Category: Movies

Things I have enjoyed of late

July 6, 2024 /

A lot of these are on YouTube, so if you are not a fan of YouTube, you should skip those. But it’s a hard world out there, and videos are some of the things that help divert me from ruminating on matters I can’t control.

  • For instance, Tico and his Man are a beautiful example of what can emerge from surrendering to inspiration and letting an enigmatic artist follow his unknowable muse, especially if that artist is a parrot.
  • I also feel a great freedom in having given up on Connections and replaced it in my mornings with friendlier puzzles. Cine2Nerdle has possibly the worst Wordle-derived name anyone has yet produced, but it does exactly what I wanted from Connections in terms of interface and hinting, and it’s about movies! (Don’t even talk to me about Cinematrix, I can’t stand it.)
  • The NYT web games team can still do good work, though. Strands has actual hints that can be earned through play (not that they’re often necessary—its challenge level varies, but tips toward the easier side). But the first few minutes of looking at a new day’s grid, waiting for my pattern-recognition neurons to wake up, are a consistent if brief instruction in patience.
  • But back to videos. I found Brad the Tech Time Traveller’s channel algorithmically—I think his literally-bricked hard drive documentary was what first caught my attention. I love to wind down in the evening by watching him work, and he also has a blog which ably demonstrates his time-travel credentials by skillful use of a <marquee> tag.
  • I’ve played a number of games set in the milieu of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but I’ve never actually read the original novel. I could just try that—the work is very much in the public domain—but these days I find it easier to digest fiction via audio. So when I want to occupy one hemisphere of my brain with Minecraft, I occupy the other with the podcast that motivated me to make this post in the first place. John Zhu originally started his Romance of the Three Kingdoms Podcast a decade ago, going through the book chapter by chapter in a kind of ongoing summation abetted by his own commentary and context. I find his work so charming and affable, and generous with explanations for a naive audience member like myself. Zhu has gone on to cover other works of similar import under the umbrella of The Chinese Lore Podcast. I’m almost a quarter of the way through the 174 (!) episodes of the original, so I’m very glad there will be more to listen to when I get through all of those.
  • Oh, also I still play Minecraft (and of course I still watch Joe). I got back into the game when my nieces and nephews became interested, and then they got kind of bored of trying to coordinate with me long-distance. I kept playing anyway. I can’t play it with joysticks at all, which rules out my Switch, and my laptop is a little unwieldy for games, so I’ve been playing the Bedrock version of the game on my tablet with a bluetooth mouse. I miss being able to mod the Java version but I don’t miss having to sit at a desk to play it. I have a nice little world going now, featuring such wonders as a villager who sells mending books and also a square chunk hole that I dug one block at a time from a mountaintop to the bottom of the world. It’s just a solo local file, but if you are a friend who would like to play in it, email me and I will click the button that makes it a server.
  • This is becoming more about video games than I expected. I can’t play Minecraft on our elliptical, so to occupy that version of my brain, I use a secondhand tiny piracy machine to play a randomized version of Final Fantasy III (6) called Worlds Collide. It’s promoted mostly as a racing game—the community holds regular tournaments where competitors all start with the same seed and try to be the first to beat the final boss. I have played through probably twenty times now and I must accept that I will never, ever be fast enough to compete in even the introductory qualifiers. But the scope of the game and my own teenage familiarity with it are juuust right to make it a fun puzzle with many possible solutions every time.
  • Let’s go back to the part where I’m bad at reading books! It took me an undisclosed amount of time to finish Roaming, because at first its illustrations of youthful personality interplay were too acute. But I barreled through the back half and loved it, as I do everything by either of the Tamaki cousins. I was spurred on in no small part by the chance to participate in my first ever Zoom-based book club meeting, a privilege of my subscription to Sophie’s wonderful newsletter. It was a treat! Sophie always has excellent book recommendations, and has since motivated me to get my heart broken by a whole different graphic novel.
  • And speaking of paid subscription privileges, ACHEWOOD IS BACK, BABY.
    It's just a robot butt joke.
  • I made the above visual goof in a few minutes on my phone with Mematic, which is kind of a silly app to pay for given how much image-editing software I already own. But I like how easily it allows me to make little jokes to show my friends in small amounts of time.

    Two panels from Scott Pilgrim featuring Todd Ingram saying "you know how you only use ten percent of your brain? well, that's because the other 90 percent is filled up with WILLIAM GIBSON AND JOHN LE CARRE QUOTES"

    it's the "Travis Kelce yelling" meme with a very long block of text implying that I am ranting about how RSS is still very much in use.

    These are just headlines where I have taken the words "with AI" and replaced them with "with an unpaid intern."

  • I loved getting to see Lucy’s collections of studio dances!
  • I continue to enjoy, above all else, being married to Kat.

    Brendan and Kat at the beach!

  • There’s just one more YouTube link left in this blog post. But I promise I saved it for last for good reason.

Figure traced in light

March 2, 2024 /

I’m so sad to learn that Dr. David Bordwell died at the end of February. Kristin Thompson’s posts to the blog they both maintained had made it clear that his health was in decline, but without knowing the specifics I admit to holding out some hope for his recovery. I didn’t know Bordwell personally myself, and was a relative latecomer to his work; both he and Thompson have been held in high regard by scholars and lovers of film for decades. But even in these few years since coming to it, their work has come to mean a lot to me.

By all accounts Bordwell was as generous with his time, attention, and goodwill as he was with his writing and knowledge. I consider the aforementioned blog the gold standard for this medium, and whenever one of his books went out of print he’d just upload a copy to his site and offer it up for free. He didn’t write to critique or pass judgment on his subject matter. Instead, he clarified, contextualized, reverse-engineered, and recommended, all out of love for the work and in pursuit of sharing it with others.

I could read Bordwell’s writing forever, and it’s a sorrowful thing to know that I won’t see him post anything new again. But there are thousands of pages in his back catalog I can still look forward to reading and learning from. I think I’ll feel grateful that he left that work to this world for the rest of my life.

Lea Stans does very good work

December 6, 2023 /

Up here in Rogers Park, the northeasternmost neighborhood of Chicago, we used to have a beloved, ramshackle neighborhood movie theater that was casually shut down by its current ownership after over eleven decades of operation. Said ownership expressed a complete lack of interest in figuring out a way to keep it going, preferring to focus on being a Starbucks lover, but the same was not true of our neighbors. There was a real grassroots effort to make the business viable—things like people buying popcorn even if they didn’t have tickets, and sold-out Silent Film Society fundraiser screenings with live music. I was glad to attend some of those screenings, even if they didn’t end up changing the owner’s mind. Having the organist play for hours, uninterrupted and without a single note wrong, made my first time seeing Metropolis (1926) a transformative experience.

I got to watch Nosferatu (1922???) in the same way, which was borderline hallucinatory. It’s only by reading that linked Silentology entry that I came to realize the film could have played in that exact theater almost a century ago: same location, different world. I wonder if there will ever be blogs that persist in some form for a hundred years. I hope so.

January 9, 2023

“Quite a few composers have had their scores rejected by dissatisfied directors… it’s a recognized risk of the profession. A few films do exist with entirely different scores, almost always as a result of release in different countries. Until now, however, I’d never come across a film that exists with three different scores.“

An Actor’s Revenge (1963)

September 25, 2022 /

I was supposed to go on a trip (my first!) to Canada to visit friends and attend TIFF a couple weeks ago, but instead I got you-know-what. I’m fine now. But I had been looking up things about Gina Prince-Bythewood, whose film The Woman King (2022) debuted in Toronto, and who I knew as the director the wonderful Love & Basketball (2000); in this way I came to watch her enjoyable Criterion Closet Picks video, and saw comments there noting that the last movie she picked, at random, was one of director Ichikawa Kon’s best. I’d never heard of it, but as long as I was on youtube anyway, I decided to type the title into the search bar and found this lovely video from a cool and new-to-me channel called Pitching Room.

That made me sure I wanted to watch the movie, so last night Kat and I did, and I loved it. Here is a list of my current top ten favorite movies, as of today, in no particular order except for the first one:

  • Hackers (1995)
  • Brick (2005)
  • Magic Mike XXL (2015)
  • Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
  • Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
  • The Matrix (1999)
  • Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
  • Spirited Away (2001)
  • Out of Sight (1998)
  • Toy Story 3 (2010)
  • Tampopo (1985)
  • Rumble in the Bronx (1995)
  • Your Name. (2016)
  • Alien (1979)
  • Moonlight (2016)

There’s a separate shortlist of movies that might get promoted when I watch them a second time, which I should really do, and An Actor’s Revenge (1963) immediately joined them. One thing I think the above entries mostly have in common is that they have genre devices they use for stunts, literal or figurative; one I think they all have in common is that they put up a strong conceptual framing and fucking commit to it, without backpedaling or compromising. Even the places where Tampopo (1985) explicitly winks at the audience are a device to prod the viewer deeper into the movie’s world, not an apology or excuse.

In its first fifteen minutes, An Actor’s Revenge (1963) establishes itself as gorgeously stylized, theatrical, liminal, serious about its stakes, and brazenly queer. It throws grand plots, competing thieves with cool sobriquets, hidden weapons, stage-lighting scene transitions, night fights, soliloquies, a jazz-meets-kabuki score, and secret scrolls from martial arts masters at you right from the start. But the most impressive thing to me was its central performance, and the way that performance was framed. The protagonist, Yukinojō, is an onnagata, a stage actor who uses masculine pronouns but whose presentation is consistently high-feminine, in or out of the theater (and indeed, Kat reminded me, even during internal monologue). Hasegawa Kazuo, who played the same character in the original 1935 version of the movie, was in his 50s by the time this one was shot; there are not a lot of movies I have seen where a middle-aged person of what can be fairly described as mincing affect is portrayed as a total badass, eminently desirable and desired, heroic, and internally tormented—but never tormented over gender presentation or sexuality. Even though Hasegawa also plays another character in the story—a fact I didn’t realize until Kat pointed it out—the film never makes that contrast into a joke, or anything else about Yukinojō either. It’s busy doing so many other cool things!

In 2022, even with filmmaking technology and distribution more nimble and fluid than they ever have been, it seems like the people making movies still have to pad their queer stories with explanatory commas and self-conscious asides. An Actor’s Revenge (1963) was shot, as you may gather, sixty years ago, and it never bothers with any of that. As of today, it’s available on the Criterion Channel, and if you like the same things I like—with the content note that it includes a brief depiction of suicide—then I bet you’ll enjoy it a lot.

April 26, 2022

“A lot of (now-forgotten) mainstream plays and novels were as experimental in shifting point-of-view and juggling time frames as any we find today. For example, we celebrate backwards stories as typical of the demands of modern storytelling. The play and film Betrayal and the films Memento and Shimmer Lake are among many recent media products presenting the scenes in 3-2-1 order. But this possibility was discussed by a prominent critic in 1914, and soon a major woman actor wrote a play that used reverse chronology.

Some will argue that innovations of popular narrative are dumbed-down borrowings from modernist or avant-garde trends. I try to show this process as a two-way dynamic: modernism borrowing from popular forms, mainstream storytellers making modernist techniques more accessible. But we also find that popular storytelling has its own intrinsic sources of innovation, as with the reverse-chronology tale.”

March 15, 2022

“For some years I’ve been arguing that the martial arts cinema of East Asia constitutes as distinctive a contribution to film artistry as did more widely recognized ‘schools and movements’ of European cinema like Soviet Montage and Italian Neorealism.”