I don’t know what possessed me to see this movie again. I knew the IFC Center was playing it for the past few weeks, I knew it was because Araki had a new film that was showing. But when I first saw that they were playing this and it had been restored in 4K, I laughed.
I watched this for the first time after I’d read the book when I was middle school. This among dozens of other books, movies, TV shows, anything that had gay guys in it.
...Finally, a pro-abortion movie <3
What’s interesting about this is that I didn’t really like it, but I enjoyed watching parts of it in IMAX and getting to talk about it with some friends afterward. To get this out of the way, the ad placements and this being made by Amazon and some film continuity errors took me out of the movie a lot. But whatever, I can get over it, and also, I really wanted to buy in so I could enjoy myself.
...I don’t remember where exactly I heard of this movie first, but when I read the premise I was like, okay let’s fkn go. That was a month ago and I figured I would have to find a version online somewhere at some point. Super happy I got to see it in a big theatre (AMC 13, yay).
I was really, really touched and endeared. There was an aching (for something, romance, attention) from Harry Melling’s character Colin that was so, like, real feeling. When you have nothing, and have nothing to lose, and so you can lose yourself entirely to a person, under whose gaze you can feel like have something, finally, maybe even be somebody.
...After going to a doctor’s appointment and then getting lunch at KazuNori, I was able to catch a showing of this at the Time Square AMC. It felt so familiar to be in that area with my MoviePass card. A coworker told me to watch this and described it as a black comedy that escalates quickly.
I thought a lot of it was so beautiful. The striking yellow colors of those trees when Mansu visits Beom-mo’s house for the first time. The comedic beats. Honestly the way the mom and dad had such different approaches to helping keep the family afloat was too real too, like. Got our ass.
...A rare occurrence where I wish I had not read the source material prior to watching the adaptation.
I started reading Solaris by Stanislaw Lem in early 2025. I heard about this writer because I had read The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer and I was looking for similar books. A lot of people mentioned Solaris but often mentioned that it was a departure from Lem’s other works. So I read The Futurological Congress (the third book in a trilogy… why did I do that) in order to prepare myself for this writer’s style. I hated it. But because Solaris was supposed to be different, I decided to give it a chance.
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