Hooptober 4.0 - 2017 - Film #30

Stalin, Eisenstein and Romero are seated in a drawing room on plush leather armchairs. They are enjoying cognac around the hearth of an open fire. They make small talk about the hoof and mouth disease epidemic in California, the Olympics in Paris and how absurd and profound Dada truly is.

Stalin narrows the conversation down to business, "Mr. Romero, I am very pleased to have you join our film program. It is my…

Hooptober 3.0 (2016) #32

Spanish hunters are exceedingly cruel. Once they have decided that a hunting dog is no longer fit for active duty they string him up by the neck from a tree branch and watch him slowly strangulate to death. While they watch his paws kick at the air in a death dance of sheer panic they laugh in bemusement. The hunters call this "playing the piano" as though the dogs are tapping out their own funeral dirge…

Her Smell is an abrasive and obnoxious carnivalesque backstage tour of a Riot Grrrl's terminal crash and burn. And as compelling as that may sound, this film is a tedious slogfest that left me wondering why I didn't turn it off after the first twenty minutes. Congregatioms of itinerant flagellants use to parade through villages whipping their own flesh bare in penance during the black plague. Maybe Covid has revealed a similar tendency to torture myself because every minute of…

Mank feels like Fincher's version of Fight Club for grown ups. However, the anger is no longer youthful angst and rebellion. It is all seething rage and piss and vinegar. But it is splashed about as though from an ornate goblet swung about with intellectual disdain. Unfortunately, between the cleverness and the period setting, Fincher somewhere loses his authentic voice and the resulting gap left me with a vague and uncertain wanting for something just as combustible but as sharp…

Thanatos, Eros and the Art of Zen - Japanese Erotic Cinema Project - #1

I went to see this film at the cinema on my own. Nobody else could go but I wanted to anyway because I am precipitously dementing into a Sion Sono fan. And it has the word porno in the title, so there is that.

There was a lesbian couple sitting next to me. It doesnt matter that they were lesbians. But with the same sex marriage…