Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Wicker Park 2004

  ★★ Watched 10 Mar 2022

  The mere presence of the auteur Matthew Lillard's sicko energy was like the slime on the cave walls that sustained me as this chugged on.
  Peak late MTV-era melodrama (to the point where editing resembles those widely-memed Indian soap operas) that is almost completely deflated by the screenplay's particularly blinkered male gaze projection, and a totally inert love affair driving everything. The circular plotting certainly had potential, and the heightened visual language could have been otherwise engaging; but all the Vertigo-doubling is just so played out in the cinematic canon. Plays out like an early aughts jock's idea of a 'women's picture'.

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  Oh Lucy! 2017

  ★★★½ Watched 08 Mar 2022

  The barely-comedic tragedies of the terminally unmoored; reaching for some ineffable fulfilment in a society and culture that privileges the ties of monogamy, youth, family and work. Bubbles punctured when the other side of the pond, for all its propaganda of freedom, is also repressive, and warps us within its strictures. In this sense and others, the perspective truly comes through a Japanese American lense.

  I think it feels meandering accidentally-on-purpose, with Setsuko/Lucy's contradictions thrown up by the openness of…

Popular reviews

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  Aimless Bullet 1961

  ★★★★½ Watched 13 Feb 2016

  'Aimless Bullet' (my preferred translation of 'Obaltan') was released five days before the 1960 April Revolution, and from what I can garner would have been right at home in the political climate of the ensuing year; sandwiched as it was between 7 years of the repressive, U.S.-installed post-war autocrat Syngman Rhee and the military coup of May 1961 that nipped democracy in the bud.

  By all accounts one of the crown jewels of Korea's neglected historic cinema culture, an account…

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  The Legend of the Holy Drinker 1988

  ★★★★½ Watched 12 Feb 2018

  How has this fallen into obscurity? Moored in a dreamlike, submerged urban destitution, rendered in flowing psychological montage, finding sacred chiaroscuro in the ordinary, the interweaving of spiritual and material... just fundamentally cinematic. The repentant struggle eternal. I've been there, brother.