amber can walk

As per my Babygirl review , I've been ruminating on the concept of catharsis and whether it's something that is owed to the audience. With that film, I found its all-too-neat and tensionless storytelling frustrating, specifically because it seemed to be terrified to shame or unseat the audience with compelling conflict. More than ever, our tastes have become dictated by algorithms catered to our personal preferences with the intent of keeping us engaged and when we're not raging over pointless nothingness, we are being siloed away from our peers with beige specificity. Following suit are a new generation of storytellers who are being instructed to mould to the streaming model of media production and tick demographic boxes rather than tell stories that are full-bodied and messy. Topicality, as a result, becomes a major selling point of a new TV show or movie and, as cynical as ever, it's not because someone had a humanistic approach to these issues, but rather, these c...

The past few of years have been marred with a kind of weightlessness. There have been and continue to be people who joke about still feeling stuck in 2019, how it doesn't feel as though it was 6 years ago at all, how it's hard to feel present when time feels like it's constantly being stolen from us. Not just pandemic-wise, but spending most of our lives working jobs we don't like or in bus stations, waiting to get to those jobs or pretty much just anywhere that isn't with people who value us beyond what labour we can provide for them.  As a result, I have formed some theories about why I seek out things I know will disturb me or piss me off. In my abandoned blog post on disturbing media I attempted to write a couple of years ago, I argued that affect is very grounding and that taking the cultural litmus test of what you can and can't endure keeps you assimilated to a certain extent, even if it's based on having an overly negative reaction to a taboo topic. ...

  Most people watched Hostel (2005) when they were teenagers.  I can't actually verify this statement but there are definitely certain generations of people who came of age during the torture porn boom of the 2000s and tried to watch as many of them as possible to prove how much disturbing and offensive material they could put in their brains before they lost their stomachs. I grew up as a child too young to remember 9/11 and too immature to read the cultural criticism related to the sub-genre, to sit and think about what it was implying about American culture or masculinity or the human body. It was all about affect. And that worked perfectly fine for me at the time. Eli Roth doesn't make movies for adults. You might think that the ratings and content of his films argue against this, but I've never been more convinced watching his 2015 paranoid home invasion gender crisis fable Knock Knock that this man has continually, but not consciously, cultivated an imagined teenage...

Talking about the pandemic can be tiring. Watching movies where the pandemic is happening, or has happened can be exhausting. Much like Trump, it feels as though all that could be said has been said and that maybe we should just stop talking about it because it's a massive downer and no longer a problem. I've never been good at processing things on time. It always feels like I'm slightly behind emotionally which is a roundabout way of saying that I don't think I'm over that one thing that happened in March 2020. The world stopped and I was stuck in permanent state of panic for about a year. And then it ended (allegedly). Everyone around me stopped being cautious which made me feel insane. Where I was still keeping my distance from people and feeling increasingly isolated, many people had already returned to what they were doing before. I felt very alone and once again, unable to process what had happened. It feels incorrect to call it traumatic, not just because the...

I did not like Blonde (2022).  When the film was being announced and more and more critics I respected were talking about how bad it was, I really tried to have a measured response to it. I did my best to not participate in the discourse surrounding the film because I really don't have the space in my brain for hating films I haven't even watched. I scrolled past. I ignored. I gave a cursory glance at those praising Marilyn Monroe as an actor, and moved on. I knew I was going to watch it at some point but it wasn't going to be when everyone was talking about it with this much animosity. More and more, outrage sells. We've probably all had a celebrity we once respected saying or doing something outrageous (code for transphobic or racist), and I'm just cynical enough to believe that at least some of them enjoy the attention and the money that comes from it. Bad publicity is better than no publicity in the internet age and thus the hate-watch is solidified in our cult...

The population of Haida Gwaii were some of the first people to watch  Edge of the Knife (2018), a horror film set in the 19th century recounting the tale of a man changing into Gaagiixiid (a wildman figure common throughout their culture's folklore) after committing an accidental act of violence. This would be the first feature film to use only Haida as dialogue, a language with only 24 native speakers . Many of the actors in the film were not fluent themselves and had to attend a two week language boot camp where elders were invited to teach Haida to younger generations. Not only was this film a milestone in its own right, the production and distribution of the film became a way to prevent the language from being forgotten. As Adeana Young, one of the stars of the film, stated:  "Not long after the language is gone, the culture is gone [which] is scary, really scary." In her second documentary feature, Violet Du Feng, along with co-director Qing Zhao, present a sto...

Source: Roger Ebert What's most frustrating about the representation of the internet in films and on TV is how incurious it is. Generally being portrayed as a vapid outlet for teenagers who are desperate for attention, social media, that is pretty much ubiquitous at this point and almost essential in staying up to date on socio-political issues, is villainised in a way that only comes across as insecure from the point of view of the writers. And I don't want to be ageist, but it does seem like the fear-mongering attitudes of someone too detached from young people's lives to even try to understand what it's function is in them. We're All Going To The World's Fair (2021) is refreshing, not just because of its transgressive use of form, but because it was so obviously made by someone who spent hours on the internet as a teenager, like myself and many other people now in their twenties. Jane Schoenbrun's bizarre coming of age story follows Casey as she plays an ...

Source: Rue Morgue The Velvet Vampire (1971) is a vampire horror hellbent on destabilising heterosexual monogamy through its exploration of desire and isolation. We follow Lee and Susan as their marriage becomes threatened through the presence of the ever-alluring Diane, a mysterious woman, who has invited them to her estate in the middle of the desert. Whilst there, their marriage and respective identities are troubled as they both seem to be attracted to Diane, who they suspect is actually a vampire. Playing on old stereotypes about the evil, promiscuous bisexual and made in a time of political unrest, it seems to be wrestling with the panic of change and the possibility of dual identities, as if those who are marginalised by normative society actually have something sinister to hide. Diane gets to punish those who seek to use her for sex and discard her afterwards and there is a certain amount catharsis that can be had from watching this film as a bisexual woman, whose identity is p...

Source: Broadway Cinema Petite Maman (2021) follows Nelly as she copes with the death of her grandmother by bonding with her mother, Marion. The film takes on a fantastical quality as Nelly is seemingly able to talk to a young version of her mother in a house that looks a lot like her grandmother's house. With the film never explaining how she came to do this, Nelly repeatedly returns and as a result, begins to understand her own grief, as well as her mother's. The film acts a cathartic fantasy, where a child is able to easily heal their parents of their pain, where they are able to live on the same level, for a short while, as the carer rather than the cared for. The fact that we don't know if this is Marion or Nelly's fantasy seems intentional. The film doesn't ask us to rationalise the events of the film, but rather feel the way grief completely changes the worlds of these characters. For Marion, she reverts to her childhood self as a way to spend more time her ...

This post contains spoilers of the above film.  This post also discusses sexual violence multiple times, though no details are described.  If this is something that you are uncomfortable with or unable to cope with, I won't blame you for skipping this post. Take care of yourself. Source: IMDb Deadgirl (2008) is not a film I'd recommend. It fails as an exploration of consent and masculinity, and it fails as a 'disturbing' movie, which is what it's trying to be. I would say that this film is disturbing, as there are numerous scenes of sexual assault and random violence, however it meanders so much that, even as something fucked up that you would watch with friends to prove what you could handle, it's a slog to get through. All this is worsened by the fact that the acting and script are awful, meaning not only can you not be entertained intellectually or viscerally from the sheer affect of what you're witnessing, you also can't enjoy it as a movie that...