19, lover of the body genres, gay. I’ve never liked star ratings. Take mine loosely and generally.
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Suspiria 1977
For all its reputation as a vision of excess, I actually find Suspiria to be rather ingeniously simple and pared-down in its construction. It is about the pleasure of fear and the pleasure of the movies; nothing more, nothing less. The grotesque and arabesque, as Poe might have put it: an unholy knot between abject horror and dazzling technique.
I wrote an overblown piece about my love for Suspiria that you can read here, if anyone is interested. Incredible movie!
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Blind Beast 1969
Saw this as a double feature with Irezumi at Metrograph, and while they’re clearly the work of the same filmmaker, and share a number of preoccupations—the battle of the sexes, the relationships between abuse/art and eroticism/death, cycles of cruelty wherein the victim and victimizer swap roles, masochism and conformity, the human body, etc.—in many respects they couldn’t be more different. Blind Beast trades in Irezumi’s poison-pill sensuality for a suitably darker and duller aesthetic, draping its several sets—which feature, in the form…
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Licorice Pizza 2021
70mm in a packed theatre with one of my very closest friends. Probably the best film of its kind in years.
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Querelle 1982
Perhaps love is a den of killers.
It’s brilliant, it’s beautiful, it’s sad, it’s scary, it’s disastrous, it’s perfect, it’s my favorite film. Watching Querelle fills my heart with joy and gives meaning to my life. I fall in love with it more every time I see it (this is my fourth). And yet still I have difficulty putting words to this love; much like Salò, trying to tackle what makes it so important to me feels like a gargantuan task…
