2024

Watched for the first time in theaters!

I was so excited about the possibility of a new HD transfer. Or revised subtitles. No. This had the same VCD-level video and subtitle quality I’d seen before, streatched across the full silver screen.

That still couldn’t spoil seeing one of my favorite movies in a crowd of people seemingly seeing it for the first time.

Seeing light fare with an enthusiastic crowd is frequently preferable to home viewing. When one of the turtles shouts “Dudes and dudeettes, major league buttkicking is back in town!”, multiple audience members stood and whooped. I was among the ones shouting out line.

I’d never seen this before, but I’ve known this line for about 20 years, as the opening seconds to DC hardcore band Affront’s album People Who Live In Glass Houses. There are several such samples of dialogue lodged in my brain from late 90s and early 00s songs, that when I finally encounter the source material I feel the arrow of time loop back and strike itself in the nock.

On a prior rewatch, I appreciated the deteriorating TV images, and the tension of things going wrong, but for uncertain causes. This time after seeing Threads, an unfair comparison, I long for a version that stews in that uncertain and fearful limbo for longer.

Still unnervingly dreamy on rewatch five years later.

I’d forgotten how much of the film takes place after the disappearance. It’s those moments and images that linger in the mind once the screen fades, but the film makes us sit with their loss for so much longer before releasing us.

Given the time handed over to action, I would have appreciated more action. And it’s also hard to get excited about a shitty copy who flouts the rules.

What was remarkable was the extent to which they allowed Jimmy Wang Yu to be sexually desirable and sleep with two white women. The script even winks about it, when one of them asks if he’s even sleptwith a white woman, and he says “only Tuesdays and Thursdays”.

The tension constantly ratchets up, with each new scene of a slight decay in peace and order in Sheffield. 40 minutes in, anxious and sweaty palmed, I reached for my phone and it squirted out from my grasp, shattering the screen. This unfortunately took my out of the moment, and it took a fair amount of time to once again fall under Threads’s spell.

What makes the first half so effective is that we’re absorbing so much of the war narrative through background diagetic broadcasts, which in at least one case get interrupted because it’s too much of a bummer for the characters!

There’s a “leopards eating people’s faces” angle to this that I like. A village that survives on the vehicular murder and pillage of strangers empowers an especially violent subset that ultimately destroys that same society and their veneer of alleged civility.

Walking home, I couldn’t help but imagine Keenan Ivory Wayan’s mailman character popping in every few minutes to pronounce “MESSAGE!”

I think of The Living End, a movie about two HIV positive gay men on a furious, hedonistic, and doomed roadtrip. There’s more joy, and more honest pain, in that film. It’s not saddled with a self-assumed responsibility to teach, or inspire, or represent.

While this has some incredible images peppering the film, the ones that linger in the mind are the ham-fisted proclamations, loudly shouting messages.

Gross in its gaze. But I relate.

On my first trip to Japan, I was awestruck by everything I saw, and filled up the card on my tiny point-and-shoot digital camera. Years later, after studying, living, and working there, I returned to those images that captured my imagination as a teen: “Kyoto station this way”, one read, in Japanese.

Marker gawks at people, beans, and other pedestrian things in a Ginza department store food court, without evidence of a desire to comprehend.

Dance was made for match cuts.

I’m reminded of the expression of “affectionate proximity” in an essay within Capitalism and the Camera. While the home movies aren’t necessarily any more truthful than those made by outsiders, they grant subjecthood to the former objects of discussion. They’re valuable, if only for that.

I wrote my first (and ideally, only) Letterboxd review about this viewing. I felt compelled to memorialize it as my favorite on the platform, and it gave me an opportunity to put more words to it than fit in this little side capsule.

Watched the Final Cut in theaters.

Has some of the most impressive night footage I’ve ever seen.

Unfairly marred now by the flourishes it pioneered having been ground down into obnoxious trope over the last 45 years. It’s a marvel that such a contemplative, slow, dreary, and dreamy film has had such a presence in the air of American media.

Fewer jokes than I’d hoped, but the one about the second verse of America’s sutras is among the best I’ve heard in a long while.

I found it to have a similar issue as Robocop, where the movie wants to indulge in genre excess, but also castigate the audience for enjoying it, which is tiring.

When at the symphony, I sometimes struggle to calm my mind, or give myself something to visually focus on. Here, Weir decorates the music with images, distracting me just enough to counter-intuitively highlight Meale’s composition.

Encountered uncomfortable echoes while watching, 52 years ago, Australian police destroy encampments of protestors. Halfway through the movie, I paused it, got in my car, drove to the nearest student encampment in solidarity with Palestine, and helped them build a barricade to offer some temporary protection from the dozens of police amassed around them.

Watched in a park in honor of “Star Wars Day”, May 4th, but due to bad rain on the day of, was observed on May 11th.

Sure, there’s a very deep debt to Scott Pilgrim here, but still it’s always fun to see films that take advantage of our learned comprehension of continuity editing to construct impossible sequences.

Watched on a plane to (darkest???) Peru

I misread the listing, and didn’t understand that the pre-show House of 1000 Corpses themed drag show would end at the listed screening time, not start at it, so I caught only the last act.

I love learning the “original” titles of pieces of art, and their implications. Here, I only learned the expression “人在江湖，身不由己” after watching, making the title 人在紐約 far more laden with meaning, and priming the viewer into an immediately somber posture that the English one doesn’t at all.

Watched at San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s “Amazing Tales From The Archives”

Given the history and racial narrative of Madame Butterfly, seeing this early example of a revisionist take emerging out of a specific Japanese-American identity and lens was fascinating, even if the film itself was just fine.

Watched at San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s “Amazing Tales From The Archives”

Watched at San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s “Amazing Tales From The Archives”

Watched in preparation for seeing the 2024 North American solar eclipse in Texas. I’d seen my first eclipse in 2017, the same event documented here, though in a very different (but similarly middle-of-nowhere) locale.

Watched with my friend and his 3-year-old, who was given unprompted permission to get himself a rare popsicle treat just in time to miss the villain crumbling to dust.

I sought out works made in Trinidad after having gone for Carnaval. Having on-the-ground familiarity with the place helped imbue the images and sounds, such as the creaking of the bamboo arches, with a specificity that the film doesn’t attempt on its own. It doesn’t seek to use the language of a presumed outsider, giving me both the experience of recognition for those things that were mildly familiar, and the sense of the alien from those that weren’t.

All respect to the likely progenitor of its genre, but it’s a little too light. I know the characters more by what instrument they play than any identifying characteristic, and the final performance doesn’t carry emotional weight the way that Linda Linda Linda does.

Speaking of Linda Linda Linda, that film successfully uses the premise of the end of year festival to tell a story about relationships. This one is just about the music and the performance. Which is fun! The running “and a boy” gag is great. But after this wrapped, I rewatched the last ~10 minutes of Linda Linda Linda and teared up a little. This has no comparable moments.

Shoutout to the fansubber for translating the Japanese haiku well, while also maintaining an English, syllable-based, haiku structure.

Screened for a couple friends who’d only seen Chan’s American work. Doing an important cinematic service.

Because I was watching with friends who’d never seen it, was particularly attuned to length and pace, and there’s just so much that gets neatly packed into 100 minutes. I kept thinking “surely they must be heading to the mall now”, but no, yet another excellent setpiece first.

Piles of spectacle. And some of it, namely the first worm ride, left my palms sweaty and my jaw sore from clenching.

But at some point, the inertia of prophecy overwhelms all else narratively, with individual character motives giving way to obligation in a parade of preordained moments. If the characters don’t seem to care, should I?

Worse of all, this sensation ends up echoing the experience of watching an abbreviated adaptation rush to check off the remaining major plot points of its source.

“I’ve been warning against the implications of the phrase “feeling seen,” because it presumes a passive and unidirectional relationship between viewer. What does it mean to give away your agency to a constructed piece of art?

If we place agency (and interpretation) in the hands of viewers, then the object can be criticized and we can STILL have our pleasurable and liberatory experience of it”

—Racquel Gates

Like Jenny Odell noted in How To Do Nothing, the careful observation required for a deep relationship with a place demands regularity and routine. Hirayama greets the day, the park, the toilets, in such a way that routine provides the foundation for beautiful serendipities.

I don’t know what to do with the hints of a sadness in his life, other than acknowledge it as real. The stories collected by the angels in Wings Of Desire likewise mingle the bouyant and the somber.

“Monotonous” is often considered a synonym of “boring”, but that misses something more precise. This movie felt consistently in the same register. Whatever loveliness there was at that pitch, I would have enjoyed greater dynamics. Dynamics I was teased with when Chin hangs out with her sister and friends. But once that sequence ends, we return to that same groove, and it didn’t work for me.

The kind of rewatch where a vague cloud of childhood recognition is solidified into something a lot less magical. I’d watched this at some point with my father, and never forgotten about it, while remembering none of the specifics of the experience.

Still delightful today!

As an atheist, I care deeply about the depiction of faith in media. It’s a sensation I can no longer tap into; except perhaps in film. Montage and the subjectivity of the camera permit contradictory realities to coexist in a linear space, begging the audience to engage in “faith” as a verb.

Mami Wata could have done that, and for much of its runtime it did. But its final third chooses concreteness and certitude in a way that undermines any consideration of Mami Wata (the being) along the dimension of faith, perhaps in service of it’s more immediate fairytale objectives.

I keep returning in my mind to Gloria’s speech, lauded by many as “empowering” and “relatable”. It describes, rather than evokes, and even then its aim isn’t lofty.

I think about Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a far cry from the fun of Barbie, and how it provokes in the audience the sensation of the impossibility of being a woman (or girl) in America, and also about the ways in which that impossibility derives not just from the perceptions and pressures of others, but from the systems installed by those others to subjugate them.

Watched on a plane from what looked like a fullscreen VHS rip, and it’s still elementally perfect. Besides Julia Roberts’ non-character.

This version reaffirmed my grievances with the visuals of The Wiz. This one has moving cameras! And frames people effectively! It looks consistently good! (where The Wiz has high highs and low lows)

That said, this retroactively made me appreciate The Wiz more. Except for the brief poetry of “conferrin’ with the flowers, consultin’ with the rain”, the songs here aren’t very good, especially not The Wiz levels of good. And I think the narrative of having always had, inside oneself, that which they seek, so much stronger than the wizard’s weird accolades. And he gets off way too easy here.

Watched in anticipation of the 2024 musical revival. Also complicating this viewing is that this is my first complete exposure to the Oz story, having never seen the original film nor read the book.

The music is fantastic, and MJ has incredible comedic timing, but I was frequently confused by some of the visual choices. The camera is remarkably static. We see lots of characters’ backs. And we’re often far from the action, depriving us of the details of costumes and performance.

Remarkable to watch this and see, effectively, a rough draft of the beginning of Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell.

Watched the “Minus Color” version. Was initially disappointed about this, based on what I’d heard about the Parasite re-grade. But now having seen it, I can’t imagine having watched it (for the first time) in color.

One stellar scene: the ash rain

Rewatched this since The Killer left me desiring an assassin palate cleanser.

Rewatched in theaters in 3D.

This affected me less than last time, and I now may prefer Kaili Blues to this. But that could just be that that was the most recent first viewing of a Bi Gan film.

At it’s best when it’s revealing the foolishness of the protagonists’ grindset via the conversation with Tilda Swinton. Everything else is fine? Ultimately just wanted me to watch other, better, assassin-botched-their-last-job-and-now-on-dealing-with-consequences movies.

Struggles with its two inharmonious stories: a cop’s rediscovery of his humanity and identity in pursuit of revenge, and a satire about corporate ruthlessness and pillaging. The one common thread they have: that policing as-is in 1987 is ok, or even good.

The first story requires the audience to participate in the sensual pleasures of vigilantism. The second story is great, but the conclusion of the first limits its swing.

“No better way to steal money than free enterprise”

“The Final Cut” version, watched on archival 35mm

I liked this movie the first time I saw it in 2015. I felt similarly on a rewatch in 2017. Since 2017, my movie watching habits, and interests, and aptitudes, have changed considerably. Watching it in 2024 felt like really watching it for the first time, and I loved it. And when the elevator doors slammed shut on me, for the third time, I was left a little breathless in a way I’d never felt before.

What a lovely ending scene!

These kids are the same age as me. That is, in the depicted year of 1999, I was just a year younger than the characters. There’s just something about that alignment that startles.

Compared to the internet aided search for guidance in Never Rarely Sometimes Always, this “my godsister” conduit for knowledge matches my memory. Of cousins, or friends’ older siblings. All while on the cusp of a burgeoning connectedness with cell phones.

Longer than necessary, and I’m not sure how essential the documentary framing is.

The depiction of faith and the divine in media is a minor obsession of mine. Something that can frustrate me about works that try is when characters understand the operation of this other world too much. I felt myself sliding down this path, as Nim seemed to have all the answers in a way that made the sacred mundane. The turning point is the ceremony at the tree, where we realize she actually is struggling to make sense of it just like we are.

I guess I love clowning? There’s a lot of space between the laughs, but I loved all of the stupid gags, as well as the anticipation of the gags (like the shark).

Ringing in the New Year by watching this, newly released into the public domain, on Wikipedia.

Animal abuse aside, it’s remarkable how so many principles of animation were already well understood almost 100 years ago. Those squishy whistles!