Her homelife is stormy; Tadeusz grows intolerant of his wife’s affairs, cocaine use, late nights spent at clubs followed by valerian-induced sleep, and long work sessions listening to Richard Wagner at full volume.
A few years later they were divorced.
I prefer to interpret this as if he could have put up with the affairs, the coke, the clubbing and valerian, but the Wagner was just a bridge too far.
As someone who went to two performances of Tristan und Isolde this season, I’m not sure I concur with his assessment.
On Friday night I went to a screening of Chungking Express. On Sunday I went to a different theatre to see the new restoration of Seven Samurai. That’s a pretty good weekend for film. It made me curious to see a list of the films I had watched in theatres over the past 12 months. I queried the Expenses:Entertainment:Film register of my ledger to put one together.
This is a pretty decent collection, and these past 12 months have not been unusual in that regard. I had the sense that I saw fewer new films in theatres, but that appears not to be the case. I think going to a revival screening of a film I already know is just more memorable as a theatrical experience. I enjoy living in a place with a robust culture of cinema, where I can go see some IMAX spectacle one weekend and a 35MM noir the next.
I was briefly stumped. I try not to be about. I replied “Well, I think the last few posts were about notebooks, opera glasses, tea, and bicycle mirrors.”
In the pilot episode of the show, the titular hero teams up with a pirate television journalist in the cyberpunk dystopia of Seattle. They broadcast the dirt about a Rich Bad Guy™, and protect a witness from being silenced before she can give her testimony in court. The implication being that facts are meaningful, and that the criminal justice system is functioning.
From the vantage of 2022, the show’s dystopia is looking pretty optimistic.
Kimi was described to me as Rear Window crossed with The Conversation. Both are great films. Kimi isn’t as great, but I still enjoyed it. It delivered on that description.
Watcher is another riff on the Rear Window thing. There were a couple times I found myself talking back to the screen because a character did something irrational, but overall I enjoyed it. The two main actors, playing the watcher and the watched, were great. The ending was great.
Swallow shows us that all is not well in soulless bourgeois suburbia. This film was super weird and discomforting, but is exactly what I imagine the lifes of Goop customers to be like.
I’m not much into boxing films, and this isn’t one, but there’s a sparring scene in the beginning in which I couldn’t identify much in the way of acting. I had to pause the film and lookup the actors who play the main character and her trainer. Either they should be winning Academy Awards or they are professional fighters. Turns out, they’re professional fighters.
Four of these films were scored by Nathan Halpern, who does excellent work.
Pilotpriest scored, directed, and wrote Come True under the alias Anthony Scott Burns. This is the first feature length film of his that I’ve seen. His previous short works include a Tron sequel and, with Ash Thorp, Lost Boy. Both are excellent. Come True follows a teenage runaway who joins a sleep study at a local university in order to have a place to sleep, and proceeds to awaken some sort of demonic universal id. It is full of neon and moody lighting and retro tech and hex dumps and I loved it. I think of it as a sort of Strange Days by way of Stranger Things. There’s not much dialogue, but I thought the lead actress did a great job of selling the character’s path from confusion to discomfort to terror.
Makeup and Vanity Set, using the nom de guerre Matthew Putsi, scored the third season of The Girlfriend Experience. The show follows a neuroscientist hooker who uses her sex work experience to help build a manipulative artificial intelligence. It is quite weird, but I enjoyed the aesthetics of the show. Reviewers seem to criticize it for feeling very cold and sterile and antiseptic, but I think that fits with the theme of sex-divorced-from-emotion. I enjoy my tech-noir, and this is that. It felt somewhat Gibsonian. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn at the end of the show that Huburtus Bigend was orchestrating things. The score, as expected, is excellent.
The only previous film score work I’ve seen from MAVS (excluding the three seconds he had in Godzilla vs Kong) is Hit TV, which also satisfies.
