Watched The Life Of Chuck

Watched Sorry, Baby

Throughout the first vignette, there is a sense of separation of the viewer from Agnes and Lydie: lots of long and extreme long shots; lots of subframing by doorways; Agnes consistently, almost defensively placed alongside Lydie. This adds a layer to the bizarre, often alienating dialog style that Victor utilizes, inheriting its awkwardness and potently unsure footing from Gerwig and Baumbach. Then, the "bad thing" happens, itself separated to the extreme from the audience as we only look on time passing via the house it occurs in (one of many formal references to Woolf's To the Lighthouse, an explicit influence on the film). Once Agnes leaves this house, during the drive home and the bathtub scene, we are allowed to be close to her while she is alone, vulnerable, and fresh from the experience that creates the stagnant atmosphere of the first vignette. The bathtub scene in particular, using perhaps the first close-up in the movie, connects us with the particulars of Agnes' experience on level animal enough to feel bodily transformative. We do not experience the "bad thing" but we do experience the aftermath, the unsureness and alienation that formulates her experience in the rest of the film. Ironically, we feel connected to her primarily in this shared alienation from herself, and Victor's gift of intimacy is also a curse: to understand her alienation requires us to experience it. In the hospital, the school administrative building, and the courtroom, she is alienated, and we are alienated. There are gleaming moments of kindness, frequently from Lydie and once from a sandwich shop owner, that alleviate this constant isolation, but mostly we are caught up in her pain, her humor, and her life as after a certainty but before only doubt.

Watched The Color of Pomegranates

Unfortunately was tired enough for this one that the thrumming rhythm and enchanting images put me in and out of consciousness. What I did see was an extraordinary collection of images that created such an alien world that I went past bafflement and felt as if I was exploring a new idea of what a cinematic world can be. At the same time, felt a little like trying to read Finnegan’s Wake with a knowledge of Ireland consisting almost entirely of its geographic position. I certainly need to take another stab on more sleep and with more background.

Saw Materialists

Definitely not a rom-com, almost not really a movie. Putting aside the failure to grapple with the subjects that it admittedly pretty deftly elaborates, the characters and their lives are so atomized that the various plots at no point feel meaningfully connected, and barely even interact. It doesn't help that Song's picture of New York is one where anyone who is not Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans is essentially a prop filling space and imitating a real urban environment. Very weird to watch a movie with three characters, two of whom basically don't interact, in a world where no one else really exists. Johnson is actually stellar for at least the first act or so at aligning herself with the malevolent atmosphere of this version of New York, and Pascal does some of his more interesting work imitating her elegant embrace of the evil of commodified relationships. Evans is trying, but his character is barely there.

Watched On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

There have been many instances of spliced vertical video in movies since the rise in popularity of the smartphone, but this was the first time i became startlingly aware of not only the cramped slit of positive space, but the vast emptiness projected on either side. Bupe’s video represents a distinct, in some sense more Western ontology, outside of the beautiful, shadowed cinematography of the rest of the movie, which then exists exactly in the epistemological void surrounding the particular truth of her digital confession. For the rest of the movie, Shula and the rest of the victims are frequently placed in the center of the camera, and we begin to understand Chardy’s distracted performance as placed outside of the physical world we see, inhabiting instead the hidden landscape revealed by Bupe’s recording. Even as she moves, the camera lurches towards Shula, confining her to a carefully delimited box in which her sense of truth and justice cannot escape to alter the structure of the toxic familial culture she observes. In the final moments of the movie, she yearns to call out and alter this culture using the natural world rather than the technological, made aware (by a television broadcast from her childhood notably narrated with a British accent) that another way is available but unable to escape her prison in the center of the screen.

warm bread with butter. reblog if you Agree

Watched Grease

Really hard for me to gauge this because it comes across as such a legitimately sinister depiction of its subject matter. A suburban hellscape version of West Side Story full of WASPs, where there are no stakes besides a brief (and inconsequential) pregnancy scare and the teenager's emotions are annoying rather than earnest. The last song is about direct denialism of the passage of time. Deeply unsettling limbo version of a falsified Los Angeles in a falsified, misremembered, and palpably ironical idealized time.

knighthooded replied to your post

your rec and this poster are so charming I might have to go see it after all!!

As one parasocial critic friend said, I have no dog in this fight: I like the Bob Dylan song in this movie and maybe 2-5 more, and that's what I got for ya vis-à-vis Dylan investment. But I like when things are interesting, and as another parasocial critic friend said, Dylan is nearly the antagonist of his own biopic in this, and that is interesting! As she also said, correctly, the version that goes full Miloš Forman's Amadeus OWNS BONES, and this is not that, but that frisson there between Bob and everyone else definitely makes the proceedings more engaging than they could be otherwise. It is also I believe a big part of what makes it so funny.

Is A Complete Unknown "accurate"? Who knows, not me. Does it include multiple moments of women or Pete Seeger watching awestruck and/or annoyed as Dylan noodles out one of his songs? Oh you bet. Did the two and a quarter hours fly by? Honestly yeah.

And I think the main thing I missed mentioning in my initial Letterboxd review, is that there really is a mysteriously compelling quality to the musical performances in this. There is something going on with the way James Mangold shot them, maybe that everyone sung live? Something in the editing? Not sure. But it's nice.

The other thing I missed is just how much Now, Voyager is in this.

Saw Blue Velvet

Spoilers herein.

So much labor has been poured into the creation of sterile environments, the brutal separation of perceived light from perceived dark. This is, of course impossible; darkness, seen through Lynch's eyes, is not the absence of light but a solid, palpable mass, coexisting universally and definitionally with light in human experience. All things contain all other things. Still, the dream of the world of robins is unbearably attractive, and so there forms a false duality of violence, sex, love, beauty. In the world seen in the final sequence, one in which the robins have eradicated all of the insect darkness, I cannot shake the sense that all of the characters we see are dead. Their ambitions, beliefs, sorrows, loves, all stagnated within the perfect, frozen suburban portrait. A world without shadows, and a world without life.

I've always felt that sincerity is overrated. It just ends up punishing those who can't perform it as well as others.

The Rehearsal, S02E02