It’s this country killed my boy

it’s most likely just because i watched them both so recently, but while watching this i couldn’t help but think about how Ford’s treatment of landscape works in relation to Hitchcock’s own in The Birds, a film in which landscapes function as backdrops for artificial terror—empty signifiers in comparison to Ford’s mode of excoriation through topography. Hitchcock paints the surroundings of Bodega Bay as listless and deliberately unremarkable in spite of how well they’re…

witnessing the cyclical creation and destruction of the universe through the eyes of god, looking in the mirror and seeing nothing in return; oh universe, i know your face / looks just like mine

it makes a great deal of sense in retrospect, but it wasn’t until somewhat recently that i came to understand just how fundamentally sad Makino’s project as an artist really is. in each of these films he searches for the impossible, making tangible the liminal space…

much closer in its tonal register(s) to something like Taylor’s Mom & Dad than it is to Nerve or Spring Breakers or what have you, which i think puts its brand of somewhat incoherent politics in a much more nebulous space than one might otherwise assume—for both better and worse. i mean, the opening conceit practically declares that this doesn’t take place in reality by positing that an entire high school of american middle class suburbanites would even know who their mayor is…

Kurosawa’s Pulse operates on so many levels it’s tough to keep track of. That being said, it is essential to note that this is not a film about the sociological dangers of the internet, or what have you. Rather, it is a film about the degradation of human systems—especially those regarding not only communication but representation—and the means through which loneliness and alienation may proliferate as a virus in the wake of such breakdown. The fact that the internet is…