This is an image from the IFC Center in the West Village the day after David Lynch’s death. I think the importance of David Lynch to aesthetics and audience cultivation in contemporary film culture is probably inestimable, and I feel the loss powerfully, but also some anger that the last feature film Lynch was able to make was Inland Empire in 2006. Like many of our greatest filmmakers (most notably Lynch’s gay prankster twin, John Waters) his art was a victim of the bottom-dropping out from mid-budget filmmaking in the U.S. thanks to the dominance of Marvel/big IP. We are starting to see a significant recovery in this area thanks to the efforts of A24 and Neon, and the aesthetics of the core “elevated horror” business of these studios owes everything to Lynch, but not in enough time for this previous generation. Lynch, of course, was able to make the miraculous third season of Twin Peaks and numerous shorts (not to mention fun cameos in Louie and Meet the Fabelmans) but it’s impossible to know the work that’s been lost because Hollywood stopped funding certain types of films for nearly two decades.

My first job making more than minimum wage as I finished college was as a projectionist at the IFC Center right at the tail end of the widespread use of 35mm. I remain proud to have that technical training in film, even if it’s mostly a dead medium. Although an early fully digital film, Inland Empire was exhibited on 35mm prints, and it was one of the first major films I projected. Seeing the above image struck up my memories. I will never forget the late-night showings that lasted until nearly 3 AM and making my way home to my apartment in Bushwick from the West Village after closing up the theater, heading home with Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” stuck in my head (which Lynch used for the wonderful career referencing end credit sequence of the film). I think this was in many ways a more powerful lesson in aesthetics than anything I was learning in my Cinema Studies classes over at NYU. It all marks out an alternate life path from the one I took, a decision I don’t regret, but always wonder what my life would have been if I started working as a PA on film shoots rather than going to graduate school.

I’ve recently been rediscovering that enthusiasm for film, by writing and thinking about it on my Letterboxd account. I’ve done a lot of writing there recently, and I thought I’d use this week’s newsletter to offer a film journal of my responses to some of the bigger films of 2024 I’ve seen. These are not polished reviews. They are first thoughts. I’ve tried to clean them up a bit, but they vary quite a bit in length, getting quite a bit longer as I redeveloped some intellectual muscles from practicing the habit.

6/21: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Dir. George Miller

I was late in getting to see this, but I am glad I caught it in the theater before it left. It works as an articulation of the mythic collective unconscious that surfaced into the dream work of Fury Road. I'm fully onboard with all these movies. I don't care if it flopped, this is too weird anyway and Fury Road’s box-office success was probably a fluke It’s a blessing this got made on such a scale. If we can trick Hollywood into spending money on stuff like this, it's even better if it's wasted in terms of ROI.

(It was a while before I saw another new film)

12/17: Rebel Ridge

Dir. Jeremy Saulnier

This is not normally the type of thing I put on, but I liked it! A tense thriller that is effective at making you hate the villains and civil forfeiture laws. I liked the conceit of the hero not using lethal force.

12/19: I Saw The TV Glow

Dir. Jane Schoenbrun

This feels like a major aesthetic breakthrough and like it’s hampered by its A24 elevated horror and TikTok shoe gaze aesthetics.

Everything with the TV show is excellent, every strange bizarre Lynchian moment is seared in my brain, and the self-suffocation at the center of the film is terrifying and heartbreaking. I'm cis, so I'm sure I'm missing some of the ways this is getting at the experience of dysphoria, but I felt like something about it was being communicated in a genuinely aesthetically inventive and exciting way.

But then we get long tracking shots of someone walking through a suburban landscape with a Broken Social Scene needle drop of a song from 2002 in a film about memories of the 90s and those parts feel like a very forced vibe to me. Maybe if I lived in the online spaces where the shoegaze revival is happening it would resonate with me more, but it winds up breaking the spell of the film for me.

I still really respect this getting made and having such a major release in such a pure and visionary form and I think what doesn't work for me is more a me problem than with the film. But I remain divided on it.

12/26: Evil Does Not Exist

Dir. Ryūsuke Hamaguchi

Mesmerizing beauty and wonderful slow pacing, but it will take a second watch for it to click. I watched it on a plane, which was probably a dumb vibe-killer choice of mine. I am excited to watch again.

Feels like the film companion to the thriller genre exercise stuff with class and environmental destruction going on in Eleanor Catton's novel Birnam Wood.

1/4: Nosferatu

Dir. Robert Eggers

Finally, a horror director inspired by Cannibal Corpse album art, instead of the other way around.

I'm joking, plenty of great trash horror lives in that sandbox, but Eggers has such an eye for gnarly imagery, and I'm thrilled with how far this goes to push the boundaries of mainstream or even elevated indie horror taste.

It's got a sustained fever dream atmosphere, the most grotesque Dracula I think ever, and it's not afraid to allow for Willem Dafoe or Lily-Rose Depp to go deliriously campy. Its reinterpretation of Murnau Nosferatu's images and the psychosexual/material meanings of the Dracula myth works beautifully. Is this the dark inversion of Poor Things in its exploding Victorian medicalizations of women? They both have mad doctor Willem presiding over the science. My one complaint is that Eggers can lean too heavily on loud and dark to quiet and brighter smash cuts.

One sour note is that I don't know that Eggers quite knows what he's doing here regarding the antisemitism implicit in the diseased migrant medievalism of the material (plague laws often targeted Jews) and the more explicit antisemitism of the Murnau. I don’t think the film is antisemitic, but I do think the historical weight slips in regardless and a more explicit carefulness with that would have gone a long way.

1/6: Emilia Perez

Dir. Jacques Audiard

This review may contain spoilers.

When it won the Golden Globe, I knew I needed to watch it before the discourse got out of control, but I am struggling to find what I think about it away from the noise.

1) If I'm feeling angst about Hollywood awards culture liberal sentimentalism, I want to angrily point out how over its head and lowkey regressive this movie is about trans issues and cartel/disappeared stuff and agree with everyone calling it this year’s Crash.

2) On the other hand, if I'm feeling angst about online pile-ons, moralizing, and cinematic illiteracy, I want to point toward the demands of genre, how camp works, and the energy generated by the visuals and music's tensions with the thematic material. It’s not anywhere near as bad as Crash, even if it’s not entirely successful.

I feel equally torn in both these directions, so I'm going to try to just make some observations that may or may not come together to say anything about the film as a whole.

1) It is corny as hell. Every single line that is sung would be laughably cringe as dialogue. But in the genre of the movie musical, some weird tensions open up if we keep in mind that everyone is morally bankrupt. So, for instance, when Zoe Saldana is talking to a potential surgeon for Emilia's transition, he sings some stuff that conflates his transphobia with his moral condemnation of what cartel bosses do. She responds with an affirmation of trans identity and the belief that people can change which is appealing, but also pretty eat/pray/love and also handwaving the serious moral questions around helping a cartel boss. She sings "I think you are wrong, change your gender, change yourself change the world," or some cringe line like that. Now beyond being corny, it's a real wtf moment, since this whole evil masculine presenting cartel boss pre-transition, caring feminine presenting human rights NGO head post-transition framing is transphobic and sexist stuff—fall on your face liberal sentimentality that sucks a lot politically while appearing progressive on the surface. And the song is so corny too, a soaring oppositional duet, the moral young woman convincing the older conservative guy. Utter convention. But a convention that is powerful with the right music (and the music is universally pretty good here, even when the lyrics are clunky, despite the growing conventional wisdom about the movie).

However, this scene had a strange and not straightforward emotional energy for me. First of all, she is making this argument on behalf of a cartel boss who she is terrified of and has shown no sympathy for—just fear and a desire for the money being offered. The film already opened with her formulating an argument, in song, to get a client off for having murdered his wife. So, she's not the moral young woman the convention casts her as. She makes her arguments cynically to appeal to the sympathies she knows her audience has. And the real kicker for me is that this scene is set in Tel Aviv of all places in the world. That is pretty much the global capital of cynical moralizing appeals to liberal sympathies on behalf of mass murderers. This is not the only scene with such a strong tension between the genre conventions being enacted and the situation and signifiers surrounding the scene, but it was an early sign for me of something layered happening here. I don't think the film fully knows what it's doing, but it’s willing to maximize audience discomfort with its corny musical surface, and that's interesting at least!

2) It’s visually, cinematographically, and musically good. If you just set aside the corny stuff and political questions, every scene is a stunner on the surface level.

3) It's very obviously and self-consciously campy through much of it. It's doing telenovela/soap stuff for huge chunks. All the dance sequences are played for camp, especially the much-clipped and derided “vaginoplasty” scene. But it is also sentimentally sincere about big serious issues at other moments. Again, its approach here seems to be maximally piling on the contradictions in form and content.

4) As I said. I don't think the film is ever able to resolve the tensions it introduces between genre form (and its demands) and the larger situation of the drama. I think this is fairly common in the movie musical genre going back to Golddiggers of '33, so it's not a knock against it so much as an explanation of why it's producing such divided responses. The Sound of Music is an absolute moral and political travesty given the historical topic it's about, too. I'm not saying this is The Sound of Music, I'm saying I'm never that surprised when movie musicals can't fully handle the themes they introduce, while still proving to be enthralling to watch.

There's a lot here that's quite cynical about how NGOs whitewash the reputations of evil men and about liberal identity politics. But it’s also very sincere about Emilia having been trapped in a horrible masculine performance that was extremely violent, and that part of her transition is trying to be her truer self that is not that way. And it lets her tragedy unfold because she can't just handwave the violence of the past away.

But it is also pretty fucked up, not that she reverts to violence and threat to get her way in a family crisis of sexual jealousy and child custody--that's real enough--but that she gives those threats in her past masculine voice. This reads as bizarre gender essentialism and transphobia, But maybe it's just a ghost of the past in a stylized musical. It's a weird choice. And it comes across as super campy at a key dramatic moment.

Everything is so maximalist at every moment, utterly committed to whatever POV the current scene adopts, such that every time I started to think "Ah this film knows what it's doing," I'd get whiplash from how whatever came next seemed so utterly naive and sincere. And I don't think it ever settles, which of course means award voters and haters will find Crash 2024 in it and not be wrong. But I also don't think I'm wrong in enjoying the genre surface, finding the tensions here kind of exciting and seeing lots of hints of something else in it.

I guess I've not resolved anything for myself. I think the movie is very worth watching even if you wind up siding with the Crash of 2024 take because it's a lot more idiosyncratic and cinematographically powerful than your typical awards bait even if it mishandles its topics and pretty much sucks as a topical film. At base, it’s an enjoyable and witty film of surface pleasures, whatever else it fails at, not a sentimental tragedy trauma slog.

(After writing this I wound up watching a bunch of other Jacque Audiard films and finding them just fantastic, although it has let me see more clearly why Emilia Perez falls short of his other work while still being interesting, I may write up an essay on Audiard soon from this material.)

1/7: The Beast

Dir. Bertrand Bonello

(In putting this together, I think this might be my favorite film of the year so far)

God, I loved this and everything it was doing with the uncanniness of digital images. What a stunning take on our loss of reality, history, and memory under the hyper-postmodern conditions of the digital image. It is intellectual but remains completely grounded in great genre work, a killer script, and the humanism of two amazing actors turning in career highlights.

All three genres work here, period melodrama, Hitchcock home invasion thriller, and dystopian sci-fi, but I come back to its interrogation of the digital image. The phrase "a revelation" is used far too often, but I genuinely feel like it revealed something vital about our image regime.

Also, I laughed hard at the scenes from Trash Humpers! Harmony Korinne clips as pop-up window spam/sign of a nightmare spinning out of control. Brilliant.

That said, stop putting Dasha from Red Scare in stuff! I don't want to have to care about Dimes Square. I'm begging you.

1/15: The Brutalist

Dir. Brady Corbet

This review may contain spoilers.

I'm giving this five stars and a heart because I got to see it on 70 mm at AFI, and it was a wonderful experience seeing film stock again for the first time in at least a decade. It was full of beautiful images to see in that medium. All credit goes to A24 here for making a big release film event with something for actual film nerds. You can call the whole Vistavision and 70mm stuff contrived marketing gimmick whatever, and I just don't care, it was a great experience and it's been so long since I've seen an actual film not living in NY or LA. I've always talked a lot of shit about how cinemas are dying because digital projection offers nothing you can't experience at home. But I hadn't seen the film in so long I was doubting myself. Well, I'm proud to be back on my bullshit, it's a totally different medium and experience, and digital projection has been an enshittification, not an advance.

All that said, it's going to take me more time to process the film. I had a great experience, the performances and visuals were great. There are some huge ideas here, too, and I'm all for the big swing of the old-school epic with intermission form adopted here. I don't have a lot of patience for the backlash that groans about trying to revitalize past forms, calling it useless pretension! It's not, it's worthy of aesthetic ambition! Particularly in a film that despite its big ideas, stays very focused on a small set of characters and lets them drive the plot. It's not just form, the form fits the characters and ideas. What's most wonderful is how this film is so committed to a character and aesthetic who is anti-fascist to the core, dreaming of transforming society into a communal public experience of beauty for everyone in the wake of brutality. It was first dreamed up as a response to Trump's disdain for brutalist architecture and his cronies’ fascist camp preference for ersatz neoclassicism, but it enacts that aesthetic argument capaciously, not narrowly. You can forget the contemporary political situation entirely and just be immersed in the now-foreclosed dream of the 20th-century Toth envisions here.

However, for better or worse, the film is not remotely subtle. I don't think that's a bad thing, but someone else might. It fits the "go to the cinema and have an experience" form very well, it fits the populist grandeur utopian community aesthetics of brutalism well, but I can see why people might want their allegories of American capitalism being abhorrent garbage with a lighter touch. And OMG this film is angry. I'm 100% there with its take on how galling it is for any of us (but especially migrants fleeing war and trauma) to live as if we belong to the very wealthy, how brutally stupid rich Americans are, and how vicious they are to the people and ethnic groups and art they adopt for a time, flatter, abuse, and then discard. (Look at the massive backlash to woke politics being directed by the rich now, what is that but them getting bored with their toy black and queer politics they pretended to oh so generously support for a while). So yeah, be blunt, right on, timely and timeless, build a community of the future for everyone including the lost, and bury the rich in the tombs of all they've destroyed.

But okay, what is going on with Zionism here? I cannot figure it out! It's not an endorsement, it’s so critical of it, but also it is an endorsement sometimes. I can't parse it! I want to confidently state with others that I'm frustrated with the film’s ambiguity about Zionism at a historical moment when the bloody horror at its core and the falsity of its promise of safety is laid so bare. But I'm not even sure it is ambiguous and I'm not just missing something. The Toths are so critical of the idea that Isreal is the Jewish home but also the film still ends thereafter American capitalism being exposed as hellish for the survivors of Nazism (bravo though for doing such a profoundly anti-American immigrant story) without showing the horrors of Isreal. But there is a fairly strong implication that this is all just another pet project of the American ruling class to dispose of the people and memory of suffering it doesn't want to deal with. And if you read the film within the extratextual context of Isreal's monstrous crimes, it all works and is even more devastating an articulation of pain and rage at how the American post-war order destroyed the promise of the 20th century to birth at last a new community for all people (the dream of Bauhaus). But if you are a Zionist, you might just nod your head at lines that can land with enormous tragic irony to everyone else.