Take care of your daughters or he will

When it comes to sheer unadulterated cool in cinema no one has been able to touch Nicolas Winding Refn since Only God Forgives (2013, Nicolas Winding Refn). How does one define cool? In the cinematic context? It’s subjective. Although the easiest way to describe it is pretentious. Aesthetically high fashion. Incoherent. Avant garde. Transgressive. Controversial. Self-aware. Fearlessly alternating between absurd shock audacious hilarious grotesque kinky sexy saccharine nihilist innocent naive humane alien artifice. Postmodern. Post cinema.
     Every Man for Himself (1980, Jean-Luc Godard) is the first cool film. Gummo (1997, Harmony Korine) is cool. Lost Highway (1997, David Lynch) is cool. What about Gaspar Noé? Gaspar Noé isn’t cool he’s warm. Too Old to Die Young (2019, #NWR) is the Mount Everest of cool. 
     Why am I so afraid of ordinary? Because if you’re just like everybody else that must mean you’re afraid to think for yourself? Normal is another word fraught with subjective implications. In the cinematic context? Cinema is escape. Escape from what? Reality. I.e. a ticket into an exhibition of artifice. There’s a distinct elastic Germanic Scandinavian resemblance between the style of mannered performances and wooden deadpan bad acting delivery of detached aloof cadence throughout the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and by NWR. They get it. Everyone else is conformist Spielbergs.

 

If you think anyone cares to hear anyone else attempt to describe Refn’s work you’re too stupid. Instead what’s up with Her Private Hell (2026, NWR)? It’s not about Elle’s feelings towards Dominique. Is it about Elle’s feelings towards Dominique?
     Have you experienced mistfortune? I am a victim of the mist. It’s not the mist you need to worry about it’s what the mist brings. Mist you. The central narrative motif of Her Private Hell is the mist. The Tragedy of the Leather Man. A father cursed to look for his lost daughter for so long that eventually he forgets. Until the mist makes him remember. If you see him he sees his daughter and will kill anyone to get her. His gloves are embedded with razor sharp diamonds.
     Most people call him the Devil. Johnny Thunders wears the leather jacket. Elle tries on the leather jacket. Private K wears the leather jacket. In the final showdown K fights the Leather Man hand to hand. Elle Only God Forgives the Leather Man’s hands off whereupon K his spacesuit daughter the golden hatchet and the leather jacket all vanish. But Johnny Thunders is nowhere to be found. All that remains are the razor sharp diamond gloves. If Elle were to put them on she would find out what she had lost. What has Elle lost? Does saving K and reuniting him with his lost daughter grant Elle redemption or damnation? Does Elle becoming the devil in her private hell require her overthrowing the money man make any sense to you? Is she an allegory for the art film?
 
Recurring motifs are always a lot of fun. Historically comic books are low culture. Base. Trite. Garbage. Contemporaneously superhero films are too. Hollywood. Commercial. The daughters are Candy Floss means they are the shameful offspring of great art. A tongue in cheek joke in itself that title evokes using the worst thing possible for its intended purpose. This movie is going to be hell. Hollywood slop is hell. It’s not going to save Elle and Dominique’s strained relationship or cure their tensions. Better Elle speeds through hyperspace suicide mission into a planet complete destruction oblivion.
     The four Candy Floss women are also the money man’s daughters. Dominique is the general public. Box office revenue. Elle wallows in her self pity. Basks in her father. When he looks at her all he sees is a gaping maw of need. Because Elle is art. The human condition. And just as Dominique first found little matchstick girl Elle who told her she was an orphan so too does Elle find little matchstick girl Hunter at her door. Hunter who gave away her room and all her luggage lost by the airline because of the mist. Dominique turning on Elle recurs when Elle turns against Hunter. Her Private Hell is about Elle reconciling her ambivalence towards everything that constrains her. And as is customary with Refn this is expressed through sex and violence. And sexual violence. 
 
To catch a ghost you must become a ghost. Private K doesn’t become the Leather Man. Elle becomes Private K. The Private K movie within a movie is the ghost of Hollywood films of the bygone era when they could be artful yet also pulpy. Film noir 1944-1958. As transcendent as Her Private Hell gets is when K all of a sudden is in that room with the bloody yakuza pleading dying wanting the woman who he has in bed it is revealed has just castrated him murdered.
     But it didn’t end in 1958. The Pino Donaggio wall to wall Forties Hollywood emotional underscoring romantic swells bridges noir into Sixties Giallo into Eighties De Palma urban slasher into Twenty-tens and beyond NWR. This movie has the most amazing climax of all time on so many levels. When Elle is getting fucked by Nico and she orgasms as Hunter’s sternum is ripped apart while she yells Daddy on the other side of the curtained glass wall while leather K is trapped helplessly fighting to stop it on the other side of yet another impenetrable glass wall is cinematically glorious rapturous breathtaking colorful visceral passionate decadent dangerous over the top self-assured. How fun is this movie? It's like Disney Giallo.
 
7/25/2026 AMC Parkway Pointe 15
7/27/2026 AMC Phipps Plaza 14
Atlanta, GA

O sing ye muse of a face a fleet a war a man a thought a trick a trick to break the walls of Troy and burn it screaming to the ground because the hand of victory shrouds the bard’s legends and makes blind beggars of us all

Now that it has finally washed up on our shores The Odyssey (2026, Christopher Nolan) it turns out was left there as a gift to be prized as the greatest movie of all time. Because it remembered what a hero is supposed to be unlike us still eating the lotus. In Odysseus we find a tragedy that doesn’t end with its protagonist paying for his redemption through being sacrificed or punished but by learning truth that cost him his entire life on a journey to find it. An odyssey if you will.

 

It’s pretty cool Nolan got a cast release date and budget this prestigious lavish to make a film that isn’t meant for complete idiots. Also I have my own personal rules about talking movies. Even though I believe everyone is entitled to an opinion for my own tastes preferences in the context of this post one is I don’t give a shit about your comparison between the book and movie.
     Somewhere at the top of what I consider the most effective powerful favorite tools of cinema or literary devices in general is when a character somehow is positioned amongst a cautionary atrocious pitiful deplorable element established as other only for said character through a twist embodies this very same accursed plight. Because the thought of that in real life is so powerful. What if I became something I hated? Something I feared? That defies logic heart and spirit. And in The Odyssey it’s The People of the Sea. I can’t believe Nolan wrote this screenplay himself. And by the way this is the first Nolan movie I felt genuine emotion. And a lot. Like full on sobbing. But tears of joy tears of beauty tears of pain. And by the way this is the first Nolan movie I think he matched maybe surpassed what Kubrick was capable of not that it makes any sense to compare the two.
     The structure of The Odyssey builds little by little. Constantly foreshadowing forging and reconfiguring our conception of the narrative’s events. And the way Nolan wrings every drop of drama and emotion out of every beat is by the heavy consequences for all of Odysseus’s actions along with their equally severe stakes whereby he atones for them. More than Penelope’s anxiety over the Suitors she tells Telemachus Ithaca needs a king because the people are fearful in a state of unrest because of talk about The People from the Sea. Like weaving a loom when the narrative is ready the way all of these events fit together is too staggering to believe it was made by hand. It’s as fine as they come. 
     Same thing with character motivation. Precision. Odysseus is introduced as fair in the scene that shows how he plucks his bow when hunting. So why does he go to fight at Troy? Because Agamemnon would kill his son if he didn’t. Yet when Eurylochus bemoans the question Couldn’t you have shown some mercy? it approaches potential moral ambiguity as to whether or if or how far we can sympathize with Odysseus’s actions ever so slightly making this question more and more difficult until it becomes unbearable.
     The final act has a monologue by Odysseus that shows the other side of the sacking of Troy. Twist. Reveal. There’s this line. What if when he fell down from the belly of the horse he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night? that at once drives straight into your soul and forces you to confront the reality of war and horrific violence murder of innocents. Making you never want to cheer at spectacle ever again. That is until he finishes the speech and you jump right back into fake movie world bloodlust insatiably thirsting for Odysseus Sword of Doom House of Blue Leaves Oldboy massacre of every single last Suitor. This is sophisticated. This is nuance. These conditions are complex but navigable.

     Yet as if if not more painful is what Odysseus says about the sirens’ wail It's everything you want most and most of all you want is what you’ve already had and lost and can never get back It’s every promise I made to my men that I couldn’t keep. These are the consequences of our desires our ambitions our hopes and dreams.

     Multipurpose motifs dramatic elements or character traits. Varied perspectives. Ambivalence. With stakes this high for a great warrior general with the gods demanding so much from him as to provoke him to defy them what better fractured narrative to evoke this than what is said about Sinon? What is it something like 1. Antinous tells Telemachus that he drew the lot to go to Troy but Odysseus chose Sinon instead so Antinous could stay and take care of his family 2. Sinon says he wanted to go to Troy so bad and Antinous family paid him to take their son’s place 3. Polybus says Sinon was Antinous’s shepherd’s son who wanted Antinous to take his place. Which of these is true? There’s no way to tell really. But I know which one feels true to me.
 
The tone is supernatural perilous. The lives of these characters at the fate of the gods. A time of apparent magic. And speaking of fate the gods consequences foreshadowing the dual meaning subtext of Odysseus's line I’ve followed Agamemnon long enough takes the cake. The Odyssey is a puzzle of dueling perspectives. Similarly Agamemnon’s advice to Odysseus in Hades Don't go in the front door expecting a homecoming of garlands and praise sneak through the back Assess.

     Nolan is the guy who made still the only other of his films I enjoy Tenet (2020, Christopher Nolan) he is a cinematic physicist. At the end of his monologue when Odysseus says They will only be able to sing songs of his exploits until all of his mistakes are forgotten this kinetic energy stays in motion reserved looked at as many different things. As in we can overlook his war crimes beyond which wisdom about leadership can be learned or we can ignore the mass murder of innocents coursing through from Troy to every military campaign ethnic cleansing guerrilla black ops terrorist dictator coup genocide that is a constant throughout all human history only to continually repeat it which we no doubt will. Maybe Circe was right about disguises? Assess.

 
7/17/2026 AMC Madison Yards 8
7/18/2026 AMC Madison Yards 8
Atlanta, GA
 

All you've done is talk about yourself?

Everyman existential middle class pretty much set perfect life family check shelter check security check but stuck hitting your upward mobility ceiling the monotony dissatisfaction of it all smothering you depicted designed manifested as abstract horror is what Chime (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa do so well. Everything about Chime is so clean staged sterile cool blue theory aesthetic average it invents itself as an image system through which the messy visceral outbursts of incomprehensible reprehensible violence evoke the morality of our repressed frustrations with the inessential we bury just beneath our surface. 

     So that’s why the most amazing shot in Chime the dude walking across the bridge high wide crane tracking ext has such an impact. Chime is the promise of cinema we’d hoped for because its economy of purpose doesn’t waste a thing. Each moment is sparse yet charged with significance to be decoded. Even the protagonist a just only slightly good enough cook to teach yet not head chef has the lifelong acquired experience to prepare a course for all to enjoy. Until you discover the tragedy at its soul. 

     Chime is the film I’ve been waiting for my entire life because it does what no other film I’ve ever seen has been able to. It makes slow exciting. Riveting. It demands you to think without spelling everything out until you feel that it already has. The horror of Chime is people who don’t have any reason to worry about their lives. That’s the kind of twist that wakes me up from my cinematic slumber. When that main character bombs his interview the random patron who tries to stab the other diner comparatively isn’t as disturbing. Although we’re made to assume each chime breakdown is the same for everyone we just get made to experience one man’s.

 

What about all the stuff we don’t see? The ghost of AKEMI visiting the academy. What does the teacher see offscreen that we don’t early on the first time he looks toward the entrance to the academy outside? A premonition of what’s to come? What’s the significance of that part of the house with the junk hoard beyond the fringe curtain that precipitates his breakdown? And what does he see when he confronts the terror out on the street? This is the abstract doom we too are confronted with manifested for us to feel.

     Remaining thoughts just gotta throw out there the el train established outside the academy to be used as int strobe light source through window as ominous supernatural capacity rocks. The final climax we get to hear the two note melody door chime is my favorite type of use of establishing sound design and use of familiar liminal nightmare instrument. The way the teacher’s descent shifts to another grain field that makes us feel like we’ve returned to film this is the end.

4/5/2026 4/8/2026 Plaza Theatre

Atlanta, GA

Christie Smith SS26 Fashion Show

Were you apprehensive worried by the trailers that this looks too colorful too chaotic like a Joel Schumacher Batman mess? I was. Don’t worry. It’s not. 

 

I Love Boosters (2026, Boots Riley) is the kind of comedy Hollywood should have been making the whole time since the Golden Age. It’s also unbridled imagination hyperartificial final solution to the what if question. 
     Like Golden Age screwball the comedy is the delivery system yet it has to be backed up by a character story. Clear as can be CORVETTE is against CHRISTIE SMITH. I Love Boosters is a Keke Palmer vehicle and rightly so. Has Demi Moore ever played a character anything like this? Her delivery elevates the Christie Smith character’s pseudointellectual narcissist powermad psychobabble cultleader influencer innovator disruptor pop messiah dictator hilariously sparklingly endearingly effective.
     The plot structure again like Golden Age screwball is busy. Hawksian screwball onslaught rambunctious fast-paced. But around the midpoint an element is introduced so unbeknownst unannounced unexpectedly dynamic creative highly conceptual that it shapes the entire latter half into the stuff of awe dream cartoon. Call it what’s in the magic bag. But it’s staggeringly sci-fi impact is purposeful practical relevant pays off and far less convoluted oversaturated needlessly complicated as the multiverse trope problem plaguing the franchise houses. And speaking of Hollywood glut mediocre cashgrab comicbook slogs how does I Love Boosters do so much more and so much better at half the runtime? 
 
The art direction’s intentionally excessive color palette is more aggressively monochromatic than anything since production designer director Bo Welch’s The Cat in the Hat (2003). But it serves the unified aesthetic of its milieu as extension of its subject matter. Fashion. Low class urban bitches. With all due respect to urban bitches.
     Does the ending work? As far as Corvette’s story yes adequately. About the political messages? There aren’t any silly this is an entertainment. And it’s intelligent. Like the way Hollywood used to be good at.
 
In closing. Random bits. The wall to wall expressionistic aggressive art score fits well. And the LaKeith Stanfield recurring plot device character offering soliciting the answers to the meaning of life’s questions along with accompanying leitmotif acoustic therapeutic escape is just that much more reason as a whole I Love Boosters is evidently every bit and more the comedy I dreamed it’d be.

4/21/2016 AMC Phipps Plaza 14
Atlanta, GA

What happens next? The clue is analytical theorem

Building on my take of Kurosawa’s previous film I read Serpent’s Path (1998, Kiyoshi Kurosawa) as a condemnation of depravity calling out the smallest cog in the machine the distribution of evil a lowly salesman is made accountable for and found guilty of contributing the worst overall whereby he’s led under false pretenses through an intricate trap that twists his own twisted morality back on himself. Its thesis is that only an innocent child has the sincerity to discern right from wrong yet none other than an innocent child is the one society is most affected by upon those transgressing said laws. I also kinda see it as dismantling the yakuza genre through directly confronting us its audience.

     The allegory in Serpent’s Path is the nastiest sfuff to be put on camera is perpetrated by the one selling it. This hits so hard with me because I’ve often pondered the nature of how just thinking about that this kinda stuff exists what disturbs me more than the acts themselves is that someone would film it. I never even thought to consider the culpability of someone who sells it. Beyond disturbing I now gotta agree someone marketing finding a clientel for said offensive taboo criminal contraband materials is too scary. More than that the way the MIYASHITA character is depicted oblivious in denial that he’s even done anything wrong. The chilling part of it all is that addressing all this is real life.

 
But the fun of it all is Shô Aikawa as NÎJIMA. The first time I saw Serpent’s Path he felt like this symbolizing embodiment of justice. As in the faulty legal system indiscriminately punishing not necessarily those who committed the crime but close enough. Somebody’s gotta pay. 
     Obviously though the twist ending is set up the first lines in the movie. Are you sure it’s the guy? It doesn’t matter they’re all connected. Miyashita laughs. Then at the end to Miyashita you were all in the same business right? The idea of the serpent’s path could refer to this grand tragedy very moralizing inevitable cause and effect tale of Miyashita making the wrong choice and paying for it. And Niijima is charismatic cool icon of countless yakuza films as against type teacher detached aloof yet driven his dialogue so revealing when he says in answer to the reason he’s doing all this I just wanted to try something like this.
     Then there’s the great image system wheels of justice Niijima constantly spinning that chamber. Also you ever notice when theyr’e playing darts that gag hearing Otsuki moaning off screen suggests though he’s obviously not really like he’s getting hit with the darts. Like he’s part of their game. Which he is. Which it turns out everyone is. And another weird image system thing is every time I see this you can’t help but notice that table of arts and crafts in the math classroom with funerary wreaths being assembled. And finally definitely not funny how do I wash this out of my brain the filthy slide swing set and chair with stirrups in the abandoned warehouse is the uh stuff that nightmares are made of. 
 
Finally there’s the way Serpent’s Path deglamorizes the yakuza genre. Like how Miyashita is having so much fun thrilled bloodthirsty bent on revenge giddy until he’s not. Once Niijima and we know Niijima intricately planned this whole thing gets Miyashita to shoot someone he doesn’t think any of this is as fun anymore. Nor do we. He becomes just this pathetic wretch loser. We realize we’re into something more now.
     The coolest most effective memorable scene in Serpent’s Path is when Miyashita crashes the classroom and right when he’s lulled into thinking he’s going to get what he’s come after. His reward. And by thanking the teacher they’re like friends or something. Like his dignity is intact. Like he’s in a place he can appreciate the child prodigy and her goodness. But no. He can’t. When he’s confronted by her outside that shot. The way his whole demeanor changes. And the blaring overwhelming sound of the el train behind them drowns us until it cuts to silence. Kiyoshi Kurosawa again here manages to make him accountable for what he’s done. And us too.
 
4/5/2026 4/8/2026 Plaza Theatre
Atlanta, GA

I am a black hole

Initial thoughts the Frankenstein character represents culture. The old. Romantic. As in pop culture in one sense. Escape fantasy dream factory product for consumption by the masses. For you see he too was created. He has been programmed conditioned to find someone and fall in love. As if that’s the only plausible meaning of existence. Where could he have got this from? Spending all his time in the cinema? 
     His delusional parasocial obsessive star worship alternates between that and projecting himself onto the celluloid he’s infatuated with. And this cycle leads to reinvigorating the corpse of the next phase of culture. The new. The Bride.
 
The Bride is accultured to her role in the status quo by Frankenstein (prevalent culture) lying to her denying her any agency identity covering up her gaslighting her trauma abuse murder and any other derivation of systemic silencing of her voice. Yet it is she who is stitched together from a bunch of different pieces. All the movies The Bride! (2026, Maggie Gyllenhaal) is cobbled together from.
     That’s why it feels like such a mess. The Bride is coming to terms with disavowing the culture that created her (and us too) pulling her pistol on everyone she blames for all manner of wrongs and moral transgressions that cause oppression while struggling to accept that it’s a part of her that happens to be pretty fun. She tears it down (hidden meaning #MeToo is what broke it?). Then everyone kills it. Then she realizes she loves it after it’s too late. But Hollywood ending Hollywood doesn’t die. Because it was never alive to begin with.
     Larry Sher’s grimy gloomy orange nasty palette big budget studio riot revolutionary cynical fake biting the hand that feeds you conformist punk wallowing in its own grandeur gothic revenge odyssey is so rad. Because it revels in its acquiescent turmoil and they gave her $90 million to make it. The Bride! despite even if I’m totally misreading it is way ahead of its time and quite possibly my favorite studio movie of the year.
 
3/7/2026 AMC Madison Yards 8
Atlanta, GA

Dog in the manger

You ask me the most romantic film of all time is Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder). Its design is two people from completely different backgrounds who similarly exist in quiet lives where they go unrecognized unappreciated undervalued until the moment they meet then mutually find and reciprocate simple modest kindness that blossoms into genuine affection until it inevitably withers. The romance genre as tearjerker. Fassbinder as tender brutalist. 

What Wuthering Heights (2026, Emeral Fennell) does is express love as the painful sick toxic self-degrading miserable excruciatingly brief yet eternally damaging inborn prank nature has bestowed on us. And it has fun doing so. Romance as bleak tragedy as dark as it gets.

     The prologue sells us the spectacle of death and sex we cheer for. The introduction of Catherine’s home Wuthering Heights full of yonic images that clit arch the winding river originating from where life begins. Poor illiterate people fuck better. And the sentimental child promise I won’t go away I will never leave you no matter what you do is the sweetest bliss swooning heart butterflies people stupid enough to exchange as part of nuptial vows for thousands of years can’t help but fall for. 
     When Heathcliff breaks that chair we know that he’s the only one good enough for Cathy. But in real life you end up hurting the one you love. And so Wuthering Heights translates into cinema a projection of a couple who have found the greatest love of all time so they treat each other abysmally spitefully relentlessly their imaginations energy and souls dedicated to the vindictive harm torture dirty talk and every variety of abuse they are able to inflict upon one another. Everything I always knew was the full expression of love. Thrushcross Grange is Academy Award for Best Production Design with that sitting room with the lacquer red floor and white marble hands mantlepiece. 
     ISABELLA LINTON is what makes Wuthering Heights probably the finest Hollywood studio trash targeted at a large audience of the twenty-first century. Alison Oliver is bubbly adorable vulnerable wanton the only character whose pain I truly feel whose arousal I truly blush. She’s the golden honeypot at the end of the tragedy degradation arc. Romance = passion. Wuthering Heights is the lavish big budget journey from the sentimental passion of first love into pornographic all consuming overwhelming lust. Passion of the heart passion of the flesh what two desires could be least worthy of our trust. Second in overall impact only to Buñuel’s adaptation of the same source Abismos de pasión (1954). And I do respect the scene where Cathy looks in the mirror and slaps herself callback to Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

2/14/2026 AMC Phipps 14
Atlanta, GA