April

Los Angeles Plays Itself [rewatch]
During the Q&A, Andersen mentioned a certain dissatisfaction with the original form of Los Angeles Plays Itself in 2003—in comparison to the decade-later remastering that replaced many clips with HD counterparts—feeling that it didn’t quite correspond to his desire to make a “real movie.” This statement felt consonant with something which I had only truly grasped when watching the film for the first time theatrically: there’s actually less constant narration than I remembered, with a good deal of the film clips playing out unabated. The film’s (simplified) aim is to critique and challenge the Hollywood machine and its pillaging of a beautiful, weird city, and the magpie-like assortment of sources holds up a mirror to the flaws. But Andersen has at the very least some affection and admiration for spectacle, and showing all these clips in full yet shorn of context, especially in a space where they would have been originally seen, magnifies all aspects: the crassness and inaccuracy, but also the attention to behavior and action, the immaculate craft (or lack thereof), the underlying politics. Additionally, by placing this range of works alongside each other (even/especially The French Connection, The Rookie, and a few Hitchcock films as a direct contrast) and the shock of Stratman’s grainy, pointedly unglamorous location footage, the viewer’s ability to distinguish between highbrow and lowbrow, artistic and commercial is largely subsumed into something almost hypnotic. Andersen uses the spectacle as both Trojan Horse and an end unto itself, just one of countless, brilliant contradictions laced throughout.

Leviathan [rewatch]
It’s easy to construe Leviathan as a case of man against nature, but there’s a certain irony in how (considering their centrality in most of the film’s publicity material) the seagulls aren’t generally considered largely separate from the marine life. In effect, they form a third part of the food triangle in the film, swarming the bloody mess strewn from the hulking fishing vessels, a quasi-parasitic relationship that skirts the line between natural and unnatural more fitfully than the most common interactions (man and fish). If the film’s interest can be broadly said to be work and its detritus, the latter part of the equation is both exterior and interior: the carnage of dead and dying sea creatures is juxtaposed with dirtied and weathered human bodies. In both the film’s most mordant and telling gesture, the workers can’t even escape the fishing life even in what little downtime they have, watching Deadliest Catch while slowly drifting to sleep. Is it because they seek identification, to see even dire circumstances? What Castaing-Taylor and Paravel provide is something else, something more awful and wondrous entirely.

June

Turning Red
A critically acclaimed 2022 film about a strained Chinese-North American mother-daughter relationship which is elaborated upon through fantastical metaphors and genre switches that eventually reach near-apocalyptic levels of destruction, incorporating numerous pop culture references and co-starring James Hong. Sound familiar?

I deeply resent this film for making me think even the slightest bit fondly about Everything Everywhere All at Once, a film I greatly disliked at the time and have little kind to say about even now, but this virtually had me longing for the relative coherence and cultural respect of that hodgepodge. It isn’t that the central concept is necessarily bad or even uninteresting, but Shi can’t resist the urge to lean into the inherent duplicitousness in her elder female characters, the idea of Chinese heritage as a smothering force. Granted, I’ve never been a teenage girl, and even from my somewhat different vantage point I still felt emotional seeing the degrees of reconciliation established. But just as in the utterly despicable and grotesque “Bao,” the extremity to which the idea of a tiger/red panda mom is pushed, and the corresponding emphasis on a modern, cheeky treatment of Chinese culture nearly completely effaces what is sometimes a pretty charming portrait of childhood. It definitely would have pushed this already overlong film to its limit and introduced all sorts of other potentially insensitive stereotypes, but I almost wish the friends got their own culturally specific inconvenient gifts; without that, and especially with the completely silent portrayal of the ancestor’s spirit, it just feels like another tokenizing of Chinese culture as more mysterious and inherently weird than the rest.

August

The Wayward Cloud [rewatch]
Watching this and The Hole back-to-back helped clear up some of the issues I’ve had with what, in some circles, is Tsai Ming-liang’s greatest work. For me, aside from a few of the musical sequences, the film essentially was just those last few shots, an utterly abject and brutal sequence of images that was as much of a shut door as the endings of Goodbye, Dragon Inn or even the similarly bleak The River felt like open invitations, final statements that nevertheless miraculously did not preclude the possibility of further expansion. Tsai’s films have always functioned best for me in this open atmosphere, where meaning is both apparent and withheld, evolving in the span of his long takes. As much as I admired the film, I felt like it was the one where it didn’t quite come across.

But I forgot just how *much* this film is in every sense of the word. For one, unlike The Hole‘s concentration on Yang Kuei-mei’s rendition of Grace Chang, The Wayward Cloud spreads them across different musical artists and different characters, trading the singular focus of its predecessor in favor of what might be seen as that very openness that I was searching for. It might be too much to say that Tsai’s musicals are his most ambitious works both aesthetically and in sociopolitical terms, but it was especially striking seeing that both films unusually begin with extensive audio of news broadcasts, both to set up their patently absurd premises and as a kind of chorus of voices that then gets elaborated upon (after a fashion) in the musical sections. That Chen Shiang-chyi’s first musical performance involves a fairly sexual dance on and around a statue of Sun Yat-sen (whose portrait is also seen in Stray Dogs) almost makes me think of the musicals and their invocation of past musical icons as statements on the national state of being at the time of their creation, or perhaps as a harbinger of things to come.

As for those last few shots, they’re more complicated in that they come immediately after an extended sequence of even more heinous acts (which permanently, purposefully sour what had been a film balanced between grotesquerie and hilarity), a span of time which seems to presage the much more restorative feat of intimate endurance in Days. Witnessing the exertion of numerous people involved and Chen’s reaction to her world crumbling, it makes it easier to accept multiple readings of that last outburst; the window is open, for better or worse.