2026

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.

The previews before the film had me worried, as it was all very, cutesty, children’s movies. But the film proved to be, not not a children’s movie, but a remarkably respectful one.

The film dedicates meaningful time to some heavy topics, but considers its (child) audience capable of, for example, dealing with death, and why remembering pain is useful.

There’s also a couple bits of Police Squad style humor, like the visual gag about steep discounts for local businesses.

This movie, recommended by my ESL student, took me down fascinating path of discovering the Ogigami Naoko industry. So many shared actors! All very similar vibes!

Despite the factory-like churning out of these, there is something interesting and prickly here, a feeling shared by my student. The mother character is just not a stereotypical Japanese woman, and my student sees something of a reflection there, if only in part. The liberatory feelings of encountering a sympathetic unconventional Japanese mother on screen.

I watched this with a 8-year-old, who cited it as her favorite movie. This does seem like the kind of movie that would be a 8-year-old’s favorite.

It’s a slog of cameos, so many of them which elicited whoops from the 8-year-old and her 5-year-old brother. This is the method of pleasure that the film seems to believe in. Beyond that, there isn’t too much on offer.

Wild movie. I was familiar with the iconography of Jin-Roh and this whole movie was a swerve.

Oshii remains my favorite bullshit merchant, but this movie trades in a kind of bullshit than I’m familiar with. I don’t think this works, but there’s so much weird wonderful stuff going on here that I can’t help but adore it.

This took me forever to finish. I started watching it before seeing The Secret Agent, and it provided a lot of additional color to that film. But had I gotten further in, I would’ve seen the real Mr Alexandre, as well as the blood bank. Missed opportunity there.

Really fell off fast, which is a shame. It even repeats a number of jokes from the prior entry.

Probably the best screen adaptation of a stage musical I’ve seen thus far. The dual nature of stage performance and “realistic” drama allows this to deliver many of the pleasures of stage performances while still taking advantage of the more elaborate staging/sets of a film.

Particular highs: the difference in audio quality within a single song when it switches between the stage-world and the real-world. All the excellent usage of mirrors and practical effects in the stage-world.

Can clearly see the way Satan Met A Lady learned lessons from this. The book was already pretty amusing, but this exaggerates so many of the character moments (especially between our engrossing duo of protagonists), at the expense of the mystery. And it’s a good trade! Could’ve actually dropped more, since this pads the start of the film with events that precede Nick and Nora arriving in town.

Some of the line deliveries in this are genuinely hilarious, an almost pre-cursor to the ZAZ humor of Airplane! and Police Squad!.

Days after visiting the Tower Of The Sun, we came across a gacha machine selling “Taroman” figures. We didn’t comprehend it, but bought some right away.

This is a TV show from 2022 pretending to be a rebroadcast from 1987, complete with nostalgic interviews, never-existed product placement and commercials, and even a return of a child actor as an old man (wearing the exact same sweater). Incredible artifact.

I just don’t understand the appeal of this. Maybe you had to be there when it came out. But where reading the original book in 2026 is still remarkable for its dialogue and structure, this adaptation seems merely fine today.

Doesn’t quite hit the kinetic highs of Ongaku, but something that we get instead is a remarkable camera. Slightly baffling, off-kilter compositions as the camera sits under or behind or within(?) our subjects.

There’s a consistent reluctance to show us the races themselves, which is a lovely touch. often anchored to the floor, pointed at the sky, we instead have to settle for the fading pounding of feet on the track, and the inevitable roar as someone, unclear as of yet, crosses the finish line.

Hell yeah! A movie with a volatile reverence for its material. Effie’s “Be koind tah meee” as a mocking refrain, both of another character in the book/film, but also the book’s prose itself. And yet, despite all the jabs at the book, diligently follows the beats of the book.

I’m surprised by the negative sentiment toward the movie, and suspect it’s largely due to having one’s mind clouded by the stature of the later 1941 adaptation, which is frankly a bore.

As I walk out of the packed theater, “What the fuck was that?”

There’s something about Oscar nominations that makes people gravitate toward a film, and this one is utterly uninterested in making the viewing experience conventional, and I loved it. So many obstructed shots implying a very specific perspective. Visual ellipses of time (like the running in circles around the home).

A movie to be felt first, rather than comprehended.

Something that animation can pull off is to depict the alien in a truly alien fashion. Here, the art style and colors of the alien beings is wholly different from the humans. They belong in distinct visual worlds.

Shame that nothing else about the movie was really that compelling.

This was made so much stronger for having watched Pictures of Ghosts, which I only ever actually finished after I seeing this.

Saw this described somewhere as DLC for the previous film, and it fits. So structurally similar to the prior entry that it’s hard to distinguish what little I remember about the two movies. All mixed together in a slurry, with only the Ash tribe standing out on top as an interesting idea.

Was shocked, at the start, when I learned that that character I only kind of recognized was dead, and that I was supposed to remember what happened. Oops.