no one exists
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The Fabelmans 2022
everything is always moving around too fast and contradictorily and that’s why I am going to relentlessly and selfishly force you all to stare at it until the day I die
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Popeye 1980
Comedically exaggerated social representations in fiction are just aesthetics and actually not exaggerated at all because the repression of the more vivid and less subconsciously coded and layered social ‘emotes’ that happen in real life are also the crafting of social aesthetics in themselves that represent the same thing that is present in these fictitious characters. What it does do, though, is make them so incredibly transparently linguistic representations. Literally one of the most insane NoClip/can see through walls films. I do not know how this is real. It’s simply too smart for the haters I’m sorry.
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As Above, So Below 2014
Pretty mid but I as a 12 yr old lol believe it or not didn’t catch how fire the flipping of the camera back upside during the the final shot is in the context of the vague hermeticism themes (i mean lol it’s literally the title). There is kind of an interesting aesthetic context they could’ve had while metaphorically presenting the principle of correspondence through found footage but they just kinda drop the classic like “woah look at this hexagram on…
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Exorcist II: The Heretic 1977
Like if Prince of Darkness was optimistically Christian instead of terrifyingly agnostic (I think). For how layered and visibly written out both the form and dramatic symbols are, there are moments in this where Boorman is just plain and simply beyond us all. Actually one of the most painful audience/critical misunderstandings in all of cinema.
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The Irishman 2019
The concept of asserting cinematic "nihilism" is often mistaken for a pessimistic trajectory of narrative. This is wrong and simply a projection of a said viewers moral inclinations onto the presentation of pessimism. The pointing to of visceral "disturbance" in these films through violence, conditions, excess etc etc, inherently moves it to be understood as a moral declaration and hence away from "nihilism." The Irishman is different. Depicted through an entire context of this fruitlessness of assertion from the start…
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The Lords of Salem 2012
Reparation never ends in Salem. All tomorrows parties.
A form different from zombies traditional post image explosion of expressionism into a more structural relation to the subject under turmoil instead of its interior depiction. Salem = said structural landscape consisting of sensory excess (the witches, ritual magic; anti repression being too unconfined/excessive for genuine ease) and false hope (neon cross). What you get in between these is simply walking emptily back and forth. Could make a crazy good double bill with Tsai’s The Hole.