Oshii is my favorite nonsense merchant. There’s something endearing about someone smashing together religious and philosophical texts like a child with their action figures. Sometimes beauty emerges from that. Sometimes it doesn’t. I’m never unhappy with the time spent, though.

This one benefits from the sparseness of dialog. Sure we get some Noah’s Ark stuff, but mostly we just get to encounter the images, and feel their tension. It called to mind how classical music and jazz never have to defend their abstractness, but film does, which is a shame. This watches this like a symphony.

It’s a shame the film is so ugly when it doesn’t need to be. Unclearly motivated soft focus everywhere. Tons and tons of medium close-ups, to the point where it isn't always obvious where two characters, who are speaking, are relative to one another (especially egregious is the main confrontation between mother and daughter).

Made me think of better films that touch on what comes after one’s creative peak. Especially Mo Better Blues, which gives us that necessary coda that's mostly lacking here.

A common defense of media is “The depiction of [juvenile or explotative thing] is a critique of [thing]!” and I rarely buy it. Depiction isn’t neutral. The manner of depiction conditions the way the audience receives it. This film can't be critiquing the ‘stunted psychology’ of Denji when at every turn it indulges in it with bare-assed fan service. Based on the manner of depiction, and the fan response to it, it seems clear that the expected audience should not merely empathize with, but be reflected in Denji.

The only repite is when all the characters dissolve into the abstracted images of action.

Ultimately too constrained by its twin genre conventions (the AIDS film and the coming of age film) to do much of interest. Its one feature that I really appreciated was that the character who ultimately succumbs to AIDS was allowed to be a full person (necessarily so due to being a historical figure). He’s selfish and thorny and flawed in ways that so many fictional characters in similar circumstances aren’t permitted to be.

Third movie of the Roxie’s “Graveyard Shift” marathon.

The film I’d been waiting for all night. I’d heard about its metatextual qualities and was primed and ready. When the film opened in French, with no subtitles, I assumed that was part of it. It wasn’t for 5-10 minutes before the film was stopped, and the maestro of the evening apologized for the mixup, in French, and assured us they were working on it. After one more false start, they gave up, and welcomed us to sit back and enjoy Wes Craven’s Nouveau Nightmare. Alas, on the third go, it was in English.

Fun movie, but not as fun as those first 15 minutes.

The second film of the Roxie’s “Graveyard Shift” marathon.

The crassness and vulgarity of it was made more palatable by seeing it in a group setting, with many who were well aware of it. Being able to share in our repulsion at various moments made dealing with those moments easier, where watching it alone would produce a far more sleazy sensation.

The first film of the Roxie’s “Graveyard Shift” all night programming.

Not without its problems, but struck me as deeply optimistic. By coincidence I went into the movie with legacy and lineage, who we choose as our ancestors, on my mind.

Sure, there’s the literal choice of ancestry that Willa but there are the revolutionary lineages here, too. Bob watching Battle of Algiers. The sensei glowing about helping a member of the French 75, clearly feeling an inheritance. And in the end, to Petty’s American Girl, the sense that Willa was following in those steps. I too feel an indebtedness and a connectedness to a history of revolution.

Love the visual distinction between reality (on VHS) and memory (shot on film). As Iseya says, our memories aren’t necessarily truth. In my estimation, they are always better than truth, as shown here.

Also something adorable about the scrappiness of production. Here’s the plane we have. Can we make this work?

I adore this movie. My third viewing I believe.

What I noticed this time around was the inaccessibility of the characters. So many shots with one of the girls, whoever might have been speaking, facing away from the camera. They’re all struggling with figuring out how to communicate, to eachother, to themselves, and this has a distinct visual echo. We don’t even get to see their faces when they do try to say something.

And then the camera lingers in the room, now silent, with all those things the characters can’t yet say.

A movie I’ve thought about for a month since watching it.

Too many thoughts to fit in this small space. This was infamous, in my TIFF group and beyond, for the pitch of “a 3-hour movie shot on a flip phone”. Both of those facts became essential to one another.

The duration is necessary to stop seeing the flip-phone-ness, and to relearn our visual comprehension of film. It took me 1h30m before it clicked. And then that last half of the film was rapturous.

At the first POV switch, I was hooked. At the second, I became worried.

Feels overly interested in creating mirrored moments, even if that mirroring (e.g. the personal conflicts our proteagonists encounter) doesn’t seem to add anything to the whole. It’s all very elaborately designed and structured, but toward what?

Here immediately comes to mind as a superior film about people and plants, and the gift of close attention.