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The Day After 2017
gotta say that I much prefer Hong in this moralist-intellectual mode: his straight-up comedies are lovely collections of simple pleasures but they take on ethical weight only because of their position in a much larger structure (hardly a novel observation, but bear with me), whereas this film operates on a more immediately intelligible plane but retains the light touch of his earlier work. he also drops the overt metatextuality, allowing the world(s) to be structured and restructured by the actions…
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The Keep 1983
resists easy comparisons to Carpenter, probably has more in common with Mann's digital work than anything else, insofar as he's careening between the abstract and the material here. evil as a concept and evil as a practice in dialectical tension with each other, the abstract understood as fundamentally unreal (Mann's special effects avoid Carpenter's squelchy physicality in favor of an uncanny, not-quite-there quality) while completely tangible in its manifestations. Mann's classic Doomed Romance of a Professional Man plot is also…
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Transit 2018
the past and present echoing back and forth, each a ghostly reflection of the other. making lives into narratives is only possible in light of death, and tragedy only intelligible because the structures which produced it remain in place. lives are inscribed upon a landscape in flux, becoming something simultaneously fixed and fleeting. the best story about hauntings in recent memory
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Ginger Snaps 2000
succeeds where prestige horror fails, insofar as Ginger Snaps completely gets that the structuring metaphor(s) aren't enough by themselves. there's definitely insight here about puberty and sex themselves, but far more interesting is the profoundly human scaffolding built around it about what those traumas can do to relationships. idk it's just kind of wild to watch a horror movie that bothers with empathetic and sophisticated characterization when most contemporary horror cinema is either soulless art-horror or sadistic torture porn bullshit.