New year, same me.
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Thief 1981
"I can see my money is still in your pocket, which is from the yield of my labor. (...) You're making profits from my work. My risk. My sweat. — But that is okay. Because I elected to make that deal. But now, the deal is over. I want my end, and I am out."
"Why don't you join a labor union?"
"I'm wearing it."
(cue ominous suggestion of a gun)
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The Lost Daughter 2021
I'm a little concerned that the real power of this will escape some who might only see in it a certain... "televisual" quality? I think that's become the general term of accusation for what I have in mind. And I absolutely see how the lensing, etc. might nudge people in that direction. I think there's a lot more going on; formally, a savvy use of the basics -- actors with impeccably expressive faces, the tight shot/reverse rhythms that know to…
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The Matrix 1999
You’d think the flip phones would have aged poorly. But something about the tactile, analog pleasure of the flip — the sound of it; the swift, unthinking cool with which Carrie-Anne Moss in particular accomplishes the gesture — feels incredibly of a piece with the skyscraping, concrete materiality of the so-called “real world” (the illusion of a world) as this movie defines it. It is hardly the case that we never talk enough about how incredible Moss is in this;…
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Zone 1995
It was a couple of minutes before I became aware of myself, of my body, responding to this with a fear I couldn’t totally account for until the film’s playful terrors and their seeming intentions, which I don’t want to pin down just yet, became undeniable. Miles of things to say about the overwhelming technique, the scent of its ideas (I want to program this alongside S3E8 “Gotta Light?”, with edibles, and see people writhe; I want to see it…
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Cruising 1980
“You fingered him.”
“I fingered him, but I didn’t think anybody was going to get that far with him.”
“Sometimes you only get that one chance.”Okay, fair enough.
I’d forgotten about the Black daddy cop(...?) who just shows up to smack white twunks around. There’s a reparations joke in there somewhere. It’s almost not even a matter of memory — I’ve seen the movie, granted it’s been a few years, and yet can’t claim to have seen those images…
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Chungking Express 1994
The apartment break-ins give me that singular WKW-induced euphoric panic that I love. The ‘90s were stupid fertile. I miss them.
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The Sniper 1952
I thought I knew where this was going but was pretty unmoored by it, in the end. The final shot... I like this film’s weird chemistry. The clarity of the violence, from the first kill on, makes him unforgivable; I’ve little faith in the police tactics the film’s characters advocate for; I was still very shaken. Its proto-procedural status is interesting enough. But it’s the canny attention to the public’s interest—its understanding of the attitudes that make procedurals such pungent fantasies—that really adds something, here. That, and its sympathy (I think) for the devil.
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