UC Santa Barbara Film and Media Studies PhD.
My favorites are chosen from what I’ve seen in the past year.
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Seven Chances 1925
This is so coded with anxieties concerning the rise of mobile Western women (you mean to tell me that all of the unmarried women who respond to the newspaper ad are made to be seen as explicitly unattractive and hive-minded?).
Still, seeing all these unmarried women leave wreckage behind as they chase Buster is super enjoyable.
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Inland Empire 2006
The older, snazzy lady in the opening scene had me giggling uncontrollably. This kind of nervosity persisted throughout: i.e There’s no paper. For the toilet.
Aesthetically, it feels like Lynch is pulling from the eyes of a paparazzi, gonzo pornographer, and a terrorist interrogator. All different aims of surveillance with their own criteria for pleasure.
In the wake of The Patriot Act, I can imagine that the film’s constant reminders that our gaze is already another’s was evocative.
All this being said, images here are often rendered in ways that defies apprehension, if not also pleasure.
Masterpiece.. I will write an essay on this film.
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Seven Samurai 1954
Mifune’s snarling and scratching is as tender as ever. For all his gleeful yipping, you can’t help but sense unaddressed wounds. These are characters I want to share cups of sake with and hug before their many battles.
Moving then, when I saw it hunched over a laptop at 17, and moving now, as an adult sharing a large popcorn in the theater.
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The Nightmare Before Christmas 1993
I know I’d relish an evening performance of the film’s ghoulish band with a cocktail of Deadly Nightshade, Frog’s Breath, and Worm’s Wort.
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