I have now officially come out as trans to everyone in my life as of today. I chose the longest, sunniest day, summer solstice, for the occasion to make this the brightest step into a better tomorrow, into the rest of my real life. The last step of courage of my inner self into the outside world. No more hiding facts. No more running from the confrontation. No more roleplaying. No more conformity of expression. No more allowing for questioning…
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Southland Tales 2006
Perfection in art is boring cause it leaves no cracks to dive into, no space to transplant your imperfect existence. No way for the imagination to fill in the incomplete.
The imperfect holds a fascination and uniqueness that cannot be replicated, shows the limits of craft and exposes earnestness, stray observation and the humanity of the creators and audiences where the sanitized, corporate and understood cannot. -
Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie 1999
I made a promise to myself last year that the next time I'd watch this would be the day I'd start HRT.
Today was that day. 🏳️⚧️
It's a long road, so just keep driving. Let's go to the outside world. It's time to graduate, to drive on, to love, to live.
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Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver 2024
Truly (SPACE) operatic.
Snyder is truly operating on that old school serialized pulp that no one else is. It feels like all other large budget franchise-coded scifi and fantasy are setting out to create longform serialization as means of revenue stability without a head creative voice guiding their spirit and use of medium at the cost of interesting formal choices, the bizareness of these genres and the spirit of pulp and pastiche that recycles and births new expressions therein. Meanwhile…
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Lady in the Water 2006
"Man thinks they are each alone in this world. It is not true. You are all connected. One act can one day affect all."
Shyamalan has a fascination with oddballs and contrasts. His visual language is steeped in horror but the heart of his works is so full of sincerity and earnestness that it goes contrary to all established sensibilities of most moviegoing audiences and critics, our existing vocabulary fails us. The off-kilter visual language at first seems distant, unfocused,…
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga 2024
Possibly the most apt prequel ever made. While Fury Road still feels ahead of modern filmmaking, Furiosa is firmly planted in modern ways of making a film but doing so at maximum intensity and in service of the wildest content in ANY modern blockbuster.
The shots go on for longer, the color palette a tad more muted like expected of the genre, the music complimentary but rarely noticable on first viewing, more reliance on visual effects, more dialogue. It is…
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The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim 2024
Between this LOTR anime and Wicked adaptation, someone in Hollywood really got 16-year-old-me's letters.
Earnest paperback Middle Earth entry, which is close to how I discovered the franchise in the first place, so this is pretty much hitting all the bases for me. Not exceptionally but fully doing its most and best with obviously limited resources and a lot of love.
Also, CAN WE STOP RE-ANIMATING THE DEAD. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.
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Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire 2023
The fun of pastiche is to see and recognize ideas, images and iconography we have become familiar with and loved, filtered through a personal vision, rendering them in new light as a whole of things we have seen in parts but not as a unity. What perfect material could there be for a pastiche than to seek to bear the torch of previous masters of the realm (Star Wars) while drawing from both its intial influences AND the fifty years…
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Avatar: The Way of Water 2022
Three things:
- The greatest and most magical special effects I have ever seen, thanks in no small part to the high frame rate. Gemini Man was already some of the most awe inspiring and breathtaking cineamtic leap I had seen up to that point and this runs circles around it in both scope and visuals and how it served to truly take us into another world. Which leads me to:
- I actually forgot I was watching special effects…
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Fast X 2023
The Fury Road of the Fast franchise. Breathless, fully loaded, breaking at the seams and the most mythological of the bunch. Introducing the best villain so far, a trickster god whose sole presence not only seems to break apart the stability of the family but also the film and franchise itself, stretching the bounds of what you are allowed to do in these films and being an ugly mirror to the bombast of the previous films coming to reap what…