of a hearse and a lovely tombstone sketch, but builds into genuine hysteria, in an almost prototypical, skeletal sense (this is a "Psychotic Woman" movie stripped to its barest parts and yet to call those parts bare seems to belie their craft and texture, which is exquisite, patient). heartbreaking too, as she doubts herself even to the very end, gaslit and disbelieved and tossed aside and oh so afraid, it's hard not recognize jessica,…