KATIE McGRATH as MORGANA 𝕸𝖊𝖗𝖑𝖎𝖓 ⧽ 𝟏.𝟏𝟐 "𝔗𝔬 𝔎𝔦𝔩𝔩 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤"

Well...that Kraven The Hunter trailer was not...very good at all now, was it Sony?

We are on experiment #3 of yet another boring and uninspired take of another Spider-Man *villain* -I say those words loosely since Sony's versions of these characters are far from resembling anything remotely villainous or even anti-hero esque but I digress - getting handed his own origin story no one asked for in Kraven the hunter and to the surprise of no one (maybe me since I thought Sony would learn their lesson🤡)...they STILL fucked this up!

Kraven is the most easy, simple and effective character you can adapt as villain for a future Spider-Man movie. His whole gimmick is he's a hunter who hunts for sport who's obsessed in taking down Spider-Man in order to prove he's the world's greatest hunter. Its simple. Now I don't mind if slight tweaks were made for his movie counterpart as long as the changes made weren't done on a significant scale where the character is totally unrecognizable, I'm fine with it.

Not here. Oh no, they fucking mauled (no pun intended) everything apart about what made this villain cool for me. His obsession with Spider-Man? It ain't here. So obviously since Sony hasnt yet established a proper Spiderman for this cinematic universe for whatever dumb fucking reason, we needed something else.

And what do we get instead as a replacement? A grown man harboring daddy issues who goes on a hunting spree to rid the world of evil men like his father after being left for dead as a young boy by said parent. Yup...excellent Oscar winning writing, right? What great storytelling!

Might I add this version of Kraven has superhuman abilities where he can connect with every land animal as means to spot his prey. I mean, what am I watching, Sony's answer to Aquaman and Tarzan rolled into one? What *IS* this movie trying to be?!😭 This comment I found on reddit sums it up perfectly another issue I have with on upcoming movie:

Venom is about a sympathetic man that transforms a monstrous anti-hero that eats people. Repeat with Venom 2. Morbius is about a sympathetic man that transforms a monstrous anti-hero that eats people. Kraven is about a sympathetic man that transforms into a monstrous anti-hero that eats people. There’s no variety here. It’s the same movie.

And for how he was gifted these powers you ask? From a drop of blood of a lion. The same damn lion that attacked him as a child. I'm not joking because this is explicitly shown in the trailer if you think I'm lying.

I should also point out a very huge difference between movie kraven and comic Kraven where in the comics he gets his abilities by ingesting various potions made from jungle herbs. He didn't inherit none of the shit from a lion's blood and even what he's got in the movie is greatly exaggerated, bordering on flat out wrong by comparison.

Imagine casting Ariana DeBose as his love interest - a whole voodoo priestess in the comics where you don't capitalize off of that potential where she could be the main power source of how he's given his abilities when the opportunity was right there! What a waste.

And there are people who really and honestly believe a corporate husk like Sony can handle any Spider-Man character better than what Marvel/Feige has done on their end with the brand? LOL ok suuure...

Anyways by that point of me watching what was left in the trailer, any little bit of interest I did have, flew right out the window. I don't care how much gore, blood, and carnage on display you show me, it didn't get me geeked at all. I can tell when a film has excessive violence to further the story at the betterment of its writing or is gory for the studio's sake to ensure an R rating. Guess which one this falls under🙃. Fuck, not even a shot of Aaron Taylor Johnson biting off a man's nose made me feel anything. I was as dry as a desert.

But I swear nothing could truly prepare me for the footage that followed soon after because this is where I truly lost my shit. And not in a good way.

And you wanna see what my immediate response was after seeing that shot? This:

Because I'm tired. I am tired of this studio constantly justifying the pointless existence behind these films through these teases and hints sprinkled in the hopes Tom or Andrew - or even Tobey for that matter - will show up for this dumb idea of a sinister six movie where all these villains join forces in fighting a version of Spider-Man only for them to turn around and team up with the hero they were just fighting moments ago to go up against an even bigger villain that either threatens the entire world or new york city. I bet my whole bank account that's the exact story Sony has been itching of telling and if so, its GARBAGE, and Y'all can keep letting this idea sit in the bottom pits of development hell if that's the case because it will never be a good movie (let alone a good comic book movie at that).

My expectations for this were already low when Kraven was announced and there I was, dare I say, showing some slight interest in how a villain like Kraven would be handled. That maybe Sony would finally win me over in finally getting at least one of these movies right with me, right?

HELL NO. 3 movies in - with two more on the way; one staring Sydney from Euphoria and another villain entry starring fucking Bad Bunny🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️I'm so excited for that last one especially 🙄 - and its painfully clear for each one that's already out, is on the way, or is in development are all nothing but cash grabs just so they can keep holding onto the rights of the Spider-Man brand and any related character to him. Since fucking 2002 they have been milking this cow.

2002! Two decades worth of Sony not producing a single original property since then and quite frankly, I'm sick of it. In fact, I've been tired of it. It just took this Kraven trailer for me to say "Fuck it."

I just seriously cannot wait for the day the full rights of Spider-Man revert back with Marvel where Feige can better utilize them because as it stands and will forever be the case since 2014 when Amazing Spider-Man 2 failed as the starting point up to present day, Sony just doesnt have that dog in them to tell good stories from this property no more. This studio really did peak at the height of genuine storytelling with that original Raimi trilogy.

I'll leave you all with this in mind: if it weren't for Sony still holding the rights hostage at this stage, we would've seen Venom in the mcu by now, and Kraven would've probably already made an appearance had Ryan's original plans of introducing him as a villain in the first Black Panther had went through. Oh welp🤷‍♀️

I suppose if there's one thing I know this movie won't fall short of is creating an entire new base full of fangirls who'll be thirsting after Aaron so..I guess there's one positive thing to be said on how this will be received in some cases which isn't saying a whole lot, really.

If anything, I'll probably check out the movie just for the eye candy of seeing him if I'm brutally honest but everything else is a hard no lol.

Years Together (Sergio Ramos)

A/N: Here I am, back with my first football little one-shot, or multiple parts since this is based on a TikTok. Anyway, I wanted to do it on bae, Sergio Ramos. I love this man, I would sacrifice a whole lot of things for this man. I know I usually write Mayans, specifically Angel, but I wanted to branch out. Be on the lookout for Rio, Billy Russo and Bucky Barnes. Maybe even Lewis Tan, Sebastian Stan are on the horizon. Regardless, I hope you all enjoy what I write still. If you don’t read, totally understandable, I still love you all!

I will try to finish all my works in progress along with the requests I have! EZ should be next since I’m almost done with his, I just have to actually finish it. 

Love you all!

Word Count: 1206

CREDITS TO THE GIF MAKER <3

You sat beside Sergio as he watched the next Marvel film in the series of chronological order for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So far, you two were at Iron Man II. Sergio has been either working out or watching film during the quarantine. La Liga was set to reconvene in two weeks and you were honestly excited. Though you couldn’t go to the matches, at least Sergio and the boys would be gracing your screens again. 

You and Sergio have been together for nine years and in those ten years, you two have had two sons together, Sergio Jr. and Thiago. You two were set to get married this year, but with the pandemic happening, you thought it would be best to postpone the wedding till all your friends and family could safely participate. 

With the pandemic happening, your work has been moved to a home setting. You actually didn’t mind holding meetings and working at home, it made things so much easier for you. You could take care of the boys, with Sergio’s help and also be able to stay safe. Sergio was holding Thiago, your three year old, while Junior, your five year old was nestled right beside you. 

“Should we order dinner? Or are we cooking?” You questioned him.

“Pizza?” Sergio has been indulging due to the pandemic and it wasn’t like the calories were staying on him. Sergio worked out far too much for the calories to really make a dent to his ungodly body.

You ordered pizza through an app, letting Sergio pick the toppings. You all got your own personalized pizza that was the perfect size for one person. You also got some cheesy bread since your sons were a sucker for cheese and so were you. 

You scrolled through TikTok as the movie began. TikTok has become an obsession you couldn’t drop. It was ridiculous, but the endless hours you spent on this app was dangerous. You even made an account. You’ve posted a few TikTok’s of you messing with Sergio, but nothing too insane as of yet. You did want to try one with Sergio, to see how he would react to this specific TikTok. There was a TikTok going around where the person gets the number of years together wrong and their partner reacts. There were a varying amount of reactions and you wanted to see what Sergio would say. 

Setting up your phone to record him, you focused the camera on Sergio, who was enjoying some juice you made earlier in the day. 

“Babe,” you called out.

“Hmm,” his eyes remained on the screen.

“You know what I find insane? My sister just texted me and told me that we’ve been together for seven years. That’s a long time huh?” You had to hold back your laughter. You didn’t think Sergio was paying attention since he’s been occupied by the Marvel Cinematic Universe since he finished his morning workout. 

Sergio paused the movie and looked back at you. “Seven years? Who have you been dating for seven years?” He gave you an incredulous look. “We’ve been together for ten years, five months, three weeks, 5 days, and six hours.” 

The details he uttered made you speechless. You knew how long you two were together by at least years and months, but he knew the weeks, days and hours? 

“What?” You looked at him in disbelief. “You know all of that?”

“Yes, of course I do. I still don’t think you understand how long I waited for you to agree to go on a date with me.” Sergio shook his head. “Now, who the hell have you been dating for seven years. I can text our sister right now.”

You’ve known Sergio since childhood through your sister. He wasn’t much older than you, just by a few years. Your sister was never fond of the idea of you dating Sergio, so you kept him at arm's length, but after the 2010 World Cup, you changed your mind and said screw it. You went on one date with Sergio and the rest was history. You two were on and off, but Sergio never let too much time pass till he waved the white flag. He had a temper and you liked to push him. You two were volatile, but somehow, you two made it work. He loves fiercely and so do you. Sergio always knew you were the one, he always said it was the way you would ignore him that got him. 

But you weren’t ignoring him, you just didn’t like him. 

And the dislike eventually grew to fondness to friendship and then to love. 

“Babe, it's a prank.” You stopped recording, saving the video as a draft and showing him where you got the idea from. 

Sergio looked at you and shook his head. “You’re such damn trouble.” He chuckled, playing the movie once again. “I’m gonna have to start watching some videos, just so we can be at an even playing field.”

“Do you know the seconds too?”

“That’s pushing it.”

You had to laugh at that. “That’s pushing it?” 

Sergio turned to you and kissed you. Junior let out a giggle along with your youngest son Thiago. “Babe, you’re the longest commitment I’ve had besides being in the Madrid team. So yes, I value and keep track of how long we’ve been together, pretty soon, I’ll be counting marriage years.”

“You know, we should just get married at a courthouse. All we need is your mom, my mom and there we go. Hell, we can even do it virtually.”

Sergio paused the movie again. “I want you to have your dream wedding.”

“I don’t have one, I just want to be married to you.”

Sergio chuckled and shook his head. “You know that’s what I want to, but I want us to be able to celebrate with our family and friends. To really enjoy the fact that we’ve annoyed them with our PDA for ten years.”

You laughed. “You’re such a dork.” You pushed his head. “Okay, we can wait. As long as I become Mrs. Ramos at the end.”

“Baby, there’s no way you won’t be Mrs. Ramos at the end. I told you three years in, it’s you and me.” Sergio squeezed your thigh. “Te queiro mi amor.” He kissed you again.

And it was true, Sergio had told you he was going to marry you some day on your third year anniversary. You brushed it off and said we’ll see next year. And each year after that, Sergio upped his game. Finally, on your eight year anniversary he proposed. It’s not like he didn’t want to do it earlier, but he knew for some reason you weren’t ready. A relationship was one thing but an engagement was another.

“Love you too.” You had your hand at the back of his neck, scratching it, a gesture Sergio absolutely adored. 

You two watched the movie, mostly Sergio whole you browsed around TikTok. You started saving videos to do with Sergio. Another one you wanted to do was the ‘what three things would you take with you if we got divorced’? 

But you would save that for next time.

Let the TikTok videos begin.

201203 The Powerful, Limitless Kai

EXO member Kai unpacks his solo debut, artistry, and how he learned to express himself.

“I wanted to show that Kai is limitless,” 26-year-old Kim Jongin, better known by his stage name Kai, tells Teen Vogue of his newly-released debut self-titled album. The word is multifaceted, conjuring up an unfettered existence or an endless void, as terrifying as it is appealing.

Kai leans toward the latter. His voice — soft, restrained, thoughtful, and at times giddy during our interview — is an anchor in that wide open space. He’s quite excited about the idea of limitlessness, of existing on more than one plane, of proving you’re more than one thing.

Kai, out November 30, is just the first step.

“Over the years I've been in the industry, many people have seen me as a member of EXO. I have performed in front of our EXO fans and SuperM fans. This is the first time I'm actually releasing something under my own name,” he says. “I want to show people who Kai is through this album. The name Kai means ‘to open’. So, I want it to be open and show a new side of me.”

The year was 2012 when EXO debuted with an intensely mythological, high-concept origin story. Shortly after the heart of the Tree of Life dried up due to the red forces’ incessant attacks, Kai descended to Earth — along with the rest of the members of EXO — as part of the legends that “see the same sky but shall stand on different grounds, shall stand on the same ground but shall see different skies.” (A parallel to EXO’s original split into two groups, one focused on China’s pop market, the other on Korea’s.) Each member has his own superpower, and Kai’s is teleportation, although he doesn’t always know what to do with it. During the music video for “Lucky One," the rest of EXO use their powers to fend off villains, but Kai breaks out into dance. (Though if you’ve seen Kai dance, you’ll know that’s as much a superpower as anything.)

That may be Kai’s beginning, but he was brought to life by Kim Jongin, the youngest of three siblings, who grew up in Suncheon, South Korea, with an early interest in ballet and jazz dance. Taking on the persona of Kai at 17 years old, he began to set the framework for what he’d soon become known for: a fluid, captivating dance style infused with seemingly endless confidence, smirking through concept changes with ease. As EXO’s popularity hit the stratosphere shortly after their single “Growl” — with performances on world stages like the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, the multi-million selling 9-member group remains one of the most revered acts in modern-day K-pop — so did Kai’s reputation as one of the most enigmatic performers in Korean idol music.

Duality is one of K-pop’s favorite concepts, and the endearing dichotomy between Kai and Jongin is a perfect example of where the person and the artist diverge. On stage, Kai paints a mysterious picture, flitting from lithe self-possession to seductive swagger, to borderline arrogance. Off stage, however, Jongin is uncharacteristically shy: he blushes when complimented by his group members, often forgets his own passwords (and asks friends to help out), and is obsessed with his niece and nephew.

While every gaze, every spin, every step with Kai is intentional, Kim Jongin is as free of the bounds of pretense as it gets. It could be as easy as turning a switch on or off, but that would be doing Kai’s ethos a disservice. It’s subliminal. “Kai is me in my dream state,” he says. “When I'm sleeping, it's like my dream character comes alive, and that would be Kai. I’m more of a normal, down-to-earth person. That's just me, but Kai is this persona that's on stage… I do notice that when I'm dancing and pulling off all these different concepts, [I’m] like a totally different person outside of myself doing that.”

And if EXO member Kai is one type of persona, solo performer Kai is another. He previewed Kai with a short film song-sampler, in which he “teleports” through a cinematic thoroughfare of concepts, each one diving deeper. In “Hello Stranger,” his voice is the lighthouse in the storm of the bustling city, asking to talk about the things that overwhelm you. “Reason” is a modern-day fairytale, with Kai as the quirky, attention-grabbing prince in a sea of droning conversations and pretentious debutantes. Hold his hand, turn the corner, and you meet Bad Boy Kai in “Amnesia,” sheathed in leather and a mullet (a hairstyle that continues to be one of the greatest things ever to happen to K-pop) and leaning into noble sacrifice: “Forget me before I know you,” he says. How can you?

We pass through scores of mirrors, each with a different version of Kai as he croons, “Don’t think about anything else.” He holds this attention until the mirrors open into a vast landscape. Now, he is the one looking at a mirror of his own — clad in lace and soft whites and vocalizing his desires openly, “Nothing On Me” is his version of suave vulnerability. The story ends on “Ride Or Die,” a throwback to yesteryears with its heavy, sensual synths and noir setup. It’s a full circle moment; this Kai is the same one we get a glimpse of within the first few seconds of the film, as a hologram. All this while, the mirrors that pull us through the songs have been windows, a journey through the hallways of Kai’s mind, ending in the confident reassurance that he will “ride or die” with us, till the end.

“[I wanted to show] that I can do anything and that anything is possible,” he says. “It’s the connection between teleportation and the limitless possibilities that I have as an artist, as Kai. I wanted to showcase that all of these different sides are Kai, are myself.” And he learned a lot about himself in the process of making the album. “To be honest, I was pretty stressed preparing for all of this on my own, but I think I learned a lot about myself throughout this process. Not just myself as an artist, but [also] a lot about myself as a person: my personality, how I deal with stress, and just... what I’m like as a human being.”

Teleportation is an apt comparison for Kai’s continued interest in embracing other art forms and expanding his artistic lexicon. If that comes with playing with the constraints of conventional style, fashion, and masculinity, then so be it. Like his artistry, his sartorial expression is boundless: whether it’s the slew of crop tops worn to highlight the chorus in “Don’t Mess Up My Tempo”, which gave us one of the most memorable fan-cams of 2018; to the shirtless red suit for “Love Shot” that, frankly, deserves its own museum; to the soft yet dangerous combination of flaming red and lace he’s sporting in the highlight medley for Kai. Every outfit is the period at the end of his words, mapping out his own zeitgeist.

“As my career progressed, fashion itself became a way to express myself on stage and the being that I am,” he says. “It's not just about expressing the song or the concept itself. I think it’s really important for me to try new things and have people notice what I've been trying. I actually want people to look back on the styles that I've tried as an example for them to reference later on. Fashion has become a really important thing for me to develop myself.”

At the heart of these many concepts, of both his Kai persona and his life as Jongin, is movement. Kim Jongin and Kai share a fundamental receptiveness to the world, and of course, a singular, synchronous rhythm that has become the bedrock of his artistry, whether as part of EXO or out on his own.

“When I was younger and I first started dancing, I think I just simply loved dancing itself. I was immersed in the art of dancing,” he says. “I loved doing it, but I think as I've progressed as a performer, as my career has grown, dancing has not only become something I love to do, but it's also become a tool [to] express myself on stage and to audiences. Dancing has been part of more than half of my life now. It’s like a friend that I can't live without.”

source: Tanu I. Raj @ Teen Vogue

[INTERVIEW] Kai - 201203 Teen Vogue: “The Powerful, Limitless Kai”

"EXO member Kai unpacks his solo debut, artistry, and how he learned to express himself.

“I wanted to show that Kai is limitless,” 26-year-old Kim Jongin, better known by his stage name Kai, tells Teen Vogue of his newly-released debut self-titled album. The word is multifaceted, conjuring up an unfettered existence or an endless void, as terrifying as it is appealing.

Kai leans toward the latter. His voice — soft, restrained, thoughtful, and at times giddy during our interview — is an anchor in that wide open space. He’s quite excited about the idea of limitlessness, of existing on more than one plane, of proving you’re more than one thing.

Kai, out November 30, is just the first step.

“Over the years I've been in the industry, many people have seen me as a member of EXO. I have performed in front of our EXO fans and SuperM fans. This is the first time I'm actually releasing something under my own name,” he says. “I want to show people who Kai is through this album. The name Kai means ‘to open’. So, I want it to be open and show a new side of me.”

The year was 2012 when EXO debuted with an intensely mythological, high-concept origin story. Shortly after the heart of the Tree of Life dried up due to the red forces’ incessant attacks, Kai descended to Earth — along with the rest of the members of EXO — as part of the legends that “see the same sky but shall stand on different grounds, shall stand on the same ground but shall see different skies.” (A parallel to EXO’s original split into two groups, one focused on China’s pop market, the other on Korea’s.) Each member has his own superpower, and Kai’s is teleportation, although he doesn’t always know what to do with it. During the music video for “Lucky One," the rest of EXO use their powers to fend off villains, but Kai breaks out into dance. (Though if you’ve seen Kai dance, you’ll know that’s as much a superpower as anything.)

That may be Kai’s beginning, but he was brought to life by Kim Jongin, the youngest of three siblings, who grew up in Suncheon, South Korea, with an early interest in ballet and jazz dance. Taking on the persona of Kai at 17 years old, he began to set the framework for what he’d soon become known for: a fluid, captivating dance style infused with seemingly endless confidence, smirking through concept changes with ease. As EXO’s popularity hit the stratosphere shortly after their single “Growl” — with performances on world stages like the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, the multi-million selling 9-member group remains one of the most revered acts in modern-day K-pop — so did Kai’s reputation as one of the most enigmatic performers in Korean idol music.

Duality is one of K-pop’s favorite concepts, and the endearing dichotomy between Kai and Jongin is a perfect example of where the person and the artist diverge. On stage, Kai paints a mysterious picture, flitting from lithe self-possession to seductive swagger, to borderline arrogance. Off stage, however, Jongin is uncharacteristically shy: he blushes when complimented by his group members, often forgets his own passwords (and asks friends to help out), and is obsessed with his niece and nephew.

While every gaze, every spin, every step with Kai is intentional, Kim Jongin is as free of the bounds of pretense as it gets. It could be as easy as turning a switch on or off, but that would be doing Kai’s ethos a disservice. It’s subliminal. “Kai is me in my dream state,” he says. “When I'm sleeping, it's like my dream character comes alive, and that would be Kai. I’m more of a normal, down-to-earth person. That's just me, but Kai is this persona that's on stage… I do notice that when I'm dancing and pulling off all these different concepts, [I’m] like a totally different person outside of myself doing that.”

And if EXO member Kai is one type of persona, solo performer Kai is another. He previewed Kai with a short film song-sampler, in which he “teleports” through a cinematic thoroughfare of concepts, each one diving deeper. In “Hello Stranger,” his voice is the lighthouse in the storm of the bustling city, asking to talk about the things that overwhelm you. “Reason” is a modern-day fairytale, with Kai as the quirky, attention-grabbing prince in a sea of droning conversations and pretentious debutantes. Hold his hand, turn the corner, and you meet Bad Boy Kai in “Amnesia,” sheathed in leather and a mullet (a hairstyle that continues to be one of the greatest things ever to happen to K-pop) and leaning into noble sacrifice: “Forget me before I know you,” he says. How can you?

We pass through scores of mirrors, each with a different version of Kai as he croons, “Don’t think about anything else.” He holds this attention until the mirrors open into a vast landscape. Now, he is the one looking at a mirror of his own — clad in lace and soft whites and vocalizing his desires openly, “Nothing On Me” is his version of suave vulnerability. The story ends on “Ride Or Die,” a throwback to yesteryears with its heavy, sensual synths and noir setup. It’s a full circle moment; this Kai is the same one we get a glimpse of within the first few seconds of the film, as a hologram. All this while, the mirrors that pull us through the songs have been windows, a journey through the hallways of Kai’s mind, ending in the confident reassurance that he will “ride or die” with us, till the end.

“[I wanted to show] that I can do anything and that anything is possible,” he says. “It’s the connection between teleportation and the limitless possibilities that I have as an artist, as Kai. I wanted to showcase that all of these different sides are Kai, are myself.” And he learned a lot about himself in the process of making the album. “To be honest, I was pretty stressed preparing for all of this on my own, but I think I learned a lot about myself throughout this process. Not just myself as an artist, but [also] a lot about myself as a person: my personality, how I deal with stress, and just... what I’m like as a human being.”

Teleportation is an apt comparison for Kai’s continued interest in embracing other art forms and expanding his artistic lexicon. If that comes with playing with the constraints of conventional style, fashion, and masculinity, then so be it. Like his artistry, his sartorial expression is boundless: whether it’s the slew of crop tops worn to highlight the chorus in “Don’t Mess Up My Tempo”, which gave us one of the most memorable fan-cams of 2018; to the shirtless red suit for “Love Shot” that, frankly, deserves its own museum; to the soft yet dangerous combination of flaming red and lace he’s sporting in the highlight medley for Kai. Every outfit is the period at the end of his words, mapping out his own zeitgeist.

“As my career progressed, fashion itself became a way to express myself on stage and the being that I am,” he says. “It's not just about expressing the song or the concept itself. I think it’s really important for me to try new things and have people notice what I've been trying. I actually want people to look back on the styles that I've tried as an example for them to reference later on. Fashion has become a really important thing for me to develop myself.”

At the heart of these many concepts, of both his Kai persona and his life as Jongin, is movement. Kim Jongin and Kai share a fundamental receptiveness to the world, and of course, a singular, synchronous rhythm that has become the bedrock of his artistry, whether as part of EXO or out on his own.

“When I was younger and I first started dancing, I think I just simply loved dancing itself. I was immersed in the art of dancing,” he says. “I loved doing it, but I think as I've progressed as a performer, as my career has grown, dancing has not only become something I love to do, but it's also become a tool [to] express myself on stage and to audiences. Dancing has been part of more than half of my life now. It’s like a friend that I can't live without.”"

Credit: Teen Vogue.

https://www.talkhouse.com/on-the-virtues-of-cinematic-failure/

///

Most journalists who have spoken to me about my new erotic drama PVT Chat (starring Peter Vack and Julia Fox and streaming now on most VOD platforms) assume it’s my first feature film. Actually, it’s my third. My first two features never played a single film festival and haven’t been seen by more than a few hundred people (mostly friends and/or curious followers of my rock band, Bodega). They were financial failures (even though they were made extremely cheaply), but you couldn’t call them critical failures because nobody has ever reviewed them. I spent the last decade working on these films and yet their cultural footprint is practically nonexistent.

Despite that, I still believe in them and hope one day I’ll make a movie (or record) that inspires people to seek them out. My early cinematic attempts certainly failed at behaving like normal movies, but to me it is precisely this failure that makes them interesting.

Godard said of Pierrot le Fou (1965), “It’s not really a film. It’s an attempt at a film.” This is a purposefully cryptic statement, but I think I understand what he meant. There is a sketch-like quality to his films from that period. He was less interested in following a particular plot through to its conclusion than suggesting narrative ideas and moving on. He enjoyed employing classical narrative tropes but didn’t want to waste screen time on the proper pacing required to sell those tropes to an audience. Instead he filled his screen time with spontaneous personal, poetic, and political ruminations that occurred to him literally on the day of filming. Many found – and still find – this approach infuriating, but for a select number of Godard disciples, like me, this type of filmmaking is still revolutionary. I remember seeing Weekend during my sophomore year of college at the University of South Carolina and having my mind completely ripped open. Suddenly the world wasn’t a small, mediocre, predictable place – it was full of music and color and philosophy and eroticism. There were people out there genuinely disgusted with the status quo and boldly proclaiming it with style.

Godard’s work is a fulfillment of the dream of the caméra-stylo – a term coined in 1948 by Alexandre Astruc that argued it was theoretically possible for someone to compose a film with as much direct personal expression as exists in prose. In order to achieve this level of expression, one often needs to move beyond the realm of mere plot and narrative naturalism, the principle that what you are seeing on screen is real. (On most movie sets, the filmmakers and actors work overtime to sell this illusion.) Films that focus solely on plot, character psychology, and one literary theme have to direct the majority of their screen time toward plotting mechanics and emotional manipulation of the audience. What you gain in dramatic catharsis you often lose in intellectual honesty. There’s always a tradeoff. I am invested in a cinema of the future that veers toward self-expression, but doesn’t need to avoid dramatic catharsis as Godard’s films did. Certainly many filmmakers my age are working to achieve such a synthesis of intellectual directness and narrative pleasure. Experimentation is required and many “bad” films need to be made to pave the way for future successes.

I graduated college in 2010 high on this dream of the caméra-stylo and philosophy (my field of study) and in 2011 started filming my first feature, Annunciation, with experimental filmmaker Simon Liu. Annunciation is an “adaptation” of the Mérode Altarpiece, an early Northern Renaissance oil painting triptych by Robert Campin. The film features three short separate narratives, one for each panel of the famous 15th-century painting. I wanted the performances in Annunciation to be controlled and somewhat surreal, as if the whole film existed in a heightened but slowed-down hypnotic state; I was thinking about Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni and, of course, Godard (particularly his work from the ’80s). There is some plot, but the main goal of the movie was to reveal the miracle of existence in the everyday. And because the Mérode Altarpiece depicts the scene in Christianity where the Virgin Mary was impregnated by light alone, the film had to be shot on 16mm film.

Now picture this: a 22-year-old walks into a conference room in Midtown Manhattan and gives this pitch to a producer who was then investing in thriller movies: “Every time light strikes a piece of celluloid, a miracle similar to the Annunciation scene occurs: an image appears in the likeness of man that redeems our fallen world and reveals it to be the beautiful place that we take for granted in our normal day-to-day.” This wasn’t met with the enthusiasm I was hoping for. “Don’t you see,” I said, “this is a film about the ecstatic of the quotidian! This is a film that audiences will flock to! It could do for Williamsburg and Bushwick what Breathless did for Paris!” Looking back, I am both shocked and charmed by my youthful naiveté, courage and idiocy.

I was laughed out of the room, but the producer was kind enough to wish me good luck and welcomed any future pitches, should I come up with something any “normal” person would want to watch. I never thought of films in the tradition of the caméra-stylo as being elite works only for the gallery or the Academy. I, like Godard before me, have always assumed that audiences are intelligent and long for thoughtful, challenging movies. That belief I carry to this day and thankfully it sometimes seems to be true. How else could you explain the recent success of heady films by Josephine Decker or Miranda July?

Thanks to small donations from family members (and credit cards), I was able to shoot Annunciation without any official backing. I cast the film with a mixture of non-actor friends and some undiscovered Backstage.com talent and dove head first into the production. Right as our principal photography began, Occupy Wall Street gained momentum, so Simon and I spent time at Zuccotti Park filming our actors experiencing the movement. The hopeful promise of OWS seemed to reflect the yearning desire of our film’s protagonists as well as our own idealist cinema experiment.

When the film was finished and edited, I naively assumed that we were well on our way towards global cinematic notoriety. Surely, I thought, this important film that manages to blend fiction with actual footage of OWS would premiere at Cannes or Berlin and the Criterion Collection would issue the DVD shortly after. In actuality, it was rejected from every single film festival we submitted to.

Undeterred, I conceded that maybe there were a few minor structural flaws in the edit. It was probably a little too long and perhaps the three separate narratives would work better if they were crosscut more. A year later, this new edit was again rejected from almost 100 festivals. Stubbornly, I thought that perhaps what could really bring the movie together was a comic voiceover by my then cinematic muse Nick Alden (who is a lead in both Annunciation and my second film, The Lion’s Den). Audiences seemed to ignore the comic tone underlying Annunciation. If only I could unearth it, they wouldn’t be put off by the pretensions to greatness the movie wore on its sleeve. There is nothing so offensive to American audiences as pretentiousness.

I didn’t send the overcooked voiceover version to festivals. I knew it was forced and worked against the core concept of the film. But it was then that I started for the first time to have doubts about Annunciation. Maybe my film wasn’t as emotional or clever as I imagined. Maybe it was bad? “No,” I decided. The film, whatever its flaws may be, has value. Herculean delusions of grandeur come in handy when you are trying to become an artist.

I opted to edit the film back to its original state, but without some of the weaker, obviously didactic moments, then hosted a few local screenings in NYC (most of them at DIY venues where my rock band would play) and put the film up for free on Vimeo. Around this time, it occurred to me that editing Annunciation had been my film school. Failure is a wonderful learning tool. Editing the same raw material in a myriad of different ways taught me about pacing and tone. Still to this day, when I find myself in a certain state of mind, I open up the Final Cut sessions and do a new edit of the footage just for fun, like some sort of DIY George Lucas tinkering with the past. Last year during quarantine, I did a new edit of Annunciation and uploaded it to Vimeo without telling a single person. It has become my own little cinematic sandbox to play in.

When people did chance upon one of my myriad edits, they often commented that they enjoyed its style but found the acting too unnatural. My response to this was to make my next film, The Lion’s Den, a cheaper HDV feature that doubled as a political farce and an essay about naturalism in cinema. The film is about a group of ding-dong radicals who kidnap a Wall Street banker and plan to donate his ransom money to UNICEF so salt pills can be provided for dehydrated children. The UNICEF plot was drawn from Living High and Letting Die, a 1996 work of moral philosophy by Peter K. Unger. It was both a serious attempt at political philosophy and a total slapstick farce; I was imagining the comedy of errors in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game mixed with the Marxist agitprop of Godard’s La Chinoise.

The acting style in The Lion’s Den was purposefully cartoonish; at no point in the film could an audience member believe that what they were seeing was real. I like to think that The Lion’s Den was an attempt at theatre for the camera, part Shakespeare and part Brecht. This was my own personal response to our epoch’s hyperrealism fetish. At the time, I believed that the current obsession with neo-neorealism, mumblecore and reality TV was worth combating. Art with a realistic aesthetic, I thought then, was inherently conservative and accepting of the political status quo (whether the artists were aware of this or not). Art with an imaginative anti-realistic aesthetic, so I thought, was utopian. It opened new vistas and ways of thinking and being. It dared to believe in a more beautiful world than the one we are living in.

The making of The Lion’s Den was extremely difficult. It was by far the hardest thing I have physically done in my life. At the time, I was malnourished and broke, not unlike the character of Jack in PVT Chat; my diet for that month we made the film consisted mostly of coffee, rice and beans, ramen, light beer, and the occasional waffle or fruit smoothie from the vegan frozen yogurt stall I worked at. Unlike Jack, my addiction wasn’t cam girls or internet gambling, but independent filmmaking. I begged, borrowed and scrimped $10,000 to make a film I knew I wouldn’t be able to sell. Despite having some key collaborators near the beginning of the shoot, most of the film was made with just me, the actors and a loyal boom operator, all living together in a house in Staten Island. This meant that I had to assemble all of the cumbersome lights for every setup, handle the art for every scene (which involved a lot of painting), block the scene and direct the actors, throw the camera on my shoulder and film, and then at the end of the day transfer the footage while logging the Screen Actors Guild reports and creating the call sheets for the next day’s scenes. Exhausted both mentally and physically, I often couldn’t stand up at the end of the day’s filming.

Once we’d wrapped and everyone had gone home, I stood in the middle of our set and played Beethoven on my headphones. Within seconds, I began bawling my eyes out, partly from exhaustion but also from the melancholy that all my friends had left and I was now alone for the first time in a month. I collapsed and slept for hours. When I woke up, it was my 26th birthday. I celebrated by watching Citizen Kane alone and then started the process of painting the walls back to a neutral white. The actor Kevin Moccia (who has been in all three of my films and actually works as a house painter) heroically came back to set and helped me. I told him that despite all of the agony of the past weeks (my bank account was now in the red, with overdraft fees piling up), I was happier than I had ever been. Working passionately on something that has great value to you is, without a doubt, the key to happiness.

Shortly after returning to the real world and my job at the vegan yogurt shop, I passed out while on the clock and was taken to a hospital by my very supportive girlfriend. Turns out, all I needed was an IV and some nutrients to get back on my feet, but unfortunately the trouble with The Lion’s Den had just begun. At some point, I formatted the production audio memory card and, in one instant, accidentally deleted everything on it. For the next two years, my friend Brian Goodheart and I worked with all of the actors to dub all of the dialogue and sound effects in the movie. Each actor had to completely re-do their verbal performance. It felt like remaking the entire movie. The result made the film especially un-naturalistic (which pleased me at the time) and it turned out far better than I think Brian and I expected.

By then, I had some hopes that The Lion’s Den could reach a small audience. It is aggressively philosophical but also features a love triangle, a car chase and a final shootout. Its comic style, I was hoping, would attract people who were put off by the purposeful flatness of Annunciation. Nevertheless, the movie was also rejected from every conceivable festival. I now realized that submitting an aggressively experimental narrative film without a single famous person in it to festivals is basically like flushing your money down the toilet. Yet I continued submitting, like an addict at a casino putting all of their savings on the roulette table. You never know, right?

In hindsight, I now see The Lion’s Den as a very angry film that perhaps uses comedy to soften the blow of some of its hotheaded fervor, and suspect some of its critique of capitalism and naturalism came from hurt and jealousy. “You think my work isn’t natural enough, eh? I’ll show you motherfuckers naturalism!”

Sometime in 2017, to my surprise I became smitten with certain neo-neorealist filmmakers (Joe Swanberg, in particular) and decided I wanted in on the mumblecore party, albeit from my own outsider perspective. I began to see how I could work symbolically with naturalistic performances, which led me to my latest film. PVT Chat is by no means a work of strict realism, but nevertheless focuses on believable dramatic performances. The film’s cast blends some actors from my past work (Kevin Moccia, Nikki Belfiglio, David White) with some heroes of the modern neo-neorealist indie cinema (Peter Vack, Julia Fox, Buddy Duress, Keith Poulson).

I want to end with a bit of advice to other filmmakers: Don’t put your self-worth into the hands of festival reviewers or distributors. The future of the moving image will belong to the films that are willing to risk cinematic failure. If you make an earnest film that doesn’t behave like a normal movie, I want to see it, even if it is full of technical or narrative mistakes (which it most likely will be). There’s no right way to make a movie. Follow the dream of the caméra-stylo and make a film that if nobody else made, wouldn’t exist.

Most Picture 2020.

In which we award the Most Picture Oscar to the most-rewatched of the 2020 Best Picture nominees, and track down the Letterboxd member who most obsessively rewatched the Most Obsessively Rewatched Film in our 2019 Year in Review—Avengers: Endgame—to ask “Why?”.

Once again, we dive into the data on the Oscar Best Picture nominees to name not the Best Picture (respect to Parasite!), but what is the Most Picture, as in, which of the nine 2020 finalists was rewatched the most by Letterboxd members?

And the 2020 “Most” Picture Award goes to… Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Letterboxd member Movie15 has the distinction of having logged Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood the most—a whopping 26 times since its August release, and though he hasn’t reviewed it on Letterboxd, we’ve enjoyed his quest to see Tarantino’s latest in as many Los Angeles movie theaters as possible, on 35mm as often as he can.

Bong Joon-ho’s multi-Academy-Award-winning masterpiece, Parasite, comes next, just 859 views behind—Khoi is the Letterboxd member who has most obsessively rewatched the film to date, with eleven recorded watches. Third place (and almost 14,000 views behind the two leaders) goes to Joker, watched the most (seventeen times) by Kenai Fleck, a hard-core Batman fan.

In fourth place, Little Women. Micah Simmons has logged the film fourteen times (but may in fact be pushing 20 views). On the thirteenth view, “I have nothing to add, except for mentioning a shot right before the scene where Amy does *the thing* to Jo, and there’s a crazy shot that foreshadows *the thing* so well and fuck this movie is smart.” Then come Marriage Story, The Irishman, 1917, Jojo Rabbit and Ford v. Ferrari in that order.

The official Letterboxd Most Picture list reveals the combined number of watches for all members with two or more entries for these films.

The Rewatches We Logged Along the Way

Avengers: Endgame was the Most Obsessively Rewatched Film of 2019 in our Year in Review, which means it had the highest number of Letterboxd members logging it five or more times in their diaries.

Member Max Joseph has the distinction of having logged Avengers: Endgame more times than any other. When we told him we needed to know why, he replied: “I’d be honored to talk about my love for Avengers Endgame!” Spoilers follow in this Q&A with Max (though at this point if you haven’t seen Avengers: Endgame it’s probably only because Max has watched it for you). This interview was conducted prior to the 2020 Academy Awards.

How many times do you think you have seen Avengers: Endgame? Max Joseph: Well, I’ve logged it 26 times as of today. But I also think there are a good three or four watches I didn’t log because I occasionally put it on before bed, and just never logged it. So I’d say my final answer is 29, but that honestly may be lowballing it. I have a feeling that by the time the Oscars roll around, it’ll probably be at 30. I always watch every single film, documentary and short nominated for the Oscars, and thankfully, Endgame was nominated!

What’s your reaction to the news that you are the member who has logged it the most? Kind of shocked! I really didn’t even realize how many times I watched it until you told me! I watch Avengers: Endgame because it brings me happiness, and I love the adventure! When it finally came out on Blu-ray and digital, there were a few times I would watch it multiple times in one day. Then I’d throw something else on, then get upset that I wasn’t watching Avengers. So maybe it isn’t as shocking as I had thought!

What keeps you coming back to it? I love all genres of film. Take this season for example. I love the more meaty and dramatic films like Parasite, 1917, Waves, Queen & Slim. I love comedies like Jojo Rabbit and Booksmart. Animation like Toy Story 4, Frozen II and Klaus.

But, you give me someone flying, turning invisible, super speed… that’s where I live. Superhero movies are just my favorites, and I think the reason I keep coming back to Avengers: Endgame is because besides being a superhero movie—which I just naturally gravitate towards—in Endgame, I get a little bit of every genre and mood. I also like that it’s split up into three acts, and each act gives me what I want in a superhero movie:

Act one is the slow burn, which we never really got in the MCU up to this point. It’s the aftermath of Avengers: Infinity War, and them dealing with the implications and the new normal of the universe. And this gives a chance for the story to build, and our actors to show off, especially Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson. It gives something new to the fans of the franchise and is one of the biggest reasons I keep coming back for more.

Act two is the “time heist” and it is a pure love letter to the fans of the franchise. They revisit some of the best parts of our MCU journey over the last eleven years and mess with it. Is it fan service? Absolutely! But I think they did it right.

Act three is the final battle at the now-destroyed Avengers headquarters. And this was where the slow burn pays off. It is what we’ve all been waiting for since 2008. The grand finale. The culmination of eleven years and 22 films. We are gifted my favorite battle I’ve ever seen, bone-chilling and heartbreaking moments, as well as the most cathartic endings to the most epic story I’ve ever had the privilege to watch, nearly 30 times over.

What have you noticed with each rewatch? Two things: firstly, how unbelievable the visual effects are. I may be alone in this, but I think Marvel has the best visual effects on the planet. By miles. And rewatching this makes me appreciate how much time and dedication was put into making this. So much happened behind the scenes, that I personally don’t really think about while watching it. But after 26 views, I start to think about green screens, the motion capturing, all of those elements, it’s insane! Go on YouTube and just check out all of that work they did visually. It’s beautiful.

Secondly, how brilliant Robert Downey Jr. is. I’ve been saying it for years, but RDJ was born to play Tony Stark. Has he had many other brilliant performances throughout his career? Absolutely. But I think that if he was not cast as Iron Man, this franchise wouldn’t have turned out the way it did. He is the heart of the MCU. And he has so many brilliant moments throughout the film, meets his dad during the “time heist”, the realization of “the one”, even the way he interacts with his daughter, Morgan. It’s truly exceptional work. I think it’s his best performance as Stark.

What is the single greatest scene in the film? Oy, well that’s near impossible. A few standouts are Cap wielding Mjölnir, the scene with Tony and his dad, the reveal of Professor Hulk, thicc Thor, Cap vs. Cap, “the snap”. There are so many! But I think the popular answer is also the greatest, and that is when our Avengers return.

As soon as I heard Sam Wilson’s (Falcon) voice, I lost my mind. And they brilliantly added “On your left” right before all the portals open up. “On your left” is a callback to Captain America: The Winter Soldier. That’s the first line of the movie, and is repeated again at the end. Both times are between Sam and Steve, and it was the same in Endgame. And then you add Alan Silvestri’s score (the song is titled ‘Portals’) which is building and building with emotion, which leads into Cap finally saying…

“Avengers (music cuts) Assemble”… (enter Avengers theme song)

It. Is. Perfection. I have chills as I type this. It was probably the greatest theater experience I’ve had in my life. I was sobbing. Imagine how I was by the end…

What has the overall Avengers cinematic adventure meant to you? I remember seeing the first Iron Man in theaters with some friends in 2008. We all dressed up in suits, because we were at a high school awards show kind of thing, and just went straight to the theater, and we had the best time. From the first moment ’til the end, when Tony says, “I am Iron Man”, then Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’ starts playing, my jaw was on the floor. I gave a standing ovation. In a suit. From that moment on, I knew that this was made for me.

It has given me the greatest moments in a movie theater, incredible discussions with friends and strangers, and although it may seem cheesy, some much-needed happiness in some of the most difficult times in my life. I watch these stories because I love them. They mean something to me. They are an important part of who I am.

What would you say to people who say that blockbusters like these aren't ‘real’ cinema? Hahaha! This is a hilarious question, and I’m thrilled that you asked it. I’ve actually had a good 20 people ask me this, and I always said that I’d write something or make a video about it, so here we go…

Let me start off by saying that Martin Scorsese is arguably one of the greatest directors of all time. I love his work, I respect it, and I encourage everyone to watch his full repertoire, ’cause it’s beautiful.

That being said… ‘real cinema’ is a matter of opinions. To me, Avengers: Endgame is just as much real cinema, as The Irishman, Goodfellas, The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather, anything. I don’t care who you are, you can be Martin Scorsese, Kevin Feige, one of my friends, a stranger, I don’t think you have the right to tell me what is ‘real cinema’. You can say something isn’t good, or only being made to earn a profit, but you don’t get to say that movies like this aren’t worthy of being ‘real cinema’. To me, they are. You’re more than entitled to that opinion! I just happen to disagree with you, but you’re not wrong by any means. I’m entitled to my opinion, you’re entitled to yours. And that’s what it comes down to. Opinions.

Thicc Thor—keep or send back to the gym? I totally don’t care. Taika Waititi figured out how to write that character in Thor: Ragnarok, and thankfully they continued writing him this way in Endgame. So as long as the writers continue on the path that Waititi sent him on, I’m good. Make him thicc, give him an eight-pack, as long as the character has purpose and the lines flow naturally, I’m more than satisfied with whatever he looks like.

How amped are you to learn more about Natasha’s background in this year’s Black Widow? Finally! We’ve been waiting since Iron Man 2, and it is finally time for the Black Widow movie she deserves! I’m fascinated by the Red Room, which was where she started her training as a Russian spy. They showed us glimpses of her beginnings in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, and I’ve always been hungry for more information because it looked really interesting.

I also think that we may finally find out what happened in Budapest. It was first mentioned in The Avengers back in 2012, as a bit of banter between Black Widow and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and has kind of been a mystery ever since. It was actually mentioned again in Endgame. I’m basing this on the San Diego Comic-Con Hall H panel. There was a title card that said “Budapest”, so it would make sense that we’re gonna get what we’ve been asking for!

I’m also thrilled because the cast is awesome. Obviously double Oscar-nominated actor this season, Scarlett Johansson, Rachel Weisz, David Harbour and one of my favorite actors, Florence Pugh, who had an unbelievable 2019, with Fighting With My Family, Midsommar (one of my favorite performances of the decade), and she topped it off with an Oscar-nominated performance in Little Women!

What do you think should win best picture at this year’s Oscars? Parasite. And it’s not even close. I think Parasite is one of the greatest films I’ve seen in my life. I think it deserves that number one slot on your Top 250 Narrative Features list.

It features the best performance from an ensemble, Song Kang-ho should have been nominated for supporting actor (he should be winning). The production design is fabulous. They literally built the Park family’s house for the film! Hong Kyung-pyo’s photography is worthy of being framed. He created a few shots that are permanently engraved in my head (in a good way). And of course, Bong Joon-ho’s direction flows with emotion and his script is original, gripping and electric. He is the definition of a visionary, at the top of his game.

Parasite is the crowning achievement of the decade and should be awarded as such. It would be the perfect way to end the decade with the first foreign-language film (now titled “International Feature Film”) winning Best Picture at the Oscars. #BONGHIVE all the way!

What do you think will win? My heart says Parasite, but I think it may end up going to something like Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, The Irishman or 1917 (which is in my top ten this year). The easy answer is probably Hollywood because it won the Globe, but that doesn’t always translate into an Oscar.

But if it’s not Parasite, I think it should be 1917. It is a technical work of art from Oscar, Golden Globe and Tony Award-winning director Sam Mendes. Roger Deakins outdid himself and is pretty much guaranteed to earn his second Oscar [update: he did!]. Thomas Newman’s score is probably my favorite of the year (possibly of his career), followed closely by Emile Mosseri’s for The Last Black Man in San Francisco and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s for Joker. And George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman should be on everyone’s radar. They’re phenomenal. It’s shaping up to be quite a race this year!

What’s your favorite thing about Letterboxd? I think the reason I love it so much is because it feels like a family. I’ve had such a passion for the cinema for my whole life, and I like to share it wherever I can. But other social platforms (as wonderful as they are), aren’t always the best place to post about every single movie I’ve watched, or a top ten that I make. Letterboxd is the only place where I can let out all of my opinions, all of my thoughts, without feeling embarrassed or like I’m bothering anyone when I say how perfect Avengers: Endgame is. Or if I watch it and spot something new, I can post about it, and have great conversations about what I’ve discovered. It is the place for movie lovers, and it actually helped me love movies more, and to learn more about the crews, studios, and everything behind the film.

Quick thoughts on Spider-Man: Far From Home:

CUT FOR SPOILERS

- 90% amazing. Had a great time at all the Teen Summer Vacation Comedy moments, it was a great genre blend for a Spider-Man film. So many great references and call-backs. I laughed a lot. 

- The 10% is... hard to express without sounding like someone who is just disappointed their theories got busted, which could (in the movie’s defense) very well be the case. 

- Let’s just start by quickly saying there was a similar sense of disorganization around the broader progression of the MCU via “Mysterio” that I felt in Captain Marvel, where now that the cinematic universe has gotten so big and could go in so many directions and have such heavy expectations placed upon each of them, sometimes it leads to jumbled motivations and story beats for the film. 

(Like in Captain Marvel it felt like the film was trying to pull double duty telling a story in space and a story about Carol and even triple duty with a story that advanced the MCU. In this case it felt like we needed to mourn Iron Man, advance Spider-Man, introduce the next possible wave of villains (which turned out to be a fake-out with the multi-verse, which left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth but I’ll get to that later), etc etc. So many possibilities of what it could be and what is going to be teased that some scenes seem set up for Misdirecting Trailer Moments in a very distracting way.)

- To that point, one minor critique I have of Mysterio is he felt a bit split on how much he liked Peter Parker. I think, personally, when they found out how much chemistry Holland and Gyllenhaal had, they should have leaned into it more and done some re-writes (or more re-writes than they did). Obviously Gyllenhaal adored chewing the scenery during the Villain Reveal of Exposition in the middle, but it was at the cost of some of the later emotional beats between him and Peter because he came across as so cartoonishly villainous, in contrast to his earlier hero persona. As such, it was hard to get a finger on just how much he really regretted the prospect of killing Peter. 

- Basically, it felt as if the script just planned Gyllenhaal’s character to be a Delightful Asshole, total evil dude who wants to be a bad guy to fill Iron Man’s shoes, very much in line with the Civil War ultimate “bad guy” of a person who is just obsessed with a hero and thus trying to bring him down or take his place, and as such had many of his flaws too.

- But because Gyllenaal seems genuinely distraught at the prospect of having to kill Peter, I feel they should have just gone with that sentiment a little more strongly? Maybe instead of him just seeming to crave becoming the next Iron Man for... idk, glory reasons? It’s not really made clear except that “being Iron Man” would be desirable and makes him Peter Parker’s foil with a similar goal gone about the wrong way? IDK, anyway, I think they could have given us a beat of him genuinely believing he could help people better than these, admittedly, rather damaged and/or immature heroes! 

- Like, it’s not unreasonable to look at Tony Stark (given his issues) or hear Peter given his immaturity (I mean, it’s unkind to say, but Mysterio basically saw him do nothing but whine about how he just wants to go on a date with this girl) and think, “Holy shit, I can do better than this! The world is at stake!” Especially if you’ve got your own team of smart people to help you that you trust. 

- Basically, his big cackling Villain Reveal scene was great! He had some legit, if unkind, critiques about the MCU heroes that leant weight to the moment and believability to his motivation! He seemed to genuinely like his team! Their plan was unorthodox but made a certain twisted sense!

- The scene after that, in the theater? Wasn’t so great. In that scene when he threatens his own team and his motivations go from wanting to “Be Iron Man”  to... what? Glory? Presumably they’ll make a lot of money, though how isn’t really clear and it’s sort of quickly dropped as a motivator. Given money was mentioned as a motivator, I’m a little surprised his team didn’t revolt when he started getting creepy about the whole thing. Also, helping people as a potential motivator kinda went away when he stopped caring about casualties.

- Anyway, that scene also kinda ruined a lot for me because it became a bit... masturbatory on Marvel’s part? A little too, “Look, we’re making a Marvel film about making a Marvel film because we’re such a big cultural touchstone now, aren’t we clever?” with how Mysterio’s suit is literally exactly what Marvel actors who do CGI wear behind the scenes? I loved the callback with the Iron Man 1 engineer being there, but overall that whole scene just took the magic out and reminded me this was a Marvel movie, because the movie itself wanted to remind me this was a Marvel (tm) movie. 

- As they say in Inception, it’s dangerous to remind the dreamer that they’re in a dream while they’re in the dream. Sometimes it can be pulled off, but normally it just takes them out of the dream entirely. Such is the rule with 4th wall breaks, no matter how clever. 

- Which gets me into my Big Issue with the film which maaay just be Disappointed Fan and less Artistic Critique. 

- I wanted multi-verse. Failing multi-verse, I would have accepted magic over technology as an explanation for Mysterio’s power, which is rare for me because I usually prefer the tech explanation.  But there was a moment when Peter is on the run from Beck’s illusions where it just wasn’t working for me, why? Because it was all drones. 

- This is a universe with Dr. Strange in it, there’s no actual reason Mysterio’s power couldn’t be magic instead of tech. 

- THAT SAID, the use of the projector tech we last saw in Civil War and the critique of Tony’s use of it, was an excellent callback and meshed nicely with the larger message of the film which is, “what to do now that Tony’s gone?” Which is the question the Marvel universe creators are facing right now (and again, struck me as a bit masturbatory like, we know you’re struggling with this question but it takes me out of the film a bit when you make a film about not knowing what to do next with the MCU?)

- THAT SAID, having them be drones instead of illusions made me feel during the fight scenes like I was watching a highlight reel of moments that would be “really cool in the trailer!” because they’d misdirect what was really happening, making the audience think it was magic instead of tech in order to conceal the Big Reveal. 

- Furthermore, the drone use raised a lot of questions like, uh, “spider senses” aside (which we’re apparently not saying for some reason?), what about sound, smell, touch, heat, taste? Is this drone wired into Peter’s nervous system? Why are they so convincing that he behaves as if he’s in a full sensory illusion (like if the illusions were magic) where we can never truly be sure if he’s awake, when this is all just Industrial Light and Magic technology at best? 

- So yeah I get it, magic is so passé, drones are cooler I guess, even if how they work so effectively with just projectors and guns makes zero sense. Mysterio is calling the plot of a Marvel movie with elemental creatures attacking dumb, thus reminding me I’m here watching a dumb Marvel movie, which by extension feels like calling the audience dumb for being here. 

- I dunno, am I crazy for wanting there to be a bit of magic? Or failing that, a bit of heart instead of a guy just villainously trying to get the perks of being a superhero by manufacturing the whole situation, never once asking if there’s good he could be doing or having deep second thoughts about the cost given a kid he genuinely likes will die if he continues with this plan? 

- Many of the scenes even looked as if they were directed and shot to be magic instead of tech, that leads further to the schizophrenic “made for the trailer” feeling of a lot of scenes, as if they were designed to be taken out of context. 

- I mean, it really was just the Iron Man 3 reveal all over again - there is no Mandarin, it’s just an actor with a guy behind him trying to become the next Iron Man. Except we’ve already had that reveal so this one felt repetitive. A more surprising reveal might have been, I dunno, Mysterio is a normal person who really does want to be Iron Man for altruistic reasons and just goes wrong along the way so he can have an honest emotional connection with Peter? Or actually from another universe but in fact a villain there and lying about it in order to become a hero in our universe? (Which was my first theory when I saw the trailer. Part of me actually wondered if Mysterio was Peter Parker from an alternate universe). 

Overall, I had fun. I think I’ll even like it more on the re-watch because my brain won’t be in overdrive trying to figure out the plot and thus be disappointed. But there was definitely a moment where they’re smirking about how stupid people are for being willing to believe a made up story about magic where I thought, “Would that really have been so bad?” 

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

Yes, once.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Seven (30.43% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Sixteen.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Significantly flawed, and well-known in fandom for it. Unpopular opinion? I still think it’s better than the first Avengers film.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Natasha and Laura pass in a single-line trade. It’s sooo close to not counting.

Female characters:

Natasha Romanoff.

Wanda Maximoff.

Maria Hill.

Helen Cho.

Peggy Carter.

Laura Barton.

FRIDAY.

Male characters:

Tony Stark.

Steve Rogers.

JARVIS.

Thor.

Clint Barton.

Strucker.

Pietro Maximoff.

Bruce Banner.

Ultron.

Sam Wilson.

James Rhodes.

Ulysses Klaue.

Heimdall.

Nick Fury.

Erik Selvig.

Vision.

OTHER NOTES:

Everyone talking about Strucker like we already know who he is...

The “Shit!”/”Language!” gag was funnier before they hung a lantern on it. Not least because it takes almost a full minute before Tony harks back to it (fifty seconds, actually. I checked). If you’re gonna make a Thing out of it, you gotta follow up immediately, not after fifty seconds of cutting around to different character intros and action shots and a whole lot of other dialogue. 

Urrgghh, ok, I’m going to break my standing rule about not discussing source material, because we gotta acknowledge the colossal wrongness of re-writing the Maximoff twins - canonically Jewish Romani - as willing volunteers in a Nazi science experiment. It gets worse the more you think about it. There are a few things about this movie which generated significant negative outcry, and this incredibly offensive decision is one of them.

Tony and Thor fighting over who has a better girlfriend does have a certain charm to it. If you’re gonna have a testosterone-off, it might as well be about how great your partner is.

I got a zero out of ten on this out-of-nowhere forced romance crap with Natasha and Bruce. We’ll come back to this later.

“I will be reinstituting Prima Nocta,” Tony declares, as he prepares to lift Thor’s hammer and thereby theoretically take charge of the Nine Realms. Primae noctis (believed to in fact be a myth) refers to a supposed Dark-Ages law that granted lords the ‘right’ to take the virginity of any newlywed peasant woman who lived on their land. So, this is a wonderful little rape joke from Tony (or, y’know, not so little, since primae noctis in reality would make Tony a serial rapist). Ha ha ha ha. Hilarious. Good one.

I’m really mad about the parts here that are total garbage, because mostly, the revels sequence has a nice low-key quality to it, good solid team dynamics. 

I can’t fucking believe that they played the ‘and then Bruce falls with his face in Natasha’s cleavage!’ gag. I cannot believe it. Is this a disgusting frat-boy comedy from the nineties?

Honestly, Tony, just shut up and admit that you KNEW from the get-go that it was wrong to try and make Ultron happen (that is why you kept it secret from everyone else to begin with); don’t try to defend the decision now that you’ve got a ‘murderbot’ on your hands. Take responsibility for a bad choice instead of talking shit about how you had to and everyone else is just too short-sighted, damn it! 

Andy Serkis is delightful.

The Iron Man/Hulk fight absolutely KILLS the momentum of this film. It goes for way the fuck too long (eight minutes) and has no narrative significance at all. Pro tip for action scenes: they should always be driving the story somewhere. You can pull off eighty minutes of action so long as your plot is advancing alongside/within it.

Also, Iron Man causes a huge amount of additional damage during this fight, in the service of the aforementioned pointless action. His efforts to minimise Hulk’s effects are extremely poor, and calling in his relief organisation to clean up after the fact does not negate that. 

Gotta love that throwing a wife and kids at Hawkeye at the same time as we suddenly start pushing this Natasha/Bruce thing. That’s not transparent at all. I also understand this to be a major deviation from Clint’s identity in the comics, and very unpopular with fans for that reason, but regardless; reinventing him as a family man to reset the romantic blather after baiting fans with the possibility of Clint/Natasha in the first Avengers movie is such a shitty move. I was not invested in the ship myself and would have loved to have them reinforce the just-friends relationship between Hawkeye and Black Widow, because there are not enough platonic friendships between compatible men and women in fiction, but 'they’re not interested in each other because they’re busy with someone else!’ is a weak reinforcement indeed. Less forced romances, and definitely less token wifey who exists for no other Goddamn reason at all. This comes out of nowhere, and not in a clever-surprise kind of way.

“You still think you’re the only monster on the team?” Natasha says, after telling Bruce about her sterilisation. This earned a HUGE backlash, and for good reason - despite all arguments about how what Natasha meant was that her being raised to be an assassin makes her a monster, the direct implication of her words as they are phrased and as the discussion is structured is that her inability to have children makes her monstrous, and that’s deeply offensive. It’s also completely in keeping with a narrative which is often played out against women, in which their value as people is attributed directly to their ability to produce offspring, so it’s not even like this outrageous implication of monstrosity - the corruption of what it means to be female! - is that unusual. It’s awful, but not unusual. Add on the fact that 1) Natasha’s nightmare-flashes specifically foregrounded her sterilisation over all other details of her training, supporting the idea that she believes that it’s what makes her irredeemable (instead of, y’know, all the murdering and stuff), and 2) this is Joss Whedon’s work and he is OBSESSED with highlighting the womanhood of his female characters and treating it like their defining trait while also variously punishing them for it, and you’ve got every reason to interpret this terrible fucking line as exactly the heinous thing it (presumably, unwittingly) seems to be. 

Steve ripping a log in half with his bare hands is the funniest thing in this whole movie.

Thor’s brief side-adventure with Erik Selvig is pretty out-of-place. He just...goes for a swim in a convenient magic pond that Selvig chances to know about. Seems normal.

Ultron is full of such boring, empty rhetoric. Reminds me of Loki in The Avengers, with all that sound-and-fury. 

I love Paul Bettany.

Man, they sure do find Natasha instantly. It’s almost like making a damsel-in-distress of her who needs to be rescued by the team was completely meaningless...

Breaking my no-BTS rule (since I already have done for this movie at this point) because it’s well-known how Joss Whedon ordered Elizabeth Olsen not to show exertion or ‘ugly emotion’ on her face in this film, because God forbid she compromise her attractiveness by being human. Joss Whedon is not human; he’s fucking trash. 

The final fight sure does just, y’know, get to a point where it ends. They really did not ratchet up the tension over the course of the Sokovia conflict, it just goes along until it stops (also, they say Sokovia is a country, but then they never call the city anything else, it’s just Sokovia. Is the city conveniently named after the country (very confusing), or is it a city-country, like The Vatican? I kinda assume it’s option three, which is that no one bothered to care because it’s just some fake European placeholder anyway and we’re not supposed to notice such a dumb oversight).

“I was born yesterday.” This is the best quip in this whole thinks-it-is-way-wittier-than-it-is movie.

Helen Cho deserved better than to be a prop rapidly dismissed and then just trotted past at the end for an ‘oh, she survived, btw’. 

Back when I reviewed the first Avengers movie, I said that I considered that film to be heavily overrated, so maybe it’s not such a surprise that I actually like this one better. The two primary problems I had with that first film were the overly simplistic plot, and the fact that most of the characters were OOC compared to previous films, and this movie does do better on both scores, so I feel more engaged by it, and less annoyed. That said...this movie has still got a lot of problems, and those include iffy characterisation and a plot with various holes, nonsensical complications, and conveniently ignored or smoothed-down dynamics. When I say I like this movie better than the first one, I mean just that: I like this better. That does not mean I am here to sing its praises. 

The tacked-on romance is part of the problem - for Clint as well as Natasha (but especially for Natasha). After Hawkeye was so heavily under-used in the first film (and his slightly-ambiguous relationship with Black Widow was the only human element that made him a character instead of a prop), Age of Ultron attempts to compensate by giving Clint a personal life, in the form of a magically-appearing heavily-pregnant wife and a pair of nameless children. The function of this family appears to be 1) to give Clint a reason to not be interested in Natasha, and 2) to ‘humanise’ him by giving him something to fight for and get home to, because we all know nothing legitimises a character quite like some otherwise-irrelevant dependents. Want a man to seem lovable and important? Give him a pregnant wife. That’s what women are for, anyway, right? To enhance a man’s story? In this case, to provide a man whose purpose in the story has been contested with insta-personality, because ‘he’s secretly a family man, ooh, twist!’ is way better than having to spend time on giving him something to do in the plot that is actually meaningful in some way. Great logic. Makes Hawkeye super dynamic, right? 

Natasha, unsurprisingly, is hit much, much harder. As the only female avenger and one of only two prominent female characters in a cast which has seven-to-nine male characters of equal or greater importance/screen time (YMMV on whether or not you think Fury and Vision count for that list), the pressure is already on for Natasha to be served up a quality narrative, because if she doesn’t get one, well...she doesn’t have six-to-eight alternative characters to pull the weight for her gender. The best solve for this problem would be to avoid the ‘Token Woman’ cliche in the first place, but since we missed that boat...not having the personal story of your only primary female character revolve completely around her womanhood and her catering to heteronormative expectations of a love interest would have been a good choice. This weird, forced, chemistry-free thing with Bruce Banner? Was the worst thing they could have used to define Natasha’s presence in the film. It sticks out like a sore thumb every time they have an awkward interaction, and it leads in to that atrocious ‘monstrous infertility’ element (though that particular egregious mistake could have been included with or without a romantic blunder, it...probably wouldn’t be, and we’d all be the better off). Even the Hulk-whisperer part of the relationship - while not awful on its own with all the unnecessary romance and Unresolved Sexual Not-Tension removed - serves to highlight Natasha’s female-ness by making her the soft maternal figure for the team, because God forbid one of the other male members of the team be asked to ASMR-speak to the Hulk while delicately caressing his hand. If Natasha’s presence in the first Avengers film leaned too heavily on her gender identity as a defining trait (and it did), this movie doesn’t fix that problem at all: it doubles down on it. 

The good news for most of the excess of male characters is, they by-and-large don’t feel as OOC as they did in the first film. The boorish romantic entanglement aside, Bruce Banner is still a naturalistic character highlight (all credit to Mark Ruffalo, who probably doesn’t know how to turn in a bad performance in the first place), and Thor’s dialogue is way less ridiculous this time ‘round, so he lands a lot closer to his personality from previous films simply by virtue of sounding like the same guy (unfortunately, the plot does not have the faintest idea what it wants to do with him as a character). Steve Rogers is still being written as if being Captain America is his character, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of his identity, albeit one which conveniently allows him to behave in a stereotypical self-righteously bland manner, thus avoiding the need for any nuance in his perspective or actions. This borderline fanfic-flamer ‘Captain America is my least favourite character so I’m going to write him as a boring stick-in-the-mud and then hopefully no one else will like him either!’ approach doesn’t grate quite as badly as it did in the first Avengers, and it can’t cancel out the innate level-headed charm of Chris Evans, so as disappointing as the bias is, it’s still a better balance here than it was last time. The one character who is not so flatteringly handled, however? Also happens to be the one who was arguably handled best last time, and unfortunately, he’s the one who is essentially treated as the ‘lead’. 

The big problem for Tony Stark is that this movie is not interested in digging in to the pathos of any character, it’s all-flash-no-substance on that front, and Tony really, really needed a less heavy-handed slathering of ‘afraid of what might come (feat. messiah complex)’ to motivate his actions and reactions in this film, because without any exploration he’s basically just a billionaire kid playing with matches. If this were an Iron Man film (either the first or third one, anyway), we’d get into some tasty deconstruction of Tony’s mental state and confront his hubris, etc, and - crucially, most crucial of all, it’s a mainstay of all his past stories in the MCU - Tony would own up to his mistakes, listen to the advice of those around him, and take contrite steps toward fixing the problem not just in the direct sense of ‘beating the bad guy’, but also in the personal and emotional sense of working on his own flaws and making amends with the people he hurt along the way. This movie offers none of that. To begin with, Tony’s ‘I know best and I will not be taking any questions’ approach to creating Ultron feels like a significant step backwards in his character development so far (Iron Man 3 was specifically about addressing his PTSD and associated tumultuous emotions surrounding the fear of imminent alien invasion, so his reactionary and secretive behaviour in this film feels particularly out-of-touch with a mental reality Tony has been explicitly working on for the past couple of years); Tony is actively aware that it’s a bad call and thus hides it from the other Avengers until it’s too late, and then he’s bizarrely unrepentant about his mistake. Worst of all, he actually attempts to repeat that mistake, only worse, late in the film (the fact that his idiotic ‘mad scientist’ pep talk actually convinces Bruce to help him again is the weakest character moment for Bruce outside of the aforementioned romance crap). The plot rewards Tony’s second, far worse mistake, in the creation of Vision, who turns out to be ‘worthy of wielding Thor’s Hammer’ and whatnot and conveniently provides every necessary skill to defeat Ultron in a deus ex machina so overt you could use it as a textbook example, so even though Tony had absolutely no way of knowing that he’d get a good result this time and almost every reason to believe he’d just compound the existing problem, his reckless disregard for the literal safety of the planet is treated like a good thing because it happens to work out this time, and they just kinda sweep under the rug the fact that Tony is playing God (and being uncharacteristically stupid and selfish about it - in other films, Tony is normally only reckless with his own safety, and it’s when his actions spill out into unintended consequences for others that he realises the error of his ways and cues up a positive learning curve; it’s what makes him palatable). At the end of the film, once Ultron is gone and Tony has thrown some dispassionate wads of cash into ‘relief efforts’, he strolls and quips and eventually drives off into the sunset in his expensive car, with nary a mention of, I dunno, maybe a little guilty conscience? Maybe a hint of having learned a valuable lesson? The closest he gets is just suggesting that it might be time he retires from Avenging, but neither he nor anyone else lets on that there’s a need for serious self-reflection. The Tony Stark in this movie is the nightmarish male-fantasy version of the character, the playboy with the cool tech and no limits who does whatever he wants and then...literally rides off into the sunset in the end, no muss, no fuss. He’s kinda like a complete reversion to his original self, pre-Iron Man, frittering money around and designing weapons of mass destruction while convincing himself he’s bringing peace to the world one explosion at a time, but that Tony has no business here, seven years of character development down the track.

While we’re talking iffy characterisation, we should also segue into plot, and that’s something we can do easily enough by looking at our villain, Ultron. Calling Ultron an actual character feels...ambitious. He’s a CGI robot full of empty rhetoric and, you guessed it, more of those quips that this movie has in place of any meaningful dialogue. I’d call him self-fellating, but he ain’t got nothing to fellate, so instead he just blathers a lot in a manner that sounds vaguely poetically intelligent but is, upon a moment’s consideration, just vapid nonsense (much like Loki in the first Avengers, as noted above, but at least Loki had the benefit of a flesh-and-blood actor delivering his lines with conviction; James Spader does solid work as the voice of Ultron, but trying to make a CGI robot who spouts a school-kid’s attempt at edgy philosophy sound like a genuine menace is an uphill battle). Speaking of genuine menace, I assume the reason the film is called Age of Ultron is because A Couple of Days of Ultron Causing Disturbances in a Handful of Specific Locations was too much. For all the big talk (and there is..so much), Ultron doesn’t get up to all that much trouble, most notably in the sense that he apparently has his code all over the internet and yet he doesn’t bother stirring up a single ounce of chaos with that ungodly power. Why bother including this as an element of the character if it achieves zero story? Is it purely to make Ultron seem ~unstoppable~ because he keeps downloading into new robots? Because it didn’t really land, y’all. They try to play it like a big victory for the good guys when Vision burns Ultron out of the ‘net, but in context it’s meaningless because he didn’t do anything while he was there. Pretty much everything about Ultron was all talk, little to no action - even a whole bunch of the trouble he did cause happened off-screen, with Maria Hill just popping in to let us know that ‘there are reports of metal men stealing shit’. Cheers, cool. And you know, Ultron makes a song and dance about how he’s going to save the world by ‘ending the Avengers’, but then he...does not pursue that at all. He tries to make himself a pretty body, the Avengers thwart him, and then he enacts a doomsday machine to destroy all life on Earth. Like every other aspect of the character, the whole ‘end the Avengers’ schtick is just white noise, there’s no meaning in it. Ultron is just a same-old-same ‘What if Artificial Intelligence wants to WIPE US OUT?!’ cliche, and maybe that’s what he was in the comics too, I don’t know, but it’s the job of the film to tell that story in a dynamic way, and they had two and a half hours to do it. And yet.

There should be more to this than a nondescript placeholder villain concept and a series of action set pieces that just kinda happen until they stop. At least the first Avengers had some variety in each of its action sequences, using the location and the different skills and weapons of its antagonists, whereas this one is just ‘there are robots and the good guys punched and shot them until they were all broken, the end’. Even making the city fly in the end doesn’t actually make it interesting, not least because the characters spend most of their time running around the (weirdly, perfectly stable) streets not having to deal with any consequences of being up in the air anyway, and the doomsday device is too nebulous to ratchet up any real tension about figuring out how to deal with it. The conflicts with the Maximoff twins have at least some spark of life in them, but the characters themselves are treated to an over-simplified and very contrived narrative arc that uses what they do and what they know more as plot devices than as details of actual people’s lives, leading to a cheap death for Pietro so that Wanda will be distracted enough to abandon the big ol’ doomsday button, and it’s just all so convenient. There’s no heart in any of it, and it makes the moments that try to have heart all the more embarrassing and out-of-place (don’t even get me started on what a prescribed attempt at tugging the heart-strings it is to have Hawkeye name his magnificently well-timed newborn after Pietro, because DAMN). When I said I liked this movie better than the first Avengers, I meant just that: I like this better. That’s not to suggest that it is significantly better in any sense, because it isn’t, and I can’t even argue that this one has a better story, because honestly, it doesn’t. The first film made more sense, it was just less interesting to watch, and the things about it that were contrived were contrived in different ways. The first film was weaker and more irritating on character, and character is always the most important part of a story for me, so as annoyed as I am by the major character blunders in Age of Ultron, I’m still not as annoyed as I was after The Avengers. That is damning with the faintest of praise; this is just not a particularly good movie, it makes a poor use of its cast at the best of times, delivers a sub-par action extravaganza, and the script is not half as witty as it gleefully convinces itself that it is. It comes as no surprise, I’m sure, that I am very glad a certain writer/director departed the franchise after disappointing everyone with this outing. I say I like this better than the first Avengers, but gee, it’s a close call.

do whichever ones you want obvs: top 5 farscape moments, top 5 w359 episodes, top 5 times black sails invented gay rights, top 5 colors, top 5 poems as of right now-ish

lkajsdf you KNOW ME these are literally all so good

i’m just gonna do the first two rn because this is already. very long.

top 5 farscape moments:

welcome to my cold war! peak john crichton/john crichton manifesto. i know i’ve already made approximately 200 posts about this specific scene & there’s not much more i can say about it without sounding like a broken record but oh i adore it so much. all those shots of him from below, the camera distorting his height, obscuring his face, letting him have the power back, if only for a moment. even when the national anthem plays it isn’t mocking him.

in the first part of “into the lion’s den” when braca’s giving crais shit about being a defector (kinda. i think the peacekeepers’ cruelty to him in ITLD is less about Betrayal and more about Failure but that’s another post.) and crais just goes “you are a consummate peacekeeper.” i think you can draw a straight line from the look on braca’s face when he says that to his decision to remain loyal to scorpius, even long after there’s ceased to be anything in it for him. like you don’t expect him to get it at all, but he does, he takes it exactly how crais meant it, and then like half a season later scorpius is the one who’s fallen from power and braca’s staging a coup against pk leadership. “you are a consummate peacekeeper” is braca’s “you can be more” and if that’s not the saddest fuckin’ thing you’ve ever heard. god.

…and maybe it was a kind of catalyst for crais, too. i’m obsessed with the scene right before he suicide-bombs the base, when he tells john what he’s going to do. “i do. i will. i hope you can believe that.” i love it when john’s torturers fall in love with him. (honorable mention is the crais/aeryn scene in “the choice.” the way he looks at her and the way he looks at john… the way he closes his eyes when she touches him, every time. i want to claw my eyes out.)

“everything old is new again.” i have this thing about how the ending of “la bomba” should’ve been the last scene of the entire series. not that there isn’t shit that i love in pkw, but there’s something really perfect about john confessing his sins to aeryn like he’s asking for her forgiveness—except he isn’t, they’re on totally equal footing, there’s not even such a thing as the moral high ground in their world anymore. this is just… who he is now. what he is. and she loves him; that’s his happy ending. that’s all you get, and it is still the last thing in the universe left sacred.

every single time chiana and john stand close to each other i feel like i am staring into the face of god.

top 5 w359 episodes:

VARIATIONS ON A THEME. lovelace back in that same old haunted house with a brand-new haunted body. she’s basically just raised a middle finger to the universe and yelled ISABEL LOVELACE WAS HERE! and resurrection is a curse, a fuck you right back. lovelace is crichton at the end of the line, she’s ripley in Aliens, she’s everyone’s final girl—bluebeard’s eighth wife, the one who figured out where all the ghosts were hidden and even now still hears them beating against the walls. the only part of her story that survived was the monster; everything else is just… static.

HAPPY ENDINGS. guys, this episode fucks. it has everything. lovelace pumping iron at 2 in the morning. hilbert being like “i found the bomb you’re secretly building on the space station we’re all trapped on. do you want some fertilizer?” when she calls him a cockroach and he calls her Isabel. more Farscape 359 #cinematic parallels: hilbert “begging” for her forgiveness a la scorpius in pkw; cutter’s fake personality chip unveiling the w359-verse version of the Aurora chair. “this is a dark room. if you put a gun to my head i might even say… a very dark room.” exactly the kind of brutal tragicomic character-driven “holy shit, what’s that noise?” episode w359 excels at.

DIRTY WORK. easily the worst thing about jacobi is that in a lot of ways maxwell was the best thing that ever happened to him, and this is the episode where they just completely pull back the curtain and force you to deal with that, and not even in like a cutesy “banter between bad guys played for laughs” way, but in a much deeper, sadder, “he loved her so much he can’t even justify to her killer what his grief for her makes him do” way. it’s actually also one of my favorite minkowski-and-lovelace episodes, even tho their relationship isn’t the focus: “oh, i knew we forgot about something!”

MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION. the return of captain isabel lovelace. she didn’t ask to be this horror story’s beating heart, but the simple act of her survival blows the narrative wide open. nothing was ever the same again. the fact that it’s a very deliberate homage to the aforementioned “welcome to my cold war” scene from Farscape is something i’ve been working into every conversation i’ve ever had since the november of 2015.

THINGS THAT BREAK OTHER THINGS. approximately once a month i remember “who wouldst thou serve?” / “you.” and i just go absolutely apeshit. kepler thinking he’s fuckin 007 bribing the bartender to get jacobi’s attention. jacobi: “sir, you left your card here! with your name and number on it!” [minkowski in Constructive Criticism voice] “hey, jacobi, how did you end up in the terrorism division of the world’s most evil megacorporation?” jacobi [vivid flashback to kepler hitting on him at a bar and jacobi drunkenly trying to impress him by telling him about how good he is at mass murder] “…i’m not at liberty to say.”

Conversation with David Panos about The Searchers

The Searchers by David Panos is at Hollybush Gardens, 1-2 Warner Yard London EC1R 5EY, 12 January – 9 February 2019

There is something chattering. Alongside a triptych a small screen displays the rhythmic loop of hands typing, contorting, touching, holding. A movement in which the artifice strains between shuddering and juddering. Machinic GIFs seem to frame an event which may or may not have taken place. Their motions appear to combine an endless neurotic repetition and a totally adrenal pumped and pumping tension, anticipating confrontation. 

JBR: How do the heavily stylised triptych of screens in ‘The Searchers’ relate to the GIF-like loops created out of conventionally-shot street footage? DP: I think of the three screens as something like the ‘unconscious’ of these nervous gestures. I’m interested in how video compositing can conjure up impossible or interior spaces, perhaps in a way similar to painting. Perhaps these semi-abstract images can somehow evoke how bodies are shot through with subterranean currents—the strange world of exchange and desire that lies under the surface of reality or physical experience. Of course abstractions don't really ‘inhabit’ bodies and you can’t depict metaphysics, but Paul Klee had this idea about an aesthetic ‘interworld’, that painting could somehow reveal invisible aspects of reality through poetic distortion. Digital video and especially 3D graphics tend to be the opposite of painting—highly regimented and sat within a very preset Euclidean space. I guess I’ve been trying to wrestle with how these programs can be misused to produce interesting images—how images of figures can be abstracted by them but retain some of their twitchy aliveness. JBR: This raises a question about the difference between the control of your media and the situation of total control in contemporary cinematic image making. DP: Under the new regimes of video making, the software often feels like it controls you. Early analogue video art was a sensuous space of flows and currents, and artists like the Vasulkas were able to build their own video cameras and mixers to allow them to create whole new images—in effect new ways of seeing. Today that kind of utopian or avant-garde idea that video can make surprising new orders of images is dead—it’s almost impossible for artists to open up a complex program like Cinema 4D and make it do something else. Those softwares were produced through huge capital investment funding hundreds of developers. But I’m still interested in engaging with digital and 3D video, trying to wrestle with it to try and get it to do something interesting—I guess because the way that it pictures the world says something about the world at the moment—and somehow it feels that one needs to work in relation to the heightened state of commodification and abstraction these programs represent. So I try and misuse the software or do things by hand as much as possible, and rather than programming and rendering I manipulate things in real time. JBR: So in some way the collective and divided labour that goes into producing the latest cinematic commodities also has a doubled effect: firstly technique is revealed as the opposite of some kind of freedom, and at the same time this has an effect both on how the cinematic object is treated and how it appears. To be represented objects have to be surrounded by the new 3D capture technology, and at the same time it laminates the images in a reflected glossiness that bespeaks both the technology and the disappearance of the labour that has gone into creating it. DP: I’m definitely interested in the images produced by the newest image technologies—especially as they go beyond lens-based capture. One of the screens in the triptych uses volumetric capturing— basically 3D scanning for moving image. The ‘camera’ perspective we experience as the viewer is non-existent, and as we travel into these virtual, impossible perspectives it creates the effect of these hollowed out, corroded bodies. This connects to a recurring motif of ‘hollowing out’ that appears in the video and sculpture I’ve been making recently. And I have a recurring obsession with the hollowing out of reality caused by the new regime of commodities whose production has become cut to the bone, so emptied of their material integrity that they’re almost just symbols of themselves. So in my show ‘The Dark Pool’ (Hollybush Gardens, 2014) I made sculptural assemblages with Ikea tables and shelves, which when you cut them open are hollow and papery. Or in ‘Time Crystals’ (Pumphouse Gallery, 2017) I worked with clothes made in the image of the past from Primark and H&M that are so low-grade that they can barely stand washing. We are increasingly surrounded by objects, all of which have—through contemporary processes of hyper-rationalisation and production—been slowly emptied of material quality. Yet they have the resemblance of luxury or historical goods. This is a real kind of spectral reality we inhabit.  I wonder to myself about how the unconscious might haunt us in these days when commodities have become hollow. Might it be like Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious, in which through the photographic still the everyday is brought into a new focus, not in order to see what is behind the veil of semblance, but to see—and reclaim for art—the veiling in a newly-won clarity. DP: Yes, I see these new technologies as similar, but am interested in how they don't just change impact perception but also movement. The veiled moving figures in ‘The Searchers' are a strange byproduct of digital video compositing. I was looking to produce highly abstract linear depictions of bodies reduced to fleshy lines, similar to those in the show and I discovered that the best way to create these abstract images was to cover the face and hands of performers when you film them to hide the obvious silhouettes of hands and faces. But asking performers to do this inadvertently produced a very peculiar movement—the strange veiled choreography that you see in the show. I found this footage of the covered performers (which was supposed to be a stepping stone to a more digitally mediated image, and never actually seen) really suggestive— the dancers seem to be seeking out different temporary forms and they have a curious classical or religious quality or sometimes evoke a contemporary state of emergency. Or they just look like absurd ghosts. JBR: In the last hundred years, when people have talked about ghosts the one thing they don’t want to think about is how children consider ghosts, as figures covered in a white sheet, in a stupid tangible way. Ghosts—as traumatic memories—have become more serious and less playful. Ghosts mean dwelling on the unfinished business of the past, or apprehending some shard of history left unredeemed that now revisits us. Not only has no one been allowed to be a child with regard to ghosts, but also ghosts are not for materialists either. All the white sheets are banished. One of the things about Marx when he talks about phantoms—or at least phantasmagorias—is much closer to thinking about, well, pieces of linen and how you clothe someone, and what happens with a coat worked up out of once living, now dead labour that seems more animate than the human who wears it.  DP: Yes, I’ve been very interested in Marx’s phantasmagorias. I reprinted Keston Sutherland’s brilliant essay on how Marx uses the term ‘Gallerte’ or ‘gelatine’ to describe abstract labour for a recent show. Sutherland highlights a vitalism in Marx’s metaphysics that I’m very drawn to. For the last few years I’ve been working primarily with dancers and physical performers and trying to somehow make work about the weird fleshy world of objects and how they’re shot through with frozen labour. I love how he describes the ‘wooden brain’ of the table as commodity and how he describes it ‘dancing’—I always wanted to make an animatronic dancing table.  JBR: There is also a sort of joyfulness about that. The phantasmagoria isn’t just scary but childish. Of course you are haunted by commodities, of course they are terrifying, of course they are worked up out of the suffering and collective labour of a billion bodies working both in concert and yet alienated from each other. People’s worked up death is made into value, and they all have unfinished business. But commodities are also funny and they bumble around; you find them in your house and play with them.  DP: Well my last body of work was all about dancing and how fashion commodities are bound up with joy and memory, but this show has come out much bleaker. It’s about how bodies are searching out something else in a time of crisis. It’s ended up reflecting a sense of lack and longing and general feeling of anxiety in the air. That said I am always drawn to images that are quite bright, colourful and ‘pop’ and maybe a bit banal—everyday moments of dead time and secret gestures.  JBR: Yes, but they are not so banal. In dealing with tangible everyday things we are close to time and motion studies, but not just in terms of the stupid questions they ask of how people work efficiently. Rather this raises questions of what sort of material should be used so that something slips or doesn’t slip—or how things move with each other or against each other—what we end up doing with our bodies or what we end up putting on our bodies. Your view into this is very sympathetic: much art dealing in cut-up bodies appears more violent, whereas the ruins of your abstractions in the stylised triptych seem almost caring.  DP: Well I’m glad you say that. Although this show is quite dark I also have a bit of a problem with a strain of nihilist melancholy that pervades a lot of art at the moment. It gives off a sense of being subsumed by capitalism and modern technology and seeing no way out. I hope my work always has a certain tension or energy that points to another possible world. But I’m not interested in making academic statements with the work about theory or politics. I want it to gesture in a much more intuitive, rhythmic, formal way like music. I had always made music and a few years back started to realise that I needed to make video with the same sense of formal freedom. The big change in my practice was to move from making images using cinematic language to working with simultaneous registers of images on multiple screens that produce rhythmic or affective structures and can propose without text or language.  JBR: The presentation of these works relies on an intervention into the time of the video. If there is a haunting here its power appears in the doubled domain of repetition, which points both backwards towards a past that must be compulsively revisited, and forwards in convulsive anticipatory energy. The presentation of the show troubles cinematic time, in which not only is linear time replaced by cycles, but also new types of simultaneity within the cinematic reality can be established between loops of different velocities.  DP: Film theorists talk about the way ‘post-cinematic’ contemporary blockbusters are made from images knitted together out of a mixture of live action, green-screen work, and 3D animation. I’ve been thinking how my recent work tries to explode that—keep each element separate but simultaneous. So I use ‘live’ images, green-screened compositing and CGI across a show but never brought together into a naturalised image—sort of like a Brechtian approach to post-cinema. The show is somehow an exploded frame of a contemporary film with each layer somehow indicating different levels of lived abstractions, each abstraction peeling back the surface further.  JBR: This raises crucial questions of order, and the notion that abstraction is something that ‘comes after’ reality, or is applied to reality, rather than being primary to its production.  DP: Yes good point. I think that’s why I’m interested in multiple screens visible simultaneously. The linear time of conventional editing is always about unveiling whereas in the show everything is available at the same time on the same level to some extent. This kind of multi-screen, multi-layered approach to me is an attempt at contemporary ‘realism’ in our times of high abstraction. That said it’s strange to me that so many artworks and games using CGI these days end up echoing a kind of ‘naturalist’ realist pictorialism from the early 19th Century—because that’s what is given in the software engines and in the gaming-post-cinema complex they’re trying to reference. Everything is perfectly in perspective and figures and landscapes are designed to be at least pseudo ‘realistic’. I guess that’s why you hear people talking about the digital sublime or see art that explores the Romanticism of these ‘gaming’ images.  JBR: But the effort to make a naturalistic picture is—as it was in the 19th century—already not the same as realism. Realism should never just mean realistic representation, but instead the incursion of reality into the work. For the realists of the mid-19th century that meant a preoccupation with motivations and material forces. But today it is even more clear that any type of naturalism in the work can only serve to mask similar preoccupations, allowing work to screen itself off from reality.  DP: In terms of an anti-naturalism I’m also interested in the pictorial space of medieval painting that breaks the laws of perspective or post-war painting that hovered between figuration and abstraction. I recently returned to Francis Bacon who I was the first artist I was into when I was a teenage goth and who I’d written off as an adolescent obsession. But revisiting Bacon I realised that my work is highly influenced by him, and reflects the same desire to capture human energy in a concentrated, abstracted way. I want to use ‘cold’ digital abstraction to create a heightened sense of the physical but not in the same way as motion capture which always seems to smooth off and denature movement. So the graph-like image in the centre of the triptych (Les Fantômes) in this show twitches with the physicality of a human body in a very subtle but palpable way. It looks like CGI but isn’t and has this concentrated human life force rippling through it. 

If in this space and time of loops of the exploded unstill still, we find ourselves again stuck in this shuddering and juddering, I can’t help but ask what its gesture really is. How does the past it holds gesture towards the future? And what does this mean for our reality and interventions into it. JBR: The green-screen video is very cold. The ruined 3D version is very tender. DP: That's funny you say that. People always associate ‘dirty’ or ‘poor’ images with warmth and find my green-screen images very cold. But in the green-screened video these bodies are performing a very tender dance—searching out each other, trying to connect, but also trying to become objects, or having to constantly reconfigure themselves and never settling. JBR: And yet with this you have a certain conceit built into the drapes you use: one that is in a totally reflective drape, and one in a drape that is slightly too close to the colour of the greenscreen background. Even within these thin props there seems to be something like a psychological description or diagnosis. And as much as there is an attempt to conjoin two bodies in a mutual darkness, each seems thrown back by its own especially modern stigma. The two figures seem to portray the incompatibility of the two poles established by veiled forms of the world of commodities: one is hidden by a veil that only reflects back to the viewer, disappearing behind what can only be the viewer’s own narcissism and their gratification in themselves, which they have mistaken for interest in an object or a person, while the other clumsily shows itself at the very moment that it might want to seem camouflaged against a background that is already designed to disappear. It forces you to recognise the object or person that seems to want to become inconspicuous. And stashed in that incompatibility of how we find ourselves cloaked or clothed is a certain unhappiness. This is not a happy show. Or at least it is a gesturally unsettled and unsettling one. DP: I was consciously thinking of the theories of gesture that emerged during the crisis years of the early 20th century. The impact of the economic and political on bodies. And I wanted the work to reflect this sense of crisis. But a lot of the melancholy in the show is personal. It's been a hard year. But to be honest I’m not that aligned to those who feel that the current moment is the worst of all possible times. There’s a left/liberal hysteria about the current moment (perhaps the same hysteria that is fuelling the rise of right-wing populist ideas) that somehow nothing could be worse than now, that everything is simply terrible. But I feel that this moment is a moment of contestation, which is tough but at least means having arguments about the way the world should be, which seems better than the strange technocratic slumber of the past 25 years. Austerity has been horrifying and I realise that I’ve been relatively shielded from its effects, but the sight of the post-political elites being ejected from the stage of history is hopeful to me, and people seem to forget that the feeling of the rise of the right has been also met with a much broader audience for the left or more left-wing ideas than have been previously allowed to impact public discussion. That said, I do think we’re experiencing the dog-end of a long-term economic decline and this sense of emptying out is producing phantasms and horrors and creating a sense of palpable dread. I started to feel that the images I was making for ‘The Searchers’ engaged with this. David Panos (b. 1971 in Athens, Greece) lives and works in London, UK. A selection of solo and group exhibitions include Pumphouse Gallery, Wandsworth, London, 2017 (solo); Sculpture on Screen. The Very Impress of the Object, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal [Kirschner & Panos], 2017; Nemocentric, Charim Galerie, Vienna, 2016; Atlas [De Las Ruinas] De Europa, Centro Centro, Madrid, 2016; The Dark Pool, Albert Baronian, Brussels, (solo), 2015; The Dark Pool, Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid, 2015; Whose Subject Am I?, Kunstverein Fur Die Rheinlande Und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2015; The Dark Pool, Hollybush Gardens, London, (solo), 2014; A Machine Needs Instructions as a Garden Needs Discipline, MARCO Vigo, 2014; Ultimate Substance, B3 Biennale des bewegten Blides, Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; Ultimate Substance, CentrePasquArt, Biel, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; Ultimate Substance, Extra City, Antwerp, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; The Magic of the State, Lisson Gallery, London, 2013; HELL AS, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013.

Do you have any favorite scifi shows? Or any recommendations?

Well! This is a fun ask. Let me see…

So, I really like sci-fi, but sometimes I also don’t like sci-fi. I overdosed a little bit on spaceship stuff after my years of Star Trek obsession and then BSG (and like, I hear The Expanse is great but I just…haven’t been in the mood), and these days my favorite sci-fi is talky, high-concept atmospheric mystery stuff in a fairly realistic world where something is a little bit weird. What I really DON’T like is violence/shooting/chasing/action, and a lot of sci-fi, unfortunately, is that. (Westworld, I am looking at your ass.) I also am a LITTLE bit over sci-fi as sledgehammery social parable, again a la Star Trek. Even though I’ll always love Star Trek (and will get around to watching Discovery one of these days). 

Some sci-fi TV that I’ve enjoyed recently includes:

(hey surprise, this got very long! so it’s under a cut)

Dark. There’s just one season of this on Netflix right now, but I LOVVVVVED it. Talk about atmospheric. It made me want to move to Germany and live in a forest where it rains all the time. It’s in German – this isn’t a bother to me because I like subtitles, but it’s available dubbed as well if you prefer that. It takes place in a small town and starts with a missing child, and it quickly becomes clear that something strange is going on. Time travel is an element. A central part of it becomes about the way all the characters in the town are interconnected and how the events of the past affect the future. It’s part Lost, part Stranger Things, part Back to the Future. 

The Returned/Les Revenants. So there’s an American show called The Returned as well, and this is not that one – the one I’m talking about is in French (sorry…I swear some ones without subtitles are coming) and was on uh, IFC or something like that. One day in a(n extremely attractive and cinematic) French town in the mountains, a girl comes home from a class field trip…except she died on that field trip years ago, in a bus accident, and her family is completely shocked and freaked out. The same thing is happening all across town. Includes one (1) very creepy child. Very spooky and also super atmospheric. (One reason I loved Dark so much was that aesthetically it reminded me of Les Revenants.)

The 4400. I binged this show and had a window of time in my life where I was super obsessed with it. Premise is similar to The Returned, actually: A bunch of people (4,400 of them to be precise) who were believed to be the victims of alien abductions – across many years – are returned to earth all at the same time, all at the age they left. So you have a man who was taken in the 1950s (Mahershala Ali!) and a little girl from the 1930s, etc., all dropped back into modern-day America – and most of them (all of them? I forget) have mysterious powers of various kinds. Two police detectives (am I predictable or what) investigate. Things escalate from there. It is a little XF-y in a way I appreciate, while also being totally different (and much less arty than something like Les Revenants). 

Stranger Things. I might as well list it…everyone knows about this show but it really is pretty great. Season 1 especially. Huge ET vibes, creepy/Spielbergy, not a cop-out where it’s all a metaphor or something (pet peeve). 

Fringe. This isn’t so recent (well, neither is The 4400), but if you like sci-fi and you haven’t watched it, you should! It starts out being a liiiiiiittle bit of a less-hooky ripoff of XF (a group of FBI folks, including a retired mad scientist basically, investigate paranormal cases), but after a few episodes it finds its groove and it becomes its own weird and wonderful thing. It was a show I really enjoyed and it ended satisfyingly. John Noble as Walter Bishop is fantastic, and one thing I really loved about it was that it was not afraid to make things happen and shake up the premise if needed. 

Jessica Jones. I really, really am not into Marvel or any of the superhero stuff, but I like this show a lot. It puts the idea of having “powers” in a very grounded kind of gritty, cynical, noir-y setting and I enjoy that. It’s also woman-focused, which is nice, and it’s just different from other stuff on TV. I dig it. 

Orphan Black. Man, I loved Orphan Black. What a fun show, and – not necessarily the most important thing to me in a show, but hugely refreshing nonetheless – it’s also very woman-centered. The premise is that a woman named Sarah sees someone who looks exactly like her – right before the doppelganger throws herself in front of a train. And in unraveling the mystery, Sarah learns that she’s a clone and she has a bunch of “sisters.” Tatiana Maslany is FREAKING AMAZINGGGGG as all the various clones. It is definitely sci-fi, but it’s also a lot of fun and just a fast-moving, action-packed (but not in a way that makes my eyes glaze over) cool-ass show. 

Grimm. Grimm was a pretty silly network-y show, but my affection for it really never waned (though it also never really went too far above “mild”). Premise: Basically, that fairytale monsters (broadly speaking) are real and walk among us (disguised for the most part), and there are these people called Grimms who can see them and are supposed to fight them. Lots of ancient documents, old books, mysterious keys, etc. This one dude who is a police detective in Portland (it was shot in Portland and is basically the second Portland-iest show after Portlandia, as far as I can tell) finds out that he’s a Grimm, and he meets this guy who is one of these monsters but also a delightfully civilized clock nerd who becomes his friend and helps him learn about this hidden world, and it’s pretty much monster-of-the-week episodes every week (though there is a mytharc of sorts involving an evil cabal of European royalty or something, snore). I think it’s the people who did Angel (which I never watched; I’m not a Buffy person). It also started the same year as Once Upon a Time, so it was the “other” fairytale show.

The Leftovers. Technically, it’s sci-fi. It’s also just very imaginative storytelling, and is a good example of what I mean by high-concept and atmospheric and something being a little bit weird in an otherwise contemporary setting. (This is a post-Lost Damon Lindelof, and Damon Lindelof has learned from his Lost mistakes, with wonderful results.) The central premise is a sci-fi one (2% of the earth’s population mysteriously vanishes), but aside from that there are also just a lot of kind of fantastic imaginative leaps and surreal settings and…ah, The Leftovers. My standard intro/warning: Season 1, while really good, is VERY depressing; Season 2 becomes marginally less depressing while also changing things up considerably and in my opinion becoming much better; Season 3 is even better than that. Love you, show. 

Lost. I suppose I should mention it even though it’s another obvious one. I have rarely been hooked as hard as I was by the pilot of this show. It doesn’t necessarily deliver on everything it promises, and it’s interesting to think of it in terms of it being one of the first shows to, basically, cancel itself – to choose to end so that it could pace its story effectively and lead to a deliberate ending instead of just vamping forever and trying to keep sucking the audience in for one more season until that stopped working and it was canceled. However, before that happened there was some time-killing, and I think that maybe contributes to people’s perception that it didn’t know what it was doing half the time. A divisive ending that I did not have a problem with. If you watch it in the spirit of being taken on a ride and enjoying the feelings that the twists and turns give you in the moment, you’ll find it more satisfying than if you’re trying to solve every mystery and trying to make it all work out perfectly with every loose end tied up.  

The OA. This was a weird-ass motherfucking show on Netflix and I still don’t know what the fuck it was about. I feel like I dreamed it. It maybe involves angels? And stuff. 

Carnivale. Lord, talk about atmosphere. This was an HBO show several years ago now about a creepy traveling circus in the 1930s. Being on HBO, it’s very violent and dirty and twisted and stuff. I was obsessed with it, and loved watching it although I vaguely remember the ending being not super satisfying? I should rewatch it, really, because I have forgotten a lot about it beyond impressions (it started in 2003). It’s not that sci-fi, but it has kind of mysterious portents and shit like that all over the place. Anytime I see anything remotely carnival-y I’m like AAAHHH CARNIVALE

Westworld. Sigh…I’m having a lot of trouble connecting to the season of Westworld that’s currently airing (Season 2, on HBO). I loved Season 1. My opinion is that they blew their premise too quickly and now they have nowhere to go – it’s just been violent chaos of the sort that puts me to sleep. Literally – one episode a couple of weeks ago I tried to watch and fell asleep during TWICE – two evenings in a row – before I finally got through it on Day 3. Because it was just a bunch of shooting. But the premise is cool – in the undetermined nearish future, there is a giant elaborate theme park where extremely realistic robots interact with the superrich guests who pay to come and basically be super destructive and violent (this show doesn’t have a particularly high opinion of humanity) in an Old West-themed setting. Like Disney World if your dream was to fuck and murder everyone in the Hall of Presidents. It’s made by one of the Nolans so there are lots of twists and also you don’t know what the hell is going on half the time. But there are some high-budget groovy sci-fi set pieces in it, and if you like amazing piano covers of popular songs (sometimes but not always in the in-show context of the player piano in the saloon), that is a fantastic bonus (the music is terrific overall). ROBOTS.

Battlestar Galactica. Speaking of robots. I loved the hell out of this show, although I have my issues with it. I felt when I first saw it (this is the 2000s remake I’m talking about, not the 1970s original) that it was like Star Trek had grown up. It gets more and more high-concept the longer it goes on, and some people weren’t fans of where it ended up (I, again, was fine with it), but it starts out with a hell of a premise: Cylons (humanlike robots originally created by humanity, which then evolved) destroy almost all of the human race except for a few stragglers in a few scattered ships, who have to pull together and somehow survive. Great acting, great writing, big themes, Laura Roslin. 

Black Mirror. This is an anthology series, meaning each one is a short story basically, with different characters, a different near-future setting, and a different premise (often having to do with technology going wrong. In the words of Mallory Ortberg: What If Phones, But Too Much?) Some of them are better than others but if you can take some upsetting conceptual stuff, it’s really a super interesting show. Your bingeing tolerance may vary, but I personally could not handle more than a couple of episodes a night.

Roswell. Holy shit I was so into this fucking teen soap opera about aliens. Also not recent. They might do a remake of this I heard?? MAX + LIZ 4EVA

Millennium. Yes…Chris Carter’s Other Show. I’ve said this before, but in a weird way I feel like this show is…CC’s best work???? Without the chemistry supernova of Mulder and Scully dimming everything around it, the “scary stories” he’s always talking about actually have room to be kind of interesting. It also works with his inclination to do what is essentially an anthology series loosely connected via recurring characters that are almost more narrators/observers than participants. In XF, this makes me want to break things when it results in stagnated character growth and no continuity and endless reset-button-pushing. In Millennium, Frank wandering grimly through the show universe encountering fable after fable (grimmer than XF – less on the stretchy mutants and fat-sucking vampires and lake monsters and Reticulans and spooky green bugs; more serial killers and cults and angels and apocalyptic stuff) actually worked pretty darn well for me. It’s not that the characters aren’t good, but they are VERYYYYY archetypal (kind of like how M&S could have been if not given such aliveness and humanity by David and Gillian, and Morgan and Wong and Vince Gilligan at that). Frank Black is the tormented detective, he has a beautiful kind wife and an innocent young daughter and they live in a beatific yellow house and he has to keep them safe from the evils out in the darkness. You might say this is hammered home a lot. But: the kind of mythic tone of it is a much better fit here than on XF. Lance Henriksen is perfect as Frank, and some of the stories are really absorbing and emotional. I cried during WAY more Millennium episodes (I can think of three or four off the top of my head that I remember WEEPING openly over, one of which stars Darren McGavin) than I ever have at XF. 

Everything changes in Season 2 when Morgan and Wong take over as (I believe) showrunners – things lighten up considerably versus S1; there’s even a Darin episode! With Jose Chung! And the Spotnitz Sanitarium! – and then everything changes again in S3 when they leave. The show does suffer from a lack of cohesion in that sense, and frankly the “mytharc” parts never did a lot for me (loosely, the world is going to end in the year 2000 and a cabal of mysterious dudes something something). But there is a lot of cool shit in this show. There really is. Every few years I attempt a rewatch and never finish; I should try again. In late fall, which is the only time Millennium should be watched. 

 BONUS

Face Off. This isn’t sci-fi per se (it’s a reality competition show, on Syfy), but if you’re a sci-fi person you might love it. The way I describe it to people is very simple: It’s the exact same premise and structure as Project Runway, except instead of fashion, it’s FX makeup. The best thing about it is that everyone is NICE and HELPFUL to each other. It’s a bunch of creative nerds making monsters together and the competition element is there but no one is a dick and there’s no fighting and drama. Michael Westmore, who did the makeup on Star Trek: TNG among many other acclaimed projects, is the mentor (and the dad of the show’s host, McKenzie Westmore), and he pops in to give dad advice to all these starstruck dorks. The new season just started and it’s just a fun show. I have, at times, thought of it as my FAVORITE show on TV. 

Well, that was probably more than you wanted, anon! I feel like I’m missing some, too. TV! I like it. 

Edgar Wright on Ghosts, Musicals, and Last Night in Soho

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Edgar Wright is trying to cure himself. That’s how the writer-director describes his latest movie Last Night in Soho: a cure for the nostalgia that’s followed him all his life, and which still causes him to daydream against his better judgment about 1960s London as if it were a golden age.

“I have this recurring time travel fantasy about the idea of going back,” Wright says with the air of a confession. “But I think it’s always that thing, this nagging fear that it’s probably a really bad idea.”

It’s a surprising admission for a filmmaker who has spent his career often looking to the past in order to find something new and clever to say about our present. After all, Wright’s breakthrough was directing the game-changing British sitcom Spaced, which featured so many references and nods to the movies he loved that the show’s DVD introduced the “Homage-o-Meter” bonus feature. And his early cinematic achievements in the Cornetto Trilogy—Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End—are nothing if not love letters to the genres that inspired him and co-writer Simon Pegg.

That sense of always being aware of the history of things weighs on Wright, even as he appears happy and relaxed when we meet on an August afternoon. He’s at the tail-end of the UK rollout for his new music documentary The Sparks Brothers, and the filmmaker is relieved to just be out of his flat and in a London hotel room (in the Soho district, of course). Sitting 90 seconds from his home down the street, the director is taken back to both better and stranger days in this neighborhood, including when he decided to set his first psychological horror movie there.

In Last Night in Soho, audiences follow Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), a young woman who has come to London with starry eyes for what the big city was like back in the day. Unfortunately, her reveries take a more insidious turn once she actually travels to the tumultuous ’60s decade, shadowing a mysterious lounge singer (Anya Taylor-Joy) toward dark places.

Looking back now, Wright is swept up in the excitement he found in  shutting down whole streets and redressing them like their seedier glory days while Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith zip by in mod attire. He’s also haunted by the evenings when he found the courage to return there during lockdown, becoming affected by the sudden silence of the district and memories of friends who were recently lost, including ’60s luminary Dame Diana Rigg.

“It was completely and utterly deserted, which added an extra poignancy to it,” Wright says. “And there’s another separate part of it that’s bittersweet and elegiac in a way. Soho is rapidly changing. Some of those buildings with ghosts in them, they’re just going forever, which is very sad.” Clearly such spirits walk beside Wright, be it in his wistful comedies or serious ghost stories. Below is our conversation, edited for length and clarity, about those shades.

In Last Night in Soho, a character says, “This is London. Someone’s died in every room and on every street corner.” Is that something you think about when you’re walking around town?

Oh, my God! I mean that character says it because I believe it. This specifically is to say there are buildings in London that are hundreds of years old, of which most of Soho is like. That’s the thing that inspired the movie, really. I’ve been in London for 25 years. I’ve spent most of that time working in Soho. I’ve probably spent more time in Soho than I have in some couches in flats that I’ve been in. Because I’ve written there, I’ve edited movies there. Nearly all of the movies I’ve done, even the American and Canadian ones, have been edited in Soho. I’ve just spent an enormous amount of time there. It’s also an entertainment district, so there’s restaurants and bars, and cinemas. 

But it’s also that thing where, even now, it is on the border of a darker side of the underworld, which is still there in contemporary Soho in plain sight. And then going back, when I first moved to London, that side of life was a lot more prevalent, and then if you go back to the ‘60s, even more so. It’s not necessarily always a great place to be, and I guess that’s the point of the movie: that there is a danger of romanticizing the past, and obviously the ‘60s is a decade to get totally obsessed with, and I certainly am in terms of having grown up with my parents’ record collection, which was predominantly ‘60s records.

You can’t help but think when you go to London, “Oh my God, the swinging ‘60s and Soho, and film and fashion and music!” But of course there was a darker side to the place. And I guess that’s what the movie ultimately is: a cautionary tale for time travelers. Like, if you could go back, should you?

Diana Rigg has a wonderful role in this. What was it like working with her and also having her as a resource on a project like this?

I was just really lucky to get to work with her and get to know her, and I guess call her a friend. Because after we’d filmed and before the lockdown, I saw her a number of times or called her on the phone. I mean all through the early lockdown, I would be calling Rita Tushingham [who also appears in the movie] and Diana Rigg and just chatting, and talking about old movies.

In terms of a resource, that would be true of Terence Stamp, Rita Tushingham, and Diana Rigg. All people who have got an incredible body of work, and obviously all three of them started essentially in the ‘60s. I mean Rita Tushingham, who plays Thomasin’s grandmother, was 18 when she shot Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey. She was the same age as Thomasin McKenzie was shooting Last Night in Soho. So the idea of her playing the grandmother—I couldn’t think of anybody better to play this part. Also Thomasin, before shooting, I think she’d already met Rita once and then she watched A Taste of Honey and she said, “Ah that film is so great but now I’m starstruck by Rita!”

So as a resource, it is really interesting, because obviously they have amazing stories to tell. But there’s another thing that I think is a microcosm of the movie itself. There are ways that I’m like Eloise. There are moments in the film where Eloise, in a puppyish sort of way, is talking very excitedly about the decade to somebody who was there. And I’ve done that to people, whether it be actors or people in a film, where you’re going, “Oh wow, the ‘60s must have been so cool, right?” And I feel like the answer from them is always, Yes… dot, dot, dot. There’s always a dot, dot, dot, because yes, great things happened but also terrible things happened, as well. 

These older actors are the living memory of that era, but you also have Anya and Thomasin channeling it for a new generation. Why was it important for you to enter this era through a female gaze?

There’s that one element where all of my movies have featured young males, and you have to challenge yourself in your career and write slightly outside of what you know. Just writing what you know all the time is not very progressive or challenging, ultimately… Also there are a lot of movies of that time that are not horror movies or psychological thrillers, but dramas of the ‘60s, and they’re cautionary tales about girls coming to London. I think what a lot of those movies were was the old guard slapping the young generation on the wrist, as if to say, “How dare you come to London and make it big?” There are a lot of moralistic films made around that time. There are some very good ones and there are a lot of ones that are of a genre that seem like they’re wagging their finger, and I always found those films quite fascinating. 

So that part of the story of Soho is to show us a different version of one of those films told in parallel decades. That you see Thomasin coming to London in the modern day, and you see Anya coming to London trying to make it big in the ‘60s.

Do you think about how Eloise’s London is different from the London Shaun moves through in Shaun of the Dead?

Well, not that there’s much that you could join the dots between the two, but Shaun is in his late 20s, living in the suburbs, and at the point when you meet Shaun in the movie, he’s clearly been around there for a long time. So he’s quite comfortable, nigh complacent, in where he lives. I think the thing is, coming to London for the first time, like any big city, is a very lonely experience. I mean, where are you?

New York. And I’m not from New York originally.

So I’m sure moving to New York is very similar to coming to London. When you first get there, it’s really forbidding. It was the same for me. I’m from the country. I’m from where Hot Fuzz is shot in Somerset, and when I came to London [in the mid-’90s], it’s that thing where we even used the term in the movie, it’s like country mouse. One of the mean girls at fashion college calls Thomasin country mouse, and I remember reading that book, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, when I was a kid. And I remember when I was going to London, I was like, “Ah, I’m the Country Mouse.” [Laughs]  Because I do not belong here, or even if you don’t belong, it’s like with any big city, you have to find your own way in and you have to let the city open up to you.

Some people never have that experience. I’m sure you have friends as well that come to the city and never get in sync with it and leave. When you find your place in the city, sometimes it’s really hard won. So I’m not Eloise, and I’ve never been an 18 year old fashion student, but I certainly had a very similar experience to her coming to London and feeling totally out of place, totally outpaced by everybody. And Krysty [Wilson-Cairns], who co-wrote the screenplay with me, is from Scotland and she came to London. It’s a very powerful thing when you come to the big city and you’re not from here.

Do you think that this experience you had when you first came to London is why you have made so many stories like Spaced or Scott Pilgrim, or even Shaun, where young people feel aimless in the world?

I guess so. You’ll never not be the kid from the country. It’s a powerful thing, and it’s something that—I don’t know. That’s a good question.

Yet, unlike many of those characters, you knew what you wanted to do since you were 14.

Yeah, and whatever the quality level of my first film, A Fistful of Fingers… I realized after the fact I’m really glad that I made it in Somerset and then came to London. Because then I always had this weird calling card in terms of, even if it was a slightly kitschy thing, it’s like, “Hey, this kid, he made a Western in Somerset!” Now it may not have been a great film. It got a good review in Variety. Empire gave it one star. So opinion on it is mixed. But the thing is that because I did it in my hometown and then came to London, I had sort of done something outside of London.

I think if I had come to London without having made anything and tried to make it in the film business, now you’re one of tens of thousands of people who want to be a film director… That can be really tough. I think it’s always a thing that I’ve given advice to younger filmmakers: If you can make a film on your own patch first, it can be more powerful.

You’ve mentioned on social media being enamored as a child with posters for movies like Alien and Friday the 13th, and your parents would say “no,” leaving them to your imagination. Do you feel like that forbidden nature influenced your tastes?

Yes, absolutely. There’s something where you start to imagine what those films might be like. And sometimes they live up to your imagination and sometimes what’s in your imagination is more powerful. That particularly became the case with the VHS mania, when there were video libraries everywhere. My parents didn’t have a VCR. They sort of refused to buy a VCR. So I didn’t actually have one in the house until I was in my late teens when I could pay for it myself. 

Prior to that though, I remember very distinctly when I was maybe 10 years old going into a video store that was around the corner from my house. And I’d usually go in the afternoon when it was empty, and just look at the covers and the back covers of 18-rated videos. I’d be looking at the cover of Brian de Palma’s Body Double, and just trying to imagine what the film was like from the poster image and the little stills on the back, and maybe what the synopsis said.

Then occasionally there are movies from that period where I’ve never seen the movie, and I realize it would be better not to see the movie, because I’m not sure it could ever live up to the cover art. Like I remember specifically being quite obsessed, aged 10, with a film called Zone Troopers, which is, I discover now, directed by Rachel Bilson’s dad, Danny Bilson! But I just remember seeing that poster, and it’s got an alien pointing, saying, “Your universe needs you!” and “Zone Troopers.” I never saw the movie and it’s probably not a good time to start now, but as a 10 year old, I’m thinking, “Woah, what is that movie?!”

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What did your parents think of your genre interests, particularly as they continued into your adult professional life?

They knew that my brother and I were both very interested in genre movies, and I think we had kind of tried to convince them on a number of levels [that genre is great]. I mean, long before I knew that I wanted to be a director, I definitely knew I wanted to do something in film, and there was definitely, like with a lot of kids, an early obsession with makeup. There are films where those things are more acceptable as a kid, where Star Wars has the cantina sequence or Raiders of the Lost Ark has the whole ending with Nazis melting. And then other things are more illicit. My Mum and Dad are well aware that me and my brother would really like to see Alien, really like to see The Thing, really like to see American Werewolf in London, but can’t.

Then I think it was when I was 10 years old that An American Werewolf in London was shown on network TV for the first time. I managed to convince my parents to let me stay up and watch it, and they acquiesced, and they let me and my brother watch it until midway through that dream sequence with the Nazi monsters. When they slit David Naughton’s throat, my Mum was like, “Okay, that’s it. Bed.” So I didn’t see the rest of the film for another three years after that! I had terrible nightmares because I never saw the story resolve. I really did, I’m not kidding around! I really had terrible nightmares because I never saw the resolution of the story.

I don’t think the resolution would’ve prevented the nightmares.

That’s true! [Laughs]

You’ve been described in the press as the ultimate film nerd fanboy. Do you like that title?

I mean, it depends how it’s used. If it’s used as an insult then, sure, I’d rather not. But in terms of, am I a fan of cinema? Of course. Like you could use the word enthusiast. It doesn’t really annoy me. I guess it only sort of is a thing where people assume that means I only like a certain type of movie, which is not true. I like all types of movies. And certainly in recent years, I’ve gravitated away from what people might think is more like the comic book nerd kind of movie, just because a lot of it tires me out to be honest. I mean, weirdly enough, I just saw James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad this weekend and I thought, “Oh, that’s the first comic book movie in quite a long time that I actually enjoyed.”

But there’s a certain type of movie that I feel like I’ve grown out of for the most part, and certainly in terms of the things that I watch. I try and watch a bit of everything. In fact in the pandemic, for the start of it, for like the first five months where nobody was going to work or couldn’t do anything, I decided to make a dent into my long list of films that I’d never seen, which had an enormous breadth to it in terms of the types of movies I was watching. And it was an amazing experience to sort of get through some of these films on the list of things that I had never seen.

I read your list of everything you watched in lockdown, and saw a movie on there which I thought about while watching Last Night in Soho: Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. Was that intentional?

Yeah, I’m a big fan of Bob Fosse full-stop, and actually just before the pandemic, they had a musical season at the BFI in London, and they had a triple bill of Sweet Charity, Cabaret, and All That Jazz, and I think I hadn’t seen any of them on the big screen actually. So I took my choreographer from [Last Night in Soho], Jenn White, and I said, “What are you doing on Sunday?” She said, “Why?” I said, “Let’s watch the three Bob Fosse films in a row!”

I love Sweet Charity, as well, and there’s a poster of Sweet Charity in Eloise’s bedroom at the start of [Soho]. And not just the Sweet Charity movie poster with Shirley MacLaine but also a photo of Judi Dench playing the character on the West End production of Sweet Charity.

In Baby Driver, you wrote into the script the songs you planned to shoot and edit the scenes to. Is that something you continued then with Eloise’s love of ‘60s music here?

Last Night in Soho was similar to Baby Driver in the sense that I had specific songs worked out for specific scenes. And in a lot of cases in the way that I write, especially with Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho, the song in some ways inspires the scene. Maybe not in terms of what’s happening in it story wise, but the rhythm of it or even the length of it. 

So there’s one song in the movie in the first dream sequence, the Graham Bond Organisation version of “Wade in the Water,” and sometimes it’s like this movie, which I’ve had in my head for 10 years. Sometimes I’ve had those songs connected with the movie for that long. If they come up again, like maybe you’re working on something else and you hear that song and you’re like, “Ah, I’ve got to make Last Night in Soho!” So I know what this scene is. 

Because the film is set in the ‘60s, I zeroed in on a particular period and a particular type of song. The majority of them were by female singers. And a lot of them I feel have, even if they’re pop-y, they kind of have a melancholic edge to them in the lyrics. That’s something that always, I find, very striking about some of those songs by Cilla Black or Dusty Springfield or Sandie Shaw.

But I love making films that become music-centric. Both with Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho, working with a choreographer on a day-to-day basis—on both films, we had a choreographer there every day because it was not just the dance sequences. It’s kind of everything involved in movement and how that relates to the music that might be in the scene. It was a great experience. Some director friends of mine have said outright, “When are you just going to make a musical?”

That’s my next question.

Alfonso Cuarón said it to me after he watched Last Night in Soho! He really liked the movie and he said, “But honestly, when are you just going to make a musical?” [Laughs]

Has it been in the back of your head? You flirted with it in Scott Pilgrim, and the first reference I caught in Spaced is to The King and I.

I can’t claim credit for The King and I reference in Spaced. That was definitely a Jessica Hynes reference. But yeah, listen, if I found the right subject matter or something that I felt could be a really great movie that I could make, then yeah, for sure. It would be amazing. They’re always a genre that I absolutely adore, right back to some of the early sound musicals, especially all of the Busby Berkeley films of the early ‘30s. I just find them mind-boggling.

I mean the thing about those movies made in the early ‘30s at Warner Bros. is that it would be difficult to better them now. Like that’s what’s crazy. Also nobody would make them with that many dancers now. The studio would be like, “Um, do you really need 60 dancers? Can you, like, CGI them?” So that to me is what’s amazing about that. Like good luck trying to top that now.

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What is harder to block for the camera: a fight scene or a musical number?

Well, they’re very close. I’d say they’re equally difficult, because they both require the same thing. A fight scene requires not just the choreography itself, but it requires strategy in that, where do you put the camera to best showcase this action? So that’s where in Scott Pilgrim and The World’s End, and working with [cinematographer] Bill Pope and [stunt coordinator] Brad Allan was incredible, because Brad Allan is an amazing stunt coordinator. I mean, he’s now directing second unit and he did second unit on Scott Pilgrim. And then Bill Pope has obviously shot incredible action films, including The Matrix. 

So another thing with action is it’s not just the choreography; it’s also where is the best place to put the camera? That’s what’s great about all of the Hong Kong cinema, the golden period of Hong Kong action. It’s just looking at it in terms of camera placement. Here for this, here for that. It’s sort of the opposite of the Western style of filmmaking, which is when I think you can get a more bog standard take on action, because they’ve just hosed it down with coverage. Whereas all of the Asian influence in action is to be very specific about this piece works for this camera, and now this piece works for this camera. 

So there was an element of that in Scott Pilgrim and The World’s End, and then with Soho, with some of the dance sequences, it was more in some cases building these extended shots. There are some very complicated one-take dance sequences. One thing I’d say about it without giving too much of the game away, I think people would be shocked at how much of Soho is in-camera. Things that you might think, “Ah, that must be motion control. Oh, that must be like a green screen.” No. A lot of it is actually in-camera, and maybe eventually with the Blu-ray we can pull back the curtain and reveal some of the trickery.

Since you already mentioned the ‘30s, did you do the Harpo Marx trick with the mirror scene between Anya and Thomasin, as seen in the trailer?

There’s an extra bit of complexity to the start of that shot, which maybe I won’t reveal. But let me put it this way: It’s all in-camera, including the part at the start of the scene where there is really a mirror there. And then the later part of the shot—you have to sort of watch the shot to figure out exactly how it’s done, but it’s like good old fashioned magic, optical illusion stuff. 

But yes, when Anya and Thomasin are facing each other in the mirror, they are in the take together and they are essentially doing choreography to mirror each other. Even if you watch the shots in the trailer where they’re twirling their hair and tapping, when they tap their fingers, it looks like there’s glass there, but they’re just going like that. But it’s not just the choreography and the actors, it’s also about the camera operator needs to be in the right place at the right time. And we had an amazing camera operator, Chris Bain. So whenever we were doing one of those sequences, we would rehearse with him.

For instance, there’s the scene on the dance floor where Matt [Smith] is dancing with Anya and sometimes Thomasin, and sometimes back to Anya, and that’s all one shot. And that is all about, we rehearsed it in a town hall with dancers and we recorded it on Steadicam, and then on a Saturday, I think it was literally the day after Anya had wrapped Emma., like with no break, she had to come straight onto the set to rehearse this dance number with the camera. And director friends of mine would watch that shot and say, ‘Is that motion control?’ No, it’s just a Steadicam shot.

You mention filmmaker friends, but do you have long conversations with filmmakers who you’ve heavily homaged? Has Michael Bay ever come up to you and been like, “We’re going to talk about Hot Fuzz?”

I’m not sure that Michael Bay has ever seen Hot Fuzz. I once met him at a birthday and I introduced myself to him, and I think this was just after Hot Fuzz came out. So I introduced myself and said, “Oh, I don’t know if you know, I’m Edgar Wright, I made the film Hot Fuzz.” And he went, “That’s the film with the guy from Mission: Impossible III?” I said, “Yeah.” And that was the end of the conversation. So I have a feeling he’s never seen it. [Laughs]

And George Romero?

Well, George was probably the first director who was a big hero of mine that I got to meet, or talk to before meeting. Specifically because when we made Shaun of the Dead, we wanted to reach out to George to watch it, because we felt that it was such a valentine to him that we’d feel bad if he didn’t like it. It was obviously a nerve-racking thing to do because what if we show it to him and he fucking hated it? Me and Simon would be devastated.

But we reached out to him through Universal, and he watched the film when he was on holiday in Florida in 2004, and he called us that night. I always remember that moment. It was before the days of group Zoom calls. He called Simon first and then he called me, and I remember I was standing when I got the call, and talking to George Romero about Shaun of the Dead and hearing this voice that I knew from documentaries and DVD commentaries. 

Now George Romero knew who we were and liked our film, and liked it enough to give it a poster quote. He was really the first director who I really admired that I met. But I also remember that as the moment that the world started getting smaller.

Last Night in Soho opens in theaters on Oct. 29.

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Thoughts on AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR

Spoilers. 

Serious.

Spoilers. 

This felt like a big comic event, where every other page turn leads to a huge splash with all the characters battling in chaos. This wasn’t just a superhero movie; It was, like the source material, an event. Characters who run their own franchises often get smaller, supportive roles in things like this. So it made sense that Black Panther serves more as a field general than a lead hero. The only hero I felt got way too shortchanged was Cap. Tony, Hulk, Thor, Strange, Gamora, and Starlord got meaningful Thanos interactions, but Cap just sparred with him a bit. As far as Thanos being fascinated/amused by characters go, I think he’d be fascinated by Cap the most, but they didn’t tap into that at all. Alas.

Most criticisms of the movie could, I think, be dispelled by the fact that this movie took place over the course of a single day, maybe two. So it’s not about plot, or a journey. It’s about surviving a train wreck. I imagine the next film will decompress a little. This doesn’t stand alone as its own movie, but it’s not meant to. And that’s okay. When we learned more and more, film by film, of what Marvel was building here, we knew what we were signing up for. This is a culmination of 18 films that have come before. The major enjoyment was in the chemistry between the characters. Those we’ve seen together before (Bruce and Tony) and new combinations (Thor and the Guardians). Yes, this was characters meeting each other for two and a half hours, but it was always great. I want a spin-off called “Pirate Angel and Sweet Rabbit.” 

Thanos was great. They nailed it. Could easily have been just a power-crazed thug (a la Ronan the Accuser), but they went the extra mile, making him nuanced, sad, and compelling. He’s evil, of course, but his conviction sells it. Even when he’s getting mind-melded, or when he’s got an oversized axe shoved in his chest. I love that he expresses admiration and liking to the heroes. He likes Starlord, “ah, the boyfriend.” and leans in to tell Tony Stark he respects him (right after stabbing him, which is messed up but great). It’s sincere. I wish he’d have had such an exchange with Cap. Thanos was the hero of the movie, and that’s the most bold part of this movie. So, it’s little wonder why Thanos was so sympathetic; the movie was structured for that. He was the protagonist, facing off against a small army of antagonists. The reversal worked, and was the smart way to approach having so many characters in the movie.

Josh Brolin was so good, and I love that the animators and effects guys were able to capture so much of what makes Brolin’s face work. The way Brolin talks as he smiles is a signature of his and Thanos had that, too.

Speaking of so many characters, this was the only movie that could get away with that. They put in the work (18 films worth) that laid the foundation for all this. So when two characters reunite, or two characters meet, we don’t need all the space we might otherwise need. Natasha and Bruce could have used a bit more time. Cap and Bucky definitely needed one more scene. I mean, Bucky is cured! We should see some relief on Cap’s face. He’s weighed down by a whole lot (and he’s just always sad) so some actual good news would have been nice for him to process.

Peter Quill’s freakout at the news of Gamora’s death really did mess things up, but it was totally in character. He hasn’t emotionally matured since he left Earth (notice how much he tried to deflect a serious conversation with Gamora before she literally put her hand on his mouth to shut him up). Peter has done this kind of thing before. When he learned that Ego, his beloved father, revealed that he killed Peter’s mom, Peter didn’t hesitate to start blasting away in rage. He’s emotionally juvenile and that’s his major flaw. Also kinda why we love him.

As many have posited, I agree that Strange giving up the stone to save Tony wasn’t an act of love or anything. It was a calculation. When he went forward in time to see all the possibilities, the only one that would save everyone involved complete failure, and certain death for Strange. Thanos had to get the stones, do his thing, and win. Defeat on the oth to ultimate victory. Whatever Strange saw as that one possibility, it needed Tony alive, and Strange had to sacrifice himself to ensure it came to pass. As he said, there was no other way. It’s a strategic retreat, in a way.

The acting MVP is Robert Downey Jr. The whole cinematic experiment rested on his shoulders from the beginning and it never let up; he’s been game to carry it and carry it well. And here he is at his most excellent. His rocky mentorship of Spider-Man, his reluctance to call Cap, his alpha-posturing with Doctor Strange (their chemistry was flawless), his exasperation with the Guardians (his reaction to “kick names and take ass” alone was Oscar-worthy). Three of my favorite lines came from him (perfect deliveries, all): “I’m sorry, Earth is closed today!” and “Dude, you’re embarrassing me in front of the wizards.” and “If you throw one more moon at me, I’m gonna lose it.” Tony's sleepless obsession with Earth’s protection over the past six years has paid off here with desperation and sacrifice and terrible defeat. He couldn’t stop the threat he’s been dreading. Now he’s stuck on Titan with Nebula, with no way home. RDJ sold every inch of his screen time here. I’ve always loved that Tony is an arrogant prick, but he’s always ready to go on a one-way trip if it means protecting people. No hesitation. With most of his suit destroyed he still goes after Thanos. No wonder Thanos respects him; how could you not? That’s the kind of beautiful idiosyncrasy that’s made Tony Stark such a great character for ten years.

Also, I really hope that Cap and Iron Man travel to Vormir to learn about the Soul Realm so Cap and Red Skull can interact. That’d just be a treat.

Some favorite odds and ends:

-Ebony Maw as a grandiose, self-righteous baddie. He was great.

-“Magic with a kick!”

-The silhouetted shot of Peter Quill pumping his fist to the music gave me chills. A perfect character intro.

-Thanos’ sacrifice for the Soul Stone.

-“All that for a drop of blood."

-Gamora asking Peter for the favor wrecked me. WRECKED ME.

-Doctor Strange talking to Thanos.

-Bruce getting angry at the Hulk.

-Bruce piloting the Hulkbuster.

-Bruce saving himself when Hulk refused to show up.

-Bruce when Thor shows up. “Oh, you guys are so screwed now!"

-Basically everything Bruce.

-Thanos’ expressions when Mantis was on him. And his expressions when Thor pushed Stormbreaker further into him. Thanos pushing through pain was extraordinary. “You should have aimed for the head."

-Rocket trying to buy Bucky’s arm.

-Nick Fury muttering “Mother f…” as he disappeared.

-“I am Steve Rogers."

Discuss

Six Questions With FilmStruck: Josh Boone 

Writer-Director Josh Boone’s filmography includes indie romance STUCK IN LOVE (’12), blockbuster adaptation THE FAULT IN OUR STARS (’14), and coming soon comic book adaptation THE NEW MUTANTS (’18). A cinephile to the core, Boone spoke to FilmStruck’s Marya E. Gates about his early love of film, how he discovered the Criterion Collection, and what films he thinks everyone should stream immediately. 

FS: What was the movie that made you fall in love with movies? 

Josh Boone: There’s so many. Could you name just one? 

FS: No. 

JB: Right? You’d have to name a couple I think. 

FS: You can name a couple. 

JB: My dad had a very large collection of movies on Beta that he taped off HBO when I was a kid in the 80s and he had a lot of those movies from the 70s, those Jack Nicholson movies like ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST and FIVE EASY PIECES and CARNAL KNOWLEDGE. He had all these old Jack Nicholson movies, so I watched those a lot. Jack Nicholson was always my favorite actor. Those 70s Jack Nicholson movies got me into Bogdanovich and THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and all the BBS stuff. When you learn about movies it’s like one thing leads to another. Back then I had to buy Video Watchdog books every year, or an Ebert guide to try to find stuff that I hadn’t seen. I remember seeing E.T. vividly as a kid. It was the 80s, so all those Spielberg movies and THE GOONIES. THE NEVERENDING STORY was one of my favorite movies of all time. That was a big deal when I was a kid. I saw that in theaters a couple of times. I watched movie after movie after movie and then I amassed over the years laserdiscs and DVDs. I didn’t go to film school, I really learned everything from DVD commentaries, behind the scenes documentaries, reading books about movies, and just watching movies. So I watched thousands and thousands of movies when I was a kid. I’d say I watch much less now because it takes so much time to make movies you have much less time to study them. You use them for reference and things like that and you watch them, but not with the same passion that you watched them with when you were young because you have to let that go a little bit to go do the job you have to do, and put the time in to do it. You build it all up and then you hold it inside you and then you go and make movies. 

FS: That’s a great segue to the next question. What was the movie that made you want to make movies? 

JB: I was obsessed with directors when I was young and I would keep file folders with every magazine clipping about David Lynch or Oliver Stone or Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino. I had all these files on them. It’s hard for me to think back to before I even wanted to make movies because my best friend (Knate Lee) and I who I wrote THE NEW MUTANTS with, we’ve known each other since we were little kids. Since we were little Muppet Babies or whatever. Our moms were best friends. We made movies on home video growing up all the time. Really as early as like 7 or 8 because my dad had one of those over the shoulder Beta cams and his parents had a Hi8 or something and we would shoot movies and edit in camera. We started making BATMAN rip-offs where my dad would play the Joker or a BACK TO THE FUTURE rip-off and that gradually led to us writing our own scripts and things like that. It was sort of an organic, long-term process so it’s hard to say the specific movie. But I can say the movie-going experience of my life when I was 12 years old my dad took me to see J.F.K. and that was maybe one of the great movie events I had at the theater when I was young. I remember gripping the armrests of my seat so tightly that there are probably still impressions of them there today. I think Oliver Stone’s run From SALVADOR to NIXON is one of the greatest runs a director has ever had. Those ten movies he made with Bob Richardson, all those movies were really big in our lives when we were young. We’d spend our lives reading comic books and watching movies and listening to music, and Oliver Stone movies were some of the first movies that made us want to go and read history books. Movies opened us up to the entire world because we were raised by very religious parents, like evangelical Christians, so like Paul Schrader – who I think wasn’t allowed to watch movies until he left for college – it was a bit of a forbidden fruit. We watched them all the time and they were an escape and a good way to see what the world was actually like beyond the crazy religious stuff. 

FS: What was your first introduction to the Criterion Collection? 

JB: I used to have a friend named Bill Kelley who worked at newspaper called the Virginian Pilot, which was the main newspaper in Virginia Beach. He was a big movie buff and he had a laserdisc player and we would all go over to his house on Sunday nights and he always had this massive collection of laserdiscs that we would pour over - religious, and old Hollywood classics, and even Spielberg movies. He had a couple of Criterions and he had a big glossy, like a brochure almost, like a 50-page Criterion catalogue that they would send out back in the day, before you could go online and just scroll through everything. It was full color and it was as big as a vinyl record. It had pictures from all the movies and all the extras. You just started to want to check all those boxes off and watch them all. So I got a laserdisc player for Christmas one year and I think the very first one I had was SE7EN, which was one like 8 discs or something. It was ridiculous. It weighed a ton. So I started collecting laserdisc and Criterion editions and listened to commentaries and all that. Oliver Stone did big pioneering laserdisc editions. I have one of PLATOON and THE DOORS. They cost like $150 dollars and they were so heavy. I loved all of that stuff. 

FS: What was the first film you streamed on FilmStruck? 

JB: I think I streamed some extras before I actually watched a movie. Then I watched some Kurosawa and Bergman that weren’t released on disc yet. I like that Criterion has all these titles in their catalogue and they can’t get them all out immediately so they’ll have them on the site so you can stream them even though it might be a couple of years before they come out on disc. There were so many things on their that haven’t been released. Kieślowski is one of my favorite directors and I love Annette Insdorf’s books about him, so she wrote this book called Double Lives, Second Chances, which I have read a couple of times. She just released a book about movie opening scenes (Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes), like what great movies do them well and what a great opening scene is. I love that video series [on the Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes theme] where she goes over the opening of BADLANDS and a bunch of other movies. She’s so eloquent and a great historian. She’s a hero a little bit. 

Those Kieślowski movies certainly meant an awful lot to me. I always loved those because I am a big fan of Philip K. Dick and when I say Philip K. Dick, I do love BLADE RUNNER and MINORITY REPORT and TOTAL RECALL, but those really are no way representative of what reading one of his books is like. The only movie that really feels like Philip K. Dick is A SCANNER DARKLY, which is really like a word for word adaptation of the book. Some of those metaphysical ideas that were in Philip K. Dick I found in Kieślowski as well and I thought all of that stuff was really interesting. I love Tarkovsky movies, as long and boring as some of my friends might think they are, they blow your mind and make you think of things you hadn’t thought about before. I love things that are imaginative. Like LA JETÉE, I love watching that and it’s inspiration on 12 MONKEYS. 

FS: If the world were about to end what movies on FilmStruck would you recommend everyone stream before we all died? 

JB: I’d put a Kieślowski on there. Certainly THREE COLORS: BLUE. I fucking love Kurosawa’s THRONE OF BLOOD with the arrows and all that. That one is amazing. A Cronenberg. 

FS: We have THE BROOD. 

JB: That is one of the scariest movies ever. Those little kids beating that lady to death. It’s pretty awful. I’d put that up if you really want to barf one night. This will do it for you. I love all those music docs like DONT LOOK BACK. I love Robert Altman. The fucking  THE CONFORMIST for sure. I love love love [Jean-Luc] Godard’s stuff with Anna Karina. I love MASCULIN FÉMININ, even though she’s not in that, I love PIERROT LE FOU. I love all the Kurosawa stuff. THRONE OF BLOOD especially I love. The movie I would recommend the most right now because it’s not on Blu-ray is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 1997 CURE. It’s one of the scariest, best horror movies ever made. I’m so glad it’s on here because I can’t watch it anywhere else. I’m a huge Terry Gilliam fan. TIME BANDITS is one of my favorite movies from back when I was a kid. I love IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, THE GRADUATE. All this stuff. It’s all just such great stuff. 

FS: Have you found anything while you’re browsing FilmStruck that you’d never heard of but just had to watch it? 

JB: I go into the directors and I look through different filmmakers and I look through all of the ones that have introductions. Like, I will go through all of the ones that Guillermo Del Toro did an introduction for. I like when people come and talk about their favorite movies. I go through all the extras, all the additional things that you guys do that are exclusive and add context. When you guys had all those [Mario] Bava movies up, we just let those play. It’s good in the background. You don’t have to pay super close attention, but it’s like those movies look so amazing.

Shot by cinematographer Peter Deming (long-time David Lynch collaborator), and co-written by Knate Lee, director Josh Boone’s latest film THE NEW MUTANTS hits theaters on April 13. 

Making Waves.

“I live in Florida, my cat’s in the movie. It is incredibly personal.” Waves writer and director Trey Edward Shults opens up about his filmmaking process, reveals the movies that made him fall in love with cinema, and gushes about fellow A24 alum Robert Eggers.

Trey Edward Shults doesn’t want to spoil Waves. We don’t want to spoil Waves either. To even begin to describe its unconventional structure would be a spoiler. We’ve said too much already. Just know it’s a sweeping melodrama that solidifies Shults as one of the defining American voices of the decade.

The coming-of-age family drama centers on brother Tyler (Shults regular and breakout star Kelvin Harrison Jr., pictured above) and sister Emily (Taylor Russell), their relationships and struggles with each other, their parents (Sterling K. Brown and Renée Elise Goldsberry), and first loves (Alexa Demie and Lucas Hedges). This is Shults’ third collaboration with A24 after his DIY debut Krisha (set in the same family house as Waves, and similarly playful with its aspect ratio), and the polarizing horror It Came At Night.

While its structure hasn’t worked for everyone, Waves has captured the enthusiasm of many Letterboxd members in a profound way. “This is the coming-of-age movie to end coming-of-age,” writes ActionTomasello. “The less you know of it, the better it is going into this one.” It’s been added to the popular ‘You’re not the same person once the film has finished’ list, and the film’s soundtrack, collected into this Spotify playlist by Letterboxd member Ella, is one of the most-mentioned contributing factors to its success. Writes Nick: “A soundtrack that’s meant for a specific group of people that I’m a part of. It feels too perfect how someone made a film filled with songs from Kanye, Frank Ocean, Radiohead and many others. It feels like one long, sad, fucked-up music video.”

But no Letterboxd review currently beats Jack’s heartfelt letter to Shults: “Your film has moved me to better myself, to love, and to meet my emotions head on. Thank you.” (He also put it in his top five of all time.)

We caught up with Shults to learn how Waves was conceived and executed, and investigate which films have hit him the hardest.

Taylor Russel as Emily in ‘Waves’.

You often draw your films from your personal experiences and you’ve described Waves as autobiographical. Can you go into some detail about which life experiences fed into this film? Trey Edward Shults: Where to start? In broad strokes, I was a wrestler and tore my shoulder in the same way as Tyler. The relationships between Tyler and Alexis and also Emily and Luke are inspired by my girlfriend and [me] in the good moments, bad moments, and everything in between. Their parents are inspired by my parents. I live in Florida, my cat’s in the movie. It is incredibly personal, but I had a huge collaboration with Kelvin, and then as more actors came on it got more collaborative, so it really started from this personal place and grew out of that.

How do you reconcile your relationship to your own suffering with the fact it’s become your livelihood and commodity? It’s very strange. When we recreated events in Missouri I think that was the furthest I’ve ever gone. That shoot was an all-consuming dread and I broke down, it was very hard. I would question: “Is this healthy? Is this right?”, but I came out the other side happy I did it. It was cathartic. My mom and my step-dad are therapists and I would be a total mess without them, though I’m not in therapy right now. Working through these movies is a bit of therapy.

I’m trying to make personal things that I hope connect with other people, especially this movie. Going through life and getting to the other side of it and having perspective informed me a lot. Whether it’s just tonally or pacing-wise, I wanted the film to spiritually feel that way.

The film’s photography is remarkable, especially the first act, when you have your fullest frame. Can you take us inside how you executed some of those spinning 360-degree shots? For the car shots we took out the middle console of the truck and put a slider that went from the backseat to the front. Basically, the dolly grip and I were crammed down hiding behind the car seats and the grip pushed the camera from the back to the front. Drew [Daniels, the director of photography] was in the car behind us with a remote, so he’s operating the spinning and I have a monitor in the back. That way I could talk to the kids in the car and I also had a walkie so I could talk to Drew.

A lot of the dynamic camera stuff was a case-by-case scenario, sometimes it was just running behind our steadicam operator or just hiding and letting them go and play. We wanted the camera to be purely motivated by where our main character’s emotional state of mind was, so it’s all coming from them, but then we also wanted to figure out the technical shit and make it feel to the actors that the camera disappeared and we’re not even there. So it was an interesting balance getting there. It’s a second skin for us and we know exactly what we’re after visually, but let’s disappear and let the kids play and we’ll adapt to them.

Since our name is ‘Letterboxd’, I feel obligated to ask you an aspect-ratio question. Can you share with us how you built this intuition to change at will—did you have films you saw that you feel did this well? That’s a good question, because this one really felt like it was building off what I did with Krisha and pushing it further. I do remember The Grand Budapest Hotel came out right before I started Krisha and it had the three aspect ratios to separate [its] time periods, which was really cool to me. I think I got really excited about using aspect ratio to echo the character’s state of mind. That was the goal with that, especially for Tyler’s trajectory.

The soundtrack is getting some acclaim. Do you have any songs you wanted to fit in but couldn’t find the room, or couldn’t clear the rights for? I realized there were so many songs I wanted in it, but the movie told you what works. If you tried to force it on, it didn’t work. It started with the writing and it worked its way organically. The final soundtrack is pretty close to what was in the script though I think a few changed along the way. We got incredibly lucky that we got everything we wanted. I don’t know how we did it. It was a long process and our last song didn’t even clear until after Telluride and Toronto.

Trey Edward Shults and Sterling K. Brown on the set of ‘Waves’. / Photo: Monica Lek

There are shades of Chungking Express, Magnolia and Moonlight in the film’s DNA. What were some other films you watched or recommended to your cast and crew as preparation? Funny thing is we didn’t do a lot of movie-watching for preparation. Drew and I lived in the same house so we’d always have a movie on. We were watching The Story of Film a lot—the giant anthology series and study of the history of cinema, incredible. What we watched would totally range, it could be things like Ordinary People and Raging Bull, to The Tree of Life and I Am Cuba, to Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love. We would take inspiration from anything, even a film like Yi Yi. It’s a completely different cinematic approach.

Yi Yi might just be the best film about family, so it’s a good start (Lulu Wang also mentioned it in our recent chat with her about The Farewell). That’s the thing exactly: even though Waves is made in such a different way, I think spiritually they’re sprawling tales of family. That’s one of my favorite movies. For the cast, we didn’t actually talk about movies that much. It was more about Florida, music and the character dynamics and all that good stuff.

Which movie scene makes you cry the hardest? One that just popped in my head is Dancer in the Dark. When Björk escapes in her head doing these musical numbers and it leads to the end, to the most devastating thing possible, it broke me. That movie’s rough, man. That’s not one I could watch and have good cries or something. I can’t rewatch it because it’s utterly traumatizing. I was probably crying for hours after it, I felt dead.

Which film makes you laugh the hardest? The most recent film that made me laugh the hardest is What We Do in the Shadows. I saw it for the first time on an airplane sitting next to a stranger and I think they thought something was wrong with me. Then I got home to Florida and showed it to my girlfriend, and her brother came home and we watched it again. It never got old.

Who was the most relatable coming-of-age film character for you? It’s hard because when I was a teen I was obsessed with sports and then it was music. I’m trying to think who I related to the most. Man, I don’t know. Nothing is coming to mind. Shocking.

What film do you wish you made? I’ll go with There Will Be Blood. It’s the first film that popped in my head.

What mind-fuck movies changed you for life and why? There were three that I saw pretty close together at a young age: Boogie Nights, A Clockwork Orange and Raging Bull. I had a digital cable box in my room, so I would sneak and watch a lot of things that my parents didn’t know I was watching. They just rocked my world. Until that point it was all Aliens and Terminator and every big action movie, so then when I saw those films it was like “this is what movies can be! What the hell is this?”.

I remember with Raging Bull I didn’t actually enjoy it. I was like, “This isn’t Rocky but I can’t stop watching.” It’s like a trainwreck and I’m fascinated but I don’t know if I like it, then I was obsessed with it and it’s one of my favorite movies now. Boogie Nights and A Clockwork Orange felt like a bigger vision was at work. It wasn’t just something made out in the ether, it was a specific singular vision and I cannot stop looking at it.

Sterling K. Brown in ‘Waves’.

What’s the most overlooked movie from A24? Shoot, I wish I could look at the catalogue right now. I’m just gonna go with The Spectacular Now because I just watched it again on the airplane and I thought it was really beautiful. It’s a good one, man.

Lastly, it’s time for best-of-decade lists. What’s the greatest film of the 2010s? When we interviewed Robert Eggers, Waves was his first choice. Shut up, come on! Oh my god, Rob’s the best. I will say that The Lighthouse is my favorite film of the year, without a doubt. I’m obsessed with it. I could gush about him for hours. He’s not just one of the greatest young filmmakers, he’s one of the great filmmakers working now. Honestly though, for my decade number one I gotta go with The Tree of Life. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time so I would put that at number one, and then The Lighthouse is close to it.

‘Waves’ is distributed by A24 and is playing in select US cinemas now. Photos courtesy A24.