I live sort of close to an actually good movie theater now, and so I’ll be watching a lot more movies for the foreseeable future. There will absolutely be spoilers, because I want to be able to comment on any and all aspects, so maybe don’t use this as a source of movie recommendations. I may go back and revise ratings so that the five-point scale (bad, mediocre, good, great, sublime) has the proper dynamic range. These are strictly by the standards of arthouse new releases — four stars here does not necessarily mean four stars in an absolute sense, bearing the entire history of cinema in mind. A solid three stars is nothing to be ashamed of. I’m also going to be overrating a lot movies, because my opinion of cinema in general is so low that I’m willing to reward and encourage just about any sign of life, and of course, every good movie is better in the afterglow of having just watched it.
Crimes of the Future ★★★★★
I fantasize every day about David Cronenberg’s Crash winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2005, nine years after it was released. I’m also obsessed with how cool it would have been for the organic gun from eXistenZ to have been a movie tie-in toy in the Tim Hortons Timmies Mini meal. This is not a new release, but I rewatched the Blu-Ray recently. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of a student film, with the ridiculous dialogue, day for night, and the clash of American (Canadian?) English with the obviously Greek shooting locations. We find out what all the characters’ names are really early on, and get a more or less gentle introduction. This movie is about as high-concept as it gets, but I don’t for one second wish that the exposition had taken the form of opening titles, rather than Wippet laying it all out in a monologue. My experience is that, in a David Cronenberg film, suspension of the viewer’s disbelief is de-emphasized. The point is not to create something indistinguishable from a portal into a parallel universe, but rather to simply make a film that delivers an aesthetic and intellectual payload, even if it is obviously a product of the real world in which we live. The movie analyzes itself, the artist’s statement right there in the piece, the stilted and didactic dialogue is just part of the whole sapiosexual Cronenbergian experience, and I love it. I love this vision of an “unspecified future” for two reasons. First, we see deep insight into the nature of technological progress. In this world, high technology and appropriate technology have become one, as the only advanced technologies that have not perished in the backsliding and deconsolidation of technological civilization (note how the Sark is coveted and yet discontinued) are those based on the energy-efficient, locally autonomous, self-healing and largely self-organizing wetware of flesh machines. In addition, we see how no technology ever really becomes obsolete, only consigned to a smaller and smaller niche. Many observers of the Russo-Ukrainian War have remarked that it’s like every 20th and 21st century war happening all at once, in a nightmare pile-up of trenches, tanks, and drones. Rather than a succession of technologies, there is only a richer and richer tapestry. Second, in Crimes of the Future we see technological civilization ending with a whimper, rather than a bang. I agree with fossil fuel apologists that, no, the end of the world is not at hand. But while technological civilization will endure in some form, it might be an impoverished and unbearable one in which, among other things, declining biodiversity seriously compromises ecosystem services, and infectious diseases blight the monocultures that remain. We won’t die, we’ll just wish we were dead. As I see it, the movie depicts just such a drawn-out decline, albeit one in which Accelerated Evolution Syndrome has arisen to meet the challenge. There are two really interesting choices here. First, Brecken is like the Christ, miraculously born with a deviant digestive system that would have absolved humanity of the original sin of the industrial way of life. Christ allegories are a dime a dozen — fucking RoboCop is a Christ allegory — but this is a refreshing and transgressive variation in which Jesus has special needs, and is smothered to death by an “overwhelmed” Mary. In addition, the symbolic resurrection (Caprice’s autopsy of Brecken) is aborted. Second, the film seems to reflect increasingly negative attitudes towards mainstream medicine. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that this is entirely misguided. The pharmaceutical industry is run by private equity, and all that. At the same time, I can totally see how your average American normie shit-for-brains with a media diet rich in Facebook and local news could freewheelingly conflate legitimate and illegitimate criticism of the healthcare system (anti-maskers and their ilk have unmistakable Satanic panic, “think of the children” energy). What’s really interesting is that, in Crimes of the Future, the way to get off the LifeFormWare treadmill that ‘keeps us sick’ with an endless proliferation of medical devices is not to return to nature, become homesteaders, reject vaccines and ultra-processed foods, and so on, but rather to eat plastic. The solution is more microplastics, and more PFAS. I love this, because to me, it casts doubt on the idea that restoring human health and wellbeing is as simple as purging our bodies of all synthetic substances, and rolling back the clock on history to some imagined pre-industrial state. This political project is simplistic and naïve, because we simply derive too much benefit from putting weird, artificial things in our bodies, like cisplatin, biologics, radiotracers, all manner of prostheses, and on and on. The only real possibility is always going to be some compromise between nature and artifice. The film could probably be interpreted as some sort of commentary on transhumanism. My opinion is that, rather than thinking about some sort of future transhuman condition, it’s far more interesting and productive to think about how already-existing humans are ‘trans-animals’ resulting from some kind of biological singularity. There’s a lot of garbage behavioral science out there, and I would rather not be bound by any particular theory of mind, but I must admit to having a soft spot for dual process theories, and the idea that the computational and uniquely human System II emerges from the connectional System I. From the standpoint of System II, it is obvious that we are genetically predisposed to have certain feelings (love, lust, and all that jazz) at the level of System I, because these feelings increased the fitness of our ancestors, and without them we would simply not exist. Nihilism, of course, holds that because System I is merely a manifestation of our slavery to immortal genes, our moral intuitions can never be justified on the grounds of any unassailable first principles, human values are baseless, human life is meaningless, and so on. Existentialism, on the other hand, holds that values and meaning are ours to create ex nihilo, with the godlike power of System II. At the risk of pigeonholing myself as some sort of empty-headed, extremely online Žižek fanboy, I’m reminded of The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.
The lesson that we should learn and that the movies try to avoid is that we ourselves are the aliens controlling our bodies. Humanity means that the aliens are controlling our animal bodies. Our ego, our psychic agency, is an alien force, distorting, controlling our body.
Brecken’s deviant digestive system is System II made flesh, a uniquely human addendum to our animal bodies. In digesting technogenic plastics, it symbolically processes the meanings and values created by human beings. In this way, he is the first complete human, with Accelerated Evolution Syndrome of body and mind. Or, it doesn’t mean this at all. Either way, the film perturbed my mind in an enjoyable way, and provoked a response. My best guess as to the main thrust is that, rather than deny our true nature, we humans should embrace our status as alien interlopers on Earth. Far from being a perversion of human nature, all of this body modification, surgery as sex (bringing new meaning to “toe-curling”), eating plastic and so on is the highest expression of human nature. That’s what makes this movie so wild. The Daniel Lopatin-adjacent score is quite good. I loved it when the proprietor of the performance space talked shit about the ear man to Saul. I loved how weird Kristen Stewart is in this movie — twitchy, mousy, and negotiating a conflict between her sexuality and biopolitics. This bitch is unraveling. I love Lang, because he’s like an entirely normal fortysomething Millennial divorced dad situated inside of a dark science fiction body horror film, and his political struggle for transhuman rights is all mixed up with something almost like a bitter custody battle. I also really love the duo of Dani and Berst — they seem so goofy and dumb, and yet they’re service technicians for complex medical devices, as well as professional assassins who don’t bat an eyelash at power drilling into the back of Scott Speedman’s head as he mourns the desecration of his son’s corpse (and enormous setback in his fight for justice). I really love how all of the names are kind of fucked up — Timlin, Wippet, Berst, and so on. One of the funniest things to me, as an armchair observer of American culture, is how white parents in the past few decades seem to have developed their own mirror-image version of inventive black names, along the lines of ‘what about WHITE baby names?’ To me, Crimes of the Future extrapolates the process that gave us Cayden, Ashleigh and Gunnar far into the future, as though the English language were the victim of an acid attack.
The Brutalist ★☆☆☆☆
I was worried that, the entire time, I would be thinking about Adrien Brody doing a fake patois and getting himself banned from SNL. Instead, I was thinking about Seinfeld. Audrey has shiksappeal. When Atilla and László are following Harry to the Van Buren estate at the beginning, Harry’s car disappears around a curve because “it’s not good enough to get there, you’ve gotta make good time.” I really liked seeing Adrien Brody sob as his frail, osteoporotic wife Felicity Jones jerked him off, and spoke of being consumed by unconditional love. And then later, he jerked her off. It’s crazy to think that when people are playing ball or selling lemon bars or whatever at the Van Buren Community Center, they’ll be doing it inside this expression of how the unbreakable bond between the architect and his wife transcended space and time, and completely preoccupied them every day of the Shoah. Beyond that, the movie was extremely online A24 Oscarbait AMC Artisan Films dreck. The more I think about this movie, the more I feel like a fucking idiot for having seen it. None of the shots were even halfway interesting compositions, and this in a movie that is supposedly about architecture. The score — of course, every single fucking movie has to have a fucking orchestral score — was completely forgettable. This is PG-13 sexual violence. As I should well have known (I am fucking kicking myself here), the movie is trying to have it both ways, in that it wants to score points for broaching all of this serious, adult subject matter on the one hand, and yet treat the audience with kid gloves on the other. It goes without saying that this is exactly the sort of anaesthetic, artless checklist completion that will win you Best Picture. The offhanded and neatly self-contained way in which Harrison expresses stupidly obvious, on-the-nose anti-Italian and -Hispanic sentiment felt like a reshoot, in response to feedback from a test audience. He wasn’t reading as a villain, so the producers had to twiddle some knobs, and recalibrate the movie. These are the cartoon characters that you need to score a 98% according the eighth-grade English essay rubric that the Academy uses to grade films.
Vermiglio ★★★★★
I found it weird how what made this film a completely convincing window into the Tyrol at the end of the Italian Social Republic was the combination of unassailable, perfect period piece execution with the neutrality and sterility of digital video. It’s like the clarity of an alpine spring, or the cold and thin air atop a mountain — you see the coarseness and the fuzz of all the fabrics, the texture of the stucco or whatever, everything. It’s just incredible how, when you have audio with such a high dynamic range, you’re reminded of just how loud the popping of damp wood in a fire really is. The creaking of wooden floorboards is sumptuous. I’m really glad that I saw this movie soon after a snowstorm, with the memory of the biting cold still fresh in my mind. I must admit, I find Lucia to be rather boring. It’s not easy to watch her go through such a terrible ordeal. It angered me how, when she was in the depths of catatonic depression, everyone would talk shit about her like she wasn’t even in the room — never addressing her by name, only as “she” (or rather, its Italian equivalent). But I still think of her mostly as someone who got knocked up by her illiterate puppy lover. It was certainly interesting to see her go on this pilgrimage to Sicily, just to see Pietro’s other wife, and visit his grave. I really enjoyed how she did seem to find some sort of closure on this journey, but in a mysterious way that I couldn’t grasp. There’s a certain laziness to examining the lives of ordinary people. I think that elevating and dignifying irredeemably boring people for its own sake is a cheap way to score points. Plus, there are, like, a million movies that weave dissimilar, in-depth character studies with mostly loose ends together, to the point that it’s almost a trope. Now Ada, on the other hand, is a different story. She’s much more in tune with the abject weirdness of the world. Her developing mind is like this open wound, poked and prodded by finding her father’s stash of vintage porn, being denied an opportunity for higher learning, smoking cigarettes with that floozy Virginia, and really grasping what Slavoj Žižek called the “obscene social contract” at the heart of Catholicism (why Latin Europe is so much more fun than than Germanic Europe), although it must be said that Ada’s personal relationship with Catholic God seems more transactional and masochistic than is strictly necessary. It just seems like, right as she’s starting to gel as a person, her psyche is this rich soup of interacting desires and pathologies, with exploding complexity. She was built different, and I really wish I could have followed her life trajectory more.
Grand Theft Hamlet ★★☆☆☆
I played a lot of Grand Theft Auto V. Trevor was a true original — a bisexual, Canadian cannibal, speed freak and entrepreneur who made Michael and Franklin look zero-dimensional (“You smell like urine, you have blood under your fingernails, and you look like you haven’t slept in over a week. And then you give me life advice?”). I was proud to have stolen a Rhino and P-996 LAZER from Fort Zancudo, instead of just buying them. Killing Jay Norris (“This company has come a long way since we started it in my parents’ pool house in East Carraway.”) and Devin Weston was a joy. I despise almost all video games — it has to be really open-ended (I logged a lot of time in The Sims 3) for me to care at all, and according to someone who works in the industry, this is a red flag that I have a god complex. So, I hadn’t been to the movies in a while, and wanted to see what the game would look like on the big screen. Coming into it, I had a vague idea of why it might be interesting to see a performance of Hamlet inside of Grand Theft Auto Online. We all osmotically absorb this highbrow-lowbrow distinction from our cultural ambiance. According to the conventional wisdom, Shakespeare is the highbrow province of old Anglophile hags who watch Masterpiece on PBS. In stark contrast, Grand Theft Auto Online has what I can only describe as powerful Emirati trust fund kid, Halo 2 Xbox Live brat, trap beat Lamborghini Bored Ape sneakerhead dipshit energy (I truly believe that all supercars should be equipped with a defeat device that randomly turns the traction control off and wraps the car around a tree Group B-style). To be perfectly clear, to subvert the highbrow-lowbrow distinction at this point in history is to beat a dead horse. The artistic possibilities here have long since been completely exhausted. I was feeling generous, though, and gave the movie a shot. It turned out to be a slog. To be fair, there were moments of real beauty. That random people could come together in such a violent and unstable environment, and accomplish something with this level of complexity, is quite beautiful. I was really taken aback by the beauty of ParTeb’s Quranic verse, and also the otherworldly movement of his green alien ass cheeks. But no interesting juxtaposition or aesthetic clash ever really materialized. The cloying stock music and tired, predictable rising and falling action made me want to pull my hair out.
Queer ★★★★☆
I enjoyed this convincing exploration of an uncomfortable, confusing, and even unhealthy relationship with very poor communication and an unequal power dynamic. I must single the ayahuasca scene out for praise. The score has this funhouse calliope quality, as though the tones are being distorted like their flesh. The heat haze during the sex scenes is a great motif, because it’s like lust radiating from their bodies, and it effortlessly communicates how, as William lays dying, what flashes before him is this unforgettable and powerfully erotic memory of unrequited love. There’s also this really spacious sound that moves through the stereo field, a little bit like what you hear at the beginning of Moss Garden, off of “Heroes” (that song is how being brought to tears by a beautiful psychedelic experience sounds). The heroin dreams are really amazing too. When William has his knife sharpened on a grindstone, sees a crying newborn lying alone on a flight of steps, and sees all of the people in his life in the striped concentration camp prisoner uniforms, the horn sounds are just so dreamy. Why can’t we see Daniel Craig’s junk? It’s only fair to the other guy who did full frontal. Jason Schwartzman does fatface. Cast fat actors! I have been saying for years that James Bond should do heroin — I am on record as having said this. I’m just dying to be given complete creative control of a Bond film. Judi Dench as M: “Bond. Your mission is to do this primo skag.” You hear the servomotors whirr as the syringe emerges from a secret compartment inside the dashboard of the Aston Martin DB12. Daniel Craig shoots up for King and Country, hits the power recline, and then there’s a solid 22 minutes set to Portishead and Beak>, entirely in the vein of the trippy opening song of every Bond film, only right in the middle of the film’s 180 minute runtime. After that, he bombs a Dickensian orphanage and the car comes flying out of the fireball, which of course is a Bond Move indicated by motion graphics that shamelessly break the fourth wall. Don’t worry, it all makes sense.
The Substance ★★★☆☆
This Cronenbergian confrontation with the double standard of aging is intense, unwatchable at times, and quite funny. I don’t like watching intravenous injections and tooth pulling as such, but here it served to help explore crushing social pressures to internalize attitudes that are obviously unhealthy and totally at odds with the realities of the human life cycle. The meat and all the whole birds, and the carnality is just unbelievable. I’m not taking any points off for this, but the raw cruelty with which Margaret Qualley killed Demi Moore left a bad taste in my mouth, and made the head injuries at the end of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood seem tame. My issue is with the third act — it was easily the funniest, but it dragged. I loved what seemed to be a nod to GWAR at the end. Sure, the eponymous Substance is a contrivance, but it just works, because the artistic license that this plot device provides — it’s an empty vessel, and can have whatever look and feel you want — was put to great use. Using the Substance is like having debilitating addictions to black tar heroin and radical cosmetic surgery, all rolled into one. I loved how much attention was put into the packaging and graphic design, because it brought to mind all of the bullshit lifestyle products that influencers hawk, and the ‘premium’ packaging that you see in fetishistic unboxing videos. Lastly, it’s shocking how many parallels there are between The Substance and Conner O’Malley’s Coreys. I really do see them as being companion pieces.
Meanwhile on Earth ★★★☆☆
It was certainly very French, in that everyone smoked, and no one was fat. It was good but not great overall, but had certain great elements, chiefly how difficult it is to label, categorize, or even date. It’s one thing to slavishly hew to genre conventions, it’s another thing to subvert genre conventions in a lazy and obvious way, and it’s still another thing to put genre conventions out of your mind entirely, and follow artistic impulses wherever they may go. Pendant ce temps sur Terre (the original French title) takes this third path, much to my delight. I wouldn’t call this a science fiction film so much as I would call it a drama situated in a cultural ambiance where science fiction (and horror, for that matter) has completely and totally penetrated our dreams and collective unconscious. The film uses a handful of subtle effects shots to great effect, helped along by great sound design. Among other things, I enjoyed the abundance of interiority, the callout of light pollution (the unresolved contradiction between street lighting and stargazing), the almost synaesthetic way in which bright green is not so much a motif as a full-blown theme (laden with a meaning that I can’t grasp), the Fiat Panda, and character design that reminded me of Leiji Matsumoto (and the very French Interstella 5555).
Saturday Night ★☆☆☆☆
Live from Burbank, it’s Saturday Night! The test audience from Soldier of Illusion (Documentary Now! S04E01) would have loved it. It’s great to be here in New Jersey! To be fair, I did laugh very hard at fake Jane Curtin plugging steel wool. There’s no exploration of how SNL was basically a bunch of Canadians not only blasting off on rails but also fucking each other’s brains out in various dressing rooms. The narrow and gimmicky focus on this particular 90-minute timespan only serves to obscure the origins and ethos of the show. It was a noble effort, but predictably failed to escape the confines of gutless and stupidly sentimental Hollywood system hagiography-by-numbers, with so many unnatural, expository and didactic lines of dialogue as to make any suspension of disbelief impossible. I was transported more to 2014 than to 1975. All of this was obvious from the trailer, and I was not planning on seeing this movie, but I fucked up and had some time to kill. There was one point at the very beginning where the score was inflected with the SNL house band sound, but other than that, it could have been from any other major release. I would have greatly preferred a more naturalistic, cinéma vérité treatment with no non-diegetic music, and I say that as someone who greatly appreciates how non-diegetic music and all the other fourth-wall theatrics were used to such great effect on 30 Rock after it really found a groove. As a period piece, it was sub-Mad Men. They may have checked off the boxes on the hair and clothes, but I never got the sense that there was any serious study of contemporaneous photography to really nail the look and feel. In a truly convincing period piece, everything looks weird. People look emaciated, and the world looks austere and depopulated. There are way more brick buildings. The proportions and massing and color are just off. I mean, people back then had completely different concepts of how faces should be framed by glasses or hair, how T-shirt fabric should bunch up, and what makeup looks clownish. Where are the braless, duckbill-shaped seventies tits? Where’s the thick bush?
A Different Man ★★★★☆
This movie is so much more than the answer to the question: what if the Elephant Man fucked? I mean, fucked like Leon from Curb Your Enthusiasm? But it is very much the answer to that question. On reflection, what initially felt like one too many twists at the end was necessary and worthwhile. It was very funny to see Edward/Guy in traction and subject to 24/7 psychological torture, and then after the flash-forward, when Ingrid and Oswald are talking about how time flies, their youngest child is in grad school, they’ve accomplished everything they’ve ever set out to do, and they’re moving to a utopian community to drop acid and fuck. What Edward did to get fired from the real estate agency was also very funny. There was definitely some Annie Hall in there but perhaps more importantly, some Synecdoche, New York — a movie that I fucking despise. In A Different Man, the performance within the performance is not cheap, and for its own sake. It is very purposeful, necessary, and funny.
Megalopolis ★★★★☆
There’s no admission of guilt as such, but the movie is basically damning evidence that, yes, of course Francis Ford Coppola was smoking huge amounts of weed in his trailer and groping women throughout the production. And then he dedicates it to his dead wife? That’s some Roman-level decadence! I found it very refreshing how it was like parts of AAA-, B- and Z-movies mashed up into a weird, lumpy mixture of moods and tones. It didn’t even feel all that turgid. It dragged, yes, but in a token way, as a nod to the craft of the good bad movie. There is absolutely nothing of any political, philosophical, or even architectural value here, which is great, because this vacuousness (together with the green screen look and feel) really reminds me of Decker. I love, love, love that all of these A-list celebrities are in this cross between Caligula, Cosmopolis and the Paul Masson ad outtakes where Orson Welles was plastered. It’s basically the powerful hallucination that Francis Ford Coppola’s illustrious film career experiences as it dies of dementia, a grandiose death rattle of childlike sincerity and optimism, and a truly surprising and worthy conclusion.
