Not Just This
Not that there was a ton of content Online today, but I got down a rabbit hole for awhile with my newest YouTube, Woodturning YouTube (with a side of art restoration YouTube), which is pretty much what it sounds like, big blocks of wood (and sometimes resin) getting spun at high speeds while someone goes to cut a shape into it. Or out of it, I’m unclear on the directionality. At any rate it’s much like seeing a sculpture emerge from a brick of marble, and it’s also oddly relaxing and I nodded off to it a not-zero number of times.
Watch This: HIGH LIFE - available via Amazon Prime
At the risk of becoming a Robert Pattinson fanzine, this 2018 film starring him, Juliette Binoche, Andre Benjamin and a surprising amount of bodily fluids, is worth a watch. We join the story at an undetermined point, as we see Pattinson caring for a child, the pair seemingly alone aboard the craft. Through the film, we learn that Pattinson was a crew of prisoners who were sent on a distinctly one-way trip to a black hole for experimentation. Unsurprisingly, an already tense situation, boils over and, through some incredibly arresting imagery we find out how R. Patt and the child came to be in their current predicament. As a warning it contains much more sexual content than you’d probably expect from the previous sentences but although trying to follow the timeline can be a little disorienting it’s a very interesting time.
Speaking of Amazon Prime, I kind of get it, though I’m curious about the overlap between viewers of one and the other.
And speaking of streaming services, it’s probably a sign of the effects of Internet time, but at this point I don’t feel like I’m ever going to watch that Tiger King show. It’s been about three weeks since it came out and it already feel impenetrable, and I don’t know what a Carole is or why people dislike her or why you’re a bad person if you dislike her and at this point it already seems like all the content juice has been squeezed from this show. I’d heard that a reporter who I’m assuming went to school for it decided to use their time to ask Trump about pardoning the fella from it, and it feels weird to use the word ‘demeaning’ to refer to something being done to rather than by Trump but here we are.
Actually I went and searched who asked it and it was a New York Post reporter so I assume they didn’t go to school for it. At any rate this is a side effect of my distaste for Netflix’s “all at once” model for shows, as it’s rough ingesting that much content at once without it just kind of washing over you, especially when the shows are made specifically to be consumed in that method, like whenever people talk about streaming shows they tend to just talk about incident, things that happened, rather than any specific standout episodes, that have internal arcs while serving the greater thematics of the series. All of that is to say I’ll also never in my life watch Stranger Things. Conversely, The Mandalorian was released weekly and didn’t suffer quite as much from those issues, and we got months and months of sweet Baby Yoda content, with that cursed Baby Nut as the only real negative side effect.
This asshole.
Presented with no additional context other than to say the characterization of the beat is correct:
Director Michael Mann has been responsible for some stone-cold masterpieces like THIEF, THE INSIDER and MIAMI VICE, and those are on a rotation with COLLATERAL for my favorite at any given moment. It’s the last one that this clip comes from, as Javier Bardem’s story about Santa Claus and his unfortunately nicknamed assistant Peter from Dutch folklore is presented as ASMR. Also, it’s weird to think Javier Bardem ever looked like that, as his Anton Chigurh feels to me like such the definitive iteration of Bardem that you forget that he can also absolutely get it.
Finally, this is an interesting look at a device called the Light Ranger 2 that was pivotal to pulling off the look of UNCUT GEMS, allowing cinematographer Darius Khondji to keep focus on actors even with a style where the word ‘frenetic’ would be kind, with very little motion pre-established before shooting.
