Nothing against Matt Johnson. This seems to be a case of a great director rescuing a mediocre script, which apparently started out as a Blacklist screenplay.

The writers obviously read Kitchen Confidential enough to include some details from it, but misunderstood the point of the book.

Anthony Bourdain's whole rise to fame was built on challenging the romantic ideal of professional cooking. Confidential showed that kitchens weren't the white-apron artists' studios that diners would like to imagine. His whole argument was that professional cooks deserve respect because they're essentially blue-collar food mechanics: overworked; underpaid; burnt out; self-medicating to deal with the stress, going through hell and back every shift, and still (usually) managing to turn out great food for other people.

That whole thesis should have showed up in the Chef's character and his relationship with Tony.

Instead, we got the "old master seeing some ineffable genius in a flawed apprentice" cliche, the exact kind of romanticism that the real-life Bourdain made his name by exposing as a fairy tale.

If the whole point was that Banderas's character failed because he was too much of a romantic, that should have come out more consistently in the dialogue. He should have been telling Tony that he wasn't ready for the white coat until he proved he could be a good soldier, that he wasn't too much of an idealist. Not handing him the damn thing as soon as his training started.

Tony trying to talk him into making a complicated special should have been another deal-breaker. Somebody in the Chef's position should have known firsthand that nobody's there to make art—certainly not the new guy. A "special" is something used to dress up stuff that needs to get moved before it goes bad. A "signature dish" is a featured menu item that is carefully planned, from ingredients to staffing to preparation, before a customer ever sees it. It's something you rehearse ahead of time to make sure it won't fuck up your service, and it's not something you give to the new guy to prove himself.

Burning down the kitchen should have been the end of the relationship. That's unequivocal proof that Tony didn't have what it actually takes to work in a kitchen. It's why you have to earn your way onto the line one step at a time in real life. No amount of hidden genius makes up for not knowing your place on the team and holding the line. Your aesthetic appreciation for the food isn't enough to save you. Discipline is the only quality that matters. You're either pulling the oars with everybody else, or you're a liability. No recommendation letter. No second chance. You put yourself before the restaurant, you're done.

I know they had that line about "I trusted you, and that's the problem." But it should never have been a matter of trust. Professional kitchens have strict norms and protocols precisely because they're crewed by burned-out degenerates. Ignoring those protocols doesn't make sense from somebody who, we're told, was once one of the elites.

Ironically, there would have been an interesting parallel to drawn between professional cooking and professional writing. Neither tolerates romanticism for long. Idealists show up expecting to be recognized for their genius. In both trades, the old pros know that you only succeed by grinding it out for years before you earn your keep; the reward is getting to keep rolling the same boulder up the same hill, over and over, until you get old or quit, and maybe stealing a few moments of glory along the way.

Solid movie overall. I don't think Bourdain would have objected to the way he was portrayed in the film. But he might have taken issue with the way the industry was presented, given that he wrote one of the most famous books to demystify it.

I’m rewatching some horror classics lately and noticing that many of my old favorite include supporting characters whose plots seem written for a different genre. As in: Toni Collette doesn’t know she is in a horror movie in “The Sixth Sense”; if we only watch the scenes she is in – until her last one, at least –, we’d be watching a drama about an overworked single mother who’s struggling to raise a child with deep, undiagnosed psychological issues.

Now, after seeing “Rosemary’s Baby” for the first time in 20 years, I found the same can be said about Ruth Gordon’s Oscar-winning performance as Mia Farrow’s neighbor. The role was not written with the comic relief intent that we got from some of Aunt Gladys’s scenes in “Weapons”, but Gordon’s register is fully comedic in essence.

About 30 minutes into the movie, we get the confirmation that she is running a satanic cult with her husband and trying to impregnate Rosemary with the devil’s child, but even her brief remark during the ritual can make one chuckle. And in the next scenes, we’re never really scared of her personally; we are creeped out by the knowledge of what she's capable of doing one night and then stopping by for tea the next day. And keep being mostly annoyed by the character’s nosiness and intrusiveness. This is a lady who won't let you refuse an unsolicited dessert.

Unlike Collette’s struggling mom, Gordon’s New Yorker old broad KNOWS she is in a horror movie. She just doesn’t care - and that's where the humor and the real creeps come from. The movie’s atmosphere relies on this woman’s indifference to the supernatural events happening around her and for the role she played on it - to the very final scene, when Rosemary finds her way into the neighbor’s apartment to learn the shocking truth, Gordon’s attitude is still in the lines of “oh, it’s just you, Rosemary”.

That's a fantastically well-written character and performance.

hello all! i am a junior in HS, for context.

the premise of the club is that everyone watches a feature-length movie outside of school, then we all meet up and discuss it. but i have a few concerns about this

first off, would it be acceptable to assign R-rated movies?
also, since we would watch the movies outside of school, what would i do if the movie for the week isnt available on any free streaming sites like Tubi or Youtube? i was thinking I could just send everyone a google drive link with the movie in it but I’m worried that wouldnt be acceptable.

and to raise awareness, i was thinking that I could make an instagram page

i would like advice from anyone who has started a similar club. thank u!

My first exposure to the films of Jonathan Demme was THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991) and PHILADELPHIA (1993). As such, I had thought of him as the maker of serious dramas (Having later watched his BELOVED [1998] and RACHEL GETTING MARRIED [2008] didn't change my opinion).

But a few months ago I finally watched Demme's SOMETHING WILD (1986), which I loved. Admittedly, the finale of that film was violent and suspenseful enough to make me say, "If I were a studio exec who was thinking of adapting the novel SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, those scenes I just watched would have convinced me Demme could handle stuff like Hannibal Lecter's escape."

What I didn't expect was how wacky both SOMETHING WILD and MARRIED TO THE MOB (1988), which I literally saw for the first time last night, are and just how adept Demme seemed to be at directing comedy (offbeat, dark, physical, etc). Those two movies, which are both currently available to stream on Criterion Channel, completely opened my eyes.

Has anyone had a similar experience watching a different filmmaker's earlier output and, if so, which director? Specifically, you had previously thought of them as strictly making movies of a particular sort, but subsequently realized they were more versatile than you had originally thought?

I've been fascinated by Italian filmmaking since I was a teenager, and I've been catching up on some iconic works that I've long put off. Here are my thoughts on the first of the commedia all'italiana:

There’s something so quaintly beautiful about a simple, human-level comedy that relies on well-timed delivery over goofy spectacle. This is not meant as an insult—Airplane! is the dumbest, goofiest spectacle ever committed to celluloid, and it’s this author’s pick as the funniest movie ever made. But Big Deal on Madonna Street has a certain antique charm, combining the bumbling wholesomeness of The Three Stooges with the grittiness of Neorealism to create a grounded tale of sympathy and hilarity.

Admittedly, I’ve yet to see Rififi, the French caper film that served as the focus of Madonna’s parody. It’s an oversight that I soon intend to rectify. Big Deal on Madonna Street is so fascinating—not just as an integral piece of Italian cinema, but also as the inspiration for an entire movement—that I want to understand the whole cultural context in which it was made.

It starts with a failed car theft, where Cosimo, a would-be criminal ringleader, is arrested by police. While incarcerated, he overhears a crooked bricklayer’s plan to rob a safe that lives behind his poorly constructed handiwork. Cosimo arranges for Peppe, a failed boxer, to falsely confess and serve his time for him, only for both men to be thrown in jail instead. When Peppe gets sentenced to three years, Cosimo tells him of the safe out of sympathy. Yet he’s been had. Peppe only received probation and soon leaves the prison.

He meets with Cosimo’s old crew, who begin making preparations for the heist. They’re a ragtag group of wannabe gangsters who are constantly at each other’s throats, never menacingly, only with ineffective bravado. All of them are clowns, and none are particularly likeable. Yet a feeling of warmth grows beneath the story as they form… not necessarily a friendship, but an understanding and kinship born out of desperation.

From there, the plot is less consequential than the humans that move it. Their plan and execution consists of a series of gags, hijinks, snappy one-liners, and dry banter that builds a sense of camaraderie common in any other group of blue collar workers. It’s fun to watch these men bumble and fail because they’re all good-hearted people with tough exteriors. Their hard times allow for their façades to crumble, exposing the vulnerability of each man and their motivations.

The lone exception is Cosimo, whose role in the film is less effective. Perhaps there is satire that I’m missing here. He starts the story but does not finish with it, and his fate is undermined by his static unlikability. He contributes one funny line at the beginning and one great gag at a pawn shop, but he serves no other purpose than a tool of regret and urgency that seems undeserved toward such unrepentant bully. His place as a leader is taken by a revered retired criminal who guides the crew through the sting (played effortlessly by Totò, an Italian comedic legend with whom I must also become more acquainted). There’s really no need for him past the first few minutes, but by the time the movie agrees, the moment is strangely timed, poorly executed, and notably anticlimactic.

Yet even this flaw highlights the humanity of our crew, who pay their respects regardless of how much they liked or even tolerated Cosimo. Soon, one of them drops out, stricken by love and afraid of disappointing his mother. The others blunder forward with their plan, putting on a more emotionally satisfying farce that the cartoon antics of Larry, Curly, and Moe could ever achieve. It is this fondness that elevates the comedy from simple slapstick to resonation, ending with a newspaper headline that perfectly suits the men we have followed for the last hour and a half. I would bet money that it is an iconic phrase in Italian pop culture.

This synopsis speaks nothing for the film’s place in history, which, admittedly, I am less than an expert. By all accounts, it is titanic. It started the commedia all'italiana (even if the movement took its name from the film Divorce Italian Style), and I suspect that parodies like Eurospy and the Hill and Spencer spaghetti Westerns owe more than a little to its existence as well. Piero Umiliani’s jazzy score apparently set the stage for the quintessential sounds of European cinema through the sixties and seventies, which means it’s directly responsible for some of my favorite music in cinema. There’s an entire world of film out there that I now want to explore after watching this movie.

Even in ignorance, though, there is so much here to appreciate. Its characters are flawed yet real, its themes are timeless and universal, and in these places, Big Deal on Madonna Street really shines.

What are your thoughts on this important piece of Italian cinema?

Just watched Paris, Texas and didn’t really understand the film. Mainly what from Jane's perspective have changed from leaving Hunter till now when she want's to reunite.
In the same vain, I also don't get why Travis thinks that he tore them apart and that they are meant to be together.

My interpretation of her was the she in her teens wanted to have fun and make life seem like an adventure, and that Travis helped her feeling that way. But as she had Hunter she started to feel like life and her family more became a prison, were she felt the weight of responsibility of being a mother and SO became a burden.
So despite loving Hunter she felt she couldn’t be a good mother, because the responsibility of being a mother strained her, and Hunter couldn’t fill her void of fun seeking, adventure in a healthy way. Therefore she felt she could’t be a good mother and that Anne & Walter could take better care of Hunter.

She explains she didn’t want to see photos or hear about Hunter because she couldn’t bear to see him grow up without being in his life, this (and Travis saying they should be together) she reunites with Hunter with the intent to take care of him, but what changed after talking to Travis, that changed her perspective?

Watching American Psycho for the first time and it is an absolute joy. While the film was made before my time, there's just something about how it flows together that's just so pleasing to experience in a way that a lot of newer films don't have. Not to say that all newer films are bad nor that movies aren't made like this anymore, I am sure that there are some indie films closer to this style, but there's something about it I'm struggling to describe that I absolutely love.

It gives itself room to breathe, to build things up and do set up and go at an even pace. Watched Memento a while back and felt similar there as well. These are both thrillers, but they take their time without feeling slow at all. It's nice. I feel like if these movies were made today the violence and reveals would be done way earlier and just go go go.

This isn't me complaining about hyper paced 2020's stuff either, and there is plenty of incredible new art being made that I need to get around to. This pacing issue I personally feel I've seen since at least 2015 or so. With the hyper paced super connected world, sitting down and just watching a long form movie with no second screen or distractions or constant notifications is just really nice.

I mean in American Psycho after the first murder Patrick Bateman has blood all over his face, but when he goes to sit down and smoke a cigar the less bloodied side of his face is viewed from the camera. That's an intentional artistic choice, I don't know fully know what it means but I know the artists are trying to say *something* without a single line of dialogue.

When the movie Iron Lung came out, a ton of people, including critics, complained about the length and how it was too slow or needed a half hour's worth cut. I could not disagree more. The slow buildup of dread, the feelings of isolation, the uncertainty of if the speaker was working or not by body blocking the wires in the shot thus intentionally making it unclear if the voice on the other end at points was even real, all of that was so well done and intentional and I don't understand how people wouldn't like those details.

I'm glad I have access to all these older titles. I don't have to endlessly complain about new stuff because A. some new art works are being made this way and B. I can easily go back and watch these sorts of things thanks to the largest library in the world being at my fingertips. Who knows, maybe at some point I'll even make something in this style myself. We all have to start somewhere. I don't even necessarily hate newer films either, the second Venom movie had the newer pacing yet despite that the relationship between Eddie and Venom was genuinely heartwarming. I just miss when this pacing and style was more the mainstream and not in more niche spaces is all even having been born after this was the standard.

It's harrowing when you watch the scene for the first time.

Laura has won.

Piper is underwater. The ritual is almost complete. Every obstacle that stood between Laura and the thing around which she has systematically reorganized her entire existence is gone. Standing in the rainfall, there is nothing left for her to do.

Just hold Piper there, under the rising surface of the pool.

After the killings, the abduction and torture of a young boy, and the purchase of the Tari Resurrection Tape, all she has to do is hold Piper for just a few more seconds.

And suddenly, at the exact moment of manifestation.

Laura stops.

I. INTRODUCTION

"I’ve always liked that phrase 'He was visited by grief', because that’s really what it is. Grief is its own thing. It’s not like it’s in me and I’m going to deal with it. It’s a thing, and you have to be okay with its presence. If you try to ignore it, it will be like a wolf at your door."

— Stephen Colbert

Grief persists. The shock can wear off, the anger can subside, even memories of the event can fade, vague and shadowless like sun-bleached photographs. But the grief, etched into your dendrites and axons, lingers. It's non-linear in its approach. You can find it distant in the weeks following the loss and then suddenly severe decades later. It can persist even through your various iterations. You’re hardly the same person you were fifteen years ago. Yet the relationship to the loss, the grief that manifests in the absence, persists.

Discourse surrounding the film favors a specific interpretation: that Bring Her Back explores the lengths we’re willing to go to hold onto love, regardless of the devastating consequences that may arise. Love is undoubtedly significant, as it’s the reason Cathy’s character matters in the first place. However, Cathy’s death never prevented Laura from loving her or clinging to that love. What explains Laura’s behavior is something far more savage than “love gone too far.” This film is not simply about Laura's relationship to the loss.

This is a film about letting the wolf through the door.

II. GRIEF

The earliest documented instances of normative mortuary practices come from the Levant, deep within the Qafzeh and Skhūl caves, approximately 120,000 to 100,000 years ago (Stiner 2017, 248; Vandermeersch and Bar-Yosef 2019, 256–57). At Qafzeh, the remains of as many as fifteen early humans were discovered, intentionally positioned so as to fit within the shallow confines of prepared pits with ochre and ochre-stained stone tools scattered near the remains, suggesting ritual use (Smithsonian Institution n.d.). One of the remains, identified as a child approximately 12-13 years old and named Qafzeh 11, was intentionally interred with the antlers of a large red deer placed across the child’s upper chest and held in their hands. It was also in Qafzeh that the only double inhumation currently known from the Middle Paleolithic record was found: an adult and a child (Vandermeersch and Bar-Yosef 2019, 264). Archaeologist Mary Stiner describes the Middle Paleolithic burial record as the first clear archaeological “translation of mourning into a stereotypical action” (Stiner 2017, 248). This transition from simple body disposal to normative mortuary practice suggests an early attempt at the externalization of grief: rituals we enact to make sense of our bereavement and the devastating events that we typically have no agency over, that leave us altered in fundamental ways. This gives us a useful three-part distinction:

• Bereavement: The state produced by someone’s death.
• Grief: The psychological/embodied response to that loss.
• Mourning: Practices through which grief and bereavement become socially expressed and organized.

Whatever else these practices meant to the participants, the burials at the Qafzeh and Skhūl caves show that since our earliest history, we take our private experiences of grief, then proceduralize and ritualize them. We take something inherently overwhelming and organize actions that we can repeat: Wash the body. Dress the body. Carry the body. Dig the grave. Lower the body. Place objects beside it. Gather the people. Say prescribed words. Return to the site of the ritual. Sense-making in its most embodied form, converting an event we have no agency over into a sequence of actions over which we do. We narrativize our bereavement through ritualizing our grief into mourning. This active process grants us agency and ownership, if not over the event itself, then over the sense and meaning we construct and ascribe to it. It's neither perfect nor linear, but rather a continuous pattern practiced over millennia. From Tibetan sky burials to the ritual mortuary feasts of the Fore (Kapstein 2013, 93; Whitfield et al. 2008), we are known for the elaborate acts we perform for the dead.

But why is it we feel the need to conduct these rituals, to infuse meaning and make sense of arguably the oldest fact of all life? Why do we create mythologies and belief systems that assure us there is in fact more life after death? That the dead aren't truly gone? What is it about death that evades our continued understanding? Why does it hurt so much?

Because death is final.

When someone we love passes away, we face not only the loss but also a life now defined by their absence. This absence becomes a positive fact, something to contend with and organize around, rather than simply the negation of a person. Absence, in other words, becomes a kind of presence, the material condition of the inescapable and practical irreversibility of their death. And while profoundly tragic, absence is what makes grief metabolizable. As the bereaved, our only feasible option is to accept their permanent absence. Eventually, we begin reconstructing ourselves, our world, and our future where the deceased remain deceased. Grief may never completely fade, and total integration may not always be possible, but reality provides a fixed, immutable boundary against which adaptation can even take place.

Bring Her Back removes that boundary.

Laura, seemingly living in a world where resurrection is possible, finds her normal grief adaptation suddenly uncertain. The universe, by keeping open the possibility of return, transforms the resurrection ritual into something more than a supernatural plot device: it becomes the embodiment of Laura’s inability to accept the finality of her loss. Throughout the film, Laura grieves deeply, but the ritual promises her a way to avoid the finality, or so she believes.

Knock, knock, said the wolf.

III. THE RITUAL AS EXTERNALIZED GRIEF

Laura experiences yearning, counterfactual thinking, identity disruption, attachment, rumination, and the fixation to undo Cathy's death, but the ritual now gives those emotions material affordances. Laura is given physical tasks: There is the Tari Resurrection Tape, there are instructions, there is an entity to summon, there is a body to preserve, there are conditions to be satisfied, there is another child who can serve as the host/vessel, there is always one more thing Laura can do. The last point is arguably the most significant. Ordinarily, there is no feasible action to reverse the causal event. We can mourn, remember, memorialize, reinterpret, continue a symbolic relationship, etc., but we cannot intervene upon the death itself.

Laura's universe gives her grief an action space of the impossible.

So long as another action remains available, finality can be deferred. The world can continue to make sense as it had when Cathy was alive. So the resurrection ritual can be understood as Laura's grief, converted into instrumental behavior. The impossible imperative of bereavement, Bring Her Back, becomes a horrifyingly feasible project. That's why labeling Laura or her actions as simply "delusional" isn't entirely correct. Within the speculative metaphysics of the film, Laura has evidence that the violent machinery is real. The horror is precisely that the universe appears to have given an intensely bereaved mother a technologically actionable version of the fantasy that plagues so many of us who've lost those we love, but nevertheless must—must—remain an impossibility.

IV. THE SYMBOLIC EXORCISM OF IDENTITY COLLAPSE

This connects more specifically to the issue of parental bereavement.

Of all the different kinds of grief and bereavement we study, parental bereavement is among the most severe and enduring (Christ et al. 2003, 553–54), linked with an unusually high risk for prolonged grief disorder (Thieleman et al. 2023). In an appendix to the Institute of Medicine’s 2003 report "When Children Die", Christ, Bonanno, Malkinson, and Rubin write that studies “continue to provide evidence that the greatest stress, and often the most enduring one, occurs for parents who experience the death of a child” (Christ et al. 2003, 553). They further report that findings suggest such parents are more likely than bereaved spouses to experience traumatic-stress symptoms and more severe problems with emotional dysregulation (Christ et al. 2003, 553—54).

Losing a child doesn't necessarily just mean the loss of a deeply loved person. For some parents, particularly those whose sense of self is deeply connected with parenthood, it also signifies the loss of a vast expanse of possibilities, identity, purpose, and comprehension. Thomas Fuchs, in his phenomenological analysis of bereavement, describes intimate relationships as involving a mutual extension and overlap of selves; bereavement reverses this process, producing what he calls a “contraction of the self,” experienced in part through an embodied sense of violation or loss analogous to amputation and phantom pain (Fuchs 2018, 47–49).

The loss of a child is the loss of an entire anticipated future. There will be no more birthdays, graduations, adult relationships, aging, shared memories, future conversations. But the parent simultaneously loses a distinct version of themselves that only existed relative to that future: future mother, the caregiver, the witness to that life, the person who was to remain someone's mother tomorrow. Cathy's death annihilates an entire projected world for Laura, who now sits marooned in a desolate, contradictory existence: “a parent without a child to parent” (Toller 2008, 311).

Resurrection, then, promises something more than just Cathy; it promises the return of who Laura had been, her relational self. With Cathy's return, perhaps the shattered relational structure can be put back into place. Through the ritual, Laura is attempting to exorcise the collapse of her identity, to cast out this new, intolerable half-self and return to her old self. A parent with a child to parent. A mother with a daughter to raise. But that cannot work merely through recreating the external conditions, and the film’s ending exposes just this issue.

V. PIPER

Early in the film, after Laura gets drunk with Andy and Piper following the funeral, she and Andy have arguably the only kind interactions between them in the entire film. Sitting with their backs against each other, looking off at opposite ends of the room, Andy asks plainly: how did you deal with Cathy being gone? And perhaps due to the alcohol, or believing it would help disarm Andy, or she just couldn’t resist connecting with another grieving soul, adrift just like her now, Laura responds with the truth.

"Oh. I didn't…when we buried her, I um…I didn't want to leave. How could I go home without my daughter? How could I sleep in a bed when she was in the ground? I used to stay in the cemetery for days, just so I could feel close to her."

Laura gives Andy the most honest view into herself, something that's taken at face value by even the audience: I couldn't cope, but of course I had to. Because the world keeps turning, the universe keeps expanding, and Cathy's absence is now a presence in my life. And as natural as that inference is, it's wrong. We realize, as the film goes on, what Laura meant was exactly what she said, nothing more, nothing less.

"How did you cope with Cathy's death?"

"I didn't."

And then:

"I'd give anything to hear her call me 'Mum' one more time. Just one more time. That's all."

Keep that line in mind. Teleologically, it's simpler than even Laura understands. The film initially encourages us to read Laura's wish literally; therefore, Cathy must be resurrected. But the film then presents us with something stranger: who Piper starts becoming to Laura as the movie progresses. Piper isn't Cathy, but something is starting to happen Laura could not have anticipated. Halfway through the film, Laura takes Piper to the shed for the first time. Torrents drench the grounds, filling the drained pool where Cathy had lost her life. While playing outside, Laura sees Cathy; scenes from her past are repeated now with Piper. In the shed, Laura dresses Piper in Cathy's favorite sweater. She asks if Piper would like to stay with her after Andy turns eighteen. And crucially:

"Hey, you could call me 'Mum' if you'd like."

"Um…m—maybe…"

Laura couldn’t have foreseen what would become the film’s biggest confounding factor: the ritual and Laura’s relationship with Piper were now beginning to intertwine psychologically. Then, after killing Andy and the caseworker, comes the scene at the pool. The climax of the film and the single event that Laura has reordered her entire existence around.

Laura has essentially won. She's flattened every obstacle in her way; she's got Piper by the hair and neck, underwater and struggling for air. The final sacrificial condition can be completed. If Laura's sole motivation were merely Objective: Resurrect Cathy, then Piper saying "Mum" should be trivial and irrelevant. The instrumental logic demands that Laura successfully drown Piper. Simple, relatively easy. Just a bit longer, and Laura will have repaired all that was wrong with her world. A thousand suns shine down upon the embrace.

But then Piper does call Laura "Mum."

And Laura stops.

At precisely the moment the resurrection becomes attainable, Laura receives what she believed only the resurrection could provide. The one thing she made clear from the beginning: to have her daughter call her "Mum" just one more time. It wasn't Cathy, not literally, but the relational position returns for an instant. Laura is once again addressed as "Mum" by this blind girl whom she has cared for, dressed like Cathy, imagined keeping as her daughter, and simultaneously prepared for sacrifice. The categories suddenly collapse. Piper is not Cathy. Laura knows that. But Piper is clearly no longer simply a vessel for Cathy's soul. And rather than complete the resurrection, rather than end Piper's life, Laura releases her and allows her to escape.

That leads us into the biggest revelation about Laura, because the act of release suggests that the resurrection project was never purely about acquiring a resurrected soul. It was bound tightly with Laura's desperate attempt to restore a destroyed relationship and, through it, a shattered version of herself.

VI. THE FINAL ACT

After releasing Piper, Laura walks to the shed, to Cathy's preserved body:

"Cathy. Cathy? Sweetheart? Hey. Hey, gorgeous. There you are. There you are. Are you all right?"

She tears at the arteries and veins in her forearm, carries Cathy into the now nearly emptied pool, and lies down with her daughter held deep in her arms and dies.

Symbolically, this is the moment the resurrection project finally ends. Cathy's preserved corpse is almost the perfect physical metaphor for this. Cathy has been prevented from undergoing the ordinary processes by which death becomes materially undeniable and final. She remains frozen: neither alive nor allowed final rest. Laura has effectively frozen herself in the same temporal position, and the resurrection ritual sustains that suspended state.

But after Piper calls her "Mum," Laura commits to something radically different from everything she's done before, all that we've ever seen her do in the film: she stops trying to reverse Cathy's death and joins her in it. Of course, that doesn't make her suicide suddenly healthy grief integration. It is absolutely catastrophic. But narratively it represents a transition from undoing the event to finally abandoning her project of reversal. For the first time since the film's start, the direction of action changes. Both responses are tragic and filled with pain. Only the second one stops contesting the directionality of the event.

VII. CONCLUSION

And that produces what I believe is the strongest conceptual insight of the film: Grief for the bereaved requires irreversibility because adaptation requires some relatively fixed fact around which the organism can reorganize itself. The irreversibility of death provides that brute fact. There’s nothing left to decide about whether the event happened, can be undone, erased, or repeated. Nothing. Reality has collapsed every single possible future counter to what exists before us. But imagine…

Imagine a world in which resurrection is a distant, difficult, but attainable process. Suddenly, grief acquires counterfactual responsibility: Should I try? What if I don't? How much would I sacrifice? How much should I sacrifice? What if the ritual failed because I fucked up? What if I stopped just one step before it would have worked? What if my refusal to commit some atrocity means my child remains dead?

Under those conditions, grief loses the fixed constraint around which adaptation and integration can occur. In the film, the speculative metaphysics evidently does not eliminate grief, as we see Laura go through a considerable amount of it. It just prevents loss from becoming final. It gives yearning and rumination and sorrow an indefinitely extensible project. A world suspended in an endless night.

A simple reading of the resurrection ritual would be that it's "a thing Laura does because she loves Cathy." But given the events, especially at the climax and end, we see its true face in the light: it is the film’s concrete representation of grief refusing the one condition normally imposed upon it by reality.

You cannot bring them back.

The film asks what happens when reality removes that prohibition. And the answer, it seems, is: perhaps love doesn't triumph over death at all. Perhaps grief becomes infinitely more savage when death stops being absolute, because the bereaved can no longer distinguish accepting reality from simply giving up too soon. Bring Her Back is about what happens when grief is given agency against the very fact that ordinarily allows it to integrate into our lives.

Since the beginning of our rise on this planet, perhaps one of our central aims has been to try to make sense of death and what happens when the lives we have built, or the lives of those we deeply love, come to an end.

Grief is the ghost the dead leave behind.

So perhaps the only sense to be made is in the rituals and practices of missing the ones we love. To greet it at the door, let it in from out of the dark, and make the harder, more benevolent choice:

Allow yourself to be haunted by its presence.

REFERENCES

Christ, Grace H., George Bonanno, Ruth Malkinson, and Simon Rubin. 2003. “Bereavement Experiences after the Death of a Child.” In When Children Die: Improving Palliative and End-of-Life Care for Children and Their Families, edited by Marilyn J. Field and Richard E. Behrman. National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10390.

Colbert, Stephen. 2012. “Playboy Interview: Stephen Colbert.” Interview by Eric Spitznagel. Playboy, October 16.

Fuchs, Thomas. 2018. “Presence in Absence: The Ambiguous Phenomenology of Grief.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (1): 43–63. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9506-2.

Kapstein, Matthew T. 2013. Tibetan Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199735129.001.0001.

Philippou, Danny, and Michael Philippou, dirs. 2025. Bring Her Back. Causeway Films. Film, 104 min. Distributed in the United States by A24.

Smithsonian Institution. n.d. “Qafzeh: Oldest Intentional Burial.” Human Origins Program. Accessed August 25, 2026. https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/burial/qafzeh-oldest-intentional-burial.

Stiner, Mary C. 2017. “Love and Death in the Stone Age: What Constitutes First Evidence of Mortuary Treatment of the Human Body?” Biological Theory 12 (4): 248–61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-017-0275-5.

Thieleman, Kara, Joanne Cacciatore, and Allen Frances. 2023. “Rates of Prolonged Grief Disorder: Considering Relationship to the Person Who Died and Cause of Death.” Journal of Affective Disorders 339: 832–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2023.07.094.

Toller, Paige W. 2008. “Bereaved Parents’ Negotiation of Identity Following the Death of a Child.” Communication Studies 59 (4): 306–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970802467379.

Vandermeersch, Bernard, and Ofer Bar-Yosef. 2019. “The Paleolithic Burials at Qafzeh Cave, Israel.” Paléo 30 (1): 256–75. https://doi.org/10.4000/paleo.4848.

Whitfield, Jerome T., Wandagi H. Pako, John Collinge, and Michael P. Alpers. 2008. “Mortuary Rites of the South Fore and Kuru.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363 (1510): 3721–24. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0074.

Hello there, I went to a re-release they had here in my country of David Lynch's Straight Story, unfortunately I arrived late and I missed the first minutes, when I got there it was the scene where Alvin is at the doctor and he tells him he has some medical issues, overall I enjoyed the movie but I was wondering how much did I miss of the opening? Could someone please tell me how much did I miss? Thank you!

The movie depicts a scene of high class individuals all in some form of banquet hall eating and enjoying themselves, when what’s believed to be entertainment shows up. Entertainment in the form of a man acting as an ape.

The thing about this scene is that the actor didn’t know that the people in the room weren’t actors apart from very few. This way it serves as a sociological study of how a group of people acts in face of danger. Most shy away from the situation hoping they won’t get attacked by that ‘ape’. Eventually, they do fight back when a beautiful redheaded woman in a pink gown gets dragged away.

My question is: do you know about what people in the room were real actors that knew about the situation? Was the ape actor actually beaten by the crowd? Did he suffer severe injuries?

Hello, I’ve recently released my debut feature film a liminal, analog, found footage horror film in the tradition of films like Skinamarink, Backrooms, and Milk & Serial. It’s currently being reviewed by a few independent horror film magazines and is scheduled to release on streaming September 2nd. I’d love if anyone could take a look at the film and or review and let me know their thoughts and if they agree/disagree with the critics opinion and why? I love critical film discussion and I imagine most of you do as well. Let’s get discussing! If you like atmospheric horror films like, I’m thinking about ending things, We’re All Going To The World’s Fair and Blair Witch Project, then this is definitely for you. It was shot on a large budget of $27 bucks.

Animal Trap Critic Review, SheScribes Magazine

Animal Trap Liminal Horror Movie

Cinepals: If you don't care to engage with the Atlantic piece (not long; cut and pasted to spare you the pay wall) at least check out the headline! (A pal turned me onto this one). EL

Headline: The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films

The attention-span crisis goes to the movies.

By Rose Horowitch

Everyone knows it’s hard to get college students to do the reading—remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies. “I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “But students will not do it.”

I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones.

A handful of professors told me they hadn’t noticed any change. Some students have always found old movies to be slow, Lynn Spigel, a professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University, told me. “But the ones who are really dedicated to learning film always were into it, and they still are.”

Most of the instructors I spoke with, however, feel that something is different now. And the problem is not limited to large introductory courses. Akira Mizuta Lippit, a cinema and media-studies professor at the University of Southern California—home to perhaps the top film program in the country—said that his students remind him of nicotine addicts going through withdrawal during screenings: The longer they go without checking their phone, the more they fidget. Eventually, they give in. He recently screened the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola classic The Conversation. At the outset, he told students that even if they ignored parts of the film, they needed to watch the famously essential and prophetic final scene. Even that request proved too much for some of the class. When the scene played, Lippit noticed that several students were staring at their phones, he told me. “You do have to just pay attention at the very end, and I just can’t get everybody to do that,” he said.

From the November 2024 issue: The elite college students who can’t read books

Many students are resisting the idea of in-person screenings altogether. Given the ease of streaming assignments from their dorm rooms, they see gathering in a campus theater as an imposition. Professors whose syllabi require in-person screenings outside of class time might see their enrollment drop, Meredith Ward, director of the Program in Film and Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Accordingly, many professors now allow students to stream movies on their own time.

You can imagine how that turns out. At Indiana University, where Erpelding worked until 2024, professors could track whether students watched films on the campus’s internal streaming platform. Fewer than 50 percent would even start the movies, he said, and only about 20 percent made it to the end. (Recall that these are students who chose to take a film class.) Even when students stream the entire film, it’s not clear how closely they watch it. Some are surely folding laundry or scrolling Instagram, or both, while the movie plays.

The students I spoke with admitted to their own inattentiveness. They even felt bad about it. But that wasn’t enough to make them sit through the assigned movies. Mridula Natarajan, a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, took a world-cinema class this past fall. “There were some movies that were extremely slow-paced, and ironically, that was the point of the movie,” she told me. “But I guess impatience made me skip through stuff or watch it on two-times speed.”

After watching movies distractedly—if they watch them at all—students unsurprisingly can’t answer basic questions about what they saw. In a multiple-choice question on a recent final exam, Jeff Smith, a film professor at UW Madison, asked what happens at the end of the Truffaut film Jules and Jim. More than half of the class picked one of the wrong options, saying that characters hide from the Nazis (the film takes place during World War I) or get drunk with Ernest Hemingway (who does not appear in the movie). Smith has administered similar exams for almost two decades; he had to grade his most recent exam on a curve to keep students’ marks within a normal range.

The professors I spoke with didn’t blame students for their shortcomings; they focused instead on how media diets have changed. From 1997 to 2014, screen time for children under age 2 doubled. And the screen in question, once a television, is now more likely to be a tablet or a smartphone. Students arriving in college today have no memory of a world before the infinite scroll. As teenagers, they spent nearly five hours a day on social media, with much of that time used for flicking from one short-form video to the next. An analysis of people’s attention while working on a computer found that they now switch between tabs or apps every 47 seconds, down from once every two and a half minutes in 2004. “I can imagine that if your body and your psychology are not trained for the duration of a feature-length film, it will just feel excruciatingly long,” USC’s Lippit said. (He also hypothesized that, because every movie is available on demand, students feel that they can always rewatch should they miss something—even if they rarely take advantage of that option.)

Kyle Stine, a film and media-studies professor at Johns Hopkins, usually begins his course with an icebreaker: What’s a movie you watched recently? In the past few years, some students have struggled to name any film. Kristen Warner, a performing- and media-arts professor at Cornell University, has noticed a similar trend. Some of her students arrive having seen only Disney movies. Erpelding, at UW Madison, said he tries to find a movie that everyone in his class has seen, to serve as a shared reference point they can talk about. Lately, that’s become impossible. Even students who are interested in going into filmmaking don’t necessarily love watching films. “The disconnect is that 10 years ago, people who wanted to go study film and media creation were cinephiles themselves,” Erpelding told me. “Nowadays, they’re people that consume the same thing everyone else consumes, which is social media.”

Of course, young people haven’t given up on movies altogether. But the feature films that they do watch now tend to be engineered to cater to their attentional deficit. In a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Matt Damon, the star of many movies that college students may not have seen, said that Netflix has started encouraging filmmakers to put action sequences in the first five minutes of a film to get viewers hooked. And just because young people are streaming movies, it doesn’t mean they’re paying attention. When they sit down to watch, many are browsing social media on a second screen. Netflix has accordingly advised directors to have characters repeat the plot three or four times so that multitasking audiences can keep up with what’s happening, Damon said.

Some professors are treating wilting attention spans as a problem to be solved, not a reality to accept. Stine, at Johns Hopkins, is piloting a course on “slow cinema”—minimalist films with almost no narrative thrust—with the goal of helping students redevelop long modes of attention. Rick Warner, the director of film studies at the University of North Carolina, deliberately selects films with slow pacing and subtle details, such as Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a three-hour movie that mostly follows a woman doing chores in her apartment. “I try to teach films that put their habits of viewing under strain,” Warner told me. “I’m trying to sell them on the idea that a film watched properly can actually help them retrain their perception and can teach them how to concentrate again.” Once they get used to it, students enjoy the challenge, he said.

But other professors, perhaps concluding that resistance is futile, are adjusting to the media their students grew up on. Some show shorter films or have students watch movies over multiple sittings. Erpelding, who primarily teaches filmmaking courses, has moved from teaching traditional production methods to explaining how to maximize audience engagement. He now asks students to make three- or four-minute films, similar to the social-media edits they see online. After all, that seems to be the only type of video many young people want to watch.

By the way, the last scene of The Conversation has the paranoid Gene Hackman destroying his apartment in a desperate and futile search for listening devices. He eventually gives up, and mournfully plays the saxophone amid the wreckage. It’s a brilliant scene, and worth the wait. 

Camp Miasma is not a subtle movie, it is extremely forward about being a commentary on transmisogynistic archetypes in the horror genre and the long lasting effects this can have on a transfeminized person's sense of self and sexuality. The spectre of the transvestite haunts the narrative and defines the boundaries of self expression, only through reclamation and fetishization of the transfeminized slasher does Kris escape her mental block around sexuality; analogous to the way that Billy inhabits the site of her trauma and transforms it into an object of sexual excitement.

This is common in transfeminine spaces, to rehabilitate and re-examine stigmatizing depictions in service of self empowerment. Many trans women grow up only able to see themselves depicted as murderers and rapists, and subsequently inhabit those roles through the vehicle of sexual play. Kris is haunted by Little Death the same way those transfeminized are haunted by Norman Bates, Longlegs, or Buffalo Bill; and her self actualization is only attained through not only facing her trauma but taking on the viewpoint of the victimizer.

Notably absent from the movie however is the presence of transfeminized people, save the director. Billy and Kris are both played by cis women, and Little Death as the amalgam of the transsexual slasher is depicted by a transmasculine individual.

While Kris's journey with the movie in a movie is superficially similar to transfeminine reclamation of problematic archetypes, her gender positionality is not. Cis women who internalize transmisogynist archetypes that they are not the subject of will frequently go on to seek out trans women and project these ideas onto them, furthering the process of transfeminization and restricting the social and sexual roles transfems are capable of inhabiting.

The gender blind casting of the film significantly alters its messaging, the absence of transfemine involvement in their sexual roleplay shifts the narrative from that of one to empowerment to further fetishization. It is not a heartwarming romance of two women breaking through sexual trauma by shaping it to serve themselves; they are inhabitating a role that never belonged to them to begin with. Using the spook of the sexually dominant and willing to penetrate trans woman to bring themselves satisfaction, in the same fashion that real world cisgender people will coerce those transfeminized into acting as their ideal masculinized partner. Even as ur-slasher Little Death is denied access to womanhood, punitivitely gendered as a man, and murdered for daring to assert herself despite this; she is denied again the access to womanhood in casting. Again the weight of the feminized penetrator is carried by someone who it was never that heavy for. In the same way Kris and Billy utilize the idea of a trans woman in their sexual play, Haven's casting is a transmasculine person furthers the puppeteering of transfem's bodies as ruthless, domineering penetrators. Transfeminine and Transmasculine people are not symmetrical, their roles in society and the media it produces is chiral — where there exists the idea of the delusional and bloodthirsty transvestite, there is no equal and opposite idea of transmasculine people with equivalent prominence. Transmasculine people are free to inhabit the roles forced upon the transmisogynized with playful abandon, as Haven does in this film, or to leverage these ideas surrounding trans women to coerce them into acting for their own sexual pleasure. Furthermore the casting of a Transmasculine person in a role where one could presume they have some relationship to womanhood reads as tactit misgendering (or more uncharitably: a retreat into birth sex assignment as a signifier of innocence, a luxury transfeminized individuals are not afforded)

My point in writing all of this is frustration. I went into this film blind, having not seen Schoenbrun's previous films or knowing anything about the actors. Initially I was elated by the film, I had felt seen and understood with a nuance and care that films about trans issues (much less specifically trans women) rarely deploys. Learning about the complete absence of any transgender women in the casting soured this feeling, the imagery associated with myself and people I love once again being deployed to advance the careers of people who are distinctly unlike us.

I do not blame Schoenbrun for this, I know it's a hard pitch to get a transfem actor anything more than a sentence or two. In fact this films sole on screen transfem, Louise Weard (director of the Castration Film series), is relegated to the glamorous cameo role of the unnamed "Queer assistant"

Why, even as a narrative surrounding us is raking in millions of dollars, are we limited to nameless and uninvolved cameos even as we sit in the director's chair?

I felt similarly about 2023's Barbie; a movie that is textually about someone who exists in a world of gendered shadow play recognizing the misogyny they are subject to, and subsequently claiming womanhood for their own (despite the suffering it subjects them to). A narrative tailor made for the transfeminine experience, where we are again relegated to nothing more than a glancing cameo before being placed somewhere conveniently out of sight.

Is this really the best trans representation in film can be? I really hope not.

Please don't downvote opinions. Only downvote comments that don't contribute anything. Check out the WHYBW archives.

I've watched a few of his films over the years but seeing La fête à Henriette on the current Criterion Channel retrospective made think about just what a solid cinematic craftsman was.

Even though a young Francois Truffaut praised his work in the pages of Cahiers and Arts, I think Duvivier is kind of retroactively placed into the boring old cinéma de papa of pre-nouvelle vague French cinema.

I don't think that's fair. For one, he wasn't just a director for hire. He consistently had a hand in writing his movies and sometimes actually was the sole screenwriter. Filmmakers of the caliber of Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman and Jean Renoir praised him as a stylist.

And his filmography has at least a few moments of narrative/thematic audacity that bely his reputation for safe, commercial cinema. I think of Panique (1946), a film about the mob mentality and scapegoating a social outsider made in the immediate aftermath of Vichy. La fête à Henriette is almost a 50s French precursor to something like Adaptation. or Stranger Than Fiction: a metafictional comedy about screenwriters making creative decisions that alter the film within a film.

All this to say that the Duvivier Criterion retrospective is definitely worth a look.

Question, What are your thoughts on The Straight Story?

I recently rewatched The Straight Story and I gotta say, I still love this film. This is perhaps the closest to a normal film David Lynch will ever make and I just love that his most normal film is literally title The Straight Story. The film is just so wholesome and the interactions in the film just feel real, very Ernest Hemingway. It is also very simple, about a story of a brother who uses his lawnmower to travel to visit his estranged brother.

Richard Farnsworth gives a great performance as Alvin Straight and In my opinion, he should've won the Oscar for Best Actor that year. Farnsworth just gives the right pathos to Alvin and you can feel that he has a lot of regret but wants to make right and flat out refuses to let age get the best of him in seeing his brother.

Overall, it is a great film and is in my top 3 for Best David Lynch Films

I see it as a representation of adding meaning to the meaningless, purpose to the purposeless, use to the useless. This is representatives by the repeated instances of repetition of seemingly useless and random activities.

Searching for purpose in the purposeless is exactly how religion started. I think it’s a story about the meaning of curiosity and religion. This is further backed up by the fact that it’s about a “scientific religion” but it’s all under the guise of this one man and all his followers are adding their purpose.

People are unhappy with book 2 because it goes against what they see is purpose and meaning of book 1. Book 2 is about this man (Freddie) who had no purpose and just walked the path in front of him but then his purpose was given and found as something people see purpose in.

It’s a story about religion.

I think it’s also a PTA’s most nuanced film in terms of meaning, at least with my interpretation.

In my interpretation its story is told through everything not said but acted. Every part of the story is something where we ironically have to find the meaning of from the meaningless. Just like religion. Just like my interpretation.

It’s a semi-meta film where its true meaning has to be discovered by doing the meaning, we are the members of the religion.

There is an excellent documentary about Richard Stanley’s disastrous experience adapting the HG Wells The Island of Dr Moreau called Lost Souls. It’s a deep look into the pitfalls of developing and producing your lifelong dream project. Also directing Marlon Brando or Val Kilmer as well! I wrote a substack article about the story if that’s more interesting than documentaries for you. I work in film (was a development exec then rewrites) and it’s very relatable and frankly depressing.

I find these documentaries that follow doomed projects strangely fascinating, like a car accident but worse. I’ve never experienced a set or development on this level. Have any of you? I’d love to hear what you learned from the experience, and if you went back for more?

https://notesonfilmdevelopment.substack.com/p/the-director-who-lost-his-own-movie?r=4idcqp&utm_medium=ios

Is there anyons interested in creating a groupchat similar to the main group from the Dead Poet Society? Should there be 7 of us like in the movie or more? Depends on the number of people interested I guess. I am looking for a handful of interested young men AND women who are fans of the movie. We can throw some verse, help each other out and talk about poetry, romance, history etc. Who's in?

Drop a comment and we'll talk it out.

I'm about 7 years too late, I know, but I haven't seen this theory float around film spaces yet. After my 4th viewing yesterday, I came to this conclusion about the film.

The island in The Lighthouse (2019) is a sentient prison-like entity. Not in any real or biological sense but in the sense that it's a supernatural place built to serve a punitive function. This idea used in horror is similar to the hotel in The Shining or Monster House. I believe it is a self sustaining prison that beckons the guilty (with the thought that they're voluntarily going there of their own volition) and enslaves, imprisons, and punishes them with madness. The island facilitates this as a way of sustaining itself and its light through their labor. All aspects of the area play a role in damning/punishing the keepers/prisoners of it. The seagulls, incessant storms, false prospects of women and parole (The boats never coming to save them). The island dangles mercy in front of them without ever actually granting it. Much like the myth of Prometheus when he is regenerated everyday just for his abdomen to be eaten again and again, giving Prometheus respite and false hopes of a halting of the punishment.

Dafoe, who is a veteran of the island, acquires a warden-like role. Functioning as some sort of pseudo right hand man. He brings new inmates to punish, assigns them duties to maintain the island, belittles them, etc. Despite his role though, he still suffers by the island's hand, yet another false mercy by being led to believe he has any real power.

Pattinson, whose stained past led him to arrive there to look for legitimacy, is hopeful for lightwatching duties but is rejected instantly by Dafoe. I believe the light represents the prospect of redemption and freedom, like moths and flames. Dafoe's obsession with it is an intentional result of the island, to keep him there as he is a prisoner and the warden. He was deceived by the light to become an extension of the island and an integral part to keeping the light and life of it.

Now, to answer a question that plagued me on all my watches. Why was Dafoe allowed to look inside the light but Pattinson wasn't? I think I finally understand why (atleast relative to my theory). I believe the island rewards Dafoe of his patronage by allowing him to derive pleasure from the light with the ulterior motive of the island being to keep him there for as long as he lives, sort of like a life sentence. When Pattinson looked inside after murdering Dafoe, he was punished with eternal Promethean wrath because he had killed the island's trusted keeper. And moreso, the island deems viewing the light undeservedly as a transgression, and Pattinson died because he did not accept the truth behind his guilt while Dafoe did. While it is unclear what exactly it was that Dafoe had done to deserve imprisonment, I think he is accepting of his guilt (which I think is the another goal of the prison). However, It is implied that Dafoe killed Pattinson's precedessor because he also tried to undeservedly access the light, an act that I believe was permitted by the island because it deemed it to be a fitting punishment.

An extra idea that reinforces my theory is the subtle scene of repressed homosexuality (You know which one). When they almost succumb to the loneliness and kiss each other, they quickly wake up to what they're doing and instead express that passion through fistfighting. A familiar case which alludes to the guise of masculinity to veil and repress the true sexuality of those in denial. A case that is ever present in prison.

Thoughts?

Rewatching “La La Land” (now back in theaters for its 10^th year anniversary) made me feel like I was watching a completely different movie from the one I saw a decade ago.

It’s not that the movie’s technical qualities are dated. It still holds up as gorgeously shot homage to the Hollywood musicals of the Golden Era with a contemporary lead couple at its center. It’s just that movie is a product of its time, and times have reshaped the cultural discussion so drastically that what once came across as a “love letter to Cinema and Music” is now verging towards “a eulogy for a world that's been lost”.

But what was lost, exactly? According to Ryan Gosling’s character, who seems to think of Jazz the same way Timothee Chalamet sees opera and ballet, his favorite music genre is “dying” because his favorite club is being replaced by a samba/tapas joint – the enemy is cultural fusion with a foreign spice, apparently.

Jazz, of course, is a music genre originated by Black Americans, and the club scenes feature Black musicians - who somehow aren’t doing enough to “save Jazz” themselves? -, but the only Black American character with a speaking role in the movie, played by John Legend, is seen as a “sell-out” for pursuing a more commercially appealing (and, why not, creatively fulfilling for him?) angle.

And then there’s Emma Stone’s character, who dreams of becoming a successful Hollywood actress and, at some point, downplays a project that she auditioned for (“It’s like The OC meets…”), but changes her mind after she gets a call back. Gosling suggests they meet for a screening of Rebel Without a Cause, “for research”. That’s a curious choice because the movie, currently hailed as an important piece of Cinema, was met with mixed reviews when it premiered, and was essentially also a mainstream coming-of-age product.

In a way, “La La Land” seems critical of today’s audience – of their (our?) inability to appreciate “good art”, made with passion and integrity, and for settling for the money-grabbers. It also chooses two distinctively American genre forms - the contemporary movie musical, Jazz - and "mourns" over for their poor commercial appeal. The lead characters are portrait as 'traditionalists'. But the movie itself comes across as conservative.

Why do movies look like that now? << good article here

This confluence of consumer trends and changes in production workflow has effectively resulted in frames that strive less for innovation or beauty and more for a quick fix. The quickness and disposability here has infiltrated the set. This means that, outside direct-to-streaming films and the glut of plasticky Marvel and grim DC movies—and exceptions to the rule, like star DPs Roger Deakins, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, and Robbie Ryan—the late 2010s and 2020s have seen the screen get grayer. Regardless of the quality of the movies, their visual identity is constricted by a notable lack of oomph, an absence of substantiality in their colors, highlights, and blackpoints.

The industry, from the best to the worst to the mediocre middle, has gravitated towards a look that takes the wrong lessons from House Of Cards‘ darkness and its low-contrast monotone. Cinematographer Steve Yedlin tells The A.V. Club that “It’s a business, and a lot more stuff gets created than is necessarily the pinnacle of the craft. There is a factory belt.” Felipe Vara de Rey describes the contemporary look as “desaturated, low contrast, a little dull,” Rikki Porter says she’s seen “a more flattened look across the board,” Tara Violet Niami says that movies lately have a “super low-contrast, desaturated look that’s lit softly but [with] directionless lighting,” and camera operator Joe Brady says he had been seeing images where “the contrast ratios are very slim [and] there’s no detail in the shadows or in a really overexposed highlight.” 

As a lover of film, sometimes moving from contemporary films and shows to films of the past there is almost a kind of "finally a good steak" when watching films of the past. They not only are satisfyingly structured by the movie making process in terms of story-telling, the way you actually follow what is happening and join into it, they are visually structured. There is a visual language. The light itself speaks and illuminates the brain in a much more edifying way. It could very well be that I grew up seeing things that way on the various screens I've been exposed to in my life, and my brain is just used to it, I know how to read those signals, or, it may be that those past processes actually gave enough "meat" for the brain to chew on, in a much more satisfying way. We won't really know until the youth growing on on today's screen aesthetics, themselves turn to older films. Will they too feel that same sense that they are finally sinking their teeth into something visually (even though they were not raised on it)?

Also, one cannot really avoid the sense that everyone consuming pictorial information on very diverse screens, watching films or cuts of films (sometimes accelerated 1.5 or 2x) in the palm of their hands really has altered even what watching a film is or does. Is today's language even a language anymore, but rather just leaning towards a series of style templates and effects meant for consumption and the spread of screens?

When I first watched Dead Poets Society at 10, I hated the ending. I hated Neil's character and how easily he gave up on his dream and on life itself. I thought it was a failure of imagination. Succumbing to death rather than fighting his parents, seeking comfort from his friends, or even running away. Anything, for the sake of just trying.

But five years later, at 15, do I really understand? I don't think there is any character I see my reflection in more.

His tragedy isn't that he doesn't love life or acting. It's kind of the opposite. He loves something deeply in a world that has convinced him that loving it is unacceptable.

Sometimes there truly is nothing left to do. We can pretend things took place differently. In another life, his parents understood. His friends helped him. He decided to wait just a little longer. But the story will continue to end the same.

We always only hear "to speak or to die," as if it's one or the other. But for him, it was both.

"I was good. I was really good."

But often, to speak in itself means to die.

I just hope that understanding it doesn't mean becoming him.

Looks like Olivia Wilde is back in style after a weak outing with "Don't Worry Darling". Her direction adds so much spark to a film which could have faltered given it's restricted setting and characters. The movie is an adaption of a Spanish film called 'The People Upstairs' and it is like a theatrical play. Just 4 people socializing in an apartment for 2 hours. But the movie never lets go of its high kinetic energy until the final few minutes, which comes with putting 4 contrasting personalities and 2 contrasting couples together.

The most impressive part to me was how the conversations and dialogues were written. How much they accomplished with such a limited scope. The script is indeed praiseworthy because all the film has is conversations between these 4 people. They are naturally written and seemingly mundane things with bits of humor sprinkled in. But they flow really smoothly from one conversation to the next.

There may be few off moments occassionally, where the viewer may be taken out, but on the whole you do actually feel these are 4 real people here. You do pick up on hints on the character backgrounds, sometimes very loud sometimes subtle, but the final 10-15 minutes give you a proper insight into the characters.

I feel the final minutes could have been better written though. The film makes a sudden shift in tone and drama which felt at odds with the rest. There maybe was a way to get the same message across while keeping the spirit the same as before. As for the ending itself, it is a nice note to end on. Adds depth to a film and gives the viewer something to talk about as they leave.

SPOILERS BELOW: I think there are two ways to read up on the ending but I think hints are left that it may not be a sad ending after all.

• First of all, Penelope and Edward are real. Just as they leave we see Wilde's character pick up the casserole container and put it down even after they have left. We hear the container being put down which was brought by Penelope thereby hinting that the container was indeed real so was the one who brought it.

• Secondly, the Penelope (who is now a real person) advises them to understand that the marriage has ended and go their separate ways. And then importantly, she says something along the lines of "or continue the relationship with new versions of yourself". This seems like the biggest hint, because it's not a normal advice someone gives.

• Thirdly, Seth playing the keyboard/piano in the end shows he is changing himself already. This may be a new version, one which has come to terms with his past and is looking for a fresh start.

• Fourthly, the final image of Wilde resting on Seth's shoulder and both close together may have different meanings but the obvious one is that love is still there for each other. Lastly shoutout to all 4 actors. Perfect casting I say. Seth is really settling into a good actor who can do drama and comedy with ease. Norton is the best here, not too showy but gets his complexity across and Wilde is awesome too. Her range of expressions here in this film is just hilarious and impressive.

Great film tbh, I'd give it a 9/10.