Last week I was too busy finishing up a paper to see a movie! But the paper is finally live! After nearly a year of work! And I feel really proud of it! Check it out if you’re interested. Notably we give a 20x speedup over state-of-the-art while being significantly more accurate!

Also next week I’ll be away for Thanksgiving. This is the last newsletter till December!

This week I am seeing TWO movies. If I could I would see even more! Lots of great stuff happening. I also intend to go rock climbing at some point but don’t yet have a slot for it. If you’d like to climb with me let me know and we can coordinate!

First, I will be going to see Viridiana at 8:20pm on Tuesday at the Film Forum. As always, I have a +1 discount for Film Forum, so the first person to indicate interest will get a ticket for $12.50!

All I know about Viridiana are the short reviews I read on the Film Forum website. I’ll leave two of them here in the hopes that they’ll be as convincing to you as they were to me.

“I can’t think of a more mischievous filmmaker than Luis Buñuel... He is one of the great originals, creator of satirical delight, sometimes hilariously funny, and if you love great movies you sooner or later get to him.”
– Roger Ebert

“He [has] the outlook of a collegiate idealist who has just discovered venality and lust.”
 – Stanley Kauffmann

What more needs to be said?

Then, I’ll be seeing Peter Hujar’s Day Thursday at 7:30 at the Film Forum. Again the same discount deal applies ;)

For those of you who don’t already know, I like movies that center around two people having a conversation. My Dinner with Andre and Before Sunrise are two such films, and they are among my favorite of all time. This appears to be another, following Peter Hujar as he recounts his day. It has rave reviews, including the following:

“A charming experiment that should delight those who like their pleasures both nostalgic and voyeuristic... Astoundingly detailed and wonderfully evocative... by turns languid, funny, tender and endearing... Beautifully performed and lovingly assembled... In its attention to the quotidian routines familiar to us all, the movie finds meaning in the mundane, showing how the most ordinary events—like, in Hujar's case, a phone call from Susan Sontag—can one day add up to an extraordinary life.”
– Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times

Who doesn’t want a life-affirming portrayal of the kind of conversation between two people we all have so often?

The last movie I saw as part of this newsletter was Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Before talking about it with a friend while waiting in line for concessions I hadn’t realized quite how much Frankenstein content I had already consumed. I’ve seen several different Frankenstein-based movies, I’ve read the original book, and I felt well-qualified to say both that this film was much closer to the original source material than any I’d seen before, and also that the departures it did make seemed very deliberate and interesting. I thought it was often very beautiful (as his movies so often are), and some parts were quite touching. But that’s it. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t consider it a must-see. If you do feel you need some Frankenstein content, I would point you towards Young Frankenstein (ft Gene Wilder as Frankenstein) instead. I saw it many years ago with my family on a wintery day and I still remember it fondly.