“No wonder you reek of death.” 

Miyazaki at his most fluid, visually and narratively. Each moment an event that is happening in three-fold: something our past selves dream of, something our present selves experience, and something our future selves look back on in fondness or in anguish. Time as a ripple, liquid in state. Something that bleeds into itself, slips through our fingers, takes the shape of what we place it in and then dissolves the moment whatever flimsy physical…

“I don’t know you.”

Hit a nerve I don’t like to look at within myself for too long. Nails these really specific spaces of loneliness and depression and autism in a way that is so striking. Quiet, stubbornly restrained, makes you wait with baited breath. The jolt of surprise that comes from being noticed after feeling so impossibly isolated from everyone around you for so long. That alarm of “do they see me?” and then the desperate uneasy feeling that…

“And do it nicely, because it really does matter how it looks.” 

The home as a chrysalis that never breaks itself fully open. Safe and warm and familiar, but strikingly claustrophobic. Domestic life as an absurdist’s playground. The possibility of not having enough hot dogs lands with the same weight as someone in the family dying. Control as a seatbelt, as an airbag, as the pole your car’s ramming into. 

The nature of these dynamics, how much is reliant on…

“Spit it out. Spit. It. Out.” 

Magnetic. Hypnotic. Dreamy. Hazy. Sad. So very, very sad. It’s like that quote from Stuck in Love: “I that it hurt. Looking at her hurt”.

As someone who’s left the church, a witness to so many corrupt displays of power dynamics and relationally abusive situations, I think there will always be a piece of me that is drawn to watching films like this. They hurt but I can’t stop leaning into their sting.…

“You were a wonderful experience.” 
“You were… everything.” 

It’s like reuniting with an old friend for the first time in years. They are the same person you know and love, and yet, they are also changed, different. You know each other and you don’t. There are pieces of them you know intimately and there are pieces of them that you are experiencing for the very first time. Familiarity that goes hand in hand with the wonder of meeting someone new.…

“Where is home for me now?” 

Earth-shattering. The four walls of a home both a protector and the strictest secret keeper. The angry yells and fearful whispers absorbed into the walls encircle you in their sturdy embrace. Until the pipes begin to leak, until the wallpaper begins to peel, until it’s all suddenly crumbling to the ground. Pushes back against the notion of what a mother is in the most assured of ways.

A.V. Rockwell hits a home run with…

I mean it as the highest compliment when I say that Slow feels like the less horny Normal People. A deconstruction of what the word “intimacy” means from top to bottom. The fact our leads’ careers are themselves rooted in deeply intimate spaces is no accident and the way those careers reflect their individualistic approaches to their relationship is so compelling to see. One who is all touch and fire and sweat and one who is all communication and tenderness and…

What ifs as metaphorical scabs that you catch yourself mindlessly picking at. Blood that stains in the shape of your former ambitions. Hiding the sting behind a mask of tranquil affirmations that “This is my life. This is the way things were meant to be”. Discarding the popular idea that your younger self resides within you, safe and warm and protected by your decisions. Picking up the permanence of abandonment instead. Leaving your younger self on the corner of the…

“Alfred Noble invented dynamite.” 

Knowledge is hunger. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is a gaping maw. Knowledge is an unquenchable thirst. Knowledge is a void that we are free to throw our entire beings into. Knowledge is a parasitic figure, eager for more. Knowledge is a child asking “why?” again and again and again and again and again. Knowledge is that child, decades later, screaming “why?” again and again and again and again and again. Knowledge is the screams echoing through…

“Use your grief.” 

The French Dispatch was an ode to the writers and now Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City stands tall as an ode to the actors. The inner musings of purpose, the hunger for lasting effect, the drumming of a heartbeat frantically explained away by pain over existentialism because one is easier than the other to stomach. The era of storytelling Anderson has moved into is one particularly rich and auspicious. A love letter to cinema and stories and art…