[choc e-Claire]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i can't quote all your previous posts but you've been on an amazing roll lately with cronenberg and john waters and lynch.

I've been trying to get "into film" in the last few months, to go along with my music hipsterdom - most of my movie watching history has been on Friday movie nights with my family, but there's a lot of things I wouldn't want to watch with them in the room, so I'm branching out on my own (and fortunately the sorts of movies for weirdos like me are very well established). TV Glow was really the inflection point for this, because it's very much not a film for a mass audience and it provokes more thoughts than your usual popcorn flick, and that's a feeling I really liked! Also a bunch of it was similar to what I'd gathered Videodrome was about, and a lot of my friends are huge Cronenberg fans, so I got to it a few days later (and yes, Schoenbrun took a few things from it very distinctly). Since then I've seen Crash (loved the book (and it's the weakest of the Ballard I've read), can't stop thinking about the film) and Scanners (definitely reads as a proto-Videodrome sort of production, though the effects are sick); will do either Dead Ringers or Crimes of the Future next (my friends think the last one would really hit me).

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

and yes multiple maniacs is right up there with the greatest... while pink flamingos is his most canonical, dont miss desperate living either

Waters was an inevitable one for me too; I needed to see the precursor for all the pervert fetishism that lights my cultural lamp. I wasn't quite sure I could stomach Pink Flamingos, from all I'd heard about it, so I decided to take on the earlier one and it was incredible, so funny. It's over fifty years old and the politics are still so combative to this new puritanical age we're headed towards - the scene at the start where his audience is as repulsed by two men kissing as they are by puke eating is the best motivation you'd ever find to stop stifling yourself. Also loved how much the Jesus Christ figure looked like Kurt Cobain (apart from the neckbeard).

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i did a stupid thing with mulholland drive which was to "solve" it as a dead person who doesn't know she's dead wandering through the bardo (my own obsession from a different time and place). and that narrative unfortunately works too well

I've gathered enough about Lynch - it's kind of hard to avoid him being talked about - that I knew trying to make sense of the film linearly would be a bit foolish, so I just wanted to ride it out. And I'm glad that I did, such a great ride to go on. One of my friends feels like it's quite simple, especially given the "clues" that were included in the DVD release, but I wasn't going to take the coward's way out and read an interpretation! A cinema in Melbourne is doing Lost Highway in a couple of weeks, so might go to that one next.

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

basic instinct is of course the great paul verhoeven. see if you can find "the fourth man", which is a very unusual movie hahaha. showgirs is often panned as trash but i think it's pure genius. and if you watch starship troopers try to remember that it was satire--problem is reality has exceeded satire by now. we are so degraded, we are beyond satire

I've seen Starship Troopers, my dad got us to watch it (he's a fan of that film) - I knew it was satire going in but jesus christ, the American people are so dumb to have not picked up on it. I very much like the analysis that says it's an in-universe version of Triumph of the Will, and how Neil Patrick Harris figured out the joke immediately and played into it (the homoeroticism of the Übermensch, god bless) - mad respect to Verhoeven for realising that RoboCop hadn't gone hard enough and really leaving it in no doubt. Gotta get to Showgirls soon.

I was talking with a friend about what some of my favourite films say about my psychology - the four I came up with were Dog Day Afternoon, Videodrome, Back to the Future, and Parasite, and his interpretation was that I have this fascination with a very idyllic, capitalist, normative depiction of suburbia and the way in which things are always fucked up beneath the surface. Which I think is pretty fitting for me!

Other films I've watched in the last few months that I haven't mentioned here yet: Lost in Translation (technically very good film that I still found a little muted and underwhelming; will probably get more out of it if I rewatch it in a few year's time), Pulp Fiction (a lot of fun, very obvious why it's such a big obsession with a certain demographic, and I have to respect Tarantino for writing a film that's so obviously drawn from his obsessions alone), Fargo (very well written to make the violent crime scenes and goofy workplace drama scenes not feel out of place with each other; my Midwest fangirlism continues unabated), and a couple of nights ago Lady Bird (brought me to tears thinking about my relationship with my own mother). Sorry for such a long post but this is fun to get passionate about!