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.