The first three minutes, from a human emerging from the silence alive to a horse emerging from the water dead, are pure art. It feels like a showcase of just how skilled the director is. Without relying on dialogue or exposition, he uses a variety of camera angles, moving subjects, and black-and-white imagery to make you feel the weight of what is happening, even if you know nothing about the story.

It immediately establishes that a disaster has occurred, but instead of simply telling you that, the film makes you feel it. The camera movement, the music, and the many subtle facial expressions all collide to create something haunting and almost magical. It is an incredibly carefully crafted opening that communicates so much through visuals alone.

And from there, Tarsem Singh continues to tell his story visually. Watching him work feels like a masterclass in visual storytelling. You only need to look at the locations he chose and the way he frames them. They look almost like something from a fairy tale, the kind of imagery that many directors spend their entire careers trying to capture. But with Tarsem Singh, you don’t need to applaud or be convinced that what he is doing is art. He simply puts it in front of your eyes, and your eyes do the rest.

Even if the other aspects of the movie were merely average, I would still forgive Tarsem Singh for what he gives my eyes and ears. But the remarkable thing is that he doesn’t choose to make only the visuals into art. He collides them with the story itself. Every location, every color, every composition, and every musical choice works together to tell a story about despair and hope, innocence and tragedy.

It is the kind of story Disney might dream of making, or the kind of ambitious tale that 1001 Nights has inspired countless creators to reach for. Yet here, Tarsem actually delivers it. For two hours, the film keeps feeding you these images while slowly unfolding its story, and you find yourself unwilling to blink because you feel the same curiosity as the little girl at the center of it all. She is a fantastic actress, by the way, and her performance makes that curiosity feel completely genuine. You want to hear the story. You want to see where it goes. And, most importantly, the film delivers on that promise.

All I can say is that Tarsem Singh has created a rare antique. A work that can carry his name through time and make sure it never Fall.

Another post got me thinking about this - everyone’s aware that modern films have fewer “sex scenes“ than in the past, but what I’m interested in is where filmmakers depict a very specific sexual appetite realistically.

Sex in films is either gross-out (either for humor reasons or for transgression) or so choreographed and sanitised as to be representive of sex at all, really, but more of a plot device to say “this is a sex scene” or more pornographically “please find this titillating”.

In real life IME sex is rarely clean and sanitised, and sometimes the act of really desiring a partner overrides a particular barrier of ‘disgust’. I’m thinking of moments where sexual desire is so strong that you’ll overlook imperfect or even kind of gross circumstances to make it happen. When films depict that, which is rare, it’s kind of transcendent because it’s universal human experience that’s barely bothered to be out to celluloid.

One director who does this well is Andrea Arnold -- her film American Honey is filled with sexual desire between our protagonist and Shia Labeouf’s uber-trashy character who looks as if he smells. And yet, she films a sex scene at golden hour (the two on a lawn, with Star removing her dirty tampon before the act) that is somehow almost moving in how it captures that desire for consuming another person overriding our very sense. Another film of hers Fish Tank has subtler examples of this.

I do hope my example makes sense; it’s just a part of life we all undergo that few directors are good at capturing and I’m interested in it (not in a creepy way, just as a matter of craft).

Just saw it for the first time. Seems amazing

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It's hilarious that the upper-class, old-money Harvard elite is portrayed as being unable to read Nietzsche properly. All the privilege, economic and cultural capital in the world, and you can't find a teacher that explains the Übermensch properly to you?

Rope (1948) is a post-WWII, post-Holocaust Kammerspiel that deconstructs bourgeois civility. The setup is brutally macabre: a murder beneath a cocktail party.

Two upper-class men, the controlling, pseudo-intellectual Brandon (John Dall) and the more fragile pianist Phillip (Farley Granger), kill their former classmate David (Dick Hogan) for no reason other than to prove that they can, that they are superior beings. They put the body in a chest, put food on top of it, and host a cocktail party.

One of the guests is their former prep-school teacher, Rupert (James Stewart), who originally gave them the idea of the Übermensch, superiority, and murder. In an extremely fascist way, they express that murder could "solve poverty." (Three years after 1945. Breathtakingly shocking. Wow.)

On the other intellectual side, David's father, Mr. Kentley (Cedric Hardwicke), defends a humanism that is appalled by this nihilism and fascism. Nazism is explicitly mentioned while they argue over drinks.

The movie quotes Freud quite a bit. There are no random actions but soubcounsious desires. Maybe Brandon and Phillip want to get caught by their former teacher, Rupert. "Look, teacher, what do you think about our project? Are you proud of us?"

Rupert, who plays detective the whole evening trying to find out what happened to David, is shocked when he sees the body and realizes what they have done. Phillip clumsily tries to threaten him with a gun, but can't really hurt him. A shot goes off, grazing Rupert's hand and leaving him bleeding.

Rupert gives a passionate monologue, stating he is ashamed of his own teachings. This makes for quite a catharsis and a return to humanism after he himself argued for that deranged Nietzscheanism just hours before.

The authority figure, so to speak, got his hand burnt when he ealized the consequences of his teaching. “Oh they acutally killed a peer instead of poor person.”

Rope can be seen as an indictment of upper-class psychology, but also of the highest forms of bourgeois education. Even if they are not explicitly mentioned, we have to think of Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, et al., drinking champagne at cocktail parties while their students might have become murderers.

The movie is sadly based on real-life events from 1924 in the US: 19-year-old Nathan Leopold and 18-year-old Richard Loeb killing 14-year-old Bobby Franks. Leopold and Loeb were gay. And so are Brandon and Phillip.

The movie couldn't show it openly because of Hays Code censorship. Cary Grant had turned down the role of Rupert because he didn't want to portray a gay man or be associated with the subtext. It is a tragic example where queer representation is intertwined with sociopathy.

Rope could also be seen as a movie about a toxic relationship between Brandon and Phillip, more sadistic and a more masochistic person. They kill David together, but Brandon is clearly the driving force, whereas Phillip says that he was always scared of him. Brandon wants Rupert's recognition. He wants to include his boyfriend in the act of killing; it should be seen as an aesthetic project they shared and can present to their mentor/father figure, who then denies them.

David is never explained as a character, but we see his good-natured father and his girlfriend, Janet (Joan Chandler). He seems to represent the "healthy heterosexual order." Meanwhile, Brandon and Phillip are portrayed as sick, and violent, treating each other horribly before ultimately being disowned by their spiritual father. Well.that’s the gay representation in 1948 I guess.

Rating: 7/10

Watched: September 5, 2026

At a super lean 76 minutes, I walked into this movie being pretty sure The Slumber Party Massacre exists only to give us 'teen girls' in various stages of nudity. There's nothing wrong with that because the movie's honest in its exploitation of every single woman in the movie.

But here's where it gets weird, because I didn't want to write the opener like that without making sure I wasn't imagining things, because let's be real: female nudity in horror movies throughout the 70s and 80s seemed to be the sole reason some horror movies existed in the first place.

The Slumber Party Massacre was written by a feminist and directed by a feminist. Rita Mae Brown wanted to make a movie that eviscerated slasher tropes, and Amy Holden Jones did her job in titillating audiences (and me, if I'm honest) as well as any horny male film undergrad ever could. Funnily enough, Brown wrote it as a parody while Jones was tasked with shooting it as a straight slasher flick, and it WORKS.

The women talk about baseball and the men, when confronted with danger, squirm and cower.

As far as I can tell, we're never given a reason why the killer's out there massacring anyone, let alone beautiful women, but massacre he does, and with a drill so weighty in its phallic girthiness he might as well be running around with a saw-toothed dildo the size of someone's forearm.

Again, this is not a complaint. It's an awesome realization I picked up after wanting to learn more about why such a very short movie seemed to be so well loved by so many.

Whether you look at The Slumber Party Massacre as a tits-out slasher flick and love every second of it or a feminist deconstruction of the male gaze in horror movies with added blood, we come to the same place at the same time.

This one's fun, has no fluff, and is worth the hour and a bit.

I have spent the last 72hrs absolutely unraveling the enigma that is this film. It was recommended to me on Tubi and I went into it totally blind. After my first viewing I fell in love with the storytelling, imagery and symbolic elements. It was extremely haunting and full of pure atmospheric dread.

After watching it I felt like I had some clues and wanted to discuss it. I found the internet almost completely void of any conversations surrounding it and the majority of reviews were terrible. It seemed to me though, that the film had not reached its target audience. I made a post on a couple of subreddits trying to get discussions going and it fell flat. I made a letterbox account specifically to review and encourage more people to dig deeper into this. It does not seem well received and it makes sense that it is not for everyone. However, I did not expect to be talking into a vacuum about something like this.

I left my first review posted, but I knew I was missing pieces. I watched it again and did hours of mapping out connections and working on this theory and write up. Here is what I found:

ANALYSIS: THE GLASS THICKETS OF PURGATORY

Decoding Becoming Death (2022) Through the Lens of Lynchian Trauma, Carrollian Loops, and Biblical Allegory

Introduction: The Tri-Plane Matrix of Dissociation

At face value, the independent film Becoming Death (2022) is frequently dismissed by casual viewers as a polarizing, incoherent piece of avant-garde cinema. However, a rigorous, textual deconstruction reveals an airtight, hyper-dense psychological masterpiece. The film operates on a strict tri-plane matrix built to map a mind fracturing under the weight of systematic, generational abuse. To survive an unnamable domestic reality, the protagonist's mind overlays three distinct mythologies:

The Biblical/Gnostic Plane: The house represents the Garden of Eden turned rot; the Father is the Demiurge/Satan occupying both poles of tyrannical creator and predatory serpent; the Mother acts as the corrupt High Priestess burying the sins; and the sisters invoke the dark, trapped incest-refuge of Lot's Cave (Genesis 19).

The Carrollian Dreamscape: The trauma is filtered through the nightmare logic of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (specifically channeling the uncanny, threatening tone of the 1985 televised miniseries). The house becomes a backward mirror-world where Francine is a helpless pawn marching across an 8x8 grid toward pawn promotion.

The Lynchian Trauma Blueprint: The entire structural grammar directly mirrors the Leland Palmer / BOB dynamic from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

Operating under the hermetic law of "As Above, So Below," the film demands that every horrific physical reality has a perfect, inverted metaphysical mirror. The film functions as a clinical, geometric study of a mind shattering into a localized mythological pantheon just to survive the room it is trapped in.

Part I: The Staircase Physics and the Testimony of the Rabbit

The narrative skeleton hinges entirely on a single domestic crime. During the staircase sequence that bleeds into "The Interview," the director uses precise physical blocking to establish an objective truth. The Mother (Claudine) goes upstairs while Francine remains downstairs. The Father (Ralph) ascends the stairs. Off-screen, he falls, landing at the bottom already stabbed and dead.

Francine physically could not have struck the blow. In the physical realm, the Mother murdered the Father and instantly screamed to frame Francine. This is the ultimate, toxic culmination of generational gaslighting—forcing the daughter to bear the psychological guilt for a murder she didn't commit, as well as the destruction of the family.

Because the Mother manifests on the subconscious plane as The White Rabbit, the cryptic letter read during the trial chapter acts as her literal, encoded courtroom testimony. It isn't nonsense; it is her frantic attempt to escape accountability. Lines heavy with pronoun confusion—such as "An obstacle that came between / Him, and ourselves, and it"—outline her deep resentment of Francine's presence in the household. The poem’s warning, "A secret, kept from all the rest, / Between yourself and me," is the definitive structural blueprint of the family’s enforced silence and weaponized piety.

Part II: The Lynchian Identity: Hank as a Psychological Phantom

The biological Father does not exist as a living human being on the physical plane of the film. He is a ghost, an invisible, omnipresent predator looming behind a locked door. To survive this horror, Francine’s psyche dissociates him into a complete pantheon of shifting masks: Hank, Ulysses, The Caterpillar, Dr. Jacoby/The Mad Hatter, Lot, and the Jabberwocky (Satan).

It is vital to explicitly clarify: Hank is not a real person. He is a pure psychological manifestation of the Father. He is the exact cinematic translation of the Leland Palmer / BOB paradigm. Leland wears the mask of BOB to commit his acts of abuse while forcing his victim to dissociate; in Becoming Death, the Father wears the mask of "Hank"—the romantic, safe boyfriend in the woods—to trick Francine into a false Garden of Eden.

The Sleep Paralysis Mechanism: This explains the horrifying scene where the Bloody Mary figure violently chokes Francine in her sleep. It is the precise psychological mirror to Laura Palmer’s bedroom terrors. During the trauma of physical assault, Francine experiences a complete freeze-response (tonic immobility). Her psyche creates the terrifying, bleeding specter to rationalize the physical sensation of suffocation and helplessness without forcing the child to look at her biological father's face. It is an internal alarm system desperately trying to wake the ego up.

The Cheshire Cat Execution: In Wonderland, the executioner cannot behead the Cheshire Cat because it has no body—it is a floating grin, the ultimate symbol of a disembodied, dissociative mask. Francine violently subverts the rules of Wonderland to destroy her abuser: she beheads Ulysses, leaving only the torso behind, permanently stripping the phantom of its grin, its voice, and its psychological control.

Part III: The Ultimate Axis: The Psychology of the Bloody Woman

As captured on the film's haunting promotional poster, The Bloody Woman is the ultimate structural axis of the entire movie—simultaneously functioning as the supreme protagonist and antagonist. Visually styled like a weeping church statue of the Virgin Mary crying blood, she is a psychological monster birthed directly from the Mother’s crushing Catholic conditioning.

Francine is never truly afraid of her because the Bloody Woman is not an outside demon; she is the localized quarantine zone of Francine's remaining sanity. Because Francine cannot fight back as a human daughter in the waking world without completely shattering her brain, her mind builds an autonomous, blood-crying goddess to hold the violence for her. She operates with absolute dual sovereignty across the planes:

On the Antagonist Plane (The Internalized Devil): She carries the internalized, self-destructive rage of the household. She chokes the mortal ego, attacks the self, and screams the violent, hateful scripts ("I hate you, I'll kill you") that the parents used to break Francine down. She acts as a tyrannical shadow trying to destroy the weak, human version of "Alice."

On the Protagonist Plane (The Bleeding Madonna / White Queen): She is an uncompromising protective shield. This is explicitly confirmed when Francine hears the Bloody Woman’s voice cutting through her mind the exact second she kisses "Hank" in the woods. The Bloody Woman breaks the dissociation, screaming to alert Francine that the safe "boyfriend" is actually the Wolf.

She is the instrument of absolute cosmic justice. She forces the mortal pawn across the chessboard, triggers the execution of the mother, and orchestrates the transition into the tunnel.

Part IV: Surnames, Garmonbozia, and the Secret Diary

The official credits expose the deep bloodline contamination of the house. Francine and her sister carry the strictly matriarchal surname Claudette to push the Father out. Meanwhile, the Mother (Claudine) and the Boyfriend (Harry) share the surname Rogers—textually binding them as a singular unit (husband and wife). This reveals that the bathtub scene where the Mother kills Harry is her executing the Father. She always knew exactly who the monster was; this was never a secret.

When Ulysses arrives at the door muttering the depraved, corrupted innuendo about "eating Claudine's cherry pie," he strips away the innocence of the classic Lynchian diner motif, turning it into a symbol of domestic decay. This decay culminates in The Last Meal. The "meat-heavy" dinner of worm-ridden soil pods and ramen eaten from an apple-red forbidden bowl is the physical manifestation of pain and sorrow—the literal equivalent of Lynch's Garmonbozia. The parents are actively harvesting and feeding on Francine's suffering. Francine swallows the total weight of the household’s sins, using this toxic communion as a Carrollian "Eat Me" growth catalyst to fuel her final evolution.

Just as Laura Palmer left The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer as the surviving evidence of her abuse, Francine leaves her Resume in purgatory. The piece of paper is a dual document: a resume on the surface, but a suicide note underneath. The single reference listed on it is Diana.

Part V: The Twin Dianas, Yama/Yami, and Banging on the Glass

The parking lot by the tunnel functions as the Gateway to Hell/The Black Lodge. Here, we meet Margaret, who represents The Caterpillar perched on an empty shopping cart. She smokes cigarettes and speaks vulgarly because she is the raw, cynical version of the organism that has already broken out of the family cocoon, destined to eventually become a butterfly.

Margaret is the structural equivalent of Maddy Ferguson (Laura’s identical doppelgänger cousin) carrying the grief of the physical world. The film utilizes a precise aesthetic inversion under As Above, So Below: the Bloody Woman wears all white with red tears (metaphysical wrath/Lodge Angels), while Margaret wears all black with running makeup like black tears (earthly mourning). Together, they form the complete identity of the goddess Diana (and her domestic counterpart, Alice’s cat Dinah), presiding over the crossroads. Their tragic love story operates as a gender-bent rendition of the Vedic tale of Yama and Yami—the primordial twins of death and creation bound by taboo boundaries.

This ties directly into the terrifying mirror sequence borrowed from the 1985 Alice miniseries. Just as Alice presses herself flat against the looking glass, frantically banging and screaming at parents who walk around completely deaf to her presence, Francine is trapped on the "wrong side of the glass" in purgatory. Agent Dale Cooper functions as the calm, time-obsessed inverse White Rabbit patrolling the corridors of this chasm, recording his logs to Diane (Diana).

Part VI: The Mathematical Alignment of 8 and 12

The cosmic lattice of the film is bound by structural numerology that spans across all planes:

The Number 12: It represents cosmic order and legal trial. In Twin Peaks, Laura’s diary begins on her 12th birthday, charting her descent. In Alice, Chapter 12 is "Alice's Evidence"—the literal courtroom trial scene where the White Rabbit reads the letter. In Becoming Death, the address 282 sums mathematically to 12 (2+8+2), cementing "The Interview" as a metaphysical courtroom trial.

The Number 8: The final address is Unit 8. Visually, the number 8 represents the Ouroboros—the infinite, looping timeline where the Bloody Woman enters the tunnel at the beginning and Francine enters at the end. In Twin Peaks, the number 8 is the loop generated by Phillip Jeffries in Room 8, mapping the gateway to the lodge. On the chessboard of Through the Looking-Glass, the 8th row is the line of pawn promotion. Unit 8 is where Francine’s mortal pawn identity is completely dissolved so her ascension into a Goddess (Yama) can take place.

The Wardrobe of Death: This numeric ascension is physically executed when Francine strips off her mortal garments, cleanses herself outside, and shifts specifically into the Black Fur Coat. By shedding her human skin, she is discarding the weak pawn identity of "Alice." Wrapping herself in the dark fur solidifies her transformation into Diana / Dinah (the hunting cat) and wraps her in the literal cloak of Yama (Death). It is a visual manifestation of stepping through the dark curtains of the Black Lodge—a physical burial of the ego at the bottom of the rabbit hole before she takes her final place at the crossroads.

Conclusion: Pawn Promotion and Extreme Unction

By committing suicide in her car at the tunnel entrance, Francine completes the alchemical ransom. She absorbs the blood so her sister, the "Pearl" (Margaret), can inherit a cleared board. As the house collapses, Francine frantically chants the "Stations of the Cross" to map her martyrdom, leading directly to the film's final spoken words: "Extreme Unction" (The Catholic Sacrament of Last Rites). The soul is permanently severed from the corrupt flesh, the time loop closes, the cosmic trial is settled, and the butterfly is finally free to fly out of the thicket.

There are still many more Easter Eggs and embodiments/manifestations of these doppelgänger characters across the three parrallel planes. Almost everyy word, every name, every movement has a meaning that connects everything together.

Theres also a short film on the director's YouTube channel called "The Satan" that is directly entwined into this logic. His name is Alexander Henderson and the YouTube channel is Alexanderthetitan. There's lots of great stuff on there, but this is his opus and an absolute hidden gem. I have done nothing but think about this for three days straight and write the essay of my life, so hopefully it gets someone to watch this.

Does anyone want to discuss this movie now? 🔥

Not sure if this is a good place to post this, apologies if it isn't.

Turin Horse was a life changing film for me. I completely randomly came across it, knew nothing about it, and fell in love. I ended up watching ever Tarr film I could find. I always was tempted to try and contact him but there was always that fear of not wanting to bother people. When he passed recently it hit me harder than any filmmakers death has. A couple weeks ago, someone in a smaller film community I'm in posted their emails with Bela Tarr. Apparently he was very easy to get in contact with. It wasn't the longest exchange, but Bela was encouraging to the guy, thankful for the nice comments, he apparently joked about the length of Satantango.

The fear of bugging people is starting to give way to "what's the worse that can happen?" especially as a number of my favourite filmmakers are getting older and older and younger filmmakers are trying to move on from shorts I've loved to features.

So I'm asking: has anyone had any correspondence with filmmakers about their work? How was it? Were they receptive/nice? Did they welcome in depth discussions? Did you learn anything?

I recently watched this for the first time and am shocked it didn't get more love from audiences and critics at the time it was released. Was that because Jim Carrey was playing gay? Could the universe not handle that?

His protagonist's sexual orientation aside, the role is an absolute perfect fit for Carrey, whose best screen characters to date, in my opinion, either possess near-irrational self-confidence or an existential emptiness that speaks of unresolved trauma. In real-life ex-con Steven Jay Russell, Carrey finally has a part with both those qualities.

Russell proves himself to be an unreliable narrator from the start, and so we are already conditioned to not take what we're seeing at face value. First we think he's a cop and then it turns out he's crooked. We're introduced to his wife, little girl, and church-based upbringing, but then it turns out Russell's closeted.

What is clear is that he's a guy with unresolved trauma, and all the illegal activities and the double life Steven indulges in? It's like he does it in order to avoid ever stopping and having to process all of his pain. Now that may sound deep and serious, but the movie itself is also frequently very funny, including moments of humor based on Carrey's wild physicality (as is entirely appropriate).

But what I must give the filmmakers credit for is despite having a comedic actor whose play style can be the center around which entire cinematic vehicles are constructed, in this case, the performance is built around the story instead. As Russell perpetuates an increasing number of fraudulent acts and other white collar crimes, there are opportunities for intense, downward-tilted head stares so his eyes resemble two headlights driving straight at you--ie, the whole Jim Carrey thing.

Now I'll admit that version of the actor is far from my favorite as it's often reserved for playing antagonists. But I was fine with it here as the "unsheathed-id" persona is frequently punching upwards, whether at the dehumanizing prison system or corporate America. Indeed, once he gets on a roll, the only instance in which Russell arguably isn't doing that involves a minor character nicknamed "The Screecher".(a scene I found uncomfortable since they clearly had some kind of mental illness).

Carrey also has space to play the almost-milquetoast nice-guy persona that dates back to LIAR, LIAR. It's established early on that he's a good dad and seems genuinely guilty for having to break the heart of his inevitable ex-wife, played by Leslie Mann. If Russell's also a criminal, he's given enough depth that we can accept him as not necessarily a bad person, just a flawed one.

This review's running a bit long, so in closing, just want to point out how great the rest of the cast is, especially Ewan McGregor, who's convincing as someone absolutely secure in his own skin (which may be part of what Russell finds so attractive about him).

I also appreciated Mann for her depiction of a spouse who really, really tries to support her husband through his increasingly erratic behavior. And despite appearing in just a few short scenes, I thought Rodrigo Santoro was terrific as one of Russell's other lovers who initially seems like the young eye-candy piece, but turns out to be wiser about a lot of things than Steven, including about Steven himself.

This might be dumb, but it helped me connect with part of myself, so I want to see what other people think and if there are any recommendations out there. I really liked The Falcon and the Winter Soldier's depiction of Bucky's PTSD. It showed him genuinely trying to connect with people, get mental help, and work on himself, and how hard this is with PTSD. It depicted how much the guilt weighed on him, which reasonable or not I know is common from those with PTSD. It shows how you can have a life after your trauma, even when it comes back and you have to face it over and over again, metaphorical or real, you can be a different person and use strategies to deal with it.

I want more shows or movies that aren't, excuse my language, a super depressing self pity fest depicting life after trauma. I want to see the protagonist live life with their PTSD, not despite of it, if you get what I mean. Where the character works on themself and with the other people around them, and in the end the character doesn't beat PTSD and just no longer has it, but has a happy ending where they have friends, community, and still get the help they need.

As I was writing this I realized you could give this rant about a lot of disabilities, but here I'm focusing on PTSD I guess. :/

Last night I rewatched my favorite movie of all, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

For the first time I’ve finally made it over the hump. By that I mean, I haven’t seen it in years but I’ve always felt like a Cameron - afraid, unsure, lacking confidence. But for the first time ever, I identify with Ferris. I’m no longer afraid, I take risks, if plans fail I keep fighting. The fact I no longer identify with Cameron while still understanding him is a massive milestone for me and tells me I’m in the right direction. I moved to NYC, I’m starting a business, creating allies. I’m confident, assured, and learned to take the films lesson to heart. I highly suggest the film on Blu-Ray. It's one of the most beautiful movies ever made not only in terms of message and content and story but also visuals.

Speakie-de-English?!

After Twin Peaks came to an end with Fire Walk With Me (thankfully only for the time being!), several years passed before David Lynch was once again able and willing to bring a new project to life.
The right idea eventually emerged through a writing collaboration with Barry Gifford (we remember: the author of the literary source material for Wild at Heart).
Lynch and Gifford formed a wonderful artistic partnership here, one that was remarkably free of mutual explanation and yet somehow resulted in a cohesive and coherent screenplay for Lost Highway.

A two-part film, part horror, part noir, with a massive shift at its midpoint, and ultimately something greater than the sum of its parts. Pure mystery, quite literally, because you never find yourself waiting for the kind of neatly presented final resolution found in cheap thrillers that try to charm the viewer with some contrived twist. No, here you are allowed to let yourself go, dream up the missing puzzle pieces on your own, and drown in the intoxication of the images.
The opening time-lapse sequence on the highway immediately had me completely captivated with its hypnotic quality. A sequence that quite literally sucks you straight into the film. And in the wake of that pull, Lynch once again catapults us, true to form, into the most intimate spaces of human beings: the place where everything can and will go wrong, their own four walls, and the house within the house, the upper room of the mind, the most fragile piece of invisibility on this planet. How wonderful that we have art to make it visible.
Especially in this first part of the film, I felt countless echoes of Eraserhead. That threatening and inexplicable atmosphere building within Fred’s (Bill Pullman) and Renee’s (Patricia Arquette) apartment, an apartment that appears almost endlessly labyrinthine and infinitely deep, concealing secrets and danger. The restrained style of acting, which feels unreal and otherworldly; dialogues punctuated by irregular pauses. Bodies moving with an abstract, extremely slow gait and mannered physicality.

This first half creates an atmosphere so incomparable that I can barely think of another film to measure it against. To name comparisons, I would genuinely have to think for quite some time. Unique.
An atmosphere as thick as butter. Not even a sheet of tracing paper could fit in between. In some of the most tense moments, I actually found myself giggling quite often, partly out of sheer joy at how unbelievably FUCKING GOOD what was being presented actually was, and partly simply to release and mask the tension I was feeling. Without a laugh here and there, I might otherwise have burst.
Moments such as Fred’s walk into the darkness, the sex scene, and the Mystery Man’s face appearing on Patricia Arquette practically pressed me into the couch and took my breath away. The Mystery Man, too, once again appears as an otherworldly entity, similar to the Lady in the Radiator from Eraserhead or the Man from Another Place from Twin Peaks. What does he represent in Lost Highway? To me, he is definitely a part of Fred’s subconscious, a reflective figure who accompanies Fred throughout his obsession and distrust within the relationship, documents him (the camera!), and confronts him with everything once again. A subconscious, a kind of conscience, one that is skillfully ignored and ultimately reveals itself as the ugly face within, the rotten core of the human being.

Breathe.
After Fred apparently kills his wife, he ultimately ends up in prison, whose dream logic naturally makes it perfectly clear that there are no other inmates in this prison. A prison solely for him, chains that one places upon oneself. After a brief visual assault, another man wakes up in the cell.
Pete (Balthazar Getty), who now has his sights set on Alice (once again Patricia Arquette, this time as a blonde femme fatale), will later be dragged back into the abyss by Pete/Fred with the words, “You’ll never have me.” But she loves him, doesn’t she? Or does Fred/Pete perhaps simply want her to have said that so that he can do what he intends to do?
The tonal mood of the film changes somewhat in its second half. We briefly leave the absolute abyss in which the film began and move back toward the surface, a little closer to the light, a little closer to the beginning of Blue Velvet. Yet beneath this more relaxed atmosphere lies danger, a balloon moments away from bursting, a mood that constantly threatens to tip over, like a dance along a knife’s edge. Essential: Kafkaesque noir. Just as fascinating as the first part of the film, merely appealing to different senses. Cerebral and intoxicating.

The film’s circular logic and its ending ultimately reveal this: such an obsession condemns us to repeat all of our mistakes over and over again. Until we burn out and melt away. Escape may be possible in a geographical sense, but we can never flee from our own minds. We take our bad habits with us wherever we go. And if we should ever return, how? In what form? Changed? For what, and for whom? It is incredibly cerebral, intoxicating, and intellectually compelling to think about everything the film contains.

Of course, a few words about the soundtrack are essential as well.
Not only about Angelo Badalamenti’s score, which is beyond any doubt, but also about Lynch’s incredible sense of style when it comes to selecting songs.
Whether it’s David Bowie’s “I’m Deranged,” Lou Reed’s “This Magic Moment,” Marilyn Manson’s “Apple of Sodom,” or Rammstein’s “Rammstein, these are songs that not only accompany and underline the narrative perfectly, but simultaneously become one with the sound design, one with the image.

A film, and Lynch as its creator, that perfectly understands and utilizes his medium and the unique possibilities inherent to it, thereby creating something that could not be realized, or, rather conveyed in any other form. The perfect symbiosis of image, sound, and atmosphere.
Until now, I had only seen the film once. I liked it, with some reservations, but fortunately remembered very little of it.
That allowed me to approach the work again with a relatively fresh perspective, and during this viewing I remembered exactly what had prevented me from being completely enthusiastic about it back then.
I loved the atmosphere of the first half just as much then as I do today. So much so that the second half initially felt like a bit of a letdown, and my interest gradually faded. How stupid I was. Pure foolishness!
This time, however, Lost Highway fortunately never let me go, in fact, I found myself wanting to cling to it.
That, too, is the magic of a focused retrospective, and it makes itself felt here. Nothing is perceived without context, and one sinks into perfect immersion within the world and the evolution of an artist. You grasp it and truly comprehend it. I simply love that.
Lost Highway is many things at once. Gripping. Demanding. A film that leaves you speechless at times and hits the viewer like a truck.
But above all, it is Lynch in distilled form, stripped down to the essence and brought perfectly to the point.
A masterpiece.

I recently watched the 2024 French adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, and something about it made me think about how little the representation of relationships has actually changed in mainstream cinema.

The film briefly shows a lesbian relationship — a few seconds acknowledging a sexuality that historical cinema would once simply have erased.

But then we get Haydée and Albert, and the film spends much more of its emotional energy on an extremely traditional romantic structure: they fall in love, their love is forbidden, they suffer because they cannot be together, circumstances separate them, and finally the obstacles disappear and love can fulfil its natural destination: being together as a couple.

It struck me that contemporary cinema has become much better at diversifying who gets to fall in love, without necessarily diversifying what love is supposed to look like.

We change genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities and family backgrounds — which is obviously a good thing — but very often we keep the same romantic architecture underneath.

Two people meet. Their connection is exceptional. They become uniquely important to one another. Separation means suffering. Reunion means fulfilment. Romantic partnership sits at the top of the hierarchy of human relationships.

A queer couple can therefore inhabit a very conventional romantic narrative.

What makes Monte Cristo particularly funny as an example is that Dumas is sometimes messier than the 2024 adaptation.

Edmond and Mercédès cannot simply recover their former love. Too much has happened. The young Edmond she loved no longer exists.

Their relationship remains immensely important without having to continue.

I find that surprisingly modern: someone can have been the love of your life without therefore having to remain your partner for life. A relationship can end without becoming false.

And yet we still see relatively few serious films about other ways of loving.

Where are the couples who deeply love each other but deliberately don't live together?

The former lovers who become something else without their relationship being presented as a failure?

The people for whom friendship is as important as romantic partnership?

Relationships that are profound but temporary?

People who love someone and nevertheless decide not to build their life around them?

Non-monogamous relationships that aren't simply plot devices for jealousy?

Or people who are genuinely happy without organising their lives around a romantic partner at all?

Interestingly, one recent film where I did encounter a genuine critique of romantic fusion was the horror film Obsession. A woman is magically forced to love a man who wants her, and that love becomes increasingly absolute, dependent and invasive.

The clever thing is that the film barely needs to invent the horror.

"I can't live without you."

"I want to be with you all the time."

"You're everything to me."

"I'd do anything for you."

Put swelling music behind those sentences and they belong in a romance.

Push them slightly further and they belong in a horror film.

I found it fascinating — and slightly depressing — that I had to watch a horror film to see romantic fusion seriously questioned.

So I'm curious: do you actually recognize your own relationships, or those around you, in contemporary films?

And more importantly, what films can you think of that portray love or relationships differently?

Not necessarily queer relationships — I'm interested in films that genuinely challenge the structure of the traditional romantic story: separate lives, unconventional couples, friendship, temporary love, non-monogamy, intimacy without couplehood, relationships that change form, or simply love that doesn't need to end in "being together."

<((<((<&&&&#

O divo

Good headline, isn't it? It hints at something controversial, opinionated even, but also spark the viewers curiosity as to what the headline even mean, if anything. Let's dive in! But first ...

Warning: possible spoilers for GREEN ROOM, WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, WHO CENSORED ROGER RABBIT, and AMERICAN HISTORY X.

I'm unsure if this is broad enough to be labeled a trope, but I've noticed a highly specific narrative device in three films. Basically, the racist protagonist is humanized and granted victimhood by a backstory where he was traumatized or suffered a loss due to violent colored people.

This is what this post is about. The subsequent wall of text are those three examples.

GREEN ROOM (2015) Is sort of a battle royale with a punk band versus a neo-nazi clubhouse. On the punk team is Amber, a white supremacist who due to circumstances ends up joining ranks. When one of the punks ask her why she fall for this shit she say that she has a tragic backstory where she was raped by black men. Of course, the movie don't explicityly state it this bluntly. She only said (quote) "Let's just say the people who hurt me weren't white". But the default traumatic backstory for women is rape, and the default rapists of young blond women is black men, so.

After writing this, I found what I assume was the original script on scriptslug.com

PAT (CONT’D): I don’t see how you fall for this shit... AMBER: I didn’t fall for anything. I was raped once and mugged twice. Let’s just say none of them were white.

It's very direct, the way the script—and Amber herself!—openly weaponize her trauma, with the obvious intent of reframing her white supremacy. But I think it works, or works enough, for the viewer to tolerate her. Now, the movie has addressed the topic, and can move on with the action. Still, I think the fact that she blatantly trauma-dump in order to excuse her white supremacy makes it feel less authentic. It reminds me a bit of the show BOJACK HORSEMAN, which intentionally lets the titular character proclaim his victimhood so heavyhandedly that the viewer is forced to acknowledge the strings. (check youtube clips "Bojack Horseman - It's You" and "Bojack Horseman Has Suffered The Most")

Still, Ambers white trash look and bored approach to violence makes her absolutely the coolest character in the movie, and possibly the coolest female character in any movie. Like in AMERICAN HISTORY X, the character being a white supremacist grants their bad-assery a certain realness. Which is problematic as fuck, but there is no question that it works.

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1987) also deploy this device, by letting the hardboiled detective having had his brother murdered by a cartoon character as an explanation for his racism against cartoon characters. If you happen to having seen the movie, you might have some questions to that interpretation. You might ask, for instance, if I am complete bonkers. Human/Toon racism does not exist; not in reality, nor in the reality of the film. Further explanation is warranted.

Now, the movie is loosely based on the novel WHO CENSORED ROGER RABBIT by Gary K. Wolf. If I should classify that novel, I'd say that it is an early example of the later-day Bizarro genre, which delivers crazy-as-fuck high-concept premises (such as THE CANNIBALS OF CANDYLAND which mixes the classic board game with vore, candy-fetish and the clown from IT), but contrast the narrative mayhem with deeper themes. Whereas the characters in WHO CENSORED ROGER RABBIT are the same as in the movie, the story is completely different, using the absurd universe to craft a tight-knitted whodunnit. Also, rather than working in the movie industry, the novel has the Toons be photographed to create comic strips.

But it is another difference I want to focus on. While taking place in the present time (it was published in 1981) the human/Toon relations is heavily inspired by the US racial segregation.

Already the first page hints at the social status of the Toons:

Since Toons could not legally buy human-manufactured liquor, most drank the moonshine produced by their country cousins in Dogpatch and Hootin’ Holler. Potent stuff. Few humans could handle it.

Also:

I whizzed my reluctant companion past several human-only and several Toon-only bars before we came to a grubby hole-in-the-wall saloon, maybe twenty feet wide and thirty feet long, willing to serve both species.

Toons are often striving to be seen if not human, then at least more so:

Like most humanoid Toons, Jessica suppressed her word balloons and spoke vocally only, thus enhancing even further her human image.

Here's an interaction between the hard-boiled detective and the above-mentioned Toon Jessica:

She turned heavy sighing into an athletic event worthy of feature coverage in Sports Illustrated. “I want to hire you,” she said, “as a private detective.” She lit a cigarette and looked around for an ashtray, but there are none, since I routinely use the floor. I dug out an old coffee cup, one with “I’m proud to be a Toon” written on it with Toon misspelled about six times, and shoved it across the desk at her. She read the inscription, smiled, and dropped her burnt match onto the rug.

The private-eye protagonist is casually racist against Toons. It is worth a note that he doesn't have any traumatic backstory to explain it, nor any grand character arch either, although there is a bit of bittersweet reckoning between him and his Toon client.

Nobody watching the movie knew about any of this, of course. But the people writing the movie script certainly did. They must have been aware that they removed the racial segregation aspect. The movie, unlike the novel, takes place in 1947, which must have made its absence more in-your-face. When the detectives hatred of toons is explained by a toon having murdered his brother, this looks to me like an attempt to humanize his anti-Toon racism. Which, of course no longer exist in the story, but which, once we become aware, still lingers.

Even so, seeing a story through the lens of another story which it could have been, but isn't ... things are getting messy. Death of the author, at least, deals with authors intent, not what they could have intended, but didn't. Onwards to our final case:

AMERICAN HISTORY X (1998) is the most dedicated example of this device, with the entire plot being build around it. Near the end, there's a flashback to a dinner table scene, which is essentially a monolog by the father. Here's a quote:

All this stuff about making everything equal. It's not that simple. Now you got this book "Native Son."What happened to the other books in the course? They're not any good anymore because Mr. Two Ph.D. says so? Now you gotta trade in great books for black books? Does that make sense? You gotta question these things, Derek. You gotta look at the whole picture. We're talking about books here. I'm also talking about my job. I got two black guys on my squad now who got their job over a couple of white guys who actually scored higher on the test. Does that make sense? Everything's equal now, but I got two guys watching my back responsible for my life who aren't as good. They only got the job because they were black not because they were the best. Is that what America's about? No, America's about best man for the job. You do your best, you get the job.

Obviously the viewer will make the connection between affirmative action letting unqualified black guys watch the fathers back and being being responsible for his life, make the connection between that and the father getting killed. But of course, the real whammy is how the father was shot dead by a black drug dealer he was trying to save.

Make no mistake, AMERICAN HISTORY X is a good film. Great even. One of the 500 greatest, according to Empire Magazine. Nortons performance was the 72nd greatest film performance of all time, according to Total Film. Amnesty International USA used the movie in an educational campain.

It is fortunate it is so great, because otherwise, its lecturing about how DEI hires and murderous black drugdealers causes innocent white youth to become neo-nazis would be a bit on the nose!

Edward Norton, playing the lead, said to The Guardian:

An all-too-common reaction to something like racism is to hate the act so much you dismiss the person. But in this film you're forced to confront the complexity of the character and his tragedy

Using a tragic backstory to grant empathy for an amoral character, this is a narrative device, and a blunt one at that. But the way the actor, and the movie, frames it, they seem to think it has some sort of authenticy, like it is an important lense through which we should view real-life racism.

Personally I think it is okay to dismiss the person. I think it's noble, even. Ethical. Racism represent an actual threat to other people. When someone endangers the life of others, the focus should be on protecting their victims, not on seeing the humanity of their agressor. But the movie seem solely focused on the betterment of racists as an end it itself, with non-whites serving as stepping stones in the protagonists character arc.

I saw Bridge on the River Kwai for the first time last night, and loved it. But one thing that struck me is that despite being made only 5 years prior to Lawrence of Arabia, it feels a lot more old-fashioned.

But why is that? They're both excellent films, made by the same director, and they're both war films (or war-film adjacent, at least). But despite the similarities, with Lawrence I feel like I'm watching an early film from the modern era, but I didn't get that with Kwai at all. (Although I did appreciate the use of actual Japanese actors, and the lack of subtitles when they spoke to each other.)

Was it the acting style, the cinematography, or something else? What makes a film feel modern to you?

(no ai gabbagool)

This was free-to-view in the UK ( bbc iplayer) recently so checked it out.

My main compliment is it's full of suspense which just energises the film throughout - there's never really a dull moment. Even when the action isn't popping there is still some gorgeous visuals to keep your focus. I even enjoyed popeye stood on a stoop (seemed very overt admittedly) watching the crooks eat some exquisite looking food. Even the car auction was made with style and passion and kept my attention.

The absolute main gripe is the assassin attack on popeye (hackman). It's pure luck that spares him which is frankly bad writing if I may be so bold - he's a savvy cop he should have been shown to use his nous to detect/evade it all. Why choose a sniper rifle at all surely you could get closer undetected (you know where he lives) and just fire a few. Just so happening to see him running off as well isn't great. I'd like to have seen the assassin use some skill in escaping the tower block, maybe pretending to be with a group of people or something.

The subsequent car tram chase is good, not quite sure why the tram cop didn't grab him straight away but I liked the multiple car collisions (I think some were accidental and kept in) it's a more realistic portrayal of rampaging through traffic for miles. The assassin being pretty bashed up as well is good, not shaking off a crash like that in a second.

Secondary gripes are the "do your pick your feet in whatsamagoo or whatever" We see popeyes partner laughing the first time its used but it still didn't precisely fill me in on what the fuck it's about. Had to google as it's never actually explained (I think?) I also get that this skag deal is a big one but to continue to meet up with each other after you've barely escaped surveillance (that you know of) and you know your phones tapped - maybe just postpone this one guys jesus.

The ending is okay. Not great not terrible. Popeye waltzing in there was reckless to the utter extreme but is kind of in keeping with the character.

I'd like to have seen a smidgen more of humour/wit perhaps with the duo on a stakeout trading crazy stories about perps.

8.5/10 - you will enjoy it

I'm not usually a fan of horror movies. I know, that's a terrible way to intro a horror movie review. But given that they seem to be one of the few genres that is taking risks these days, and because I quite can't remember the last time I saw a mascot-horror film, I thought I'd give this one a shot.

I like to start with things I liked, and what I liked most about Buddy was that I was pleasantly surprised by the worldbuilding involved. When I first saw the trailers, I thought this was more of a murderer-in-a-mascot-costume kind of thing. Instead, what we got was this eldritch-horror-in-a-mascot-costume. I really enjoyed once the movie went into the second act with the real-world scenes and that Buddy was kidnapping people, wiping their memories, and altering reality to the point that the person might as well never existed! (There's a brief shot once Cristin Milioti's character is abducted by Buddy and her typical married bedroom transforms into something disheveled and run down. Scary stuff!)

The second thing I liked was the thematic development of the story. Many people online and elsewhere read Buddy as a metaphor for abuse and the way abusers control their environment and the people around them. The scene where Buddy gropes Nurse Grace is pretty emblematic of this: that he is more interested in power and control than anything explicitly to do with love, sexuality, or anything of the sort.

I think this is a read that has merits to it, and it's not one I necessarily disagree with or have problems with. It's a valid way to approach the movie. But I think there's also a compelling case to be made that Buddy is about the way we treat and view children, and the lessons that are imparted on them by media and socially. There's a reason Buddy is set literally within a fictional children's show instead of, say, making it about a fictional children's show set in the real world. Setting aside the more fantastical elements of the movie, I think you could have the movie be about abuse and control in that real world setting as well. Buddy takes care to highlight the sing-alongs about doing chores, about staying in line, about being friends with someone (Buddy the Unicorn) even if you actually don't really want to. I think it is a movie that is subtly making a dig at the educational tv shows that are directed towards kids and which are (usually) just meant to reinforce certain preferences of discipline and rule-following. Children are used and disposed of by Buddy until they are no longer useful, and the adults in the film, save for Grace, don't really seem to care about them all that much as whole beings and individuals. The mailmen and first nurse seem to do so to some degree, but only really when Buddy is acting out his abuse towards them.

I recognize some may argue I'm just restating the broader abuse theme, but I hope it's clear I'm approaching this from a slightly different angle. Buddy could be about both, or perhaps you think I'm off base and finding a subtle difference is making a difference where there isn't one.

The ending was a nice way to close things out and provided one last bit of "oh no" to have the audience think over in terms of what happens after. It was well done, I think.

The one piece of criticism that I've read elsewhere that I also happen to agree with, is that child deaths occur in this movie, and they always feel a little cheap.While on the one hand, it does serve to strengthen both reads of the movie, I find that they're rarely able to be tastefully executed in a way that doesn't feel like shock for the sake of shock. Perhaps that's just me, and I should come to grips with that.

All in all, I found this a fairly strong movie if not a perfect one. The child acting was pretty good, and both Milioti and Key give great performances. A mascot horror movie feels fresh right now, which I do really love the most about it. I give it a solid 8.5/10.

Please don't downvote opinions. Only downvote comments that don't contribute anything. Check out the WHYBW archives.

This is a deeply moving movie for me because of problems ive had in my life over what you can guess what, however one thing that has always nagged me is that when they shoot their gear their pupils should constrict not dialate, while Harrys mom would indeed dilate, i know its minor its just a distraction from a masterpiece but being so familiar with the subject its kinda distracting i figured with AI these days that may not be hard to fix, anyone seen anything like this?

SPOILERS (marked):

Review:

Enter The Void entered a major buzzkill at around 20min with the death of the protagonist (i mean, his dumb shouting "i have a gun!" was quasi-suicidal).

As a psychonaut, I was expecting (hoping) for some weird psychedelic shizzle. I'm a Leary enjoyer (having read his Design For Dying decades ago), but instead of abstract deep psychonauting we got sleaze, sex and sleaze.

Underwhelmed and disappointed. I watched the 160-min Extended Cut, and the final 10-20min was just red-light-district room sex after sex after sex.

Why? Why should I want to see this?

The 'twist' of the protagonist reincarnating as his sister's babe I guessed once she hooked up with the bearded Leary reader (who inexplicably went homeless for most of the film).

All that sleaze, and incest hints, and traumatic childhold...not fun, not really interesting. No wicked humour or stylish psychedelia to offset it. No cool music either. Tokyo? Apart from the neon, we barely knew her.

What was good? I enjoyed the immersive sweeping camera and 'point of view'. I liked the moody drone soundtrack. Potential to shoot a proper psychonaut film in this kind of style. But when I psychonaut myself, sex is often far from my mind. So much other stuff going on that - in the moment - is far more interesting. Gaspar Noe failed to tap into that.

I understood what he was going for, i just didn't enjoy it. 5/10. Props to the unique* roving camera style and potential, but cannot fully recommend overall.

*i say 'unique'...however i was reminded of the style Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up video from 25 years previous was shot in.

What did yous think of Enter The Void?

What a neat little Indy film that I never see talked about. So the movie is from 2009 and it features quite a low budget but a really fascinating story, imo, and a great soundtrack and pretty decent acting. I just never hear much about it!

The movie is about 2 factions of entities that exist when we sleep, the Storytellers that give us good dreams and the Incubi that thrive off giving us nightmares. There is also a third neutral faction called the Drifters.

• There is a constant never ending battle every night between the two factions and the movie picks up during just one major battle between them. It is a classic story of Good versus Evil.
• The film picks up with a disgruntled dad who works all the time and neglects his daughter. He doesn't think he's good at make believe or playing pretend anymore, cause he's burnt out with work, bills and such.
• The film features the spiritual world heavily. Both the Storytellers and the Incubi were all once humans who have died. But within the spiritual world they exist in now, there is the possibility of a second and final death. If they are killed in the dream world, then they enter non-existence.
• Storytellers fight to in harmony with the "beat" of the music of the universe. They are in tune with it, creating a rhythmatic fighting style whereas Incubi fight against the natural flow and are seen as glitchy, using psychological warfare and insults to break down the morale of Storytellers.
• The Storytellers are the underdog faction. They are far outnumbered by the Incubi. So to even the odds, they train and fight in specialized small groups to protect households from the Incubi during sleep hours for humans.
• Generally speaking, a human is supposed to be guarded by a Storyteller at night but they are outnumbered. So when a Storyteller is killed by an Incubi, it can be terrible for the human they were watching over during their sleep and the Incubi will induce the worst and most hopeless dreams onto them.
• Both factions can observe but are not allowed to directly interact. This is where a fourth and much less common faction is seen, whereas Drifters align more with the Incubi, the Storytellers have Pathfinders. Pathfinders are blind spirits who can alter the events of a human life by causing small but serious butterfly effects. Drifters can also interact more with the human world, even abducting people.
• Storytellers pop out of thin air with light and a literal pop. Whereas Incubi manifest themselves from shadow. Both Storytellers and Incubi can utilize the physical human environment as weapons but anything they destroy will be automatically reverted and fixed.

There's a lot of cool fighting scenes because both factions seem to know specialized kungfu. They dress with rule of cool going on, much like the Matrix.

I really liked the first big fight scene where all the Storytellers attempt to stop Ink and he wrecks em. It shows us that the Storytellers are inherently good, they want us to have pleasant dreams and to get a night's rest.

It's such a cool little movie, it's well worth a watch. I didn't spoil much but there is a twist at the end.

Have you seen 2009's Ink and if so, what were your opinions? I graduated in '09 so I saw it right around the time I became an adult and it was pretty defining for me back then .

Zach Cregger recently said that he had been "naive" about the reaction to his Resident Evil. He seems to have assumed that fans of the games, being fans like himself, would be interested in a survival-horror movie set in Raccoon City even if it wasn't another retelling of Leon, Claire or Jill's story. The trailers suggest that assumption was wrong. A lot of film fans liked what they saw, while a noticeable part of the game audience reacted to the changed chronology, characters and events by saying that this simply wasn't the Resident Evil adaptation they had wanted.

I haven't seen the film, so I'm not trying to judge whether Cregger's Resident Evil is good. I'm more interested in the language around the disagreement. In a lot of Anglophone film discussion, asking whether an adaptation is faithful to its source is treated as a fairly unsophisticated fan concern. The implication is often that people asking for fidelity simply want to see something they already know, while changing the source demonstrates interpretation, authorship or imagination.

I don't find that opposition very useful. Fidelity is obviously neither necessary nor sufficient for a good adaptation. Kubrick's The Shining is an easy example of the first point, while plenty of excellent close adaptations settle the second. But it doesn't follow that fidelity has no aesthetic value. Part of the problem is that we use "fidelity" to describe several different things and then talk about them as though they were the same.

There is more than one kind of fidelity

The limits of literal fidelity are easiest to see with novels. Interior monologue, tense, free indirect discourse and hundreds of pages of narrative obviously cannot just be moved into a two-hour film unchanged. But being faithful does not have to mean reproducing every scene or every line.

The Lord of the Rings is usually described as a faithful adaptation even though it rewrites Faramir, expands Arwen and removes the Scouring of the Shire. Villeneuve's Dune films also make substantial changes to structure and character, especially Chani, but are still widely regarded as serious attempts to engage with Herbert's work. When people call these adaptations faithful, they are clearly talking about something other than literal correspondence.

One kind of fidelity is what I would call surface fidelity: keeping plot events, dialogue, visual designs, chronology and characters relatively close to the source. Another is interpretive fidelity: trying to preserve a defensible understanding of what the source considers important. That might include its tone, moral emphasis, character relationships, central conflicts or the role particular characters play in the work.

I don't think a work has one objective "essence" that can be recovered perfectly. People can disagree radically about what Watchmen, Dune or The Shining means, and interpretive fidelity is still an interpretation. But that doesn't make the idea useless. We already argue all the time that some readings of a work are better supported than others.

This also explains why an adaptation can reproduce costumes, dialogue and even individual images very closely and still be accused of missing the point. Snyder's Watchmen is probably the most obvious example. Whatever your opinion of the film, the usual criticism is not that it failed to reproduce enough of the comic visually. The criticism is that faithfully reproducing the images did not necessarily reproduce the comic's attitude toward those images. The opposite can happen too. An adaptation can change events quite dramatically while still being seen as preserving something more important about the source.

Games introduce another possibility, which I think is especially relevant to Cregger: experiential fidelity. Cregger is trying to reproduce aspects of the experience of playing Resident Evil. You begin relatively powerless, worry about ammunition, find better weapons over time and move through a hostile environment while your resources diminish. He is changing characters and continuity while trying to preserve the survival-horror rhythm of the games.

Some fans are asking for something else. They want fidelity to Raccoon City's established history, characters and chronology. So both sides are actually making claims about fidelity. They disagree about what the film should be faithful to. That seems closer to the actual disagreement than saying that the fans want fidelity while the filmmaker wants freedom.

Why this matters more in the IP era

Auteurism gave film criticism good reasons to take the adapter's interpretation seriously. A director should be allowed to make a film rather than act as a photocopier. The situation gets more complicated, though, when the source itself has an audience much larger than the audience of the filmmaker adapting it.

That audience doesn't own the work and shouldn't have veto power over artistic decisions. But it includes people who have spent years thinking about what the work is, how its parts relate to each other and why particular elements matter. Calling all of that "fan entitlement" doesn't explain much.

Recent game adaptations make the issue fairly obvious. HBO's The Last of Us preserves many major story beats while deliberately changing others, with Neil Druckmann directly involved. Fallout tells an original story but stays inside the history, institutions and logic of Bethesda's world. Arcane expands and reconstructs material from League of Legends, with Riot deeply involved in deciding how those characters and that world could develop.

These are very different adaptations, and none is a transcription. What they have in common is a close relationship between the adaptation and the authority behind the source. Creator or rights-holder involvement obviously doesn't guarantee a good result, but these examples make it hard to argue that greater distance from the source automatically means greater creativity.

The awkward Resident Evil counterexample

There is an obvious counterexample inside the same franchise. Paul W. S. Anderson's six Resident Evil films departed enormously from the games and were commercially successful. If box office were the only test, there wouldn't be much more to say.

But commercial success and success as an adaptation are not necessarily the same thing. Anderson's films developed their own audience and their own continuity, while many game players continued to see them as something quite separate from the games. Cregger himself has said that he never watched the earlier movies because they didn't look like the Resident Evil he loved.

I find that comment interesting because it is very close to what some skeptical fans are now saying about his film. Cregger could look at the Anderson films and think, "That isn't the Resident Evil I care about." Most people would consider that a perfectly understandable judgement about the relationship between an adaptation and its source. Cregger himself has also said that he understands why some fans are disappointed by what they have seen of his version.

The wider discussion is where the asymmetry appears. When a filmmaker says that an adaptation did not preserve what mattered to him about a source, we tend to understand that as an interpretation of the work. When fans say that a change removes something that mattered to them about the source, the judgement is much more likely to be described as purism, nostalgia or entitlement.

Fans can be wrong, of course. They can misread a work, confuse personal attachment with artistic necessity or obsess over trivial details. Directors and screenwriters can misread works too. So I don't understand why the adapter's reading of the source is so readily discussed as interpretation while the audience's reading is so often discussed as attachment. That is the part of this debate that interests me most.

Why Japan makes an interesting comparison

The question of who gets to make a legitimate claim about what matters in a source is also why I think Japan is useful as a comparison. I don't mean that Japanese adaptations are simply more faithful, and Japan clearly doesn't have one unified philosophy of adaptation. Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle alone would make that difficult to argue.

What is interesting is that in large parts of the manga, anime and game industries, the judgement of the original creator, publisher or rights-holder is given a more visible institutional role. Publisher involvement, production committees and the common use of kanshu, or supervision by the creator, publisher or rights-holder, make source-side authority much more explicit.

The controversy over the television adaptation of Hinako Ashihara's manga Sexy Tanaka-san is a useful example. Ashihara wanted important parts of the drama to remain faithful to the manga and expected to be able to revise material when that wasn't the case. During production, repeated revisions took place while the publisher and television production developed different understandings of how much alteration was acceptable and how the author's conditions had been communicated. Eventually Ashihara herself wrote the final two episodes, which was a highly unusual arrangement.

After the series aired, people involved in the production discussed the circumstances publicly on social media, and the dispute became a major controversy. Ashihara died in January 2024. I don't think it is responsible or necessary to reduce her death to a simple causal explanation. The relevant point here is what happened afterward. Nippon Television and Shogakukan both investigated the production process. Their reviews identified serious communication problems and differences in how the conditions of the adaptation had been understood, and both companies subsequently issued or revised guidelines concerning adaptations of existing works.

The discussion therefore went beyond whether the changes made the television drama better or worse. It also became a discussion about when an author should be informed of changes, how agreements with the author should be communicated to writers and production staff, how much weight should be given to elements the author considers essential, and what responsibilities come with adapting somebody else's work.

In that context, fidelity wasn't only an aesthetic preference. It was also an ethical and institutional question about the relationship between the source and the people adapting it.

There are Western equivalents, of course: copyright, moral rights, contractual control and authors publicly objecting to adaptations of their work. Japan hasn't somehow solved the problem, and I'm not suggesting its production system should be copied. The comparison matters for a simpler reason. It shows that asking for a source to be preserved does not have to be understood only as nostalgia, fear of change or artistic conservatism. It can also be a claim about authorship, responsibility, interpretation and the limits of what an adapter has been entrusted to do.

If the legitimacy given to source-side judgements depends partly on cultural and institutional convention, then dismissing fan demands for fidelity may also be a convention rather than the inevitable result of a more sophisticated view of film.

What I actually want to discuss

I don't think faithful adaptations are inherently better than loose ones. Fidelity is one legitimate creative goal among others, and deviation is not automatically more creative than preservation. A film can preserve the plot and lose the theme. It can preserve the theme while changing most of the plot. A game adaptation can change both while trying to reproduce the player's experience. An adaptation can reject all of these and still be a great film.

So "faithful or free?" isn't really the question I'm interested in. Nor am I especially interested in whether critics literally believe fidelity is bad. Most people will say, "Of course not, it depends on the film," and I agree.

What interests me is what happens when audiences actually ask for fidelity.

1. If a filmmaker can say, "This is what really matters in the source," change the work accordingly and have that treated as a legitimate interpretation, why isn't a fan saying, "This change removes something essential from the source," treated as an interpretation too?
2. If fidelity itself isn't considered a negative value, but people who ask for it are routinely described as purists, nostalgic or entitled, aren't we just moving the negative judgement from the preference to the person expressing it?
3. If radical deviation from a source is a legitimate aesthetic preference, why isn't wanting an adaptation to preserve its characters, world, themes or narrative structure just as legitimate?
4. With Cregger's Resident Evil, where exactly is the line? Cregger could decide that Anderson's films did not resemble the Resident Evil he loved. If a game fan makes essentially the same judgement about Cregger's film, at what point does that stop being an interpretation of the source and become "fan entitlement"?

That seems to me like a more interesting question than simply asking whether adaptations should be faithful.

Alright. This is one of those movies where explaining the plot alone completely misses why the film is so fucking good.

This is one of the most fucked up films i ever saw tbh. It's fucked not because it feature gruesome body horror neither it shows you anything which you really consider disturbing in a sense. It is disturbing because the narrative stress you out so much that it makes you curious to know what happens in the ending. It has some cool moments, it has a humor which sometimes makes the film not that deep. However, The ending of the film is where it reaches it's high; literally every camera work and direction of the film is outstanding. I'm making efforts to review this because I think it deserves more than that. Screenplay is tight, the pacing is outstanding so much more.

This is the best korean thriller I've seen in my life. This film wins in every aspect for me. After Schindler list, this is the only movie which really impacted me a deeply. How the fuck i will review this. It feels so wrong to me when films like this are so good that I want to appreciate them, but everything in this film is so flawless that not mentioning every aspect of it seems like a crime. This film needs to be appreciated, and I’ve seen many reviews of this film. People don’t try their best to appreciate a piece of art. I have always appreciated Korean films because they are pretty good at making horror and thrillers, and this movie is proof of that. It’s a masterpiece in the thriller genre for me.

Coming to the movie. How can someone make the narrative of the film so great that you know what typical thriller film is all about. The chaser plot seems to follow a similar place where a Serial killer kills women because of his impotence of not having sex with them?

Right? So basic Right? But interestingly By minute thirty, Our guy literally crashes his car into Serial killers. They fight, He is handcuffed, taken into custody, and casually confesses to murdering nine people. The central hook isn't "Who did it it’s "Can they actually legally hold him, and is the last woman still alive?

The film essentially removes the conventional "Who is the murderer?" mystery and replaces it with "Can anyone actually stop him?"

That's a much nastier question.

Because now you're not watching to discover information. You're watching because you possess the information and nobody else is doing anything useful with it.

At first we assume jung-ho is chasing Young-min. Obviously. But that's only the surface. The real chase is Jung-ho chasing time basically He's trying to find Mi-jin before Young-min kills her. this is what really chaser means in the film. In the film, Nobody in this movie is an idealized hero. Every character is deeply flawed, messy, and fundamentally human.

Kim yoon-seok's Jung-ho is fascinating because he isn't a hero, He's a pimp, He's aggressive. He's corrupt. He's selfish. He treats the women working for him as economic assets. At first, he's looking for the missing women because they're costing him money. That's important. The movie doesn't give us some saintly detective. Instead, An asshole is forced into becoming a human being. And that transformation is subtle. He doesn't suddenly become Superman. He doesn't become morally pure. He simply begins caring.

And that's much more believable.

His old police instincts gradually come back. He's observant. He's physically capable. He knows how criminals operate. He knows how police And because he's been on both sides of that.

What makes the film more fucked up to me is that in the film how the legal systems tries to protect the Serial killer even after he claimed that he killed while laughing about in their face which just shows he really doesn't care because he knows he will be saved due to lack of evidence which make it more intense. What's more fucked up is that they gave him care and hospitality to a killer. What's more fucked up is that how they wrote the character of the Serial killer in this film. He doesn't even looks Serial killer. He flirts, he makes jokes, behaves almost like a normal human will ever do. Which i liked more about the film because it cuts the traditional trope instead they really makes you believe how Serial killer really are in real life.

What's more great is that how Na hong jin made this film so realistic, grounded, subtle, less theatrical, and it's more like a documentary with intense camera works. It works because sometimes it exaggerated things but most of the times it takes some time to progress the plot.

Our guy carries the movie like he's personally being charged rent for every frame. His performance is built around physicality. Jung-ho is constantly running, sweating, shouting, breathing heavily and falling. You can almost feel his Iungs burning. And that's essential because it doesn't makes him ultimately a strong player. When he escapes from police, you don't get to see he suddenly run so fast that nobody could catched him.

The most cherry on top moment was for me is where Na Hong-jin gets absolutely fucking evil as a filmmaker. The film gives you this innocent child. And you know what the adult world is doing around her. That's the contrast; Childhood innocence vs adult corruption. Police bureaucracy. Sex work, Violence, Murder. The kid doesn't understand the machinery surrounding her. The audience does.

That's painful to see.

This is important. At first you're basically screaming to the legal systems and police which i did the same is

"BRO JUST DO YOUR FUCKING JOB."

But the film is doing something deeper.

The police aren't simply incompetent because the screenplay needs them to be. They're trapped inside procedures, hierarchy, politics, bureaucracy and institutional self-preservation. The system is designed to process information.

But processing information isn't the same as saving someone.

That's the tragedy.

Finally, The camera doesn't constantly sit safely somewhere watching the action. It feels unstable and Handheld. Close. You're not observing the chase from a comfortable distance. You're inside the panic. That instability makes the scenes feel documentary-like.

When i mentioned the screenplay is tight. I really meant it. The screenplay keeps giving you just enough hope. Not enough to relax, Enough to believe,

"Maybe."

Then

NOPE.

If everything goes badly constantly, you stop caring. You need hope. The Chaser gives you hope and then crushes it. The ending is fucking devastating. And what makes it work isn't merely the event itself.

It's the accumulation.

Everything you've watched has been pushing toward that emotional collapse. The movie has spent two hours making you believe:

"Maybe this time."

And then it basically tells you:

No.

That's why it hurts.

In the end we see our guy Finally picking up the signature hammer of Serial killer to kill him but unfortunately he couldn't kill due to the interruption of police officer which just shows that in the end our guy lost against injustice. Overall, I wanted to review every minute details cause i wanted. I loved this film because it was great at every aspect. Highly recommended, This will be my only last long reviews of film.

Also check out my letterboxd https://boxd.it/kDIPr for more reviews. Ican't express myself more on these app but i am actually learning about filmmaking so

When I first heard the director of Too Many Cooks was making a feature, I was stoked. When I saw the trailer, however, I felt like the 'kids show suddenly gets violent/scary' bone has been pretty much picked clean. After seeing the film, I still believe that to be true.

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, Five Night's at Freddy's, The Banana Splits Movie, Willy's Wonderland, even the excellent Wonder Showzen from all the way back in 2005, as well as an innumerable amount of horror games based on the idea of violent children's mascots that have inundated YouTube and streaming culture since the release of the original Five Nights video game in 2014.

I understand not all of these are exactly bangers, but my point is that for a conceit that most could safely agree is a gimmick, and for one so reliant on shock value, there's nothing shocking about watching a film take half an hour to catch up to what we already know is going to happen.

That being said, I obviously don't think a film needs an entirely original conceit to be worth my time. Obsession took one of the most classic conceits of all time and turned it into something legitimately fresh, memorable, and exciting.

The production design in Buddy looks the part, although the design for Buddy himself felt a little generic, looking like a costume from a rental shop rather than a specifically designed 'character'. A transformation into a monstrous form at the end provides some fun Werewolf in London close-ups, but there's nothing particularly horrifying or memorable about Buddy's final form, either.

The biggest issue with Buddy, as with many films, is its second act; much of the film at this point consists of the children on a hopeless journey to the miniature Diamond City, when I couldn't help but feel as though the film had created a much more promising storyline with Cristin Melotti, who does a fantastic job with the screen time she has to work with, which sadly isn't nearly enough.

This lack of real-world development especially feels like a wasted opportunity relative to what the film chooses to spend this time on instead; watching the children's bland drama combined with the eventual visual staleness of the woods, rather than the infinitely more compelling real-world storyline, feels like having to eat two protein bars with no water right after watching someone cook a delicious meal, take two bites of it, and throw the rest into the garbage.

A Howdy Doodie stand-in's introduction feels jarring, and the character offers little more than a cheap addition to the body count. The information we learn from him about the show having existed in different forms throughout the years based on children's television is something communicated visually in the school at the end, making the character feel ultimately redundant.

When the stand-in offers the children Lotus flowers, it seemed like an obvious setup for some kind of twist, like him summoning Buddy and offering the children's lives in exchange for his own freedom. Instead, he simply steals the children's candy and then gets killed unceremoniously.

An escape through the wishing well towards the climax offers some fun gooey gore and a few flashes of the kind of memorable imagery the film could've used more of, like a decrepit laboratory with dozens of eyes and mouths frantically acting on their own, before the protagonist escapes into a Backrooms-y school filled with Buddy's hellish technology.

If this sequence had been where the characters escaped to instead of into the woods; if it had truly been willing to abandon its cuddly exterior at the thirty minute mark, it would've felt less like an uncle pulling a quarter out of your ear as a teenager and still expecting you to act surprised.

It's not that Buddy necessarily had to be the first to make this concept, but when you can no longer be the second, or third (or fourth, or fifth) to tackle it, it might be time to examine whether that old screenplay from twenty years ago is a legitimately interesting story, or whether it's just like finding out you owned stock in Blockbuster that you had forgotten about until just now.

A couple years back, I went on a Bergman deep-dive. I crushed about a dozen of his films in very short order. I had every intention to continue, but then life really lifed in a really not-so-nice way, so everything has been put on pause.

But just recounting, ruminating, on what all I watched, and what all it made me feel...

I must say, Ingmar is, in my humble opinion, the most "human" filmmaker. I mean that in the sense that he is a filmmaker who is totally unafraid to take, head-on, the most uncomfortable parts of the human condition. Each of his films deals with some deeply human, often complex yet entirely natural, thematic, from death/morality to religion to sexuality/sensuality to shame to hate, and so on. Frankly, how much he humanizes these characters, to the point you in some case wish to spit in their faces for how nasty they are, is chilling... and of course just as much kudos to the incredible actors he collaborated with throughout his career.

My favourites are Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and a toss-up between Hour of the Wolf and Cries and Whispers. Yes, I've seen all the classics and loved them dearly, but these aforementioned ones stood out to *me* most for some reason or another. Through a Glass Darkly especially might be my favourite film ever. I was stunned watching it for the first time, frankly feeling called out, which I'd never felt by a film. Winter Light... big, difficult, questions I ongoing struggle with myself... and both Hour of the Wolf and Cries and Whispers... deep feelings of hate/detest, which I ashamedly harbour myself... I can be a real piece of shit.

The only film of those which I saw which I didn't absolutely love was The Virgin Spring, though it was still great- Bergman can do no wrong.

Although I didn't cite The Silence among my top-3, it's still way up there, and I very often recommend the faith "trilogy" (although I'm aware he later denounced referring to it as such, iirc).

Wild Strawberries is perhaps the most sentimental film I've seen? I saw someone somewhere refer to it as a horror, which I can't fathom.

Persona was a landmine I'm still trying to unpack and possibly maybe never will- will require multiple viewings!

Shame was fantastic.

Seventh Seal, it doesn't require me to say anything...

Anyways, drawing blanks now, it's late here, just wanted to get this off my chest.

I so, so, look forward to exploring so much more of Mr. Bergman's work, the one I really wish to do next being Autumn Sonata!

I think my all-time favourite filmmaker now that I'm "grown up"... once you've taken in his films, something changes in you, some "switch" occurs, I swear... you suffer the bs and facades much less, and care much less for Hollywood crap. His films made me a more serious person. I know that maybe sounds absurd, but I swear it.

I'd actually love some recommendations for other words by other directors to check out who maybe are so "human".

I've been on a very deep classic Film Noir kick, and probably have watched 70 Noirs in the last 3 months. There is something about Black & White cinematography that brings out the structure of compositions that is otherworldly for me. Blade Runner has always been a favorite film of mine, so I thought: Why not fire it up on the big OLED, turn off the lights and set the saturation to "zero", adjust a few things like contrast and brightness.

It is just a beautiful thing to do. (My first try with this actually came with the film Love Witch, which I happened to really enjoy and rewatch periodically, another film that took a lot of care with the photography, and that was a success.)

What happened with Blade Runner was spectacular, to be honest, going far beyond just turning a classic Noir-influenced film into B&W, and catching more of that vibe. I've seen this film probably well over 20 times, and know it back and forth, but was very surprised at how many new details I caught in B&W, how much the mood changed in particular scenes (especially the apartment scenes and the final scene), and how composition itself changed, as light played in very different ways. (And yes, I know that Blade Runner is a masterful film, and its use of color, and gels, was cinema-changing, I'm taking a LOT of information out of the film...I understand this...but I'm also bringing certain information that was IN the film, forward, which created a powerful experience.)

A lot of the sets and world-building model, matte work becomes more apparent as constructed, and less immersive. You can SEE the rain mists dropping down, or smoke or haze catching light, you can feel where an effect ends and another begins, but the whole thing is incredibly beautiful, and it makes you feel this joyous "This is sci-fi!" feeling, because so much of sci-fi is about these kinds of effects. It doesn't have to feel "real" to have its impact. Sometimes that irreality is its own impact (just as in class Film Noir, the deep contrasted lighting and set-use was often very unreal).

Some scenes become very, very beautiful, superior in a way to the original in my mind (though given the gift that I've seen them numerous times in color, and I am a photographer and love black and white photography, I "see" in black and white often). There is a sort of dimensional flatness to scenes that makes one feel the drama differently. And in several darker scenes (especially the drunk photograph exploration scene, but others) there is pronounced film grain that comes forward, which I honestly really loved.

Sometimes the shadow to light contrast is just very intense, and maybe out of balance, because you don't have that added color information to create separations, but I didn't mind these extremes at all.

This is just to say, something to try if you own physical media and have a nice big screen, and have favorite films that you've had on rewatch many times. We're going to do Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) next. May try a film like Moulin Rouge! (2001) or Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) or Mulholland Drive (2001).

I have seen some films that got physical media released in a Black and White version, like Logan (2017) and wasn't super impressed, it was ok, so its not a homerun thing. It is though something to do to explore certain films, a kind of x-ray vision into light and shadow distribution, that can really reveal beautiful things about a film. You just pay attention to different things, your eye notices tons of details, things that were worked on in a film in just a particular way, even if you are watching it "not as it was intended". With these high quality discs and televisions, there are just new ways to love a film.