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Sada 1998
Obayashi struggles against the deadening effects of narrativization with all his might: emotions burst forth, breaking the shell of historical fact and transforming into some of his most lushly composed and expressive images. truth can only be extracted in the form of sensations felt, while facticity becomes an obfuscating and defamiliarizing force. a major work.
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The Ghost and Mrs. Muir 1947
develops in gestures and tiny shifts in tone until it's grown into something colossal and devastating.
"You'll never be tired again, Lucia..."
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Eaten Alive 1976
in which the murder of a sex worker stains the entire world blood-red, and the Nazi flag sits only a few feet away from its American counterpart. genre filmmaking at its most abrasive and electric.
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The Day After 2017
gotta say that I much prefer Hong in this moralist-intellectual mode: his straight-up comedies are lovely collections of simple pleasures but they take on ethical weight only because of their position in a much larger structure (hardly a novel observation, but bear with me), whereas this film operates on a more immediately intelligible plane but retains the light touch of his earlier work. he also drops the overt metatextuality, allowing the world(s) to be structured and restructured by the actions…
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Her Smell 2018
the bipartite structure at play here (the first half a jumbled mess of dizzyingly rapid editing, barely intelligible monologuing; the second half drastically slowed down, stretching out those uneventful post-sobriety family scenes to sometimes excruciating lengths) is genuinely sophisticated, moreso than i would've expected from ARP. certainly there's still some formal overdetermination, especially in the first hour or so, but Moss & co. sell the logorrheic writing as the desperate rantings of terrified addicts, giving emotional heft to the pseudo-Shakespearean drivel.…
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The Keep 1983
resists easy comparisons to Carpenter, probably has more in common with Mann's digital work than anything else, insofar as he's careening between the abstract and the material here. evil as a concept and evil as a practice in dialectical tension with each other, the abstract understood as fundamentally unreal (Mann's special effects avoid Carpenter's squelchy physicality in favor of an uncanny, not-quite-there quality) while completely tangible in its manifestations. Mann's classic Doomed Romance of a Professional Man plot is also…
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The Discarnates 1988
cinema as nostalgia, cinema as regret. the intervention which creates the image decaying or otherwise rendering lifeless that which it seeks to capture. in the attempt to destroy the past we reanimate it, more ravenous than ever
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Transit 2018
the past and present echoing back and forth, each a ghostly reflection of the other. making lives into narratives is only possible in light of death, and tragedy only intelligible because the structures which produced it remain in place. lives are inscribed upon a landscape in flux, becoming something simultaneously fixed and fleeting. the best story about hauntings in recent memory