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sorry to bother you [film - 2018]

Go see Sorry To Bother You right now. If you’re looking for a bottom-line review on whether it’s good: yes. It’s outstanding. It’s so breathtakingly original that it will no doubt receive the highest praise the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has to give: an award for best original screenplay and no other Oscars.

The rest of this discussion is for people who’ve seen the film.

Something I kept thinking about while watching it was the Every Frame a Painting video essay about visual comedy. It sounds like a truism that, for a visual medium like film, making something funny requires the use of visuals as well as dialog and plot. In the opening scene, when the two characters are making out and the wall with decoration on it, previously just an unimportant background, starts inexplicably moving, the humor hits in a few different waves: it provokes an instinctive laugh just out of surprise, then it’s funny with the realization that our protagonist is living in a garage, then the more contemplative humor about the implications of a movie hero with that sort of living arrangement.

Pretty soon into the movie, Boots Riley follows that up with what is, I think, going to be the gold standard for filming a telephone conversation (easily surpassing Mean Girls’s split-screen reveal about other people being on the line). In some sort of hybrid of magical realism and screwball comedy, Cash is literally dropped into the living space of the person he’s trying to reach on the phone. His surprise is shared by the audience, and the titular phrase takes on a more physical meaning with how he’s actually bothering them in their home. It works amazingly well because it’s immediately funny, it conveys through visual language (because it’s a goddamned MOVIE) what’s happening between the characters, and it’s so much easier to look at than the traditional (bad) ways of filming phone calls.

I’ve seen other people saying for one reason or another than Riley’s novice direction shows through at times, and I don’t feel that way at all. To me, it feels like he’s sick of traditional ways of shooting certain scenes, and wants to do things in an entirely original way. He’s obviously put a lifetime’s work of love and care into the execution of everything about it; minor things like Detroit’s ever-changing earrings don’t make the slightest bit of logical sense, but fit perfectly into this over-the-top satire.

Well, over-the-top is how the movie comes across. But in this late capitalist era, certain aspects of it feel uncomfortably close to real life. Amazon’s horrific shipping warehouses have moved closer and closer to WorryFree’s profit model, and private prisons incarcerating toddlers for profit have easy parallels with the film’s telemarketing of weapons and slave labor.

Sorry To Bother You has the best politics of any film in recent memory. It fills me with joy that a movie made by an actual communist, openly advocating for labor organizing and physical resistance to capitalist oppression, can get a wide release and skirt so close to mainstream culture. The right is correct to be afraid of the cultural influence of art on the masses; however, they’ve recently just been getting upset that international conglomerates worth over $100 billion are making movies starring people other than straight white males. What they should be worried about is one of the best films of our generation being an open call to action to overthrow capitalism.

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chef [film - 2014]

Just over two years since my last post here, I’m reviving my media journal because of how irritated I am at this movie.

There are several classic kinds of conflict in literature: man vs man vs self, man vs nature, etc. Chef takes the innovative route of including absolutely none of them.

A celebrity chef, Jon Favreau, beloved by everyone and universally praised as a great chef, is unhappy that he has the unusual position of working for a boss. The closest thing to a real conflict is the chef’s fight with that boss (Dustin Hoffman) over his refusal to make the same ol’ boring food when a food reviewer is going to the restaurant. Favreau quits, goes apeshit on the food reviewer, learns what Twitter is (has to learn it from his son! Ha ha! Kids these days, am I right folks?? Say, any baby boomers in the audience tonight??), and has a heartwarming trip around the country with his ten year-old kid and Spanish-speaking sidekick John Leguizamo.

“Male wish fulfillment” doesn’t do the film justice. His ex-wife is Sofia Vergara, with whom he’s still on good terms with, and his rebound woman is his coworker (and I think subordinate at work???) Scarlett Johansson.

There’s a scene where he’s cooking for Johansson as foreplay after an initial kiss, and the camera cuts back and forth between shots of him cooking and her laying sideways, magazine-shoot-style, on a couch with her shoulder exposed. I genuinely couldn’t figure out if the film was in on the joke of how absolutely ridiculous this was, or if it sincerely thinks it’s a good scene to have an unattractive 50 year-old turning on Scarlett Johansson with his incredible cooking. Come to think if it, between this role, Lost in Translation, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and Her, I think the list of the most blatant male wish fulfillment movies of all time all include her.

Favreau, who cannot speak a word of Spanish other than the “EL JEFE” tattooed on his knuckles (also the name of the truck, see poster), decides to start a food truck making cuban sandwiches after his Cuban ex-wife tells him that his are better than the authentic ones in Little Havana. (Again, his ex wife SOFIA VERGARA.) His loyal former employee John Leguizamo shows up unannounced to work for him without pay, and Favreau’s ten year-old son goes across the country with him to help.

Oh, and Robert Downey Jr is in the movie and decides not to eat any of the food in favor of the scenery.

Because there’s no more real plot arc because there’s no conflict, most of the film is an excuse to show a bunch of cooking and a bunch of food from across the country. One scene, where Favreau brings them into a Texas barbecue, looks and sounds exactly like an episode of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, and down to the pudgy over-enthusiastic lead that everyone just has to love.

By the end of it, he’s grown closer to his kid, he’s proven to his ex-wife (SOFIA VERGARA) that he can be a responsible dad despite all evidence to the contrary, his kid is on the way to becoming a chef, the guy that he screamed at in public (and threw his dinner across the room) offers him unlimited money and unlimited creative freedom after tasting one of his sandwiches, and the Robert Downey Jr and Scarlett Johansson characters are completely forgotten. It all has a heartwarming message: any ten year-old who’s the son of a celebrity chef can become a good chef if he has nannies and other servants taking care of him constantly so he can focus on that. That’s not me adding stuff and judging them because they’re rich so they must have servants; the reason Vergara gives for Favreau to come to Miami at one point is that the nannies can’t fly on airplanes.

I’m pretty sure that’s a reference to how they’re undocumented workers, so they can’t travel like normal people! Ha ha! What a great lighthearted movie!

It’s a movie that could only have been made by insanely privileged people. The entire concept of the movie is that this old white guy is so beloved that, guess what, no matter what happens and what job he quits everything just works out okay for him! Huh, wonder why that is.

The message of the movie, that you should achieve greatness by doing what you really love, not by making unchallenging, uninnovative, crowd-pleasing stuff at the behest of someone else (this is what the conflict with Hoffman was about), is completely contradicted by the fact that the movie is as unchallenging and playing to the crowd as a movie can possibly get. Any filmmaker who goes the ideological path of the chef would hopefully make a movie that takes some risks, not just shows a tourism reel of New Orleans and some heartwarming family hugs in order to make people like it.

The movie had some issues, is what I’m saying.

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the brief and frightening reign of phil [novella - 2005]

There are books I enjoy, and there are books like this one: where the writing is so good that I’m mad at the writer that they are so much better at writing than I will ever be.

The most obvious description is that it’s a political allegory novella in the same vein as George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and while I’ve always loved Orwell, Animal Farm is a much better concept than it is a story. You can summarize it to someone in two minutes and they pretty much don’t need to read the story.

Saunders’s novella has almost too many funny ideas in its tiny world to fit in the novella. The population of the book is either in a tiny circle, or the country that surrounds that, or in the six-inch-wide country surrounding that. Also, everyone seems to be a robot, or something similar.

Why does Saunders get to write political satire that has genuinely good jokes? Who gave him the right to have a more fitting description of a six-inch-wide country than most writers can give of their own country?

Fuck George Saunders, he can burn in hell alongside this incredibly good book. Yes, I loved it, I’ll probably reread it multiple times and the next thing I write will be a complete rip-off of it, no matter how hard I try for it not to be. The world sucks.

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blow out [film - 1981]

The title and basic plot are an obvious allusion to Blowup: someone out on unrelated assignment [takes pictures of/records] something relating to a murder.

Blowup is kind of a weird starting point for a more traditional thriller, though, being made by a director (Antonioni) very interested in mood, atmosphere, and emotion, and almost entirely dismissive of plot structure. It’s to the benefit of Blow Out, then, that it only takes that fragment of an idea from Blowup and pretty much goes its own way (in an openly Hitchcock-referential style, however) rather than trying to recreate it.

I really enjoyed how Blow Out presented information to the audience. While it’s not totally POV from the protagonist, showing us glimpses of what one of the antagonists is up to, it never gives the audience too much information that we can figure things out ahead of the person doing the digging in the film.

The ending is good enough that I don’t want to give it away, but it’s a very satisfying one, if you’re a cynical enough person. The way it incorporates an “irrelevant” bit that’s been running through the film alongside the major plot is brilliant.

Oh, and John Lithgow is always creepy. Always.

This is a thriller that genuinely thrilled me for almost the entirety of the second half of the film, and there’s not much more something in this genre can do.

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blast of silence [film - 1961]

This might be one of the most introverted films I’ve ever seen. It’s certainly the most introverted crime film. The main character isn’t motivated necessarily by greed, and certainly not the desire to live the Scarface lifestyle. He just wants to be alone, and I guess killing people makes one more alone, in a technical sense.

I have a personal connection to this film: my grandfather, Lionel Stander, did the narration for it. And this film has a shitload of narration; I think there’s more of it than the protagonist has lines. It makes the film oddly novelistic, like you’re watching someone’s low-budget student film based on this pre-existing narrative. This isn’t necessarily bad: the narration is well-written, and unusual in its second-person structure.

Aside from that, the film has many positive qualities. It’s shot beautifully, every shadow carefully constructed, and the nighttime scenes evoke The Sweet Smell of Success. But the plot is threadbare, and there isn’t the characterization to make up for it. The director is also the writer and lead actor, and he seems to be a very good director, an okay writer (the narration is credited to a different person), and someone who shouldn’t be an actor. This makes it tough to understand what’s going through his head, despite the narration.

Not all the performances are bad. The character of a gun dealer is one of the creepiest people I’ve seen on screen in a while.

The most conflicted part of the film is the score. Most of it has a wonderful jazz score, but then certain climactic scenes are emphasized by super-cliche orchestral stings that sound straight out of a lesser Bogart film. It really jilted me out of the mood of the scene; I really wish they had just stuck with one style of score for the entire thing instead of mixing and matching something unique with something that seems like every other thriller movie.

It’s definitely worth watching, and it’s a pretty quick film. I’d compare it to a good short story, rather than an essential novel.

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the sweet smell of success [film - 1957]

The Sweet Smell of Success is a beautiful film about internal ugliness. It is one of the rare films that finds nearly no redeeming qualities in its main characters; the only happiness or love present in it occurs between the only characters that aren’t completely awful, and the plot is about breaking up their romance.

When I was much younger, I walked through the living room as my mom was watching a black and white film. I stopped to catch a minute of it, and had no idea what was going on; she commented that it was “all subtext.” When I watched a scene early on in this, I realized that this was the film she was watching.

She was right: the screenplay is all about characters obscuring their true motivations, talking nearly in code in extremely tense exchanges with one another, their motivations held close to their chest, while only the audience knows what’s really going on (and sometimes, we don’t). It’s up to the direction and absolutely jaw-dropping cinematography to tell us the real story here.

Even if this was just an experimental film with no dialogue and no plot, it would still be noteworthy in film history as one of the best uses of black and white. There’s really nothing that can portray “seedy underbelly” like black and white footage of a city at night, all car headlights and blinking signs, as the characters give one another the eye.

It’s the rare influential work that still stands up to all the things that it influenced. House of Cards over dozens of hours can’t capture the scheming menace that JJ Hunsecker can have in a co-starring role.

Also, I’m pretty sure that JJ Hunsecker partly served as inspiration for J Jonah Jameson.

I would say that if you care at all about film, you should see this. But chances are, anyone that fits that description has seen it already. This isn’t something that I’m going to put on a personal “top ten” list, but I still recognize greatness when I see it.

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tales from the borderlands [game - 2014-2015]

There are some things that I enjoy more after I’m done with them, thinking about the implications, ideology, artistry, and plot of them, than I did while actually engaged with it. Movies and books that I just couldn’t get out of my head for days afterward. Their mastery revealed itself well after I was done.

Tales from the Borderlands is the opposite. I mostly enjoyed it while I was playing it, but the ending and the way it was structured annoyed me so profoundly that I can’t think many positive things about it now that I’m done playing it.

The game has two forms of engagement with the player: choices for the player to make, and quick-time events. The latter are almost entirely extraneous; I guess they’re mostly there so that people don’t start reading their phones during the action scenes. The game would function exactly the same, as far as I’m concerned, if they just didn’t exist.

So there are choices. And the game tries very hard to convince us that these choices are relevant, with a little popup that says “[character name] will remember this” after you make a seemingly-important choice. But if they do, in fact, remember this, they make no sign of showing it. In the early episodes, I was more than okay with it not giving me an immediate impact of dialogue decisions; in the later ones, it becomes clear that there just weren’t going to be relevant impacts for the things that were supposedly remembered. Some of the characters that were supposed to remember shit just disappeared instead!

The one that stood out the most to me was a specific character that I made sure to treat like shit at every available opportunity. I insulted him, told him his love interest hated him, etc. etc., yet in the Big Climactic Scene, he still risked his life for me. Why? Because it was written into the plot that way, and my choices couldn’t affect something that big.

There are also recurring interactions with Handsome Jack, who is, surprise, still a bad guy. And because, at a certain point, he has to be the bad guy, no matter how much you’ve buttered him up before, there’s still a point where he does something bad to you, and the choices are something like “no!” and “don’t!” and “I hate you!” (or silence).

I really wish I hadn’t even played the last episode. All the real plot threads, other than one set up from the beginning with a framing story and a mysterious kidnapper, are resolved in episode 4. So in the last section, the game has to entirely make something up about a guardian of the vault (the guardian was previously unmentioned, and previously the characters were only interested in a vault key because it was worth money), and the player gets to select some surviving characters for a really cheesy action sequence. But the absolute nadir of the game is after it, when there’s hugging and tearful smiley conversations and so much generic sci-fi post-climax bullshit that it feels like it lasts hours.

I respect that Telltale includes very few traditional game mechanics in their game. But if we’re basically playing an animated film with a couple alternate scenes, we should really judge it more with the grammar of film than of a game. The voice acting was good, the writing was clever and funny, but the plot was a bloated mess with 20% of it tacked on at the end, and visually, it didn’t do anything. It has the random pans and automated-feeling cinematography of a dialogue scene in an RPG, rather than the complex, artful shots of a film.

Did I enjoy the game? Yes. But damn did it also piss me off.

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narconomics [book - 2016]

Pop-econ books are a ton of fun to read. They explore a variety of topics with a bemused, irreverent-but-serious-minded tone and know just how to sprinkle in anecdotes and interviews with hard evidentiary backup.

I was roughly expecting the conclusion of the book (our drug laws are needlessly prohibitionist, our foreign policy ineffectively interventionist), and the broad-stroke analogy (drug cartels are like legitimate businesses in many ways), but wasn’t expecting the streak of black humor running through the book. It’s not laid on too thick, but some bits, such as drug cartels making recruits read Christian self-help as part of their initiation, legitimately had me laughing and reading it out loud to anyone who was in the room with me.

The book does fall victim to one of the common sins of this genre: it’s basically a collection of journalism on a similar subject, and then it’s in a book. There are chapters that seem only tangentially related to the rest of it; the parts about synthetic drugs and Colorado’s legalization are only tangentially related to “drug cartels” (and the “narco-” in the title, but that might just be the implications I associate with that prefix).

It was a fairly quick read for me; at 250 pages of nonfiction, it wasn’t hard to get through it in a few days of bus rides and coffeehouse visits. I wish it had dove deeper into how drug cartels really worked; the “how to run a drug cartel” in the subtitle seems like a blatant publisher invention, as it’s not really in the text.

However, that’s more of a complaint via request for more than it is a fault with the book. I’d read a follow-up or two where the author really went harder into learning about how cartels operate. This is a wonderful book, and anyone who likes economics or drug policy-related things should pick it up.

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a hard day’s night [film - 1964]

Many years ago, I was a fan of ~classic rock~. I thought that every dadrock band from the mid-to-late 60s was the pinnacle of musical achievement. Before that, though, when I was a small, small kid, I loved The Beatles almost exclusively. Not just any Beatles, though: early Beatles, from their first stuff through Rubber Soul.

Accordingly, I’ve seen A Hard Day’s Night Before. Probably many times. Not as many times as I’d seen Help!, because that had a plot and humor that I could actually somewhat understand, sometimes, but I’d estimate that I saw this between five and a dozen times. Childhood is weird like that.

It’s a music-based movie, obviously, with non-music scenes alternating with members of the band randomly running around and lip-syncing to songs from the soundtrack. The musical parts I pretty much mentally glossed over; they’re so burned into my brain from decades of over-listening that I could probably notice an alternate mix playing for three seconds on a car stereo a block away. These scenes stand out really abruptly from the rest of the movie, because the audio is so obviously studio-recorded rather than from the film set; compared to modern music videos, absolutely nothing happens during them.

Not much happens in the rest of the film, either, but it’s a nice sort of nothing happening. The band meanders around, going from place to place, because that’s pretty realistic for what touring bands do. The (sub?)plots that do exist are pretty entertaining, about McCartney’s grandfather and Ringo going missing, but most of it is a well-shot film of mumbly jokes and wisecracks and the manager trying to manage them.

Also, between watching this and Godard films like Breathless, I realize that early-60s actresses are Extremely Cute, with nice hair and dresses and very smoochable faces. I enjoyed this film especially for that.

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firewatch [game - 2016]

“Wow, this sunrise is so beautiful,” I say as I sit in my bathrobe surrounded by garbage. “Perhaps the most lovely forms of art are not created by humans at all,” as I sip disappointment from an empty teacup.

It is a powerful game indeed that makes me think that perhaps nature is better than being inside. Then I remember that all this creation is not actually nature at all, but a game studio’s vision of what the best parts of nature are. Suck my ass, actual nature.

Firewatch reminded me of a cognitive bias people have: that we remember how something feels when it ends, and ignore how long we spent before that in an enjoyable (or non-enjoyable) state. An example from Daniel Kahneman is that of a sublime performance of classical music, pressed on vinyl; the listener is in heaven until the very end, which has a horrible scratch.

[spoilers below]

The game isn’t a letdown to that extent, though. It starts off with heartbreak, continues with exploration and humor, and builds up a fantastic tension through the experience. Then it just kind of... wraps up all of it, way too neatly. What was a long-running plot thread about two teenage girls (continuing from the first “real” quest of the game) gets solved offscreen with no interaction from the player. What could have been a vast conspiracy and a sinister plot just... isn’t. It’s one guy screwing with you, and when you find out what he’s up to, he pretty much comes clean and leaves a mea culpa.

I wasn’t disappointed in the ending ending, though, where the woman you’ve been talking to for months doesn’t even want to see you. That seems realistic, and fitting.

Don’t get me wrong, the game is very, very good. The first two thirds of it border on perfect. But the structure of the story could have used some work in order to give the player more agency toward the end, instead of just “oh that thing is all solved now.”

There’s also a turtle. I enjoyed the game, and especially the turtle.

[killmedia]

weekend [film - 1967]

This movie would have made me even more obnoxious if I had seen it as a teenager. There’s a certain type of film that can really mess up an impressionable 15 year-old: counter-cultural, irreverent, transgressive something that older people would hate (or at least, the 15 year-old’s envisions them hating it), with a philosophy or altered worldview underneath it. For Americans about my age, this basically meant Fight Club. I’m going to get thrown in cinema review jail if I further compare a Godard film to Fight Club, though.

This is the third Godard film I’ve seen (after Breathless and Bande a Part), and I was expecting the structure to basically carry over from those two: about an hour of characters interacting and pretty much going about their lives, being cooler and more French than I could ever hope for, then half an hour of something like plot. Weekend, instead, is an entire film of vignettes with two recurring characters. I guess these are in chronological order? It seems like they are, at least.

The film is a satire of bourgeois culture, and specifically the self-centered money-centric people (kind of like American Psycho characters, but 24 years earlier). I’m used to at least one central character being an irredeemable asshole in Godard’s films, but there’s almost no one that’s half-decent here. In this satire, capitalism has regressed all people back to a Hobbesian state of nature.

Weekend is car-obsessed, but not in the idolizing way of car as status symbol or a means to freedom, or even for aesthetic value like in Mad Max. It’s closer to Crash (the JG Ballard/Cronenberg one), fixated on crashes and death in crashes. Car wrecks are the most commonly recurring motif in Weekend, both to show the depravity of modern society and to show how uncaring our protagonist couple is.

They also figure prominently in what is (from my brief reading about the film) the most famous scene, and (very obviously from just watching it) its best scene: an eight-minute shot of a traffic jam. It’s a magnificent scene. It has a structure, it has surprises, it has sight gags like looking across an overstuffed page of comic book-era Mad. Even for people with no interest in watching the whole film, please watch the traffic jam scene.

One problem I had watching this was that I’m not French, I’m not particularly well-read, and Godard makes a ton of references everywhere. About a third of the way through the film, it becomes clear that the laws of reality don’t much apply to what goes on here, and different characters can just be magical, or transported from history, or from fiction, or some combination of the three. I didn’t know who almost any of them were, because I’m an ignorant American.

Side note: I was genuinely bothered by what appears to be, in a few places, unsimulated killing of animals. I’m very glad this no longer happens in modern (non-documentary) film, because it’s disgusting on many levels.

Weekend is a film where a brilliant filmmaker has fun with cinema and promotes Marxism for two hours. I enjoyed it.

[killmedia]

fka twigs - M3LL155X [EP - 2015]

This EP was officially released as a short film. I’ll just be talking about the music, though.

All this enjoying of things is really starting to cut into my personal brand as the guy who doesn’t enjoy anything.

However, I can’t really say that I “enjoy” this record, because that’s not nearly a strong enough term. I adore it, I love it, I want to live inside of it for years at a time and come out a twisted amalgamation of flesh and sound.

FKA twigs has been an artist I’ve liked since her first two EPs, which are sparse, vague electronic music seemingly influenced by Portishead and the more listenable work of Aphex Twin. I liked those EPs. I would listen to them back to back, and end with a pleasant smile.

Then LP1 came out, and I devoured it like few other full-lengths in the recent pop canon. I still listen to Two Weeks on a near-daily basis; the combination of vocal vulnerability and trembling bass really hits something inside me.

But holy hell, oh my lord  M3LL155X. Christ almighty this might be the best EP I’ve ever heard. I’m blasting it so loud on headphones now I’m probably giving myself ear damage.

It’s still recognizably FKA twigs, the same vulnerability (though slightly more commanding), but the sparse, even gentle electronic production has moved forward into a more aggressive form. She’s long collaborated with the Venezuelan producer Arca (whose LP I kind of understood, though didn’t like as much as his productions for other artists), and the same production muscle that shone through on his work on Kanye’s Yeezus is put to work slightly differently here. The bassline seems to shift when it comes in, like it’s going to shift the ground everyone’s standing on. Little vocal samples of twigs complement her singing.

It plays around with verse/chorus/verse, in that if one were to only look at the lyrics, it seems structured more or less traditionally. But the music on every track is more like it builds up to a crescendo 95% of the way through, like a shortened, electronic version of a Godspeed composition.

The only thing stopping me from naming either “I’m Your Doll” or “Glass and Patron” among my top ten songs of all time is that I’d feel bad leaving the other one off. The bass drop, along with vocal sampling, about 1:15 in the latter track, is one of the best things in my life.

Fuck.

[killmedia]

red desert [film - 1964]

I don’t know why I’ve only written about movies so far, because I’m clearly a Philistine who knows nothing about true art. I really like the idea of enjoying Art Films, but then I sit down to watch this Goddamned Serious Art Film and I was super bored almost the entire time.

Clearly, there is merit to Red Desert. It’s goddamned beautiful, with hand-painted backdrops; it’s director Michelangelo Antonioni’s first color production, and he treats color like a wonderful new toybox to play around with. And he did a great job with that, certainly, but not a single thing happens in this Serious Art Film.

There’s a woman (Monica Vitti), and she expressed her alienation from modern society by clutching herself really close and acting all, well, acting the entire time. She reminded me of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, except that was a character purposefully playing an over-acting silent film star, whereas this seems unintentional. Vitti’s performance in this is supposedly revelatory, but I just found it overdone the entire time when every other character is behaving somewhat like human beings behave.

The most surprising (and interesting) aspect of this, to me, were the environmentalist overtones in a bunch of scenes. There’s smoke billowing everywhere, polluted water, everything seems destroyed by humans. For 1964, that’s a surprising thing to see.

I still didn’t like it, though.

[killmedia]

z [film - 1969]

Instead of an abstract political satire with only a parabolic connection to real life, Z is so close to reality that I’d describe it as a film à clef. Every character is this French-language film is actually a specific person in Greek politics just six years earlier.

I didn’t actually know that going in, of course. Like any God-fearing critic in 2016, I learned everything I needed to know from Wikipedia. It turns out that “Z” doesn’t seem to make any sense as a title, because it makes sense as a slogan in Greek (it means “he lives”). Wikipedia is the best.

The non-fiction nature of the story means that the audience is largely expected to know what will happen as soon as the film begins: there’s a highly killable opposition leader, his assassination, and the prolonged investigation that Goes All The Way To The Top. It’s the kind of thriller where the audience is mostly waiting for the main characters to catch up in knowledge to the audience; this type of mystery is often derided by plot-oriented fans of the genre, but I loved it in this case. The drama is provided by the cover-up versus the investigation, which gives its characters protagonist/antagonist roles.

One of my favorite things about the film was how it used the ensemble cast (these actors were, apparently, very big-name French stars, and despite not knowing the language I can tell they gave great performances) in a way of shifting protagonists. Different people cycle in to play their own part in the story, so the focus of the film will be a minor character ten minutes later. It makes the (rather long) film feel forward-moving and explosive even during straightforward dialogue scenes.

The screenplay is fantastic, the drama is heart-racing, the acting is phenomenal, the cinematography is beautiful, there’s a mix of chaos and order that perfectly feels like military-government-politics. I loved this film.

[killmedia]

investigation of a citizen above suspicion [film - 1970]

I watched this movie because it’s a political/social satire, which is extremely my shit, and had no idea going in that it would be so incredibly relevant to modern American issues: specifically, the abuse of police power, and the invulnerability of police to their own prosecution. It’s the kind of film that it seems like someone should be shouting, “watch this 70s film because of its relevance.”

So I’ll be the one to say that.

The idea of the film is that a powerful policeman commits a murder, does everything possible to get caught for it, and cannot for the life of him be suspected (let alone convicted) for it. It’s openly reverential for Kafka’s political satires, and the plot is basically a negative of The Trial: he knows exactly the crime in question, he knows everyone involved in prosecuting it, and no matter what, he won’t be punished.

In modern American language, “satire” is thought of as very close in meaning to “parody,” with both of them being part of “humor.” There are a couple chuckle-worthy moments in this film, but overall, I wouldn’t describe it as funny. It’s the kind of satire that makes you sadly reflect rather than laugh.

It’s not a perfect film (though I’m not sure I’d want to watch a version that was), and despite some experimental camerawork and editing revolving around the crime scene, it’s a more interesting film to think about after the fact, based on the merits of its ideas, than a visually striking film to watch. There are a bunch of scenes that I felt like I knew everything about going into them, and just wanted them to get to the bit that was somewhat unexpected. It was really difficult to suppress my desire to check my phone during parts, but still a great film.

Also, the main character spends most of his time in a really nice blue suit. It’s worth watching for the suit, and someone should get me that suit.

Also, it reminded me that espresso culture actually comes from Italy and not Seattle.

[killmedia]

videodrome [film - 1983]

Most technology-centric films from this era look like shit. They’re focused on an idea of what is current, and what will come in the future, but the vision of the future is inherently constricted by the ideas that existed at the creation of the film.

Videodrome, rather than focusing on the positive parts of the technology of broadcast TV and cassette tape, focuses on the scuzzy parts: the low fidelity, the scrambling, the feeling of getting a 5th-generation bootleg of something so forbidden that whoever made it in the first place is either in hiding or in jail by now. Instead of a primitive version of the future, we start from a realistic (or at least, real-feeling) version of technology, and this holds up a lot better. There are still artists that play up the low fidelity of analogue media. Maybe some of them were influenced by this film.

It’s a thriller about a seedy TV station executive who stumbles across footage of camcorder-quality torture porn. As he dives deeper into it, trying to find the source, an increasing series of conspiracies and hallucinatory horseshit swirls around.

Cronenberg has a ton of really interesting ideas, and somehow works in a few hundred of them into this. It’s overtly influenced by Marshall McLuhan (I understand enough to know that it is without having any real comprehension of McLuhan’s ideas despite reading a book on the man), and manages to throw enough BDSM in there involving “Deborah” Harry that I’ll uncomfortably cross my legs from now on every time I hear Heart of Glass.

Sidenote: I got a really strong “topping from the bottom” vibe from her. She was the one that seduces the protagonist into masochistic sex, more or less, and he seems a bit taken aback by everything. I projected a lot of “no, you idiot, push it through my ear THIS way” that wasn’t in the actual script.

This film is overflowing with story, cyberpunk-esque aesthetic, sex, communications philosophy, corporate satire, undermining of right-wing politics, and gore. I loved this movie.