so I will be migrating wonder.systems; expect in February some poem twice, as the last from this old list then as the first from a new list. In the meantime I've watched many movies this year and peered into a
. It's been fun writing there, though I refuse to rate beyond would or wouldn't watch again and indeed use an adblocker on all interface stars. To fill this notice, then, here's my month of movies:
the 30th – Stalker (1979)
Beautiful but not how I expected; a philosophical character play much more than landscape effects, shy of its manufactured beauties. Very different priorities than the book; meditation on profession felt its surest footing. Long and slow as is said, I'd have lost focus if not surrounded by a hundred others. But when I stepped back onto the sidewalk I felt light aware and in some reciprocal way communicative, enmeshed in society with an infrastructural joy.
the 25th – Memories of Murder (2003)
The denouement and ending are perfectly sharp. If fictions but wield the means of their production this a perfect film, presenting cops as deluded directors, dirty cameras, and eager audience to their own lies. The only good they can do is stop watching.
the 24th – Tampopo (1985)
I like movies to be many in one/at once and Tampopo jumps genres by scene. The throughline that caught my eye was relation to westernization, in genre trappings, clothing, interiors, etiquette, class. Diegetically and referentially western sources are positioned as authorities and as raw materials. Perhaps such commodious fetishism is authority's best end. And the film is a magnet for puns: I was gobstruck by my couchmate's "a spaghetti western with ramen", turnabout on my "bildungsramen" six years ago.
the 18th – Porco Rosso (1992)
Struck this time by the shadows of the cels, like the shadows of clouds on water. I found myself caught by porco and the hemingway seaplane fantasy less, the larger islands, the pirates, the radios, the women's work more.
the -2nd – The Boy and the Heron (2023)
I'd never seen Ghibli in a theater so I lost myself in background paintings following brushstrokes. It's a good one for staring at the scenery: beautiful patterns, playful colors, interlinked symbols. I can't speak much to the foreground; not much plot (not a bad thing), few I wanted to say more (the wheel-robed duo, the puckish heron), only a light message: The master sets aside his tools (of platonic modernism, of destructive underworld-bridging called creation); our boy doesn't want to take them up; perhaps this is for the best. Such directorial insert sits more easily here than in The Wind Rises.
the -3rd – Poor Things (2023)
A beautiful but cowardly movie, afraid of its source's layers, afraid of philosophical depths, afraid of its own lustful gaze, and so staying safely at the philantrophic-liberal surface, ending on the thought we should hire more women Frankensteins. Lovely though, especially the title card typography, and fun to see such pantomime characters – more of that please!