Quantity continues to decline, but quality never does.

And there you have it, another year just about over. Time continues to have very little sway over the rhythm of my life. Well, except for the general absence of it for movie watching. This is year eleven around here and I watched... checks notes... a grand total of fifteen films. But, as I said last year, some films is still infinitely more than no films. So it goes.

This was a year of two halves for me. Professionally things got very dicey in the middle of the year, but luckily are now fully recovered. That meant even less time for these films, but I had a nice bump at the end of the year to somewhat make up for it. I’m in this for the long haul; this isn’t so much a destination as it is a journey after all.

On a personal level my kids continue to grow and amaze me. They are the coolest people I know and I really can’t believe they let me be their father. It’s the absolute best. This year I was able to get them to start watching some of the films I’ve been saving for them, and I’m very happy to report some huge successes. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was perhaps the biggest hit of this variety, but of course all paled in comparison to the power of KPop.

The world continues to be a challenging place, and I continue to find solace in family, friends, history, and cinema. I don’t imagine any of that will change next year, but then I have absolutely no idea what the future holds for any of us. If anyone is still reading me after all this time, thank you, and I’ll see you next year! - Dec 30th, 2025

I suppose it’s nice to know that they couldn’t be bothered to hire an actual native English speaker to play one any more than American films typically do for foreign languages here.

This is a strange one. Strange in the sense that it doesn’t seem to know quite what it wants to be. It starts out as an honestly pretty brutal “screwball” style comedy about three couples, all of whom are married to the wrong person in the group. Then it transitions to being about one of the wives in particular having a nervous breakdown. Then it transitions to being about an American cousin who is in love with a country doctor. Finally to an attempt at some kind of universal statement about love.

None of those are necessarily bad films, but the tonal shifts were pretty jarring. I enjoyed the first one the most, and it was especially fun to see Ingrid Bergman in the role of the poison tongued scorned wife in love with her brother-in-law. The sudden appearance of the doctor and the rich American who loves him was my least favorite plot point.

Sandwiched in between was the nervous breakdown, caused by the aforementioned love hexagon. It “resolves” the situation, but in the most milquetoast way possible. Everyone turns out to actually really love their own spouse, not the other member of the group they heretofore have pledged themselves to. It’s a cop out that completely invalidates most of the early part of the film. I don’t know, maybe I just don’t, like, get it man.

Overall I don’t have that much else to say. The beauty of the Eclipse line is that you get to watch films like this. Films that aren’t necessarily remembered for their greatness, but rather help fill in the gaps in an overall understanding of something about film history. In this case about the early career of Ingrid Bergman. In that role this was perfect. - Dec 29th, 2025

Not sure the guy in the bar really needed that, but, you know, I get it.

There was a moment while watching this film that I suddenly had the thought that the attitudes about life and humor presented here reminded me somewhat of the upper midwest. I quickly searched to learn that, yes, there is a large contingent of folk of Finnish descent living there. It all made so much sense.

It’s something about the cold spare nature of people who live in a cold dark place. This film isn’t just brutal in its story, but the entire thing exists in an almost oppressive well of silence. No one talks to each other. Barely a world is ever spoken, and certainly none that aren’t absolutely needed. It could be overwhelming but luckily for me I find the humor and joy in this style.

I’m not sure why. Probably for a similar reason that sad songs make me happy. Aki Kaurismäki is definitely not a filmmaker for everyone, but he definitely is a filmmaker for me. I loved this entire set of films, each more dark and sour than the previous. But to call them dark, or sour, or brutal, or any of the other words that I and others have used, is to misunderstand them. These are remarkably humanist and uplifting stories.

Where Kaurismäki excels is at stripping down absolutely everything that isn’t needed in a story, leaving just the essentials behind. This is not a long film, but the entire story gets told. There’s nothing else to add so nothing else is added. It is, from what I understand, a particularly Finnish sensibility. No small talk. Nothing extraneous or unneeded. I suspect that I’m far too chatty to fit into that sort of society, but on film I get it. - Dec 12th, 2025

The effects and design are insane for the time, and hold up surprisingly well even for today. But far more interesting to me now is the message. The powers of suggestion, mass belief, and fear are so incredibly strong.

This is one of those rare times on this journey through cinema history where I’ve actually already seen the film before. In this case, I’m not sure when exactly I first watched this, but I definitely rewatched it in 2012, because my Letterboxd tells me I did. 2012 is a few years before I started this project and it’s therefore a fascinating window into the ways in which I’ve changed over the years.

My slender review back then doesn’t seem to engage much with the substance of the film. Rather I was taken by the trappings. This is a ridiculous movie on the surface. The effects are absolutely over the top, and would be considered decent for 2025, let alone 1922 when it was released. Satan, played by the director himself, is legitimately super creepy and everything feels surprisingly modern. Even the intertitles feel like they could have almost been written today.

But none of that is what is sitting with me after watching it this time. The point of this film was to compare the suffering of women in the Middle Ages to the suffering of women in the contemporary time Christensen was living. Where there were once “witches” who were burned at the stake and tortured, there were now “hysterical women” who were locked in institutions, tortured, and sometimes lobotomized. From the perspective of Christensen, little had really changed.

That was 103 years ago as of this writing. Things have improved I’d say. We certainly aren’t suffering from the subjective power of nervous “hysteria”. That’s good. We don’t lobotomize people or use electro shock therapy. That’s also good. But we do still do basically the same set of things to women we’ve always done. These days it’s just canceling through social media, ostracizing, body shaming, sexuality shaming, and all the rest of it.

Would these same men and women, but let’s be honest mostly men, be calling these women “witches”, if this was still the Middle Ages? I think it very, very likely. So, on the one hand, yay for progress. We aren’t murdering people in quite the same terrible way we used to. On the other hand, we still have a long way to go before we get rid of the underlying evil that caused it. - Dec 10th, 2025

This hasn’t aged well to say the least. It’s transphobic and ridiculous. It’s also so much fun and that museum scene is absolutely incredible. So many bonus points for the heroine and the teenage boy not having a romance.

I seem to be on a thriller kick lately, which is definitely not always the case. But the winds of interest are fickle and ever changing, as they say. At any rate, this is another one that I’ve avoided for a long time, although I think it’s mostly because I thought this was To Die For, a Nicole Kidman movie that I saw in high school and absolutely hated.

Turns out I was missing out. Let’s get this out of the way up front, this movie is dated in a particular way that’s hard to stomach. The “sexual deviant” as murderer trope, especially as it relates to transgender folks, has, mercifully, gone the way of the dodo. But particularly at a time where the very existence of trans people is somehow considered debatable... it’s a particularly rough look.

If you can’t get past that, I get it. If you can, this is a phenomenally fun and worthwhile watch. I mean, the entire thing is absolutely ridiculous, but it’s such earnest and lovely ridiculousness that it was impossible not to get swept up in it. The whole thing is just so damn well made, so much more well made than it has basically any right being.

There is a famous scene where the initial candidate for main character, Angie Dickinson is wandering around through a museum. We know she’s lovelorn, trapped in an unstimulating marriage. We know this is a thriller. And we know that she is drawn to a somewhat sketchy man she’s just met. The film plays with the conventions of the genre to create a serious amount of unease, while also being beautifully shot and arranged. It’s worth watching this whole film for just that part, and there’s lots more delight to be found. - Dec 3rd, 2025

Perhaps it’s just the nature of a seventies/thirties back-to-back watch, but I couldn’t get into this one at all. Brutal for its time, and a great illustration of what we lost with the coming of the Hays Code, but I just couldn’t find my way in.

I didn’t like this film. Well... it’s not quite that simple I suppose. I liked parts of this film and I was bored by most of it. I suspect a large part of that was that I’m no longer used to watching movies in quick succession. This has been a long dry year for movie watching but I managed to watch one yesterday and today, hurrah for me! As a result, I think the tonal shift was probably just too much to overcome.

But anyway. I’ve been dreading this one for a long time, but was finally compelled to give it a chance tonight. I’m not really sure why either those things are true. I suppose I thought it would be upsetting. It wasn’t. I mean, what happened to Temple Drake is certainly upsetting, but the film is so thirties divorced from the realities of what’s happening that it didn’t really hit like that.

Honestly, the best part of the film was the worst part. The beginning is all reasons not to like Temple. She’s a flirt, as if that’s the worst thing in the world. She isn’t good to the guy she “should marry”, as though she owes him anything. She has her local judge grandfather wrapped around her finger. Ok, so she’s kind of spoiled and has terrible taste in men. That’s not really something worthy of all that much scorn.

The middle though. Her actual ordeal. The “story” of the story, as it were. It’s tense. The anticipation and dread is palpable. For the same reason as Don’t Look Now actually, because Temple has made one terrible choice and is now stuck with it. Not to a fatal end, but to something horrible for sure. This part of the film isn’t fun but it is incredibly well-made, especially given the limitations of the era. The look on her face as she is driven away? Harrowing.

The final act is apparently extremely divergent from the source material novel. Instead of whatever happens there, we get the all-too-unfortunately-common example of a woman being forced to sacrifice herself to “virtue”, entirely because of “moral failings” and the choices of men around her. Temple must ruin her reputation, and probably her future, because she “let” herself be the victim of sexual assault. It’s meant to redeem her in some sense, in the eyes of the moral police I suppose. Instead I just found it tiresome.

I do want to give this one another chance someday. One of the inherent dangers of a project like this is that I am watching these films randomly, whenever I have time, and sometimes I just choose the wrong one for the moment. I’ll try again, someday, and perhaps I’ll find something more worth paying attention to. - Dec 2nd, 2025

Venice is the perfect spot for a thriller, especially a gothic one like this. It’s already all alleys and water and religious iconography. Creepy and in this film not even a little beautiful. Just all sinister decay. The unease was intense and I am generally afraid of discovering too late that I’ve made a fatal error. Brutal.

I’ve never been to Venice. To be quite honest I’ve never really even been that excited to go. Not that I proactively haven’t wanted to, but it has never been high on my list of potential travel destinations. Italy I am very much wanting to visit, but Venice hasn’t piqued my interest nearly as much as Rome, or Milan. I think it’s mainly because I associate it with just being for tourists.

It’s funny because I really like boats and being on the water. With that in mind I bet I’d really like it there. I would not want to visit this Venice though, no matter what. Forgetting a serial killer wandering around, just the city itself in this film is a dark and foreboding character. You feel the presence of the place more than almost any film I can remember watching. Venice doesn’t seem to want the characters to be there and neither do we, eventually.

This is a horror film as much as a thriller. I vaguely knew that going in, but as is my usual style I was pretty unaware of what I was getting myself into. That’s not a bad thing, but man I really wasn’t prepared for the amount of dread I was going to be feeling. If I had been, I might have chosen to watch this during the daytime. Certainly going to bed right after was... challenging.

It’s a serious fear of mine I suppose. That of making that one fatal error, but not finding out you’ve made it until it’s absolutely impossible to change course. I am such a normally logical person. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have my irrational moments, I am not Spock. But overall I’m a pretty measured and thoughtful person. Therefore the idea of making a mistake and being fatally unable to change it? Terrifying.

I cannot get the final scene out of my head. I suppose that means this was a success, although I must confess I haven’t quite stumbled into a larger message yet. Maybe something about grief, certainly something about death. Mostly I’m just amazed at how ugly they made Venice look, although maybe it was just the seventies, I don’t know. - Dec 1st, 2025

This grew on me more and more as it went on. What a charming lovely film. Laughton is a genius as always, of course, but it’s the heart of it all that really makes it special. Hilarious and charming.

Part of the challenge of watching these at the rate I’m currently managing, is that I’ve lost some of my superhero power of attention. One of the things I’ve noted in the past here is that modern media has destroyed the attention span of most people, but that I’ve found it can be reversed by enough consumption of older, slower, media.

The reversible nature is encouraging, but, also, it goes both directions. So initially I found myself wandering away from this film, not fully committing to its meandering classic pacing. But, as with all the best media from any age, it was ultimately undeniable. Slowly but surely it snared my full attention, to the point that I was eventually hanging on every moment, so happy with what I had finally consented to experience.

This is a classic British comedy of station, manners, expectations, class divisions, and society. Turns out I love that sort of thing, especially when it’s done with this much empathy and heart. Sure Charles Laughton’s Hobson is the worst. But he’s the worst in a charming way. Which doesn’t forgive him his sins, but this also doesn’t drown us in them.

His daughter, Maggie, is a force of nature, but ultimately she learned that from him. The battle of wills that he loses was always going to be lost, because she’s an evolved version of him. Minus the alcoholism to boot, and with a great deal more work ethic on top. She knows what she wants and she is going to get it, it’s only a matter of when.

Anyway, I enjoyed this so, so much. It’s discoveries like this one that propel me to continue this long quest. Turns out we’ve known how to make movies for a long time now, all over the world, and there’s incredible things to be found. There’s a ton of terrible stuff to find too, of course, but that’s where curation comes in, and Criterion maintains a pretty high batting average over all. - Nov 14th, 2025

Clearly the moral here is to never try and bribe Jackie Chan. He’ll bring his long suffering girlfriend to the big fight and still win.

This was a ton of fun. There’s honestly not that much more to say other than that. There’s no huge idea or interesting plot or family memory to draw on, or anything like that. It’s a super fun, silly, occasionally jaw dropping, martial arts film from one of the most talented physical actors since the silent era. Which, to be clear, is not a criticism. This was great!

What I do find interesting to think about though, is the way in which CGI and superhero films have made something like this feel even more vital than it did in the 80s when it was first released. I mean, the stunts in this film are absolutely insane. Like Buster Keaton/Harold Lloyd level bonkers. To know, for sure, that Jackie Chan is actually doing all of them? Absurd.

The stakes in superhero films only rise. The entire genre is like that. Every time the heroes fight the villains, like a drug, it has to get more intense. That leads to utterly nonsensical situations where a street level hero like Spider-Man is suddenly saving the world every five minutes. In a movie sense, it’s so cool that we can finally see all that stuff on screen, and it mostly looks like the comic books, that’s rad. Childhood me is geeking out every time I get to see one of my literal heroes on the screen doing all this cool stuff.

But another big part of my brain knows I’m watching what amounts to a very realistic cartoon. And it just... doesn’t look quite right. There’s an uncanny valley that I think exists no matter how good the special effects are. Because my brain knows it’s not real. Whereas, watching a person do the most ludicrous stuff, and knowing that they were really doing it? That just hits so much harder. - Sep 29th, 2025

I’m not nearly Czech enough to understand most of this, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Summers are a special treasure, lusty old men perhaps somewhat less so.

My mother has somewhat recently developed a serious interest in doing genealogical research on her family. It’s particularly interesting given that her ancestors were from a diaspora population and her parents were refugees. Through this research she’s discovered that at least part of her family spent a few hundred years living in what is now called Czechia, but was called Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Perhaps that historic link is what led me to enjoy this film a lot more than I thought I would when it first started. I am nowhere near Czech enough to understand it fully, that’s for sure. But somehow something came through that I found increasingly pleasant to watch. Even as the things happening to the characters were increasingly of, shall we say, mixed pleasantness.

There is something eternal I suppose about the ennui of an unremarkable summer. As well as something about the foolishness some men get up to in their dotage. All it takes is one pretty young thing, who is, for entirely unexamined reasons, willing to entertain the notion of them, for all three men to completely fall apart. It’s simultaneously amusing and awful. - Sep 6th, 2025

All marriage is work, but arranged marriage seems like it’s playing on hard mode.

I randomly had a night with time for a movie recently, and decided it had been far too long since I’d watched a film by Yasujiro Ozu. It’s amazing really, I’ve only seen two of his non-silent fully developed works, and yet I would absolutely declare him as one of my all time favorite directors. That’s how good these films are.

No one makes anything like them today. If I’m wrong, and I just don’t know about it, please let me know! The smallness of the stories is incredible, and yet they resonate just the same. In this particular instance it’s all about the way that modernity and tradition can run directly into each other. On top of that, the ways in which marriage is ultimately about alignment, almost as much as it is about feeling.

I am not in an arranged marriage. Thank goodness for that. What a challenge that must have been! In a “love marriage” you at least have that love to fall back on in times of trouble. It’s what compels you to try to see things from their side. It’s what propels you to try and be the best you can be. It’s what carries you through when things are rough. In an arranged marriage, what do you have?

Still, the odds are probably about as good, all things considered. I mean, half of all love marriages fail. I wonder what the statistics are for arranged marriages. Probably hard to say given that they were in their peak in an era before the possibility of divorce was really widespread. These days, with younger people seemingly losing the ability to compromise, or to empathize, I fear the percentage of all marriages that fail will be on the rise. - Aug 1st, 2025

The low points are pretty low, but luckily the 1970s Italian fashion, and the majesty of Bruce Lee, are enough in the end.

We are incredibly firmly back on it’s-been-too-long-since-I-watched-this corner. Not my favorite corner, certainly. But one that is simply a fact of my current life. I watched this about three weeks ago, as of writing. To be honest, I’m not sure I had that much to say about it anyway, but now it’s just a fun mush in my brain.

This type of movie is perhaps particularly poorly suited to this long a break before writing. It’s a trifle ultimately. Something enjoyable but signifying very little. I enjoyed it. It was fun. Bruce Lee had a star power that is absolutely undeniable. Like watching the best dancer in an ensemble dance piece. You simple cannot take your eyes off him.

Other than that? This didn’t leave much of an impression. It’s cool he got to direct this. It’s cool that it’s so awesomely seventies and Italian. It’s just cool. I’m cool with that. - Jul 18th, 2025

Poor guy was minding his own business, hiding from himself, as you do. Then his good-for-nothing brother just had to show up and ruin everything.

I have mentioned before that Breathless was the film that, more than any other, introduced me to this journey through the history of world “cinema”. To be sure, I had seen “art films” before, in particular Ran, but that was the one that just knocked me flat on my back and had me rethinking everything I thought I knew about film.

If I had never seen that, this might have been the one to do it. In many ways it’s very similar, just nowhere near as good or as impactful. Truffaut wrote the story for both, and the ideas he’s playing with here aren’t that fundamentally different. Maybe it really is just that, as Truffaut once said, Breathless is sadder than intended because Godard was just sadder than he is. Maybe I need that sadness a bit, because I can be a bit of a melancholy boy myself.

But also, I read that this film almost undoes its own goals, by how seamlessly it integrates its various genres into one cohesive whole. In a sense that’s very true. It’s so potentially incongruous, but it all just comes together so easily. That should be praise, but maybe that obscures the difficulty of the endeavor to the point that we miss the point.

Overall I still enjoyed this quite a lot. I wouldn’t say this was top-tier Truffaut, but that’s an absurdly high bar to hit anyway. The examination of the ways in which hiding from your problems doesn’t actually solve them remains a fertile territory to mine. I’d like to hope that Charlie gets another chance at happiness. He seems like he could use it. - Jun 24th, 2025

Every director who has ever been called an auteur should have to make a film like this about somewhere they lived.

This is the film I remember having seen many years ago and really appreciating. It didn’t diminish at all in a second viewing. If anything, my journey through Bergman’s filmography has only deepened my appreciation of what a relative oddity this is. Like most people I’m sad that we never got the promised Fårö Document 1989, but this will just have to suffice.

One of the unexpected benefits of watching this now was seeing the clips from the first film that he integrated, and the catch-up interviews with folks he had previously spoken with. Unsurprisingly, most of the kids lives had not gone how they expected them too. Some for the better, some for the worse, but I am reminded of that old Heraclitus quote “call no man happy until he’s dead”.

Every auteur, every artist really, should make something like this at some point in their career. It’s such a great look into the liminal space that they occupy. Torn between the world and their art. Additionally it kind of breathes some life into where they are coming from, more than Bergman probably intended really, and helps provide a solid foundation.

More than that, this is just a really lovely film. The sardonic Bergman is almost nowhere to be found here. In that sense it feels almost intimate, like we’re being let into the one happy part of his soul. For a director known for wrestling with demons that’s not a small thing. Can you imagine what an Antonioni might have done with the same brief? - May 12th, 2025

A well meaning attempt to gently agitate for change. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it didn’t do much to change the fundamental realities of this place that Bergman so loved.

Well then. The last few years have not been kind to my movie watching habit, and so far 2025 looks like the worst one yet. Not since the heady days of 2020 have I really made any significant progress here. But, I persist nonetheless, because this is a hobby not a job. Still, I am once again on “it’s been a long time since I actually watched this” corner. Such is life, as they say.

At any rate, I’m not sure I’d have that much to say here anyway. This was definitely a documentary made by Ingmar Bergman, that much I feel capable to definitively state. There were some interesting stylistic choices made, like filming all the nature in color but the interviews in black and white. It’s a slim film, barely an hour long, but I do feel like it gave me some sense of what Fårö must have been like.

It’s also just so Bergman to call something a “swimming paradise” and then immediately show it during winter, complete with trash everywhere and locked up buildings. Just perfectly on brand, no notes. But, other than that, this feels like a precursor to its successor. A film I saw many years ago and remember as being a lot more developed than this one.

This was apparently Bergman’s attempt to change things for Fårö in some meaningful way. In that attempt he failed pretty completely. As far as I can tell the island continues to sort of fade away over time. No bridge has been built, services continue to move to the larger Gotland. It’s bleak. But then again, doesn’t that make it absolutely perfect as the home of Bergman? - Mar 27th, 2025

Man, there are saps and then there’s this guy. It’s almost like he wants to be played.

I don’t like the films of Christopher Nolan. Inception made me super angry, you can hear me rant about it on my old podcast. Batman Begins was fine. The Dark Knight was also fine, but seriously overrated. The Dark Knight Rises was terrible. Boring and long. So very, very long. I gave up after that and didn’t watch any of his other films.

He clearly wants to be someone. Probably Alfred Hitchcock, mixed in with a few other auteurs whose films he idolized. But it’s a bit like an old quote I remember Frank Frazetta saying, in the long gone, but not forgotten, Hero Illustrated. You can teach someone how to paint but you can’t teach them to have anything unique or interesting to say. Nolan is the perfect example of that.

He wants to be a great filmmaker, but he doesn’t actually have any vitality. There’s no authenticity or perspective to his work. So, instead, he has focused on the mechanical aspects of the craft. Even this, his first feature, is well made. A bit cookie cutter, not terrible, enjoyably light one might say. A snack. But a very well-made snack. That’s his entire filmography, at least the ones I’ve seen.

My problem is two-fold. One, I would much rather watch vital art poorly made, than meh art executed to perfection. But the other problem is that I get really annoyed at art that wants to pretend it’s smart. Inception triggered this. The entire idea behind that film is that you walk out of the theater feeling smart, like you “got it”. And then you debate with your friends about what “it” is. But there is no it. The entire thing is stupid and resolves to nothing.

The best thing I can say about this one is that it’s inoffensive. I watched it and I wasn’t upset. I was a bit bored, but overall it was a decent experience. Definitely a student film, and one that would not likely still be talked about if it hadn’t come from Nolan, but it was fine. - Jan 24th, 2025

This wasn’t a great year for quantity, but it was for quality. Overall a phenomenal set of film experiences.

And that’s it for 2024 here at Cinema Gadfly. A new record for fewest films watched, but also a ten year anniversary celebrated. And few films isn’t no films, after all. This journey continues, even if it feels glacial at times. These films are my meditation, and I will keep going at whatever pace is available to me.

If there’s a theme in my watching for this year, it’s that I overcame my hesitation on a lot of these films. From a previously unliked Wes Anderson, to a film I have owned for almost the entire time this site has existed, to a film that I have literally started and not finished three or four times before. This was a year of just getting over myself and hitting the play button. I am better for it.

Last year I wrote about hope for the future. Sadly this year none of those external hopes came true. The world is even less filled with the kind of nuance we so desperately need. People are even more team oriented and individual over community focused. It’s quite depressing. I’m currently avoiding the news, just to try and rebuild some basic mental health.

On the family front though, all those wishes continue to come true to an astonishing degree. My kids keep getting more and more interested in everything around them. They, and my wife, are truly the primary drivers of joy in my world. I watched less movies, but I spent more time with them. I’ll take that deal any day of the week. - Dec 31st, 2024

Ordinary people as Greek epic poems, only no one knows or cares.

Llewyn Davis is not going to “make it”. In this case, making it is the music business and financial, or critical, success. He’s talented, to a point. But he’s also completely incapable of helping himself get ahead. He’s caustic and sardonic. He doesn’t connect with, well, anyone really. He isn’t a great showman or a great spectacle.

He’s a good singer, and a good guitar player, and he knows a bunch of great pre-Dylan folk songs. He exists in a moment in music, a breath really, just before his entire genre is swept into almost total cultural irrelevance by the coming of the singer-songwriter. He’s also not particularly business savvy.

It’s just not a good match. If any, or really most, of those things were different, he might be able to have a Utah Phillips style career as a sort living memory archivist. But he’s not that guy at all. He’s way, way too concerned with not appearing to be any kind of phony for one thing. The whole idea would seem completely ridiculous to him.

And yet. He says the same line at every one of his shows, and usually gets a laugh. The line is “if it was never new and it never gets old, it’s a folk song”. That’s not that far off from Phillips’ “the past didn’t go anywhere” and “folk songs are boring. But I am a folk singer, this is a folk music establishment, and you are, ostensibly, the folk.”

Llewyn could have had something. But he would have had to be a completely different person than he is. - Dec 29th, 2024

For all of us who are raising our kids while also trying to break generational chains of trauma. I feel very fortunate to be a part of the first generation of my family who even could do that. But, also, man that sucks sometimes.

On the one hand I could write about this film for an entire book. On the other hand, I don’t really want to put any of those thoughts on the internet. So that leaves me in a bit of a pickle. This film affected me deeply and profoundly, but I don’t really want to explain why.

So, instead, I will talk about something else related to it. Bing Liu talks in the special features about how he had no idea what this film was going to be about, even while he was actually making it. I find that both unsurprising and amazing. Unsurprising because that’s often how trauma is uncovered, and honestly also often how art creation works. Amazing because man that’s a crazy road to walk on with your first feature film documentary.

I find it especially interesting in the themes of toxic masculinity, and childhood trauma, and therapy. Making this film made him realize how much he hadn’t dealt with the things that happened to him. It led him to therapy and to a better relationship with his family. That’s incredible. At some point the film itself really became a form of therapy for most of the people involved in it.

Which includes the viewer. As is so often the case I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I hit play on this one. I was absolutely prepared for a beautiful skate documentary. I was thoroughly unprepared for the examination of childhood and trauma that followed. To say it has stuck with me is a dramatic understatement. That’s about the most I’m willing to say here. - Dec 27th, 2024

It’s a small film to treasure. If you like this sort of oddball village meets outsider genre you’re going to love it. As someone whose favorite television show was once Northern Exposure and someone who once loved living in Scotland, I absolutely ate this up.

There is a genre that I love, but I don’t know if it has a name. It’s definitely a fish-out-of-water vibe, but with the addition of an eccentric village thrown into the mix. My canonical example is probably Northern Exposure, which was my absolute favorite show in high school. But, Twin Peaks, Gilmore Girls, and many others, would also qualify.

The primary elements are a town, or village, made up of almost impossible odd people. There’s usually some kind of unexpected regular visitors, like maybe a Russian fisherman, who the town nonetheless expects to receive. And then there’s our guy or gal, the newcomer who doesn’t really exist in the same existential plane as the rest. Joel Fleishman from Northern Exposure is the archetype.

I love this type of story so much. I love it to the point that I’ve been searching for a real version of it most of my life. Now that I think about it, that’s probably a large part of why I spent my college years in a place called Yellow Springs, Ohio. There’s just something so satisfying about a place full of quirky mystery. A little bit of a Wes Anderson vibe, you might say. Or even David Lynch, but without the actual danger.

On top of that, I spent a half a year living in Scotland in my early twenties, and fell completely in love with the place. The accent, the people, the mentality, the food, everything. I adored my time there. This film, combining that unnamed genre, with Scotland, was therefore just absolutely catnip for me. I loved every second of it, to the point where I’m now bidding on eBay auctions for the watch that the main character was wearing. - Dec 24th, 2024

I’m really gonna go out on a limb here, and say that the Bergman of this era wasn’t, like, totally satisfied with his life, or feeling particularly connected to those around him.

It’s always a shame when I can’t write about these films expeditiously. I’ve mentioned it many times at this point. Life gets in the way, and, well, that’s life. It’s always a shame, but it’s especially a shame this time, because I had a lot to say about this film. I’ll try to recapture that spirit now.

Let’s start with the title. In English it’s, for some reason, “The Passion of Anna”. I don’t have any idea who named it that, but it’s a terrible translation. The original Swedish title is “En passion”, which would literally translate as “A passion.” Bergman grew up in a very religious conservative Christian family. His father was a parish minister. In Christian tradition, the passion is the suffering of Jesus. I do not believe that he named this film “A passion” without it being very much a reference. As the latin definition says, “to suffer, bear, endure”.

It’s certainly a much better description of what everyone is doing here. The character of Anna has no passion, for almost anything. Nor does anyone else. This is Bergman in his most alienated and disconnected. There is an incredible scene of a dinner party, where almost the entire thing is filmed in closeups. It feels like four people having dinner together, by themselves. At no point do you feel like anyone is with anyone else.

The entire thing is like that, and it tracks pretty closely with what was going on in Bergman’s private life at the time. He was also going through a divorce and disconnection, and it seems to have very clearly translated to the screen. Everyone is suffering. Everyone is bearing their burden. Everyone is just trundling their path forward, almost never actually engaging with anything outside of themselves. The only moments of “passion”, in the modern sense, in this entire film, are angry ones.

Anyway, I loved it. - Dec 20th, 2024

This has grown on me over the years. I still see little of the Wes Anderson style to come, but it’s a charming film.

So, here’s the flip-side of the Narayama coin. I assume that you, dear reader, cannot imagine what I could possible write next. Well, don’t worry, I’m here for you! This is the other way expectations can go. Unlike last time, where I waited ten years to watch a film, I’ve seen this one before. I saw it, and did not care for it.

I saw it twelve years ago, a couple years before I started this project. I saw it as a Wes Anderson fan, perhaps even a bit of a super-fan in those days. I saw it sixteen years after it was released, and with the full context of having seen and loved so many of his other films. And, as a result, I just wasn’t prepared to accept this for what it is. A fun, silly, not-particularly Andersonian, trifle.

And, because of that prior experience, I have delayed rewatching it for the last ten years. See how that ties in? Similarly, when I finally gave in, I found something quite a bit different than I expected. Rather than not enjoying this at all, I was able to appreciate it just for what it is, not for what it’s not. In that respect it’s not that dissimilar to other first efforts from favorited directors. Bergman’s Torment comes to mind strongly here.

I don’t know that I have any big lesson to learn from these last two films. Or at least not from the expectations game I’ve been playing. I guess... just don’t let summaries and memories determine my course of action? That feels a bit thin in terms of takeaways. For one thing, I literally only have summaries and box art by which to choose films to watch. And memories are often confirmed. But, still, I will endeavor to be a bit bolder moving forward, and less afraid of what I think might happen. - Nov 29th, 2024

I have to say, I’m not a fan of sending senior citizens to a mountain top to die of exposure. I guess I’m just weird like that.

There is something so interesting about expectations. I don’t talk about the collecting aspect of this journey that often, but I own the first thousand or so of these films on physical media. This one was one of the first I bought, its lack of supplements meaning that it was relatively cheaply found. I bought it ten years ago and then... just never watched it. I would read the description and then pick something else.

Over time this gave the film kind of a weird form of power over me. I was a bit scared to actually watch it. It had become something that worried me. I’m not trying to be melodramatic here. These were very minor feelings. But still, I had a bit of a mental block towards actually sitting down with this film. But, as ever, I should have learned by now not to pay much attention to the back of the box.

I loved this. Honestly it’s not really that surprising, given actual thought. The film was made by Keisuke Kinoshita, who also directed the films in one of my favorite Eclipse boxes. That alone was probably the best piece of actual information of all. But, also, I had no idea that this was such a fascinating experiment in staging and filmmaking style.

This is, essentially, a kabuki play filmed for the screen. But it doesn’t shy away from that, nor does it lean too far in. Virtually the entire thing was shot on a soundstage, and you can definitely tell. But that’s because the controlled environment is used for dramatic effect. Night and day are just lights. The backdrop sometimes falls away to indicate a location change. It could feel cheap, but it doesn’t. It feels purposeful and beautiful.

This is also the second film in a row that I’ve watched that is just so tense. In both cases it’s kind of for a similar reason. It’s the inevitability of what’s happening. In this case the fact that the grandmother will go to Narayama. Everything else is just waiting around for that moment. It’s powerful and hard to watch at times. I can’t believe I waited this long to see it. But then maybe I wasn’t ready until just now. - Nov 21st, 2024

How can something so beautiful be so incredibly tense. It’s all just too much.

I’m not really all that surprised that this didn’t do well upon its initial 1955 release. It’s far too “art house” for that, not to mention that it came out at a time where the idea that preachers weren’t to be automatically trusted was somewhat less obvious than it is today. Throw in a proto-Southern Gothic aesthetic, and it all kind of makes sense. Thankfully this has been rightfully reevaluated in the decades since.

I say thankfully because it’s an incredible film. I love Robert Mitchum anyway, but this role is just utterly perfect for him. He’s menacing, and cloying, and alluring, all at the same time. The entire premise of the film, that he’s able to get all these people to trust him, would be utterly ridiculous if he wasn’t just so damned charismatic and repulsively attracting.

I found this so hard to watch and I mean that in the best way. I had to distract myself, even as I couldn’t look away from the beautiful cinematography. There are endless shots in this film that could be still photographs, or paintings. It’s just insanely well staged. But it was all just so tense and scary that, even though I knew the story, I still found it hard to actually watch.

Partially that’s probably because it’s about children. As any parent is likely to tell you, kids in trouble narratives hit very different once you have your own. It’s not at all surprising to me that so much awful stuff in this society can be achieved simply by appealing to the fears of parents. This film threatens these kids and gives them, for most of the running time anyway, nowhere to go to be safe. It also leaves the audience with nowhere to go, something, as I said, I found both undeniable and uncomfortable. What a masterpiece! - Nov 19th, 2024

It’s crazy to think that zooming in and crossfades were new at one point, but then so was everything.

The thing about watching early films from an established and beloved director, is that you’re often not watching them as much for what they are, as for what you know they lead to later on. This is probably even more true if the director is mostly known for films in the sound era and you’re watching an early silent. It’s certainly true in this case. This is a perfectly lovely little film. A bit slow, a bit obvious, but very heartfelt. It also has some really cool hints at filmmaking to come.

There is a dynamism and a, for lack of a better term, movie-ness to this that is sometimes missing from these silent films. There is nothing stage-like about it, but more than that it’s also just very dynamic. I hate to reuse the word, but it’s the only one that fits. There is just so much camera movement, and each times it comes almost totally unexpectedly.

Maybe that’s partially me not being as familiar with Naruse. He’s often compared to Ozu, who would never have this much movement. His films are static as a style, as a worldview, as a philosophy. So perhaps I’m just seeing the similarities between their storytelling instincts and adding my own expectations. Whatever it is I’m doing, it all worked for me.

One other thing I will note is that I have often said that watching these movies is an incredible cure for the attention spans of the modern era. These are slow films and they demand attention. That’s especially true for the silent films, where if you aren’t watching you have no idea what’s even happening. I have not been able to watch as many movies lately and I can tell that it’s had a real impact on my ability to focus. Hopefully this is helping bring me back to a slower and more deliberate pace of life. - Nov 18th, 2024

This is just so, so, so boring. I get that these films are for someone, I really do, they are just not at all for me.

I’ve been struggling to sit down and write anything about this film. That’s because it was boring. Boring things are hard to write about, because even thinking about them is also boring. Watching the film was boring, thinking about it was boring, and I don’t want this writing to also be boring.

I haven’t enjoyed any of these films. I haven’t enjoyed Maurice Chevalier. I haven’t enjoyed the terrible songs. I haven’t enjoyed the retrograde politics and thought. I haven’t enjoyed the pacing or the sets or the costumes. I have enjoyed some of the actresses. So I guess that’s something.

I’m mostly just very happy to be done with this particular part of this journey. And, you know what? That’s fine. There is no collection of 1000+ films on Earth that I would enjoy all of. Even if I curated it myself, I would likely find that some of them had lost their luster over time. So, it’s fine. This was an experience. A boring experience and I’m happy I’m done with it. - Nov 15th, 2024

There’s to the point and then there’s Finnish to the point. I don’t think I’d do well there, but I do love watching it.

What is so striking about this film is the matter-of-fact dispassionate way everything in it plays out. It creates a world where anything can happen at any time, because it would all be treated as more or less the same. No one reacts to anything essentially, it all just happens to and around them. In a way that’s sort of similar to Jarmusch films, but with a very Finnish perspective, instead of a very American one.

Because anything can happen, it could feel like nothing happens. And in a sense it does. For a short film, with a ton going on, it’s surprisingly easy to forget just how much insanity actually takes place. It’s quite a journey from the closing of a mine and looking for part time work, to bank robbery and murder. But the story gets there anyway, one completely reasonable seeming moment at a time.

The entire thing is just so droll. I’m absolutely sure this isn’t for everyone. It’s far too detached and revels far too much in a dark humor. But it’s like catnip for me. I could watch a version of this that was ten times longer, and still enjoy every weird new twist and development. - Nov 13th, 2024

This is deep, but like a river rather than the sea.

We’re back on “it’s been such a long time since I watched this” corner. Oh how I haven’t missed you! For those of you who don’t celebrate, this means that I watched this film, thought about it, and then got busy with the rest of my life before writing my thoughts down. I don’t like when this happens because I lose the depth of my thinking. Sadly the days where I could just contemplate great cinema for hours at a time are now long in my past.

I do find the timing of when I chose to watch this rather fitting. Because I know essentially nothing when I start these, except what’s written on the Criterion blurb, I had no idea that this took place partially in pre-revolution Iran. That turns out to be what most of my thoughts about the film hinged on though, hardly surprising given that I watched this in September of 2024. Even less surprising now that I’m writing about in October.

In the film, one of the two women is married to an Iranian man and, spoiler alert or whatever, ends up sending one of her children to live with him in Iran while she stays in Paris. Besides the bonkers nature of that choice, that presents a fascinating set of questions, given the timing. The film takes place in the mid-seventies, right before the Islamic Republic overthrew the Shah.

You really have to wonder. Or, at least, I did. What happened to Darius and his young son after the revolution. He didn’t really seem like the religious fundamentalist type, but then how would you know before hand. Did he stay in Iran and raise their son there? Did he go back to Paris and find refuge? Does Pomme ever see them again? How does their daughter grow up in France as a half-Iranian women?

Film exists in a moment in time. That’s obvious, but rarely as consequential as it is here. The entire world changed shortly after this story was told. Suddenly the feminist narratives are even more striking. In so many ways this film feels of its time, but also of our time. Naive and prescient. It’s heady stuff, but hardly a surprise coming from Varda, who remains one of my absolute favorites. - Oct 30th, 2024

Finally back in the AGCU! This is where all his characters end up eventually, even Obi-Wan Kenobi. Especially Obi-Wan. A force ghost painting pictures of feet forevermore.

It’s been quite a while since my last Alec Guinness film, which is an utterly intolerable situation to be in. Luckily I have rectified it, with this oddball weirdo of a movie. Funny and charming, but also just random and confusing. These are the types of gems that would be lost to history without groups like the Criterion Collection, long may they reign.

I find it somewhat incredible that, until I began this journey, I only knew Alec Guinness from one role. And, in particular, that it was from Star Wars. That’s like only knowing Max von Sydow from... uh... Star Wars. Bad analogy maybe. But my point is that Obi-Wan Kenobi is, by far, Guinness’ least interesting or compelling character. His entire career before that is full of absolute bangers and I can’t believe I almost never knew about them.

One of the many things I love about his acting is how different the roles he played were. A lot of that is down to directors, I suppose, although he certainly worked with Ronald Neame a lot. But in this case he actually wrote the script himself, so clearly he wanted to push himself. And push himself he did. This is a weird character. We pick up in medias res and never totally recover, but we can piece together the general feel of things.

And that feel is of a weirdo with a very distinctive voice. An anti-hero, maybe, but maybe just a jerk? A character who is engaging with the world around him like a natural disaster does. Unpredictable, often unpleasant, sometimes creates something of true beauty. Like a hurricane and the beautiful sky it leaves in its aftermath. Not someone I’d ever want to know in real life, but a fun character to spend an evening watching. - Oct 4th, 2024

I must admit that I totally misunderstood the plot, and had to read the Wikipedia just to understand what happened. But who cares, this was stylish and fun and I loved it.

I’m not even going to bother to write about how long it’s been since I’ve written. It’s such a cliche at this point and I’m just going to ignore it and continue like nothing happened. Nothing in the previous two sentences constitutes a contradiction either. Please move along.

There’s something delightfully fatalistic about this film. I think that’s what I resonate so strongly with. The way that some of the characters are eternally optimistic, in the face of no path to success, and others are hopelessly bleak in the face of less actual challenge than first appears. It’s a heady mixture that I found intoxicating, somewhat to my own surprise.

Honestly, I don’t know why I was surprised. This is, ostensibly, a homage to Sanshiro Sugata, a film I thoroughly enjoyed. The director calls Akira Kurosawa the greatest of filmmakers, which is an idea I can at least entertain the notion of. The film is a judo story about perseverance in face of obstacle and getting back up when you’re down. All of that sounds great. But it’s also something else. A whimsical alternate world of silliness, and a story lacking most of the crucial details as to exactly what’s happening. It’s like catnip for me!

I really needed to watch this. It’s been months since I’ve had time to watch anything, and I was overdue. Luckily it was also great. So fun, and funny, and weird, and confusing, and beautiful, and bleak, and hopeful. Just a great mix for me. I don’t have any deeper thoughts. I could probably fake something about the nature of bad luck and the importance of some level of irrational confidence. But mostly I’m just happy to have seen this delightful film. - Aug 28th, 2024

The only way to win is not to play?

Samurai films have often been called the “Westerns” of Japanese filmmaking. It makes a lot of sense. They contain many similar elements, and directors have been influenced in both directions. For every Kurosawa homage to John Ford there’s a Sergio Leone remake of Kurosawa. Both genres are fundamentally about myth making. But, at least in this film, there’s a major cultural difference in the nature of that myth.

This is the story of Gennosuke, a low-level Samurai who kills one of his superiors, after having been manipulated to do so. He thinks he’s striking a blow for positive reform, but really he’s just helping an unscrupulous rival get more personal power. In the aftermath he becomes a hunted Ronin, determined to live “like a beast”. The rest of the film is about his attempt to survive, and a similar situation to his own that he accidentally wanders into.

I’m going to spoil the end here, but Gennosuke “wins”. At least on a basic level. He kills the people who are hunting him and isn’t killed himself. He’s still a homeless Ronin, but he receives no moral comeuppance. This is in stark contrast to most Westerns I’ve seen, or most of American filmmaking honestly. It’s totally ok in American cinema to have anti-heroes. In fact in recent decades we might even prefer them. But society still demands that their “crimes” are ultimately punished.

So, if you’re a character who is the protagonist, but you did something “wrong”, you don’t get to fully win. Audiences demand that there is some personal cost. You win, but you die at the end. You win, but your loved one dies. You cannot escape totally unscathed. In that context, this film is kind of shocking. Sure, Gennosuke was manipulated, but he still murdered a minister, and a whole bunch of other people got killed along the way. And yet, he’s ultimately the “hero”. We just feel bad for him, and root for his success.

I’m not sure what it says about the two societies. On one level I do think it points to an overly “moral” America. One that struggles with nuance. As I’ve been discussing recently, that is a very top-of-mind topic for me, so perhaps I’m seeing it everywhere. But our need for “justice” to prevail, even if it’s perverse justice, is a very interesting one. - Jul 9th, 2024

Maybe it’s an unpopular opinion, but it doesn’t look all that fun to grow up in a super wealthy family.

This film, which is utterly delightful, was not a hit when it was initially released in 1938. By itself that’s not all that remarkable, there are plenty of now-acknowledged classics that were missed upon their debut. What is more interesting is to contemplate why it was disliked, and what that says about the time period of its release, as well as our time period now.

The story isn’t all that deep really. A young “self-made” Cary Grant meets the daughter of a generationally wealthy family, and knowing nothing about her background falls quickly in love with her. He has a plan to make a bit of money and then quit working, to retire while he’s young and explore the meaning of life, with the intention to return to work when he’s older and wiser. Turns out the woman he’s fallen for isn’t exactly thrilled at that plan, but her older sister is, and screwball hijinks commence.

One of the main theories I’ve read as to why audiences weren’t enamored with this plot, is that it came at the height of the Great Depression. The idea is that people were put off by the notion of someone with a good job abandoning it, given that jobs at all were a real scarcity. There’s also the idea that he’s throwing away the life of luxury and privilege his marriage to the original heiress would provide.

That was certainly a radical idea in 1938, but I think it’s just as radical today. America is badly lacking the concept of enough. We are the most capitalistic society on the planet, and the idea that you could ever have enough, that growth is not an unalloyed good, is largely missing from our group mindset. Cary Grant’s character has made enough, at least for now, and wants to focus on other, more important things. His bride-to-be, and her father, cannot fathom the idea of someone walking away, when ever more money is available.

It’s toxic. At some point you really do have enough. There are plenty of studies that have shown that there is an initially huge improvement in life happiness with additional wealth, but that it plateaus at a number which would likely seem shockingly low to most of you. After that money doesn’t increase happiness, it’s just more. At some point it becomes a disease of more, and destroys even the original happiness it provided. This film is raging against that idea, and doing it a time when most folks really were struggling. That’s incredible. - Jun 6th, 2024

Free Chen Zhen!

This movie is fun and silly and badass, and all the things you’d expect from a Bruce Lee picture. He’s righteous, he kicks ass, he’s a superhero. The plot is a bit over the top, and more than a bit ridiculous, but it doesn’t matter because the entire thing is just too much fun. I really enjoyed it.

Having said that, there are a couple things that are a bit deeper to explore. This film is about something, and that something is the way that imperial Japan treated China during the pre-war era. The way that the Japanese, from the Chinese perspective, looked down at their neighbors. Their racism and all of its effects.

This is perhaps especially useful for an American audience to see. Americans are incredibly good at assigning our own understanding of race to everywhere else in the world, over simplifying and downright falsifying situations we don’t actual understand by attempting to reduce them to a mere variation of our own experiences. It’s toxic. It’s crucial that we understand that things are more complicated than that, and this film can potentially introduce that idea to someone who hasn’t seen it before.

The other, more inward thing, is that a lot of the problems that happen in this film are directly a result of Lee’s character Chen Zhen being unwilling to let literally anyone in. He absolutely has to do everything completely on his own, to the point that it causes the destruction of everything he cares about, and ultimately himself. It’s hard to watch, even as it’s so fun to watch him do it. But, seriously, a whole lot of trouble could have been avoided if he would have just told anyone what he was doing and why. - Jun 3rd, 2024

As expected, this is better than the terrible American version in basically every way. It’s still a goofy mess but at least it’s authentically so, with a fun weird story and some epic moments.

It’s become an almost comical tradition around here that I first tell you how long it’s been since I watched the film I’m writing about. That said, this one will hopefully be the record. I watched this more than a month ago, with some caveats. Those being that I first watched the terrible American version and then slowly made my way through the much, much better Japanese version. I finally finished that a few days ago.

This is the transition of Godzilla from a commentary on post-war Japanese atomic angst to a superhero format. No longer is there really any message to be found, just comedy, absurdity, and an attempt at action. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. To much of an attempt at allegory starts to become very tiresome. Still, I think I’ll miss the lack of a bigger picture. Or maybe I won’t. There’s nothing wrong with ice cream, as long as you don’t eat it everyday.

The Japanese version of this is a lot of fun. I read that this is an attempt to allude to popular “salaryman” comedies of the time. I haven’t really watched any of those, but if this is what they are like I think I probably should. The boss here is absolutely hilarious, and I guess there actually is a commentary in this film about Japanese post-war post-economic-recovery consumption and a lack of intellectual depth.

The American version is exactly as terrible as you probably already imagine it is. It removes any subtlety or authenticity. Which is really saying something given that this is a movie about a giant dinosaur fighting a giant gorilla. Still, the American version is pandering in a way that the Japanese one absolutely isn’t. That’s a fascinating look at the differences between the two cultures right there. - May 17th, 2024

The problem with seeing yourself in someone else’s story during the good times is it’s that much harder to watch in the hard ones. Absolutely soul destructive, in the best way.

It’s all fun and games to insert yourself into a fictional narrative, until the narrative shifts and you’re left holding an uncomfortable space. That’s a fancy way of saying that this just got really real, and really uncomfortable, really fast. I absolutely loved this movie, just like I did the previous two, but I’d be lying if I said my heart wasn’t furiously beating for a lot of it.

The thing is... I really do see a lot of myself and my wife in these characters. Obviously not everything, that would be delusional. But, yeah, there’s a lot of overlap. In the ways that I can be overly rational as a defense mechanism. In the ways that my spouse likes to take things to the ultimate extreme when making a point, especially if we’re having a disagreement. The rhythm of the fight in this film, its musicality if you will, resembles ours to an unsettling degree.

Or, more accurately, resembles the kinds of disagreements we really don’t have much anymore. One of the things my long suffering spouse managed to accomplish with me was to get me to go to therapy. And, after that, she got us to go to couples therapy too. I was very skeptical. For me couples therapy was something that couples in a bad relationship needed. That’s a very wrong idea.

Ask basically any couples therapist and they will tell you that the time to go to therapy is before you get to the make or break point. By that time the only thing the therapist is likely to be able to help you with, is to separate amicably. But if you go when things are still good, when there’s still real love to save, that’s when you can start to unpack the paths your relationship walks, and to forge new ones that maybe aren’t as fighty.

So we used to fight like this. And we used to resolve like this. And maybe we still do, to some degree. But now we tend to have tools and techniques to find a better path to shared understanding. We don’t spend as much time talking past each other. It’s a huge improvement. Love is not a static “happily ever after” kind of thing, after all. At least I don’t think so. It requires maintenance, like a bonsai tree. Maybe someone has a completely uncomplicated and easy permanent love. They are probably also very simple people. - Mar 5th, 2024

Milestones are important to mark in life. They help give meaning to all the time we’ve invested and all the work we’ve done. This is a big one for me.

Something pretty incredible happened over the weekend. It’s a bit hard, at this point, for me to pinpoint exactly when this site “started”. That’s because the early days were unsurprisingly chaotic, and this wasn’t what it’s become for quite a while. Also, I rewrote a majority of the early posts, which were maybe a sentence or two at most.

But, the official start date, if for no other reason than it’s the date on the first post, is February 24, 2014. Which means that Saturday was the ten year anniversary of Cinema Gadfly. That’s hard for me to fathom. When this site started I had only been dating my wife for about a month. We’ve now been married for five years and have two kids together who are four and two.

This is one of the longest commitments, along with said wife relationship, that I’ve ever made. The silly dream that guy had all those years ago, to watch and write about all these incredible films, is still going strong. Ok, slowly, so very slowly, but still. As of this writing I’m at 38% of the mainline films and 51% of the Eclipse Series. That’s insane.

What’s even crazier is that I’m not stopping. I know I write so infrequently now that it can maybe seem like I’ve given up, but I assure you I haven’t. This is still a form of meditation and immense satisfaction for me. I don’t know that I’ll ever finish this project, especially given that Criterion is growing the collection way faster than I’m consuming it. But that’s never really been the point. This is about doing it, and I’m still very much doing it. Thanks to whoever has read anything I’ve written over the past ten years. Now let’s see if we can get this thing to twenty! - Feb 26th, 2024

As someone who once had a Facebook group dedicated to my pet called “Che is not a revolutionary, he’s my cat”, I think I’m entitled to believe this film was basically just made for me.

It’s a shame whenever I can’t find the time to write up my thoughts in a timely manner. I’ve certainly mentioned that ad nauseam for the past year or so. But it’s especially unfortunate this time, because this film hit me right in the relationship feels. I was stunned afterwards and I spent a lot of time thinking about it.

Others may disagree, but I found that, as hoped for, all the twenty something annoyances of these characters mostly fell away now that we were seeing them in their early thirties. Are these two people still somewhat ridiculous, speaking only in movie monologues? Yes, of course. Still, they are so much easier to deal with than their younger selves, but like, I suspect, we mostly all are.

But what struck me so strongly here was that I feel like my own relationship with my wife is somehow being referenced in this movie. Not directly, of course. I’m not suggesting Richard Linklater knows our story. And, to be honest, our story doesn’t resemble this one that much. At least not superficially anyway. But there’s a throughline that was immediately so apparent.

My wife and I met five years before we started dating, and ten years before we got married. We were “friends”. I put that in quotes because I don’t think either of us actually had friend-type feelings for the other, although at least one of us denied that for a long, long time. You know who you are. But we were not together. In that sense we were like Jesse and Céline, connected but also dating other people. Being married to other people in fact, for one of us, just like in this film.

But we were missing that incredible connection that we had found with each other. We were discovering exactly how special and rare that is to find in another person. I don’t know if I believe in the idea of having a soul mate, it seems a bit overly confused, but if there were ever a couple that could make the argument it’s us. Just the circumstances of us meeting at all were at least a million to one, if not much, much lower. But somehow we found each other, and we’re together still. The film spoke to all of that, and therefore holds an incredibly special place in my heart.

Also, I had a cat named Che. Who I adopted before this movie came out. So... that hit me pretty hard to. I mean obviously a coincidence, but to have that happen in a movie that otherwise spoke to me like this. Very eerie indeed. - Feb 19th, 2024

I have a soft spot for basically every element that makes up this movie… so yeah, not really a surprise that I loved it. But, oh man, I would have watched this every day if I’d seen it in ‘95.

A new year, and finally I got to watch something! This early part of 2024 seems to be starting just how 2023 finished, which makes sense. But that means it’s still a real struggle for me to carve out the time for this hobby. But, still, any progress is better than no progress here. Anyway...

This film is pretty well liked on Letterboxd, my film social network of choice. But because I’m a somewhat contrarian (see the title of this site) fellow, I often like to read the most negative reviews of a title, especially when I also really enjoyed it. In this case, what I found was that a large number of people seem to find the two principal characters here absolutely insufferable. I’m not surprised by that at all, but I am surprised at how it affected the experience of those watchers.

This tells the story of American tourist Jesse and French student Céline, two early twenty-somethings who randomly meet each other on a train traveling from Budapest to Paris. Because they are both young and freakishly attractive, they start a conversation, and when Jesse needs to get off the train at Vienna, they decide to spend his last day in Europe together. The rest of the film is them falling for each other, being cute, and then parting ways, unsure if they will ever see each other again. It’s all very romantic.

Like I said, a lot of people seem to find Jesse and Céline extremely off-putting. I’m honestly not sure what those people expect. These are two early twenties people who are trying to convince each other to like them. Maybe it’s just me, but weren’t / aren’t basically all early twenties first date couples absolutely just the worst? Like, he’s a pretentious “deep thinker” and she’s a pretentious “free spirit”. Yeah... of course they are. If I tried to have a conversation with my 22-year-old self now, I would want to shove something in my ears after about five minutes.

I really enjoyed this film anyway. Yes, at times they were the worst, but, also, it filled me with nostalgic memories of a “simpler” time. One I lived through, and sometimes miss a little bit. I was a young teenager when this story takes place and I would have thought these two were so cool. Hell, even if I had just seen this film when it was released, I would have thought this whole situation was basically all I could hope for in life. I would have day dreamed about it. I would have watched this movie until my eyes bled. From my perspective now, I can look back with semi-wistful sighs. The rose colored glasses of the unexplored potential of youth. - Feb 1st, 2024

Well, it’s that time again. Time to turn off the lights on another year around here, recharge, and come back even more excited in 2024.

What a year. What a wonderful, terrible, all the things year. I can’t really believe it’s already almost over, but here we are. I will be traveling for the rest of the year, so this is my last opportunity to sum things up with a final entry. It’s a tradition I’ve been doing since 2015, something that just doesn’t seem possible even as I know it’s true.

This has been another challenging year for movie watching. I set a new, and wholly unwanted record, for fewest entries on the site. I really thought 2022 would be the nadir, but... that’s life for you. To be honest, the reason I haven’t had time is the best possible one, it’s because I’m now a father to two incredible young kids who take up all my time, and I remain a husband to the best partner I can imagine.

Still, I do hope that time will begin to turn in my favor again. It should, all things being equal, but I am wise enough at this point not to make any predictions about when that will happen. What I will do is what I did last year, just celebrate the fact that I found as much time as I did, and enjoy the memories of these incredible cinematic experiences. Especially given the ending of this year, which sees us still in the middle of a terrible war, one which affects my family directly, but thankfully not in the sense that any of us is currently in harms way.

My hopes for 2024 are almost entirely non-film related. I hope that people will lose the selective empathy that is driving so much of the division and hatred around the world. I hope people will rediscover our shared humanity and build a better future together. I hope my children will continue to grow into curious and delightful small people. I hope my wife and I will continue to grow together, the branches of our shared tree intertwining more and more together. I hope for peace and love and safety and calm. Thanks for reading everyone and I’ll see you next year. - Dec 12th, 2023

I’m a sucker for the genre, but also, how the hell do you not enjoy this?!?

Time dulls the impact of most media, but man this one hit Hollywood and American popular consciousness like a bomb going off. It singlehandedly sparked the Blaxploitation era and gave us the first Black superhero character. It showed a view into a NYC that is now long gone, as well as commented on the nature of revolutionary struggle. All that is to say... there’s a lot more going on here than it might seem at first glance.

I’ve loved this film, and the genre it spawned for a long time. This is one of those rare occurrences, although not so rare recently around here, where I am watching a movie I’ve seen before. My first viewing of Shaft, perhaps twenty years ago or so, focused primarily on how cool it was, and how great the soundtrack is. I don’t think I really understood the deeper message.

To be honest, I’m still trying to fully understand it. But in the booklet that came with this one, Gordon Parks, is quoted as saying “You’ve got a forty-five automatic on your lap, and I’ve got a thirty-five millimeter camera on mine. And I still think my weapon is the most powerful.” That basically sums up what’s going on here for me.

Parks was trying to change the world through storytelling, and what a powerful tool that is. In this era it wasn’t well understood, but it was already reshaping our world. I’m thinking of things like the 1960 United States presidential election, but also new films featuring parts of society that had previously been completely overlooked.

Shaft might look like a fun action film with some questionable sexual politics now, but when it came out it was a revelation. The idea of a Black man who was winning, who was sexual, who took on both white and Black power structures. It was not a small thing. That it remains so watchable and enjoyable, so many years later, is also no small thing. - Dec 11th, 2023

Wes Anderson makes movies about the world I wish we lived in. Also, man Bruce Willis is bad in this, it’s the only drawback.

It’s become more than a cliche around here. I watched a movie, yay! Oh, but, it was like a week ago. Boo! Oh well. I write these like 99.9% for future me to enjoy, and this will be a persistent reminder of just what was going on at this point in my life. I don’t have time for movies, but I sneak them in anyway. I don’t have time to write these, but I do it anyway.

I do think the writing peaked from a quality standpoint a couple of years ago. That’s not really a criticism of me. You are not going to get better at something by not doing it. Plus, while I barely have the time to watch a movie, I have essentially no time to think about it after. I’m using these films as a form of mental salve anyway, rather than anything to be deeply challenged by.

That’s how I came to be watching this one. It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve seen it. I’ve probably seen it more than twice and less than ten times. So, yeah, not a new film by any stretch. Which was kind of the point. I wanted to wrap myself in the warmth of the particular way that Wes Anderson is weird. His world view and the logic that undergirds it.

Because Wes Anderson is not a filmmaker who has any pretense that he’s presenting the world as it actually is. No film is really, but most of them at least sort of pretend that they are. This, on the other hand, is an exercise in pure world building. A bit like epic fantasy, or a Marvel film, but in the tiniest way instead of the grandest. But this world doesn’t exist. I just, kind of, mostly, wish it did.

Because it’s an infinitely friendlier one than the one I’m currently inhabiting. So, yeah, I wish I could go and vacation on a weird island in the sixties where the bad guys realize they’re bad and turn good. Where love is enough, and people ultimately do, mostly, the right thing. Where everyone is weird in extremely specific and endearing ways. Yes please, sign me up! - Dec 7th, 2023

If you don’t like this, I don’t know what to tell you. We probably wouldn’t have much to talk about anyway. Oh, and but also, this perfect soundtrack, by Tangerine Dream, was nominated for a Razzie for Worst Musical Score?! What the hell was wrong with people in the eighties?!?

Welcome back to “it’s been a crazy long time since I watched this” theater, wherein I try to recollect the memories of a now almost mythical time. In this case, my world is still a complete mess thanks to the events of our world. This film was mostly a welcome reprieve from engaging myself in that world, but sadly I was immediately thrust back into its cold embrace upon the conclusion.

I’m feeling flowery today clearly! At any rate. There is so much going on here, in a film that on the surface might seem rather simple. I suppose most things seem simple on the surface, but my point is that there is a lot more depth here than one might immediately engage with. Frank, the titular Thief, is a complexly simple man. In some ways he’s almost childlike in his worldview. Prison did that to him, by freezing his emotional growth at eighteen or so. Arguably the state did that earlier by raising him in whatever hellhole of an orphanage he came out of.

But, that is to say, his vision of the future is childlike in both its simplicity and its complexity. The logic of children can be like that. He follows that logic intently, never for a minute imagining it might actually ruin him. He follows it right until the point where he cannot follow it anymore and then he switches directly into the emotional survival skills he acquired in that prison stint.

It’s fascinating to watch. Almost equally fascinating is the choice that Jessie makes to follow him on this journey. She knows what Frank is. If she didn’t at first he is completely, and endearingly, honest about it. She is getting involved with a thief who has a plan to go straight. Not a journey that typically enjoys a high likelihood of success. She does it anyway. Is part of that Frank’s charm? Maybe, although we don’t really see a lot of that from him. More likely she has simply realized that this long shot is still the best shot she has.

It’s all just a lot. Wrapped up in as smooth a heist film I’ve seen since Rififi. I can imagine a world where Frank’s plan came off. Where he gets the money he’s owed and that’s it. I don’t know if that world has a happy ending either, but at any rate that just isn’t how this goes. At least not in the movies. - Nov 20th, 2023

This is undeniably a masterpiece, but I hated watching it. That’s not even a knock on Bergman, who remains my favorite director. It’s a testament to this film completely achieving its goal. It was uncomfortable and awful to behold.

Typically, if it had been more than two weeks since I’d watched one of these films, I’d be apologizing to you all for the resultant sketchy thoughts I’d have to share. This time, however, the film is burned in to my brain, having been made all the more pertinent by the horrible events in the real world.

I don’t publish these when I write them, so I’ll note that it’s currently October 18, 2023. There is also, currently, a war happening between Israel and Hamas. I’m not going to comment on that, other than to say that my heart breaks daily with all of the suffering, and all of the killing. I mention it only in the context of what I’m about to write.

I hated watching this movie. That’s not to say that I hated the movie itself. This is an incredible film. But, for me, it was pure triggering trauma to sit through it. I am very fortunate, so far in my life I haven’t lived in a war zone. But, I am the grandchild of those who have, and their experiences are burned into my being. For those of us for whom war isn’t merely an abstract concept, this was an unbelievably unpleasant experience.

The title is exactly right. War is shameful, as are the actions of those caught up in it. This film isn’t about right and wrong, or sides, it’s merely about what it’s like to be a person living in that moment. To be fearing for one’s life, caught between impossible choices, and merely trying to find a means of survival. It’s unbearable, and yet being born by any number of real people around the world at any time. We are all witness to the failure of our species to do better. - Nov 14th, 2023

I like Zatoichi, but man I wish they would have made 26 of these instead. Mifune was the absolute GOAT, and Nakadai wasn’t far off.

As is so often the case when a movie is just really good, I don’t have that much to say about it. I’ve written before about how much easier it is to talk about things you don’t like, or things that provoke some immense question. In this case, this is just a super fun film with some incredible acting. Which makes for a first-rate cinema experience, but a pretty boring essay around these parts!

What I will say is that it’s just such a pleasure watching Toshiro Mifune work. He was seriously a national, in this case Japanese national, treasure. He descends on the proceedings here and lifts them up, in concert with the as-usual incredible work of Akira Kurosawa, and the rest of the filmmaking team. Most of the rest of the cast doesn’t stand a chance, they are merely there to provide the strict structure that makes his complete lack of it all the more noticeable.

This is a film about contrasts. Mifune’s Sanjuro is a character in motion, physical in his disregard for societal norms. Everyone around him is instead mechanical and stiff. Their order allows his chaos to shine through. All of them except Tatsuya Nakadai, who is almost as towering a figure as Mifune himself. The pairing is absolutely delicious.

Contrasts. Strict samurai codes come up against Mifune’s earthy lack of concern and Nakadai’s complete and open dastardliness. It all melds together to create something far greater than the sum of its parts. Not a masterpiece really. More of a trifle, something absolutely perfect and small and delicious. More of this please! - Oct 18th, 2023

Man Kenji Misumi filmed em nice. Every shot is absolutely beautiful. It doesn’t hurt that this also has the most narrative weight the series has had for quite a few films. I had pretty low expectations for this one, and it dramatically exceeded them.

Ultimately, this is a series about loss. Due to his circumstances, Ichi will never know happiness, nor peace, nor any semblance of a normal life. His is the struggle of the road. It’s heavy stuff, and the various entries so far, this is number eight, have leaned in to this narrative to a greater or lesser degree. This one leans all the way in, to a pretty emotional effect.

The basic Zatoichi premise is that the titular character is wandering around, gets into some kind of situation with some local Yakuza, and then has to fight his way out of it. Ichi is never about violence as a means unto itself. His is the path of begrudging violence, in stark contrast to Lone Wolf and Cub, who is a literal executioner and hired killer, for example.

In this instance, Ichi is being targeted, for some reason or another, by a gang of assassins. Like, literally, I don’t think they even bother to explain why the bad guys are after Ichi. They just are. Anyway, they think he’s in a palanquin, but he’s actually given it to a mother and her son. The confusion leads to the mother being brutally murdered protecting her infant child. and Ichi determines that he will take that child back to its father in a nearby village.

Of course nothing is ever that simple in the movies, and Ichi ends up forming a bond with the child, as well as with a “mother” substitute geisha that he meets along the way. When he gets to his destination the father denies his parentage and is revealed to also be a Yakuza deadbeat. As has been the case in some of the other films, a “normal” life path is partially open to him. He can adopt the kid, marry the geisha and finally settle down.

But, of course, Ichi knows that he can’t actually make that choice. It’s not reality, it’s merely a very painful illusion. His journey is the road, not a comfortable village life of fatherhood and marriage. This long-form meditation on the nature of grief and loss is a fascinating one. I cannot imagine an American film series taking the same approach. - Oct 3rd, 2023

Wow. It’s a good thing this is the last film, because there really isn’t anywhere to take the story at this point. So over the top and deranged. I know others disagree, but I throughly enjoyed this.

I mentioned in my previous essay that there was a lot riding on this, the final film in the series. The first film setup a lot of story, which the middle four films mostly ignored. I assumed that they would try to fit all that resolution into one final sendoff. I assumed incorrectly as it turns out.

Not that this film didn’t try to resolve anything. It did. I suppose. But it definitely didn’t try to resolve everything. It didn’t even come close. I suppose in a way that’s as it should be. I just started reading the manga that this film series is based on, so I don’t know how that ends, but I assume it’s with some sense of closure. But this film, really this series, is a superhero story, and those don’t ever end really. Even death is merely a plot point in a superhero narrative.

So, yeah, nothing ends here. Superhero stories are, for the most part, just eternal middles. Maybe that’s why I like middles so much better than beginnings or endings actually. The result of a youth spent devouring comic books that needed the story to continue on regardless. There’s just something so comforting about not having to say hello or goodbye. We already know who everyone is and we just keep on keeping on.

Beyond that, this is one super weird way to go out. Apparently, Tomisaburo Wakayama was finally given the green light with this one, to make the weird film that was always in his heart. If that’s the case, he leaned all the way in. From the very beginning this is so odd, with the sudden introduction of worm-like-zombie men being one of the lesser strange parts. It’s all quite a breathtaking choice, but also firmly supports this being the final film. I cannot imagine what the path forward from here would have looked like. - Sep 25th, 2023

The beginning is awesome, but it lags in the middle, and it’s pretty confusing overall. I still don’t get what erasing the message accomplished and, man, publicly flogging a three year old is a choice.

I thoroughly enjoy these movies. To me they are the perfect type of popcorn flick, something to just enjoy. Overall the quality has risen and dipped, but each one so far has been consistently fun, and I can honestly say I’m enjoying the journey. All of that applies most definitely to this, the fifth film in the series.

To be honest, I don’t have much else to say about it. Kenji Misumi is back in the director’s chair for this one, and the awesomely beautiful cinematography is back. The story this time is a bit of a muddle. It starts out awesome, dips very hard in the middle, and mostly redeems itself by the end. There are some bewildering story choices made, including a truly weird scene of child beating.

But, yeah, that’s about it. I think the thing I find most interesting about this film, is that the central mission of the character is mostly being ignored. I mean, his ultimate enemy is the big bad behind the story here, but it’s really only very tangentially related to Ogami. He’s once again doing the Zatoichi thing of just getting involved because he gets roped in.

We’re five films in though! And, really, the main plot hasn’t advanced much since the first one. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy all this Demon Way in Hell stuff, but man this is putting a lot of pressure on the next film to make something coherent out of all of this. - Sep 19th, 2023

That is just about the least sexy, most predatory, way I can possibly imagine someone having an affair.

There’s something that Antonioni does in this film, that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. There are multiple shots where the scene appears out of focus, until Monica Vitti enters it, and we figure out that she’s what’s in focus. It was startling the first time it happened, and then I kept my eye out for it the rest of the time. It such an incredibly cool way to demonstrate the internal struggle this women is going through.

This is a very different kind of existential alienation story than I expected. The first Antonioni in color, I was picturing a kind of vast cinematic wandering about. I was expecting Vitti to be moving from place to place with little enthusiasm for life, except for maybe a random encounter here and there. This isn’t really that film at all. Instead it’s a character study of someone who has suffered some kind of brain trauma.

Vitti’s character was in a car accident, the seriousness of which is debated in the film. The result seems to be someone who is struggling with semi-diagnosed brain damage, and definitely with PTSD. She seems chemically and emotionally distanced from everything around her, literally unable to connect with her former self and life. We never see her before this happens, so we have no frame of reference for the true amount of damage, but it seems substantial.

To her “rescue” is Corrado, played by extremely Italian actor, and future Dumbledore, Richard Harris. He sees this women in struggle and thinks “yeah, I’d like to get with that.” The entire thing is super rapey and gross. He basically just pursues her, acting like he connects with her situation, but he honestly seems to think she just needs to “get over it.” They finally have semi-consensual sex and he immediately is revealed to be completely useless. He cannot save her, he doesn’t even really try.

For a lot of the film I just kept wondering who was taking care of this women’s child, and wondering if this was another film made by a man who was completely clueless about how a family works. But it’s not that at all. Her detachment from her child, where she is clearly just playing the role she thinks she’s supposed to play, is the most depressing part of the entire thing. This women has lost her grip on everything and no one in her life has any care or desire to help her at all. It’s depressing. Beautiful and depressing. - Sep 1st, 2023

Somewhere between Looney Tunes and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I enjoyed the former and throughly disliked the latter. I very much doubt I’ll watch this ever again.

I have seen a lot of comparisons of this film to the work of one of my all-time favorite directors, Jacques Tati. I think those comparisons are specious. While it’s true that Malle, incidentally also a favorite of mine, is playing in some of the same universes as, say, PlayTime, his approach is missing some fundamental characteristics that make any comparison fall flat.

The first of those is timing. Even PlayTime, Tati’s most rambunctious film, doesn’t have jokes and sketches that are anything close to the rapid fire pace of this film. Tati allows things to breathe. There is a natural rhythm to the humor and to the setups. This careens from joke to joke, with so little space that I got exhausted watching it. It doesn’t create a sense of the modern world gone mad as much as another world where there never was any sense to begin with.

The second thing missing is that Tati is ultimately a very humanist director, and so there’s a good naturedness about everyone in his films. The humor comes from the bumbling aspect of existence, not the ill intentions of any specific people. Another way to put this is that Tati’s work is beautiful, even as it’s skewering that beauty. This film is ugly. It has a specific 60s preoccupation with ugliness as a source of humor. It’s something I find extremely off-putting. Pedophilia and rape are not inherently funny.

Ultimately my issue might be as simple as I don’t like slapstick. I never have. My favorite parts of this film are the times when the humor is smart, or the antics are zany in a cartoon sense. My least favorite part is everything else. Unfortunately the everything else is the majority of the film, which leaves me ultimately feeling very cold about the whole endeavor. - Aug 17th, 2023

If it were me, and I knew a murderer was going around covering the bottom half of his face, I’d probably take my scarf off before entering a strangers house. But that’s just me.

This is far from a masterpiece, although it’s a perfectly pleasant and decent film. That’s hardly a crime, as so few movies can possible be “masterpieces". I suppose the only reason it’s notable at all is that it’s a Hitchcock film, and he does have an unusually high success rate. This one has a ton of the elements of what makes his later work great, but is firmly in the “future master learning his chops” phase of the experience.

That’s all well and good though, because what I mostly want to talk about is the way in which silent film forced filmmakers to be creative about how they conveyed meaning. The lack of one of the basic tools in a modern films toolkit, sound, necessitates that other methods of information passing be developed. This is hardly a big idea. But it struck me, watching this, that the truly successful silent films were the ones that used the least intertitle cards.

Famously Buster Keaton tried to have as few as possible. I think that was the right approach. By not relying on written words, which in the context of a movie are distracting at best, the filmmaker forces themselves to be deliberate about what matters and what doesn’t. So much of the conversation here is only relevant in very broad strokes. The exact details of who said what add very little to the overall comprehension of the story.

I’m going to argue that the addition of sound to cinema has been, in this one very narrow sense, a bit of a mixed bag. Long time readers here will probably know that I question why almost any film needs to be longer than roughly 90 minutes. If it was good enough for Bergman, it’s probably good enough for you. There are absolutely exceptions to that, but it’s good as a general guideline.

In that context, there are so many modern films that are overstuffed with irrelevant details, and in desperate need of an editor to cut them down. Something that was apparently also necessary here, supposedly the number of intertitles was “dramatically reduced” from the original cut to what was finally released. But so many directors these days seem drunk on the willingness of audiences to suffer through endlessly long scripts. We would all do very well to return to a more ruthless focus on presenting mostly just what’s necessary. - Aug 15th, 2023

The fact that you could tell this same story in 2023 America, and have the only implausible part be the generosity of the police, is truly infuriating.

This film was made in the middle of the Great Depression, in a country that had no, or a very limited, safety net. It was one of many films calling attention to the struggles of ordinary people, in an attempt to shine a light on their problems. The story is one of theft, but only so that a father can pay a doctor to help save his young daughter’s life.

Of course, it’s no longer the Great Depression. Japan now has an excellent social safety net. No one should be forced to rob in order to get basic medical care of their children. That would be barbaric. Can you even imagine a society working like that? It would be madness! Madness! Is that enough sarcasm for you? Because I happen to live in one of the few “rich” countries in the world where it’s completely possible.

This storyline doesn’t feel like something from almost a hundred years ago if you live in America. It feels like something that not only could be happening today, almost certainly is. If it’s not crime to pay for a doctor, then it’s bankruptcy after having tried. This country has the most material wealth of any society in the history of the world. And yet we allow a completely unhinged level of economic inequality.

Two thousand years ago the Romans understood this. You can be a cruel empire, but you cannot be cruel to your own people. Of course I would strongly prefer no cruelty to anyone, but if there is any possible justification for the actions of empire (spoiler: there isn’t), then it has to be to provide a better life for the people who are the empire. We don’t even have that. - Aug 8th, 2023

There is such a fine line between art and pretension, and this just barely stays on the good side.

It feels almost trite to say this, but we’re back in it’s-been-so-long-since-I-watched-this territory. In this case more than two weeks have passed due to a combination of illness and family responsibilities. To be honest though, I’m not sure I would have had that much more success writing about this even if I had done it the next day. This film left me with very little to wrap my mind around.

I liked this film. It was just pretty and interesting enough for that. Plus, it’s the first film in the collection that has anything to do with Ethiopia, a place I feel oddly connected to. I say odd because I’m not Ethiopian, and I have never been there. But, it’s really not that odd at all. My mother was a linguist for all of my childhood and her specialty was in Ethiopian languages. My parents house is still filled with Ethiopian art, and I have eaten so much good Ethiopian food. I used to work for an Ethiopian family and I dated an Ethiopian woman. That is all to say that I have quite a lot of connection to the people and the place.

Having said all that, I actually have basically no connection to the people of this film. That’s because they are Oromo, a Cushitic ethnic group that isn’t part of my mothers area of study. So the language and the people in this film were all new to me. That’s the part I found fascinating. What I struggled with was basically everything else.

This isn’t a documentary. I don’t really know what this is. A trip maybe. It’s “about” a mild hallucinogen called khat and I think the purpose of the film is to make you feel like the people eating those leaves do. The film it itself an attempt to create a psychedelic space. Which is an endeavor I fully endorse. My issue is that everything was just so damned pretentious that it kept taking me out of that energy. The whole thing teetered endlessly on being either too boring. or way too precious, for its own good. I ended up liking the experience, but just barely. - Aug 4th, 2023

I’m in a bit of a state of shock to be honest. I don’t know why, but I didn’t expect this to be quite as matter-of-fact as it is. Anyway, it’s great. My only qualm is that it’s clearly Uruguay, but for financial backer reasons everyone is speaking French. A small price to pay for the experience!

I was taken aback by this film, my first by Costa-Gavras. I was in the mood for a political thriller, and one from the paranoid seventies sounded great. That’s not what this is at all. This is not a film that wants to thrill you, or to surprise you with dramatic tension. This is a film that wants to make you feel the political reality it is describing. It wants to tell you how it is, then methodically show you how it came to be. It’s precise in its purpose.

The idea that the United States of America has done truly awful things in Latin America, as well as in many other parts of the world, isn’t news to me. I’m not an expert, but I’ve long been aware of the ways in which the CIA and other parts of the establishment conspired to help fascist dictators keep power. All while enabling, participating, and training those who overthrew elected liberal and socialist governments.

But I probably a bit atypical for an American. For one thing I grew up in a liberal marginalized minority household. For another I’m the grandson of refugees. And for a final third, I went to an extremely liberal university. So, I’m likely in the top some percent of all Americans, when it comes to awareness around these issues. And still, my information is extremely surface level. I had no idea about this particular situation in Uruguay, for example, nor anything about what happened there in the sixties and seventies.

This film, and related films like it, should be required viewing in a country that otherwise learns so little of its flaws. We are taught hagiography here, not history. There aren’t even really mainstream filmmakers doing this kind of work anymore. Certainly nothing exists at the level of the post-Watergate seventies. That’s a problem, as the only way to start dealing with the terrible things in our past is to acknowledge they happened at all. - Jul 20th, 2023

Just so boring. It starts like it’s going to be an overly dramatic social commentary film and pivots to an overly dramatic romantic love triangle film. It’s pretty but ultimately empty, and that’s all before the ending completely subverts whatever wisdom it might have had.

I’m unclear what point this film is trying to make, but maybe writing about it will help me figure it out. It’s supposedly a work of “social realism", or, as Criterion calls it, an “ode to the power of working-class female solidarity". I guess. I mean, it’s true that there is definitely a bond-between-women thing going on. But one of the women is a literal aristocrat who has only fallen on hard times because she had the temerity to get pregnant out of wedlock. Not really the stuff of socialist legend.

This is the story of two women. Gyöngyi, the aforementioned aristocrat, and Vica, a naive country girl who has come to the big city in search of work, and ended up on a construction site. Vica is immediately the victim of an attempted rape by her boss, a man she looked up to, and is saved from homelessness by an unlikely encounter with Gyöngyi.

The two end up living as a sort of pseudo mother/daughter couple. At first in relative squalor, but then as the result of a payoff from Gyöngyi’s rich father, they move into the finished building that Vica had been working on. From there the story devolves into a melodrama where they both are interesting in dating the molester boss that attacked Vica in the opening.

It’s a weird turn. More than that though, the film repeatedly undercuts any point it’s trying to make. Is this a solidarity film about women? In that case it’s ruined by them both going for the same man, albeit slightly saved by the “mother” acting like she’s only dating the boss to save her “daughter” from him.

Is it a commentary on class struggle? It certainly seems like it for most of the film. The two women struggle and Vica makes multiple comments about the way people are treated on building sites. The problem is that the very end of the film shows another women being treated identically to how Vica was, but now that she’s the wife of the boss she completely ignores it.

But, actually, maybe that’s the point then? A commentary on the way that upward mobility robs working people of class solidarity. That’s actually pretty good. The melodrama surrounding it made it hard to see, but ok, I’ve sold myself after all. - Jul 17th, 2023

Oh man, poor sheep.

Well then. So, even in the context of me saying that I haven’t had a lot of movie watching time, this feels like a lot. It’s been almost 4 months since I last managed to watch one of these. That’s, by far, the longest stretch since I started this project almost ten years ago. It’s a real challenge, but, such is life.

This one was a random choice maybe to come back, but really I chose it because my Turkish father-in-law is visiting, and it thus seemed appropriate. When I mentioned it to him, he had absolutely heard of Lütfi Akad, Yılmaz Güney, and Erol Taş. These were titans of a cinema that most of us over here know nothing about. That alone made this a very meaningful thing to watch.

The other thing that struck me was the way that, as usual, being a parent has completely changed my perception of media. My perception of everything really, but in this case I’m thinking of the way certain plots just grab me now. This story, of a father doing something unpopular because he thinks it’s the best future for his son... it hit me hard. Before I had kids I think I would have just smirked, now it’s all I can do to hold back a tear.

This is the second Turkish film in the collection, and it’s honestly nowhere near as good as Dry Summer. But there’s something vital here. This is unpretentious cinema, but also a film with something to say. There’s something here about the way that society sets poor people up for failure. The way the edges of society are manipulated to be exactly in the worst place possible. The way societies fall to function. It’s all wrapped in a fun little movie that is also just trying to entertain. It succeeded with me on both fronts. - Jun 24th, 2023

Hard to follow, but it really doesn’t matter, it’s too much fun. A bit slower and less majestic than A Touch of Zen, it’s still a hell of a lot better than basically any action movie you’ll find today.

Another film, another long delay before sitting down to write. I started to ask myself, why do I mention this at all? The answer I came up with, is that I’m mostly writing these thoughts for myself. I do this so I can capture something about what I was thinking at the time I saw these films. A bit like a journal or a diary, but just with directed prompts. On that basis, when I reread this period of my life I’d like to remind myself of my complete lack of personal time.

This is the second King Hu film I’ve watched for this project. The first was the incredible A Touch of Zen. Both films are wuxia, which means “martial heroes", and they are basically the superhero movies of China/Taiwan/Hong Kong. But, what I love about them, and this film in particular, is the way in which cultural differences play out, as opposed to the superhero films we get here.

These aren’t about violence. That’s the best way I can think of to put it. American superhero films are absolutely about violence. Whatever morals and choices they have the heroes make, the issue comes down to using force, for good or for evil. It’s still almost never about examining the nature of the force itself.

Contrast that with these films, where martial prowess is celebrated, yes, but only the evil characters are quick to resort to violence. The good ones try their best to avoid it, and in some cases are actively unwilling to participate. The violence then becomes almost a ballet, so stylized that it’s barely recognizable. The wires and moves that are associated with wuxia are a form of modern dance almost. It’s really lovely. - May 11th, 2023

Making a movie about how you don’t really know your wife, by having her become a prostitute, is quite a choice.

We are once again back in it’s-been-a-bit-too-long-since-I-saw-this territory. I don’t even know why I mention it, other than so that when I’m rereading this someday I’ll give myself a gentle pass for whatever comes next. But, anyway, I saw this about a week ago now, and it’s gently faded from the front of my brain.

I read in the booklet that came with this, that it’s about Godard’s relationship with his wife, star of the film Anna Karina. He felt like he didn’t understand her, that although he loved her, he didn’t know her. It strikes me as a particularly French sensibility. What does it really mean to “know” somebody anyway?

His response to this unknowableness, is to make her an avatar for all women. And his response to that is to have her character descend into prostitution, despair, and early death. That’s quite a move there. It’s definitely a statement about something, although, as always with Godard, I can’t quite figure out what.

I think that’s ultimately what I both love and hate about his films. His movies are about being movies, and that gives them an eternal lack of depth. They pretend to have depth, but it’s always just a mirror reflecting itself endlessly. Ultimately his movies are about an image more than a reality, and as such they struggle to say anything meaningful at all.

What they do achieve at their best is a feeling of something. At that point it’s really just whether that feeling resonates with me or not. This one didn’t, but I absolutely adore Anna Karina, so I’m not that mad about it. - Mar 10th, 2023

It’s all ultimately so sadly predictable. But man the energy this generates is palpable. I do love the dad turning out to be not a total shithead though.

There are so many things about this film that one could be moved by, or that could have an impact. It’s a remarkable achievement, and terribly good. It’s sad, but also funny, and it turns our attention to a person and reality that isn’t usually the focus of cinema. In this case this is the classic genre of coming-of-age, but told from a queer Black perspective.

What moved me are two things. Both are more personal than anything else. In order to understand either we need to establish a bit about the story here. This is a film about a seventeen year old high school student who is struggling to come to terms with her sexuality, living in an extremely repressive and heteronormative Christian household.

When she finally does come out, her conservative Christian mother essentially disowns her. Her father, on the other hand, and her sister, do not. Both of those characters are what I felt most connected to. The father, for probably obvious reasons, as a father myself. But also because it’s so rare to see a dad as the one who understands, as the one who is supportive and caring. He’s a terrible husband, but he’s a great dad, and that part is so nice to see.

The sister struck the deepest chord though. Because I also have had the experience of having a sibling come out to me. And my reaction was, all things considered, more or less the same. I didn’t care. It didn’t bother me at all. I don’t think anyone should be bothered. It changed absolutely nothing about my relationship or feelings for my sibling. Perhaps that’s why I silently thought “of course she’s ok with it", even after the film portrayed the sisterly relationship as fraught and adversarial. It’s a sibling thing y’all. - Feb 22nd, 2023

The man just wanted to see his kid. But, you know, you live by the sword…

I’m discovering that there is a type of western I really enjoy. It’s the ones where a character is waiting for something inevitable to happen and we wait with them. Examples include 3:10 to Yuma and High Noon, both of which I absolutely adore. This film falls squarely into that category as well, and it was another massive hit with me.

I’ve been trying to find some mental energy to examine what it is about that premise that works so well for me. Maybe it’s universally great and I’m just an average movie watching Joe. I would believe that. But I wonder if there’s something specific to my own personality that is also playing out here.

In general, I tend to be reactive rather than proactive to the changes that life brings. I don’t tend to dwell much on the past or the future. I tend to exist in the present, with daydreams of the future and hazy memories from the past. A bit like a top down scrolling video game, I adjust my strategy as needed for what’s suddenly on screen. It’s a quality that drives my wife crazy anytime long-term planning is required for something to be successful. And she’s right, I’m hopeless.

On top of that, I have a great deal of anxiety about the known unknowns. That is, I hate anticipation, when I don’t know how the thing I’m anticipating is likely to play out. What’s interesting, is that it’s true even if I firmly believe that things are going to turn out well. Which I usually do. It’s not the uncertainty of outcome that bothers me, but the uncertainty of change. I just want it to be over with already.

All of that adds up to me wondering if the reason I like this format so much is that it’s much nicer to process that kind of uncertainty when it’s effecting some one else’s life and not mine? Or maybe it’s the certainty that Hollywood Westerns give. The end is inevitable so there is no point in thinking about it. Certainly when things are outside my control I tend not to dwell much on them. I don’t know. Maybe this was just great. - Feb 5th, 2023

Amusing more than funny. But I remain utterly impressed that Étaix could make these pseudo silent films at all.

This is probably a better film that I give it credit for. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, I did. But I’m in the middle of a pretty exhausting stretch of parenting right now and I’m not sure I picked the right moment for such a subtle film. I found it amusing and endearing, but not really all that funny. The first segment in particular was absolutely delightful, and then things went downhill, but so did my energy. Oh well. Movies are about the timing of watching them as much as anything else.

What this did spark was a question. Is there anyone working in movies today who is trying to do what folks like Étaix, Jacques Tati, or the original silent comedians like Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton were doing? Designing a film entirely around trying to setup clever comedic situations? I guess maybe someone like Judd Apatow is a modern version? Kind of? Not really.

It’s a real shame. These films are such a treasure, and as shown by Étaix and Tati, they don’t require a return to silent film. They just require someone to put the same level of effort into crafting humorous situations that Christopher Nolan puts into trippy camera effects or Michael Bay puts into blowing things up. You know what? I’m going to say Chris Farley was in the conversation for a modern-ish version of this.

It’s a shame. It’s a lost art. But then again, maybe I’m just not thinking of someone, or maybe I don’t know they exist. If anyone out there reading has any suggestions, let me know. - Jan 28th, 2023

It was mostly really good... but... uh, yeah... you know.

There is a sadness I know quite well. It’s the experience of really enjoying the work of a particular artist and then discovering that they are, or were, antisemitic. It happens upsettingly frequently, especially when looking at work from the past. Inevitably it colors the experience of the art. All the more if that prejudice is a part of the art itself.

I do not identify as Black, and therefore I don’t really know what it’s like to come across instances of blackface. But those moments where I encounter antisemitic racism are my empathy connection to what I think it might be like. That feeling of weight, of burden, of sadness, of anger. That sense that hand waving explanations like “it was a different time” can never be enough.

So, yeah, the scene in this film where Fred Astaire does a dance in blackface kind of ruined the film for me. Certainly it took my mind completely out of the story for the rest of the running time. Even after reading a lot of apologetic takes that this was meant a tribute to Bill Robinson, and therefore not intentionally pejorative.

I would say it’s a shame, because the rest of this is truly wonderful. But it’s not a shame, it’s shameful, and there’s a huge difference there. I’ve never bought the “it was a different time” argument, because it was also wrong then, and lots of people knew it. At any rate, I’m not from that time, so I can only react with my own sense of right and wrong. That sense tells me that it was wrong then and it is wrong now. - Jan 8th, 2023

Another year in the books. This one was a challenging one for movie watching, but had so many other wonderful things to fill that hole.

It’s that time again. The annual tradition around here, to mark the end of a Gregorian year with a post summing things up. This is the ninth year I’ve been doing this. Holy wow. That’s hard to even imagine. When I started this, I had just begun dating my wife, had no kids, a completely different job, lived in a different city. It’s really something to contemplate.

Close readers (I have been assured there is at least one, hi Ryan!) will know that this has not been a very prolific year for me. After mentioning last year that I had watched an all-time low, I absolutely crushed that unfortunate statistic this time around. With my former toddler becoming a little kid, and a new baby zooming to toddlerdom, it was unbelievably hard to find the time to watch and think and write.

But that’s life. This is a long term project for a reason. I think, at the moment, the Criterion universe is expanding faster than I’m consuming it, but that’s ok. That just means that I have so many more wonderful experiences waiting for me as I find the time to, well, experience them.

Overall, what my year lacked in quantity, it made up in quality. This was a wonderful set of films, with the highlights being Children of Paradise, the Marlon Riggs films, and Down by Law. But, really, it was just a joy to get to watch any films at all.

My children remain the biggest thing taking up time, space, and effort in my life. But they also bring me the most love, so it’s hardly a fair bargain. I’m looking forward to seeing what 2023 has in store. I’ll make no predictions on my pace, but here’s hoping I can at least find a bit of time to continue on the long road ahead. Thanks for reading! - Dec 31st, 2022

It’s all a bit too trite, a bit too pat. The characters a bit thin. The plot never really bites down. The setup is great but the rest just kind of rambles to conclusion. It’s a shame because it’s absolutely beautiful and the premise really is good.

This film is a great example of why I would never be comfortable entering into a suicide pact with anyone. I mean, you know, besides all the other obvious reasons. But yeah, I just don’t think I’m trusting enough. There’s something so unbelievably perverse about the idea of one of the two people dying and the other not.

Being first is no good, because how do you know the other person followed through. But being second is also not great, because man that’s a lot of pressure. And what if something happens, like in this film, that prevents you from following through. After the energy of the moment passes, it seems impossible to generate that same momentum again on your own.

In that sense I really felt for the male half of the suicidal lovers duo here. I am not at all surprised he doesn’t jump in front of a train, and I don’t think he’s a coward at all. Killing yourself in the heat of love is one thing, but to do it days later, after watching your loved one die and then being forced to run? No way.

Of course, if you are feeling sorry for yourself, going to prison for attempted murder is probably a good, if incredibly unpleasant, way to atone. You can flog yourself to acceptance. And, of course, in this film acceptance comes along anyway. - Dec 30th, 2022

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I think it’s possible one or two of these people might have been on some drugs here.

As I’ll discuss in far more detail for my year ending post, 2022 has been rough for finding time to watch these films. An equally big problem is finding the time to write. Writing requires thinking and presence and patience and time. All of those have been in super limited quantities of late.

I’ve harped on and on about that this year, but only because it’s so true. I have found scant time to watch and then less time to think and then no time to write. I watched this film almost a week ago. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I love concert documentaries and I love a lot of the musicians and songs presented in this one. I thoroughly enjoyed it but spent almost literally no other time contemplating it.

I therefore have almost nothing to say. Mostly what I have are impressions. Neil Young is so damn high during this it’s uncomfortable to watch. Things like that. It’s an incredible document to have of what has always seemed like a super fun time period. Getting to see just a bit of what that part of San Francisco looked like back then is a bonus. Mostly I like to imagine myself at a 9+ hour concert, blissed out of my mind. - Dec 28th, 2022

Hoo boy this is an absolute mess. Pretty but signifying nothing.

This was unappealing enough to me, that I will admit I didn’t give it my full attention. After a while I just sort of had it on, in the background. This is definitely not a movie you can just have on in the background, at least if you want to have any real sense of what’s happening. But, that’s exactly it, I didn’t care what was happening.

This is the story of a traumatized young women who is dating two men, and isn’t really happy with either. That’s about all I got from the plot. The entire thing is told in brief moments, from different time periods, going from one period to another in an attempt at extreme match cut cinema. It’s maddeningly hard to follow, but could be worth it if the plot inspired interest.

This most definitely did not inspire my interest. Mainly what it made me think about is how much unappealing behavior some people are willing to overlook in someone they find attractive enough. The main guy that Noah is dating surely realizes she’s a bit... off... from the moment they first meet. But he ignores it, because she’s beautiful, and he wants to be with her.

That held a bit of interest, as did some of the Jack Nicholson moments. Otherwise this was another miss in this box set for me. I didn’t hate it as much as I did Drive, He Said, but it definitely felt like a minor work included purely for the meta-narrative the box set is trying to tell about BBS. Oh well. At least it was very, very pretty. - Dec 21st, 2022

The life of a world class athlete is so incredibly narrow and small. Plus, this one is kind of a dick.

There is something so limiting about top-tier athletics. The drive that is required to be that good at one thing. The endless practice, the single minded focus. In modern society we tend to fetishize this, and especially the overly competitive individualism of the very best. The endless stories of the maniacal way Michael Jordan refused to lose at literally anything, as if that’s in any way a healthy way to live one’s life.

One of the challenges of athletics, especially for those who do rise to the absolute peak, is that it only lasts for an incredibly short period. Basically all athletic careers are over by the time a person is forty, and most are over long before that. Having spent their lifetime chasing a dream, what do they do when that dream is no longer available to them?

Even, or maybe especially, if you have actually achieved the dream. Robert Redford’s David Chappellet wins the Olympic Gold Medal. That’s all he’s ever wanted, his entire life to that point. He’s also maybe thirty? What the heck is he going to do now? The truth is he has absolutely no idea.

Somehow he’ll make some money. Part of the nonsense of amateur status in the Olympics was always the promise that if you succeeded you can make a living out of it. That’s why the moment that he almost loses the gold is so dramatic. Because that one moment, completely out of his control, is going to determine the possibility space for what comes next. What a wild way to live. - Dec 1st, 2022

This was utterly pointless and meaningless. Looked like they had a lot of fun making it though!

I don’t understand what the point of making a film “without a beginning, middle, or end” is. That sounds like the pretentious wankery of someone trying way too hard to do something “edgy". Honestly, it reminds me of myself in my college Video 100 class. We were assigned the task of making a film exploring sound and I chose to make a silent film. How unbelievably avant-garde of me right?

So, yeah, this is a complete and utter mess of pointlessness. Robert Downey Sr. has admitted that there is nothing like a purpose to any of it. I was so prepared to just absolutely hate it and slog my way to the end, only to come here and deliver an absolute roasting. But then something else happened instead. I can’t say I “liked” this, but... there was just so much fun energy to it.

I have no idea how this was made, but my guess is that Robert, his wife Elsie, his friends, and his son Robert Jr. just... made random films when they were inspired or bored. The whole thing feels like it was just talented people messing around, and then Downey cut the entire thing together into some kind of Dadaist mess at the end. I can’t totally hate that. There were some really funny lines ("I have a brain tumor", “It’s all in your head") and some really great moments. Is it a film? No, yes, not really, I don’t know. But it’s definitely something. - Nov 22nd, 2022

Bleak. I would describe this as bleak.

I’m not at all confident that I know what Kenji Mizoguchi was aiming at with these films. Am I meant to empathize with these women? Are they the heroes of the films? On the surface I have thought yes, these films are exposing the inherent sexism that Mizoguchi found in the Japanese society of his era. There are some things in this one that have me questioning that assumption.

This film is seriously just so damned depressing. It starts out dark and never brightens at all. Supposedly Mizoguchi was enamored by Italian Neorealism, and man he really, really went for it. The story starts with a woman learning her husband has died as a result of World War II. Then her baby dies of tuberculosis. Then she becomes homeless. Oh! Then she finds her sister, that’s happy. But then the sister sleeps with her boss, who is also her lover, spiraling her into revenge prostitution.

Nothing better happens to anyone else. The sister gets pregnant but loses the baby due to syphilis. The boss turns out to be a drug dealer and goes to prison. The younger sister of the ex-husband runs away from home, is raped, has her money stolen, and is forced into a life of prostitution. It’s all just endlessly bleak.

This isn’t necessarily contradicting what I assumed was the point of these movies. It’s a bit much, perhaps, but it’s still strongly making the point that Japan of this era was incredibly unfair to women. But then the last couple scenes undermine a lot of that. First the women go to a sort of halfway-house, and get lectured on why all of the problems in society are actually their fault. They are told that they need to redeem themselves, stop acting so shamelessly, and save the country with their virtue.

Then, the main women who is on this disease revenge tour against men decides to go straight. She’s initially attacked by all of her fellow prostitutes, but then gives a speech about morality and wins them all over.

What am I supposed to do with this? Is Mizoguchi saying that really this is all women’s fault? That they just need to not be prostitutes and all of societies ills will vanish? I don’t think so, that would be a very odd turn. But the moralizing just completely fails to cohere with the earlier story. - Oct 14th, 2022

This entire movie is all just set up for one scene. It’s a good scene, to be sure, but everything around it is just so boring. Also, and this is really a nitpick, but lingerie doesn’t rhyme with melody.

This movie was boring. Which is, ultimately, the one cinematic sin that I find impossible to recover from. I believe I’ve mentioned it here before; I would rather be angry than bored. I know people really like these early Lubitsch musicals, but the last two have been a slog for me. This entire thing has one good scene, and it mostly just underlines how awful the sexual politics of the entire thing actually are.

The story centers around Maurice Chevalier as a young military man, who catches the fancy of a jazz-age flapper Claudette Colbert. They are going along just dandy until, through a truly ludicrous series of misunderstandings, Chevalier ends up married to a seriously unhip princess Miriam Hopkins. He declares that they can force him to marry her, but they can’t force him to sleep with her.

He starts cheating with his old girlfriend, and eventually the princess wises up. She arrests Colbert and when they finally meet she convinces her to teach her how to win Chevalier’s affection. The answer? Become a jazz-age flapper herself. Once she does Colbert leaves with no qualms and Chevalier falls instantly in love with his wife. Problems solved.

It’s such a terrible moral. His deep love for Colbert, such that he was completely unwilling to commit to his wife, was actually just attraction to her hairstyle and generalized stereotypical mannerisms. Once Hopkins changes everything about herself then she is finally able to win his life, on a purely superficial basis. Yay. - Oct 8th, 2022

There’s a lot you have to overlook, but if you can this is a good film, if slightly boring. It’s heart is definitely in the right place. And Sabu shines right through the screen.

You have to do a lot of overlooking with these Zoltán Korda films. Sometimes you get a Four Feathers and sometimes you get a Sanders of the River. In both cases the lens is definitely the British empire, but what changes is the extent to which that lens compromises the intent of the subject it’s showing.

Different viewers will naturally have different opinions, but for me the heart of this film came through, and overshadowed the colonialist elements that are otherwise on full display. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a film full of British actors in brown face. This still features a strongly paternalistic British man in power. It has all the trappings of a “contentedly colonized” narrative.

What saves it is a couple of things. First, the main British character really seems to care and value the people around him. That goes a long way. The second is the ethnographic filmmaking of Robert Flaherty. It’s incredibly obvious what footage is his, and it’s breathtaking. He has such a natural eye and reverence for his subjects. It’s a window into a long gone kingdom, Mysore, and a long gone time. But of far more importance is the presence of Sabu.

A bit like Paul Robeson rising above the mediocre, racist, crap he is surrounded with, Sabu is the supernova at the center of this film. You can’t take your eyes off him, and he brings just such an incredible energy to every moment he’s on screen. It’s apparent in an instant that this person became a star. It turns an otherwise fairly slow and meandering film into something rather lovely. - Sep 15th, 2022

What an absurdly brilliant premise. Seriously, folks, this is the stuff of movie magic. Absolutely ridiculous, of course, but so damn good.

Perhaps I’m being a killjoy, but I just don’t buy it. Not that a Russian Czarist General could end up an extra in Hollywood, that actually happened. Not even that a Bolshevik revolutionary could fall in love with him, after being captured, even though he’s a reactionary aristocrat, simply because he displayed the tiniest concern for human life.

Even that a different Bolshevik revolutionary, that he sent to prison, could end up a Hollywood director. That the director would then cast the former General as a version of himself, and set him up for public humiliation. It’s all in the realm of suspension of disbelief. But that the director would suddenly care about him when he died? That he would call him a great man? That’s “If you like that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you!” territory.

The essay that comes with the film suggests that this is an example of Hollywood’s general reactionary attitude, and I agree with that. Hollywood is a force of almost pure capitalism, and as such has never really had much of a spine when it comes to social change. Sure, most of the people involved in Hollywood are liberal, but the industry as a whole isn’t. It’s mass market, and the mass market is almost always profoundly conservative in its attitudes.

The Russian revolution is a fascinating story, one I recently learned far more about through the fabulous Revolutions podcast. I’m certainly not going to claim that I’m any kind of expert after listening to one podcast series, even a super long one, but one thing I know is that the Bolsheviks weren’t just playing around. They were obsessive about their beliefs. I just don’t think that anything the general did in this film would have endeared him to the director in any way. Not buying it. - Sep 9th, 2022

It’s just really hard to care when vaguely bad things happen to unlikable people. If her husband hadn’t had his own mistress I’d be Team André.

I put off watching this for a long time. In retrospect, I simply had put far too much faith in the description on the back of the box. It’s a mistake I’m often guilty of. I know nothing about most of these films, so that’s the only judge I really have on what to watch. At any rate, I was expecting something of emotional intensity, and therefore never felt like I was in quite the right mood. Had I known that this was really much fluffier I might have had less resistance to it.

I didn’t like this movie. I think the problem is me really, not the film itself. Perhaps I remain in too cynical a place. Or maybe the exact opposite actually, perhaps I’m in too happy and hopeful a place. In either respect, I just don’t enjoy stories about unlikable people. It hasn’t changed throughout this project, and it often puts me on the outs with an otherwise phenomenal film like this one.

This is the story of a woman whose full name we never learn. She is simply Madame de ..., the wife of a count and military general. At the beginning of the film she is pawning the earrings he gave her as a wedding present, due to some unexplained financial debt. That leads to a web of coincidences that ultimately doom her marriage, and maybe her life.

My problem is that we are never given a reason to care what happens to this woman. She’s unbelievably spoiled, but also a prisoner of her circumstance. Her husband clearly loves her, but their marriage is one of formality of role adherence. He has his own mistress, which is apparently fine, but she’s only allowed to flirt, never allowed to take it further than that. Which is fine, until she falls in love.

But her love story isn’t given any weight either, not really. Why does she love the Baron? Because she does. Why is she willing to risk everything for him? Because she is. Why does her husband keep covering for her, until he doesn’t? Because. Ultimately, I just didn’t feel anything for anyone in the story. If anything, I had the most sympathy for her husband, and he’s pretty clearly a controlling philanderer. That’s a hard story to feel passionate about. - Sep 6th, 2022

I’d really like to believe they opened their cafe someday. I think it’d do gangbusters. But, also, even kissing was off-limits in 1947?!? Damn.

There is a facade of good humor that can go a long way to keeping oneself moving throughout difficult times. To put it another way, one way to deal with true despair is to feign happiness. Fake it ’till you make it essentially. It’s very hard to remain unhappy if you pretend to be happy for long enough. The danger is that if your mask slips for even a second it can slip very hard.

This is the story of a postwar Japanese couple who are trying to make it, while retaining a strong moral center. They live in a society that is wrecked to the point that only the blackmarket is really a viable means of economic advancement, but they refuse to participate. It’s a noble sentiment. They are like the opposite of Harry Lime in The Third Man. Because they’re honest, they are truly struggling financially, to the point that they can’t get married because they can’t afford to live together.

For most of the film Masako maintains a happy-go-lucky perspective about their hardscrabble existence, constantly having to lift her boyfriend Yuzo out of despair. She shrugs off things like holes in her shoes or an apartment being too expensive. Yuzo, for his part, seems determined to bring them both down, unable to get out of his own head.

Eventually the whole things briefly flips, and then suddenly Yuzo seems to recapture his own sense of possibility. His own ambition. It’s a powerful moment, even though the film is fairly hackneyed in its presentation. Mostly it reminded me both of my incredible good fortune, but also of the importance of modifying ones attitude, when that’s the only thing one has any control over. - Aug 16th, 2022

We all need a Roberto Benigni in our life from time to time.

I’ve been trying to decide what it is about Jim Jarmusch’s films that I like so much. Certainly they are stylized, in a way that I find very cool but also relatable. That helps a lot. More than that I think it’s just that I also have a certain affinity for the dregs of society. I’m ultimately a lot more comfortable with squalor than I am with luxury.

This movie shouldn’t really work. The story is pretty threadbare; the tale of a pimp and a DJ, who are both arrested for crimes that they happened to have not committed. They end up in jail as cellmates and immediately absolutely loathe each other. Most of the film takes place over the course of the next year of their indeterminate jail sentences.

It shouldn’t work, but it does, almost entirely because Roberto Benigni torpedos in from somewhere and completely steals the entire show. He is hilariously weird, and his weirdness perfectly matches with the cooler than cool of both John Lurie and Tom Waits. What you get is a prison break film where both prison and the break are absolutely the least important things that are happening. I loved it. - Aug 12th, 2022

I enjoyed it, it’s so beautifully shot and expressive. I have to ask though; is this actually a romantic film? Or is it just the story of a fairly douchey guy who suddenly pines for old faithful when his shiny new life turns out to kind of suck?

Perhaps I’m simply in an overly cynical headspace right now. Still, I just can’t really get there with the idea that this is a tender romantic film about separation making the heart grow fonder. It’s a beautiful film and one that I enjoyed, but I saw something far less noble in the story.

This tells the tale of a young couple, Giovanni and Liliana, who don’t seem to be clicking anymore. He’s distant and cheating and she’s miserable about it. On top of that he’s recently accepted a promotion and transfer, that will take him from Milan in the north of Italy, to Sicily in the south. He’ll be gone for at least a year and a half.

The film is almost entirely centered on Giovanni, but also doesn’t allow almost any reveal of his interior emotions. Instead what we see is a guy going about his business in a new place. He’s lonely, and bored, and things are honestly kind of crappy there. In that vacuum Liliana sends him a letter and he responds in a surprisingly tender way. She’s taken by this and they start a meaningful correspondence for perhaps the first time in their entire relationship. Still when they finally talk on the phone it’s stilted and perfunctory.

My read is a lot less touching than I’ve seen others espouse. Rather than the two of them learning the true depths of their feelings, I see one guy who thought the grass was greener, discovered it wasn’t, and suddenly wanted to go back to his safety net. If he had met a single woman, or even a new male friend, in his new city, I don’t think there’s any way he contacts her at all.

Because we don’t ever see what Liliana is going through, there is also no emotional journey for her. She starts out as a jilted fiancée and ends up with her shitty fiancé acting like he cares all of a sudden. There’s no growth there, just a woman taking back a deadbeat because he’s decided to try. How romantic. - Aug 4th, 2022

The madness of an artist is truly something, but, also, we do not deserve Liv Ullmann or Max von Sydow. Wow.

My availability to watch these films continues to charitably be called erratic. So excited I found the time to watch something, but oh boy I wasn’t really expecting a Bergman horror film, more or less in the Vampyr vein. My favorite director continues to give, however, and that’s exactly what I got. How wonderful, and utterly disturbing. Exactly the kind of thing Bergman would make.

One scene in particular sticks with me. The painter, Johan Borg, is explaining to his wife a story from his childhood. His parents, punishing him for some misdeed, confined him in a small closet in the dark. A closet they had previously told him contained a small creature who would eat his toes if he was bad. He eventually begged to be let out, and willingly encouraged his father to beat him with a cane.

This story apparently comes from Bergman’s actual childhood. It’s so incredibly upsetting. First of all, because it’s obviously horrific child abuse. But, what has stuck with me is the way that his parents maliciously abused his clearly very active and ripe imagination. To take a child like that and put that kind of imagery in his head as a threat? It’s almost worse than the physical violence that was enacted on him.

My oldest son is a very creative and imaginative kid. I can absolutely imagine the impact and effect that this kind of imagery would have on him. On top of that, he’s currently going through an age appropriate fear of darkness. To add to that? That’s just unspeakably cruel. - Jul 25th, 2022

I am just really glad I don’t live in 17th century Japan. Would not have gone well for me at all.

Close readers of this site, if such a person exists, will likely have noticed a precipitous drop-off in my output this year. You also know why; I’m once again a new father, and my movie watching time is extremely limited at the moment. More than that, my movie contemplation time, and energy, are very low.

Because of that, even when the opportunity to watch arrises, I sometimes hesitate to take it. The issue is that I don’t just watch these films, I try to think about them as well. I want to turn them around in my head, to try to come up with some thoughts about them worth immortalizing here. That requires extra brain cycles that I don’t really have right now.

All of that is to say that I totally watched this, I really enjoyed it, and that’s about the extent to which it has lived in my head. That’s not entirely true, the imagery has been playing in the background. This is a beautifully shot thing, full of intentionally wonderful imagery. Also, some weirdly out of focus long shots that I’m surprised they kept in?

My main takeaway, which I already put in the Letterboxd summary, is that feudal Japan was not for me. Way, way, way too formalized in its roles. I would do very poorly trying to exist in such a ritualistic and rigid structure. Actually, I would probably do very well subverting that structure, right up until the moment I had my head chopped off because some other dude did something that was somewhat thoughtless, I guess. - Jun 27th, 2022

No ethnic group is a monolith, and it’s so endlessly vital to examine our own part in our wider community. This film came out 18 years ago and it feels like it could have been released yesterday. Like Utah Phillips said, the past didn’t go anywhere, in fact it isn’t even past.

Questions of identity have been a major focus of my thought for a very long time. I was on a personal journey of self identification, and then engaged in what we now call identity politics, from a young age. In many ways I experienced the current moment, and many of the current conversations, two decades or so early.

That still puts me after this film, and I was shocked at times at how prescient it was. We are still discussing and grappling with most of the things discussed in it, whether we’re members of the Black community or not. So much of the language was familiar, even some that I didn’t think existed, or was widely prevalent, until much more recently.

As has been the case throughout this series, Marlon Riggs has shocked me with his insight and his bravery. These films are vital. They should be taught in every classroom in this country. His name should ring out like James Baldwin, or Kwame Ture, or Cornel West. Maybe you have to cameo in a Matrix movie for that last one to resonate?

I have been on my own journey. Attempting at first to define myself to myself. Later attempting to create an identity structure that would nurture rather than suffocate. Lately trying to explain any of it to my long-suffering spouse. It’s a lifelong pursuit, and as such I resonate with work like this so deeply. - Jun 3rd, 2022

Somehow Swedish sensibilities come out much darker and colder when mixed with German ones.

I’ve mentioned before that writing, for me at least, is like a muscle. It needs to be exercised regularly. When I’m doing it as rarely as I am these days, it’s a bit like going back to the gym after a long break away. You know there will be a process of getting into it, and you’re definitely going to be sore afterwards. But, ever onwards my dear friends!

There are a couple things I found fascinating about this film. The first is the way that making it in Germany, with a German cast, changes its sensibility. There is something droll about Swedish disillusionment that is simply not present in the German variety. As a result, this film comes across much harsher and meaner. There’s less of a sense of the deep irony of life, and more just grim loss of humor. It’s especially interesting with the context that this is a spinoff of some minor characters from Scenes from a Marriage.

The other thing that has stuck with me, is that most of the writing I’ve found about this film comment on it as a story of repressed homosexuality, with some further describing it as a retrograde homophobic version of that story. I think this is misguided.

All of these ideas come from the character of the psychiatrist, Mogens, who presents them as an explanation for the brutality of the central murder. But the psychiatrist has already proven to be both an unreliable narrator, and bad at his job. He knew what the husband, Peter, was planning in a general sense, and did very little to stop it. To believe his characterization, and assume it’s the filmmaker’s intended meaning, is a version of the appeal to authority fallacy.

Bergman himself said that the various explanations presented in the film were intended to be non-conclusive. He wanted to showcase the ways in which love can be a prison, with the idea that people will do horrific things to escape. He specifically mentions that Mogens is interested in Peter’s wife Katarina, and is therefore helping to sabotage Peter’s life, in the hopes of taking her away from him.

Katarina’s friend, Tim, is similarly interested in Peter, and wants to slowly take him away from her, and that’s why he introduces Peter to the prostitute Ka. So, what we have is a bunch of people circling one another, all with their own agendas, and “meaning” isn’t really the point. They all fail Peter, and he fails himself, leading to the brutal murder of Ka.

The idea of repressed homosexuality is retrograde, but it’s also in the mouth of a loathsome man. Mogens is doing almost nothing to help anyone but himself. His self-serving explanation probably helps him sleep at night, but does little else to resolve the central conflict of the story. - May 12th, 2022

You never want to be the hit man on the job they’re making a movie about.

I was planning on watching the Lone Wolf and Cub series sequentially. Even with the long breaks I currently have between movie watching opportunities, it provided a nice idea of continuity and purpose. However, I am never one to be a slave to a plan when circumstances intervene. A good friend was visiting, a movie night was had, and this was what we chose to watch.

Afterwards I told him that I didn’t think I had much to say about this film. That’s at least partially because virtually all of my brain is still consumed with new child stuff. But it’s also because this is one of those entries in the collection which just sort of is. It’s a surprise and a bit of a head scratcher. Enjoyable but not overwhelming.

We ended up talking about various things, but the one that held our attention the most was the narration. It’s a potentially very cheesy device, and initially I found it pretty silly. But over the course of the movie it provided a fascinating look into someone’s mind. Whose mind is the question my friend and I ended up discussing.

The essay that Criterion includes with this film suggests that the narration is second person. Meaning that this is some outside perspective on what’s going on. That makes almost no sense to me. My limited understanding of second person narrative is that the narration is describing things to the narrator. You instead of I. I suppose in a limited way that’s true here. But this feels much more like the internal monologue of someone, rather than a message to someone else.

So many people seem to have a narrator in their head like this one. Someone a bit cold and not necessarily their best friend. Someone who tells them they aren’t doing well enough. Someone who criticizes them. The main character of this film seems to be deeply unhappy with himself and his life choices. That’s why he’s mocking himself. - Apr 29th, 2022

Somewhat of a disconnected series of vignettes. But so damn cool, and it’s nice to see Lone Wolf be about something again.

One of the benefits of watching this series all at once, is that the previous film is at least theoretically still more embedded in my brain. There’s something cool about watching how the narrative evolves over the course of the films. That has been mostly destroyed by my current life circumstances.

It’s been a while since the last time I watched one of these films. That’s not surprising to me in the slightest, because we also just had our second child. Having a newborn in the house, along with a toddler, has reduced my potential movie watching time down to essentially zero. It has simultaneously provided me with copious amounts of sleep deprivation, the sort of which make remembering anything honestly pretty much an exercise in futility.

My primary feeling about this particular entry in the series was a positive one. I like that Itto Ogami continues to live by his own personal code. I still don’t have any idea what the “Demon Way in Hell” means, but maybe that’s just a cultural competency that I’m missing by not being Japanese? Beyond that, this whole film is just so damn cool. - Apr 13th, 2022

I’m not really sure where the moral center of this lies. In the first film he was helping someone in legitimate need, but here he’s just killing for capitalism?

There are some standard things one can usually expect from a sequel to a successful film. The main one, with some exceptions of course, is that the film will be very similar to the first entry, but with everything turned up in intensity. The same, but more. That’s absolutely the case here. This is more violent, with more avant-garde camera work, more color, more ridiculous deaths, just more.

I enjoyed the first film, and I enjoyed the more as well. That’s not always a given, but it generally speaking all works here. What I find interesting to contemplate is exactly what the moral center of this series is shaping up to be. Samurai films, and superhero films, both revolve around their morals. Is this a story of a hero, a villain, an anti-hero? What is this?

Itto Ogami clearly has something of a personal code. That much is made very plain. But, is he a hero? He clearly doesn’t think of himself as one. He describes himself as walking the “demon way in hell” and using that as justification for whatever he’s doing. Specifically, for being an assassin for hire. At least in the first film he was helping a legitimate cause, this time he’s just protecting the wealth of some capitalists.

His main purpose is supposedly as an instrument of vengeance, a very different spirit than justice. In that sense, I’m also not quite sure where this is all going. He’s sort of wandering around, seemingly somewhat aimlessly, killing people for money. I’m not really sure how that helps accomplish the goal of destroying the people who killed his family. There are still four more movies left to find out I suppose. - Feb 15th, 2022

It drags at times but good grief is it atmospheric. I’m not a huge fan of origin stories, but now that it’s out of the way I’m excited for what’s to come.

As I’ve mentioned when writing about the various Zatoichi films, a Samurai movie is often also a superhero movie. Not always, but often. Great Samurai are shown defeating armies of opponents seemingly effortlessly. They can do superhuman things and have a similar set of stakes to their stories. This is an almost pure example of that overlap.

In that sense, this is the classic origin story we’re used to. It sets the table for everything that will come after it. What I find fascinating, though, is that this isn’t the origin of how the superhuman was created, but rather the origin of his motivation for vengeance.

Itto Ogami is already powerful far beyond the meager talents of those that attack him. There is never really any doubt that he will succeed in whatever he’s doing, we’re just waiting around to see how he’s going to accomplish it. All we really need to know is who he’s upset with, an idea as to why, and an extremely vague sense of what he might do about it.

It’s a thread-bare plot style, but oh boy when the action comes it works. This film is visually stunning, even as it’s otherwise a bit listless. Its lack of a coherent narrative is almost the point. This is a story of pure vengeance, marching implacably towards some internally understood destiny. I’m excited to see where it goes from here. - Jan 27th, 2022

We keep doing this assimilation thing, thinking this time it’s going to finally all work out. It never does and it never will.

Assimilation is a concept I think about a lot. I’m not Black, but I am Jewish, and a lot of the issues that this film addresses are very familiar to my community as well. We are a people that spent almost two thousand years in diaspora. We have lived in every society on Earth, and we have tried many, many times to assimilate into those societies. It doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work for a few reasons. Primarily it’s because the majority never forgets that the minority isn’t really one of them. If you want to retain any sense of your own cultural identity, then you are, by definition, an other. Even if you don’t try to retain your uniqueness, they will retain it for you. To put it bluntly, the trains to Auschwitz were full of people who thought they weren’t Jewish anymore.

The other problem is that assimilation doesn’t let you become the group you’re assimilating into. It merely lets you become a knock-off. It’s built-in; you’re trying to become something you’re not, that they actually are. You can never be them, you can only be almost-them, which isn’t the same thing. Really you’re just trying to become non-threatening anyway, and that leads us right back to the first issue.

Assimilation isn’t the answer. What we need, instead, is to grow the possibility space for who and what is considered to be part of the “norm". Different cultures bringing things with them, altering what the mainstream looks like. Instead of trying to become part of the already established majority, we grow its rules for inclusion until they also include us. It isn’t easy, but given that the other thing has literally never worked, I’m not sure what other choice we have. - Jan 22nd, 2022

I guess it takes a while to transition from a surprisingly thoughtful take on nuclear power to… whatever monster madness this series becomes. This one was boring, but points for using a dinosaur as cool as Ankylosaurus.

A successful franchise is a complicated thing. In the past they happened almost entirely by accident it seems. A film would be made, do shockingly well, and then sequels would inevitably follow until they became unprofitable. For a precious few the sequels would just keep coming and coming. Godzilla is in that camp. There have been more than thirty films thus far, over eight decades.

It’s hard to see that path in this film. They haven’t worked out their formula for success yet. Dropping all the anti-war and nuclear tension of the first film, they don’t yet know what to replace it with. So this is pretty much just a straight action film, with little in the way of any kind of relevant plot. People find Godzilla, Godzilla fights another monster, Godzilla fights the people, the people find a way to end the threat. That’s basically it.

It’s not surprising to me that it was seven years before they tried again. This isn’t even a good film, and they needed at least that long to let the bad taste leave people’s mouths. Luckily, I find this sort of progression fascinating, so I’m onboard to continue with this journey and see where it takes me. - Jan 19th, 2022

It’s very appealing to imagine the real world was as poetic as our dreams, but it really wouldn’t be fun to live there.

This is a story told through poetic realism. I discussed the form at some length when writing about Port of Shadows, but the short version is that it portrays the reality of the dredges of society with a dramatic, and often ridiculous, flair. I eat the style up. There’s just something beautiful and sad about it, which is a combination that so much of my favorite art tries to capture.

This is a really long film, with a lot going on, so summarizing it would be tricky. But, at its core, it’s the story of four different men who are all circling around the same woman. They all supposedly love her in their own way, and they all definitely desire her. The film plays their relationships off one another, as the various circles slowly intersect and create increasing complexity.

The woman, who goes by the alias Garance, is desirable because she’s supposedly the most beautiful woman they’ve ever seen. A beauty so overwhelming that is cannot be denied. Her beauty stems from her outward appearance to some extent, but more from her attitude towards life. She’s carefree in a way they find alluring, even as they want to control it in ways that would kill the very thing they profess to love.

They want to possess her, but they don’t want to actually know her. They are all completely uninterested in her as a person, they are purely interested in her as an object. None of them put any effort into actually trying to understand her. Even the “best” one, the mime Baptiste, is mostly coming from a place of pure obsession, rather than any actual human connection.

It’s something the film only touches on in broad strokes. I can’t tell if the film is aware of the banality of the men’s love, and is commenting archly on it, or not. But it was very much there for me. Garance isn’t even the woman’s real name, but rather an alias designed to create an idealized fiction for self-benefit.

Ultimately, Garance’s line that “love is simple” is true, in a sense. To love is simple. To make love work, to last, to grow, is most definitely not. That requires actual connection and effort. None of these people are capable of that, and so in the end they are all doomed to their fate. - Jan 10th, 2022

I watched the fewest films since this project began, but I still found a tremendous amount of value in doing it. I’m excited to see what cinematic experiences I have next year.

In some ways 2021 feels like two different years stitched together. For most of the first half I was unexpectedly still in Europe, and really it feels just like an extended version of 2020. My 2021 begins in May when I got vaccinated. Life didn’t return to anything like “normal", but things got a bit less terrifying.

Because of that 2021 feels like it went by extremely fast. It’s hard to believe it’s really the last day before 2022, and yet here we are. It probably doesn’t help things that I have a toddler, a very pregnant wife, and another kid whose arrival is fairly imminent.

2021 was the year my son went from being a baby to a kid. He’s suddenly able to convey all the fascinating thoughts in his adorably tiny head, and I am so very here for it. So much of my life is wrapped up in going on adventures with him, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

At the same time, I’m about to embark on the whole rollercoaster all over again. I’m terrified and excited in equal measure. I don’t know much about popular culture, but I can tell you a whole lot about dinosaurs. It’s been a weird long year. I’m hopeful about 2022, but I’m also just taking things day-by-day. My year is going to be mostly about changing diapers and playing with a Giganotosaurus. I’m here for it. - Dec 31st, 2021

Any film where a kid is separated from his father is just going to make me want to go wake up my own and hold him tight.

It would not surprise me if there were plenty of people for whom the sentimentality of Chaplin is a major drawback to his work. He definitely loves a happy ending, and the emotions he most often trades in are definitely a bit on the maudlin side. Having said that, I am absolutely not one of those people. Especially since becoming a father, I absolutely eat it up.

This one hit me straight in the feels, as the kids at one point said. As the parent of a child not much younger than the one in this film, it felt like it was made just for me. The pathos of the separation between the two was powerful, but so were all the little kisses of their bond. It was shockingly well done and it hit me hard.

By contrast, this wasn’t the funniest Chaplin film I’ve seen. I don’t know if those two are related, but they might be. Perhaps in this case the scales tilted a bit too far on the side of sentimentality, to the detriment of the comedy. That’s not to say there were no laughs, there were many, but I was ultimately far more interested in the narrative.

The film does an amazing job of showing the bonds of fathers and sons, and a fairly terrible job of showing the bonds between mothers and sons. The abandoning of the titular kid at the beginning feels perfunctory, and we never really learn what happened to make the mother change her mind. It assumes a lot. There’s something to be examined there, I suppose, but as a father I’m just going to keep appreciating this. - Dec 30th, 2021

It’s the mixture of hope and hopelessness, and the utter certainty that there’s nothing else out there. For a lot of these kids, there really wasn’t. The failure happened way before we met them.

This is one of those moments where I’m so happy Criterion packaged things the way they did. I’ve seen that a lot of people would have preferred Streetwise to be alone in this release, maybe with Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell as a bonus feature. For me, the inclusion of both on equal footing was essential to my understanding and processing of these films.

After watching Streetwise, which takes place in one of the cities I grew up in, Seattle, and the one I usually say I’m “from", I mostly had a kind of sad feeling about the tragic nature of the lives of these people. After watching the followup, which tells the next 30 years of one of the kid’s stories, I have a very different perspective.

I’ve been seeing a therapist for a while now. In my case, I was largely motivated by wanting to understand better generational trauma, and explore how it affected my life. In watching the way that Erin Blackwell’s life has played out, I see so many of the same kinds of chains that I’ve been learning about in my therapy. The causes and the effects are different, but the overall structure is basically the same.

What got me to finally go to therapy, after talking about it for a long time, was the then-impending birth of my first child. Now, on the eve of my second child’s arrival, I find myself reflecting a lot. What I wanted, was to avoid continuing the chain of trauma that I had been given. To break some of the patterns and outcomes.

In Erin’s family I see exactly what the alternative looks like. Her children are all burdened with the same stuff she was, and so is her mother. It’s so absurdly obvious. What’s heartbreaking, truly, is the way that Erin can so clearly recognize what her mother did to her, but not what she’s doing to her kids in turn. It’s so very hard to watch. I don’t know yet how my kids are going to turn out, but I hope when they are in therapy someday they’re at least discussing something different than I am. - Dec 29th, 2021

It’s once again taken me too long to write something, which is a shame, because these films definitely made me think.

There is an interview with Steve Buscemi included with these films, where he tells the story of how he was at Sundance in 1992 and saw the first of these films. He describes being absolutely blown away by it, shocked that it hadn’t achieved more renown. It ultimately led to him getting involved in a follow-up film made almost forty years later. I can imagine what he might have felt that day in ’92.

This set is broken up into two films. Take One was made in 1968, and Take Two in 2005. They are very different. Take One is a miracle. I can’t really believe it’s an actual film that exists. William Greaves set out on an experiment. He would film rehearsals for a supposed film he wanted to make, then he would film that filming, and then he would also film that filming. The entire time he would pretend to be a totally inept director. Just to see what might happen. To create a symbiotaxiplasm, or “those events that transpire in the course of anyone’s life that have an impact on the consciousness and the psyche of the average human being, and how that human being also controls or effects changes or has an impact on the environment."

It works. The crew eventually, supposedly, spontaneously rebelled against him, filming themselves having an intellectual discussion of the film, their role in it, and even the meta nature of what they were doing. It makes the film. What would otherwise just be a bunch of weird rehearsal becomes something so much more. It becomes a commentary on life, and on the people and attitudes of that era. It’s breathtaking.

Take Two was never going to be able to live up to it. The experiment, once run and popularized, cannot be recreated. It required obliviousness which was no longer available. Greaves knows that, of course, and doesn’t even try. Instead he provides an almost metatextual commentary on the first film. By bringing back the same actors, to play the same characters, and blurring the line between the characters and them as people, he tries to create some new magic. It doesn’t totally work, but what a cool thing to even attempt. - Dec 26th, 2021

I’m absolutely here for 70s Paranoia thrillers. The sense of complete dread speaks to my soul. I should probably worry a bit more about that really.

Existential dread and angst was in the air of the United States in the seventies. It was in the water. It was seemingly everywhere. I suppose that’s a reasonable reaction to what was going on. Starting with JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., RFK. Then you have the Vietnam war, and Watergate. All of a sudden, it must have seemed like a combination of the curtain being pulled back and the world going mad.

There is a peculiar feature of the human mind. We struggle with causality. Specifically, we struggle to understand that big things can be caused by little things. That is to say that the world can be changed by one person. A president can be killed by a lone gunman. It seems impossible to us. Something so world shattering cannot possibly have such a straightforward explanation. Thus the conspiracy theory is born.

Conspiracies happen all the time, it’s a very common criminal charge. But conspiracy theories are essentially never true. If they were true they would be actual conspiracies, with consequences. They remain forever in the realm of the theoretical. They rely on this frailty in human understanding of events. One person really can change the course of history, in fact it happens all the time.

I see something of a through line from the era these films come from, and the perspective they were tapping into, to our modern era. Conspiracy theories are everywhere now and it’s hard for us to all agree even on facts these days. I wonder if that’s not simply the natural progression of the kind of disillusionment that folks began to feel in this era.

The assassinations made us collectively doubt the official explanations of things. Vietnam made us doubt our righteousness. Watergate made us doubt our government. Suddenly nothing was on solid ground anymore. Now, fifty years later, that has only intensified. It makes these films indispensable, relatable, and terrifying. - Dec 23rd, 2021

This is so boring. There are a couple of great scenes, full of vinegar, but the rest is such a chore.

Welcome back to one of my least favorite corners. That is, the one where I watched a film longer ago than normal, and thus have lost whatever fragment of an idea of what to say about it. Still, we press forward, doing our best.

In this case, to be honest, there wasn’t much to lose. That’s because I don’t have much to say about this movie. It’s... fine. It’s honestly very boring, with a few moments of real intensity between the leads. Other than that, it just plods on from start to finish. There just isn’t much here to talk or think about anyway.

That’s ok. The costumes were pretty and the few fun scenes were, well, fun. Sometimes that’s all you get. A lot of the joy of this project is in trying new things and seeing what they bring. Sometimes they bring the most wondrous experiences in cinema excellence. Sometimes, they bring this. The wheel turns ever onwards. - Dec 12th, 2021

This should be a genre of film. The fact that we only have this one rediscovered gem is infuriating, but I guess I’ll just be ecstatic there’s one.

I’ve mentioned before that I am Jewish-American. We, essentially, invented Hollywood. Many, if not most, of the original Hollywood studios were operated by Jewish people. That was largely a result of prejudice not allowing us to enter other industries at the time, and so we built our own.

Because we built it, we made sure that there was opportunity for us. It was a place where Jewish people with talent could find work. As a result, Jews are hardly underrepresented in the modern movie industry. There are Jewish directors, writers, producers, actors, technicians, editors, etc.

We made sure we had a seat at the table, but we also needed to have it be commercially viable. As a result, Hollywood has always played to the tastes of a majority of its consumers. What that means, is that Hollywood is lousy with Jewish creators, but there is a serious dearth of Jewish characters.

The Jewish stories that do get told are usually either trauma stories, involving Pogroms or the Holocaust, biblical, or they focus on the otherness of the ultra-religious. We don’t get a lot of stories that are Jewish, but also just whatever. This is one of the rare examples I can think of.

Susan is Jewish, and her Jewishness is essential to the story, but it’s not central. This isn’t a story about Jewishness, it’s a story about a specific person who happens to be Jewish. It shapes the narrative rather than dominating it. That’s so rare and wonderful to see.

The other thing about this film that is unusual and wonderful is that it really trusts the viewer to follow along with these people. We don’t get all the details, but not in a withholding or punitive way. We see the parts of their lives we see, and they know the rest. They reference things that the film doesn’t explain or wink at. It’s just life.

Specifically, the coming of age of one twenty-something year old Jewish woman living in late seventies New York and trying to figure her shit out. There are a lot of reviews of this film on Letterboxd comparing it to Frances Ha, which I totally get, but it’s incredibly sad that it took 35 years for there to be something to compare it to. It better not take another 35 for the next one. - Dec 8th, 2021

There’s something here. A lot of it is a muddled mess, but there is something.

I didn’t enjoy this film for the vast majority of its runtime. I was watching along, thinking that it just wasn’t for me. That, on its own, isn’t that unusual. What is somewhat less frequent though, is that as I thought about it after it ended, I realized I had enjoyed it after all. Sometimes it takes until the very, very end, to find the thing in a movie that you resonate with.

In this one, I think I didn’t quite understand what was going on. The film doesn’t hand hold the audience, with its layering of fantasy and reality. It wasn’t until the end, when I realized that most of the things that were happening were only in the script of a book a writer was writing, that I began to be on Varda’s wavelength.

What I find interesting in this film is a moment very near the end. The writer I mentioned, Edgar, has imagined a terrible duel with a reclusive scientist who lives in the town. Edgar has won the duel, but at the cost of the life of the scientist, who fell from his high tower into a glass building below.

Edgar is talking to a local, who mentions that the scientist has committed suicide. He jumped from exactly the spot where Edgar imagined he fell in the duel. Suddenly art becomes disturbingly real. We have probably all imagined the people around us in various situations, how terrifying when they play out in a similar way to our imagination!

Edgar didn’t “cause” the death of the scientist, not in any type of causality we understand. But he is connected to it in his mind. It’s fascinating thing to think about. Does he feel any sense of culpability, no matter how ill-placed? I would for sure. How can you not, when you sent that kind of energy around? - Nov 28th, 2021

I was raised on musicals and in the theatre and I am so here for this.

Update: I did not put any thought into the timing of this essay. I don’t write on any kind of schedule. When I finish writing the next one I post the previous one. All that is to say, Stephen Sondheim passed away today at the age of 91. Somehow it seems fitting that, in my own tiny way, I accidentally made this tribute to his genius.

I could understand someone for whom this film is a trifle. It’s under an hour long, it’s about the making of a cast album for a Broadway show, it’s mostly just people singing songs. For me, it is monumental. I can thank my mother for that one.

My mother grew up in Westchester County, just outside New York City. As a birthday gift each year she was taken to a Broadway show, and, crucially, gifted the Original Cast Album from that show. I grew up in a house where all of those cast albums had been lovingly kept. I devoured them. I still know all the words to so many shows.

I grew up as a theatre kid. I was incredibly fortunate to spend a portion of my youth in Palo Alto, CA, home to the phenomenal Children’s Theater. I was in my first play at 11, in maybe 30 or so overall, and spent four consecutive summers attending a conservatory there. I lived in that place.

All of that is to say that this was very much my thing. I loved every second of it. As it was playing I had two thoughts, one was how much I loved it, and the other was how impressed I was at how nice and gentle everyone was being. This was a tremendously stressful moment, and I was so surprised and delighted that it was handled so pleasantly.

I wonder what that says about me and my own days in the theatre? Because as far as I can tell, I am singularly alone in this reading of the film. Even the producer of the record himself later profusely apologized for his behavior. Was my own experience so brutal, or have I just been jaded by too many stories of horrific set conditions on auteur-directed films? - Nov 26th, 2021

This is film as revolutionary act. It’s provoking, deep, funny, painful, and powerful. Essential.

This is a film about intersectionality. That’s a word that you hear a lot these days, but its meaning can be lost in the noise. In this case it means that someone can face oppression for being gay and they can face oppression for being Black, but they can also face oppression for being gay and Black. They can encounter racism from their gay community and homophobia from their Black community. Their identity intersects and creates distinct advantages and disadvantages.

Gay Black men are, and have been, erased from their respective broader narratives, and that’s something that Marlon Riggs wanted to challenge. He does it brilliantly. On one level it’s really nice to know that 32 years later some things actually have improved. It’s no longer quite as shocking to see two men kiss on television. On the other hand, it’s incredibly depressing to contemplate about what Marlon Riggs might think of the world as it stands today. I’m not sure he would see it as any kind of victory for the issues he cared about.

At least some people are starting to understand the nuances of these identity circles. That a person can be discriminated for complex combinations of reasons. That marginalized communities still marginalize people. And most of all how much beauty and joy there is in the Black gay community. That’s what ultimately makes this film such a wonder. The love that pours out of it to the point of bursting. Love that all the pain and sadness still cannot eclipse. - Nov 22nd, 2021

I don’t think Buster Keaton gets nearly enough credit for having been in absolutely phenomenal shape.

There are three comedians who are generally considered to have been the most important of the silent era. Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton. The first two have appeared here many times over the years, but this is the first Keaton feature film I’ve had the pleasure to watch.

What struck me the most was the physicality with which he performed. That’s something I usually associate more with slapstick, a brand of comedy I am very much not a fan of. The types of comedians I usually go for are Marx Brothers types. Or Chaplin and Lloyd even, both of whom have some physical presence in their comedy, but nothing like this.

Keaton was a serious athlete. When he runs down the street I started to wonder if the film had been sped up at all. Knowing that he actually did all of these stunts is mind boggling. How the heck did he manage to not kill himself doing all of this? It’s just so impressive, before you even factor in how absolutely hilarious it all is. - Nov 8th, 2021

Jean Cocteau definitely used a capital P anytime he used the word poet. I have no real idea what this was about, and while it was pretty, it was also so boring.

There are parts of this that are simply visually delightful. Jean Cocteau, like Karel Zeman in a way, was so adept at making the most of the practical effects at his disposal. When people nowadays talk about what we’ve lost with the advent of ubiquitous CGI, this is what they mean. There was such an incredible can-do spirit to this era of visual filmmaking. I miss it.

Having said all of that, that was the only thing I liked about this film. Allegory, and poetic filmmaking, remains deeply not for me. Don’t get me wrong, I want to like this stuff, I just really don’t. I find myself immediately frustrated and bored. This film in particular, with its interminable middle “court” scene, was just such a chore to get through.

There’s a certain way young designers talk about design. I’ve always described it as being able to tell, when they’re speaking, that they are pronouncing design with a capital D. They’re saying Design, with reverence. That’s the way Jean Cocteau says poet. Poet. Poetry is a justification and universe all of its own to Cocteau. That’s beautiful, it’s just not for me. - Nov 2nd, 2021

Corridors of Blood? More like Borridors of Blood. Amirite?!?

This is the worst kind of film. A boring one. At least when a film is truly bad, that’s something to focus on. It demands a certain kind of attention. Even if a film makes me angry, that’s an emotion, and gives me something to write about here. But boring is just the actual worst. Merely finishing this felt like such a chore, and I was very happy when the finale finally finished. The last three words of that sentence were more interesting than this movie was.

It’s a shame, because the premise and the themes could be interesting in another, better, film. This is the story of a surgeon working in a pre-anesthesia world, who believes that there must be a more humane method of medicine. His desire to find it leads to experimenting on himself, which in turn leads to a bad opium addiction. The drugs lead him to ruin and despair, and we all learn a good moral lesson about not rushing into things.

There is something in there about the complacency many people have with the current way things work. There is a prominent rival doctor in this film who believes that pain is an eternal unavoidable requirement of surgery. That’s a terrible view. Testing new drugs on yourself is obviously a bad idea, but so is stagnation based on “that’s how it’s always been done.” That attitude has never lead to changing anything for the better. - Oct 27th, 2021

Well, that certainly took some unexpected turns. Not at all the movie I thought it was halfway through and so much weirder than I could ever have predicted. The blood stays on the blade.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I love a good police procedural. I especially love it when the crime investigators aren’t actually police. My favorite episode of the classic 80s and 90s Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series is The Blue Carbuncle, where Sherlock just goes from clue to clue in relentless pursuit of the truth. For roughly the first half of this movie that’s what I thought I was watching. What I was actually watching was something very different.

I didn’t know this was a horror movie. I should maybe have guessed due to the inclusion of Boris Karloff as the lead actor, but I didn’t. I had no idea what was going on until the film took its dramatic turn, which I won’t spoil here. I think I actually gasped out loud, then laughed, and said to no one “well, I wasn’t expecting that!” Those kinds of surprises in life feel rare, and are something to celebrate.

It’s a goofy film to be sure, with an absolutely ridiculous and twisting plot. What I found most interesting to ruminate on though was how the story was really about Karloff’s character being so compelled to investigate a crime, because of his own repressed memories. It’s something I thought a lot about before I started therapy for the first time. I wondered if there was some deep dark secret buried away inside me. I’ve talked to other friends and they’ve told the same story.

I think it makes sense. It’s one of the tropes of therapy to begin with, and then if you sense you have a need for therapy anyway how could you not wonder? As it turns out my issues were much more obvious than that, well obvious to any trained therapist who wasn’t me I suppose. But the concept has stuck with me. This film represented a ludicrous horror movie version of the same idea, and I found that I enjoyed that very much. - Oct 13th, 2021