Recent Posts

• May 18, 2025

  The Long Goodbye

  The Robert Altman journey continues. This time Elliot Gould is Philip Marlowe, Raymon Chandler’s private detective, who lives on the top of some kind of tower with a collection of mostly nude women across the bridge in the next one. Marlowe spends the first ten minutes of the movie trying, and failing, to feed his cat; first by putting together some unholy concoction that the cat - correctly - bashes off the countertop, and then by changing the label on a can to try and fool the cat into believing he’s eating his preferred brand. It does not work. Marlowe being outsmarted by a cat gives us a good anchor of what we should expect when his friend comes up the lift and asks for a lift to Mexico. Soon after, the police arrive and say that he’s murdered his wife.

• April 26, 2025

  Boston Marathon 2025

  Training Highlights

• April 18, 2025

  Jeanne Dielman

  Or, because the full title would be too big up there, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The BFI, by way of Sight and Sound magazine, does a poll every ten years of the best movies ever made, and in 2022 it voted this as the best movie ever made. I would consider myself a person who has seen a reasonable amount of movies, and have certainly heard of even more, but my reaction here was Jeanne Who? I had somehow missed ever hearing a mention of the best film in existence and I had seen Jaws: The Revenge at least twice.

• April 16, 2025

  Daisies

  Daisies is a Czechoslovakian movie about two girls who spend a lot of time lazing around and eating. They are both called Marie. It is one hour and sixteen minutes long and gets a lot done with that time, even if nearly all of it is Marie 1 and Marie 2 lazing around and eating.

• April 04, 2025

  Mandy

  I don’t think this is for me any more. Early 2000s me would have been all over it, like when I found a DVD rental place that carried Ichi the Killer despite it (as far as I knew) being banned in Ireland. Mandy had a reputation of being way out, pushing the boundaries, an experience unlike any other. And while it kind of was those things, it was very very aware that it was doing them. I could see the thought process in every bit, what’s the wackiest, most extreme thing we could do now. You’re at home on the couch watching a serious movie and thinking, wouldn’t it be crazy if this thing happened, and then this thing happens. Nicolas Cage finds a chainsaw to fight a goon? He pulls out another chainsaw that’s about twice the length to have a swordfight with. Even having written that, it sounds cool, but that’s it, there’s absolutely nothing to care about. It always annoyed me when people would say to stop being critical of, for example, Transformers, because “I just want to see giant robots punching each other”. No you don’t, if there are no stakes, then that’s boring. That’s something AI could generate today. Why did they put humans in the movie if that’s all you’re interested in? If everything is being done just for spectacle, it gets boring. I was ten times more invested in (not in this movie, obviously) a Belgian lady forgetting a button on her cardigan as a symbol of her mental state beginning to crack than Mandy being burned alive in a sleeping bag.