experimental/stop-motion, slow cinema, psychotronic trash, interesting failures, obscure novelties
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Vortex 2021
The sharp decline of dementia, which kills the soul before the body, is one of those inevitable horrors of reality which cannot be assimilated into the theodically-minded humanism that dominates film festivals. The progression of the disease does not pause for consolation or conciliation; farewells soon become impossible. Noe, whose own mother succumbed to this process, doesn’t flinch. Nearly sixty, he reminds himself as much as us the audience that aging is cruel and lonely, and that those who live to…
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The Drifting Classroom 1987
My second Obayashi after Hausu. It’s good to know his subsequent efforts carry over the adorable psychopathy which made that feature so enjoyable. The editing is even more illogical this time around, despite the fact that Hausu was co-written by Obayashi’s 12-year-old daughter, which proves he’s just on his own wave.
The Drifting Classroom is based on a manga I’ve been meaning to read but haven’t gotten around to, so I’m uncertain how much of this insanity has spilled straight from the director’s…
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Meltdown 2016
Nick Land's rightward drift (by no means especially recent) should surprise a new reader of his CCRU-era writings, who may be more familiar with him as a so-called 'neo-reactionary' (i.e. silicon fascist) thinker enamored with racial statistics. Meltdown takes its name from an article of the same name, which represents the most popular text from this pre-reactionary period, and like much of this output it's probably best appreciated less as theory than as sci-fi poetry, a mashup that sounds compatible…
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We're All Going to the World's Fair 2021
Contemporary filmmakers have struggled with rendering the new normal of digital socialization into a properly cinematic language, especially in horror which treats mass instant communication as an obstacle to creating an isolating setting. A common workaround is an earlier setting, often the 80s (or a chimeric time period as in It Follows), but there’s also the simpler tactic of the mysterious internet outage. Even when social media is adapted into the form of the narrative, as in Unfriended, it ends up…
