With each passing day this shines a little bit brighter. I had a bad time in the theater because I was led to believe, through advertising, that it was something that it wasn’t.

Having since read more about the Brazilian film industry of the 70s and 80s, I think I can better appreciate what it’s doing within its own context. I just wish I’d gotten that context sooner.

Even still, in the theater, there were two visually breath-taking sequences: Rita’s drug induced hallucination + come-down, and Marcelo’s walk down the highway in the leather mini-skirt, that stick out as inspired choices in a sex-comedy.

There’s some minimal sensuous pleasure of watching people interact with the tactility of the backrooms. But ultimately the film is weightless.

This was likely doomed from the start. Parsons’ “The Backrooms” series, like its creepypasta cousin Petscop, operates primarily in the realm of lore. Lore here is the simulation of depth through the assemblage of details. What I care about is the sensuous experience of watching and/or story that communicates something otherwise ineffable. This can’t muster much of either. Meanwhile fans online clamor about “canon”. It knows its audience.

Still stuck on the mediation of the senses. Another element of it is the ways in which people opt for the mediated version (watching the TV at the strip club) instead of the immediate one (the giant UFO outside the window).

There’s also the detail of how varies the “senses” are that are available to the characters, and their low fidelity (or alternatively, singular specificity). The audio signal at the start. Radar. Infrared. Weird little computer interfaces with triangles for jets.

The “plot”, such as it is, of searching for an old friend, is largely unnecessary framing in the end. Where this shines is in its being a document of children, excitedly pleaing to be captured, remembered perhaps, on video.

When we look at photos and video of Gaza today, we see devastating loss. Something that this delivers on, even as it documents a period of hostilities and despair, is what was lost. Children excitedly showing a fish. Children holding a young hawk. People playing cards and dominoes. People laying back and watching TV.

Rewatched after a trip to New York City, where unfortunately the accents of this film are now broadly extinct.

I feel even more confident that this movie is a comedy being inconveniently interrupted by a crime thriller. What other kind of movie ends like that!

Why bother adapting High And Low to do this to it? Almost every quality of the original is degraded here. The one novel and successful contribution is the recording studio battle sequence. In that moment, it’s easy to see the Spike Lee that’s impressed me so often in the past.

But here, there’s this desparate flinging of Black Excellence imagery at the screen, hoping that some of the aura of those works (“Oh, I love The Bluest Eye!”) will leave its residue on the accompanying sequences. Aretha Franklin, Kehinde Wiley, Basquiat, and Zora Neale Hurston deserve better than that.

A highlight: the pleasure of seeing the Predator here pull an Arnold (in Predator) adapting the environment to his purposes, replacing the conventional accessories of the Yautja with scavenged equivalents.