cultural chat
Walking out of this into a mostly empty cinema in the hometown I effectively abandoned 20 years ago was a perfect and unsettling postscript to this excellent film. I go on about how sensorily flat films feel lately but this bucks the trend with numerous excellent visual and audio choices. The 90s aesthetic occupies an uncanny sweet spot between pastiche and historical accuracy. The obvious game…
Over the past few months I've been watching the films of Nobuhiko Obayashi. This was prompted by the refrain of various respected cinephiles that his films deepened their relationship with cinema. Thirteen films in I can confirm that they weren't exaggerating - working through this man's filmography has felt like a cinematic bildungsroman. I'm writing about Casting Blossoms to the Sky because it's…
I do not know why I do the things I do, but rewatching The Hudsucker Proxy on a whim was an extremely good decision. This film has seemingly received a kinder critical reappraisal in the intervening years, but there was a point where it was considered a lesser Coens. We're a tired and weary audience these days, desperate for this level of filmmaking, and we now know what's good when we see it.…
Gay men have been denied a certain kind of love for a very long time. Queer considers the self-destruction that emanates from that denial. There's a scene where the two leads finally have sex after a lot of courtship tempered by uncertainty (Drew Starkey character never quite tips whether he is, in fact, queer). Craig's character touches Starkey's body with a cautious tenderness that is moving but…
Sean Baker is obsessed with transgressive women. Anora returns to this potent fixation after the stumble of Red Rocket. It's a sensational film with a year-best performance from Mikey Madison. Despite this, I want to talk about Anora's ending because I think I hated it. That's no reflection on its merits inherently, because it is an extremely strong ending, but I wanted something different and I'm…
Below is a terse series of reactions I had after seeing the film A Different Man. Upon reflection I might try to be more thoughtful/generous to the film now I've had some distance from it. Still, I think these points have value as a raw response to something that I thought was very successful (and exciting to see) in some ways while being disappointing in others. I do recommend seeing the film…
Suzume is as much a film as a memorial for a traumatised land. In it Japan is a place where gods rage beneath the surface, breaking the earth and churning the sea. Its titular character travels across the nation to places where natural disaster has left deep but mundane scars. A road movie almost - Suzume herself goes to so-called "lonely places" and listens to the memories of people who used to…
Episodes 1 to 18 The perils of entering into a fandom as entrenched as Gundam’s is the amount of extra curricular work required to feel au fait. As a franchise, even at its most UC-focused, Gundam is in constant conversation with other non-Gundam shows. The most notable, evidenced by the shock in style and tone when moving from First Gundam to Zeta, is SDF Macross. I've always been curious about…