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well thank you for making me cry with your hbo comedy show nathan fielder

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Watched Friendship

So much fun, at least a dozen long term bits for me and my friends, but also pretty harrowing. A couple of amazing moments (Jimp and kiss on the mouth in particular) where Tim Robinson gets to do what he does best and become the shockingly relatable, momentary straight man. They give the audience what we need to actually empathize with him as an admittedly strange (and probably bad) man living in a definitely strange and definitely bad world. It also looked gorgeous, I loved the lean into the voyeuristic angle in the cinematography and how that complicates us watching and laughing at this fucked up guy. Robinson and Rudd are unsurprisingly hilarious, but Mara, experiencing the same crisis of self as the other characters but confined by her economic and gendered relationship to her husband, makes this devastating.

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Watched Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW!!!! Significant improvement from the last two entries in at least a few ways. It actually feels like McQuarrie is directing with a much stronger aesthetic vision, the set pieces are neither too sparse (as in Rogue Nation) nor too dense (as in Fallout). That train action sequence is easily the best in the three movies. It's almost even about something. I am willing to believe that there is some intentionality behind the relationship between artifice and doing things to some standard of 'real' and the production structure of the Mission: Impossible movies within the context of contemporary filmmaking (although I think McQuarrie and Jendresen a little out of their epistemological depth as screenwriters). I'm even willing to believe that the Entity is a potentially potent way of constructing this analogy. It certainly does not succeed in all respects, but this movie is actually trying to say something, which is more impressive than the previous installations I have seen over the past few weeks.

I'm not willing to extend enough good will to believe that Ilsa's fridging is some meta-commentary on bad scriptwriting because it was orchestrated by an artificial intelligence. I think that it is an interesting angle, but it's also a very convenient excuse to eliminate the character who was so mistreated in the last installment. On the bright side, Atwell's Grace is a significantly more realized character and a real step in the right direction. It's just too bad that McQuarrie is only willing to have one female team member at a time.

There are a couple of other minor ups and downs, like the wonderful typewriter shot (love love love), the brief grasp at a real sense of a new digital epistomology, the disappointing lack of emphasis on the non-use of technology in the final act, and the juvenile, absurd nightclub scene where rave lights and circular screen graphics are meant to instill some deep sense of fear. Broadly, this movie does function. Unlike Rogue Nation, I don't feel a frustration with the ridiculous political positioning (although perhaps I've just gotten used to ignoring it), and unlike Fallout I don't have quite the pit forming in my stomach about how much I enjoyed the 'Tom Cruise is the best' show. We'll see how the final chapter stacks up.

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Finished Dhalgren

But it is more memorable unfixed. And to me, that's important.

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“The first bird I searched for was the nightjar, which used to nest in the valley. Its song is like the sound of a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask. It is an odorous sound, with a bouquet that rises to the quiet sky. In the glare of day it would seem thinner and drier, but dusk mellows it and gives it vintage. If a song could smell, this song would smell of crushed grapes and almonds and dark wood. The sound spills out, and none of it is lost. The whole wood brims with it. Then it stops. Suddenly, unexpectedly. But the ear hears it still, a prolonged and fading echo, draining and winding out among the surrounding trees. Into the deep stillness, between the early stars and the long afterglow, the nightjar leaps up joyfully. It glides and flutters, dances and bounces, lightly, silently away. In pictures it seems to have a frog-like despondency, a mournful aura, as though it were sepulchred in twilight, ghostly and disturbing. It is never like that in life. Through the dusk, one sees only its shape and its flight, intangibly light and gay, graceful and nimble as a swallow.” Excerpt from The Peregrine by J.A. Baker

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Watched The Velvet Vampire

Prefaced with great drag performances by Prince Peanut Butter and XO Skeleton.

Lots of campy fun, delightful in an audience. Two interesting ideas here that are mildly explored but cool enough to comment on. The first is the hallucinatory terrain of the mirage-filled desert as an alternative to Le Fanu and Stoker's illusory European woods. Most interesting in the dream scenes, where the house vanishes. Second is the reverse triangulation of the protagonists, where the mutual attractions to Lee (hugely boring character) transform into an almost fulfilled lesbian relationship.

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Read The Peregrine by J. A Baker

Utterly fascinating narrator. A man trying with extreme fortitude to remove himself from himself. A friend said that it was as if he was suicidal, but had not quite figured it out yet. The detestation of humanity, and the deep, swelling love of the peregrines that fill every fluid, desperate clause come across with piercing clarity and heartbreaking ardor. I would seek more information on Baker, but that would almost be a betrayal: he has not written this book, as one might expect, to give us a part of his conscious, personal self, but to give us his own annihilation (or attempt), to demonstrate his vision of splendor in dying contrast to his own misery.

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Watched Mission Impossible - Fallout

Extremely fun while watching it and then falls off a cliff as soon as the credits roll. Certainly a step up from Rogue Nation in the cinematography, editing, and density of action pieces that distract from the nonsense plot, characters, and morality. Has at least shown me what it takes to distract me from what is so clearly a narcissistic indulgence in the physicality of a single, awful man. It is delightful in the literal sense, and so I'm willing to give it a 'like' but its failures are so much more interesting than anything else. The misogyny is, I think, less frequent but more cutting than in the last entry (Stickell's awful speech to Ilsa a particularly egregious example) and there is an increasing sense that the characters have fallen into the same rapture as the audience; Cruise's 'impossibility' overriding their sense of individuality and personhood, sending an icepick into their brain of just the right endorphins to distract from the insipid nonsense of the whole endeavor. This is much better elaborated here, here, and here. A movie like this can never be a truly great action movie, in that all of the various arts of the form are totally subordinated to the creation of a stunt show with barely even a frame narrative.

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La Chimera (2023) dir. Alice Rohrwacher

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Went for a round two. Probably best movie of the year so far. Only On Becoming a Guinea Fowl comes close. Spoilers ahead.

Cannot stop thinking about thresholds. This time around, my brain is broken.

There is of course the threshold of the door, the entryway to a building that directly correlates (here) to an entry into a community of people brought together by their shared identity and experience. This threshold is what most immediately elaborates the vampire metaphor: Remmick seeks community, but a community through his own dominion, without realizing that the distinctions between different peoples allow those communities to exist. This will be important later.

The next immediate threshold is that of time. We are separated from the past and from the future, and it is in the present moment that we establish community (but with a foresight and hindsight that let us interface with interpreted history and development). The stated thesis of the movie is that music, acting as a cultural throughline, can allow us to demolish this barrier, and participate in broad stretches of time in a much more ontologically informative way. The first dance scene in the juke joint ties these two barriers together: Sammy annihilates the temporal barrier, allowing a temporally continuous community to manifest, but symbolically 'burns the house down', and so also (for a moment) annihilates the barrier of the home, of the community, and allows Remmick to observe, cultural voyeur, even behind closed doors. When you let in the good, you may also let in the bad. This can be understood as an alternate thesis.

There is, in my accounting, one more primary layer of thresholds (although the layers of the threshold symbol continue to unravel as I consider them, so this is obviously not 'complete'). This is the threshold between individuals. It is extremely significant that Coogler focuses the vampire's telepathy almost as much as their exclusion from entryways. Remmick, and those under his influence, believe in the annihilation of the individual exactly because the individual represents an inherent exclusion of the other. In many ways this separation is oppressive (it is certainly a primary source of oppressive thought in that it limits empathy). In this sense, individuality is the most significant barrier, that between the self and the other, and of course those creatures excluded from culture, excluded from homes, excluded from life could see the annihilation of the ultimate exclusive object, the self, as a thing of beauty. And of course Remmick, with his dominating personality, would believe that his individuality should supersede those of others, essentially because it can. He fails to be empathetic because he believes too deeply that human experience can be singularized, and as his only real reference of self is himself, he exerts it on others, possibly even unconsciously. He fails further to realize that the community, the home, and the life he seeks exist only within the context of the separated individuals, seen not as the self and the other, but, for a moment at least, as a composition of distinct but interrelated subjectivities, spanning time through the one thing that even Remmick knows can connect people in a way his domineering telepathy cannot: music.

Watched Sinners

Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!

Phenomenal. That first dance scene is a revelation. Everything Coogler does, from the timer of the setting sun to the Lord's Prayer to the end-credits, he pulls off perfectly. The music (and the rest of the sound in those distorted states in the first half of the movie) deftly conveys the emotional states and sociopolitical allegory. A level of complexity to the use of the vampire motif that if I start talking about this will get way too long. Deeply moving. Great move to watch if you're terrified of death.

Will ye go, Lassie, go? And we'll all go together To pull wild mountain thyme All around the bloomin' heather Wlil ye go, Lassie, go?

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When I was sixteen, I won a great victory. I felt in that moment I would live to be a hundred. Now I know I shall not see thirty. None of us know our end, really, or what hand will guide us there. A king may move a man, a father may claim a son, but that man can also move himself, and only then does that man truly begin his own game. Remember that howsoever you are played or by whom, your soul is in your keeping alone, even though those who presume to play you be kings or men of power. When you stand before God, you cannot say, "But I was told by others to do thus," or that virtue was not convenient at the time. This will not suffice. Remember that.

EDWARD NORTON as KING BALDWIN IV in Kingdom of Heaven (2005) dir. Ridley Scott

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Watched Kingdom of Heaven

Director's cut.

A lot of things here almost worked for me and a few really did. The ensemble is nominally impressive, but only a few performances actually stood out (Neeson and Norton are great, Green and Gleeson are quite impressive). Bloom is disappointing, but his character is pretty weak in the script (although so is Green's for that matter and she soars above him). I wonder if a more impressive performance from the lead would have made the three acts feel a little more coherent. Frequently visually impressive, but never quite breathtaking. Saw in theaters, but not a particularly large screen or far enough back, so the splendor not quite achieving the heights it was attempting may be a symptom of that. Some great action sequences, although nothing that feels much more than a warm-up for The Last Duel or Gladiator II.

What did work, as is usual with Scott, is the thematic and political structure. Impressive to make, in 2005, a movie that asserts that a threat to life is a threat to land, but a threat to land need not be a threat to life, and in fact that the only real claim to land is life on that land. Even more impressive to do so in Jerusalem. Painful elaboration of the twin myths of ownership and salvation. Certainly spells itself out, but does so with care and beauty.

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What's wrong with you? Nothing you can't fix | Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep (1946)

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Watched Hit Man

Weird movie. Trying to puzzle out the ambiguous sympathy given to Gary, who is clearly evil. For a moment I earnestly thought there was going to be some consideration given to the fact that he only realizes that his entire job is about ruining people's lives by lying to them to lure them into traps while they are mentally unwell when he comes across an incredibly beautiful woman who is remotely communicative about why she might reasonably want someone dead. It doesn't do that, but it at least lets you think about it. That college scene on the grass where his students conclude that the progress of civilization has been movement from the death penalty to life imprisonment seems pretty damning but it's hard to read the intent in a mostly unthinking (but very fun!) movie. Especially weird in the state of Louisiana which practices the death penalty, so even the minute imagined progress is false. The primary motivating force of the movie is not really to think about the ethics (although it presents itself almost as about ethics), nor to get that into the plot (fun! repetitive. straightforward) but to see Glenn Powell convince us that he's a good actor (he is!), particularly in the scene where he wrote himself directing himself (a good scene!). Not as psyched about it as the people I saw talking when it released, and my hang-ups mean I don't know if I would exactly recommend it, but it was a good time to go out of my mind with how evil most of the characters are.

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The Third Man 1949 | dir. Carol Reed