The appeal of rallying behind Coyote vs. Acme at this precise moment is obvious. Via Donald Trump, we are getting a daily example of what happens when executive leadership pursued solely for its own sake is allowed to run (duck) amuck, and observing a secondary example via the white-collar-workplace AI push. By deciding to bury the film for a tax write-off, David Zaslav aligned himself with the forces busily ruining the republic, among some of the least likable “RESPECT MY AUTHORITAH” Americans on display. His decision was disrespectful and greedy, but also just stupid (and terrible, terrible optics: this is the only movie I’ve ever seen where the studio logo got booed at the beginning and end). We’ll see what the movie’s commercial potential is, but it’s hard not to imagine that parents won’t be grateful for a children’s film that doesn’t actively make them want to die and that won’t degrade their kids with alternating “just be yourself” messaging and farting animals.

Coyote is a huge improvement over the other Zaslav-nixed Looney Tunes reboot, The Day the Earth Blew Up, a dismal Daffy-and-Porky-vs.-aliens affair that bizarrely kept all the other Looney mainstays out of sight and devolved into Lessons On Friendship. At this point, my main memory is the deployment of “It’s The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” during a scene where the ’toons face off against the invaders, which is both an astonishingly lazy/hacky joke (not even a joke, more a call to nostalgia for parents) and a reminder of the power of corporate synergy, since WB also owns most of R.E.M.’s catalogue. How touching. [EDIT: via email, a correction. “Warner Music Group despite the name is not related at all to Warner Bros anymore. It got sold off during the AOL merger era, so now it's an entirely independently operated company. I'm sure there are relationships there that make this stuff easy and maybe include some sweetheart deals, but it's technically not cross-utilization.”]

Coyote gets all the major ’toons in for at least a brief moment (Pepé Le Pew’s return lasts maybe all of two seconds for a killer gag that neatly internalizes all the Discourse around him.) Acme as Amazon doesn’t really develop metaphorically in any way beyond me writing that clause, though the film does potentially present Wile as a medical guinea pig, in the same way that pharmaceutical companies release new drugs with bare-minimum FDA testing and pivot their intended use after the public’s found out the hard way.

But that’s a lot of weight to place on what is a best-case children’s film which lovingly puts Wile through the expected wringer in its opening stretches before launching into a plot which, for once, is actually not bad at all.2 (Also, the live-action and animation compositing in widescreen looks and sounds great.) In interviews, screenwriter Samy Burch has insisted a little too much that this isn’t really her sole script but instead very much a group effort, which a) welcome to comedy b) this is exponentially better than her two filmed scripts so far, May December and Late Fame, so dilution is the way. Despite my bafflement at her career so far, I have to give the script a lot of credit for figuring out how to finesse the relationship between Wile and the Roadrunner. That the film would soften their bond into something like friendship is inevitable; the specific way it does it, however, lands surprisingly deftly. (I suppose we’ll have to wait for public domain to see the S&M version.) No oversell intended here, but the first 20 minutes is destined to be the hardest I’ve laughed all year.

*******

Two more quick hits: I’ve been beating the drum for It Ends for about two years now, beginning when I profiled writer-dictor Alex Ullom in 2024: it’s fresh, it’s funny, it’s a rare sign of Amerindie life. That the movie has taken so long to come out since its SXSW premiere last year may work in its commercial favor, insofar as it can now boast the advertising enticement “From the producer of Backrooms” and align itself with the rise of zoomer liminal horror. So, my only important note: this is not a horror movie, but a movie pretending to be a horror movie for 20 minutes before repeatedly changing shape; the question “what is this?” doesn’t get answered for a long time. But the title is a good-faith promise: the movie does end in a definite way.

Also recommended: How to Divorce During the War, a black comedy that answers a question I’d never thought to ask: “How did the Ukrainian invasion affect their Lithuanian neighbors?” After four years of Ukraine docs so thick on the ground I had to stop watching them, here’s a fresh perspective whose ethical complexity nearly operates at the high level of I May Destroy You. (Also, if your parents’ brains have been rotted by conservative cable news, the film will be cathartic.) It was my pleasure to dedicated last Friday almost entirely to the film, recording a commentary track with director Andrius Blaževičius (my first!) and then moderating that night’s Q&A.

First up: David Ehrlich asked me if I had anything to contribute to Indiewire’s “Sequels Week” and generously gave me the unsupervised scope to just go and do some granular interviews with craftspeople as is my wont. In this case, I talked to actor Alex Winter, costume designers Alex Kavanagh and Luis Sequira and graphic designer Teddy Blanks. Here’s one of my favorite bits, Kavanagh explaining the complicated afterlife of one of her wardrobe sets:

After “Land,” Kavanagh returned for the lower-budgeted final installments, “Diary of the Dead” and “Survival of the Dead.” “On ‘Land,’ we had zombified a huge stock of clothing for all the background and stunts,” she noted. “At the end we sold it to a local company that was starting a costume rental house. When we went to do ‘Diary,’ there was such a tiny budget I didn’t know how we were going to do the bigger scenes, but I was able to get back the whole stock from ‘Land’ (it had been in storage and never used), which I sent back at the end of filming—and was able to get again for ‘Survival.’ So, if anyone looked closely, there are some of the same clothes on the zombies in all three films. That stock then went to ‘Resident Evil 5.’”

That whole piece is here.

Next up, an interview with Isabelle Huppert, who objectively has to be one of the most famous people I’ve interviewed, as celebrities are generally not in my wheelhouse. The prompt was the recently-completed retrospective at L’Alliance New York of six of her seven features with Claude Chabrol. This also gave me an excuse to watch or rewatch six of them myself, which was hugely gratifying. (A big big thanks to Jake Perlin, L’Alliance’s programmer, for making this all happen.) Here’s some of that:

When we shot Violette, we didn’t shoot in the studio; we shot in a very small apartment in the 15th arrondissement in an old building. He would always say something funny: “It’s not so difficult to find where to put the camera, because there is only one possible place,” meaning that the space was so narrow. That’s how he would define his choices, in terms of where to put the camera: There is only one possible place. The angle was obvious because there was no choice to make between two angles.

He wrote a book called No Matter What, I Shoot. [The 1976 book’s title is et pourtant je tourne…, which translates as And Yet I Keep Turning—a translated pun on Galileo’s Italian statement “E pur si muove” about the earth: “And yet it moves!”] That was a good summary of Chabrol’s attitude regarding moviemaking. He had to shoot, to work, to make movies. He was perfectly aware that certain ones were better than others, and he didn’t have this pretension of being a genius each time. But he had to shoot and make movies no matter what. I would have made more films with him if he had not left us so quickly.

That whole piece is here.

Lastly: not a new piece, but one whose time has come back around. For my last print issue of Filmmaker, I interviewed Gregg Araki and the team behind the new 4K restoration of Mysterious Skin, which is beginning its theatrical run today. It was a lot of fun to get into those particular weeds, as this is definitely not a purist restoration. The beginning of that:

Toward the end of my interview with Gregg Araki, I remind him of his scene from Michael Almereyda and Amy Hobby’s 1995 documentary At Sundance. Sitting on a couch next to Todd Haynes, Araki is at that year’s festival with The Doom Generation. “The first draft of Doom was done when The Living End premiered at Sundance in 1992” he says. “The hard part is always the money and the financing, and it gets worse, and worse and worse [….] I hate the fact that you write, you make a movie, it’s fresh and what you want to say and urgent. It’s your thing. And then, three-and-a-half years later, you’re talking about it in interviews like this.” Araki laughs when I ask whether anything has changed in terms of production time and difficulty level: “My new movie is fucking never-ending. All movies are like that. Look at Mysterious Skin: that movie was [more than] 20 years ago, and I’m still working on it.”

And the whole piece here.

One more thing on the latter: when converting the article for online, I chose to not also include the last three pages of the issue, which are compare/contrast examples of Skin before and after the restoration, in part because I understood the kind of message board chaos that would ensue when nerds see these types image and take to the internet and didn’t want to inflict that on any of the team. But it seems safe to sneak one image in here now that the film is meaningfully back out in the world, so here’s the last page of my final issue:

Also, a reminder that I have a food map with all these restaurants and all I’ve previously written up on there.

Guobaorou

As much value as I get out of Robert Sietsema and Eating in Translation, it’s satisfying to find something for myself. After doing some kind of weird fugue-state trawl through Yelp, I arrived with companions for my first Flushing meal of the year at this dongbei restaurant. The restaurant’s name comes from the signature sweet and sour pork dish, satisfying here with a not-cloying sauce, with more breading than meat, which seems to throw some people off but we all liked it.

An intriguing anomaly here are the dongbei cold noodles, which arrive resembling a cold Korean-Uzbek soup more than anything—how did this end up here?

Both are worth ordering, but the consensus highlight was a cumin squid; as a friend observed, the tentacle to body proportions was right on.

Also, here’s a weird sign, with its Google Translation following:

Hotspots for romantic encounters

You have entered an area where romantic encounters frequently occur; please safeguard your alluring photos.

Proceed at your own risk—and prepare for some flirtation.

Wouldn’t really say it’s that kind of spot, but optimism springs eternal.

Old Captain Dumplings + Long Island Dumplings

In my very first newsletter—nearly three years ago, while employed, aieeee—I wrote about Flushing’s Old Captain Dumplings as a purveyor of lamb-and-onion dumplings. But it’s also worth noting that they are the sole purveyor in the city that I know of to offer fish dumplings, also available frozen, which are quite good; you don’t feel as guilty about indulging when the filling is whitefish. But now there’s some competition at Long Island Dumplings, the unfortunately named establishment on Sixth Avenue. They now offer whitefish shumai (above), and to be honest they’re not great, with an avoidable blandness. However: they’ve also started offering what I believe is an in-house novelty, black pepper dumplings (below), and those are actually quite good, as tender and flavorful as you might wish. Everything is steamed to order, so budget your time accordingly.

You Fu Happy Breakfast

“Did you see this on social media?” a man asked when I walked in and, to my shame, I had to admit the truth: though my companion for the afternoon outing had clocked the place while walking past, I immediately dialed up the video in question in my head. Shame! But useful, I guess. This place went quasi-viral for its oyster pancakes, which are $3 and do not skimp on said oysters. Deep-frying briny molluscs is never going to be my favorite way to go about eating them, but this is a pretty solid taste nonetheless.

Gui Zhou Miao Jia

Judging by the name, what we have here is a very rare NYC entry in Miao cuisine, which I first had in LA at Hengry. Highly underrated. You’re here for item #16, Gui Zhou Spicy Chicken Soup Vermicelli (below, left). I wouldn’t be able to tell you what this actually signifies, but I can say that this broth has some of the deepest chicken taste I’ve gotten in a while from a soup I haven’t personally made, and that the sour-spicy profile on this is pretty great. Authentic, I don’t know, but who really cares? Tastes great. The chicken feet here are weak but that’s OK, you’ll be full anyway.

Juqi

One of my most reliable food guides is the estimable Elissa Suh, who brought a group of us here with the promise that this is probably the best peking duck in the city. I love duck, which is quite possibly my favorite innocent animal to eat, but I’ve never had a peking duck that convinced me this was superior to a normal roast duck. But when Elissa speaks, I listen—and indeed, this is a top-notch presentation, with expertly rendered skin separated from the flesh. Because the new school of Chinese restaurants is very social media-aware, you can also get a fried rice, which is flashy: as if the squid ink dye weren’t enough, after the column is put on the table the lights go out, the servers light their gloves on fire and then send it up in quick-lasting flames. Looks great, tastes whatever.

Much more impressive on the “camera eats first” front are the litchi shrimp balls: dyed red, otherwise texturally immaculate, coated in puffed rice and a real treat.

The menu is huge and I’d cheerfully come back to sample such exotica as wasabi duck feet. The space is also quite delightful, located as it is on the basement level of a multi-story mall whose design—tall, with a big skylight in the center, half-Guggenheim floors swirling around it—and the placement of stores took me straight back to the malls of Thailand or a higher-end Japanese mall, spaces from which this clearly swiped some DNA. It’s worth a trip just for the evocative atmosphere; sometimes a mall is not just a mall.

“The Odyssey was shot and finished on film”—an unusual line for the end credits scroll of a studio production, one almost certainly attesting to Christopher Nolan’s ongoing mutual-admiration society with British visual artist Tacita Dean. Both are avid celluloid loyalists who have spoken together on the medium’s irreplaceability at multiple Kodak events; he credits her with teaching him the term “medium specificity,” and it’s improbable that the coinage “finished,” most often heard in the realm of experimental film, snuck in any other way. Both have pushed beyond standard film usages: there’s not such a world of difference between the instinct that led to Dean’s 2011 installation FILM—which projects a 35mm loop on a 42-foot screen—and Nolan’s nearly two-decade quest to normalize IMAX. The shared goal, on some level, is to overwhelm with scale in service of highlighting the stock itself.

The full review’s here, and you better believe someone on Twitter already told me I don’t know what I’m talking about (which is sad, because I wrote the review just for him). For another perspective from someone with a classical education who can do the comparative mythology work, I refer you to Ali Arikan.

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Some of you may recall that I’ve been beating this Nolan-Dean connection into the ground for a while now, most recently in my LA culture diary where I took in the Bruce Conner show (whose last day is tomorrow—Angelenos, take note). In fact, I liked the show so much that I went back and talked to Douglas Fogle, the curator behind it, as well as Conner’s former assistant and current estate manager Michelle Silva. That piece was my first for e-flux, and I was pleasantly surprised that it seemed to have made a pretty substantial footprint, with the kind of engagement that I normally only get when I write about something on the scale of…The Odyssey. That begins thus:

In 2018, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened “3D: Double Vision,” an extensive survey of the medium that included a room dedicated to exhibiting scenes from 3D films. When I visited, that space was packed with students on a high school field trip enjoying scenes from Avatar (2009) and Hugo (2011). But then came a snippet of Goodbye to Language (2014). As a man and woman spoke in dense Godardian maxims, an audible murmur of discontent rippled through the previously placid teens—a whispering sound that signaled, roughly, “What is this bullshit?” Before anyone had a chance to get really riled up came the film’s signature shot, in which two cameras switch sides, invigorating violence to the image and to spectators’ eyeballs. The energy immediately changed: Jean-Luc Godard had suddenly won over an entire group of teens he almost certainly never intended to reach. It was groundbreaking, hard art reaching unlikely converts, the kind of moment that could change a young person’s perception forever.

Full piece is here. By pleasing coincidence, the Marciano’s next exhibition will be Dean’s aforementioned FILM.

Back to the beach!

Now then.

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Maybe four months before Toy Story came out, I saw the first still and was confused. It was a variant of this:

At the time, the asphalt and trees registered as photorealistic (this is obviously no longer true). The rest looked like the worst animation I’d ever seen, if it looked like anything at all; my brain literally couldn’t comprehend part of what I was seeing. When the movie came out, it all made sense by the end, but acceptance was a lot to process—partly the shock of the new, partly because I was, you know, nine.

We are now 31 years into the Toy Story regime and no such further visual resets are expected. What’s happening now is analogous to what an Apple Store employee once told me in a philosophical mood: two decades ago each new laptop could offer entirely new features and programs, now the latest model basically just runs a little faster. Thus with Toy Story 5, which at $250 million is the most expensive Pixar feature to date and boasts the kind of technological refinements that need to be explained in great detail to register as impressive to the layman: the amount of work it takes to make 50 Buzz Lightyears all run simultaneously and plausibility in the same frame, the complexities of rendering curly hair with photorealism. We are in the realm of incremental gains which I can kind of see but would probably need to be a specialist to truly appreciate.

I take VFX supervisor Thomas Jordan at his word that the film doesn’t use AI, but only in the sense that he expects to be understood—i.e., that the film doesn’t feature any AI-generated imagery. (Jordan: “We have done experiments with it, but so far nothing lives up to the standards or expectations that we have for the quality of our films.”) However, I don’t for a second believe that the film’s production and post processes didn’t integrate any AI tech—in part because this stuff is everywhere across the pipeline, which studios are trying to prevent the public from learning about, but also because that would go a long way to explaining why this is $50 million more expensive than its predecessor. See, for example, this description of the new lighting software used:

Pixar first used Luna, the new lighting tool, for a half-dozen interior shots on Hoppers, then expanded its use to two exterior sequences on Toy Story 5. With Luna, lighting artists can work across multiple shots at once. When they adjust the position of the sun in one shot, for example, they immediately see the effect ripple across a grid of shots. “We like to take a measured approach with new technology and give the tools team feedback,” Thomas Jordan, Visual Effects Supervisor, says.

That sounds exactly like AI to me, complete with the scaling-up timeline and feedback-adjustment time.

In Toy Story 5, the enemies are (generic-brand) iPhones and iPads which suck up children’s attention and turn them into cyber-bullies. The tech threat enters Buzz Lightyear’s bedroom via a tablet named Lilypad (voiced by Greta Lee), who immediately diverts Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) from her beloved toys and into screentime hypnosis. Toy Story 5’s mission is to drive her back to the joys of playtime and creativity, which manifest as Bonnie fantasizing elaborate multi-genre comedy mash-ups from familiar archetypes. This is totally OK (because she is a child) and presented as an obviously laudable imagination-flexing alternative to anti-social screentime, but it’s also the vision that many AI boosters share online whenever they mash up five celebrities in heaven—the toys-in-the-sandbox mentality of childhood rebranded as adult creativity.

When the toys accuse Lilypad of not listening to them, she proves she was by reading back their speech (which they didn’t know was being recorded), then immediately reads it out again in Spanish and as a rap song. It’s a good bit about AI generating tons of useless and unasked-for content, even if the tech is never once named in the text. But inevitably, the analog toys make their peace with the digital tool, who herself wants Bonnie to be happy and, realizing that her methods are incorrect, trains herself in a different direction. Agentic learning curve! AI techvangelists are currently busily trying to convince anyone who will (be forced to) listen that this tech isn’t being trained to replace us but merely to make our working lives more satisfying, and that (a phrase that appears in multiple close variants) “ultimately, control returns to the human.” Toy Story 5 mirrors this journey of acceptance, with toy and tablet uniting to synergize their learnings.

Nostalgia is inevitably a driver here, and I definitely noticed that, after the 50-Buzz-opener, an establishing shot labeled “A long time ago” slapped a big layer of fake 35mm grain on top to drive it home. I also noticed that some of the exterior “shots” mirror the most maddening contemporary visual trend of applying lenses that go fuzzy around the edges (a tic that arose from live-action DPs wanted to muddy up the too-clean images of digital sensors), as if to firmly ground us in the now. All that observed, I’m not going to pretend that I had a bad time watching Toy Story 5, which is funnier and fleeter of foot than the last two, looks better than 90% of live-action studio movies and delivered pretty much exactly what I would expect: I shed a Pavlovian tear as Sheriff Woody (Tom Hanks) reunited with Buzz (Tim Allen) and “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” entered the musical chat. Because neither I nor most of my friends have children, I also found the film surprisingly educational: I’ve seen kids zoned out on tablets playing nightmare hyper-speed stimuli all over the subway, but the toilet-training tech given voice by Conan O’Brien was news to me. (Also, I’m amused that the millennial dad here has vague Ben Gibbard vibes.) And I do think it’s kind of ridiculous for me to both pay $17 to watch Toy Story 5 and then complain that it’s the latest installment of a cash-draining franchise whose sentimentality and convictions will end precisely the moment the revenue drops down. I knew what I was signing up for!

But I can’t stop myself: there’s a game to be played here about what the specific metatextual anxiety of each movie’s iteration of “playtime is over” means. Toy Story 3 could be seen as fear of children aging out and leaving the franchise behind, while Toy Story 4 struck me as a tribute to the gig economy, with Woody and Buzz pinch-hitters for a succession of children who don’t believe they deserve job stability. Maybe another anxiety percolates here: isn’t the potential revenue from games smaller than the terrific volume of money to be made from toy merchandise? I know video games are big business, but that still strikes me as plausible when there are so many toys to manufacture and comparatively so few games that can be extrapolated from any one property. If the screens take over, the toy manufacturers lose and so does Disney. The real threat isn’t screentime per se; it’s the loss of ancillary revenue.

[Edit: not a smoking gun, but funny to find this Pixar press release from, presumably, 2017 (based on the Cars 3 reference), which they would probably never, ever put out now, on using AI to accelerate rendering.]

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If I weren’t in D.C. for the first time since the pandemic, I would probably be at the Museum of the Moving Image tonight to rewatch a De Palma peak, Body Double. I am, however, there in spirit, as I wrote about the film for Reverse Shot, my first time at that august publication in a good while. Michael Koresky remains a ferociously good editor (and De Palma expert), and I benefitted keenly from his attentive approach while revisiting this personal favorite through the lens of Susan Dworkin’s extremely good making-of book Double De Palma. I found this volume at LA’s excellent Illiad Bookstore, which is particularly distinguished by its Hollywood-centric collection of film books; if a B-list character actor wrote a memoir, it is almost guaranteed to be there. Double De Palma is a detailed dispatch from the period after Louis B. Mayer’s death and the death of his star-image micromanaging but before that spirit came roaring viciously back in the form of a billion publicists and crafted talking points almost as good as such gold standards as John Gregory Dunne’s a-year-at-Fox chronicle The Studio and Bob Balaban’s set diaries from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I paid $35 for this book, which I didn’t know existed beforehand, and considered it worth every penny, not least because it came with a glossy printed still of this less-than-flattering photo of De Palma on set with Melanie Griffith:

Here’s the start of my piece:

“It’s a good script. It’s not gonna save the world. I mean, it doesn’t have eighty-five messages pasted on it. But it shows a side of Los Angeles, and it’s gonna be entertaining.”

As indicated by that not particularly overwhelmed evaluation from Joe Napolitano, Brian De Palma’s’s first AD from Blow Out to The Untouchables, deeming Body Double (1984) one of his peaks is largely a retroactive estimation. That quote opens Susan Dworkin’s book-length making-of chronicle from the time, Double De Palma: A Film Study with Brian De Palma, which captures in granular detail both the workings of a mid-size studio ’80s crew and how De Palma made use of it. As she documents, his penchant for improvisation and incorporating suggestions made for a more flexible vision than suggested by his aesthetically airtight camera drifts, meticulous storyboarding, and rigorous formalism.

One more interview that fell through the cracks a little: at Visions du Réel, I interviewed João Dumans about his new film The Night and the Days of Miguel Burnier. Dumans is probably best-known as the co-director of 2017’s Araby. Here’s the opening of that:

DOCUMENTARY: You’re from the area. Did you always have a desire to make a film about it, or did this come about because of events with the mining company?

JOÃO DUMANS: I live in Ouro Preto, but it has lots of small districts and I live in the central part. The city has a history with colonization. The Portuguese came in 1500. In the 18th century, they extracted a great deal of gold from Ouro Preto; this gold went to Portugal and financed the Industrial Revolution. The city is marked by this heritage. Nowadays it’s a tourist city: people go there to visit, eat in the restaurants, see the monuments and museum. But actually, this story continued in the small districts—the theme of land extraction is a permanent question in the place where I live, [the state of] Minas Gerais. This has become a more serious issue since the 2000s, when we in Brazil began to intensify mining activities. More recently, we experienced two massive mining-related disasters, one in Brumadinho, the other in Mariana. Both are next to the place where I live.

I’ve lived between Belo Horizonte and Ouro Preto for 42 years but never been to Miguel Burnier. I went for the first time because someone said in a Q&A of Araby that the film reminded him of Miguel Burnier and I said, “Fuck, I’ve never visited this place.” When I arrived, I was struck by how the factory had taken over the area. There was a security booth there. I asked: “Where is the Miguel Burnier district?” And the guard asked me: “Which district? There is no district here.” That answer made me make the film. The people working at the factory didn’t know they were in the district; to them, the district no longer existed. I said, “I have to start filming things to try to help.”

And now to walk and celebrate the 22 Trump-restored fountains.

Even for ardent champions, “who was Richard Fleischer in an artistic sense” remains a vexed question. Setting up the Cinémathèque’s 2006 retro, Jacques Lourcelles (via Google Translate, sorry) hedged by presenting him as “the gifted director who, in each of the genres in which he distinguished himself (and God knows there were many!), sought, consciously or unconsciously, but always with the same paradoxical humility, to create the most accomplished, the most astonishing, the most inventive, the most definitive film.” “Consciously or unconsciously” buys a lot of evasion room; Jason A. Ney’s new biography, Richard Fleischer: Journeyman, helps flesh out how much self-consciousness was involved. More than I thought! (The book’s publication appears to be the prompt for the retro; all quotes are from there, minus one exception noted below.)

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Early in his career, Fleischer was crippled by self-doubt after finishing 1949’s The Clay Pigeon. Upon watching it, he “was suddenly overwhelmed by the fact that anybody could have made this picture. It was done in the most conventional way possible—long shot, two over-shoulder shots, two close-ups, and bang, the scene was done.” Looking back, he identified this as a turning point: “I vowed that if I got the chance to make another picture, I’d break all my previous rules about how a picture should be shot, and not just do it for the budget and the schedule.” But by the late-60s New Hollywood shift, Fleischer’s pigeonholing as, at best, a ready-to-compromise Hollywood hired hand was set in American stone, in part because of his thematic promiscuity. It was a reputation of which he was aware, not terribly happy about and worked on redirecting in a flattering way. “I enjoy directing a large-scale epic just as much as I do a small, introspective melodrama or psychological drama,” he said while doing press for The Last Run. “In a way, I suppose I’m like the general public. They like all kinds of stories and so do I. […] It would be terrible to limit oneself to making the same kinds of films over and over under different titles. I look for diversity in film subject matter.”

A cheerfully “entertainment’s just entertainment and damn the reviews”-minded hack Fleischer was not; he made sure to both make enough money for his family and tried to not capitulate to producers on every single thing, in which he was as successful as anyone could be. But to make the case for Fleischer via thematic unity is virtually impossible; even his disproportionate number of serial killer movies, framed from a strong and explicit anti-capital-punishment viewpoint, is not enough to clarify his other interests or redefine the surrounding work.

Three unifying characteristics pop out for me. One is a fairly consistent preference for using a musical score sporadically, if at all: non-diagetic music’s conspicuous presence-through-absence unites disparate works like 1952’s peak noir The Narrow Margin, the first half of 1966’s sci-fi spectacular Fantastic Voyage, all of 1968’s The Boston Strangler and much of 1983’s Amityville 3-D—surely one of the quietest horror films of the ’80s until, like a Marvel film confronting studio-mandated inevitability, the finale explodes into meaningless noise.

Ney notes this aversion but either can’t find a quote to explain it or didn’t include one (the bio is so thorough that my money’s on the former). I like to imagine Fleischer’s antipathy towards scores grew from his first feature, 1946’s Child of Divorce, which is as simple, straightforward and maudlin as its title. In some ways, it’s a rare treat to see a movie as bad as this in a pristine 35mm print, the better to gawk at well-shot, thoroughly overplayed pathos, triple-underlined at every possible juncture by Leigh Harline’s wretched score; certainly there’s nothing as egregious as this sonic crutch in Fleischer’s other movies that I’ve seen, in which music is more often a bridging accent or even something like comic relief. Cf. The Last Run (at my screening of which we were joined by Paul Schrader), in which Jerry Goldsmith’s faux-Euro score is irregularly used for gorgeous Spanish countryside shots, as if to remind us that what we’re seeing is pretty, before getting back to the music-free business of suspense and existential woe.

Secondly, there’s Fleischer’s varying sense of verisimilitude. From early on, he preferred shooting on location for exteriors, filming deep in residential Hollywood for 1949’s Trapped or outside Wrigley Field for 1950’s Armored Car Heist, but also sometimes for interiors; cf. his plan to shoot in a real attorney general’s office for The Boston Strangler, which led to a tense meeting as documented in John Gregory Dunne’s a-year-at-20th-Century-Fox chronicle The Studio:

[Production manager and producer Lewis “Doc”] Merman blanched when he saw the scene was going to be shot on location. “It’s an interior,” he said. “Why not build a set and shoot it here?”

“No,” Fleischer said. “You don’t get the same feeling, the desk, the chairs, the mementos.”

“We can take pictures,” Merman said strenuously. “Duplicate it here.”

“Uh-uh,” Fleischer said.

“When do you expect to use this office?” Merman said. “When the attorney general’s out taking a leak in the men’s room?”

“On a Saturday,” Fleischer said. […]

“Saturday is double time. You build a set here, you’re saving money.”

“Let’s spend it,” Fleischer said.

There’s a regular clash in Fleischer’s work between clearly-real exteriors and equally-clearly studio-lit interiors. This can be productive: The Boston Strangler is generally/rightly considered a Fleischer peak, and one of the things that makes it pop is the tension between the real daylight streets and the classically-lit, largely highly stylized and (attorney general’s office notwithstanding) extremely soundstage-bound interiors, as if New Hollywood and Old Hollywood were slugging it out scene by alternate scene. That latter reading is, of course, my imposition rather than intended, but the moments when Fleischer turned off his desire for reality are still odd and striking, as if he simply didn’t realize how great the gap between scenes could be.

Lastly, there’s Fleischer’s long-master-shot default style, which starts early and consistently unifies his work. Ney locates an origin story for that in a 1971 interview where Fleischer looks back at 1949’s The Clay Pigeon:

I had a shoot-up to do the next day, I just had one day to do it, and I hadn’t done my homework. [Editor] Elmo [Williams] invited me out to dinner and said, “There are fifty set-ups in that day’s work, and the way you are going, you cannot possibly do it in a day.” Later that night, after dinner, he took me to the studios, and we walked around the deserted set. And then he showed me exactly how, with careful planning and working out every angle so we never had to move unnecessarily, it would be possible to do the day’s work in a day.

It’s worth remembering that severe arthouse cinema with master-shot tendencies can, in part, be considered a cost-effective strategy as well as an aesthetic one: the fewer shots you have, the fewer lighting resets and so-on. Perhaps what unites Fleischer’s work with the arthouse is his preference for leaning into that mode for both reasons; that seems to be how I ended up here.

I’m now 19 features into the Fleischer filmography. Film Forum’s retro continues through Thursday and, of what remains to screen that I’ve seen, I recommend the obvious titles: The Narrow Margin, The Boston Strangler and Barabbas (a valued discovery and reference point for Scorsese while making The Last Temptation of Christ). And I finally get to see what Bonello’s talking about re: See No Evil on Wednesday.

Unusually, I’ve been to two hypebeast pizza places on two consecutive Fridays. Generally speaking, my patience for lines and/or onerous Resy reload roulette is low; I would always rather wait until it’s easier to get into a place I’m interested in (although it’s a fine line between “reasonably easy to get into” and “abruptly going out of business”). But two Fridays ago, I had a birthday party to go to in Bushwick, which is kind of a drag transit-time wise. When there, I like to max out my value, so I gathered a troupe of fellow attendees beforehand at Lucky Charlie. I knew that the place was both hot and walk-in only, which is a tricky proposition; you want to show up before the rest of your party to hopefully whittle down the wait when they arrive, but not too early lest there’s an empty table and you can’t put your name down for later. I guess the latter possibility isn’t a problem here after all: I got there at 5:45, everyone else at 6:15, then we waited for 50 minutes on the sidewalk, per the guidance provided, instead of perching at the bar across the street, which would have been fine if we had known what the real wait time would be.

Tempers, though not flaring, were definitely not sanguine by the time we got in. The coal oven pizzas come out very fast, and both the white pie (which we got with sausage and mushroom) and classic pie (with not-enough nduja—those are the little dark patches—and peppers) were very strong. The salad has a weirdly unzippy, bland dressing, and the place is mobbed to a degree that you can tell is hard for the staff to keep up with. Our four-top only had room for one pie at a time, because—bizarrely—this is a place that hasn’t invested in a bi-level pizza stand, causing weird table-top problems. The food was good! But I would not say you need to stand and fume indefinitely to access it.

Last Friday, I went to Pizza Studio Tamaki, which is apparently even harder to get into; I had inherited a reservation from a friend who, having more patience for this type of game than me, had then unfortunately been sent to Buffalo on business. It had opened two days before and, judging by my feeds, apparently every single food critic and Instagram influencer in NYC was there; I haven’t seen such a crush of opinions sent in one direction since Barbie came out. PST is a Tokyo-originated restaurant widely touted as “some of the best pizza in the world,” so it’s not a surprise that the Instagram crowd was blown away; that’s what they’re there for. Robert Sietsema, on the other hand, wrote an oddly querulous review, as if in preemptive pushback on a restaurant not a week old. I get the instinct (boy, do I!), but it was still strange to read his complaints: that the pizza topped with smoked mozzarella was dominated by that taste (yes, and?); that he wished the new location made use of distinctive Japanese ingredients as at the original (do you feel like paying $53 for a pizza?); that there was too much olive oil on the broccoli, to a degree that felt wasteful.

I don’t know what was going on with the olive oil levels his night, but they were within the boundaries of ecologically responsible EVOO usage on my evening. The broccoli was pretty good, the octopus appetizer simply bad: thin, tough pieces of octopus sashimi getting outclassed by the celery it’s paired with.

The pizzas are good! The more standard signature house pie with the aforementioned smoked mozzarella tastes like…smoked mozzarella, yup. It also comes with grape tomatoes on top, blistered from the oven, which you’re advised to cut into immediately, which is good advice and adds an oddly pleasing layer of liquidy texture. The Bismarck is basically a sausage and mushroom pie with an egg on top which it melds well. The most distinctive thing about both pizzas is the pleasingly intense saltiness of their crust—but just the crust, not the rest of the dough. Since no finishing salt crystals are visible, my dining companion hypothesized that they add salt to the crust after letting the dough rise but before baking. Would I ruin my life for this pizza/do I think it’s some of the “best in the world”? Neither/nor; I’ve never had a Neapolitan pie that reached transcendence. (A nice thin-crust tavern style is closer to my ideal.) But it is very good, and saying it’s just flatly underwhelming is trying a little too hard to resist the obvious.

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I’m not in Cannes this year, but David Ehrlich was nice enough to assign me one review to keep my hand in, of Lisandro Alonso’s La libertad doble (the English-language poster goes with the clumsier “Double Freedom”). I sense Lynchian affinities; here’s the review.

I also published my write-up of this year’s edition of Visions du Réel, the Swiss art-friendly non-fiction festival I’ve been viewing the lineups of since 2020. Because this is already getting long, I’ll skip the long excerpt on that and add on my interview with Nikolaus Geyrhalter, whose work I have been watching for 21 years now. The end of this one is a fine way to end here as well:

D: Do you think your films have gotten funnier over time? I feel like they might have.

NG: Are they?

D: I mean, Melt is funnier than Our Daily Bread, right?

NG: Yeah, maybe. Our Daily Bread is so way back for me.

D: Well, it was the first of your films that I saw and at the time I was thinking of it in the framework of you, Michael Glawogger and Ulrich Seidl—all filmmakers that are kind of funny in their way, but humor is not necessarily the primary goal.

NG: It’s true. Ulrich Seidl was really influential for me and Michael. This kind of Austrian documentary cinema was very new when Ulrich invented it, then Michael and me followed. We were never working together, but we were always seen as a trio doing a similar aesthetic thing.

D: Do you think that was accurate?

NG: Yes, it was. When I did my very first movie, I was 22 years old, very much influenced by Ulrich Seidl and shot it on 16mm with a wide-angle lens. In the end, I even called him and talked to him: “Sorry, you don’t know me, but I just made a film which really looks like a film of yours. I hope you don’t mind.” And he was totally nice: “No, it’s great. Come on.” Since then we know each other. And then, it was a coincidence that when I was shooting The Year After Dayton, I had to buy another camera. The film business in Austria is not so big, and I accidentally bought the camera on which his previous films were shot, with the same lens. I shot two more films with the same camera and wide-angle lens. Of course, the rhythm is similar, but it didn’t matter. I think the way that we appeared on the international market, as an unspoken trademark, made the position of the three of us altogether stronger.

It’s clear Soderbergh has no problem being very direct when it suits him, so what’s going on with The Christophers? Two main dialectics underpin the relationship between elderly painter Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) and his brand-new assistant Lori Butler (Michaela Coel). The more obvious one is the ontologically vexing, irresolvable question of What Makes Art Art. Lori has been hired by Julian’s children to forge completed versions of his titular unfinished series of paintings. A Blonde Redhead album proposed that Fake Can Be Just as Good as Real; the movie wonders if that is true. Obviously, this has implications for filmmaking—traditionally the product of multiple voices, of which Soderbergh has tried to eliminate as many as technically and fiscally possible by being his own DP, editor and returning to working within his own production apparatus after doing studio and streamer time. When does collaboration yield rich synthesis and when does it just cross over into dilution?

I don’t know that the film really does anything with this question other than gesturing vaguely in various familiar directions, though it’s an enticing proposition probably because it can never be resolved—art is mysterious! I’m more frustrated by The Christophers’ other evasions. The main attraction is the odd couple duo of Julian and Lori—old vs. young, white vs. black, posh establishment vs. scrappy up-and-comer, politically regressive vs. progressive—but nothing really comes of these frictions. It’s implied that Julian was canceled for saying various objectionable things, although we never really learn what those are, save that he was on a reality TV show where he was the Simon Cowell member of the panel. Doling out rude, ostensibly witty insults to young artists isn’t really getting MeToo’d, or even the equivalent of Hito Steyerl’s pro-Zionist sentiments, which should surely also scan as a red flag to Lori.

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Lori once admired Julian’s work but has since come to cancel him from her own aesthetic canon, and—towards the very end—we learn why that really happened: a piece of backstory gives them a connection that began earlier than Julian realized. I find this exasperating, as it turns out Lori can’t have just an intellectual and aesthetic aversion to Julian—sure, the political is personal, but this almost implies that the political could only be personal. I need a zoomer-vs.-boomer ideological throwdown like I need a third Trump administration—but OK, if we’re going to do this, shouldn’t we try to flesh out what that might actually mean, what the stakes are and how they could be higher than personal beef? Come back TÁR, all is forgiven.

An obligatory note here that both leads are tremendous and worth the price of admission; McKellan hasn’t looked this dialed-in in years, while Coel is a personal favorite from one of my rare forays into recent TV, I May Destroy You (one of my favorite title uses of the conditional tense). While Soderbergh is 100% a more competent DP than similar apparatus-eliminator Hong Sang-soo, his current lens kit is driving me off the wall, super-blurry around the edges and kind of bizarrely ugly for no particular reason. Finally, a spoiler: as I understand it, for some time now Soderbergh has been coming up with ideas or situations, then giving him to a small stable of screenwriters to flesh out. I can’t help but note that this is the second film he’s made under that model, after 2020’s (delightful) Let Them All Talk, where an older artist who’s quarreled with previously close friends befriends a young admirer, then dies. This is either a symbolic baton-passing or something a little more maudlin; I’m not sure which.

I’ll have a dispatch proper at MUBI Notebook soonish, along with interviews with Nikolaus Geyrhalter and João Dumans at Documentary Magazine. But, of course, there’s viewing that doesn’t fit any of those write-ups. This year’s VdR includes a sidebar tribute to Sergei Loznitsa, and I attended two programs of short/medium-length deep cuts. These included his first film, 1996’s Today We are Going to Build a House, co-directed with one Marat Magambetov. With its long shots and clearly dubbed-in sound, it suggests both the master visuals of Loznitsa’s mature verite and narrative modes and the foley’d-in sound of his archival efforts; the man was clear on what he wanted from the get-go. The twist here are songs performed by Estonian musical group Kukerpillid, occasionally quite lushly arranged and which I would love to be able to access again.

Novelty rarity viewing aside, the film that popped out at me was the final one, 2003’s Landscape, less for what it is than the possibilities it suggests. Bookended by single, static landscape shots—one in full sunlight, the other at either dawn or dusk—Landscape is otherwise almost entirely composed of 360-degree pans. One reference point might be Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx, which is similarly composed of 360-degree pans—but that (excellent, recommended) film has a narrative and resets its location from one shot to the next. Not so for Loznitsa: The first of his circular pans is nearly 11 minutes long and almost entirely devoid of people, moving with borderline sadistic slowness to survey an uninspiring expanse of snowy sidewalks and dilapidated buildings. This will comprise the sole location for both us and the luckless subjects on-screen.

Eventually people start streaming to the bus stop, where they remain bitterly planted, smoking and sniping in the wind. Where the first shot seems to be captured in one continuous gesture broken up by the space of buildings that momentarily black out the image, the rest of Landscape proceeds along the principle that any passing body momentarily obscuring the frame can serve as a prompt to cut. The cuts first feint at invisibility, then grow more overt in their resets; ever-so-incrementally, the camera tilts down slightly or comes closer to those faces, all growing angrier as they wait for a bus that may never arrive. It eventually does—but it’s full, with no tickets available! That punchline is funny if you’re in the mood for a particular flavor of post-Soviet miserabilism (I generally am—cultural heritage!).

Loznitsa is already using his signature documentary preference for using sound without regard for diagetic fidelity; it’s clear that the overheard snippets we hear have been applied to the footage at will, as, with one very brief exception, we never actually see anyone speaking what we hear. The conversations allude to Chernobyl and Chechnya, easily legible signposts that we’re seeing not just a landscape and its people but an allegorical representation of a population waiting on the false promise of change after a period of extended brutalities.

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This is, honestly, not that interesting to me; the idea is clear and not that surprising. (That said, the subtitles don’t come even close to suggesting the guiltily hilarious brutality of the casual venom being thrown around.) But Landscape’s construction is fascinating. It wouldn’t remotely surprise me to find out that the speed of the initial pan was determined by how long the 35mm film roll would last, and there’s a case to be made that using math to make initial creative decisions means this is a legitimately experimental film. Using this single gesture at varying speeds and lengths suggests the possibility of constructing an entire story around a singular place across time that I feel like someone should pick up on, taking this gesture from the experimental research lab to narrative cinema proper.

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Anyway, the point: when I started volunteering myself at the AV Club to review Christian and/or rightwing propaganda, I didn’t know this would become one of my most regular go-to beats. But, following up on my Melania essay, Documentary Magazine asked me to write about Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere. Because I am eager to please I obliged, and because I am irrepressibly me, I also worked in a formalist interpretation. Here’s some of that:

Finding a new, productive angle of inquiry on the manosphere is inherently difficult, especially when there’s not much mystery about what exactly is going on here: the conservative grievance industry is a bedrock of American society. Much like any part of the conspiratorial right-wing, the MRA prides itself on being excluded from untrustworthy “mainstream media”; their lack of slickness is presented to disciples as a feature rather than a bug. But unexpectedly, Theroux’s first point of attack on this MRA Greek chorus is formal. Arriving to meet his first interview subject, HSTikkyTokky (née Harrison Sullivan), Theroux’s documentary crew is greeted by HS’s associates, armed with iPhones that they’ll use to both create a for-the-record reverse shot to this film’s angle and live-stream some of the encounters. They marvel at the size of Theroux’s crew’s camera, and he responds that this is a proper documentary, not just online content. In this context, that categorical descriptor is presented not as admirable—as per, say, Netflix head Ted Sarandos’s title of “Chief Content Officer”—but pejoratively, signifying a degrading bait-for-monetary-switch. Theroux is making a movie, a distinction reinforced through shifting aspect ratios. The manosphere content is presented in its native vertical formats, while this streamer-funded documentary is in widescreen.

The whole thing’s here.

Speaking of nonfiction filmmaking: on Saturday I’ll be flying out to attend my fourth IRL Visions du Réel. If the 2010s were very much about True/False for me, VdR is what the 2020s are about—the spot to see formalist-friendly creative nonfiction, where I never come away without three or four Movies of the Year. It’s there, for example, last year I saw Soldiers of Light, which I use as a stick to beat Manosphere with in the essay above. If you or someone you know is going, drop a line; like E.M Forster said, “Let’s (only) connect.”

First up: I interviewed Kevin Walker and Jack Auen, the team behind the surprisingly popular IFFR premiere Chronovisor. I say “surprisingly popular” in part because the movie near-immediately sold out its Los Angeles Festival of Movies dates, which is not intuitive for a movie primarily consisting of an academic sitting and reading to the sounds of Holst. Walker explains the starting point:

I stumbled across the Chronovisor in a book about aliens called Angels, Archons & Aliens by Ambrose Andreano. I was interested in UFOs at the time, which is the main subject of that book—specifically from the angle of theology, which is what I have my master’s in. That’s the subject of that book: what kind of import does the search for extraterrestrial intelligence have on our theological vision of the world? I spent weeks researching every detail I could possibly find, brought it to Jack and we knew there was something cinematic about it. Your mind immediately goes to a Ninth Gate [Roman Polanski, 1999] situation of international mystery—jumping from European country to country, trying to find the Chronovisor—which is obviously not feasible at our budget level.

Other topics: finding hand models, sourcing materials from eBay, National Treasure. I love that MUBI’s style guide required that last title to be annotated with “(2004, Turteltaub).” (I keep trying to find a venue for my proposed retrospective “Phenomenon: The Films of Jon Turteltaub”). You can read the whole thing here—spoiler-free, though it’ll probably read better once you’ve had a chance to see the film, which you should when the opportunity presents itself.

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The second piece I published has a slightly complicated backstory. Three years ago, Daniel Goldhaber invited me to do a set visit to his third feature, a remake/reboot of Faces of Death that is finally entering release this Friday. I was having (lifelong, since resolved) trouble falling asleep at an early hour, so I stumbled around the first day in semi-delirium, retreating every hour upstairs to write out my bullet-point notes into hastily detailed prose, and I’m very glad I did. The model was set reports of the ’70s and ’80s: granular, relatively unfettered, not overly concerned with manicured assemblages of quotes from everyone saying how wonderful it was to work with everyone else. We, of course, do not live in that world anymore, but it was a lot of fun to pretend like we still do. A taste:

The day’s first shot will be the decapitation of Dacre Montgomery’s first victim executed in a fluid moving oner—a dolly out, then a 180 pan and zoom in—followed by a mix of 35mm and DSLR inserts. “Our goal is to get out of this scene an hour ahead of schedule,” Danny says. “Sounds great!” Jason says. “Let’s do that!” The garage contains five mannequins who have yet to be fully clothed; it’s not yet time to deploy their decapitated heads, two of which sit in a basket outside, one having her hair brushed. The lights are rigged and, after a safety session, the set’s dressed. I wander around and listen to crew members talk about their weekends. “I crawfish boiled it on Saturday, had three beers, fell asleep and woke up at six am on Sunday morning,” says one. “I just got asked to do a Tier Zero,” another laughs in a way that suggests this is definitely not happening. Another guy is wearing a shirt that says “Killing It AD Department”; despite the lack of italics, this turns out to refer to a TV show rather than just being self-aggrandizement. Gear carts are covered in stickers for bands, restaurants (“Zero James Beard awards. Mom’s Basement—B’ham, Alabama”) and libertarian sentiments (“Question authority”); there are generators labeled Ren and Stimpy, Biggie and Tupac.

It’s sincerely one of my favorite things I’ve written, and it’s all here.

Finally, a few quick recommendations for both the west and east coast. At LAFM, a few movies I would recommend (Chronovisor, again; After Dreaming) are sold out—but not Isaiah’s Phone, so try to catch that. It’s the second feature from Frédéric Da, whose Teenage Emotions I was an enthusiastic booster for a few years ago. It’s a fun (kind of), unnerving (definitely) movie that’s way more interesting than the basic premise (teens, phones, alienation) would suggest, including a killer Silverchair song cue. And the iPhone image is also surprisingly interesting when big. You can read more about that here.

At New Directors/New Films, I can vouch for two movies, both of which I saw at Busan; those write-ups are here. If On a Winter’s Night, which premiered there, is an economic horror story about a film festival worker who doesn’t get paid enough, a description that only slightly distorts the film. The other film, Strange River, premiered at Venice last year, and reads as another film that scans generic on paper (family vacation, queer coming of age) but which really opened up into something more surprising and gratifying after, say, the first half-hour. That rarely happens!

The external stakes are higher while the internal obstacles somehow feel lower (unless, I guess, we think that “pissing rich people off” is as life-threatening and serious as cocaine addiction, which could well be true in certain circumstances). This is in keeping with everyone and everything in my lifetime being diluted in intensity to smooth out the presumptive rough edges of what you hired people for in the first place, a principle extending to Gosling’s co-star Sandra Hüller karaoke-ing Harry Styles at approximately one-third the strength of her Whitney Houston performance in Toni Erdmann.

My Twitter feed has been harsh harsh harsh on Project Hail Mary to a degree I find baffling. I should be clear: I booked my ticket for an IMAX 70mm screening three weeks in advance and got exactly what I came for. In their first live-action feature 21 Jump Street, Lord and Miller drew upon their animation backgrounds and demonstrated unusually strong compositional chops within a genre that generally rejects even the possibility of thinking visually; 21 and (less so but still) 22 Jump Street are about as good as studio comedies have been allowed to get in the last 15 years. I tapped out of the duo’s output after The Lego Movie and the first Spider-Verse (which they produced and heavily sculpted but didn’t direct), since both went from kind-of-funny to the inevitable conclusion where kids are lectured about the importance of being yourself. Still, I was genuinely pumped to see their first feature as directors in 12 years.

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Beyond dubious auteurism, I was born in Houston and taken on a few formative childhood trips to NASA’s Space Center; space nostalgia is definitely a thing for me. The physical miniatures, photographed with real light bouncing off of them, look Alien-level good, which is probably the most important thing for me in this genre, while the “getting to know you” language-acquisition sequences top the entirety of Arrival (which was severely reductive of Ted Chiang’s original story). I was expecting something relentlessly jokey, in an elbow-to-rib way, but this is actually pretty laid-back, with dialogue greasing the pace rather than subverting/stalling the project. Also, for people who complaint the dialogue is too relentlessly jokey, I invite you to contemplate the following sample of Andy Weir’s source novel prose as the alternative:

She grabbed her satchel and put the tablet inside. “I’ll be on my way.”

“Hold on, Ms. Stratt,” said Justice Spencer. “This is still a court of law, and you will remain for the duration of these proceedings!”

“No, I won’t,” said Stratt.

The bailiff walked forward. “Ma’am. I’ll have to restrain you if you don’t comply.”

“You and what army?” Stratt asked.

Five armed men in military fatigues entered the courtroom and took up station around her. “Because I have the U.S. Army,” she said. “And that’s a damn fine army.”

As default government propaganda goes, I’ll take this funnier/smoother PHM over Top Gun: Maverick any day—but, however inadvertently, this is certainly propaganda of one kind or another. After an early classroom scene, not a single speaking character is shown speaking to anyone outside of scientific and government circles; the usual “crowds of people gather to contemplate their doom” shots characteristic of the save-the-world genre are absent, not that I missed them. Weir clearly leans libertarian, a tendency translated from his novel into a metaphor for leaving directors alone to do their work in peace without top-down micromanaging or vulgar crowds gawking; solitary great men are guaranteed to produce success.

Spite, of course, is a powerful motivator, but the petulant “let us just do the woooork” undercurrent is just one of the subtexts that accrues to PHM. As Adam Nayman has pointed out, there’s also the movie’s allegorical self-justification: “Its quarter-billion-dollar mission is to save the big-screen experience from the scourge of streaming (despite it being an Amazon/MGM release).” If you want more, I always have more: Gosling teams up with a Groot-y looking extraterrestrial to save the universe, moving from initial mutual fear and incomprehension to respect and friendship in a demonstration of the necessity of bonding with (previously) undocumented aliens. I’m sure someone right now is explaining how this creates a powerful allegory for tolerance in the age of Trump. (Mind you, creating a stone creature with no head that’s almost—but not quite—too cute is quite an achievement.) Science, great men and empathy, in interchangeable order, will save us!

Obviously, none of these forces are at play in the current American scene. It’s worth noting that, presumably for supplying some massive destroyer ships, the end credits give special thanks to an entity that no longer exists, the United States Department of Defense. Per Secretary Pete Hegseth, the DoD is now the Department of War, a rebranding change the credits ignore—probably not deliberately, but that underlying optimism is indicative of outmoded assumptions. Like a lot of mainstream narrative films, PHM feints at one thematic objective (watch the hero’s journey of meaningful change, be galvanized) while actually reinforcing the opposite reality (groove, don’t think, all shall be well).

As a takeaway lesson about why PHM is doing so well, the New York Times thought it worthwhile to publish 742 words from former Amazon Video head Roy Price titled “How to Save Hollywood: Make Fun Movies”—not even as a film section special but as an op-ed guest essay, the kind of presumable honor that actually generally signals “wealthy dumbass incoming.” The big chip-on-shoulder thesis is that Hollywood erred during the first Trump administration by giving in to blue-haired scolds: “An unmistakable censoriousness and fear of saying or doing the wrong thing seemed to settle over the creative process. Cultural and political considerations played an outsize role — not only in what movies got made, but in how success for these movies was defined.” Presumably the words “too woke” were struck out at some point by an editor. Beware of anyone calling for “pure fun,” because their motivations are likely covert (I wonder if Price’s ouster from Amazon over sexual harassment allegations has anything to do with his objection to said censoriousness).

And yet: this is the best we’ve got, and I’ll take it.

Stray notes:

• PHM was shot digitally, outed to celluloid, then scanned back in for a “filmic” look, a process DP Greig Fraser first used on Dune. I don’t love how the print looks at certain moments, nor do I love how changing aspect ratios are deployed: widescreen for flashbacks, IMAX for the present, with a little streak-y faux-light leak to open up the frame when it jumps to “full size” in a very literal-minded way to spell out the timeline shifts. But fair play: the IMAX does look correct and fairly spectacular, answering the (to be fair, unnecessary) question “What if 2001 but full-frame?”

• I also don’t love when movies cut songs down but whoever did the edit on Dennis Wilson’s “Rainbows” did excellent work. If I didn’t know the song very well, I wouldn’t be able to tell where the splice is.

• Speaking of Dune: I’ve been confused by how different filmmakers handle the increasingly common practice of different aspect ratios for different formats. The new Dune trailer makes very clear how Denis Villeneuve handles that challenge: lots and lots of head room! This is 100% not worth doing.

• That, however, is not as cursed as the trailer for the forthcoming Michael Jackson jukebox musical. Setting aside the obvious, er, let’s say “elisions” of “controversial subject matter,” it ends with a trailercore cover of “Billie Jean” which is completely unnecessary—I’d settle for hearing it loud and clear—and doubly tarnished now that we know, thanks to Brett Ratner, that it’s Melania Trump’s favorite MJ song.

Back in January, Criterion’s Andrew Chan very kindly asked if I wanted to write an essay for the Channel’s “Deep Dives” section, so I submitted a list of half-a-dozen movies streaming on the platform that might fit the bill. One man’s deep cut is, of course, another Twitter user’s bedrock canon; still, I am going to guess that most people have indeed never seen Peter Whitehead’s Charlie is My Darling, which was a surprising option to take me up on. But it was a lot of fun to research and prepare the piece: I was able to take my time, do a lot of homework and receive rigorous editing. What a treat!

Here’s my favorite anecdote that I dug up in the research process:

The tour shown here wasn’t the Stones’ first time in Ireland; in January of that year, the band was on a three-day tour when it stopped in a small army-surplus shop. As bassist Bill Wyman would recall, “Mick, Keith, Charlie, and Andrew went inside to look around. The proprietor refused to serve them, and talked about ‘having not forgotten Oliver Cromwell.’ They exchanged insults, and walked out, but [manager] Andrew [Loog Oldham] peed against the shop front.”

Fun! The whole thing’s here. Please read if this is your kind of thing, and as a reminder: I’m available to do a lot of forms of writing, including not just this but writethroughs of corporate webinars and all kinds of other very professional esoterica.

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Sunday, March 1

When I initially entered the Hollywood Farmer’s Market, it seemed like haphazardly-laid-out chaos but then I figured it out: one axis is for prepared foods, the other for produce and meat, and once you know that everything is perfectly logical. When I reported my pleasure in this spatial organization later that night, my friend snorted “That’s the most New York shit I’ve ever heard.” I’ve been there too long, it’s true.

Amidst children clutching bags of citrus to their chest like they’re the last oranges they’ll ever get, I had two primary goals for produce I can’t get in NYC farmer’s markets. For oranges, I was able to try the pink-fleshed cara cara; in the avocado category, in addition to the usual Hass representatives, I snagged two different new-to-me varieties. One is called a “black beauty,” and setting aside the present-day advisability of the label, a single specimen ran eight dollars. It was…totally fine. The other avocado variety is the fuerte, which was the single best avocado I’ve ever had in my life and, I read later, used to be the commercially dominant variety before the thicker-skinned (and therefore easier to transport) Hass variety gained favor. As usual, American rapaciousness and a desire for expedience rebranded as a benefit for consumers ruins everything.

Later, I went to the first-day launch of Wilshire Online, a co-working/event/etc. space hosting an all-day expo which was pulled together in two weeks. On either side were pop-up art installations in a huge dead dollar store on the right and a decommissioned Sizzler on its left. The 99Cent Group Art Show had a 20-minute line trailing through the parking lot to get in, where the work was wretched and very LA—nightmarishly refracted Betty Boops, Labubu riffs, Matteo Garrone’s head drawn in black marker on a duct tape-wrapped cardboard box. (OK, that last one’s a little different.) A t-shirt on sale to commemorate the event misspelled Kim Gordon’s name “Kim Gordan,” presumably not on purpose. Though smaller and thus slightly more focused curatorially, Sizzler offered more of the same. Both were kind of a nightmare but also exemplary “welcome to LA” hypebeast events.

Dinner was at Raffi’s Place, a Persian institution in Glendale I’d heard about but never gotten around to. One of my group took the hit to stand in line and get our name on the list. He was approached by an elderly couple who inform him that they were here to celebrate regime change in Iran, they were so happy they could cry and so on. I know there’s a lot of this out there but it was still unnerving to experience in person. The food was fine.

Tuesday, March 3

I’ve never been a huge Bruce Conner fan, but I’d also never seen Crossroads before, and certainly never had the opportunity to see and hear it at the scale it’s presented in at the Marciano Art Foundation. Located in an enormous former Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, with bizarre faux-Egyptian statues carved into the exterior facade, the Marciano is an oversized but pleasing oddity. The ground floor is currently set aside for a program of some of Conner’s greatest hits, totaling around 84 minutes. Three single screens are at the left, front and right of the space; assuming you keep your entering perspective, behind you is the triple-screen set-up for Three Screen Ray, a guaranteed crowd-pleaser of pleasingly assertive visuals strobing at you to the sounds of Ray Charles.

I timed my arrival nearly exactly right, as that short was wrapping and led into Crossroads, by far the longest (35 minutes) and most demanding work in the program and also curator Douglas Fogle’s preferred starting point. Composed of footage of Bikini Atoll bomb tests, the first half augments the sound of explosions augmented with a Patrick Gleason synthesizer score that’s not perceptible as “music,” while the second offers up more of the same visually backed by Terry Riley. All of this has been remixed into eight channels of sound arranged quadraphonically and the results are an ass-kicker. Waiting for the delayed sonic boom of each explosion scared the shit out of me, and the levels of bass made David Lynch sound like an amateur; in a more pleasing way, Riley was also overwhelming. This is still definitely not a purist experience: movies normally shown on a much smaller screen at Anthology Film Archives or similar venues on 16mm are now rendered enormous in pristine digital scans. Theoretically this should have made me bristle, but in practice it was undeniably cool and overwhelming.

My big group dinner excursions to the San Gabriel Valley landed on Tuesdays, and this week it was Hengry, a place which offers the extremely specific Miao soup with different proteins; we got fish rather and it was great (above). The rest of the menu is all over the place, exemplifying current Chinese “fusion” trends, where “fusion” means pan-Chinese rather than pan-Asian. Not everything lands; the salted duck, which is from Nanjing and really has no business being on this menu, is a particular lowlight. I did like/was amused by the stir fried crispy pork with diced potato, which is essentially a flagrant, less impressive knockoff of Mission Chinese’s thrice-cooked pastrami.

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Wed., Mar. 4

In theory, the idea of the Julia Stoschek Foundation at the Variety Arts Theater is very cool and laudable: downtown LA would indeed benefit from a multi-story theater where you can wander around and see experimental films for free. In practice, the execution is horrible on multiple literal/metaphorical levels. One conceptual gambit is the idea that hearing disparate works bleeding into each other creates a productive, exciting friction; in practice, the loudest movie is always going to win, to an extent that makes it impossible to concentrate on anything else within its vicinity. Thus, on the ground floor a projection of Arthur Jafa’s Apex benefits from subwoofers and very large speakers blasting it out but destroys the possibility of concentrating on any other work being shown nearby on smaller screens and soundsystems. On another floor, the loudest short turned out to be a guy walking through a field of firecrackers going off; it only got louder as it went along, as if mocking my efforts to concentrate on anything else. The selection of works was bad in its deep cuts and otherwise greatest-hits pedestrian in its selection of artists, and I can’t say it did a lot for me to see Un Chien Andalou “recontextualized” on a tiny CRT. As an example of creating new audiences for experimental works through accessibility and presentational frills, it was much less successful than the Conner show.

Fri. Mar. 6

The curatorial plan of MOCA’s MONUMENTS show involves clustering new artworks around Confederate et al. monuments that have been taken down in the last decade; an inadvertent implication is that contemporary gallery art is as irrelevant and removed from public consciousness and the needs of the present as those racist sculptures. Also, I just didn’t like a lot of the new art. That said, I did very much like Stan Douglas’s The Birth of a Nation, which was also my introduction to his work. There is a long tradition of works that remix or push back against Griffith’s movie, none of which I’ve directly engaged with, so I can’t speak to how this fits into that lineage. Douglas divides the screen into three frames on the top half, two on the bottom; all but the central frame in the top half are newly shot images, with that top-center frame reserved for footage from Griffith’s film itself.

Douglas works through and quite literally around Nation’s most infamous scene, in which a young white girl throws herself off a cliff rather than allow herself to be raped by a black soldier. In Douglas’s version, the Union trooper is more or less just minding his own business while young white maidenhood works itself up to suicidal, entirely unprovoked hysteria. Douglas makes zero effort to match Griffith’s celluloid grain or lighting, refusing to texturally fetishize and replicate a toxic object; his images are clearly digital and take advantage of steadicam/gimbal mobility which Griffith couldn’t access (some Gerry/Tarr energy seems to have crept in), not beholden in any aesthetic way to what it’s repudiating.

Sat. Mar 7

Canadian by birth but Californian by professional choice, Sarah Davachi has become a bit of an unlikely mascot for the LA music scene; Sunset Strip redux this is not. It’s basically fair to call her a drone musician, even if sometimes her work gestures a little more energetically outside of that realm. This concert at the Broad Museum offered up the premieres of two works commissioned as site-specific compositions. The opener, Robert Takahashi Novak, was cool, playing some kind of music-plus-interview composition (title: “The Voices We Keep”) from his laptop. It was indeed spatially 360 and inherently compelling, but the energy really kicked in with Davachi’s “Long Dance Vale,” at which point the seating layout’s logic became fully clear.

Seats were arranged in the round, with two rows dividing the audience at clean right angles. Two trombonists start by trading sustained tones at diametrical ends; at some point, Davachi’s electronics joined in, matching their timbres so precisely as to be imperceptible at first. Eventually the trombonists moved towards each other; both Mattie Barbier and Mason Moy are notable musicians in their own right, with Barbier’s Solo Music in Resonant Spaces a particularly intense album I enjoyed learning about after the performance. Barbier is dramatically taller than Moy, and when they finally met in the middle I was amused to see Barbier swinging their trombone over Moy, a both neatly comical and pragmatic gesture. The two then repeatedly went down the other horizontal axis and reconverged in the center repeatedly; at the climax, the duo formed a kind of double-statue on a pedestal, turning 360 while aggressively spraying loud noise at the audience as the horns slowly traversed the room. From initial soft murk to final blasting intensity, it was a riveting performance.

Tues. Mar. 10

It’s probably not a huge surprise that I did not enjoy Sueño Perro, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “film installation” at LACMA. This isn’t Iñárritu’s first stab at being a gallery multihyphenate; 2017’s Carne y Arena, a VR experience that I did not...experience, but which I read at the time invited viewers to feel empathy for Mexican migrants by literally plunging into the heart of one at the climax. After firmly sworn off Iñárritu’s work after seeing 21 Grams in high school and having my resolve renewed when I was dumb enough to watch Birdman, I wasn’t the target audience for this—but I was already at LACMA, it was free and I was told the installation tech was worth checking out.

Before entering, a very well-meaning and earnest volunteer had to first deliver a trigger warning and get viewers to nod affirmative consent before they enter. The pitch was basically that the installation—the meat of which consists of footage shot but not used for Amores Perros—contains upsetting animal injury imagery and is an R-rated movie; this was not the most hardcore warning I’ve heard, but that latter detail was enough to make the middle-aged couple in front of me decide not to chance it. Once inside, I was reminded of how much and how badly Iñárritu needs attention and the hamhandedness with which he’s accustomed to pursue it; the footage plays on loops strung around large platters, and you must walk past every projector’s beam of light to thread the room, choosing to place yourself repeatedly into light’s glare. The footage was unexceptional, the experience unpleasant, the whole thing thoroughly pointless. I will now go back to ignoring this man for the rest of my life.

Dinner was an improvement; it had to be! This Tuesday’s group gathering was at Xibei, an outpost of a Mongolian chain that was the subject of a big controversy last year when a Chinese influencer accused the chain of cooking pre-made dishes—which turned out to be true, leading to a downturn in revenue and a third of the chain’s restaurants being closed. None of this seems to have anything to do with how this Angeleno outpost operates—the food was good and definitely not reheated along industrial-production lines—but there was a twist nonetheless, as many of the items I’d flagged to try weren’t on the menu. I have to give a special shout-out here to Sue Ding, who took on the unenviable task of talking to the waitress in Mandarin and figuring it out on behalf of the table. It emerged that the lamb shank wasn’t on the menu but there might still be some in the kitchen; there were, of which we got two and were encouraged to order as many as we wanted. When we were done, the waitress explained that they’d just revised the menu and the shank was gone, simply because people don’t eat lamb as much as they used to. Last-chance-to-see dinner!

Wed. Mar. 11

One of my favorite things about experimental filmmaker Tacita Dean is her unlikely alliance with Christopher Nolan. In any terms you could think of—artistic temperament, desire for legibility, scale of apparatus—they have pretty much nothing in common, yet the two have appeared on-stage at least twice to stump for celluloid and Dean has repeatedly shouted him out in solo interviews. “There’s barely anyone who cuts negative anymore,” she noted in 2021. “I mean, there’s me and there’s Chris [Nolan].” For his part, Nolan has rather charmingly credited Dean for introducing him to the term “medium specificity.”

Though I haven’t seen anything close to the majority of Dean’s output, she’s basically batting one-for-three with me; the ones I like I really like, the others I tend to move past almost immediately. And that was indeed the case with her Trial of the Finger show (on through April 26); I have nothing to say about two of the works on display (and didn’t have time to take in the non-moving-image component), but the clear winner was 2021’s Paradise. I kind of understood how the images were being generated without getting it exactly and read up afterwards on Dean’s “aperture gate masking system”: “a series of 3D-printed stencils which, slipped into the camera and over the aperture, partially obstruct the light’s journey through the lens and onto the film’s layered emulsion. When the camera rolls, only the uncovered portion of the emulsion is exposed, making it possible – by painstakingly rewinding the reel and inserting a different stencil – to expose with the next shot a different section of the same film. The process is like masking off sections of a canvas in order to paint them independently, or undertaking a solo game of Exquisite Corpse in which you have only a rough idea of what you previously sketched onto the concealed panels.” Neat!

In practice, Paradise looks like a homebrewed 2001 climax with a little dose of Vertigo’s dream sequences, making for a lovely and refreshing 21 minutes. If Nolan one day commissioned Dean to make a little VFX sequence for him (a la Jordan Belson contributing to The Right Stuff) I wouldn’t be super-surprised.

One top-down recommendation I would make when getting organized is considering buying a Grutto Pass—which, annoyingly, you can’t actually do right now, because cards for this year aren’t on sale until April 1. (More on that and how to buy here.) The pass offers discounts to basically every big museum plus a number of gardens, many of which charge admission. In terms of the pass being cost-effective, the discounts are often token; even with the museums being pretty pricy, you’d need to go to quite a few to see a significant cost difference. That said, if you’re in Tokyo for more than three days with a fairly open schedule and lots of cultural intent, it probably makes financial sense since the cost, 2500 yen, is $15.85 the day I’m writing this. The pass’s other value is in the map and annotated guide it comes with, and that you can access for free; if you’re ever in an area with a little unclear time to kill and wondering if there’s a nice park nearby or something you haven’t thought of, there probably is. You can use the map (here’s one version) to orient yourself wherever you are for smaller attractions, and also for a quick and easy overview of all the major attractions in one cluster before you set out.

That said, here is also my messy Google Map, which mixes places I’ve been and merely wanted to go, some of which are recommended below.

Museums

You can basically find anything you’re interested in meaningfully addressed in Tokyo, and that definitely applies to the museums. I didn’t visit any of the major ones that focus around large traditions of traditional art and can’t speak to that, but a few other recommendations:

• Getting there and back from the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum will take up half your day and be eminently worth it. There are some 30 restored and reconstructed buildings here spanning hundreds of years of Japanese history, and the effect is both fascinating and a little spooky; you walk into e.g. a ’30s photography studio and feel like you’ve entered some kind of Kiyoshi Kurosawa zone.

  

  The day I went was cold and kind of nasty, so fire pits in some of the samurai dwellings had been lit and elderly volunteers gathered round and kibitzed, which was delightful. The site is also relatively close to the Studio Ghibli Museum, so it makes sense that Miyazaki himself is said to come and refresh his visual memory from time to time. So, if you’re going to visit that, you’re basically already in range. (Ghibli tickets are in high demand and if you want to go you should book them—if it’s even possible to do so—as far in advance as possible, basically the day you book your plane tickets.)

• Of the two major contemporary art museums, I find the National Museum of Modern Art vastly preferable to Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, which is further out than anywhere you’re likely to organically be and relatively underwhelming. The National Museum has a seriously impressive collection of both Western and Japanese art, with no permanent exhibitions but always something new from the collection on display, and both visits have been very rewarding. Whatever shows are on at the National Art Center also tend to be worthwhile.

• There are a variety of smaller museums and it’s worth checking out what’s on there at any given time, including the Aritzon, Mori Art and Panasonic Shiodome museums.

• If you like this kind of chintz, the Advertising Museum Tokyo is free and good for about an hour’s worth of looking at Japanese TV commercials that are probably missing from YouTube, at least in subtitled form. If that sounds like fun to you, it will be.

Go to as many parks and gardens as possible, they’re all beautiful.

For book-shopping, the Jimpocho district is famous; the only store there with a meaningful English-language selection is Kitazawa, which has a fairly- but not bargain-priced good selection heavy on British volumes that might be a little too fustian even for me. The collected Punch, anybody? But it’s worth going to the area and buying some postcards or weird old rock magazines, there’s a billion.

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Restaurants

Oh boy.

This is obviously an enormous subject; I’m going to recommend (tersely!) a number of places to eat, but I’m sure you could find another 500 that are comparable or even better. There are obsessive food blogs with names like The Pursuit of Food Perfection that are happy to catalogue 20 different options at different price points for e.g. the best tonkatsu in town, and they’re fun to examine. (Ryoko Traveler is also helpful.) Japan’s Yelp/TripAdvisor equivalent, restricted to restaurants only, is Tabelog, also a platform that you might end up using for reservations. The reviewers are, without exceptionally, dish-by-dish detailed and disturbingly useful, and the auto-translate works pretty well, so that’s also a handy tool for on-the-fly browsing.

• Tonkatsu: Tonta, which is, by design, a real pain in the ass—only open three days a week (Wed./Fri./Sat.) from 5:30-8:30, no reservations, cash only. I got there 45 minutes before it opened and was the first person in the second seating (albeit 45 minutes later, not too bad). This place really impressed me with the seriousness of the food culture on display; in NYC, and I think generally throughout the US, a line is a sign of short-lived viral fame which almost certainly doesn’t correlate to actually amazing food. But in Japan, lines exist for places that have been open for decades because they are simply the best at what they do. The breading here made me rethink everything I thought I knew about how good tonkatsu could be, and the meal unfolds in a space with no music, just people paying very close attention to what they’re eating. There was a guy behind me in line who looked like he was about to fall asleep on his feet, but once he got inside became one of the most alert humans I’ve ever seen.

  

• Splurge: Shima Steak. You will need to make a reservation for this as far in advance as you can (this goes for many, many places). The chef cooks A4 wagyu rather than A5 because he believes the latter is simply too fatty for a large cut; the A4 is amazing (tastes indeed, as they say, alarmingly like butter), so whatever he’s doing is right on. I got that, a salmon sashimi and a glass of sake for $172, which is honestly reasonable. (You would pay more for, e.g., a high-end tempura place, though I never had the nerve.) The steak comes with some astonishingly perfunctory and unseasoned vegetables, and I was somehow not offended by this, even while surrounded by boisterous expense-account types chatting about the Yankees with the chef. Yes, those are roast garlic chips on top.

  

• Tsukeman ramen: Menya Itto. This one via the self-explanatorily detailed, commendably obsessive Ramen Guide Japan. In general, Tokyo made me into a ramen obsessive.

• Sushi: I did not splurge on this, but I did go to two very strong and reasonably priced omakases. Mantensoushi Maranouchi came in at around $59 for an omakase lunch, and for that you will need a reservation. Here’s an adorable soup full of tiny clams.

  

  Or you can get a very strong sushi set for under $30 at Sushi no Midori, which has eight locations. I went to the one in Ginza. Here, you are trading time for money, as you will definitely wait in line.

  

• Chicken ramen: Ginza Kagari Honten (below) and Homemade Ramen 麦苗

  

• Udon: Moriya

  

• Soba: Honmura-an is cute and gets you outside the usual zone. Not sure it’s worth the hustle, but the space is huge and pleasant.

  

• Gyoza/curry: no particular recs. I tried iterations of both, and in neither case did I locate transcendence. It may well exist! But I didn’t find it.

• Clam ramen: Mugi to Olive is ok but underwhelming. Might not be my genre. And let me actively dissuade you from the lobster ramen (below) at Ebimaru, which is bisque-rich and way too much and full of weird stuff that doesn’t cohere.

  

• Eel: Hakarime is a solid intro.

  

• Chicken yakitori: Tori Megu is a trek out of the city, which is why it’s cheap, and it’s very good. Roasted chicken testicles look and taste kinda like cherry tomatoes.

  

• Pass: Tokyo Ramen Street (charmless, annoying, nothing you can get there that you can’t get somewhere less stressful). And as you value your life, don’t go to Golden Gai and get drunk with random Brits at cash-only bars with onerous minimums. Go to Nakano City instead. Specifically, go to the Purple Door and try habashu, which is rattlesnake liquor that tastes surprisingly like licorice. That would be in the jar with the curved-up rattlesnake in it; you won’t have a hard time locating it.

• The famed Tsukuji Fish Market is worth going to…once. Eat some of the biggest oysters you’ve ever seen in your life and then get going, it’s kinda crowded.

  

• Izakayas: I have literally never had a bad time walking into any random izakaya, ordering six items and seeing what happens. This is one thing that’s a lot of fun to wing. That said, I liked the Okinawan food at Yanbaru Diner a lot.

• The salt bread at Pain Maison is legitimately incredible. You have to sign up online before you can go in, it’s a whole thing, but regrettably worth it. Roe salt bread!

But in the meantime, some self-promotion. The main item I have offer this week is 2200 words which Documentary Magazine asked me to write about Brett Ratner’s Melania. Editors Abby Sun and Manuel Betancourt very nicely waited for me to return so that, rather than streaming on Amazon Prime, I could have the full theatrical experience during the film’s second week of release, which I viewed the morning after arriving back from IFFR—a real “welcome back to America” moment if there ever was one. My screening took place in the smallest, unloveliest auditorium within the Regal Union Square I’ve ever seen, a demoralizing space I shared with three companions: a Russian mother and daughter, and the archetypally fearsome “20something dude exuding weird loner vibes.” The woman who tore my ticket also gave me a promotional bookmark left over from opening night:

The movie, obviously, is terrible, and there will hopefully be no more morally abject moment in a movie this year than Brett Ratner, off-camera, wishing Trump good night after multiple re-inauguration balls: “Sweet dreams, Mr. President!” Anyway, the whole piece can be read here.

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This week also marks the release of a movie that got one of my crankiest Sundance 2025 reviews, Andre is an Idiot. This review was originally 200 words and even meaner, which prompted, let’s say, some editorial back-and-forth. A taste of what remains (which, OK, is more than mean enough):

Andre’s bigger problem is the way it applies the aesthetic of “artistic” commercial spots—and much “Indiewood” non-fiction—to a feature-length work about death and dying. It’s not at all a stretch for Ricciardi to announce that he sees this film as possibly a “TV commercial” raising awareness about the importance of regular colonoscopies from 40 on—a goal it would be churlish to decry, but the unblinking choice of this self-applied label still startled me. Is a PSA the only path forward for anyone who wants to accomplish any feat of meaningful mass communication for the public good? If that’s true, isn’t that immensely depressing?

The full review is here. Next week, cheerier notes from the healing warmth of the sun.

The sesame-seed-encrusted sheep is marinated for a day. The next morning, it takes three hours for the pit to get fully heated, after which the animal is roasted for two; I can’t even fathom how hot it must be to cook it all through in that short amount of time. We were told the sheep would be served at 2; about 2:12, the husband who co-runs the farm with wife Bobo poked his head in and asked if we were ready. The animal was brought in on hooks and deposited on a serving tray with a golden ram’s head at the front.

After a pause for picture-taking, the hooks were removed and within five minutes the animal was basically been broken down, with great chicharron-esque crackles of skin and entire bones being wrenched out. Then everyone put on their plastic gloves and got right in there while slowly moving the animal around on the biggest lazy Susan I’ve ever seen.

The animal is beautifully roasted, with a deep wood-smoke flavor (oak?) that’s very Texas BBQ, and it’s all so well-rendered that despite sitting on the tray for four hours until we left barely any fat pooled on the bottom; this isn’t just a novelty. Though there are images of Genghis Khan on the tent’s walls, this isn’t Mongolian food but instead Dongbei cuisine from Northeast China, just on the other side of the border, and the kitchen as a whole excels at the cuisine.

The beer braised duck (above, top) was spicy and tender, the potato salad’s strands (bottom) more thickly julienned than usual, the tiger vegetable salad more tahini-esque than general; there’s also a more rarely-seen dish, an omelette with toona, a leafy green I’d never heard of before. The only thing that flat-out sucked was the fried rice, which I guess makes sense since the dish isn’t organic to Dongbei food; for carbs, you’re supposed to rely on the sweet corn cakes traditional to the cuisine. I would say the rice and corn cakes were the two items of which the most remained on the table when we were done. Carb fiends, this is not your day.

When everyone emerges from the frenzy of initial eating, you have the tent until six and, if you wish, can perform karaoke while you digest. Walking outside the yurt brings you back into slightly surreal contact with other groups of people on their own yurt journeys. In the last 20 minutes, someone will come in and break down the entire animal further, pulling flesh off bones and tightly double-wrapping the disturbing amount of meat that remains in aluminum foil for the journey home. It’s both a terrific meal and an experience that’s difficult to arrange but very rewarding once you figure it all out.

Also, a quick note on the late Tom Noonan (RIP): I’ve actually got nothing on him personally, but in 2015 I took notes at a Q&A he did following a screening of Manhunter and it was very fun. The whole thing’s here; here’s a taste:

On getting the part: Even though it was early in my acting [career], I still had done a bunch of weirdo parts. I am sort of weird, but not that bad. I got this script and I read it and was like “Oh my god, do I really want to do this?” Not that anybody was going to give it to me, I really hadn’t done much.

I went up to this casting place, and I saw they’re bringing in all these people from Steppenwolf — the theater company in Chicago that we all love so much. I had an appointment at 10:00 and then it got pushed to 10:30, 11, 11:30. I was starting to get really unhappy, and all these people are going in — I think from Steppenwolf, that’s probably just my paranoia. Finally they brought me in and I was really fucking pissed off. That’s all I knew: I was going to get in there and I was going to read the fucking scene, and just leave.

So I was really mad, I didn’t have a plan about how to do this thing. I go in and Michael’s there. Michael’s sort of a scary guy, even though he’s not huge, and I learned over time that you really don’t talk back to him or give him shit, ever. He’s like Napoleon. I walked up and I said, “Listen, I’m gonna read and then I’m gonna leave, OK?” He said, “OK.” I sat down. There was a woman reading with me, who apparently was a casting assistant but now she was the casting person and was going to read with me. They put her opposite me, and I don’t know…I didn’t do anything, but she started to get really frightened of me, which made me feel really excited and full of myself. Michael got real excited and started wandering around the room. I could feel that he was really into what I was doing too, and I thought, “I got this job.” Then I finished, and he started to talk to me. I said, “I told you. I’m reading and now I’m leaving.” I just walked out.

The first film in the “Cinema Situations” program, Shashin no Ma, came out swinging as a representative of my favorite experimental sub-genres: the flicker film! I’ve often wondered why this most viscerally satisfying of genres has fallen by the wayside; I get that there’s an obvious technical problem in the digital era, in that the literal flicker produced by celluloid frames passing through a projection gate doesn’t apply to digital projectors and so has to be simulated by other means, which opens up a trove of conceptual/perceptual problems. Still, with the exception of Sylvia Schedelbauer (one of my favorite working experimental filmmakers; incidentally, some of her work is showing soon in Bristol), everyone seems to have pretty much avoided tangling with this; not Maruyama, who goes all in on giving Super-8 home movies the digitally-stroboscopic treatment and gets pretty far.

In general, most of the work Maruyama showed was analog to an extreme, with the filmmaker himself operating 8mm and 16mm projectors placed in the theater rather than a projection booth. You could hear every splice running through the gate, which frankly made me nervous; I thought back to my own abortive time in film school, during the tail end of NYU’s 16mm era, wondering if my own poorly-spliced work would make it through a single projection. Emphasizing film’s physicality also meant projecting 8mm at levels so deafening I felt the bass coursing under my feet, a sonic-assault approach I’m all for. In general, each work seems to start from a place of interrogating basic problems of the medium, in the same spirit as Michael Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew attempts to systematically play with 26 perceptual problems related to filmmaking—in short, very old-school stuff in a tradition that involves a bit of a preservationist spirit. I had a vigorous argument with a friend who basically said “We already had Ken Jacobs at home 50 years ago and I don’t know why we need this now.” I can see it both ways, but I’m deeming the retro a success that expanded my cinematic world a little bit. And this is my home turf: materiality, the cinematic apparatus, the whole bit. It’s nice to be at home even when I’m not at home.

I also want to shout-out a two-film sidebar of experimental films from archival organizations making up the DINAMO distribution network. In the first of these programs, no less than 14 archival reps and filmmakers got up in front of an audience for a 20-minute introduction highlighting all their windows (longer than Josh Safdie bringing out the entire cast of Uncut Gems at his TIFF premiere but not nearly as funny). But it was all worth it: the archives had a chance to select whatever they wanted to highlight and I learned of many cool filmmakers whose work I probably wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. My absolute highlight here was Antonin De Bemels’s 1999 Scrub Solo 1: Soloneliness, a bracing dose of Martin Arnold-adjacent film looping. If you don’t know Arnold’s work, start here:

I thought the titular scrub solo was manipulating footage from Orpheus, given that a man seemed to be walking through a mirror, but these are actual original images De Bemels shot himself for the purpose of further manipulation. (From the 13th Videobrasil catalogue: ”The dancer moved extremely slowly, in semidarkness, with the super-8 camera set in automatic exposure in very low luminosity.”) Where Arnold worked with physical film, which had implications for exactly how much he could manipulate every stutter, De Bemels takes the freedom of the VHS deck to speed down, slow up, stop on a dime, plunge into total silence and then contort his male model into a sudden frenzy. It’s exactly the kind of work I can always use more of.