Letterboxd — Your life in film

a few weeks ago, I went to see Justin Torres at a reading and Q&A for his new novel Blackouts (which just won the fucking National Book Award!!), which is a book hard to describe even beginning with its genre. I guess it’s formally classified as historical fiction—Torres uses a book from the 1940s called Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, which is a test that does a lot of things, but most troubling among them is its simultaneous attempt…

the grief lives here, too—sometimes its a quiet interloper in the reading nook, easy enough to ignore; other times its a sudden shock around the corner, something unexpectedly startling you. the absence becomes a presence itself. a palpable emptiness. that missing thing, still a thing, even when it cannot be recovered.

the way light cuts across the kitchen sink, filtered through the window screen. the sharp smell of fresh oranges. a wooden chess board. the weight of a snow globe…

so strange to watch this the day that Omegle—that text-based turn video chat site that connected you with strangers—shut down. I would’ve been about 14 (maybe a little younger?) when I first went on. I don’t have many specific memories about what I talked about on there—sometimes I logged on with my friends, most of the time I was connecting, disconnecting, reconnecting. I have an abundant sense of retrospective embarrassment for the desire I was trying to quell.

I wanted…

toward the end of the movie, I turned to Charlie and said surely they can’t be setting this up for a sequel, there’s no way anyone would finance more of this

at which point he informed me this is doing insane numbers… and after which point I found out they’ve signed a three picture deal…

anyway I’m worried by how much I want to write about this movie, because it really doesn’t merit much LOL—but this stupid game was the…

before we knew my brother-in-law was dead, he was missing. the worst week of my life was a blur of group text messages, social media posts, and phone call after phone call. calling the police station only to be told to call the sheriff’s office only to be told that no, that’s the other country’s jurisdiction, oh no, you live here, so you call here; he was last seen here, it’s their problem. we called every hospital we could find.…

i am sorry to my father, who has spent the last decade asking me to watch this film and me refusing on no more complicated grounds than “you want me to do x so i will do y”

and i am sorry to myself for not watching this sooner!!! i fear i loved it… reminded me so much of why i love Inherent Vice. noir is just such a perfect proxy for collective uncertainty; the line between curiosity and paranoia…

for some reason I was under the impression Sling Blade was a sci-fi action film a la Total Recall—Charlie convinced me to watch it because he said it was a Halloween movie too 🤨

although it was neither a sci-action film nor a Halloween movie, I did really enjoy its lackadaisical, contemplative world. the short storyness of it all feels very apparent; I saw some reference to the 1972 film Tomorrow on the IMDB trivia page, and definitely get a sense of…

this is a weird one for me! the visual storytelling is so compelling, with so many gorgeous set pieces. but then the actual script’s storytelling is so painfully vanilla and vague—everything feels like a first thought, the most obvious plot turn. as good as Washington’s acting is, his character’s whole motivation is “where is my wifeeee”—we don’t know anything else about him! and even when he’s bonding with Alphie, it feels like we miss some key, smaller scenes of character…