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Movies
It's honestly deeply frustrating to me that simulation theory, an unfalsifiable thought experiment with a huge leap of a first premise, has been embraced by a lot of the same extremely online techbros who (used to?) enjoy poking holes in religious belief for being an unfalsifiable thought experiment with a huge leap of a first premise. Points to this documentary, which at its best draws the line between religious mysticism and simulation theory pretty well. There is something to be said for the way that a rigidly rational, naturalist worldview of the kind promoted by the Enlightenment onward is ill-equipped to deal with the epistemological complexities of living a subjective existence—that's something that a lot of religious, literary, and philosophical thought has wrestled with since the Enlightenment itself, but if the only things you ever watched were The Matrix and Elon Musk interviews, I suppose simulation theory would seem like the only possible explanation for the human experience, and the movie is at its best when it's gently poking at the sad, pseudo-secular solipsism created by the alienating framework of post-religious digital capitalism. I wish the documentary burrowed into that idea more, though, or honestly any idea here—in typical Rodney Ascher style, the meat of the film involves letting a handful of true believers just meander through the wildest, far-flung regions of their ideas, but the difference between this and a movie like Room 237 is that Room 237 had a pretty whimsical and specific premise (people's interpretations of The Shining) that allowed the interviews to cluster into a natural geography in tension to one another, whereas simulation theory is such an all-encompassing idea that the movie just ends up skipping around and briefly lighting on these enormous ideas about consciousness and belief and epistemology and alienation without settling on one quite long enough to tease out the implications. Also, by virtue of being a grand theory about life, simulation theory is a bit more serious than wacky exegesis of a Stanley Kubrick movie, so A Glitch in the Matrix gets really grim at times, touching on sociopathy and murder in a way that is both scary but also frustrating in that it doesn't get any more in-depth investigation than any of the other two dozen loose ends this movie tugs on. A weird kind of movie that is endlessly fascinating in the moment while also being fairly empty as a whole. Here's hoping that Ascher can find a smaller subject for his next movie, because I don't think his style can really sustain something this big. Grade: B-
This movie has a really rich setting in its central haunted house/orphanage, and the ending is surprisingly great. But the movie just takes forever getting there, with some fairly generic spooky atmosphere padding out places that either should have had more engaging drama or more hair-raising scares—as a mushy middle ground between those two, the vibes of this movie don't really work for me until the aforementioned ending, which, again, is super good. Too little too late, though. Grade: B-
I was severely under-prepared for what this movie was, and I don't know if that was just because I was cavalier enough to have not done more than read the logline or because the movie's advertising was intentionally playing coy about a subject that would have almost certainly been impossible to market (which kind of calls into question how crass the whole enterprise of commodifying art is, right?). Regardless, this movie should come with the biggest content/trigger warnings imaginable, and I'm rating this movie in terms of how well it's made rather than my usual way of how I feel from having watched it—Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet alone make this a masterclass, giving what have to be two of the greatest, most human performances of the cinematic century so far. But whew, I probably would have skipped this one if I'd known more about it. Sending as much love as I can muster to anyone who has experienced sexual abuse. Grade: A-
Begins as something of an anthology film of Buddhist parables and eventually coalesces into a much larger spiritual/monastic journey. It's told through this patient but still conventional style that seems to be trying to evoke the effects of slow cinema without actually using the techniques of slow cinema. Both the storytelling and the cinematic style have moments that left me a little restless and unfulfilled, but the overall effect is so strong that it ends up not really mattering that every moment doesn't work. Grade: B+
So, Hungary's first animated feature is extremely racist/nationalist—almost fascist, even, which was a real unfun surprise for me. There are like thirty straight minutes of this that are just the hero with an army mowing down dozens of caricatured Asians and Africans. I guess that's what you get when the government commissions an adaptation of an epic nationalist poem, as I assume a lot of this is just baked into the source material. Luckily, the story structure has that fun, dream-logic folktale shape that Marcell Jankovics would explore more in his later masterpiece, Son of the White Mare, and the animation here is truly spectacular, a really engaging midpoint between Yellow Submarine (which Jankovics cites as a direct inspiration) and White Mare (a purer achievement of the aesthetic this movie is gesturing toward). So I guess I'm going to shake out positive on this one, which maybe reflects poorly on the strength of my opposition to fascism. One last thing: why on earth is the English title of this "Johnny Corncob"? As best I can tell, the literal translation of the Hungarian title is "John the Knight," which makes sense with the actual story instead of the hicksploitation vibe we got in the English title. Grade: B
It's so rare to get a film with a vision this radical make it to the screen this uncompromised. But holy cow, here we go. I don't think I've ever seen a more transgressive movie in my life. Explicitly a contest of escalating hostility between two groups (two bourgeois posers vs. drag legend Divine and her crew) to see who can be "the filthiest person alive," and every minute of this movie is a direct engagement with that conflict, whether that's the unbroken shot of a butthole lip-syncing (sphincter-syncing?) to "Surfin' Bird," the unbroken shot of Divine just chomping on some dog poop fresh from the dog anus, the unbroken shot of a couple bashing to death a real-live chicken with their bodies as they have sex, or the unbroken shot of... well, I could go on, but for once, the MPAA got it 100% right by giving this the single greatest content descriptor of all time when they rated it NC-17 for "a wide range of perversions in explicit detail," a description which I imagine writer/director/cinematographer/editor/narrator/pervert extraordinaire John Waters was ecstatic to receive. I'm sure he would also be excited to hear that I was pretty turned off by the animal cruelty and really, really excessive sexual assault in this movie. Transgression as an end to itself is a two-edged sword maybe never better embodied than by this movie—on the one hand liberating from oppressive social forces, on the other hand lacking an ethos coherent enough to avoid hurting the vulnerable, I guess. I know it's a losing game to accuse a movie premised on poor taste of having poor taste, and maybe I'm a bourgeois poser myself, but I really didn't find that stuff fun at all. But the rest of this is really magical. There's this frothing contempt here for all hierarchy and social convention that I found super appealing, and its delivery through Waters's exquisite, borderline dreamlike sense of camp makes the parts of this movie that I didn't find actively risible to be transcendent—and in a turn that should be impossible, that transcendence finds a rich humanity and even a kind of affection within its anarchy. Plus, of course Divine is one of the most compelling screen presences of all time. Grade: B+
Feels like an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents or The Twilight Zone stretched out to feature length, which makes sense given that Ida Lupino, the director, went on to direct episodes of those shows. But like both of those series, this movie has a terrific sense of atmosphere that simply isn't sustainable as the primary engine for a feature film (or even, in the case of The Twilight Zone's fourth season, an hour as opposed to a half hour). But for a while at least, this is pretty gripping. Grade: B-
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