Author: Dan
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A Journey of Infinite Understanding
As is the case with many twenty-something white men of a certain demographic upbringing, I am thrilled announce that I have finished Infinite Jest. (Crowd erupts in applause) As is the case with at least some of my compatriots I’m sure, I began reading it with some apprehension. There’s the obvious obstacle of steeling yourself…
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A Star Wars Retrospective, kind of
Edit: I’m realizing that the first entry took me a lot longer than I thought it would, so I’m going to make this an ongoing piece that I can (hopefully) contribute to regularly until I have a fully fleshed Opinion about Star Wars in its entirety. So this is a “retrospective” on Star Wars, a…
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EEAAO Oscar hangover
Yesterday, kittencabal send me a really good article by Haley Nahman, who writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby and who seems very cool. The article was about EEAAO and the reignited debate over the film’s critical legitimacy in the wake of its Oscar sweep. I responded to Gia with an email that, in retrospect, was…
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Notes from the senso tank
While enjoying the muted pleasures of a sensory deprivation tank last weekend, I began to understand Skinamarink a bit better. In the moist air of this cocoon, I became almost convinced in a half-dream that Kyle Edward Ball had himself conceived of his film while doing the exact same thing. This kind of device is…
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Don’t worry darling, they’re called “inspirations”
The most original part of Don’t Worry Darling is that an accomplished surgeon working overtime is living in squalor with some dingy apartment and no hot water. *in Dr. Oz voice* we’ve got Joe Biden to thank for this. That’s what you get for living in New York I guess… Probably one of the more…
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Omg I’m Gen Z and this is totally how I’d react to my friends getting brutally killed!!!!
It was really only a matter of time before the painfully targeted marketing of Bodies Bodies Bodies got to me. That, and just one or two passing entreaties from contemporaries who were wise enough to see it early in the cycle and thus hopefully detached from most critical assessments. It is definitely a movie that benefits from…
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Gravity and a lack thereof
A human body, spent of every drop of energy, willing itself past the point of expiration to survival. Clawing at the wet sand to drag itself out of a murky, certain death. Such is the last shot of Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, a film hailed in 2013 for its extensive and groundbreaking production, that chronicles Sandra Bullock’s…
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Eating pomegranates with my brothers of the cloth
The Color of Pomegranates is one of those films that I’ve always told myself I’d watch in a moment of contemplative quietude. Naturally, that moment didn’t come. Instead fate brought me to a screening of Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 rose-tinted collage at the Philadelphia Film Society theater. More specifically, I caught wind of my girlfriend and one…
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Everything Everywhere All At Once, or the perfect Zoomer film
The conceit of Everything Everywhere All At Once is not overly complex. Boiled down, it’s probably little more than an ode to everyday life, or more accurately, contemporary everyday life. Following the life of Evelyn Wang, our protagonist, it begins with the stressful, if cinematically innocuous task of filing her taxes with the IRS. Before…
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Soviet Meditations from Andrey Tarkovsky
Recently I watched the 1979 film Stalker by Andrey Tarkovsky. The best place to start with this movie is probably the story of how it was made. After shooting the entire movie once, Tarkovsky found that the film had been developed incorrectly, and was unusable. In response, he fired his cinematographer, and re-shot the entire…
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