Letterboxd — Your life in film

grief fills the world with strangeness and terror, rising from the ground like swirling fog, wrapping a tale of marital woe and loss in its curling, mythopoeic eddies. the pursuit of ghosts is labyrinthine and impossible: at the end its winding progression reveals nothing other than our own desperate heart turned against itself. wild movie tbh

lovely, small movie about real loneliness, which is so seldom treated with this much care and attention on film. jarringly ferocious montage pulls away at the threads of what might otherwise be a relatively unobtrusive indie comedy until the depth of our heroine's desperation has nothing left to hide behind, all the patchwork clothes and fake loves and affected cheeriness dead in the freezer with the cat. really fucking sad and really fucking sweet, can't decide which is more important. if you can't find a friend, make one!

psychiatry as emotional vampirism, drawing blood from old wounds that has to go somewhere, and so of course it refashions the past into even more grotesque new shapes. family is a curse you've put on each other, and all you can do is make increasingly depraved images of your own rage and hurt in miniature until they finally destroy everything you love and you end up as a pitiable monster begging to die. gutting cinema, clearly the product of real pain

Gregg Araki leaves behind the brash expressivity and amateurish immediacy of his earlier work and explores emotionally direct, almost ordinary filmmaking for the first time, quite successfully. cycles and epicycles of abuse crash against typically Araki-an preoccupations with suburbia and millennial conspiracism, which then become recontextualized as toxic microcosm and failed coping mechanism, respectively. the empathy here is really something, miraculous because it asks for no forgiveness and understands that breaking free requires none. nothing coheres by the end but of course it shouldn’t: Brady Corbet’s nose is still bleeding

apparently this is considered minor De Palma even though it's a film almost purely constituted of dizzying phantasmagorias signifying not so much the bleed of dreams and past into reality as the total dissolution of the barriers between these experiences in the face of the intergenerational trauma inflicted by the family. and yet instead of a hitchcockian ending (wherein the overdetermined symbolic order is reinscribed and new traumatic ruptures emerge) de palma opts for a rube goldberg machine miracle. the cycle is broken but its victims remain

only a dream can kill a dream: the fantasies of wuxia bubble up from beneath the surface of Jack Burton's sunny All-American dream as if to claim revenge for the stolen labor of untold numbers of immigrants on whose backs California was built. and who could claim they don't succeed? poor Jack is humiliated, alone, and tragically convinced of his own heroism while better and stronger men around him dance through neon abstractions and kill half-tangible evils he can't even comprehend. can't think of a better tribute to Tsui Hark than a breezily constructed martial arts comedy about the delusions of men who believe they're heroes

has the greatest moments of quiet of any film i've seen: whole movies could be made about the changes that occur when these most human of characters stop speaking and you'd never run out of material. predicts and surpasses every action movie, every male melodrama, honestly every film that was to follow.
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wild that this is considered lesser Carpenter (let alone a bad movie) when it furtively inverts the structure of the slasher and uses it to disassemble the mythologized and otherwise concealed nihilism that low-rent ghost stories, asylum horror, etc. tend to offer as a response to female trauma. that it manages to not only perform these acrobatic feats of deconstruction but also is so restlessly paced and economical in its delineation of spaces is a minor miracle, at least.

had no idea my dude Snyder could make something like this repulsive, thorny rejoinder to predominating cultural notions of how 'empowerment' and catharsis operate in genre, here imprisoning their subjects in a diegetically pseudo-pornographic fantasy which can ultimately offer those caught in its spell nothing but mindless passivity as an end. anyone who survives with their personhood intact in these patriarchal conditions does so by chance and tremendous sacrifice, alone. honestly surprised me, i resisted it the whole way but it ends up in a place that's surprisingly coherent and strangely necessary

a displaced man enters a movie theater (surrounded by Orientalist images) that only shows the cinema of Orientalist images. he is remade by these images even as he remakes them; the colonial subject is first fetishized and then dismembered, but she always drifts back to him, even in pieces. Raul Ruiz’s zombie movie, a film of rotting bodies shambling around through dreams and afterlifes (it remains unclear which is which). undeniably grotesque and monstrous, decomposing as it goes, and yet infinitely pleasurable in how the progress of decay becomes just another excuse for increasingly elusive Ruizian transformations

"this is my god"