2021

This short doc was mentioned in Dawson City: Frozen Time. It was nice to see more time dedicated to Hegg’s photos.

Watched with pretty janky subtitles. Rarely incomprehensible, one could always feels the texture of Mandarin grammar beneath the English words. When so much of modern media is made easy to access, there was something nostalgic and exhilirating about watching something endearingly bootlegged.

There’s a scene where a character ignores, and then gently apologizes to his partner for not listening. I can’t easily recall a film that displays the routine frictions between partners like this. It lends a genuine foundation to their relationship that so many on-screen romances lack.

It was nice returning to Sono’s work after a year long break.

While this is getting a lot of comparisons to Why Don’t You Play in Hell?, I think the more interesting comparison is to Bad Film. In 2012, when it was finally released, it already represented the same gesture to a past film-making life that the character Kobayashi is seeking. The final minutes of this, too, echo the activities of Tokyo GAGAGA, the anarchist art collective Sono belonged to who served as Bad Film’s cast.

My father and I watched this a long while ago, closer to its release. Rewatched again with my father, partly in celebration of my parents getting their COVID vaccine.

I missed this at TIFF in 2019, so was glad to see Netflix had picked it up.

Rewatched with commentary by Matthew H. Bernstein

This isn’t a martial arts movie, it’s a stabbing movie. The fight scenes are scrappy and scummy in a way that feels at least a decade ahead of its time, if not more.

The pre-credits montage is one of the most affecting few minutes of a film I’ve seen. Even without the preceding two hours, it’s a hell of an indictment of (then) 100 years of film history. With it, it’s also an empathetic remembrance of the black performers and talents featured in it.

I’d rather play a maid […] than be a maid
— Hattie McDaniel

Rewatched with commentary by Spike Lee

Has exactly two good jokes in it, and they’re subtle enough that they might not have even been intentional.

2008 Criterion version

Rewatched with commentary by Tony Rayns, which I don’t recommend

Rewatched for a film club

The slapstick stuff doesn’t do much for me, but there’s a comedy of desperation throughout that’s biting and quite good. The tunnel scene alone, of people recognizing their power having stopped the machine of the city, and extracting mahjongg/pop concerts/free tunnel tolls for life is a particularly fun power fantasy to see on screen.

Rewatched for the first time as an adult; this time through the lens of John Woo.

Was disappointed with the handling of codes and principles. There’s clearly tension around duty, obligation, and betrayal, but the main characters have a non-self-aware inconsistency in their application of those principles that it’s hard to take the transformation at the end seriously.

The editing in the action sequences is stunning, rapidly stiching together multiple parallel sequences of simultaneous action. Best exemplified by the onset and conclusion of multiple gun fights in the time it takes a body to fall from a roof.

I hadn’t been to a theater in 14 months. Exiting the Roxie was such a time warp that I was halfway home before I realized I was walking to the apartment I’d moved out of a year ago.

As for the movie, it was exciting seeing the likely inspiration for Spike Lee’s double dolly shot.

A reimagining of Blood Simple.

The closing shot captures my problems with this. Adherence to individual shots and scenes, but deviating in so much of the connective tissue that it’s lost all thematic coherence.

A startling stylistic leap from Heroes Shed No Tears. I expected to see a more gradual discovery of style.

Watched for a horror film club. “Complete” cut.

I’d heard a fair amount about the critique of consumerism in the film, but that didn’t really land. Instead, especially after the intervening 40+ years of disaster and post-apocalyptic media, I saw a lot in here about the seductive narrative of the apocalypse. The group is never really happier than when they’re striving for their basic needs. Never unhappier than when those needs are met and the hard work of living resumes.

Watched on what would have been Akerman’s 71st birthday. I’d read so much about it in reference to Jenni Olson’s work, but found it significantly different, especially in the portrayal of motion. Basically every shot in the subway was breathtaking.

Watched for a film club

Follow up to The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On

Interesting in its contrast to the 1959 version. The more subjective camera here ends up lessening the impact of a number of significant moments, such as the strafing scene.

Tony Rayns described the 1959 version as free of ideology, which is nonsense. Rather, it used an objective, austere, clean image to precisely depict the debasement of humanity in war. This version loses that with its change in visual language.

Watched in 35mm from someone’s personal collection. Shown at the Balboa Theater.

The first movie that scared me in years.

The cinematographer shared some fun details about the film.

Preshow short before The Virgin Suicides.

Rewatched in theaters to better spend some time with it as pure showcase of animation. Glad I saw The Tale of Princess Kaguya first, since the running away scene might have hit a little less hard if I’d seen the same kind of technique (used less powerfully) here.

Obayashi’s didactic approach works well for me, as does his situating of the fiction as a thread through multiple specific moments of history. The blurring of those boundaries, as when an actress’s photo is placed inside a real war memorial, can be discomforting in moments, but I have enough faith in Obayashi’s compassion for these people’s stories to tell them faithfully.

The video quality of the Japan Society stream tanked when trying to compress the play scenes, reminding me of what we’ve lost with today’s streaming technology.

Didn’t finish. I tried three times, but I couldn’t get through it. Whatever poignancy exists at the end, which I’ve read plenty about, couldn’t motivate me enough to plod through the early-2000s-internet-esque mean spirited & non sequitur laden humor that’s layered on top of everything.

Watched as part of a horror film club

Could have done without Carax’s segment. Rewatched Gondry’s segment multiple times because it was that good.

あたしがあたしの好きな事をやって自分の存在を定義できるじゃないの？

I actually loved Hiroko’s stance on ambition vs hobby, and the ending reads as a different kind of tragedy to me than what was intended.

Rewatched as part of a film club.

Kind of fortuitous to watch it so soon after Seven Weeks, given both films’ fixation on the manifestation of connections betwen people, and the power of personal histories embedded in used books.

Watched as part of a horror film club

Watched as a companion to Jordan Schonig’s lectures on new media theory.

Freshman year of high school, a friend showed me a video he’d downloaded of a man being beheaded. The audio was distorted. The visuals small and muddy. I wouldn’t say I saw anything, but that was certainly a human’s last moments.

Gore captured in that degraded digital aesthetic will probably always register as real to me.

Having characters in your film talk about being fans of the movie you made 3 years ago is a bold move.

The action felt stuck in the past perfect. A tool had been invented. A discovery had been made. A child had been killed. We rarely witness events, instead just seeing their consequences. Presumably there’s something interesting happening just off screen.

I was first introduced to Rikuzentakata in Kamome when NBC aired it during the Olympics. While that story had a great hook, hearing directly from the survivors in this felt far more pressing.

Relatedly, the documentary explores the limits of telling a story on behalf of another, and the way that our retellings (or our recollections) of stories are malleable. The intertwined fiction gestures towards the idea that fiction can accurately convey the emotional truth of a story in a way that conveying a comprehensive factual truth might be infeasible.

An idea I’ve been thinking about for a while is the notion that while we may think of places “in the wide”, our experience of them, by virtue of scale, is wholly dominated by details, and the best avenue for evoking a location is not in a wide shot that captures, say, the whole skyline, but by an assemblage of specific views that in sum capture that place’s essence (potentially without even containing its landmarks).

All that to say, this resonated in a similar way as The Joy of Life.

Works best as a story of an artist summoning a spirit to enact vengeance upon a vicious art world. It never actually tells that story, but one can squint and see it for a brief moment.

Saw it on 35mm. Thought throughout: “this is really blue”. Got home and stumbled upon the hubbub around restoration broadly and the allegedly revisionist coloring of the latest release. I guess they’re wrong?

There’s an noteworthy transmedia trick going on here. This movie is quite light on characterization, possibly due to the assumption that the TV show has already done the work of defining the characters, and the Rebuild movies can just focus on what’s distinct. Similar to the way Marvel movies can avoid introducing characters/stories because the viewer is assumed to already know, or to imbue it with prestige for dedicated fans who seek it out.

On a literal narrative level, this whole series is Kabbalistic word salad and is not really deserving of deep inspection. Where the series is special is its revisions, and how the differences between them help triangulate Anno’s mental and emotional state during their creation. It gives us the opportunity to hold some things constant, to permit a glance into his heart in a way lots of singular pieces of art can’t.

Black Panther had years of revision and redefinition to elevate it out of “a white fantasy of blackness”. Shang-chi as a character is much earlier in that journey out of yellow peril exploitation.

So good I had to watch it a second time. I sometimes get discouraged after watching several middling shorts, wondering if I’ll find something as good as my favorite feature length works. This is does that.

Watched the 2012 Criterion version

How do I watch this movie of Tony and Maggie cooking and dancing?

Woo is haunted by A Better Tomorrow’s Mark. Revived, then referred to as a known fictional character, and now found rolling across a kitchen on a skateboard. Mark is too fun of a character to not see his echoes everywhere.

Watched as part of a film club

Watched the 2021 restoration (with the weird credits) in theater.

All I wanted was to hear California Dreamin’ played at too loud a volume. Too bad it was balanced to be reasonable.

If possible, I pick images for this diary that’re evocative of the movie as a whole. Here, I just really liked the juxtaposition with the Chungking Express frame below, and how it emphasizes the doubling inherent to 2046’s characters.

Watched this on a plane without sound (lost my headphones) and without closed captioning (the option didn’t work). I’d seen it before, so wasn’t worried about not following the plot. As a purely visual spectacle, it was great, and it’s impressive how rarely the film dips into bland shot reverse shot. There’s almost always something of visual interest happening.

The last Hong Kong film of Woo’s. The tracking shot through two floors’ of hallways is perhaps his best action scene so far. It smartly deemphasizes a key moment of friendly fire in the middle, a casualty of the fog of war.

Thematically barren. Not unrelatedly, Woo didn’t write this (nor any of his other US or Canadian films). Late in the film, Henriksen lampshades and asks Van Damme why he meddled since this wasn’t his problem. Good question.

Inspired by having watched a few episodes of Squid Game.

Throughout the pandemic I’d been interested in borrowing from the library the book of the same name by Arthur Dong, but the one copy available was a reference copy only. Glad this popped up on Criterion Channel. There was also some serendipity of this becoming available at the same time as the first volume of The Good Asian, which references the club.

Watched the 2021 4K restoration.

Upsetting and alienating. I didn’t recognize among the principal characters anything that resembled understandable behavior or motivations, in a way that remained enthralling rather than frustrating.

Watched as part of the Halloween edition of horror film club

Watched as part of the Halloween edition of horror film club

Watched as part of the Halloween edition of horror film club

Deserved a far more critical assessment. Isaac Julien’s contribution on the fetishization of black men shouldn’t have been so clearly abridged, and someone really should have said something about the Nazi stuff.

Watched as part of a film club.

Expected to enjoy it more on my second go, when I didn’t have to spend so much time/energy trying to unravel the mystery. Wrong. Without the mystery, everything after the appearance at the house is weak. The scenes before, of a traumatized Adelaide returning the to site of said trauma, is incredible, and I wish that anticipation had been held for more than about 20 minutes.

Not nearly as bad as I expected. That might’ve been because I was less watching the movie, and more watching the space between this and the original. There are some interesting choices (making one of the “siblings” the villain) and some curious (not getting rid of the semi-incestuous romance).

I bought this for $5 since it’s not easy to track down otherwise. It has the saddest bootleg-looking DVD menu I’ve ever seen.

Watched in Cantonese with Chinese subtitles. I understood a bit of dialogue, I could read a little bit more, but mostly I just relied on already knowing the dialogue.

Confusing morals. Perhaps best captured by Shelby’s “they’ll find new ways to screw you because you’re different”? But is that all there is? Both titular entities are ultimately villains. But one holds our heroes hostage so we cheer for them, I guess.

I was excited to see how this depicted violent reactions to status threat, but via a certain reveal at the end, the family’s terrible ritual was shown to be totally rational, deflating much of the critique. That choice also meant the absence of a cathartic triumph.

I thought this was a thriller but it’s actually a comedy about a bunch of shitty New Yorkers just trying to run a railroad.

Full of ellipses. Produces a wonderful rhythm.

Having been involved in Norcal punk/hardcore from the mid-00’s, where stories of what it took to beat up and expel honest-to-god Nazis were still in the air, it was startling the see the volume of swastikas here. And fuck Fear.

Continuing a pattern in Woo’s Hollywood work, the action lives separate from the narrative. It’s only spectacle, filled with the iconography of Woo’s Hong Kong work but little else. A more integrated climactic fight might have spoke to Ambrose as a poor, more impulsive, substitute for Hunt. But instead it’s Hunt who ultimately “gets his gun off” to defeat him. Some nice Bruce Lee homage before that, though.

Cruise does seem to be the best suited actor for Woo that I’ve seen in this stretch.

The whole BMW short series helpfully juxtaposes Woo against contemporary Hollywood filmmakers. This period marks a transition from Intensified Continuity to Chaos Cinema, and Woo’s style is much more continuous and readable. Hostage shares a release year with The Bourne Identity, which is the poster child of this new style.

Contrary to what I wrote about Hostage, there is actually a dash of Chaos Cinema in here. But for that, and several other reasons, it never ends up feeling like a Woo film.

I am a sucker for narratives within narratives, and the role that Uncle Vanya plays in being a space for the characters to work through their issues is magical. Lines and scenes repeated through the film take on new flavor as the circumstances of their performance changes.

Watched as one 5 hour movie.

Thematically right in Woo’s wheelhouse, and it feels good to return to steady ground. The “romance” between Zhuge and Zhou Yu, temporary allies against a foe lacking in principles ties, it to Woo’s Hong Kong work. Having a passing familiarty with the historical event, and the fictional representations, provides the opportunity to see what Woo is adding: melodrama, and men standing far to close to each others’ faces.

Watched as one 5 hour movie.

The CGI is wisely often obscured. Behind rain, glass, poor lighting. Keeping us from getting a good view of the dinosaurs helps them blend into our world so much better, and protects this from looking aged.

I’ve long been a fan of the spomeniks. I do wonder if that familiarity, and association with very human pursuits/events, hinders seeing them as otherworldy, in the way this film wants.

This movie also sufferred badly from compression artifacts on the Metrograph stream.