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I Would Like to See It: January 2021
Hey gang! So, next week I kick off my new column, I Would Like to See It, where every week I watch a new-to-me movie and write about it on here.For those who would like to watch along, January's movies are as follows!Jan 1st: Repulsion, Roman PolanskyJan 8th: The New World, Terrence MalickJan 15th: Alucarda, Juan López MoctezumaJan 22nd: Three Women, Robert AltmanJan 29th: Orlando, Sally Pott...
I Would Have Followed You: Masculine Love and Devotion in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings
In December of 2003, Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens’ Return of the King—the third and final film in their trilogy adapting J. R. R. Tolkien’s beloved fantasy epic Lord of the Rings—premiered to a gigantic opening weekend and critical acclaim. I half-remember its sweep at the Oscars the following year, the tides of fanfiction that flooded the internet, the memes, the sudden ...
You Love to See It: The Apartment
In the opening voiceover to Billy Wilder’s 1960 Christmas movie The Apartment, C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) explains that shifts in his insurance company’s vast NYC headquarters are staggered so that its more than thirty thousand workers don’t jam the building’s elevators upon arrival or at quitting time. Ironically, a great deal of the subsequent film concerns whether or not Baxter can get ...
You Love to See It: First Blood
There have been a hundred parodies of Sylvester Stallone’s mush-mouthed delivery of John Rambo’s final monologue in First Blood. The actor’s huge, haunted eyes and phlegmy sobbing are certainly memorable enough to warrant riffing, but beyond the cheap laughs you can score off Stallone’s diction is the monumental emotional achievement the scene represents. Kotcheff’s movie understands the...
In the Flesh: Rhymes for Young Ghouls
It’s hard to believe Rhymes for Young Ghouls is director Jeff Barnaby’s first feature-length movie. It has its flaws — jumpy pacing, a few awkward cuts, an animated sequence that detracts from the grisly story it accompanies — but its tone is so bleakly human, its shots of nature so assured in their immensity and emptiness, that it has an outsize confidence about it. The film’s opening i...
You Love to See It: The Terror
In a few short minutes and with no more than a pinch of fog-assisted CGI, The Terror’s eighth episode stages an action sequence more exciting, immediate, and emotionally intense than anything Hollywood produced in the 2010s. So much goes into building toward the vengeful spirit Tuunbaq’s attack on the camp of the survivors of the icebreakers Terror and Erebus, but the parallel buildup of Mr. H...
You Love to See It: Black Christmas
John Carpenter’s Halloween typically receives the nod as the first proper slasher, but Black Christmas — Bob Clark and A. Roy Moore’s spare, mean-spirited tale of a sorority house falling prey to a disturbed killer — beat it to the punch by just under four years and heavily influenced its aesthetics and themes. Where Carpenter plunges into violence against women through silence and faceles...
Bulbous Hymenopus: Wishes of the Shimmering Chunk
PROMPTSA pretty Martian girl with a big dumptruck ass- trying to score weed before lockdown hitsDatura infused astral journey gone HORRIBLY wronga snake and a mongoose who have a homoerotic rivalry like from a 1980's moviecatboi gender fuckeryThe stars are getting closer every day, forming strange and familiar symbolsA sentient electric scooter with a thick Jersey accentWild jaguars are just a...
You Love to See It: Rogue One
Juggling overlapping and technically oriented action scenes at the climax of a movie is no mean feat, but Tony Gilroy manages to take a final battle revolving around landline access, a broadcast tower, and stellar gate mechanics and spin all that tangled wire into gold. The ending of Rogue One moves like a Swiss watch, precise and flawlessly paced without ever once feeling overly linear. Jyn and C...
We Are Gone: Emptiness and the Unknown in The Terror
In the first episode of David Kajganich’s The Terror, the British Discovery Service’s Franklin expedition attempts to dynamite its way through the Arctic ice pack and into the Pacific. For minutes on end the screen is alive with a frenzy of human activity. Holes are drilled, explosives set off, huge chunks of ice sawed by huffing teams of men. The crews of Erebus and Terror swarm over the ice ...
You Love to See It: Noroi
Noroi: The Curse, Kōji Shiraishi’s 2005 pseudo-documentary, is one of only a small handful of films to use its chosen genre to the fullest extent. Along with The Blair Witch Project, it wields the cutting edge of plausible veracity as more than just a gimmick to sell tickets. As Masafumi Kobayashi, a documentary filmmaker fascinated by the supernatural, Jin Muraki is a creative weapon so subtle...
You Love to See It: 13 Assassins
As the stoic swordmaster Hirayama in Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, Tsuyoshi Ihara moves like a force of nature, his sinewy arms swinging his sword with irresistible strength. Even the Foley work reflects his terrible power, emphasizing the hard, brutal thunk of each strike hacking through cloth, flesh, and bone. Ihara’s unblinking stare and rough, jutting features work in perfect concert with ...
In the Flesh: First Love
First Love is like if Snatch had a tender little love story in the middle of its high-speed blender of colliding criminal mishaps. It also has the advantage of being written and directed by longtime jack of all trades Takashi Miike rather than cardboard tough guy aficionado Guy Ritchie. The chemistry between apathetic young boxer Leo (Masataka Kubota), who learns early on he may not have long to l...
You Love to See It: Flesh and Bone
Moira Walley-Beckett’s Flesh and Bone isn’t what I’d call a good TV show. The pacing is jumbled, the plot both absurdly grimy and off-puttingly precious, and the characters often repetitive. Still, scattered throughout its bog-standard “the dark side of ballet” story are moments of true transcendence, flashes of insight into the self-destructive core of the famously rigid and exacting ar...
Jacob's Children, Part 2: Nymphs
NYMPHSKrine, alone among the hidden people, was born with her wings formed. In her first memory she tastes the fear of the onlooking swarm. She hears the voices saying she will die, that her first moult will claim her, snagging on her freakish body’s soft protrusions. Dripping gossamer folded along her dorsal ridge. Now a chiliad is past and she soars easily above the waste, scanning the map of ...
You Love to See It: The Loved Ones
The Loved Ones, an out-of-nowhere Australian abduction flick from the otherwise deeply mediocre Sean Byrne, is plenty grisly. Power drills, razor blades, syringes full of bleach and boiling water — it has all the trappings of ultraviolent slashers like Wolf Creek, but where that film employs mystery and a slow-burn setup to juice its vicious tooth-and-nail back half, The Loved Ones turns instead...
You Love to See It: The Last Unicorn
As a child I used to lie in bed at night and beg God to change my body, to remake me into anything but what I was. As I grew older and abandoned God, those pleas took on a formless, aching desperation which puberty sharpened to a killing point. As I grew body hair and my thoughts lost their magical inclination, drifting toward a hormonally addled species of “Scientific Rationality”, I started ...
In the Flesh: Possessor
Just before psychic assassin Tasya Vos seizes control over the body of Colin Tate, one of the technicians operating the machinery which connects her to Tate’s mind tells her it might be “a little bumpy” going in. The images accompanying her transition are electrifying. A wet, waxy substance outlining the form of an invisible body, then flying away from its surface as though siphoned up by an...
You Love to See It: In the Realm of the Senses
There comes a point somewhere toward the middle of In the Realm of the Senses, Nagisa Ōshima’s fictionalization of the real-life story of lovers Sada Abe and Kichizo Ishida, when the act of fucking becomes the most boring, soul-sucking thing imaginable. This is not to suggest that the film is somehow lacking, or that its scenes of unsimulated sex are anything but scorching and deeply human. The...
You Love to See It: The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
"Papa, if your happiness depends on wearing the cap of a court official, then I will go to his majesty as you wish, and after you have put on that cap as part of the court, I will kill myself." Chloë Grace Moretz’s quietly resigned delivery of that line in the English language version of The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Isao Takahata’s devastating swan song of a final film, has lived in m...
You Love to See It: Caligula
Actor Guido Mannari has a single fleeting scene in which to transform the infamous ‘Wall of Death’, the most outrageous image in a film famous for little else, from banally demented fantasy to tragic backdrop. It’s a tall order. Caligula, one of the twentieth century’s most infamously misbegotten films, is not a subtle production. Its dramatic sensibilities are Roman, superstitious, jaded,...
You Love to See It: The Wicker Man
There’s something profoundly moving in the way Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) kneels at his bedside to say his evening prayers in Robin Hardy’s cult classic horror movie The Wicker Man. In his cotton pajamas, hair combed flat, Howie looks like nothing so much as a serious, frowning schoolboy — a not inaccurate representation of his prudish, moralistic, and oddly vulnerable way of movi...
You Love to See It: The Descent
Neil Marshall’s The Descent is a straightforward act of symbolic transubstantiation, transforming protagonist Sarah’s trauma over the loss of her husband and daughter into the fathomless cave system into which she and her friends penetrate as part of a thrill-seeking group tradition. Sarah’s titular descent functions as a proxy for a rushed confrontation with her buried grief, an exploration...
You Love to See It: Crash
Like a cunt, a wound has lips. In many ways this statement encompasses the totality of David Cronenberg’s almost unbearably sensual Crash, a movie which literalizes the psychological conceit of sexuality taking shape around the psychic wound of trauma. In Cronenberg’s film the characters’ wounds becomes sexual in and of themselves, the trauma inflicted on their bodies by repeated car crashes...
You Love to See It: Last Year at Marienbad
Director Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, driven almost entirely by the stark, enigmatic visions of cinematographer Sacha Vierny and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s minimalistically elliptical script, is a glacial film on its surface. Even the few events which anchor its story about a complex and fraught affair between the vacationing elite are mired in uncertainty, none more so than the nameless ...
The Cunt
Powdered hemp cutting into soft, bruised flesh. Jax tries to hook a finger between rope and skin and finds there isn’t room. It excites them, knowing that she’s grown since last time. With a sigh they press their face against the shelf of her ass where it dimples against her back and inhale her smell — milk and lilacs, and beneath it the faint musk of sweat from her walk over. Her inner thig...
Deadlines!
You Love to See It will return next week with a triple-header! For now I am grinding out Manhunt as fast as is humanly possible.-G
You Love to See It: Rebecca
EDIT: A housekeeper, I have been informed, is always called "Mrs" whether or not she's married.“I'd stand behind her,” Mrs. Danvers whispers, her normally glacial features alight with something between delirium and greedy adoration as she mimes the act of brushing the nameless second Mrs. de Winter’s hair, “like this, and brush away for twenty minutes at a time.” Then the...
Jacob's Children, Part 1: The Mountain
She tires so easily now. The stump of her left hinder twitches sometimes, phantom sensation crawling up and down its absent length, and often her gnawed and ruined wings beat madly of their own volition. In the last chiliad something has clogged the ovary which runs along her keel. It hurts. She worries that it is not eggs. Still, the scent of food is in the air. There are whispers in the canyons ...
KTA
You have to do it in the middle of the day. The itinerary is always changing. The city is so flat and vast and full of same-faced men and women pulsing in and out of buildings you can’t tell apart. You won’t get them all. You know you won’t. But this is your best shot. In your dingy motel room you sit cross-legged in front of the TV, dry-swallowing your last few pills as you watch a balding ...
