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This post is so ridiculously delayed. I don’t really feel like going back and trying to conjure up the initial thoughts and feelings I had to each of these works. So, for the most part, I am electing not to fill in the gaps that I never finished, leaving it as is. I just cannot be bothered anymore.

Albums and Movies

6/1: Real Steel (2011, Shawn Levy)*

Does not hit as hard when you’re not a child.

6/2: Immortals (2011, Tarsem Singh Dhandwar)

Returning digital video back to painting in order to properly imbue ancient gods and heroes with the mythic significance and scale that they deserve. Stunning. I had never seen a Tarsem movie, so I cannot speak to his other works, however, in Immortals, the man is a dedicated tenebrist. It probably was mostly due to talking throughout, but shit is hard to follow, or maybe paying attention isn’t the point at all.

6/4: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, George Miller)*

You know, hope is a mistake. If you can’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go insane.

“There’s high ground just beyond that thing” MAD MAX: FURY ROAD REVIEW

There is no paradise to which one can return; even if there was, there wouldn’t be room for just one: it’ll have to be all or none. It’s a simple premise. A group of diverse characters must band together and share in the only instinct afforded to them in the desert wasteland of George Miller’s creation, that is, to survive, as Max establishes in the film’s opening soliloquy. Surviving until surviving feels like something more. Unparalleled visual poetry on an impossible scale. Yet still with such a precise and graceful hand, this movie speaks universally to life in the West (all of the characters we follow can be diegetically traced back to some notion of west–sex slaves, soldiers, and blood bags alike). The West, where life is constantly accelerating ever faster toward no future at all. Thus, the only one way to progress beyond hierarchical systems is to constantly stay ahead of them. A process of deterritorialization that must outpace an opponent that is more machine than man. It’s funny, I almost felt bad for the lone tree getting uprooted, but the tree is dead. It’d been dead. Rip out its roots and pull yourself out of the sour mud. Rip out its roots and plant something new. Rip out its roots and destroy your past. It was never about hope (in the world of Mad Max, such a possibility bears no fruit), it’s about activating the utopian potentialities within the dystopian, unearthing them. The tree wasn’t just destroyed, it was leveraged, teleologically endowed with a purpose alternative to that assigned it in life. Even in death, a thing can save a life. Max’s vision of a girl he failed to protect causes him to flinch and shield his eyes, blocking an otherwise fatal crossbow bolt. In Fury Road, people are things, subjects collapsed into objects. You own the objects (water, gasoline, bullets), you own the people. Everything is a commodity. Miller offers two alternatives through Max and Furiosa. Furiosa ascends, bringing resources to the masses. Max vanishes into the crowd. The last look they share is recognition of the other’s role: Furiosa the strong leader and Max the guerrilla fighter. So, they are not mutually exclusive paths, but, in fact, two prongs of one attack to jumpstart the world out of its inertial stagnation. “An object at rest will stay at rest.” As said before, people are just objects. “Unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” There is no velocity without first acceleration, without first an initial force. Furiosa imagines a better world for Immortan Joe’s breeders, motivated by nostalgia and escapism to return to the Green Place. Miller does not allow any such fantasy for his audience either, enduring criticisms that “they just go in a big circle.” On the contrary, they travel in a line. “I suggest we go back the way we came,” says Max. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

6/4: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024, George Miller)

Much better than the trailers made it seem. I wasn’t excited for this movie at all, until I rewatched Fury Road and remembered it’s one of the greatest movies within its respective genre and decade. In hindsight, this one is kinda just whatever.

6/7: The 15:17 to Paris (2018, Clint Eastwood)

No one loves the troops more than Clint Eastwood. I applaud what he’s trying to do, but overall, it’s understandable why this movie is regarded as such a dud. However, if you can’t look past nonprofessional actors and poor writing, grow up. That being said, I can understand why anyone would be turned off Eastwood’s antistyle. The complete lack of, or maybe even the negation of audiovisual and narrative flare, let alone spectacle. However, the scenes with the three leads as children struck me as a crystal clear mirror of what life is really like in a White American Christian household. Judy Greer is just a normal mother until she blurts out, “My God is bigger than your statistics,” to a teacher claiming her son could have ADD. Her middle-school-aged son has an armory of airsoft guns and a hunting rifle in his bedroom closet. He prays to God at night . He’s being raised in a single parent household. He gets in trouble at his restrictive Christian school. He wants to join the military because war looks fun. But for all 15:17’s stylelessness, I don’t think you can rightly say that Eastwood is just presenting things “as they are.” He’s still a conservative old guy who likes to make movies about American heroes. And I don’t know how to feel about his movies (formally, not politically). I was too focused on Alek Skarlatos looking like Chad Bo Burnham.

6/?: Good Time (2017, Josh and Benny Safdie)

6/9: Yeezus (2013, Kanye West); Weathering with You (2019, Makoto Shinkai)

6/11: Peeping Tom (1960, Michael Powell)

This should’ve been one of my favorite things ever and it wasn’t. Need to give another shot.

6/12: Yesterday Girl (1966, Alexander Kluge), Om Shanti Om (2007, Farah Khan)

6/19: Le joli mai (1963, Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme); Borat (2006, Larry Charles); From a Distant Gaze (1964, Jean Ravel)

6/22: Blue Collar (1978, Paul Schrader)

6/25: Evil Does Not Exist (2023, Ryusuke Hamaguchi); I Saw the TV Glow (2024, Jane Schoenbrun); Enter the Void (2009, Gaspar Noé)

I Saw the TV Glow did NOT make me feel good about working at a movie theater.

Digital filmmaking to surveillance to death to transcendence, but forced back into the cycle, like a neverending bootloop. Like a moth, the camera is drawn to light, leading to free associative editing—a world where a fetus can become a model volcano. The best parts are with no characters or voiceover, not even any scenes, just wandering. Consciousness is montage. I also don’t know how I didn’t realize until I was sitting in the theater that every Noé film has a gimmick. But all of that aside, some of the finest child acting ever put to screen. The aftermath of the car crash is heartbreaking to watch.

6/29: Submarine (2024, The Marias); Kinds of Kindness (2024, Yorgos Lanthimos); Velvet Goldmine (1995, Todd Haynes); Citizen Kane (1944, Orson Welles)

Books and TV Shows

6/1: “Steel” from Twilight Zone (1963, Rod Serling)

6/9–6/11: Attack on Titan: The Final Season, Part One

6/11–6/12: Attack on Titan: The Final Season, Part Two

Nothing is a coincidence; it’s all planned out, but it doesn’t matter. It still fails—Eren and Isayama. Impossibly monumental work of fiction only made more interesting by the fact its ending doesn’t land for everyone.

6/23-Ongoing: The Boys: Season Four