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Donnie Darko 2001
so, so adolescent but also so impressively, monotonically committed to its depressive teenage psychodrama that it disarms one's instinctive revulsion to the childish rough edges. kelly is clearly fascinated by corniness in all its forms, from the new age wine mom cult built on child pornography to donnie's parents who, if cheesy and ultimately as limited as the suburbia around them, are warmly, instructively so, and he deploys the corniness of his film just like the strange visual overlays and…
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Blonde Death 1984
pure rage (at the cops, at the middle class family unit, at heterosexuality, at the whole goddamn world) with a protective coating of absolutely caustic, weapons-grade irony, the bitter cyanide disguised as tylenol and tang. funny as hell, tonally dissonant in a way that threatens to destabilize any and all meaning-making, our attempts to extract value or morality thwarted and yet we are compelled inextricably to watch on by the luridness of it all. i know this is hacky criticism…
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Margaret 2011
completely torn on this one. it’s brilliant, but it’s equally insipid; the pace of edits, in which scenes lap up against each other or crash into one another with equal precision, is brilliant, but everything is beige; the perspective is unbearably blinkered, but it’s just reflexive enough about its own blinkeredness to be convincing, in the moments of highest drama. so it falters in the interstitial space between dramaturgical performativity and quotidian daily rhythms, in the plain unadorned performance of…
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Don't Look Now 1973
grief fills the world with strangeness and terror, rising from the ground like swirling fog, wrapping a tale of marital woe and loss in its curling, mythopoeic eddies. the pursuit of ghosts is labyrinthine and impossible: at the end its winding progression reveals nothing other than our own desperate heart turned against itself. wild movie tbh
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Audition 1999
what stands out most to me is the whirling phantasmagoria of the middle section, bridging the warm-hued patriarchal fantasy of the first hour and the cynical hyperviolent self-castigation of the last twenty minutes in a gesture that deflates both the (almost noirish?) libidinal probing of Aoyama's ego and the various mythologies he attempts to hang on Asami's image. she is victim and victimizer, sex object and domestic servant, empty vessel and overburdened signifier, each and every configuration colliding like tectonic…
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May 2002
lovely, small movie about real loneliness, which is so seldom treated with this much care and attention on film. jarringly ferocious montage pulls away at the threads of what might otherwise be a relatively unobtrusive indie comedy until the depth of our heroine's desperation has nothing left to hide behind, all the patchwork clothes and fake loves and affected cheeriness dead in the freezer with the cat. really fucking sad and really fucking sweet, can't decide which is more important. if you can't find a friend, make one!
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The Brood 1979
psychiatry as emotional vampirism, drawing blood from old wounds that has to go somewhere, and so of course it refashions the past into even more grotesque new shapes. family is a curse you've put on each other, and all you can do is make increasingly depraved images of your own rage and hurt in miniature until they finally destroy everything you love and you end up as a pitiable monster begging to die. gutting cinema, clearly the product of real pain
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Mysterious Skin 2004
Gregg Araki leaves behind the brash expressivity and amateurish immediacy of his earlier work and explores emotionally direct, almost ordinary filmmaking for the first time, quite successfully. cycles and epicycles of abuse crash against typically Araki-an preoccupations with suburbia and millennial conspiracism, which then become recontextualized as toxic microcosm and failed coping mechanism, respectively. the empathy here is really something, miraculous because it asks for no forgiveness and understands that breaking free requires none. nothing coheres by the end but of course it shouldn’t: Brady Corbet’s nose is still bleeding
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Raising Cain 1992
apparently this is considered minor De Palma even though it's a film almost purely constituted of dizzying phantasmagorias signifying not so much the bleed of dreams and past into reality as the total dissolution of the barriers between these experiences in the face of the intergenerational trauma inflicted by the family. and yet instead of a hitchcockian ending (wherein the overdetermined symbolic order is reinscribed and new traumatic ruptures emerge) de palma opts for a rube goldberg machine miracle. the cycle is broken but its victims remain
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Big Trouble in Little China 1986
only a dream can kill a dream: the fantasies of wuxia bubble up from beneath the surface of Jack Burton's sunny All-American dream as if to claim revenge for the stolen labor of untold numbers of immigrants on whose backs California was built. and who could claim they don't succeed? poor Jack is humiliated, alone, and tragically convinced of his own heroism while better and stronger men around him dance through neon abstractions and kill half-tangible evils he can't even comprehend. can't think of a better tribute to Tsui Hark than a breezily constructed martial arts comedy about the delusions of men who believe they're heroes
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Rio Bravo 1959
has the greatest moments of quiet of any film i've seen: whole movies could be made about the changes that occur when these most human of characters stop speaking and you'd never run out of material. predicts and surpasses every action movie, every male melodrama, honestly every film that was to follow.
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