I watched the 1967 Jean-Luc Godard film Weekend recently. It’s a surreal masterpiece, much of it centering around a couple’s attempt to flee Paris because modern life has become impossible. But many other Parisians have gotten the same idea and there’s an absurd traffic jam on a small country road. Lots of wrecks ensue.
At one point the driver learns that someone they know has died in a wreck, and he turns to his female companion and says ‘Paul is dead.’
I thought Godard was riffing on the rumor. Then I realized that the Paul story started getting circulated after the movie.
It’s the kind of celebrated avant-garde movie the Beatles would have certainly seen, and I idly wondered if they or someone else got the idea for the hoax/conspiracy from Godard.
The death in a car accident evokes ADITL, of course, but time wise that has to be an artistic coincidence.
Idle thoughts from a guy sitting in a hospital bed. Thanks for indulging me.

Rewatched John Hillcoat's Australian western The Proposition last night. Gotta say, it still remains one of my favorite westerns despite discovering it only a few years ago.

By far the best quality about it is Hillcoat's dismantling of the western genre. There's no romance, no beauty, or the slightest moment of humor in The Proposition. It's pure unremitting despair in a world so devoid of hope and full of violence it makes Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven seem cheery. Roger Ebert wrote in his review how the film feels close to being an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and boy, he was not wrong. Though a different tale, The Proposition is not only unflinching in its violence, but it never feels cinematic nor sensationalized compared to other westerns. Furthermore, it also has the same kind of bleak setting full of characters that are almost morally reprehensible in one way or another. The fact John Hillcoat is said to be working on the film adaptation of Blood Meridian really shows how The Proposition is very similar tonally and thematically.

The decision to set it in 1880s Australia under British colonialism too is genuinely original. The unique setting perfectly fits with the film's dark narrative and characters, sometimes even making it feel like a loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in depicting colonization in a land that is hostile to non-natives. The way Captain Stanley wants to bring order to the land but fails to due to its hostile nature in many scenes really emphasizes this aspect.

Of course, Nick Cave's screenplay deserves much credit as this is such a smartly written western. The setup is simple, yet there are so many moments where much is said without dialogue between characters and their relationships. And when the characters do speak, it's incredibly engaging dialogue that brings a unique life to each character, especially the monologue from John Hurt that arguably is the best scene in the film.

All of this too is backed up by many great performances from Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, John Hurt, and Danny Huston who, on rewatch, I think gives the best performance by far. The way he plays Arthur Burns as a cold-blooded, emotionless bandit who philosophies about life is genuinely unnerving, with even Ebert stating his character to feel like a takeoff of the Judge character in Blood Meridian.

To me, The Proposition is easily the most underrated western of the 2000s and possibly of all time. It borrows from many anti-western inspirations, yet John Hillcoat and Nick Cave take it in a vastly different direction. And the score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis? Absolutely haunting.

Source: Ebert, Roger. "Blood on the saddle." Roger Ebert, 18 May 2006, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-proposition-2006.

I'm not going to say its a great film, but as a critique of Capitalism it puts a spike through the heart.

Marx's comparison of Capital to "dead labor" comes to mind, as well as the appeal to vampirism.

"As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has only one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour. Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him.... Like all buyers, he seeks to extract the maximum possible benefit from the use-value of his commodity"

The film itself is a satire of the high-finance Art World, and Gilroy and Gyllenhaal join forces again, as they did in Nightcrawler (which was excellent). Some things in this film really stand out. Gyllenhaal is wonderful, he low key is becoming a favorite actor I think, though I seldom think of him. The way he changes the intensity of the caricature to fit the context is very deft acting. Sometimes he's an over the top, queeny Stanley Tucci, and at other times just very human and sincere. There is a great cast with good performances. The writing is excellent. A big part of the film is a sort of send up of the high-brow language of "criticism" and the elite concept space that drives "taste" in high-finance art trading. So much of this film is enjoyable, though it veers into canned horror, on purpose (the paintings are cursed).

What I really loved though was the critique itself of not even high-end Art, but really of Capitalism itself. Everyone who profited from the sale of this cursed art, which comes from a pained and possibly mentally ill mind, is cursed. The key is "profit" as a perversity of what "art" is, including the impulse of "punk" music and street art. The perversity of exploitation of intensely lived lives that produced "art" really maps further down into the exploitation of the lived lives of "labor" itself, and the affluent, high-brow, discernment of driven tastes which drive the flows of Capital around the world, what they call "going Global". As profiteers of various kinds ghoulishly extract value from the paintings, the genre cliche supernatural powers that come for them exact a kind of like-in-kind justice.

I didn't love the film, but I actually want to see it again, so interesting was its intellectual point.

I've seen a lot of takes saying this movie only works for white, queer AFAB viewers because it's "sapphic." I get where that's coming from, but stopping at "they're lesbians and this is about sapphic sexuality" misses the whole point, I fear.

What got me was the depiction of sex and dysphoria. Every sexual moment in this film is coated in discomfort, from Kris explaining her poly relationship to the KFC dipping sauce scene to her hyperfixation on her own sexual awakening. Kris doesn't have language for sex, desire, or her own body. It takes meeting someone who actually gets it, Billie, before she can open up at all. She has to dissociate from her own body just to approach anything sexual, or even talk about it.

I don't read Kris as a cis woman. I read her as a trans woman still deep in dysphoria about her body and her sex organs, and that's reinforced by her fantasy of being the bimbo "last girl" in a horror movie. She wants to be seen, felt, and heard as a woman... But her dysphoria and subsequent dissociation surrounding this is amplified by the whole style of the movie shifting in and out of reality. The lines get really blurred between what's real and what's not.

Little Death is the scary trans monster transphobes swear is coming for their kids. And it's that monster, taking Kris over, guided by Billie (the first person who actually sees and understands her), that finally lets Kris come into herself, her sexuality, and her body's place in all of it.

Every time I read a take from a cis queer viewer, I feel like I'm in that Zoom meeting with Kris, watching her explain the movie's whole allegory while it sails right over everyone's head. Even the queer assistant, who thinks they get it and chimes in, only to have Kris go "actually, no, you don't."

One of the things that stayed with me from Lovers of the Arctic Circle is its obsession with circularity.

Even the names Ana and Otto are palindromes. They can be read in both directions, returning to where they began. The film seems to construct their relationship in much the same way: departures become returns, coincidences accumulate, perspectives repeat events differently, and the story keeps suggesting that Ana and Otto are moving around some invisible center.

What interests me is whether Medem wants us to believe in that idea of fate, or whether he is showing us how people create patterns when they desperately need their lives to have one.

Coincidence in the film rarely feels neutral. Ana and Otto interpret events, encounters and repetitions as though they belong to a larger design. And because the film itself is organized around circles, mirrored perspectives and recurrence, the cinematic form seems to validate their belief.
But there’s another possibility.

Maybe the film isn’t demonstrating that their lives are governed by fate. Maybe we’re experiencing reality through two people who have become so invested in their shared story that everything begins to look like evidence that the story must continue.

If the coincidences are objectively meaningful, Lovers of the Arctic Circle is a romantic tragedy about two people repeatedly brought together by fate.
If they aren’t, it becomes something stranger: a film about the human tendency to turn coincidence into narrative and narrative into destiny.

Do you think Medem ultimately asks us to believe in Ana and Otto’s fate, or does the film deliberately leave open the possibility that the “circle” exists mainly because they, and perhaps we as viewers, need to see one?

​

In the mess hall in the prison, a bald white man is staring at a black man, prompting the black man to try to attack him, before being intercepted by Warden McClusky (Tommy Lee Jones). The bald man was a real prisoner, who had been convicted of murdering his wife and children by beating them to death with a lead pipe. Oliver Stone gave him a featured role, because he said the man's stoicism terrified him.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110632/trivia?item=tr0774748

A lot of people consider NBK to be about how the media glorifies mass murders and serial killers so why would Stone hire someone so deplorable in the very same film?

I decided to watch Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! on a slight yesterday and my jet-lagged brain keeps circling around how incredibly poorly it managed the theme of feminism, despite how loud and insistent it tries to be about it.

I guess the takeaway is about women having their voices and choices stifled by the patriarchy, but on the other hand (spoilers if anyone still cares):

- Ida is violently and painfully possessed against her will by the ghost of Mary Shelley. This actually leads directly to her death, since it ruins her undercover operation and she's accidentally killed as the mobsters try to snap her out of it. Thanks for that, Mary Shelley.

- As The Bride, she experiences a taste of freedom by anachronistically going clubbing, then shortly gets into trouble and has to be rescued by her man. She then follows him around for most of the movie.

- She is continually gaslit by Frank into believing she loves him. When he's revealed to be a manipulative liar, she almost immediately forgives him without Frank having to do anything to earn it, and their dynamic doesn't change at all.

- The often-repeated reframe of 'I'd prefer not to' used to symbolise her rebellion against the patriarchy is from Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener. So, we're going with a male author from a work not related to feminism at all. No suitable quotes from Mary Shelley herself, or her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the acclaimed female rights advocate?

- The Bride's big moment is screaming at a room she has taken hostage at gunpoint, going on about a crime boss (from Chicago, while she's hundreds of miles away in New York) and then shooting a cop by accident. This sparks a nationwide feminist movement that mostly causes a lot of property damage.

- Penelope Cruz's detective character has a whole arc about being denied her proper position despite being the better investigator. When she does get the promotion, the first thing she does is shoo all the male cops out of the room so that the two wanted murderers can escape justice, because it's romantic or something. This is framed as another big feminist win.

Anyway, I partly wanted to dunk on this shitty movie I wasted my time with, but I was also wondering what other movies even manage to fuck their central themes up this badly?

(Sorry if this isn't right for this sub, the r/movies automod suggested it blocking this for whatever reason.)

Since Interstellar, Nolan has made two films based on historical events (Dunkirk and Oppenheimer), one adaptation (The Odyssey), and one original film (Tenet, arguably his worst film), and I've been ambivalent about them all.

Hitchcock could do fun adventures like North By Northwest but also thrillers in a single setting like Dial M For Murder and Rear Window that were no less engrossing. Kubrick made epics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon but also transgressive works like A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket. You can see trademarks of each director across these films, but you can't say FMJ felt like Lyndon or North By Northwest like Psycho. I get the sense that Nolan has been taking stories and making them fit his brand rather than adapting as a filmmaker to new things.

It doesn't help that the people who contributed to his earlier films have left. I've been confident that Interstellar was the peak and things have gone downhill since then and knowing that Jonathan Nolan hasn't contributed since that film really puts things into perspective. It's also worth noting that Inception was the only Nolan film from 2005-2014 that Jonathan wasn't involved, and Inception exemplifies things that became even worse in later films like the convoluted plot, the tormented male lead (with some guilt-washing in the cases of Oppenheimer and Odysseus), and characters who come second to the spectacle and said-convoluted plots.

Other absences include editor (Lee Smith to Jennifer Lame) and cinematographer (Wally Pfister to Hoyte van Hoytema). The quick-editing of Tenet through The Odyssey has resulted in films that simultaneously feel bloated yet undercooked. Tenet and Oppenheimer inundate you with so much exposition that you can feel overwhelmed. As for cinematography, while I love Interstellar, I've come to notice that Nolan's recent output feels rather small in scale despite their large budgets. Compare Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven to The Odyssey and you'll see what I mean.

I don't know where else Nolan has to go as a filmmaker. He accomplished all he could do in the 2000s and early-2010s and has now established a formula based on superior films made decades ago, from Memento to Inception to Interstellar. But if you were to compare, say, The Dark Knight to The Odyssey, you'd see that the former feels grander and more cohesive despite not being a historical epic. It feels livelier, with moments of levity in between the more serious bits, engaging action, and leaves you more time to breathe. It doesn't feel like an extended trailer meant to showcase IMAX and cater to a particular brand.

In If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Rose Byrne's despairing mother character 'Linda' is paying to have therapy with Conan O'Brien's character essentially daily by the last act (the movie is light of exposition but you hear it in a conversation she has on the phone with her husband when he raises how much she's paying for therapy; it's also useful because until that point I'd kind of assumed she was seeing O'Brien for free as a kind of peer supervisor/colleague deal, but no, he's charging her full fees).

I've posted about this movie before but not with this perspective: O'Brien is in very few scenes but Mary Bronstein really leaned on him in promo, which makes sense, but also even before production -- she had this character in her mind from the point of writing. This tells me he was central to the premise's conception.

The therapist he plays, importantly, is so unhelpful to Linda to be actively harmful, but also, on a technical level, he gives advice that is largely 'true'. In his first scene he deflects some of her aimlessness by telling her that her problems would get smaller if she'd just get some sleep, which is true, and pushes back on her self-flagellating. But it doesn't matter because she wants more from him.

She describes a dream she has about him which sounds like the kind of dream you have about an inappropriate crush. He doesn't acknowledge this, he doesn't name it. In the one scene after he actually helps her practically, Conan leaves the room as Linda whispers "I love you". Does she love him, in the sense that she wants to be intimate with him, have a relationship with him? We see Linda try to deepen their relationship in multiple settings -- in the breakroom he ignores her politesse, and in sessions she tries to push his boundaries re self-disclosure (which he calls out and immediately ends their therapeutic relationship, never appearing again).

The only moment Conan shares anything about himself or his own life, it's a totally useless story about lab rats from his time in college. He has no idea Linda just caused a hamster's murder; he has no sense that what she needs from him in that moment is a real vulnerability. But Linda (Rose Byrne's performance in this scene is so good) is begging for him to stay in that moment anyway.

All of this is, by the way, very funny -- the complete disconnect between Linda's needs and what her expensive therapist gives her is hilarious. But it's also mirrored in the relationship she has with her own clients. Caroline is begging for a deeper connection with Linda that Linda pushes off constantly, resulting in an abandoned baby and a haunting by a missing client.

It's a microcosm of every aspect of Linda's life. All of her problems are solvable via her therapists' advice but the way the Western world approaches the counselling relationship can never really meet her needs. She does everything against the better advice of professionals, including her daughter's doctor. Without the production's insistence on painting her life as bleakly stressful her choices would seem comically counterintuitive.

But think of our title again - not literal. But if only Linda 'had legs' -- a counselling relationship that worked, a marriage that strengthened her, an experience of parenthood that sustained her, a day-to-day life that gave her joy -- she'd have her shit together (kick you). Conan's character represents the possibility of all of these things coming together for her because she (wrongly) feels she can manipulate him into being the therapist she needs if she just pays him enough. If she could just get a therapist who told her what to do, as she requests (but only in the way she wants to hear it) she could fix the hole in her roof and her daughter's stomach.

It's a really interesting role to insist on giving to a famous face that people don't even remotely associate with dramatic importance -- it's as if Bronstein knew he was the key to understanding why Linda was destroying everything but wanted his pop culture presence to distract us from it.

I just watched The Exorcist for the first time, and thought it was very well-done. I looked up the Wikipedia page for it, and this part interested me:

"Second-wave feminism has figured in discussions of The Exorcist. At the time, the US women's liberation movement had enjoyed some early gains in legislatures and courts. Commentators[who?] have seen the film's depiction of a single working mother and her uncontrollable daughter who are rescued by patriarchal authority as a reaction against feminism.[233][11][235] Former studio executive Peter Biskind, in Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, describes the film as "a male nightmare of female puberty. Emergent female sexuality is equated with demonic possession." For the male authority figures in The Exorcist, whether priests or physicians, Regan must be restored to her innocence through abusive and violent means if necessary.[178] Many feminist critics, like Biskind, note the film's focus on the female body as the site of horror. "When her body changes, Regan becomes someone else; someone sexual, whose desire is a dark visitor" writes Jude Ellison Doyle in Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy and the Fear of Female Power. "To become a woman is to become the ... enemy of all that is pure or holy."[236] But Australian film studies professor Barbara Creed, in The Monstrous-Feminine, which inaugurated psychoanalytic feminist film theory, counters the prevailing feminist take on The Exorcist by insisting that Pazuzu is female[237] and thus the possession of Regan is itself a feminist act, exposing "the inability of the male order to control the woman whose perversity is expressed through her rebellious body",[238] as she navigates an incestuous desire for her mother.[239] University of Toronto professor S. Trimble writes that the film tapped into "white American fears of nightmare futures" that could result from the women's liberation, gay liberation and Black Power movements' challenge to the established 1970s social order. Trimble writes that, as a film about "a revolting girl revolting against the little-girl box in which she was stuck" and army of men trying to put her back, The Exorcist follows older horror movies that use gender-bending to create a monster.[240]"

And also, she had a desire for the mother? I must have missed that.

Edit: I have found this article: https://fightbacknews.org/articles/exorcist-and-right-wing-politics-possession.

"Extremely retrograde views on women and gender roles abound in The Exorcist, most clearly seen through the character of Chris. For one, she's a single mother who left Reagan's estranged father to pursue her acting career. Chris screams profanity at him over the phone for everyone to hear, Reagan included. She's casually dating producer Burke Dennings, much to the dislike of her daughter. Even the film's central plot point – the demon possession – happens during Reagan's long afternoons home alone while Chris works. The Exorcist falls into the tired sexist troupe of blaming single working mothers for the problems that befall their children. The movie not-so-subtly suggests that women like Chris put their families through literal hell if they pursue their careers or show too much independence."

I thought that was interesting because my impression throughout the movie was that Chris was actually very present and loving, she came home from work and spent time with her daughter, etc. But maybe I am seeing this through a 2026 lens.

I'm going to Brussels for four days in mid September and will have some free time to visit the city.

Do you know of any movie theaters worth visiting, or any activities or places related to the world of cinema and film culture that I might want to check out?

It's a shame that the city's film festival is just starting now and ends on the 12th, because I'm going during the third week of the month.

Spoilers ahead for the entire Tremors franchise. If you don't know who Burt Gummer is, or why "more guns" is always the correct answer, stop reading. I envy you. Go watch the 1990 original instead; it's the better use of your time. Proceed to the sequels at your own peril.

I don't just want to gush about Tremors, though I could. I want to argue something specific:

Tremors (1990) works because it stands on two load-bearing walls, genuine terror and genuine harmony, and each sequel that follows knocks one of them down. Aftershock keeps the harmony and abandons the terror. Back to Perfection abandons both. Watch those two walls and you can see a masterpiece decay into a merely-fun B-movie franchise in real time.

The original: terror and harmony

Perfection, Nevada. Population 14, soon to be adjusted downward. Val McKee (Kevin Bacon) and Earl Bassett (Fred Ward) are the town's handymen, not ranchers but odd-job men, two good-looking, believably American guys who can read each other perfectly and fall completely apart the moment a well-educated young woman shows up. That woman is Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter), a seismology grad student, and here's the first quiet signal of what kind of movie this is: instead of belittling her fieldwork, they try to relate to it. Are their motives entirely pure? Probably not; they clearly find her attractive. But whatever, man. They're trying, and that decency beats the modern version of this scene by a mile.

That decency is the whole ethic. In true Gene Roddenberry spirit, there is no villain among the humans. Even Melvin, the town's insufferable kid, is a nuisance, never a threat. Everyone gets along. And crucially, nobody is stupid. The horror doesn't run on characters making idiotic choices so the plot can punish them; everyone does their level best with what they know. That's why the deaths land as tragedy rather than comeuppance: Edgar dead of dehydration on the electrical tower, poor Old Fred, Walter Chang swallowed whole in the middle of his own store. No one earns it. No one deserves this. Compare that to slasher logic, where death is a moral verdict on stupidity or sin, and you see how radical Tremors' generosity toward its own cast really is.

Then there's the monster, and this is where the terror lives. The film follows Stephen King's ladder in Danse Macabre (terror, then horror, then the gross-out) with real discipline. The graboid is withheld, then glimpsed, then finally understood, and the genius of the design is that it weaponizes the one surface you cannot avoid: the ground itself is hunting you. That's an elemental, primal fear. Better still, the creatures learn. Every trick the humans invent, the graboids adapt to. These are old, patient, intelligent things, and the escalation is watching them out-think people who are themselves being clever.

Underneath the creature feature is a Western. An isolated frontier town, a siege, and salvation earned through self-reliance and pooled competence: pole-vaulting across boulders, the bulldozer, the pipe bombs, and finally luring the last worm off a cliff. It's competence porn with a heart. I wanted every single character to make it out.

Tremors II: Aftershock (harmony survives, terror does not)

The opening still delivers exactly what it should: an oil-field worker taken from below, down he goes. A proper graboid execution, and a clean way to onboard new "grabbies" who never saw the first film. From there it's a slow burn, and the burn is where the movie earns its keep.

Earl is the lead now. Val (Bacon) is gone, married to Rhonda, living happily off-screen. And Earl? He blew his fifteen minutes and his fortune on a failed ostrich ranch. This is the duality-of-man beat, and it's the most relatable thing in the film: the two men who survived the impossible took the two most human roads afterward. One settled down. The other squandered it, got bitter, and went stale. Then Grady Hoover, a young hustler and self-professed fan, drags Earl back in with a number: $50,000 per graboid, double if you bring one back alive. In 1996 dollars, a single confirmed kill is life-changing money, and that economic realism is doing genuine character work, not just moving the plot.

The formula does start to show. Kate Reilly, the age-appropriate geologist love interest, mirrors Rhonda a little too neatly: brilliant, attractive, conveniently single, never made the time to date. She's a beat more than a person.

But the real fork in the road is the Shriekers. The graboids metamorphose into smaller, bipedal, pack-hunting things that "see" by heat and reproduce asexually: feed one, get two. On paper: terrifying. In practice, it's the Jurassic Park move. The franchise watched velociraptors clean up and thought, let's do graboid raptors. And here's the problem with that trade: the graboid's whole genius was that it took away the ground. The Shrieker gives the ground back. It's above the surface, it's visible, and the moment you learn it hunts heat, you know how to beat it. The unknowable becomes a puzzle. Terror becomes an action set-piece. That's the actual reason the tone flips from horror to comedy-horror, not because the jokes got funnier, but because there's nothing left to dread. You feel it in the tonal whiplash of being surrounded by monsters while a cheery country-western montage plays over the hunt.

And yet the second wall holds. Everyone still gets along. Grady is grating, sure, but he's an ally you're meant to root for, not a fault line running through the town. Burt Gummer becomes the spine of the film: the survivalist who is simultaneously the most likely person to live and the reason anyone else does, whose arrogance and nonchalance double as the comic relief. The sequence of Burt trapped with the Shriekers is the movie at its best. The bond is intact even as the fear drains out of the room. Aftershock loses terror but keeps harmony, and that's exactly why it's still a good time.

Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (both walls fall)

First, the title, because it matters on this sub: it's Back to Perfection (2001), not "Return to."

The nostalgia is real and mostly earned. Chang's Market is now run by Jodi Chang, Walter's niece, a genuinely likeable businesswoman and a lovely nod. Nancy and Mindy Sterngood are back from the original. And El Blanco, the sterile albino graboid the town semi-adopts as a protected mascot, is a legitimately clever piece of world-building.

But this is the first film in the franchise that manufactures people you're supposed to dislike, and internal friction to go with them:

Jack ("Desert Jack"), running staged Graboid-attack tours off a catastrophe he was never there for. Pure parasite, and the film knows it. (I spent his introduction quietly rooting for the worms. Possibly a me problem. Possibly not.)

Melvin Plug returns, the town's obnoxious kid now grown into a smug real-estate developer trying to pave Perfection. The nuisance has matured into the threat.

Mindy, flanderized into "a teenager," and I mean that as a personality, not an age. She had maybe three lines in the original, so there was no real character to betray, but the vacuum gets filled with attitude and a crush on Jack that I do not buy for one second.

This is the Deep Space Nine move: deliberately seeding rifts among your own people to generate drama. On DS9 it was a bold, largely successful reinvention. Here it's a mistake, because harmony was never incidental to Tremors; it was half the machine. The instant some townsfolk become people you'd cheerfully watch get eaten, the "no one deserves this" contract is void, and the film's soul goes out with it.

One accidental grace note is buried in all of this. Mindy is played in both films by Ariana Richards, who between them played Lex in Jurassic Park. So the franchise that spent an entire sequel chasing Spielberg's velociraptors had one of his kids sitting in its own cast the whole time. Nobody could have planned it, and it's funnier than anything the movie does on purpose.

Meanwhile the creature escalation runs on autopilot. Shriekers return, then evolve into Ass-Blasters: Shriekers that gorge, ignite their own gas, and fly. Every sequel now owes you a new monster tier, and every tier drags the series further from the one idea that ever mattered: a thing beneath your feet that you cannot see.

The Gummer Show, and the road not taken

So why did it go this way? Follow the enthusiasm. Michael Gross has appeared in all seven films and the TV series, the only original-cast member to go the distance. When producers floated ending it at seven, he shrugged and said the door was still open, and his position is blunt: as long as the movies keep making money, he is glad to keep making them. He's the franchise's engine and its truest believer, now in his late seventies and still openly campaigning for more. Of course the series reorganized itself around Burt, and Burt is firepower, action, and fun, not dread. The repeated attempts to pass the torch to his son Travis (Jamie Kennedy, films 5 and 6) only confirm the model: this became an action-comedy about a gun guy and his legacy.

Picture the other timeline. Bacon stays. Someone leans into the terror instead of the arsenal. Seven films and a prestige HBO series that treat the graboids as a genuinely ancient, unknowable intelligence and Perfection as a town under permanent elemental siege. That Tremors doesn't exist. We got the Gummer Show instead: a genuinely good hang, sprawling now across a prequel (1889, Hiram Gummer), South Africa, the Canadian Arctic, and a tropical island.

I love the first film without a single reservation. I like the second one a great deal, for exactly what it is. The third is where you can feel the franchise decide what it's going to be, and it picks spectacle and spite over terror and harmony.

More guns really is the answer to a Shrieker.

It was never the answer to a graboid. The graboid was the answer to us.

• I have noticed something, that I think might be weird, but I am not sure if it is just me. Might be.
• I have been watching a lot of movies lately. Mostly hollywood movies or european movies. And I notice other people in the cinema hall get emotional, in sad scenes, eg. something sad happens to a mother and/or her child. But it does not effect me.
• However when I watch movies with characters from the country my parents come from or movies from that country, I get much more emotional easier. I notice that this happens in "worse" movies as well.
• I feel like this might not just be the acting and story, it might be because I am psychologically more inclined to get emotional for people that I relate to. Like that mother could be my mother or that child could be or that is "my people" so to speak.
• I feel like cultural familiarity and percieved group similarity are affecting my emotional processing.
• But I saw this paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17144754/ and which saw some differences but not for all groups.
• Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

I just finished watching Immortal Tales (1974), and it’s basically five unrelated stories, but the main thing in each story is simply fucking. The first story is about a couple who go to a beach and she gives him a blowjob, the second is about a woman who starts masturbating, the third is literally a woman fucking a monster, and so on.

I finished the movie and I have no idea what I just watched. I mean yes has a good directing and i enjoyed it, but for UNSPEAKABLE reasons.

I’ve watched multiple erotic movies(idk if this one even considers an erotic), but this one feels different because of the sheer amount of sex scenes and the lack of an actual story. So it’s really hard to even come up with an opinion on it.

Note: If there was anything "deeper" to it, I completely missed it.

I was thinking about how the movies we consider part of the great lexicon of cinema aren't a given and how much availability and restoration effect those discussing

For example , Theo anglepolpous was once considered one of the most important filmmakers in the world he won a palmdor multiple internationally famous actors starred in his movies like Harvey keitel and Marcello mastrioni

But now he feels like an obscure art house darling , he still has his fans but his not Revered like say tarkovsky or Bella Tarr

On the other hand some films that were ignored can re_ enter the Canon decades later

Like soy Cuba or chess of the wind that were discovered and restored by the world cinema foundation ran by Scorsese

Or the works of edward yang, I feel with each passing year his body of work is more and more revered

I'm in my early 20s, so I don't have much frame of reference

But can you guys think of some directors who lost or found appreciation in your lifetime because the availability of their work ?

I really think that Snyder's Dawn of the Dead needs to be included alongside The Thing and Scarface when we talk about movie remakes that are great. In the opening when we first see the zombie virus reeking chaos on the world, there is an excellent scene where a guy is standing in the middle of the street talking to the protagonist, and out of no where the guy gets fucking nailed by an ambulance. An ambulance that doesn't even stop after it's just run a man over.

Which is just, such a fantastic way to demonstrate in a instant how things are falling to chaos. And honestly the entire opening is fantastic, from when the zombie enter's the main character's room to when she crashes and falls unconscious.

Not a lot of zombie media covers this period where the zombies are first showing up things are just starting to fall apart. If any of you played Dead Space 2 you'll know that this is why the intro to that game is also so memorable. I wish that we would see that more often, and maybe have an entire film or the first season of a show that is all about dealing with the first few hours, days, or weeks of this. It's also why the next 29 whatever film should be either 29 minutes or hours later.

Spent 3 years on this forever WiP project of mine :)

In the transitions I did not just prioritize chronology, but also setting, and perhaps most of all: theme, mood and subject matter.

I would like adjacent movies to be in dialogue with each other and also tried to create rhymes and echoes across the full sequence, e.g. Chariots of Fire > Race > Contact.

Prioritized throughline over comprehensiveness. Sometimes I really wanted to include certain history such as the French revolution, etc. but I just couldn't find the film chain to bridge it seamlessly. Another example is WW1 which is mostly present as negative space. I wanted to prevent oversaturating with war movies, and give WW2 more space to breathe.

I have focused on films released from the 70s onwards, for visual/acting consistency, and due to my own strong preference for color films, so unfortunately that disqualified some highly acclaimed historical films that otherwise would have fit nicely.

My personal genre definitions:

Epic = multiple characters and events over a significant timespan
Biopic = deep single character study (even if fictional)
Drama = focus on event(s) and/or multiple characters (but lacking the scale of an Epic)

Let me know if a transition puzzles you or if you have suggestions for how to improve!

The List: 153 fish

Has anyone seen this yet? There’s a lot to discuss, but I just want to talk about cinematography in this post.

1. How did she get that satellite shot? Did she pay to send a camera to space?
2. The color is brilliant. Who knew that the jersey’s on an amateur girl’s soccer team could be that visually arresting?
3. Disembodied voices: Lucretia Martel is captivated with this trope: in La Mujer sin Cabeza, the head of the lead is always chopped in the frame, never fully present. Here, we often do not see the face of a speaker. Separating image from locution.

4. Textures: clothing, the red wood panels of the courtroom, white hair, all vivid and visceral.

5. The use of found footage: taking the raw, documentary footage and rendering both as evidence (as it is used in court) and as an abstraction (e.g., the long shot of the scuffle, in which we only see swirling rocks)

INTRODUCTION

When I was first watching "In The Mood For Love", I had this idea / theory inside my head that two characters (Mr. Chow, played by Tony Leung and Su Li-Zhen/Mrs.Chan, played by Maggie Cheung) are actually sharing the identity of four people. I had this idea because the film doesn't show you Tony's wife and it doesn't show you Maggie's husband either, the latter of whom apparently frequently visits Japan. And I believe anytime a movie intentionally DOESN'T show you something, it gotta mean something.

NOT A TYPICAL AFFAIR...

When Tony & Maggie get into an affair because they believe their spouses are cheating on them, most of their affair is actually role-playing as their spouses. Like Tony pretends as if he is Maggie's husband and Maggie pretends as if she is Tony's wife. Maggie tries to eat the food that Tony's wife might love. There are a lot of dialogues where one person asks the other "What would you do if you were my wife / husband?" I was thinking, in a normal world, who has an affair like this?

They both keep telling themselves that "We won't end up like them" in the affair, but that's exactly what happens as they both fall for each other in love. Tony has a matching tie with Maggie's husband and Maggie has a matching handbag with Tony's wife. You can explicitly see the identities blurring into one other. I just had this in the back of my head as a cool idea, never considered it deep because the film's story felt pretty straightforward at first.

INTERVIEW FROM THE ACTORS

A couple weeks after I saw the film, I was watching an interview that both the actors did for the Toronto International Film Festival 2000 (link here), and about 15:24 minutes in, the actors reveal that Wong Kar-Wai's initial idea was to cast both of them in dual roles. Maggie Cheung was supposed to play both Su Li-Zhen and Mrs. Chow. She is both Mrs. Chan & Mrs. Chow now. Tony Leung was originally cast as Mr. Chan, Su Li-Zhen's husband. Four characters, two actors...Four identities, two people.

Eventually, this idea was abondoned by WKW in favour of not showing the face at all of Mr. Chan & Mrs. Chow, which is how the movie currently is. He could've cast other actors for the role but he chose not to. Seeing this interview kind of validated my initial theory on blurred identities.

INTERVIEW FROM WONG KAR-WAI

A couple more weeks later, I stumble upon a clip from Wong Kar-Wai himself explaining why he doesn't show you the other couple (link here) and it makes an important revelation towards the psychological nature of "In The Mood For Love"

In the clip, WKW reveals that he never shows you the face of Mrs. Chow (Tony's Wife) / Mr. Chan (Maggie's Husband) or their side of the affair because it adds an "extra layer" to the film.

"I hate the idea of showing the husband and wife because it makes the film boring. I'd rather have these two actors go through both sides of the affair. This will give another layer to the film. because maybe there's a dark side in Maggie or a dark side in Tony and they need an excuse to release it. So they are not only portraying the husband and the wife [as in roleplay], they are trying to show THEMSELVES. They can be the husband and they can be the wife." - Wong Kar-Wai

Even if Kar-Wai's English isn't the greatest, the ideas are crystal clear here. There are two aspects to this quote. One is, he is saying he never shows you the other side of affair because there might be darkness inside both Maggie & Tony and they both needed an "excuse" to release it.

EXCUSE TO RELEASE DARKNESS?

It is only implied with dialogues that they both are getting cheated on, there's no real scene where the other spouses are shown hanging out in Japan or something. So maybe there's no other side of the affair at all, maybe Maggie doesn't have a matching handbag with Tony's wife, maybe Tony doesn't have a matching tie with Maggie's husband (again, both are never shown in the movie). Or maybe they do but Tony & Maggie are perceiving coincidences as direct evidence for getting cheated on because THEY want each other and THEY want to spend time with each together. I say this with a string of "maybes" because it's an interesting angle to examine what WKW mentions as an "excuse to release".

Tony & Maggie maybe perceiving their spouses as having an affair so they find an excuse to have an affair themselves. Perhaps they aren't discovering an affair, perhaps they're constructing one. Tony & Maggie repeatedly tell each other that "We won't end up like them" just to exactly end up like "them". We never actually know if the spouses' affair exists with 100% certainty independent of Mr. Chow & Mrs. Chan's subjective perception of it and this ambiguity is the point. There is a little bit of evidence the other side of the affair does exist, the biggest being Tony's wife calling someone from her office, telling this person that his wife had visited him after Maggie visits her, but the evidence is left intentionally sparse and nothing hugely confirmatory, like Kar-Wai explained in the quote.

DARK SIDE OF TONY & MAGGIE ARE THE HUSBAND & WIFE?

The second aspect of the quote is, since he doesn't show you the other side of the affair, Kar-Wai says you can interpret the darker side of Tony & darker side of Maggie TO BE the husband and the wife. WKW says the same actors go through "both sides of the affair". When they role play, they aren't simply mimicking their "spouses", they're liberating the dark side within themselves. When the role play ends, and they snap back to reality, it's like they are turning back into their good personality. The roleplay/fun rehearsals slowly becomes their reality. It allows them to express forbidden physical and emotional intimacy while maintaining plausible deniability. By pretending to be Mr. Chan and Mrs. Chow, they can flirt, hold hands, and confess feelings under the guise of "rehearsal" or "simulation."

I see this fitting especially with Maggie, she becomes very flirtatious and smiley faced while role playing and then suddenly serious with a straight/sad face when the role play ends. She's now back to being Su Li-Zhen. Just a brilliant acting performance by her in general. The film also has a ton of mirror shots, especially in the 2046 hotel room where Maggie & Tony write together, further reinforcing this duality inside them, as if their other side is reflected on the mirrors.

The film isn't really about two couples. It's about two people performing four identities. Tony & Maggie even move in on the same exact day, at the same exact time, as one half of a couple, looking space for 2 people, themselves and their spouse, in the very beginning / first scene of the film. So, the signs were always there from scene one.

Dark side doesn't necessarily mean "evil" or "bad", it could very simply mean suppressed desire and longing, which is something Tony & Maggie clearly have for each other but don't quite directly communicate. The only way they communicate this desire is by role-playing as the other side of their spouses' affair. So this idea of their dark side being interpreted as the other spouse makes sense now. The movie also emphasises loneliness and suppressed emotions with how 1960s Hong Kong is surrounded by working people and gossiping neighbours. It's easier for Maggie & Tony to suppress desire than be the victim of gossip.

DARK SIDE OF TONY

Disclaimer: After this point, this analysis will also contain minor spoilers from the sequel “2046”, in terms of general remarks on the film’s story and the evolution of Tony’s character. Nothing major or specific will be spoiled.

Coming to Tony, this psychological reading also adds layers to the film's ending and Tony's decision to move away to Singapore. On the surface level, Tony tells Maggie that "he's had enough of the gossip", so he's going to move away from her. He doesn't wanna be labelled as as a cheater by others. On a deeper level, it's about confronting the darkness within himself. He chooses not to confront it, and rather moves away to a different place (Singapore).

He thinks running away can fix him, but we see how this darkness shapes him as a person in the film's sequel "2046". He is stuck in a purgatorial space, failing to move past his memories of Maggie and ultimately turning into a stone hearted womaniser, having sex for the sake of it, and gambling.

There is a scene (which some may dismiss as unimportant) in between Ping and Tony in Tony's Hong Kong office where Ping says that he left behind his hat intentionally at Maggie's place so he can go back and flirt with her. Ping also jokes that if Tony's wife weren't so pretty, she would be worried, suggesting that Tony might cheat on her if she weren't pretty.

To this Tony replies "I'm not like you", pretending he's such a nice husband who would never pursue other women, just to exactly end up as what Ping suggested (or maybe even worse). Tony did get into an affair in "In The Mood Love", and in 2046, fully channeled the darkness outside. There's another scene in 2046 where now Tony exploits Ping to flirt with Zhang Ziyi's character, bringing the earlier scene on "In The Mood For Love" & Tony's transformation arc a full circle. Speaking of 2046, even that movie shows no traces of Tony's wife, further reinforcing the psychological reading of these identities.

ANGKOR WAT SCENE

Another important scene between Tony and Ping, this time in the Singapore office is the famous "whispering your secret into a hole in a tree and sealing it with mud" dialogue scene. Everyone knows how this ties into the climax of Tony going to Cambodia, and burying his secret in Angkor Wat.

We don't know what exactly this "secret" is, it could be the fact that he fell in love with a married woman, or that he is a cheater. In either case, this can be interpreted as Tony burying his dark secrets in what is the world's largest religious monument, with just a Monk watching him over, instead of confronting or revealing the darkness, which would mean making his affair public. Instead he does the opposite and buries it deep. The sequel 2046 also re-tells the "hole in tree" dialogue in its opening scene and the movie depicts Tony falling deeper into the abyss.

Although it's not shown what Maggie does with her secrets, she also does something metaphorically similar, she also buries it deep, by one, rejecting a chance to go with Mr. Chow to Singapore with an extra boat ticket & two, Visiting Singapore, contacting Tony on the phone but yet not having the courage to face Tony or get back together with him. She actively chooses not to despite her feelings for Mr. Chow. When she moves back to her Hong Kong apartment, the scene just before Angkor Wat, Maggie gets teary eyed reminiscing on who used to live next door.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

I'll finish this analysis by saying although "In The Mood For Love" is deservedly discussed as one of the greatest films ever, I wish more people would discuss it as a psychological piece on desire + suppressed emotions and also in the context of the trilogy because it elevates the romance shown even more. The main protagonist Yuddy from the first installment Days Of Being Wild is a womanizer. He intentionally fails to form emotional bonds with women he loves. He gets into a relationship just to break their hearts, including Maggie's Su Li-Zhen.

Mr. Chow in 2046 then becomes emotionally just like Yuddy in terms of relationships with women. Carina Lau's character "Mimi" reprises her role in 2046 and tells Mr. Chow that he is very much like her ex-boyfriend Yuddy, which confirms this connection. But in this trilogy, as the middle child, "In the mood for love" shows something emotionally resonant between the two lovers. It's an affair yes but is based on true yearning for one another with no intimate sex / kissing scenes like many have noted. It's the beauty in the middle of the trilogy that shines through the ugliness that bookends it.

Let me know your thoughts on my analysis and if there's anything you'd like to add.

For a while, I’ve been trying to find movies about loneliness. I looked on sites, asked people, and watched content, yet 95% of the movies I got aren’t actually about “loneliness” because people mix up something being in a movie with what the movie is actually about or what it discusses.

I saw recommendations like Moon (2009), The Martian (2015), The eternal sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), the apartment (1960) and so on

Yes, those have a character who might be alone, but the movie itself IS NOT about loneliness. It’s like asking someone to recommend a movie about WW2 and they recommend Inglourious Basterds. Like yeah it’s set during WW2 but the movie itself doesn’t actually really talk or focus on WW2(might be a poor example but you get the point)

What should happen(imo), when you recommend a movie to someone is that you tell them what the movie is focusing on, not what side attributes it may have. A movie about depression shouldn’t be recommended as a movie about a guy who wants to start his own company just because that’s what the main character is trying to do. In the end, the movie is about his depression, not about him trying to start a company. Even if that’s part of his character, it shouldn’t be what defines the movie

I might be wrong, but I’m just saying what I’ve encountered. I look for movies based on what I actually want the movie to talk about, and I end up finding a movie about a guy who’s trying to survive on Mars, but since he’s alone, they’re gonna count it as “a movie about loneliness"

I just watched it last night and was wondering about something, is the reason the first Sam is dying because the clones only have a 3 year lifespan or because of his injuries from the crash?

There is signs he is feeling ill earlier in the film like when he doesnt want hot sauce as his stomach is upset and he is obviously seeing hallucinations which cause him to burn his hand and ultimately crash the rover.

The 3 year contract would also suggest that the clones only live for that period

I’ve been thinking about why the Montgomery Riverfront Brawl footage stuck with so many people. Beyond the actual fight there was something striking about seeing a Black man attacked and then watching other people immediately step in rather than seeing him framed only as a victim.

It got me thinking about how films handle agency in stories about racial violence.

By Any Means seems like an interesting example. It puts a Black FBI agent at the center of a Civil Rights-era story in Mississippi and pairs him with a Mafia informant when the usual legal process isn’t getting results. The film is inspired by real events but clearly takes dramatic liberties with them.

There’s a difficult balance there. Make the characters too passive and the film can become another story where Black suffering drives everything. Push too far the other way and history can become the backdrop for a revenge fantasy.

Where do you think that line is? Can a historical film heighten resistance and retaliation while still taking the history seriously?

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017)

Rating: 9.5/10

Watched: August 24, 2026

Brawl in Cell Block 99 was not what I was expecting. At all. I'd seen a few clips on the various social media platforms, but they were all pretty banal. There was no doubting it was going to be a violent movie, but I always wondered why they weren't even showing those clips with some censoring.

Simply put, it's because if you censor the violence in the most interesting clips, all you're left with is a lot of big black blocks everywhere or an entirely pixelated screen. By the time Bradley (never Brad) makes it Cell Block 99 and things truly kick off, there's no stopping the man.

Imagine if the producers for Reacher woke up one morning and had been given the green light to film Reacher's fight scenes in the most graphically lurid manner possible. That's how intent Bradley is on achieving his goals, and Vince Vaughn is terrifyingly believable as soft-spoken, weirdly intelligent Bradley Thomas.

I won't give you the details on how and why Bradley (never Brad) winds up in prison, or why he winds up having to do what he does. That's for Google and your other friends who spoil stuff.

The violence and the carnage is shocking because they show it. It's also kind of funny because in a few spots it's blatant dummies and the like, but I never mind that because it's fun to see. Practical effects are always better than digital, even if you can tell it's a dummy.

The most effective part for me was Vince Vaughn as Bradley Thomas. Bradley never raises his voice. He's never particularly mean or angry. He never says anything that could even really be considered racist or even unkind. He's soft-spoken and he means what he says and he does what he promises.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 gets an 9.5 out of 10 from me because it wound up subverting my expectations. From the few clips I saw and some very vague stuff online, I was thinking it'd be like Prison Kumite with extras, but what I got was a surprisingly sad story about a man just trying to do right for his wife and unborn daughter.

As a side note, I initially rated this 8 out of 10, but I found myself thinking about the movie for a few days afterwards, which is very rare. The last movie to force an adjustment was Possession, though that took several months instead of a few days.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 earns it's 9.5.

SPOILERS:

Please let your five favorite scenes from Fire Walk With Me and explain why you chose them. It was hard for me not to include the whole movie but here's mine from 5th best to 1st best:

5: Laura's Dream in the painting: This is probably the most "David Lynch" scene in the movie. The image of the Tremond boy in the shadows snapping his finger is awesomely dreamlike. In retrospect this scene really connects all of Twin Peaks from Annie showing up telling Laura what to write in her diary to seeing the wallpaper from the place above the convenience store.

4.David Bowie and the meeting: Another crazily surreal scene with Cooper seeing his double on the monitor and David Bowie of all people showing up and acting insane. Then the wild meeting with all of the Black Lodge entities and the introduction of one of the coolest and most mysterious characters, The Jumping Man.

1. The Murder and aftermath: The whole movie builds up beautifully to the inciting incident of the whole Twin Peaks universe. When it arrives it is suitably epic and most importantly the climax of Laura's character between life and death. She makes her courageous decision to put the ring on and accept death, defying Bob who wants to possess her (she sees his face in the mirror right before). After the deed is done we get goosebump inducing little moments like seeing the necklace, her being wrapped in plastic, and Leland entering the black lodge through glastonbury grove and being held up by Bob.

2. Laura, Cooper, and the Angel: One of the greatest endings in film history. After the struggle and torture of Laura she finally gets her moment of joy and absolution. The angel is a symbol of goodness to Laura who was swayed back and forth between darkness and light throughout her life. it is beautifully bittersweet and creepy at the same time seeing the two best characters in Twin Peaks lost beyond life and death but together.

3. The Bang Bang Bar and The Pink Room: I had to combine these two scenes together because it creates a whole experience. Laura encounters the log lady outside the Bang Bang bar and her words cut through her like a knife as she reflects on how far gone she is, and if she is a good or a bad person. She breaks down to Julee Cruise's beautiful song (with incredible red and blue lighting) but continues to prostitute herself to two rough looking men as Donna watches. This is where Donna realizes the darkness of the path the Laura has gone down. Sheryl Lee's performance is incredible she goes from this broken down little girl to a world weary prostitute in seconds. The dialogue here is incredible (So you wanna fuck the homecoming queen) and Laura portrays anger towards these older men clearly taking advantage of her but also resigns herself to being with them. Then there is this great "audition" where Laura and Donna make out with the two guys and Laura lets her join. But then Donna realizes how in over her head she gets when she goes to the Pink Room. An incredible design by Lynch with the insane lighting, pulsating music nudity and drugs (We are seeing the depths of Laura's life that they could never show on tv in the 90s). They engage in a crazy drug ritual but we see the true heart of Laura when she protects her best friend's innocence. An incredible stretch of film on every level- acting, visuals, music, direction, emotion, meaning....