Man, The Dark Knight was a weird allegory about how big daddy GW and the NSA were right to use warrantless wiretapping to stop terrorism, so… when the hell did Nolan get woke?
He did make a movie about an entirely corn-based future climate dystopia. Even the rich know the d@mn planet’s dyin’
I mean I generally wouldn’t take the heavy-handedness of one nakedly fascist batman movie as representative of a director’s politics
sometimes you just want to make a fascist batman movie
(also kind of wincing at referring to what should be a totally noncontroversial take on labour unions post-thatcher/reagan as “woke”)
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I was sort of using the ironic formulation of woke, but who can really keep track of the constantly shifting meaning of that word?
The shooting style of The Shape of Water lurches between indifferent to v. specific classic hollywood and back again so often and rapidly I just couldn’t
wtf I love Nolan now
I think you mean obviously Pittsburgh because it was reeeeaaallly obviously Pittsburgh (also that is where it was filmed). Like as someone who has hung around Pittsburgh a decent amount, it was super distracting, but I guess he was relying on people not having been there.
I meant that the city politics and implied geography of the first two were much closer to Chicago and the third one was like blammo nope we’re doing New York now
Ah, fair enough. I just kept distractingly noticing the actual locations all just being Pittsburgh, but yeah, storywise, it definitely shifted.
I re-watched Pacific Rim last night. (I’d previously only seen it the one time in the theater, though I’ve owned a copy for years.) I turned Del Toro’s commentary on, and it was a good commentary track. He talked about the origins of giant monster movies and I enjoyed his insights into creating a world, etc.
One thing I didn’t notice the first time I watched the film is that in the fight involving shipping containers, you can see tiny furniture and vehicles and things fall from the containers as they are smashed.
just finished party monster!! now i REALLY feel compelled to get a early 00’s DV camera, some molly, and more pink designer clothes.
a poem i wrote during my viewing:
sweaty junkie
sweaty faced junkie
im a sweaty faced junkie
i want someone to fuck me
michael alig has a podcast now even though he killed and chopped up someone
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I’m going to have to try that out 
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for reasons, I have a boatload of miniDV tapes just sitting around so if you wind up needing those I can ship them to you
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thank you that would be sick!! i’ll keep it in mind
i caught a double feature of Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Dressmaker two days ago and holy shit
Picnic is of course amazing, so mysterious and dark, but also the shots of the sunbleached Australian landscape are about the most gorgeous and evocative i’ve seen. i love that it’s set in the exact biome where you get eucalypts and ferns. also on this print the bit where things get really eerie was really damaged so it got very scratchy and bubbly and the sound was all deep-sea rumbles so that was great. and there was like a whole extra chunk to the story i don’t remember! maybe i saw the director’s cut before
The Dressmaker is ridiculously entertaining and like, perfectly crafted. i was surprised to see Kate Winslet playing the protagonist when Australia has two of the coolest white blonde women in movies but she did so well, and there were a lot of close-ups where you could see all the lil lines on her face? idk it was really great and she’s so gorgeous. there were so many stunning tableaux and everything about the plot and sequences is geared to sweep you right away and i love it thank you. called up my mum when i got out to gush with her about it
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Picnic at Hanging Rock is so cool. It’s the best acid trip movie ever made, and it’s set 43 years before acid was discovered.
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I watched Picnic at Hanging rock a few weeks ago and it’s so perfect; the stilted Victorian manners (and our remembrance of them) build the surreal world as effectively as the ominous sound design over footage of – well, rocks in the sun, transformed by the film’s inflection and our ears.
I’d been reading Clark Ashton-Smith and this movie felt like a bridge between the Lovecraft-circle’s fear of deep nature and Lynch’s fear of odd mundanity. Would go well with Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, I think.
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Peter Weir’s had the weirdest career.
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oh MAN the other wild thing was comparing the actors’ faces between the films. like idk if standards of aussie beauty have changed or if they could just afford the hollywood faces in the dressmaker but everyone in Picnic looks a lot more distinctively ocker
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i love that the biggest commonalities between this and Gallipoli are the sun and heavy synth