2025

There are a couple images from this that have reached me through their cultural virality. What didn’t reach me was just how burdened this is with all that plotting.

Hell yeah! I've recently watched a number of videos by or about Christine Sun Kim, all as build up to this. Imagine my delight when she herself appears on screen signing poetry!

There are so many venues for artistic expression in spaces, formats, etc that we overlook. Give me more of this. I'm reminded of this piece in Another Gaze that points in a similar direction.

I didn’t know going in that this was about enjo-kousai. Yeesh.

There's a lot to enjoy, but this was ultimately just a really bad time at the theater. Made worse by the behavior of the audience. To the man moaning during the first sexual assault in the video store: your moans straddle an uncomfortable line between pleasure and disgust, and nobody needs to hear that shit. The unpleasantness on screen doesn't productively color any of the relationships depicted on screen, unlike say Smooth Talk.

Like Starr Farm, I struggled to connect to this. I have no a priori affection or interest in this New England suburban milieu. The heavily featured radio that evokes no nostalgia. The cast (minus Franny) isn’t characterized in any particular way beyond to develop attachment.

I think about The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, another baseball movie about the ends of things, and how it succeeds because I care about these characters, and that the ending the characters face (not wholly welcome nor unwelcome, like this one’s) points to a larger American dilemma. Here, a school versus a field feels like small beans.

Struggles once it’s time to dump a ton of exposition, but Obayashi’s visuals to represent time travel are lovely, especially the stop-motion photography of the clock traveling around town.

Justice for Argylle.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still bad. But this feels like a film punished for the excesses of its advertising campaign. The kind of bad movie that I wouldn’t mind seeing more of.

The movie’s biggest textual sin, if anything, is showing us a dopey spy drama starring Henry Cavill and John Cena. I’d genuinely watch a parody spy thriller with these guys playing caricatures of themselves. Far more interesting that the plot machinations this pulled out.

This screening was programmed by the Bay Area Chinese Culture Salon, and they always pack the house. Watching in an audience of (I suspect) primarily young Chinese ex-pats meant I, the tourist to many of the symbols the film traded in, was guided by the audience’s reactions. Two shots stand out in particular. The first, with the bulletin about the rumor spreaders, elicited sad sighs before applause, prompted by a doctor’s photo. The second, applause at a memorial for a burned apartment building. Those reactions signaled to me in ways subtitles never could that “these images are important”.

Is 90% of the way to a classic, but that missing 10% is all the tension needed to sustain everything. Paranoia Agent comes to mind as a successor that delivers successfully in a similar register.

The premise of the mysterious suicide is so ripe! But it gets resolved so early, and so cleanly, with off-screen investigation and weird biblical references, and very lightweight critique about re-development in the bubble era? I don’t know. This premise deserves a second swing.

Has the most compelling first 5 or 10 minutes I can recall. The cutting, the dramatic and non-sensical lighting as our villains enter the venue, and the gorgeous draping of light of Diane Lane and her band. So thick is the spell that when I see Lane outside of the spotlight, I’m startled by the recognition that she still looks like a kid, a far cry from the figure we see up on stage.

The rest of the movie, outside of the bookending performances, and the interesting shot-on-video music video in the middle are just ok. But that start is propulsive.

While the setting and context are explicitly juvenile, the arcs and emotions of these characters are anything but. It’s a remarkable feat that a teary-eyed game of human-whack-a-mole can be so resonant, the key manifestation of their immaturity being their inability to verbally express their feelings, and their flailing physical expressions to compensate.

Sugimura stands out among the four protagonists. Self-aware that she’s a consolation prize for the crush, but still being an attentive and beneficial companion in Yusuke’s life.

One always wants to find redemption for maligned art. Misunderstood masterpieces! Works ahead of their time!

In many ways, this was ahead of its time, in that we simply didn’t have the means in 1984 to render the spectacle of this story if attempting anything like a straight adaptation. Without abandoning that posture, this could never succeed. And in most ways, this film is more faithful than the more recent adaptation. And so it must fail.

It’s often interesting to look at! An it takes premonition more seriously than Villeneuve’s. But yeesh.

proto-Universal Language

4chan the animated series. Formally interesting, but the particularities of the selections, from niche videogames to weird hentai to pictures of Dylann fucking Roof puts me uncomfortably close to the dregs of an internet I’m all too familiar with.

A supreme nothing of a film. Cruise at his most characterized when pretending to be an off-putting and over-observant Virginia Department of Transportation worker. After that, what? He chases a nothing weapon, pursued by a nothing villian, controlled by a nothing mastermind. He steals the nothing weapon from the highly guarded tower holding it, and we don’t even get to watch it happen.

There’s a cool running scene, though. And the moment when Cruise dies and his wife needs to take over and kill a bunch of terrorists is genuinelly thrilling; the only instance of real danger we ever believe.

Went with comrades, which made the experience more fruitful.

In the end, what is the use of seeing works like this? If I am already engaged in activism, in rallies, in the opposition to the occupation that I can manage here. What does bearing further witness do, exactly?

I found Foragers more useful in that it taught me something new, and drew useful parallels to Native American land rights and food sovereignty. I’m afraid that so many will be content to consider their viewing of this now-Oscar-winning film as activism-in-itself. As part of a just media diet. And then call it a day.

The appearance of a Streets of Fire marquee, and re-animated scene, in the opening is an incredible marker of time, and reminds me of this Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young music video on youtube filled with 50-year-old Japanese dudes reminscing about how great it was to be young and how hot Diane Lane is.

This OVA is pretty bad on a lot of fundamental levels (pacing, dialogue, exposition), but I can’t stop thinking about it. A fascinating piece of historical junk. Filled to the brim with ideas it can’t really deliver on. Impossibly nostalgic for the time of its own creation.

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, then later claiming them in order to usurp the experiences is the AI-antagonistic balm I need to combat the AI-sympathetic impulse in Ex Machina 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 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 sensuous 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 in later films) 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.