Contains spoilers up to and including the very end

Real talk, definitely thought this took place in space. Turns out it doesn’t! Also, definitely did not expect it to be so homoerotic. Turns out it is! Gattaca! What won’t it surprise me with!

The first thing to address though, is that this is a movie where I think there are two total non-white characters who have maybe 10-60 seconds of dialogue each? And it is a movie about eugenics. It’s just odd. The movie is aware of this, they have the black doctor really deliver a line about how Ethan Hawke’s parents’ second son will have “fair skin”, and later Vincent will comment that the new form of discrimination is all gene-based and not about things like skin color anymore. But if that were really the case, all the named characters should not be white! Just, diversify your casting, my friends, it’s SO easy to fix!

They didn’t do that, but they did make a movie that I really enjoyed. The world-building is fun, extensive but not over-bearing on the narrative. It’s rather manufactured how frequently Vincent is at risk of being found out as an “In-valid”, someone born without gene optimization, but you can’t fault the effectiveness of the stakes! So many scenes of high stakes! Good tension, and varied—all the biological tests sure, but also those STAIRS. And as a former corrective lens-wearer who got my own (surgically) optimized eyes just this past spring, the scene of Vincent trying to cross a busy street at night after surreptitiously ditching his tell-tale contacts was very personally anxiety-inducing. I have had nightmares like that.

While Gattaca does not actually take place in space, going there is the primary motivating force of Vincent’s whole life, driving him to his most extreme actions to prove that he is capable of it, and as such, kinda would have expected space to be more present in the narrative, must say. Even just more imagery of the stars, that would have been enough. I had a much stronger visual and emotional sense of how the ocean figures in his mental landscape, the repeated image of swimming through the waves away from shore. Which was great, I liked the way that was done, and just would have appreciated that attention paid to representing inter-planetary travel as well, as that dream is to have an equally powerful influence on who Vincent is.

But while they didn’t give me that, Gattaca IS very gay, which was a whole new element outside of what I anticipated that I graciously accepted. The movie holds back Jude Law’s entrance for long enough that I was beginning to wonder how he was going to fit into the picture, and the answer was as Jerome, a definitely queer, I’d-call-him-alcoholic-if-he-hadn’t-been-augmented-to-avoid-such-things Brit, whose superior genetic material apparently did not make him happy, as he soberly stepped in front of a speeding car and wound up paralyzed in a wheelchair instead of his preferred ending. Due to their passingly similar appearance, he gets matched up with Vincent by a black market Yenta (Tony Shalhoub, incredibly) for a highly illegal sci-fi scam, in which Vincent can pretend to be Jerome for career advancement, palming (semi-literally) Jerome’s fingerprints and blood and hair and urine to pass off as his own during this society’s apparently near-constant genetic spot checks, and Jerome can live off a portion of “Jerome”’s subsequent high income. So here’s your classic, Persona-esque blended identity element built right in to the plot, which can so easily pass into a fission of queer erotic tension.

But I wasn’t expecting that to really come to the fore at all, until out at a celebratory dinner one night, Jerome downed an entire glass of wine in one go while looking at Vincent through the glass, asked what Saturn’s moon Titan “is like this time of year,” and Vincent laughed lowly and said “Exactly like this” and leaned down to slowly blow cigarette smoke into the bowl of his own wine glass. “Holy fuck,” I said. Jerome stares, and then Vincent drinks the wine, with the smoke still spilling out, and wow, wow. Wow.

Vincent, apparently a tease, then spends the rest of the film pursuing Uma Thurman (understandable, she is like a beautiful sad 7 foot gazelle), leaving the remainder of the queer coding to Jude Law, who manages very well on his own, thank you. The kiss he steals from Irene during their improvisational ruse? That had everything to do with the fact of her dating Vincent, a transference, he kisses you and now I kiss you. I wasn’t surprised the movie doesn’t actually do anything textually undeniable with all this, as I didn’t find this in the Queer Cinema section, but fuck, Jerome genuinely sends Vincent off to the stars with a lock of his hair tucked into a fold of paper. “God that is Romantic,” I breathed, in awe. Jerome…you are Valid.

★★★★

Well this movie sure is not good, but it does have this sort of gonzo innocence that someway endears me to it. Mostly conceptually. Actually watching it was….well kinda evened out to a neutral experience in the end, because whenever I’d hit another point in all the goopy smashing and crashing where I’d wonder how I could still be watching this, I’d remember watching Jenny Slate and Riz Ahmed standing in a laboratory just saying absolute nonsense to each other, which while not necessarily riveting, was so……weird…that I couldn’t not stick around.

This cast is bonkers. I don’t know if that’s part of it or some other factor, but I mean, Michelle Williams is in this movie. I laughed three times and one of them was just at her delivery of a line. God this movie makes no goddamn sense. Doylist or Watsonian. Within world, I have no idea why suddenly the symbiotes could bond with whomever no problem when before it was a big disaster. Outwith world, I have no idea why anyone in this cast agreed to this script.

Anyway, when I said gonzo innocence, what I mean is that there were clearly no stakes to the success of this film, and it was refreshing to watch a superhero movie that just doesn’t matter. Even less than the X-Men! No one cares about Venom, this is technically a Marvel property but they put no other characters in this, it’s just out here on its own, footloose and franchise-free, and that seemingly let them do whatever oddball thing they wanted without overthinking it. Is it, as a result, under-thought? Oh sure! Again, it’s really not good! But it also doesn’t have that tiring MCU feeling of a movie that’s constantly conscious of its position within an existing mythos. There is no sense of self-importance here. None. Nor self-awareness either, this is not another Thor: Ragnarok. This is just a dumbass comics-based action flick where at one point Tom Hardy crawls into a restaurant lobster tank, chills for a moment like a capybara in a pool, then scoops up a crustacean and just chomps it.

Overall though, and I really am sorry to say it, I just did not find Venom near as funny or as kinky as I’d been expecting. Honestly, found it surprisingly dull. But I do absolutely see where that happy rowdiness came about in the ensuing fanbase. That hungry monster does love that sweet trash man, as he directly roared inside his ear.

★★

Spoilers probably

I was into this. I don’t know I just love movies from the 70s, man! That was an aesthetically terrible decade for clothing, interiors, design in general, but for cinema? Banging. They have these scene transitions that jar me sometimes and yet, as a piece, they just work. MOVIES.

Mostly though I did spend this whole thing fixated on the score and how I could somehow already know it. Wikipedia is telling me that the part I knew was heavily referencing the ‘Aquarium’ movement from Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals suite. Wikipedia is not telling me that Alan Menken’s ‘Prologue’ in his Beauty & the Beast score is also referencing this, and that if A = B, and  B = C, then the Days of Heaven theme is the Beauty & the Beast theme, but it is, isn’t it? I’ve had too much mezcal (smokey appropriateness!) but, isn’t it?? I mean not as much as how the ‘My Tamako’ theme from The Handmaiden is the Downton Abbey theme (ENTIRELY), but it is so so similar! The music was so beautiful! God! And the cinnamontography of those wheat fields? Fuck me up.

Though—Richard Gere feels fundamentally out of place in the 1910s, I never fully accepted it. His hair is so fluffy, his face so….post-1950s. Richard Gere you look askew. What is that anyway? Where people’s faces just don’t align with certain times? Incongruous. Richard Gere in this looks like a Tibetan fox dropped into the Panhandle. Like I see what they were going for, but wrong grassland environ for you, bud.

But I like a tone poem very much. I also like a movie that gets surprisingly well on the way to polyamory. I mean it was…the Seventies. But when one party hasn’t agreed to this, then that is just an affair. A like, reverse affair? Hey it was interesting! So was the use of narration. I liked the little sister’s odd film noir VO (film sepia?) so much, but it also made me grieve for her lack of education. Imagine what she could do with her word choice instincts if she had more words to choose from.

Anyway, this is one hour and a half and every scene is good to look at. It’s a movie you can just feel and not really have to think about. Sometimes I wonder why people consider action movies the mindless ones, when impressionist movies like this deliberately invite you to just slip into neutral and drift along with it for a spell.

★★★★½

Deep (deep) into The Great Beauty, deeper than possible in most, as this is just an extraordinarily long movie, a character stands on a stage and says that it’s the end of August, and it feels like September may never come. And I sat there watching this on September 1st like god damn, I’ve done it again. Near calendar-perfect, you are welcome @ myself.

Maybe on some level I had sensed the last weekend of August was the time for The Great Beauty (“La grande bellezza“), because I knew it opens with a man in fancy Rome celebrating his 65th birthday, and the rest is an impressionistic sort of mosaic of him going about his life considering the idea of his own and also the concept in general. And what better time than the slowly drawn end of summer for that, the waning gold light and drowsy melancholy of a warmth that is due to turn, that should turn. Perhaps we’ve been too long in the sun. It’s still warm and butter yellow now, but the shadows at dusk are going blue. As Jep’s face at the end, intermittently, gently lit by the sweep of the lighthouse lamp, doused in the blue of the night.

But if you’d asked me, the reason I was watching The Great Beauty now, about five years since my roommate in New York had told me about it, was because the trailer for The New Pope dropped this week, and I was hopped up on Paolo Sorrentino again. I love the way he and his cinematographer he always works with set up shots, this living tableau quality that gets me every time. I love the way he deploys songs, the music direction always just killer, integral to the art of the work, in way where I mean it as a compliment when I say that Sorrentino basically makes very long very good music videos. The Great Beauty shares far more in common with something like Thom Yorke & Paul Thomas Anderson’s Anima than it does most feature length releases. It’s not that Sorrentino can’t plot—The Young Pope speaks to just how very much he can, so much story in so few episodes and somehow never feeling rushed. Plot and action just wasn’t the focus in The Great Beauty, he was building a movie out of other things. Visuals and sound and contemplation.

It is too long, not because of the length itself, but because the Saint storyline that meanders through the last half hour feels too much like a new thread, and over an hour and forty-five minutes in is too late to introduce another chapter. At that point you begin to wonder if you’re in a rare sexagenarian picaresque, a thousand-page Candide unspooling over hours, which is fine if you just know that’s what you’re getting yourself into. As is, either it should have been even longer and a miniseries, or stay a movie and just trim off that last stepping stone, keeping this at maybe an hour fifty? That seems fine for its pace and purpose. Do keep the interlude with the artist with the pictures of himself every day from childhood to now, because it unexpectedly moved me to sudden, overcome tears. I wept and wept. Art, man! All the things of Great Beauty.

★★★★

Contains spoilers

CHARMING. Precious! Of course I cried. This is one of those movies I’d always meant to see, I just kept missing Day of the Deads. But I ended up watching it with a friend last weekend, and found, of course, that Coco is for any time. Coco is for your heart. 

It looks unmistakably like Pixar, with the same hyper-cute style of smooth, huge-eyed faces and noodle limbs they’ve been working in since the first Toy Story movie—somehow still even rendered here in skeleton form. But the rest of the art direction on this one has the most distinct visual atmosphere I’ve seen from the studio since Brave. Pixar movies are always vividly colored, but this one actually glows, lit by deep orange drifts of magical marigold petals set against a velvety blue-black night. Is it always night in the Land of the Dead? I would believe it instantly if you told me, that whole world seemed so calibrated for the rich shadows & warmth palette of a night market. 

And it makes sense, of course, that Coco would have deeper blacks, as this is a story about death. Death cast in a familial, unscary, even comforting way, but still dark! Still macabre! I mean this cute little kid is slowly turning to bones right in front of us. And that is a plus, I love this. Kids like weird dark goth shit and so do I. It’s not like it’s not still sweet as hell, it’s both and that’s why it’s so lovable.

Also, to talk of lovable: Gael García Bernal. Gael García Bernal! Gael García Bernal as an airy limbed, clattering, trickster skeleton scamp with a third act reveal as our tenderly romantic heartbreak hero—a cinematic gift I had not even thought to ask for! 

So thank you for that, and thank you for that big chonky majestic flying jaguar who would blow magical fog out of his nose, and that the two aesthetic reference points for the Land of the Dead were wrought iron/The Crystal Palace and LA-ish art deco, and for the mariachi who looked like Mexican Paul F. Tompkins, and the fierce great-great-grandmother’s time-stoppingly beautiful singing voice. She doesn’t actually stop time in the movie, that’s just how I felt about it.

In short, very glad I finally watched this one, even in August.

★★★★

“She has the It factor,” my friend said of Awkwafina as we left the theater. She’s charismatic and attractive, attractive not simply in her looks but in the sense of attracting attention, being someone you want to watch when she’s on screen. It’s particularly this last that we were trying to pinpoint—this presence Awkwafina has where she feels like a person you want to get to get to know, that you could get to know. The praise of a performance being “real” is probably overextended these days, and kinda means anything from non-stylized to just “playing a character who is messy,” both of which applies to Awkwafina’s performance as Billi. But this thing that isn’t quite contained by “real” is also there in her outsized comedy performance in the glom-com (glam rom-com) Crazy Rich Asians, and her dry turn in the chill heist caper Ocean’s 8, neither being movies that trafficked much in “realism.” It took The Farewell for both of us to get a better sense of whatever innate quality she has, that extra element that can’t quite be taught, and can be so hard to describe. Resonance? Openness? Just likability? Whatever It is, that girl’s got it.

And without Awkwafina’s approachable, graceful handling of Billi, this movie might not have so successfully rendered its tone, which has had me wracking my brain to come up with something better than tragicomedy. There is humor here, jokes and gentle absurdism and the laughter that comes from trying to break tension. But it’s mostly a drama, a meditation on honesty and loss. I keep thinking “This is a movie for adults”, but I’m not quite sure what I mean by that. Certainly not the content—it’s rated PG. But while The Farewell tells a simple story, simple to describe and simple to follow, its treatment is never simplistic. It has nuance. It doesn’t lay out answers for you. It is respectful to its audience, with faith that they’ll meet it at its level. On that last note, this movie offers strong support for the theory of art that it’s actually the works with greater specificity of experience that most affect the widest array of people. This is the story of a Chinese & Chinese American family, and it is rooted in their world, a world quite different from that known by non-Chinese Americans like myself. The majority of the movie takes places in China, and in Mandarin, and proves once again that families are families are families, no matter our language or food or attitudes on end-of-life care.

The friend I saw this with is actually a doctor himself, family practice, and has been in situations where patients have told him that they don’t want to know their diagnosis, that he should tell their family members only, who will make the decisions. But a medical practitioner keeping a diagnosis from a patient without their instruction to do so, to openly lie and tell Nai Nai that her cough is leftover from a case of pneumonia and not the stage four lung cancer she truly has, never would that be allowed here!! You’d be put on immediate suspension and review and almost certainly lose your license. “In American it would be illegal. How do you say ‘illegal’?” Billi asks her dad in the waiting room, and he provides the Chinese word to the rest of the family. 

This conflict is the crux of the movie, a family with mixed cultural backgrounds confronting their different ideas on what is the right thing to do for their grandmother. It comes up just in the language barrier sometimes—Billi’s Mandarin isn’t that good, as she well knows, having left for America with her parents when she was only a few years old. But her occasional difficulties are nothing compared to those of the delightfully lost Aiko, Billi’s cousin’s Japanese girlfriend of just three months, who has gamely agreed to get faux married to him as an excuse to bring his family together to secretly say goodbye to their matriarch, and who does not speak a lick of Chinese. While Awkwafina is busy being our protagonist, it’s this awkwardly shuffled along couple who take on the comedy roles. God, their halting karaoke duet at the reception….this time I was crying with *laughter*.

Because gosh, folks, I sure cried! I have lost all my grandmothers at this point, and so much of this hit so close to my heart. And I was also brought to tears by the lovely arc the rest of this family goes through over the course of this 98 minute film. That beautiful shot of them all walking together in slow motion toward the camera, having just successfully scrambled to keep hiding Nai Nai’s diagnosis from her once again, where suddenly you can see this ragtag group of different people bound together as a team, and that this coordination is an act of love, that this act is an act of love, while still something to be very, very, very conflicted over!

Another thing I’m trying to do more in my reviews is be more critical. But honestly, don’t have much to pick over in a film as fine as this. There were a handful of striking shots that I certainly would take more of—the family hurrying along a tree-lined road with their umbrellas shot with a ton of headroom, when they wove through the gravestones after paying respects to their long-passed grandfather, Billi watching her father’s cigarette smoke swirling past her hotel window from the room next door…

Really, this is a wonderful movie. It exists to tell one family’s story (filmmaker Lulu Wang’s own) with grace and feeling. Its goals are simply that, and it feels like a quiet, replenishing breath in between the all big event pictures, franchise spectacles and Oscar tentpoles alike. There’s a place for those too—soon on this very blog!—but right now let’s all just take a breath with The Farewell.

★★★★

Andrew Garfield plays a paranoid trashbag hipster Redditor Philip Marlowe trying to solve a surreal Lynchian Lite shaggy dog mystery in a neo noir LA populated primarily by beautiful aspiring starlets and a handful of the kinds of men who could all be played by bearded Topher Grace (instead of just the one), and I just don’t know where I come down on this one! It’s a mix for me, my friends. And it’s not even as simple as “I liked these parts, I didn’t like these parts”, because there are fundamental elements to this movie’s, I don’t know, thesis? ethos? irony? that I feel like I flip on continuously, like closing one eye and then the other and watching something in your field of vision jump back and forth. One minute I really like that this is a movie about social & artistic conspiracy theories that’s deliberately stuffed with clues and patterns and easter eggs for the real life Sams to rabbit-hole through for weeks, and then the next minute I’ve cooled on that, dismissing it as too self-amused and recursive by half. Then I wonder if maybe that’s the point, a sort of indictment of the fanboy culture of trying to “solve” a movie, and we’re supposed to come out the other side of these 2.3 hours tired, having learned….something, about art & meaning. 

On that metric I am more clear though: I do not think that worked. That being maybe the whole last third. I don’t think this movie could sustain trying to be Thoughtful for that long. Honestly, I think it wasn’t that deep, or even quite as weird as it thought it was, though maybe it could have been. One of them at least.

At the end of the day, I actually feel the real value in mixed movies like Under the Silver Lake are in what weirdo pictures they’ll inspire other people to make. Because you can watch this movie and just really mine material, because there is a lot in the frame and those frames are damn well put together—and not just the ones scrupulously recreating shots from other movies. It is just funny enough, just startling enough, and just off-putting enough to get your mind jumping a bit, and even if you’re jumping to what you would have made instead, well maybe that means more art will get out there in the world someday. Art that won’t be ghostwritten by the Songwriter.

So, spoiler line here….

…..what Emily and I would have done with our own Under the Silver Lake was super clear to both of us. For Emily, she would have carried through with Sam getting evicted and then show that this was all leading to him becoming the new Homeless King, that the role is Dread Pirate Roberts’ed onto each successive person who figures out the mystery. A resonant and satisfying ending from a real life playwright, that’s skill baby! And for me, I found the billionaires plot nearly more toothless than sexist, but both enough that I probably would have just ditched most of it to stay closer to the Dog Killer and the eyebrows man with the zine. No matter what though Sam would 100% die at my end, killed by The Owl’s Kiss of course. He’d only encounter her in person at the very end, in a scene where almost every strange character he’s come across throughout the movie seems to have appeared, converged more like, like all the curlicue mysteries are collapsing on themselves into a single point, and it culminates with him being murdered by an Old Hollywood cryptid of a naked woman wearing a taxidermy owl mask, never able to share with anyone that she exists. Now that’s my kind of ironic.

★★½

Toy Story 4 is this summer’s equal but opposite movie to Dark Phoenix, it too arriving seemingly unannounced and unasked for, a belated fourth installment of what we kinda thought was a trilogy, but with the difference being that Toy Story 4 absolutely makes a case for its existence, and is good. Like most Pixar features, it is ostensibly a kids movie, but a pretty convincing argument could be made that it was crafted in some part for the people who were kids back when the first Toy Story came out in 1995. For an audience now aged about 28-36, prime age for having kids themselves, there is something very comforting about watching a movie populated with the warm characters you grew up with, modeling the pains and joys of parenting as they always have, but this time also presenting a life path that doesn’t involve having a kid of your own, and assuring you that that is fine. That life too can be a beautiful and rewarding adventure, a choice as valid as any.

And this is also a movie in which Tony Hale voices a plastic spork gripped in existential terror at being brought suddenly and unbidden to life, and spends all of act one trying to fling himself into garbage bins, warbling “Traaaash!”, which is certainly, as the now-30-year-old kids say, a whole ass mood.

I expect Pixar movies, particularly their consistently very strong Toy Story franchise, to be beautifully animated, and this one sure is. That opening scene in the rain storm? Get right out of here! All the gorgeous lighting gilding their sweet plastic faces, the little details of wear & tear on the toys (Buzz’s peeling sticker!), the hyper-real mat of dust on that outlet strip nestled in an uncleaned nook of an antique shop—it’s just beautiful, a beautiful looking movie. And I expect Toy Story movies to be genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, and this one soundly hits that mark as well. I mean Toy Story 4 features beloved Man Of the Moment Keanu Reeves voicing a showboating Canadian stuntman toy named Duke Caboom who harbors a heart still broken from being jilted by the cold Quebecois boy he was once gifted to. “Réjean!” Keanu Reeves cries out in manful mourning, killing me. And that’s before we even get to Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key as a quick-talking double act pair of anarchist plushies who are just, *so* good at brainstorming. I also expect zip and creativity, and Toy Story 4 has that too, with a never dull, 100-minute plot, stakes not too big not too small, and sparkling swings like developing Lost Toy Bo Peep into a clever, swashbuckling porcelain Furiosa, complete with her own trick arm, careening through a charming rest stop town in a scrappy, bizarre, high octane little vehicle that looks like a skunk.

But what I did not expect from Pixar’s Toy Story films, was Forky. I did not expect this universe to ever address the inherent darkness of its premise: that these are sentient beings who are “owned” by children, to whom they offer perfect slavish devotion, bordering on worship. And I SUPER did not expect them to just carry this forward to a logical but bananas conclusion, which is that children in the Toy Story world are functionally gods, whose attention and love can literally endow trash with life, of which these tiny deities know not of, leaving their creations to fend for themselves in matters of theology and existence. Come again, Toy Story??? Amazing. Forky may be a literal spork, but he is a wrench thrown in the workings of this universe, breaking it open into something much more philosophically fascinating, and this weirdo existential direction is one I am happy to take in the toy movies. To infinity and fucking beyond.

★★★

If you take the concept “surreal black fable about gentrification in the Bay Area,” then go as far away from Sorry to Bother You as you can get on foot in an afternoon, always keeping If Beale Street Could Talk in your line of sight, you might land in the neighborhood of The Last Black Man in San Francisco. I liked this movie quite a bit. It was strange in ways I enjoyed, and strange in others that felt more like the growing pangs of a directorial debut. The first was in some of the details, and the second in the story structure, which I would have pushed them on. The pacing gets too airy in the back half, the focus widening in a way that was intended to bring more into the frame but I felt just made everything a bit fuzzier, and would have made a case that they stay more narrowly focused in favor of stronger clarity. Just stay tight on that house, it’s such an anchor; the set and the stakes and framing all wrapped up in one big old Victorian in the Mission.

But god, is this ever a visually gorgeous film. The opening sequence of Jimmy and Montgomery traveling through the city is breathtaking—luminous light, this grand yet frayed-edged horn score, that one slow motion effect where it’s like you’re moving around someone in a tableau (I looove thaaaat). Honestly, if they’d kept up the sheer glowing artistry of the first 10 or so minutes throughout the whole piece, that might not have even been a good thing! I might have passed out.

The cinematography does maintain a baseline of high beauty throughout though, with a loving Portrait mode focus length, and colors that made the whole city look the way summer days look when I’m wearing my nice polarized sunglasses. And this is good—it is a movie about beauty in many ways. About the longing for a beautiful, physical thing, something whose beauty you can maintain with your own two hands and thus share in it. I think the style was in harmony with the substance there. And not just because I sure did like resting my eyes on the warm color scheme of the two leads’ costumes, which they wear day in day out, like picture book characters.

So yes, The Last Black Man in San Francisco does have some flaws, but it looks good, and it feels good, too. Some of the messaging may have a clumsy delivery, but it’s still sincerely intended and moving, with enough wry humor to give texture to this elegiac love letter to a city passing away, and those it leaves as survivors. It also has a truly fantastic trailer, like this is the kind of trailer that can make you believe in Movies, full stop.

★★★★

I’m writing this at my table while a summer thunderstorm rolls in over the evening and shakes the trees outside my window, because when ELSE am I going to write about The Love Witch, the astonishingly period-perfect 1960s B-movie pulp pastiche in which, essentially, Lana Del Rey is a psychotic lovesick California witch who, [sighs prettily], just wants a man but they just keep dying on her.

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like Anna Biller’s The Love Witch. The thoroughness with which it renders the brightly colored costumes and sculptural 35mm cinematography and terrible, terrible clunky acting of its cheesy occult horror reference points is positively fetishistic. This movie never winks, never even blinks, it is so committed to the bit that it becomes almost narcotic to watch. “What,” I silently mouthed at every set, every line delivery, every pigment of Samantha Robinson’s makeup. This whole thing is so camp you could stick a spoon in it and it wouldn’t fall over, and no I don’t know what I mean by that! That’s what this movie brings me to!

I think the part most lodged in my mind is when Elaine and her latest lover stumble into some sort of Renaissance Fair Sleep No More under the California sunshine that looks like absolutely nothing so much as a Rider-Waite tarot deck brought to life in cheap satin. Like, just incredible, insane aesthetic dedication. I do not think this movie should be two hours long, and I’m sure the bizarre throwback style of it will turn off quite a number of people, at times nearly me, but man, this thing is such an object. I kinda treasure that this was made. Keep making movies, Anna Biller, you are fearless.

★★