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.