First thought: the live action car stunts are actually kind of insane.
I challenege anyone who says the new US movies are ridiculous compared to the good ol days to sit down and watch this. pure imaginative art.
I mean come on, weve got a 3 million year old hollow earth atlantian adjacent race that originated the easter island statues.
The humans in this do nothing of value, and the narrative feels like it was written the day of.
Jet…
I need to put together a list of snowy noirs. There's something really powerful about the juxtaposition of dark, grimey city alleys and wide open barren snow tundra in stunning black and white.
This film is surprisingly melancholic in a way I feel most noirs prefer to resolve in some up-beat didactic epilogue, though I guess this does have a "happy" ending of sorts. Though mostly, it just hits you with poignant loneliness of varying flavors. A misanthropic cop without…
The mise en scène in this thing is off the charts. Schrader has an undeniable knack for digging into the psyche of compelling and deeply troubled men, without glorifying or condemning them. In this, he paints an empathetic picture of a man who's life's trajectory could never escape the drag of his turbulent childhood, and the extreme societal shifts of post-war Japan. Purity and eroticism, beauty and decay, the finality of death as a timeless merger of action and word. The ending feels heartbreaking as his ideals, twisted as they were, collapse before his eyes.
