yuqiboy

Caught By The Tides

Saw this at the Lincoln Center theatre with Annie, last minute invite.

I read up what little I could on Jia Zhangke in the afternoon, but honestly, I could not really get a handle on what to expect. I was vaguely prepared for a lot of visually striking and maybe some mundane BTS stuff. But somehow, I felt hooked for basically the whole time.

It starts of with a mishmash of older clips, probably from the beginning of the two decades worth of footage. The content itself felt a bit awkward and stilted, interview with a business owner, women singing for money, a man (Brother Bin) and a woman (Qiao Qiao) caught in a weirdly entangled relationship.

Pumping Iron

Bodybuilding is an art. Like Arnold says, a painter can look at a subject and decide, oh he needs more rounded shoulders, take some paint and add it to the canvas. A bodybuilder can decide he needs more rounded shoulders and goes to the gym and eats and rests in order to physically build those shoulders.

Legit, it was cool to see someone talk about bodybuilding in that way because I do have this morbid, almost body horror fascination with this process. We use our bodies, and then intake nutrition to feed and give energy to the bodies, and then we rest to recover from the activities. All this fundamentally changes our bodies, there is a real, physical difference.

Sinners

Saw this with a coworker and her friend in IMAX at the Village East Angelika. It was awesome as hell.

The very beginning scenes containing like a series of jumpscares about what happened last night kept me locked in my seat. And I love love love a movie or story that takes place in just one day. It was so cool to remember all the various things that happened during the day that kept coming back later in the movie. Like:Smoke stabbing and killing the snake and letting it bleed to death, the same way in which Stack did. Smoke seeing a girl with a flower and teaching her how to negotiate for a higher price, teaching some economics and what he couldn’t teach his own daughter.

The Wedding Banquet

Saw this with a coworker and her friend. It was so bad that if I were alone I would have been pissed that no one else is around to corroborate.

Things I didn’t like: the acting, the length, I couldn’t - for the life of me - care about the stakes enough. It’s such a clearly American diaspora of a movie because, like, who wants babies that much? Who would give up money that easily? It was so messy. The arguments between the couples felt forced.

Dr. Strangelove

Another coworker recommendation. I went into this thinking I would be laughing out loud but mostly, I was impressed with the quality of the film and cameras and had to double check that this was actually made in the 60s. To be honest, I feel like I don’t really have the context of the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR so a lot of the tension went over my head.

Blue Velvet

After reading the synopsis and realizing that there’s a severed ear involved, I was pretty spooked and apprehensive about this movie. Especially since I watched Mulholland Drive and there was that spooky jumpscare at the very beginning. But very glad to see a very young Kyle Mclaughlin in a cute lil silver hoop playing detective.

Like Mulholland Drive, I mostly enjoyed the colors, and soundscape of the movie. The atmosphere felt so tense and loaded. I also don’t know very much about the mystery or noir genre, they honestly never really appealed to me. “Like oooh who could have done this?” I don’t know!!! Not my problem…! And noir only appeals to me in the aesthetic sense of having a hot femme fatale, and things taking place at night time, hopefully with cool reflective neon bright colors. I’d say Blue Velvet delivered on most of that which is why I’m ultimately glad I watched it.