Me from behind, flexing

Me from behind

It ain’t much, but it’s me!

I’m making the gorgeous weather y’all’s problem, sorry 😂

Goat blood slowly filling a pail

White water ocean waves under stormy sky

Sunrise igniting the tips of stormy clouds

A goat hanging, ready for bloodletting slaughter Still the Water (2014), Naomi Kawase

Naomi Kawase’s Still The Water (2014) is a stilted, but enchanting, synergy of contrasts. Teen agonies act as unwieldy and unnatural mouthpieces than characters, spouting too-precise and poetic Palme d'Or lures, but the ensouled ocean crashing onto human mortality like a God is REALLY good stuff.

A teenage boy and girl sharing a bike ride by the ocean

Seaside trees

A teenager boy completely in typhoon darkness

An elaborated fish tattoo on a naked father’s back in a bathhouse Still the Water (2014), Naomi Kawase

A boy’s adolescent disillusionment with his rural childhood projected onto a mysterious corpse in the water, the same cadaver that becomes his first love’s catalyst for preparing to say goodbye to her mother. An entire town locked into an eternal funeral haunted by the expanse of typhoon and tide.

A teenager walking on the beach during a steady building storm

A teenager in a darkened window, almost entirely blurred in shadow

A thick storm blowing over the ocean

A couple swimming naked together deep in the sea Still the Water (2014), Naomi Kawase

A peak of her evolution as a fictitious documentarian, everything just a little too digitally dirty, too gruesome, too grieving to be romanticized. Truly fascinating how it can be sculpted to a fault, pure Cannes bait, while effectively raw, eerie, and unsettling in its blues and stormy grays.

A teenage girl saying “I’m just a coward.”

“What’s noble about it?”

An old man saying to both teens “You young people should never be cowards”

“Whatever you want to do, do it.” Still the Water (2014), Naomi Kawase

If Suzaku was childhood’s end slowly subsumed by immortal nature and Shara’s Nara was a dead end of looping timelines, this is Amami as the end of the world at the white-foamed jaws of those before and beyond, the all-too real fishermen and goatcutters all but begging the kids to get the fuck out.

Dust in the Wind (1986), Hou Hsiao-Hsien

A young girl fading into her adult self as a flashback ends

Two figures, out of focus, being a spider’s web

A woman in disguise punting her boat across a river cast in golden sunlight

Water cast in magentas and blues Death Shadows (1986), Hideo Gosha

While reputably one of Hideo Gosha’s worst films, I absolutely fucking loved Death Shadows (1986)? One of chambara’s foremost and gnarliest innovators fading into a late period of an almost archaic style stagnation, soundstages of unreal wilderness and feudal fever cast in prism glimmer and glower.

An assassin flourishing her weapon of choice, an indestructible and razored silk ribbon

Two shadow figures against a blue nighttime sky

A temple lit with hundreds of paper lanterns

A woman in finery dancing violently against a liminal space of fog and stage lights Death Shadows (1986), Hideo Gosha

Gosha’s legacy of samurai splatter and violently creative camerawork grinds to a bafflingly traditionalist halt for most of this action, which just highlights the bizarre silk ribbon razor, the death traps, the music, the interstitial dance numbers in the game of chess between two assassin women?

The assassin further flourishing her ribbon

Three men, their faces covered, kneeling in preparation for execution

The assassin walking away from her most recent triumph, a dead man slumped against a torii gate

The assassin and heroine brandishing her weapons, cast in pink light, a single tear on her cheek Death Shadows (1986), Hideo Gosha

In the era of Kinji Fukasaku’s jidaigeki fantasias and Akira Kurosawa’s final golden run, this moves as such a fascinating paradox of dated delirium and singular invention. Delightfully fucking weird, a beautiful last hurrah of ‘60s color spectacle instincts, and carried by the lady archenemy leads.

dragon sketch

Luigi says "Spit in this hole"

Voice Acting Is My Passion

A figure amongst destroyed buildings

Two figures on a brutal iron bridge

A cameraman slumped in his chair, a man tending to him, the unmanned camera aimed at a blue sailboat

Two figures in a ruined city Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), Thodōros Angelopoulos

A master of the craft and a scholar of its legacy demonstrating the power of the camera, its ability to warp time and space, while gravely relaying its futility as anything other than an archivist’s stare in the face of real war, real brutality, and real destruction.

A completely blue sailboat

Two crowds of political riots meeting on a darkened street

An industrial bridge in a ruined city

A man naked and trapped in a blanket, knelt Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), Thodōros Angelopoulos

Harvey Keitel stalks a ruin of nations as a ruin of a man. The shallow escapism of the desperate hunt for lost reels overtakes any art and passion. A love of movies and their history that rejects any soulful naïveté of their “magic” changing a world of destroyed towns and rotting villages of ghosts.

A man in profile and complete in shadow, haunting against decaying infrastructure

Completely devastated and destroy buildings

A scattered crowd of people in snowy wastes

The back of a dismantled statue of Lenin Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), Thodōros Angelopoulos

Thodōros Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) is a dire trek for a lost creation tale of cinema across the devastated Balkans; the Soviet Union’s collapse as an end of the world, the Bosnian War as an eschatological rampage, snow falling like nuclear ash on the literal wreckage of communism.

Pigmon stands on a rocky forest cliff, looking started and letting slip a balloon on a string. The giant form of Bemular stomps through the background, looking down at Pigmon angrily.

Pigmon and Bemular (2019)
#jandriSFWart #ultraman

It is genuinely insane what Jackson Yee does in this movie. He bounces between a character well into his 40s and a punk no older than 21 so effortlessly, both completely believable and unrecognizable from the other, to say nothing of his stint as Lon Chaney’s ghost. Fucking nuts.

Me from behind, flexing

Me from behind

It ain’t much, but it’s me!

I’m making the gorgeous weather y’all’s problem, sorry 😂

It’s just me!

Me!

I’m ngl, I think confusing every new piece of Mummy media with relation to the Sommers/Fraser film is being willfully obtuse

The my dinner with Andre video game

One of my all time favorite Simpsons gags

A teenage girl saying “I’m just a coward.”

“What’s noble about it?”

An old man saying to both teens “You young people should never be cowards”

“Whatever you want to do, do it.” Still the Water (2014), Naomi Kawase

If Suzaku was childhood’s end slowly subsumed by immortal nature and Shara’s Nara was a dead end of looping timelines, this is Amami as the end of the world at the white-foamed jaws of those before and beyond, the all-too real fishermen and goatcutters all but begging the kids to get the fuck out.

A teenager walking on the beach during a steady building storm

A teenager in a darkened window, almost entirely blurred in shadow

A thick storm blowing over the ocean

A couple swimming naked together deep in the sea Still the Water (2014), Naomi Kawase

A peak of her evolution as a fictitious documentarian, everything just a little too digitally dirty, too gruesome, too grieving to be romanticized. Truly fascinating how it can be sculpted to a fault, pure Cannes bait, while effectively raw, eerie, and unsettling in its blues and stormy grays.

A teenage boy and girl sharing a bike ride by the ocean

Seaside trees

A teenager boy completely in typhoon darkness

An elaborated fish tattoo on a naked father’s back in a bathhouse Still the Water (2014), Naomi Kawase

A boy’s adolescent disillusionment with his rural childhood projected onto a mysterious corpse in the water, the same cadaver that becomes his first love’s catalyst for preparing to say goodbye to her mother. An entire town locked into an eternal funeral haunted by the expanse of typhoon and tide.

Goat blood slowly filling a pail

White water ocean waves under stormy sky

Sunrise igniting the tips of stormy clouds

A goat hanging, ready for bloodletting slaughter Still the Water (2014), Naomi Kawase

Naomi Kawase’s Still The Water (2014) is a stilted, but enchanting, synergy of contrasts. Teen agonies act as unwieldy and unnatural mouthpieces than characters, spouting too-precise and poetic Palme d'Or lures, but the ensouled ocean crashing onto human mortality like a God is REALLY good stuff.

I know a lot of Tunes historians and purists deride Daffy’s shift from whacky goofball to a mean-spirited, hateful, cruel foil to Bugs, but I don’t think many characters have been anywhere near as fucking funny as the Chuck Jones version.