Letterboxd — Your life in film

There was no way this was going to be good, but I was at least hoping it wouldn't be this bad. You pretty much get the exact movie you expect as soon as you see the "Illumination" logo, but I think the crux of all its issues is in how it wants to be a pan-Mario universe epic while having a runtime of 80 minutes (not including credits) and so everything, every character arc, setpiece, plot point, is forced to…

Possibly the best anthology there is, genuinely not a single weak link among itself which I attribute heavily to the directors of each being already-established directors who are familiar with genre film-making. It would honestly be a misnomer to say this is a collection of horror films insomuch as they are a triptych of fleshed-out dramas with strong horror to them; a bit of a pedantic distinction but what I feel makes these have a longevity that many horror anthologies…

Silent yet rings with utmost clarity, austere but with some of the most evocative imagery, a slowness that steadily unravels the comforts of fiction we encase ourselves in; Miike at his minimalist is about where I think he's most successful and certainly where I like him most, with Box being an impressive demonstration in how much he can strip away at his gonzo idiosyncracies while still retaining an unsettling (enrapturing) fetishism. He does so by framing the unsightly as also…

Less the presence of spirits than the suggestion of their presence, invoking the occult in order to manifest the occult and birth that from the minds that envision said thing. Language itself becoming the medium of which presences are born, but in that case it begs the question of veracity. Can we create presences of history that never existed by editing the truth, knowingly or not? The concept of 'truth' itself is also called into question as to the unavoidable…

Intense social paranoia magnified until it's manifested physically, the very shame of being found out something which becomes both the haunt and the refuge. There's a strange undercurrent beneath the entire thing which lends the film an uncanniness in all but its heroine, a social pariah who finds herself lying low within the strangeness of suburbia. It's more likely that the town is an exaggerated expression of contemporary social norms (which haven't much changed) but the way Fuller presents it…

Idolatry in all its forms shown at first with smiles and pleasantries before it pulls back the curtain and flashes its fangs. There's a particular sense of certain tragedy awaiting its characters on-the-move that initially registers as mechanical, run-of-the-mill even, before blooming into something both beautiful but dark at the end in which the outcome seems to be the only thing that possibly could happen. The title then carries with it a sense of foredestined fatalism in which one false…

Appeals to my increasingly 'middled-aged mom' sensibilities (only the director of teen-girl fantasy Twilight could make such an equivalent for wine moms) but maybe this speaks more to how my life turned out than anything else; still, there's a certain combination of haplessness and brutality in the whisking away of a (read: the) pushover American suburbanite woman into a combined vacation-like and film-like fantasy of Italy, or at least its signifiers, and that's a wavelength I find not just tolerable…