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.

I love to see a “magician” drop any pretense of magic, and just acknowledge that this is sleight of hand and misdirection and _still_ blow me away.

It’s Jane McAlevey and Eddie Glaude that make the most persuasive arguments here. Putnam is able to observe an effect, an effect that I concede is real and consequential, but is unable to posit a meaningful cause for it. How do you hit a target you can’t name?

I have strong feelings about solidarity, reciprocity, and community. I should be an easy mark for Putnam’s case. I want people to join clubs (mine or otherwise). But the reality is that I regularly talk to people who’re motivated to join but struggle to do so given their work schedule, commute, or other obligations. It isn’t the TV that’s doing it.

Was initially ambivalent upon leaving the theater, but as more time passed, it’s grown on me. There’s one sequence, upon a high peak, where the straight-forwardness of the events is halted, and something truly extraordinary happens. I found myself, in that moment, surprising moved, almost to tears.

As time passes, that moment, and little ones like it, are the ones that have stuck with me. A memory polished by the tumbling of time.

AI hangs over this “restoration”. Made from an inferior replica of the inaccesible (to this restoration’s creators) masters. We already live in a world of weirdly shiny True Lies Ai-aided restorations.

While watching, I thought it was strange that the character of the linework seemed to change from scene to scene, or even shot to shot, in a way that didn’t seem obviously motivated by anything. Having now rewatched scenes of this from their DVD release, it seems clear that these aberrations are AI “confabulations” (“hallucinations”, while the more widely used term, seems inappropriate and imprecise).