Selected Arthouse Film Reviews 2021-2025

(2/20/2025)

In a piece from last year, Scott Alexander contends with the possibility that blues music might be evil. To summarize his argument: depression seems like a disorder of the hedonic set point that makes the "natural" mood very, very low. A depressed mind will "seek out" reasons to maintain its equilibrium. Blues music is sad, but in sadness people seem to prefer it anyways. But low mood is bad. So, is it possible that blues music is a kind of memetic hazard? A way to maintain a disordered equilibrium? And so should a psychiatrist ban a depressed patient from listening to blues music and keep them on a strict regimen of bubblegum pop until they feel better?

I like this argument in part because it's so obviously wrong. No, of course the blues isn't evil. It's cathartic! Trying to force oneself to think happy thoughts is painful and constricting; better to experience sadness fully than try to resist it. But it's wrong in a way that exposes an unasked question in naive utilitarianism: is it compatible with deliberate negativity? Suppose it isn't, and everything painful is unutilitarian, even the painful things people like. Spicy food is now considered a form of self-harm. Crying is a sign of mental illness. Super Meat Boy is definitely banned. This absurd dystopia is pretty easy to dismiss, as long as you assume 'utility' casts a wider net than 'happiness'. But it does complicate the hedonic calculus.

That said, I think Frownland might be evil anyways.

Ronald Bronstein's lo-fi nightmare world centers on Keith, the Most Mentally Ill Man In The World. His stammer is so bad he can hardly get a sentence out. He hates himself intensely, and is unbelievably anxious and awkward in all social contexts. He can't make eye contact or sit still, constantly stimming his face in weird ways (my producer in school was like that). He seems unable to focus on what's in front of him. Literally everybody he meets hates him, including his roommate, his coworkers, his boss, his only friend(?), random strangers, a girl whose relationship with him is unclear, and, of course, himself. He's not exactly unsympathetic - he never does anything objectionable - but he's certainly uncomfortable to watch. Everything about him just seems wrong.

There's no progression or evolution beyond this essential wrongness. We occasionally switch perspective to his roommate (Charles) or the girl (unnamed?), and they too are suffused with wrongness, though it's less extreme. Charles is pretty arrogant and seems constantly affronted, like everyone is disrespecting him. The girl writes suicide plans in her notebook and rubs her head on a pillow to deliberately inflame her allergies. They are constantly on the brink of financial crisis, but it never comes to anything. Every conversation they have is a fight, but they never resolve anything. Keith is constantly about to be fired, and Charles is always at the last straw before getting kicked out of the apartment - but neither of these things are closer to happening at the end of the film than its start. It is a pure evocation of mood, unhindered by theme or arc.

Given that this is entirely a tone piece, rather than a story: why are you trying to evoke this mood?? It's not like blues, which is sad but cathartic; it's an endless hurricane of mundane panic attacks, a prison of the least meaningful torment possible. Why would anyone choose that? Who wakes up and says hmmm yes, today I will immerse myself in extreme mental suffering that goes literally nowhere? It's named after a Captain Beefheart song, but I don't think anyone told Bronstein that the song is supposed to be about NOT going to Frownland! His smile is stuck, he cannot go back! (at long last, we have created the frownland from classic psych rock song Don't Create Frownland)

One possibility is that Frownland, unpleasant as it is, is important as an expression of something "real". But I don't think it is. It seems deliberately unreal, blocking out everything that doesn't fit the vibe. More than half the film is spent so zoomed in on the faces of Keith and his not-friends that we can hardly even see what they're doing. There is a kind of tunnel vision, like a life reduced to only its worst moments. It's less a portrait of a complete character and more a magnifying glass that amplifies the worst parts of his life, then repeats and extends the bitter moment until it fills all the space and nothing else is left. I'm not saying it needs to be realistic, only that it's very much acting on the plane of fantasy, not reality. Like the opposite of wish-fulfillment. So if Bronstein is constructing this world, not expressing a pre-existing reality, it seems legitimate to ask if it is the sort of imaginal space one would prefer to construct.

But that's too harsh, I think. Maybe Frownland isn't evil, just... incomplete. This feels like it could be a really good first act to a larger narrative. It establishes its cast and setting perfectly. The world is ripe to be mined for all sorts of insight. All the pieces are in place for Keith to discover a hidden secondary world in his closet, or start a wrestling group with his shadow-self, or get absorbed by the oncoming technocapital singularity, or die a slow and painful death, or SOMETHING. Anything. But for it to just be utterly static like that seems both less enjoyable and less honest. Nobody is actually trapped in the stammering confusion forever. Eventually the predictive engine either finds a way out or the dam breaks and you fall into abjection. Or death. Any one of these outcomes could be part of something compelling, but I can't bear the nothing.

There are two parts of Frownland I really liked. One is the music: these weird spacey synth riffs that add an element of the alien, like Keith and his not-friends are extradimensional bug-people from the planet Zarg. The other is a scene from near the end which centers on Charles. He's just taken the LSAT and is sitting on a staircase having a smoke with another test-taker. It's soon obvious that this other guy is exactly like him. They start on the right foot, but his new friend is quickly repulsed by him. The two identical personalities take, inevitably, to hating their mirror. Eventually his new friend sneers, disgusted: "You're telling me, in the middle of this ontological or epistemological fuckin' crisis, that your safety net is Twizzlers?"

These two bits give me hope that there could be more to Frownland. There's some tiny sliver of whimsy breaking through the grainy wrongness. But at the same time, I wonder what it says that my favorite parts of the movie only make it less effective at being what it is. It seems like a backhanded compliment - look, the cool music is helping me forget what I'm watching! It's still enough, at least, to leave me in ambivalence. Someone, somewhere, might for some reason feel it was very important to evoke a mood of extreme self-hatred for two hours. Maybe they'll need to defuse a bomb that will only stop when presented with several uninterrupted minutes of anxious stammering. When that time comes, Frownland will be there.

5/10

(2/20/2025)

At some point during the viewing of El Topo, a refrain started running through my head. It would bring itself to the surface anew at each new setpiece. Again and again, like a mantra: "This is a video game."

In his debut film, Jodorowsky casts himself as a mystical cowboy wandering through the desert, each of its three acts sending him on a new quest with a shifting roster of companions and enemies. In the first act, he and his (nude, uncomfortably malnourished) son travel on horseback through the desert to find and kill the wicked Colonel. Then, he is joined by a lover and a lesbian on a quest to prove his worth to said lover by killing the four great masters in a duel. He loses the final duel, is spurned by his lover, and awakens in the last act many years later, as a monk living among an underground society of incestuous cave-people. He must construct a tunnel to connect them to the nearby surface town, raising money through various feats.

This already sounds like it could be a Kojima plot, but the gaminess only enhances itself when one zooms in to observe the details. Take the start of act 3: he wakes up in a new location, stripped of his inventory and apart from his allies. That's one trope. He meets a new companion (who will join his party for the remaining missions). The companion takes him to a small village of odd but friendly people. They give him a quest (build a tunnel for them). Before he continues, though, he must prove his worth (very Zelda-coded) by traveling to visit the village elder. He is given a weird bug and instructed to EAT BUG. Then, when his quest begins proper, he travels to a new location - the town. The town is covered with these Illuminati symbols, and the various quirky townsfolk each have a little task/sidequest for him involving some kind of menial labor - begging, washing windows, doing little performances. And what video game protagonist hasn't had to collect resources by acting as the village labor-slave for a little while?

I could go on and on with these. The four great gunmen each have their own designated minions - a drag queen, a guy with no legs carried by a guy with no hands, a herd of bunnies. They each have their own gameplay gimmick - one has very high DEFENSE, another high ACCURACY, the last takes his gun away so they need to fight barehanded (I hate when they change the control scheme like that). Their dialogue even matches the same terse quasi-profundity that often comes before a big bossfight - compare "You bring me your life as a gift and you are not afraid to die. That is why you are a dangerous enemy" to "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!", or any opening monologue from any member of any Elite Four. To catch this vibe so closely in 1970 is impressively prophetic.

El Topo himself is very recognizably a video game protagonist; the central verbs of his existence are travel and kill. He is capable of casual miracles, like drawing water from a stone, and somehow nobody seems to care. He finds new companions as easily as he loses old ones, and never goes to the same place twice. His exploits give him a strained relationship with death; we as the audience must accept that (A) he can get shot dozens of times and survive, (B) he easily kills dozens of people without really registering the meaning of it, but (C) when he does die, this is as serious and meaningful as a human death in real life. Normally this would be bizarre, but every game narrative will exist within the exact same cognitive dissonance.

Most of all, though, is the imagery of it. Like The Holy Mountain, El Topo is a dense and tangled web of striking images and interesting patterns. But most of them don't really mean anything within any cultural or religious context. Rather, they seem to form a kind of self-contained symbolic universe where the various moments seem meaningful even as they are entirely disconnected from any external referent. Technically this is the Baudrillardian nightmare, but personally, I think it's fucking great. I think a lot of the appeal of a good game world, especially the imaginative spaces of killer7 or NaissanceE or Dark Souls or OFF, is in immersing oneself in that same density of simulation. The web of interrelations is complete in itself as long as the viewer can be carried along by its productive momentum.

And boy does El Topo have MOMENTUM. I think I like this best of all the Jodorowsky I've seen just through its sheer force of pacing. The music is bubbly, there are plenty of sharp jumpcuts and tense fights and buckets of gooey bright-red cartoon blood. We meet a new strange and fascinating character probably every five minutes. The events form less of a structured plot and more of a disconnected series of anecdotes, but most game plots do. It's drugged-out insanity, but it's the fun kind: the sort of altered state that lets you free-associate off the edge of a cliff and float all the way to the other side because you haven't even noticed the ground disappearing beneath your feet.

The most similar game I could think to compare it to is EarthBound, if it were less innocent and more deliberately scandalous. But it skips EB's dreary introductory sequences, bringing you right into playful madness from the word go. It has the same way of deriving humor from the juxtaposition of cosmic mythology and goofy middle-class caricatures. Townwide games of Russian Roulette versus the New Age Retro Hippie. In his edgier moments Jodorowsky falls more into LISA: The Painful archetypes: a lone hero fighting his way through hordes of drooling horndogs, their humanity stripped away by the desert. They are nothing but beasts of hunger and lust, but he rises above them because he is a father. (At least, until he isn't.)

Not that I want to say it's all only whimsy. The central theme of the plot is self-discovery, and from what I can tell Jodorowksy is taking that theme very seriously. The solemn, brooding, bearded El Topo at the start of the film is completely unrecognizable by its end. But the absurd, grinning, red-eyed monk he becomes is recognizably the same man as Jodorowsky's character in The Holy Mountain; and still seems fundamentally unchanged in Jodorowsky's Dune and current-day interviews. I think Jodorowsky really did try to become himself through El Topo, and he seems to have succeeded. Even in 1970, a time before Pong, Jodorowsky learns to reach into himself with an open heart, and inside he finds that most sacred of beings: the holy gamer. Amen.

9/10

(2/28/2024)

By all accounts there is absolutely no excuse for me not to have seen Con Air, beloved(?) action B-movie and central icon of John Egbert, eight billion times by now. Somehow I sidestepped the part of Andrew Hussie's terrible gypsy curse that transmogrifies his readers into Con Air fans in the light of the full moon. No longer. Now that the seal is broken, I will probably rewatch Con Air every April 13th from now until I am old and gray.

Because this movie actually kinda goes hard??? For a cheesy action meme, it's surprisingly enjoyable. Nick Cage's street-tough ex-con estranged father with a heart of gold manages to be both a bizarre pop-culture mutation of "likable hero", AND an actually likable hero. The motley crew of villains are entertaining. I liked John Cusack as the weird deuteragonist. I dunno if this is a GREAT movie, but it's funny and pleasant to watch and there's not much to turn me against it. There are some kinks, as one might expect, such as the general disconcerting sense of apathy around civilian casualties and property damage. The degree of comeuppance given to villains has less to do with the magnitude of their crimes and more to do with how likable they are to the audience, which leads to some dissonant scenes in the ending. Still, these are all easy to look past. Con Air gets a thumbs up from me.

This isn't an unbiased review, because I'm already in the secondhand Con Air fandom and so am predisposed to like it. It's a strange situation, acting as a 'fan' for something I've never seen in a genre I mostly don't like. Certain scenes are burned in as icons from Homestuck; when dangerous murderer Cyrus "The Virus" picks up a stuffed bunny, holds a gun to its head, and says "don't move or the bunny gets it", the immense stupidity of the scene drifts away on a wave of recognition. When "How Do I Live" plays in the ending, I almost could've sang along (it was midnight and people were trying to sleep, though). At the same time, the unfamiliar aspects of the genre are still capable of surprising me. Who knew action B-movies had so many explosions in them!!

There's a really nice sense of gradually escalating absurdity to Con Air. It begins with the simple tale of a man who was in the wrong place in the wrong time. Then the convicts take over the plane - the way they do it is implausible, but not completely ridiculous. Their plan to get the plane to Lerner Airfield flies further and further off the rails. At some point, the fearsome, terrible serial killer Garland Greene's mask is removed, revealing under it the nightmare visage of... Steve Buscemi. It is at this moment that any pretense of seriousness falls away completely. Half an hour later the plane has a fancy Corvette tied to a rope flying behind it for literally no in-universe reason except that the rope happened to hook onto the car while flailing around randomly, and then the car falls to the ground and explodes dramatically, all arranged carefully for no higher purpose than to stick it to one unusually unlikable character. And then the plane flies into a huge neon sign of an electric guitar at the Las Vegas strip, which explodes dramatically, because there weren't enough explosions already.

Is there something condescending about turning Con Air into an icon of deliberately overwrought fandom obsession? Maybe. You could say I enjoy this on the same level as enjoying something made by a little kid: the warm, nonthreatening feeling of seeing something made with love but also knowing that it is somehow 'beneath you'. This is too harsh, though. At some point I think enjoying this movie ironically transitions into enjoying it post-ironically, in the sense Jreg uses the term. The self-aware, eye-rolling 'look, it's so cheesy!' mindset, intended to demonstrate some ideal of "good taste" which Con Air fails to fulfill, instead presents an opportunity to transcend that taste, to exist outside of it, to put the bunny back in the box.

Maybe this was Andrew Hussie's plan all along. It's not hard to imagine a 12-year-old nerd be moved to tears the first time he sees Cameron Poe reunite with his loving wife and daughter; it's a goofy mental image, but not an impossible one. It's not some total trashfire garbage like The Room where the whole point is to bring the boys and riff on how terrible it is. The ritual of rebuilding Con Air as an internet meme isn't about being better than it, it's about returning yourself to a mental state where you don't HAVE to be better than it. Taking an object of cringe and recasting it as a holy symbol, because holy symbols do not care if people think they're cringe. I think this is what the Buddhists meant by "cultivating beginner's mind".

If any of this matters at all, I think it's as a method for separating objects of desire from the image of objects of desire. On the internet, the object of desire is entertainment, and criticism is its image. Aggregation of criticism - Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic - intends to reflect some underlying social current of desire, the true image under all images. Cringe is the painful sensation of friction on noticing a disjunction between the real desire and the reflected image of desire. The first method to resolve cringe is to disavow the real desire and give the image precedence. The second method is to replace the image with a new image that is closer to the real. The other second method is Homestuck. I can't honestly tell you I'm sure the second method is better: maybe at some point the wrong person will catch me watching the Hazbin Hotel and fire me, or divorce me, or stab me to death in a dark alley, or something. But, at least in the meantime, I can receive the wisdom of the ancients as they chant in unison, bowed heads pressed against their deep robes: "Let people enjoy things. Let people enjoy things. Let people enjoy things."

I give Con Air four out of five hats for keeping it real.

(2/27/2023)

Today I am reviewing a real whopper from the greatest heights of profound artistic vision: Lord of Chaos • Varg Vikernes attacks the movie, written and directed by Varg Vikernes, and heroically distributed by "Enderdragon" after the original copies were taken down. This is what real auteur art looks like. Let's hear what ol' Varg has to say.

Now, like any masterpiece, truly appreciating this film requires understanding its context. So, to sum up: in the mid-80s a Norweigan guy going by the pseudonym 'Euronymous' formed a death metal band called Mayhem. The original lead singer killed himself; Euronymous hired Varg Vikernes aka Burzum (another death metal artist) as a bassist; the group burned down a bunch of churches; there were some tensions about money; Varg stabbed Euronymous to death and went to prison for 15 years. In 1998, someone turned the story into a book called Lords of Chaos, and the book was adapted into a movie in 2018.

One year after that, a recording of Varg's response to the movie was posted on YouTube. Then, after another few years, I heard about the movie, thought it sounded neat, and made a note of it. I watched it, (LORDS OF CHAOS REVIEW: pretty much just a macabre Spinal Tap), and then learned from the internet it was rather inaccurate in several ways. Luckily, I have someone who was there at the time to set the story straight.

The most striking inaccuracy of Lords of Chaos is that it invents a fictional girlfriend for Euronymous, who had none in real life. I agree with Varg that this is a pretty important thing to get wrong, especially since (in his words) Euronymous was actually closeted gay, and everyone knew it. The movie also got wrong that (checks notes) Euronymous was actually a terrible salesman, everyone else in the band was a rat who sold each other out, Varg never talked to the police, they never had anything proving he burned down those churches, and he is NOT a vegetarian. (A caption helpfully adds that he tried carnivore "for some time", but gave up "after a week".)

Now, as Varg notes, Lords of Chaos opens with a disclaimer that it is based on "truth and lies", so it's not surprising that they stretch the facts a bit. Let's give the movie a fair shake and ask what thematic purpose some of these fictionalizations might serve. For example, the scene where Varg talks to the press, accidentally giving away his identity, appears to be made-up. Varg thinks this is done purely to slander him, but I think there may be some meaning to the scene. The critical line comes when the journalist, looking around his room, notes how "broad" it is that his belief system includes being a paganist, a Satanist, and a Nazi. Now, Varg doesn't directly comment on this characterization, but he does advertise his books on Paganism Explained, available now from burzum.com; he further expresses distaste for black metal artists that aren't "really" Satanic; and finally, a bitter amusement that despite his outspoken political views, the actor chosen to play him was none other than... Emory COHEN. Is it possible the fictional journalist had a point?

One reason he might not be able to respond to that part directly is that he hasn't actually seen the movie for himself. He fully admits this - he's practically bragging about it. This leads to an interesting thematic resonance. Lords of Chaos is fundamentally a movie about truth vs. image; Euronymous is a normal-ish guy wants to be seen as an evil satanist, Varg actually is one and doesn't care what other people think, and the conflict grows from there. In the last line of the movie, Euronymous callis you a poser for sitting at home, watching him rather than going out and doing black-metal type things yourself. On another level, Varg is calling the creators of the film posers, for turning his story into Hollywood schlock without interviewing anyone involved or trying to get their facts straight. But then on another level, Varg himself is a poseur for dissing the film without actually watching it. However, only I, sitting atop my golden throne at the peak of Hipster Mountain, can claim the ultimate crown of poserdom, because I wrote all this and I don't even like death metal.

Maybe this isn't the most serious review, but I actually do think there is something to be learned from Varg's videos. I'm thinking about the "banality of evil" idea, coined in reference to Bob Eichmann, a man best known for his participation in some trivial historical event or other. As I watched Varg, murderer and church-arsonist, try to make himself look cooler than Hollywood in a series of poorly-edited YouTube videos, I viscerally felt the banality of evil. In Lords of Chaos, fiction-Varg claims he's more "real" than Euronymous because he was out burning churches while his bandmate was spouting off. Maybe he's right. But you know what's really real? This man hated someone enough to stab them to death THIRTY YEARS AGO, and he's STILL bitter enough about it to play stupid dick-measuring games against him in front of the entire internet!

Varg, come on. Euronymous doesn't care if you call him a homosexual or insult his business prowess. Euronymous is dead. YOU KILLED HIM! This is a man who does not demonstrate a single ounce of remorse for any of the violent crimes committed by him or the people around him, but he is butthurt enough about being ratted out to give his former bandmates silly high-pitched voices while he makes fun of them for his YouTube channel. And yeah, it is weird that someone would turn this real, living person into a cartoon villain for their schlocky horror movie when he doesn't want them to. But if anything, Lords of Chaos gives him too MUCH credit, by portraying him as someone Serious and Brooding. I think your Serious Brooding Satanist pass gets pretty much thrown out the window when you complain about being misrepresented for listening to the wrong bands! Varg is like a school shooter in a Shadow the Hedgehog hoodie. It's unnerving to watch a real person so evil act so pathetically petty.

4/10

(2/25/2023)

Jodorowsky's Dune is totally not an arthouse film; it is a conventional documentary, presented straightforwardly, with the intent to entertain a mass audience. But it's about an arthouse film, and I'm officially declaring that close enough. Also, I've wanted to see this thing for years, and I'm not gonna let petty technicalities stand in the way.

Alejandro Jodorowsky is fucking awesome. The director Frank Pavich correctly chooses to let him do most of the talking, since the man spins solid gold every time he opens his mouth. Everything he says could have come from the mind of any doofy drugged-out lunatic, but he's so good-natured and earnest that it's impossible to dislike him. If I said "my art will be the most ambitious achievement in human history, it will create a mass enlightenment", you might want to punch me in the face, but Jodorowsky is so interesting and charismatic he can get away with saying basically whatever he wants. Also, he's probably just bullshitting 50% of the time. Dude is 80 years old and definitely does not take himself very seriously. At one point, he completely drops his train of thought to play with his cat for a minute; at another, he pulls a stack of cash from his wallet and yells at it for being fake and empty. He seems to have had so much fun making Dune, it almost doesn't matter whether or not it went anywhere.

Pavich's Jodorowsky's Dune's middle act even starts to FEEL like The Holy Mountain. In that movie, the hero travels to each planet of the solar system, getting the various authoritarian leaders of each planet to join his ragtag band of misfits. Jodorowsky, instead, goes around collecting celebrities; he convinces Salvador Dali by offering him "$100,000 per minute" (with a bit of clever fine-print), and he convinces Orson Welles by agreeing to house his favorite chef on-set. Mick Jagger doesn't even need to be asked. In the interview, the people joining his crew make it sound like they respected his artistic prowess and followed of their own free will. They're all terrible liars. They joined because - well, look at him. Who would say no??

The least important part of his vision seems to be Dune itself. Jodorowsky's Dune sounds like less of an actual adaptation, and more of a vaguely Dune-themed Jodorowsky movie. Like, lock Jodorowsky in a room with a toaster, and in a week he'll have a grand vision of a surreal, toaster-themed film where the Bread Tsar finds profound truth in the Planet of Coils, and all his happy subjects are instantly charred to a perfect crisp. In the same vein, lock Jodorowsky in a room with a copy of Dune, and you'll get something kind of science-fiction-y that has sand worms and superintelligent emperors; his bizarre imagination will fill in the rest. (Lock him in a room with a Bible to get The Holy Mountain.)

I think this is good, to be clear. I haven't read Dune, but everything I hear about it makes it sound ridiculous. Jodorowsky said he hadn't even read the book when he agreed to adapt it, basically choosing it to be his Magnum Opus at random. Jodorowsky's Dune claims that his storyboards inspired Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Masters of the Universe (???), and ESPECIALLY Alien. From this, and all the storyboards we see, I interpret that it would've been very campy and not at all the kind of Serious Philosophy For Serious Men that the books want to be. On some level, I think the people involved all realize the movie they were trying to make was absolute nonsense. They try to pump it it up and make you think it would've been Serious Art. They're missing the point: absolute nonsense is better than Serious Art. (At least, it is when Jodorowsky does it.)

There is one strong critique I have of Jodorowsky's Dune: I think it is trying too hard to minimize the part where the movie never actually got made. The last act finds the film's motley crew crushed by the iron fist of Reality as their dreams are turned to dust. This should be genuinely painful; it obviously stuck with Jodorowsky, if he can still remember this idea in such detail 50 years on. Instead, little details like the part where he wanted it to be twelve hours long get skimmed past. I find this especially frustrating because I already agree with them that it's a tragedy Jodorowsky's Dune never got made; they don't need to hide the executive meddling. They try to connect the happy ending of Jodorowsky's Dune to Jodorowsky's Dune to make it seem more 'inspiring', but to me it felt like pasting a happy face on a tragedy.

Like Jodorowsky's Dune, Jodorowsky's Dune tells an absurd story. I find it inspiring in its ridiculousness. Sure, he never finished Dune, but Jodorowsky still made plenty of movies without once compromising to executives or "the public". And he never stopped having fun along the way. I had to pause briefly near the end of this movie, because I was coming up with too many ideas and I needed to write them down before I forgot them all. If I ever make Serious Art (or, even better, if I ever make surreal nonsense), now it'll have a little bit of Jodorowsky DNA in it too.

9/10

PS: The first two search results on my computer for "where to watch jodorowsky dune" were op-eds in online magazines declaring that it's a good thing Dune never got created, and that Jodorowsky is actually cringe. In other words, Google search prioritizes telling me what my opinion on Jodorowsky's Dune should be over actually letting me WATCH it. Fuck you, Google. One might rebut that Google didn't choose this on purpose, because something something SEO something something. Bullshit. Google knows this is how their something something SEO works and they encourage it. They need to make sure everyone has the Correct Cultural Opinion whether they ask for it or not, on all subjects. For this heinous search-engine misfire, I decree all Google employees deserve to suffer horribly for the rest of their days.

(2/20/2022)

Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves is a very, very simple movie. In fact, it's so simple and straightforward that I think it is best understood as less of a traditional movie and more of a fable, like the ones I was told as a kid. Specifically, it occupies the sub-genre of fable known as "For Want of a Nail". It looks like this: For want of attention, the bike was lost. For want of a bike, the job was lost. For want of a job, the money was lost. For want of a money, the food was lost. For want of a food, the lives will be lost. And all for the want of attention. The moral: better pay better attention to your bicycle, there, bucko.

As a fable, Bicycle Thieves strictly follows the beats necessary to advance the plot and avoids excess detail. Antonio Ricci is poor. Then, he gets a job, for which he needs a bicycle. Then, he buys one by pawning his bedsheets. Then... I already had the ending spoiled before going in, but it didn't hurt my viewing experience at all. In fact, de Sica seems to assume the audience can figure out where the plot is going, and includes little winks throughout (like a scene early on which really makes it clear that his bike could have been stolen even earlier than it was).

Because of this laser-focus on plot, the characters never advance much beyond sketches. Take, for example, Antonio's wife Maria. She has two personality traits; (1) she is Antonio's wife, and (2) she is superstitious. Her superstition is relevant because it leads into the fortune-teller scene in Act III. Once these two traits are established, Maria never shows up again - not even for the ending! The whole movie is constructed sparsely like this. Even Antonio, the main character, is kind of a generic everyman. This all makes sense only if you recognize Bicycle Thieves as a fable, a genre not generally known for expansive worldbuilding.

I have only one criticism of Bicycle Thieves, but it's a big one: movies aren't fables. I had a book of stories by Aesop when I was a kid; the average length was ~20 pages, and the average number of sentences per page was three. Without any worldbuilding, there's just not enough meat for a story like this to fill a feature-length running time. De Sica gets around this by repeating himself a lot. Probably at least a third of the scenes are, in some way, redundant to other scenes in the movie.

It's not BLATANTLY obvious that he's doing this, but think about it a bit and you start seeing the pattern. I'm particularly thinking of the 'Antonio yells at someone who he thinks is connected to his stolen bike, thereby making a fool of himself' story beat, which plays out like four times. Imagine if, in The Tortoise and the Hare, the Hare didn't just take a nap - he took two naps, went for a little stroll, did the daily crossword, and only THEN did he realize he lost. Like, damn dude, we get it. The hare's hubris led to his downfall. Can we move on?

The upshot of this is that, as a minimalist story, Bicycle Thieves has what TvTropes would call 'Applicability'. There's a lot of room for interpretation here, and as a result, the film holds up a lot better than you'd expect after 70+ years. For example, back in paragraph one when I said what I thought the moral was, I was being facetious. The ACTUAL moral of Bicycle Thieves is about UBI.

Oh, sure, De Sica probably didn't INTEND to write it as a UBI story. In fact, I'm not sure De Sica even knew what UBI was. But think about it: everything about Antonio's situation is a direct consequence of the disconnect between his need for work and the state's lack of need for workers. Suppose that, rather than trying to find the guy who stole his bicycle, Antonio quit his job and signed up for Andrew Yang's Freedom Dividend instead. Then all his troubles would be over! Thanks, Mr. Yang!

Look back at the "For Want of a Nail" description of the plot. For most of the movie, De Sica focuses on the single point, 'attention -> bicycle'. But ANY break in the chain of causality would save Antonio from his fate. It's only because of an incompetent bureaucracy that he needs the bike in the first place; look at it from the 'bicycle -> job' angle, and now it's a fable about red tape. 'Job -> money' is UBI, of course, but take a 'money -> food' reading and suddenly De Sica is starting to look a bit Communist. Hell, why not go all the way and cut the tie between food and life directly? Maybe Bicycle Thieves is, at its core, really a fable about transhumanism. Let Antonio ascend to a plane of pure energy, abandoning this petty material realm! Can't steal a bike if you don't have a physical form to grab it with.

6.5/10

(5/22/2021)

I was about halfway home in the middle of the highway when the COVID-19 vaccine began to take hold.

The first symptom was arm soreness. Unsurprising. Happened last time as well. Worse than before, but not too much worse.

The second symptom was tiredness. Again, unsurprising. I was able to keep myself awake and pretty much alert.

The third symptom, such as I could tell, was misery. Maybe I was just having a bad few days, but around 7PM I started to feel like human garbage. The scum of the Earth. I wanted to give my soul a shower.

At 7:30 PM I started watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, to distract myself. The movie ended two hours later. For those two hours, I forgot about the sore arm and the tiredness and the misery. Then, at 9:30, the movie was over, and they all came back.

About an hour later, I received a message from a college friend, asking me if I wanted to do something or other. I told him I was too tired because I just got my COVID shot. He told me to watch out for insane dreams - he, apparently, had one so realistic he still thought he was in the dream even after waking up. I told him I'd keep it in mind. About an hour after that, I went to bed.

The one solace a fever dream has when compared to a bad drug trip is the lack of interaction with other real humans. In my head I may have been babbling to my Samoan attorney about bat country and lizard people for hours. In reality, all I was doing was tossing and turning in my bed. I can well imagine that, if some other person had approached me in my stupor, I would have grabbed them and frantically mumbled a plea for someone to help me find the American dream. I probably would've freaked them out just as much as Thompson seemed to.

Other than that, there are quite a few similarities. At its worst, light, color and sound divorce entirely from context and meaning. Snapshots of the world repeat themselves in my head, bits of phrase plucked from memory to run on loop. "...grossly atavistic..." "...he who makes a beast out of himself..." "...buy some heroin?" It all seems too strange to be real, yet too convincing to be fake. The constantly-shifting strobe lights of Vegas punctuate a series of fuzzy, disconnected anecdotes. It's hard to remember where exactly I am and what I'm doing at any given moment, only that the world is huge and too bright and full of people who are giving me funny looks. Occasionally I can grab hold of some higher understanding - oh yeah, I'm looking for the American dream - but it doesn't stick around for long.

The movie runs through a startling array of drugs, giving each its time in the limelight, and pays tribute to them with lavish special effects. First the walls and people shift on LSD. Then Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro flail around like morons with devil ether. Then comes mescaline, etc. Of these, the devil ether seemed to come back the strongest, maybe because I felt a strong kinship with the characters' total loss of motor control. I would feel myself tossing and turning, suddenly jolt back into consciousness for a moment if I accidentally put too much weight on my sore arm. Then, knowing full well what I was going to return to, I'd turn to rest on my other arm and fall back to sleep. Why didn't Thompson ever just take a moment to rest and sober up?

Dr. Gonzo almost never appeared in my dream. Despite getting second billing and playing the only other major character in the movie, he is totally eclipsed by Depp and his cigarette holder. The fucking cigarette holder just doesn't go away. Depp has to keep his teeth clenched for the entire movie to keep it in his mouth; del Toro's insanity is comparatively well-hidden, so it doesn't have as much impact on-screen. When I tried to speak, the words came out as a delirious mumble. I doubt he could've gotten rid of the damn thing if he tried, not that he could really do much of anything lucid between all the drugs he was taking. On one level, by all accounts Thompson was a public menace freaking out everyone he came across. But he seems fully aware of his own ludicrousness, and accepts it as part of the ride. I wish a fever dream offered that level of clarity.

I do not mean this as an insult, but it comes as a great relief when Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is over. The movie, the book, the dream. The purpose of Gonzo journalism is to immerse the consumer as directly as possible into the life of the journalist, whatever that journalist might happen to be doing. Thompson's life is exhausting. Too weird to live and too rare to die. If he has one undeniable talent, it is the ability to stay poetic as a writer and thinker even as he's completely ruining himself with drugs and paranoia. The paranoia is almost worse, although the two are probably connected. Everyone who enters his room is a secret cop planning his downfall. He's always one step away from being caught by the pigs. Something terrible must be happening, just out of the corner of his eye.

Watching a movie is easy. You can check how much time is left, pause to get some water, or just look around, safe in the knowledge that what you are watching is not real. Dreams offer no such luxuries. I would have much rather dreamed through many, many other movies before this one. Still, there is something very appropriate about it. Fear and Loathing has little plot and no character arcs. There is only one thing on offer: for two hours, you get to live as someone who is completely batshit insane. Then, you get to wake up. I don't know how to feel about the former, but I am infinitely grateful for the latter. Poor Hunter Thompson - he couldn't wake up from his own life, whether or not he wanted to. I wonder what his dreams were like.

8/10