Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Happiest Season 2020

  Rewatched 04 Dec 2023

  It’s Get Out for the corny, Christmas loving gays—Come Out?

  I don’t care if this is some bury-your-gays trauma-porn-loving festive fantasia—let the queers have their Hallmark Holiday moment!

  Let us have our Christmas miracle in the form of Eugene Levy’s beautifully browed and blessedly gay idiot offspring paired with our favorite dour asymmetric haircut lesbian; let us have our coming-out-nightmare-turned-deus-ex-machina fantasy; let us have the holy trinity of wish-they-were-gay screen crushes (Aubrey Plaza, Mackenzie Davis, and Alison Brie); let us…

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  The Holiday 2006

  Rewatched 04 Dec 2023

  The Holiday: Your Unproblematic Mid-2000s Festive Fave! 

  Look, I actually love Love Actually despite all the annoying discourse, but even that film suffers from a massive case of Aughts-itis—too many weird observations on bodies, too much horrible fashion taste, too much misogyny, too much datedness. 

  Here, none of that is present—save maybe in certain characters’ insecurities which, who can blame them! Instead, it’s a dream blunt rotation of four absolute wholesome hotties banging out all their frustrations and adding emotional…

Popular reviews

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  Totally Fucked Up 1993

  Rewatched 14 Nov 2023

  The quintessential AIDS epidemic youth manifesto, chiefly because it is so unadorned that it comes full circle to stylish. This is indie/DIY before the labels were ever invented, much less worn out to meaninglessness by market saturation. It might as well be a documentary for how directly it examines its subjects, how unfiltered its lens is. There’s still a few bells and whistles—Araki’s love for slowcore and shoegaze seeps out into the open, and his postmodern angst bleeds through on…

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  Autumn Sonata 1978

  ★★★★★ Watched 29 Nov 2023

  A reunion that’s anything but sweet; a song that’s anything but soft. This sonata is one of sturm und drang. 

  The opening narration feels like Wong Kar Wai—contemplative, literary reflection. And that characterizes much of the rest—a lot of hindsight, flashbacks, past-looking. In truth, it’s like a novel adapted into a one-act play. There’s such theatric drama; soliloquys and asides, private moments broadcast for an invisible audience, thoughts expressed aloud. And with the focus mostly on the dynamics between two characters,…