Watched on Friday January 17, 2025.

Why do bad things happen? If we were able to somehow peel back the surface of reality and see the inner workings of bad things, the clandestine cosmic meetings where bad things were decided upon, they would drive us mad, like the long-lost Philip Jeffries. So we turn to fiction, to detective stories, and ask “whodunnit?”, as if the answer could satisfy us. But a detective can never tell us what a victim can. Despite everything, Laura Palmer knew herself in her final moments, and that’s all any of us can really hope for. She can’t tell us why bad things happen, neither could David Lynch. But they can help all of us weather them, and for that I am forever grateful. RIP.

Like Saltburn but funnier and cleverer and actually erotic. All this cynicism wouldn’t work nearly as well if it wasn’t undercut with the film’s delicate poignancy - the bitter irony of hateful vengeance being meted out on behalf of a woman whose only crime was marrying for love.

Some pretty cool stuff and a couple of laffs but it drags more than any 80 minute cartoon really should. Definitely iffy in its politics, particularly the ending - left me with a sour taste! Ralph’s better on the mean streets of NYC than he is with goblins and boblins I think.

Watched on Tuesday January 14, 2025.

More showing off from Babs 🙄

You cannot stop gay!

Watched on Monday January 13, 2025.

Watched on Saturday January 11, 2025.

Watched on Friday January 10, 2025.

Watched on Thursday January 9, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday January 8, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday January 7, 2025.

Vivid, absorbing, and totally devastating. A thoughtful treatise on gender, class, love, sex, and money that doesn’t sacrifice melodrama for verisimilitude - Haynes knows the two needn’t be mutually exclusive. Up there with Fassbinder’s television work. Should be more seen and talked about!

Like a student film made by very promising students - brimming with ideas and fizzing with youthful exuberance. Liked that the men were bastards, felt very French New Wave!

Watched on Sunday January 5, 2025.

Elizabeth Hurley is really, really good in this. Christabel is not a fixed point or a type - her circumstances constantly shape and re-shape her. Hurley makes these shifts legible while also remaining compellingly remote. This is a level of acting virtuosity that, on the basis of Austin Powers, I had assumed she was incapable of. Seems to be a shockingly underrated work in the Dennis Potter canon, seek it out!!

Confusing!

Cute, but it’s no Wet Hot American Summer. Took me a while to get over my anti-jock bias (and I still think there would have been a lot more homophobia/sexual pestering irl) but these handsome boys did make me laugh. Hands down the best weed smoking set piece I’ve ever seen - easily the highlight of the film, but maybe that’s because it’s the only part of this hangout movie I’d like to hangout in.

What McQueen has done here feels genuinely subversive. He’s taken the form and trappings of soggy, flag-waving, stiff-upper-lip Oscar Bait (Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, 1917), and laced it with Good Politics™️. He’s managed to pull off the Douglas Sirk trick in 2024, which also means he’s also made a compelling work of populist entertainment in its own right. Its many heartstring-pulling moments are effective, but it’s never far from striking a more ambivalent note. It even has a devastating unhappy-happy ending, one which totally denies us the customary sense of hard won victory and ultimately confirms Blitz’s much too uncommon sense of moral seriousness.

Leave it to Hollyweird to make a movie that’s ostensibly about a really sexy lady but is actually about being gay and sucking dick and cock 🙄

Watched on Sunday October 13, 2024.

Watched on Sunday October 13, 2024.

Watched on Sunday October 13, 2024.

Watched on Sunday October 13, 2024.

Watched on Saturday October 12, 2024.

Watched on Saturday October 12, 2024.

Watched on Saturday October 12, 2024.

Watched on Saturday October 12, 2024.

“I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as... animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us.”

I found this a lot more personally resonant than I had previously, but this line from Father Merrin really shook me to my core. I’ve had pretty serious mental health problems since my teens and his characterisation of the demon really encapsulates every nasty, nagging, destructive voice I’ve ever had in my head. I’ve never been more grateful for the film’s happy(ish) ending.

Frequently hilarious. Sometimes boring. Always silly. The mini bow and arrow reveal is the hardest I’ve laughed at a movie in ages - it was giving Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories.

It had never occurred to me before but the prom sequence is totally one of De Palma’s many re-stagings of the JFK assassination - a conspiracy only visible from certain vantage points culminating in a sudden, violent disruption of all-American pageantry. Had this pegged as a “one for them”, and maybe it was to some extent, but you can’t phone in this kind of power and impact. Maybe his best!

Watched on Wednesday October 2, 2024.

Sounds corny but I genuinely see more and more each viewing. It just gets better, richer, deeper. Persuasively argues that being a hopeless romantic and being an embittered, vengeful psychopath are two sides of the same coin. I think that’s true, I think we see can see that everywhere. But to watch this movie is to feel yourself dragged, kicking and screaming, from one end of that continuum to the other. There’s not one step on the journey that you’re not present for and made to be complicit in. That’s what makes it so bone-chilling.

Watched on Sunday September 29, 2024.

• Velvet Goldmine
• Phantom of the Paradise
• Flame
• Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show
• Marc Bolan & T. Rex - Born to Boogie
• Lisztomania
• Tommy

• The Girl with the Hat Box
• Harbour Drift
• Angel Face
• Body Double
• D.O.A.
• Magnificent Obsession
• Bye Bye Birdie
• To Live and Die in L.A.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street
• Braindead

...plus 19 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Linda/Les and Annie
• Glen or Glenda
• I Don't Know
• Gender Troublemakers
• Trans
• I Am My Own Woman
• Let Me Die a Woman

• Lifeforce
• The Lair of the White Worm
• Halloween III: Season of the Witch

• The Beast
• The Sweet East
• La Chimera
• Challengers
• MaXXXine
• Love Lies Bleeding
• I Saw the TV Glow
• Dune: Part Two
• The Iron Claw
• Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Hallelujah, I'm a Bum
• Little Shop of Horrors
• Original Cast Album: Company
• Cabaret
• Love Me Tonight
• Gold Diggers of 1933
• The Wizard of Oz
• Singin' in the Rain
• One Hour with You
• The Muppet Movie

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Velvet Goldmine
• Holiday
• Penda's Fen
• Blue
• The Singing Detective
• Moolaadé
• Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day
• Queen Christina
• Vagabond
• The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Easy Rider
• Funeral Parade of Roses
• Vivre Sa Vie
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
• The Patsy
• Women in Love
• Le Bonheur
• The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
• Rosemary's Baby
• La Dolce Vita

• Love Me Tonight
• City Streets
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• The Covered Wagon
• A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate
• The Marriage Circle
• Crossroads
• Applause
• One Way age
• Dragnet Girl

...plus 47 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Gummo
• Wayne's World
• Wild at Heart
• Heavy Metal Parking Lot
• Opera
• The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years
• Phenomena
• Conan the Barbarian
• American Movie
• Mandy

...plus 9 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.