Favorite Films

This may very well be the single most beautiful piece of art ever produced. It's achingly gorgeous in every aspect, from the understated yet hypnotic imagery of the greatest director, to its treatment of the deep melancholy of a damaged soul regressing into belief, to the very soundtrack.

While its condemnation of the closed mindedness of the scientists was Tarkovsky's means of reinforcing his own struggling faith, this film seems more and more important as mindless cynicism and irony tear a deeper hole into our culture.

I don't think very highly of cinema as a medium. What's so fetishized in it is very often what I find so unappealing, hence my intense dislike of so many beloved filmmakers. I think as a medium of narrative innovation it often comes across as regressive, banal, and reactionary. It's succeeded in making legends of idiots like Godard, Tarr, and Tarintino, and perfectly adequate filmmakers like Chaplin and Hitchcock are likely to outlive actual geniuses who made the erroneous decision to write a book. For all my contempt for what the medium has done, all my aversion to things at its core, my general dislike of an idea heavy story that only goes two hours, I recognize its necessity if just for Solaris

"Remember Tolstoy? His suffering over the impossibility of loving mankind as a whole? How much time has passed since then? Somehow I can't figure it out. Help me."

Probably the single most important film in American cinema, Network's document of how capitalism claims as it's tool every form of counter culture and ideological dissent and only silences it when the people who consume it as another form of entertainment move on to something else is genius. How misunderstood the film is is incredible; it's not about TV, folks, it's about how it controls complacent, mindless consumers like us, and always will. Posting the entire anti television monologue on your facebook page is just involving yourself more in the system of making someone who steps on your beliefs money, you'll never transcend it. Beale dies only after his heroism becomes boring, Faye Dunaway's racist bitch of a character gets the help of the black panthers for ratings, it's also brilliantly depicted

As a condemnation of Western life under capitalism, it's undeniably potent, but the true merit of the film is in its horrifying extended document of self-destruction. The smashing of clocks, the flushing of the money, all the gestures of release before taking the plunge are just such incredible images. It's denouement, the television reflecting the character's inhumanity, hasn't left me to this day.

As far as horror is concerned, this is clearly a real step down from Bergman's Hour of the Wolf, but there's just such great cinema in this I can't but love it. Miike is truly one of a kind; first he envisions an Ikki Kajiwara manga with Atsushi Onita in the lead role and then he envisions the most artful and viscerally horrifying eek into a world of deep psychological wounds and horrifying violence.

This is very likely the worst film ever made, and I adore it. It's not "so bad it's good" (which isn't a thing), it's so unfathomably pretentious, immature, and genuinely unhinged (how he goes from the fetishization of cinema to tearing the institution down and suggesting only his film has merit in the span of 50 minutes is just incredible) that it's a genuinely fascinating experience. This kid is such a fantastic psychological narcissist, unironically engaging in some of the most overblown megalomania, indiscriminately shitting on everything, and making every attempt at provocation. I'm loathe to put it on the same list as genuine triumphs of humanity like Woman Under the Influence or Solaris, but the level of enjoyment I took from this is too much for me not to put it at least at the tail end. I suppose this is my The Room.