I'm sure I'll enjoy it more now, just for that structure alone, it's become like a cheat code for me since then lol

Special shout out to Daigo Matsui's Just Remembering

This one was like pulling teeth, you can't make me choose which Kitano, Tsukamoto or Oshii to shout out

I need to revisit Peppermint Candy, because I think I wasn't quite ready for it the first time I saw it, but I definitely did not forget about it, which speaks to how affecting it was. Burning I did love right away, and yeah, that really bleak view of society is just going to be a throughline huh

Lee ties up those ideas on broader social/systemic level so well too. The little intrusions of religion into the story make me so curious about Secret Sunshine now, given all I know about it is from the synopsis describing it as a "woman waging war against god" lol

You start desperately wishing for the fabric of the film to break again and to somehow, bleed out into the material reality it depicts, and it's so poignant that it only gives you that redemptive release on symbolic level, in that framework. Disability rarely feels this violent in film. Flesh/prison

The way Lee gradually builds up Gong-ju's internal world and her as an individual is fantastic, to the point where Moon So-ri's able-bodied transformations start feeling like actual magic - which makes everything crashing down all the more devastating

Remembering anxious articles about GTA IV possibly nuking Iron Man's box office back in the day, if only that had been the case

As far as "late festival season darlings about workers and class" go, I sure hope Possible Love will go better than No Other Choice last year, though that was more a result of my exhaustion with Park than anything else. This is bound to be a whole different beast.

I'd say it's closer to Beau than anything else, but it sheds much of the grotesque neurotic solipsism, which was also the Achilles' heel of that movie for me. It's just way more angry and focused rather than stuck in tiresome repetitive loops of self-pity.

I was also 50/50 on Aster going into Eddington, but it really broke through for me. Though it did so by turning his spite outward, so make of that what you will lol

*called Superman hopecore as a point of praise, to clarify lol

People calling it a "film for Europeans", "doomer manifesto" that "hates people who called Superman hopecore" and "2026's Eddington" (which I loved tbh) did pique my interest, but I'm not doing that coin toss to be annoyed in the theater, especially with how disenchanted I've grown with Cruise

It's in context of the sex in movies discourse too, I feel like so many people just want to see hot actors bone and to have "sex good" affirmed and when there's a movie that superficially ticks those boxes but then moves somewhere uncomfortable or has different ideas, it's a problem

(Camp Miasma)