2025

Takes on new resonance in 2025. The mechanical turk aspect of AI entertainment and performance is eerie. And though we lacked the public language for it at the time, the idea of the system training off of a human's emotions, and claiming them in order to usurp the experiences is the AI-antagonistic balm I need to combat the AI-sympathetic impulse in Deus Ex or Blade Runner.

Where this succeeds on that front is in locating the conflict in labor, rather than in identity and freedom.

I can understand deriving a vicarious pleasure from watching young women behave badly, and largely without consequence. It mostly felt like empty provocations, though, similar in many ways to the punk music I listened to as a teen. There’s no doubt about the abundance of sincerity and fury at the heart of the work. But when listening to those albums now, I can hear the facile conception of rebellion and liberation. Their righteousness is betrayed by a politics that’s not up to the task of meaningfully describing the cultural hegemony we need to overturn.

I do love the visible formal play on display

I managed to clock this as San Francisco within two minutes, which is wild.

There’s a writer whose name I can’t recall, through whom I learned this basket theory of writing. A benefit of writing is that as you have the various experiences of everyday life, your writing project gives you a basket to place certain encounters that resonate with said project.

Here, seeing a review echoed with thoughts I was processing about Nickel Boys as well as a passage from To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die, all about recognizing the art and beauty in our regular lives.

An improbable companion of Macross: DYRL! Both films are painfully humanist and reverent of the quotidian. In this case: the general and steadfast solidarity amongst average people. “This home will always be yours”. “I want to share the places that’re meaningful to me”. I left the theater longing for a way to express and receive such a public love.

It was a treat in so many other ways. The perplexing visuals of the Grey and Beige Districts. The cutting in the Ontario office. The humor that suffuses every moment. This was near the top of my list of movies at TIFF, had I attended.

Not what I was expecting to find in my mecha war movie: a paean to the power of the average love song. Perhaps the show makes the war feel more like war, but I think its reduction is beneficial. It allows the war to operate more on the level of parable. The male and female warring factions forgetting the pleasure of love as the basis for war? Sounds like a joke if played wholly straight.

This also has some lovely sequences, especially when Minmay and Hikaru are speaking at the end, silent lasers and destruction throwing them into silhouette.

When I watched Hale County…, I felt a lack of material to grab onto. That I was engaged observationally, but not enough emotionally. I needed a narrative within which to situate all of these affecting images and sequences.

Nickel Boys is that! It’s inaccurate to describe the experience as delightful, but there were so many cinematographic moments that made me grin, that carried with them not only their inherent impact, but also carried narrative weight.

Upon returning home, I put Hale County… on and within minutes saw precursors to the boxcar scene that took my breath away.

As a kid, I had friends who loved building Gundam models. I even bought a tiny one for myself to try to understand the appeal. It didn't stick. One of those friends still builds them, and the sets have only grown larger and more elaborate.

At no point during our friendship have I ever heard him talk about the anime. This was the era of Gundam Wing. Maybe that series was more appealing to kids, but this one is a pretty harrowing account of the hardening of child soldiers abandoned by superiors for reasons that are perhaps explained later, in the face of rising space fascism. I doubt this one would be able to move a bunch of fun cool mech toys.

Watched on a rainy night, in an attempt to quell my own fears about the water seeping through the ceiling and wall in my bedroom. Confronting it directly, in the controlled setting of a movie.

It turns out that this is more about absent parents than water damage and mold, so it didn’t have the effect I’d hoped.

Saw the two channel version in a museum.

The two standout pieces in the exhibit both decentered the ball in a televisual presentation of an event (the other was tennis). It’s remarkable how little needs to be done to render a very familiar event/activity alien.

In a museum context, visitors enter and exit throughout the runtime. I was early enough that I caught the beginning, but none of the opening credits. As a result, when Zidane’s reminiscience appears on screen, and the Mogwai soundtrack started, I was shocked. The piece had transformed into something more intentionally crafted, rather than merely observational, and I voewed to return an watch the whole thing in full (which is this entry) when I had more time.

Has so many individual ingredients that I find palatable, but they don’t wanage to come together for me as well as I’d hoped. The Yuki/Yoko sequence is delightful, and the way the seemingly disconnected coffee shop couple plugs into it at the end was a jolt out of the flow I’d been in, a secret hidden in plain sight, like when walking through an unfamiliar place only to cross the street and realize you live around the corner.

I have to respect a movie that commits the first 20-30 minutes to its characters speaking to nobody except a feral cat sitting outside their apartment. The rehearsed pleas of a tissue advertiser don’t count as connection.

Caught this broadcast on tv, and despite this being my likely fourth viewing, this was the first one where I noticed the aspect ratio changes.

As a kid seeing it in the theater, I probably wouldn’t have had the language to explain what was happening, and so probably wouldn’t have clocked it. These days, I do, and have shamelessly complained.

The DVD (and the Netflix version) don’t do this, instead staying at 1.85:1. Thank you PBS!

Steps dangerously close to the precipice of miserabilism, but never topples, all successfully in service of an ending of genuine hope for redemption and second chances.

Even so, it’s not clear to me that I got anything out of this.

After the bath scene, I had to step outside the threater for a deep breath and a cup of water, and found I wasn’t the only one who felt the same. I suppose there’s something nice in those communal physical responses.

Like a goofier antecedent of Hit Man. The romance is less convincing, and the actual assassin stuff is far lighter and milder, but the consistent goofy tone assures that I can just sit back and relax, something that Hit Man’s darker tone made (productively) troubling.

Perhaps I’m just too old, but there isn’t a lot to find in a story of kids overcoming insignificant problems. The dilemma of telling our family what we want is so broad, so general, that it doesn’t penetrate very far in the psyche. I always compare these to Linda Linda Linda, and beyond the careful and emotionally precise rendering of teenage relationships, locates something universal in Son’s specific challenge of coming to terms with herself, and making friends, in a foreign world through the music. Here: I get nothing.

Doesn’t reveal what it’s doing until relatively late, and that reframing grants so much more substance to beats that initially felt slight. All of the wonderful, and to borrow a phrase from an earlier capsule, “prickly” bits are undermined by an overwrought emphasis on pain and death.

It’s not that those things shouldn’t be included, but holding on the pained, immobilized expression of a bed-ridden woman before death feels cheap in ways that the rest of the movie doesn’t.

Unclear how this got on my list. Perhaps some Swing Girls connection?

I’m stuck on how prickly it remains, particularly in its ending. Its implicating of the film audience, just as it does the Albert Hall audience. We sit, in rapt attention, expecting a fairytale triumph of these plucky miners. The flattery of Disney-esque narratives and endings. But real life doesn’t abide by the hero’s journey. And our miners will be, even contemporaneous to the release, some combination of displaced and dead. Out of a job, deprived of the wealth it produced, and irreparably injured by it.

Feels like Kwaidan 2 for a while.

Couldn’t help be see a parallel with Megalopolis, especially with Dreams’ final tale, master filmmakers putting forward a please to the world about how we could be, and how we move forward. Of the visions proferred, I prefer Kurosawa’s.

Seeing Martin Scorcese (as Van Gogh!) and Chishu Ryu make appearances hammers it home further. Ryu did get to live to a “ripe old age”, as the then-young Scorcese will hopefully be fortunate enough to get. 103 years old. “A good age to stop living”.

Its often unpredictable visuals meant that, even though the conclusion of the final race was foregone, I still held my breath during those last few minutes.

What’s most remarkable about this is how abachronistic its earnestness is. 2008 would put us squarely in a period of debilitating irnoy poisoning. To be too sincere was weakness. Today is different. And sitting in a sold-out second screening of this movie, I could see that the atmosphere of earnestness we find ourselves in our current moment prepares us to be better recipients of this movie’s gifts.

Was I ever going to be able to judge this fairly? I’m excited that the Every Frame A Painting folks have been able to progress beyond their video essay past. So many on YouTube view themselves as filmmakers, temporarily making this other kind of thing, while the slower turning gears of film projects turn. Congratulations to them for doing it.

Operates too much in the realm of unnerving vibes. There isn’t anything here that’s tangible for me to grasp onto, upon which the unsettling moments can be fixed.