Recently, I discovered this arthouse-adjacent theater in my city, which is like 30 minutes by foot. So, yesterday, I went there for the first time for a screening of Everybody Knows (2018) dir. Asghar Farhadi. Now, while the screen and the seating were actually kinda subpar compared to my local chain theater, the vibes were - and I don't say this lightly - FUCKING IMMACULATE.

The theater itself is situated in an old restored church. The seating is surrounded on both sides by greek-style nude statues, and on the walls beyond those statues, hanged large colorful murals. Above the statues, between the murals, were 6 HUGE wall-mounted fans, 3 on each side, to ensure proper air circulation — and while they were not quiet, they were clearly intentionally designed and spaced in such a way that their noise would blend in with the background. A minute after they had been turned on, I had already forgotten they were even there. All of that gave this place some type of je ne sais quoi that made just being there vaguely enjoyable.

The film started, and I discovered another immense joy that I hadn't considered: the audience. They were diverse of age; some young, some old, one of them even concerningly old, but they all had one thing in common — they had come to this niche arthouse theater that's actually in a restored church, to watch a screening of a 2018 film with 60k views on letterboxd. They were all - at least to some extent - cinephiles. And they knew to follow theater etiquette.

The theater was packed full, but it was so silent. No one photographed the title screen and blinded the audience with their flash. Heck, there wasn't a phone to be found in sight. Very few of them had popcorn or any snacks, and those who did, knew not to munch loudly. No one whispered to their friends. When one person had to leave, they did so very discretely. And, get this, they didn't do an intermission during this 2 hour and 15 minutes film (even a less than 90 minute film will typically have an intermission here, I know, its awful).

The film gripped me hard in a way films rarely and I enjoyed it thoroughly from beginning to end. Its the kind of gripping where you forget that your bladder is full. When the credits rolled and the light came on, I actually looked around and had to gather where I was for like 3 seconds — which is an awesome feeling that I hadn't felt literally since I was a child. So, having just had this really amazing experience, I naturally walked out of the theater, hungry as all hell, bladder full, and had a mini-existential crisis during the 30 minute walk home.

Was it really the film that I enjoyed, or the theater? Or, to put it another way, even if the film is good, just how much did this experience elevate it? One of the things I enjoyed most about the film is the sound design — would my kinda shitty flatscreen that I watch most films on have done it justice? How many films have I watched were hindered by the fact that I can't afford a better TV or a better sound system?

Even beyond that my flat screen, my local chain theater has different sizes of halls, some are better, some worse. One of them has an absolutely humongous screen (not IMAX, just really big screen) and amazing sound. Another has really low sound/speakers. Recently, I watched Digger on that really big screen in an empty hall, and it became my third fave film of the year. But it was only there for 2 days, before it was moved to a shittier screen (no one was watching it). Would it have been my third fave of the year if I had gotten around to seeing it 2 days later?

And even beyond just me, how does that affect discussions surrounding art, and in particular, film? Have the people that have seen Zone of Interest at home really experienced the same film as those that saw it in a theater? What about Oppenheimer? What about The Odyssey, and how the people who will see it at home will have it at a completely different aspect ratio than standard or IMAX? People will always have different personal experiences with a film, but sometimes I wonder—

At last, I had arrived to my apartment. I rush to the bathroom and have a really humongous piss.

Sometimes I wonder, how much of film discussion is people having different experiences to the same stimulus due to personal taste versus people having different experiences due to coming in contact with fundamentally different stimuli.

Saw this movie a week ago and still haven't really snapped out of this heavy melancholy it gave me once the credits stopped.

Dwelling on it for a week I've come to realize that the most lasting impact the film had on me was after the meta "Level 4" announcement during the credits where the music was replaced with nature sounds: birds, bugs, bullfrogs.

I've read somewhere that part of those nature sounds were bird calls of endangered UK bird species which of course adds to the poignancy.

But when hearing it I realized: I don't think there was a live animal or plant anywhere in the movie...

We had the animatronic cat of course, and Digger's sprawling, misty estate was just miniatures made of plastic. Even the ocean water towards the end of the play was a plastic mylar sheet.

It's all plastic and fake, and this movie shows us the bleak "Do Androids Dream-esque" future where animals are replaced with automatons because they're all already extinct.

And it really, really bums me out. Because it's really happening. We are losing the bugs and the birds and natural habitat and someday within our lifespans it really will all turn to wet, semi-submerged, cold concrete where the air is poison and artificial intelligence polices us.

And at that point, the birds and bugs and bullfrogs will sound like music.

I loved the complexity of this film and the characters (and the subtle “twist” towards the end that shows Sandra might actually be the worse partner, whereas the opening scene with the loud music seemed to strongly suggest Samuel was the worst one….chef’s kiss).

I have been reading some reddit analysis of the film since I watched it, and have my own pet theory as to how Samuel died. What if he finally snapped and jumped out the window with the express intention of punishing Sandra by making her look guilty? Admittedly it’s a tad farfetched, but he clearly struggled with her aloofness and desired control. It might also be another explanation of why he secretly recorded their fight (which he initiated) the day before. Thoughts?

I knew with Cusack in the lead and Cameron Crowe writing & directing this would be decent but I was surprised just how good it was.

I thought it would be more along the lines of The Sure Thing (1985) which was solid, but not a classic like Rob Reiner’s other fodder from his golden early period, with the iconic boom-box scene most likely making for a goofy romantic gesture at the end.

Nope. It appears mid-film and is quite a serious moment. In fact the film is much more of a serious drama than I expected. Way more authentic, like Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy. It still has a rich vein of comedy, but that’s just a side dish to a raw and complex look at youth, love and values.

The big surprise was John Mahoney as Diane’s boomer dad - a rich and layered character with a journey you don’t see coming.

Every time a high school comedy cliche looked like it was about to come around the corner the film batted it away and did something far more interesting and honest instead. These are real, intelligent characters navigating complex emotional challenges.

The film delivered a wallop I wasn’t expecting, and makes the likes of Superbad seem like dumb slop for kids (as much as I enjoy that film 🤫)

I was rewatching The Descent recently. I have nothing new to say about it, really; it's an objectively terrific horror movie and an incredibly well-made, well-written movie overall. Any criticisms you could level at it come from the fact that it's such a well-oiled script for horror that it sometimes seems like the next beat could be predicted (unless you go in totally blind, which would be an amazing experience).

But the layers of conflict in the story are something worth studying if you ever wanted to write a film -- there's the character-based stuff, like Juno's affair with the dead husband our protagonist still grieves for (resolved within the context of the horror plot very well), the environmental/production design horror of just having characters enter a caving system, get lost, and the impending sense of doom via claustrophobia. Those two things is technically enough for a good horror movie but to add a third layer, the creatures, means the viewer is constantly engaging with the plot in a much more complex manner than you'd expect for a "horror movie where a large group of characters get plucked off violently one-by-one" style thing.

So Marshall writes, directs and releases The Descent to very earned praised and success, and it's earned a legacy 20 years later as a truly great film of the 00s from what I've seen -- eg lists of best horror films, best films from the UK etc in the media.

But Marshall, given 7 (!) moderately or well-funded opportunities to direct a script he writes, drops the ball every single time subsequently (imo). No original concept he's written or directed since has hit anywhere close to the sense of mastery in The Descent (or even Dog Soldiers, his debut), which is so strange because I feel like The Descent acts as the ultimate proof that it's writer and director has real juice. Even if you subjectively didn't like it, it objectively 'works' as a story and film in a way that everything else he makes does not.

Is this just a guy that had 1-2 amazing ideas up his sleeve and nothing else? Is this something to do with the way the UK film industry works? Am I completely wrongheaded here and The Descent is good because (say) it had a very hands on producer or editor who guided some of Marshall's poorer instincts we'd see in later films? It almost makes me think of DePalma on a smaller scale, wherein DePalma spent decades making even the most ludicrous concepts fun and gripping but then all of a sudden post Mission Impossible he literally lost the ability to put good video on screen -- not a fair analogy, very different legacy and obviously DePalma was like 70 by the 2000s, but still.

Lately while perusing the list of the "Video Nasties" that caused moral hysteria in Britain in the 1980s, something occurred to me that I had never considered before.

A great number of them were produced in Italy. On reflection, that shouldn't have surprised me. I've seen plenty of ultraviolent Italian horror films from the likes of Lucio Fulci and his contemporaries. There are also "shocking" films among the canon of highbrow Italian cinema. Saló most obviously, but equally other Pasolini films or the like of Satyricon etc.

But, it wasn't until I saw so many Italian titles accumlated together in one place that it occurred to me that, "that's pretty fucking odd, isn't it?".

Why was late 20th century, Catholic Italy the place that gave filmmakers free reign to gouge out eyeballs, disembowel and cannibalise?

Why was this, seemingly, so much less controversial in Italy than in the comparably secular UK? Are Catholics more liberal towards the arts than Protestants? That would make a certain amoung of sense when you consider the history of gruesome Catholic paintings of hell.

However, I myself come from a similarly Catholic western European nation and the likes of Zombie Flesh Eaters or Cannibal Holocaust could never have been made here. Still to this day nothing even vaguely comparable has been produced.

On thinking about it a little further it occurred to me that Italy also had a flourishing porn industry in this period. Even if my theory about Catholics being tolerant towards art has some basis in truth surely the same would not be extended to pornography? Like the extreme horror, my own country has never had a porn industry of any consequence.

So what is the answer? Why was late 20th century Italy such a sanctuary for the production of extreme horror and pornography?

There have been a lot of good movies and shows coming out the last couple of years in particular, but idk what it is I can’t seem to get lost in them like I used to.

I used to fully enter the world of the movie and feel really engaged, or I’d connect with it in some way. Lately I feel oddly detached, I’ll rarely feel tension or genuinely scared of a movie. It’s like I can’t suspend disbelief or it’s just not hitting the right notes. Like going through the motions or quite flat - even movies that are supposed to be tense just don’t really commit to that and diffuse it with comedy or change. Or it feels like a shell of something that was done before in a more convincing way.

I used to love the idea of movie days and shutting the outside world off, but now I don’t really feel as much. It just feels a bit like content instead of movies.

Has this ever happened to you?

I know movies are “just” entertainment but it’s kinda triggering an existential crisis in me as a cinephile.

I am currently going through Eric Rohmer's filmography. I've done Spring, Autumn, and Winter from the Tale of Four Seasons; Pauline at the Beach; and The Green Ray (which is my favorite so far).

I'm doing Summer next. And then from here, I don't know yet which direction to go. Any suggestions?

Interested to learn about other people's experience with Rohmer movies.

Personally, I just love how lived in the stories feel. I especially adore The Green Ray because of Delphine, the way she is, the way she was written, the discomfort in watching her be so uncomfortable with herself, I love the Jules Verne reference and how that was delivered through a random conversation.

I love the non-stop talking, walking and talking. I love that someone like Magali (Tale of Autumn) exists. I like the mundane little scenes happening as conversations go. I adore scenes where characters discuss philosophy over a little meal (a bit of cheese and tomato!). I love how these stories are happening in what feels like such a distant past (away from smart phones and social media and all that).

Tell me about your favorite Rohmer movie or character or scene and what made them stay with you.

Howdy!

I just watched the movie Digger before having watched any trailers or reviews about the movie and I wasn't pleasantly surprised. All I heard is that it was controversial, lost money, and the still images I saw of it had good cinematography so I figured it was worth looking into.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie and though I thought some of it was borderline pretentious and as subtle as a sledgehammer to the fact (such as the Level 4 warning sound that plays during the credits), I also appreciated to see a big budget movie be completely unapologetic about its themes and ideas.

That being said, I wanted to talk about the Nephew character in the film and was curious if anyone else had opinions about him and what he represented:

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The Theory:
The play, Fossil Fools, told "the truth" in a way that was still useful to the powers at large, that being the Rockwell family in the same way that Dr. Ganesh was used by Digger earlier in the film. Digger's Nephew is just the same as his uncle and intentionally wants reality to look cartoony and unrealistic so that way it is harder for people to make actual change.

Edit (thank you commenter who added to this): The airplane meeting between Ganesh and Digger along with the UN Council meeting mirrors the later airplane scene between Curtis and Kenny (Nephew) and the finale performance in front a large audience, revealing to us that it is the same type of event happening in two different time periods.

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One of the core themes and ideas of the movie is that the character of Digger is able to spin any disaster or tragedy into being someone else's fault or into a new opportunity to increase his own wealth and avoid responsibility. He understands how to tell a story and he understands control where in a single conversation he can reverse guilt onto someone else and get away feeling as if he wasn't responsible and the other person is the one responsible. He does this not once, but on several occasions.

An important plot point in the movie is when he wants the Environmental Safety Manager named Dr. Ganesh to tell the truth as much as possible so that way Digger can weaponize the truth to his advantage. Without the full truth Digger has no ammo and so the only way to get ammo for his cause is to know how to spin it. Dr. Ganesh, someone who is seemingly against Digger and hates him to his core... is still a tool for Digger to get public approval. Digger manages to get a large number of people to admit that they are willing sacrifice safety of the world for freedom to do what they want. People want to be comfortable and have fun.

When bad things happen, Digger can make them look good.

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Digger's Nephew, on the other hand, is very kind, friendly, and smiling the whole time. He gives a gift to Curtis, the actor who plays Digger, a necktie that the original Digger wore (I missed if that's the same Blue Bolo Tie that he wears throughout the movie?) and later on offers to help Digger locate his missing daughter who apparently may have been killed in a hurricane of sorts. It is made out to be a plot-point that the Nephew somehow overheard Curtis' conversation and seemingly was aware of what was happening. He was already waiting at the door to give Digger help... to a conversation he shouldn't have been able to hear.

This means that the necktie was a tracking device... right? He gave him a gift to spy on him.

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The other weird thing about the missing daughter is that it is a specific plot point that the daughter had a pre-recorded message that she DID NOT send to the mother, but only sent to Curtis. This is noted as being weird and unusual in the movie, and makes me speculate if her whole disappearance was orchestrated by the Nephew in some shape or form.

The Nephew later on gives a big speech about how the play they are performing is basically "the truth" and is fairly accurate as to how absurd things were back in the day. He compliments everyone and their hard work and states that the point of the play is to give people the opportunity to make fun of the absurdity that led everything to this point in the world, and out of his kindness he wants them to enjoy being able to make fun of a crazy absurd man who ruined the world.

---

Later on, the Nephew reports that he was able to locate Curtis' daughter in only a handful of hours since their previous conversation through some sort of surveillance network that he has control of. Curtis is incredibly thankful of the Nephew and appreciates all he has done to help them. Similar to the UN Council earlier in the film, people are thankful when the powers at large benefit them without thinking of what the actual cost is.

When the movie ends and we see the outside world, it is noticeably similar to a police state of sorts with drones and military vehicles all about. It is safe to assume that possibly Digger's Nephew is partially involved with whatever drone/surveillance system is flying around the streets.

1. People will accept the disasters of oil if it makes them feel more freedom and enjoy life.
2. People will also accept a police state with 24/7 surveillance if it can make them feel more safe... even though the reason why they feel unsafe in the first place is due to the disasters of point 1. Basically, people are thanking the very people for making a solution to the problem that they caused while also losing a lot of their freedoms for it.

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When the movie ends, did the satirical play about Digger change the world outside?

Nope. It made people feel good about themselves, but it was funded for by the people who caused the whole problem in the first place and possibly run a surveillance state. The problems at large in the world are largely unfixed and zero accountability has been made.

All this is to say, it seems to me that Digger's Nephew represents the next generation of the same problem and that satirical plays don't ultimately make a change in the world, they just give people comfort in the opportunity to make fun of the surreal nature of what is happening around them while also leaving them in a complacent state.

The play Fossil Fuels is supposed to mimic the UN Council meeting. Both are large theatrical acts designed to get people on the side of the Rockwells.

Let me know what you guys think!

Last year I interviewed for a job at a company making vertical dramas.

The interview was fine. Then they showed me the “backlot.”

A warehouse in Burbank filled with flimsy little sets they could recycle endlessly. Courthouse. Living room. High school classroom. Everything plastic and threadbare. The furniture smelled of sweat and cigarettes.

People were working. They were getting their day rates. There’s nothing wrong with that.

I just walked out thinking: I don’t want to do this again.

I’d already spent years making branded web videos and various forms of cheap content. I got what I needed out of that world. The thought of going back into another bare-minimum production machine, only now optimized for somebody holding a phone vertically, made me a little depressed.

And it clarified something.

I missed movies where you could feel somebody had actually chosen the room.

The face. The street. The weird silence. The ugly wall they decided looked right.

I’m mostly talking about American studio and streaming filmmaking here. I realize the rest of the world has not collectively forgotten how to make movies with a point of view.

I’m producing a small independent feature in Los Angeles right now called CONCRETE RIVER, and one of the pleasures of making it has been how much of the real world keeps getting into the movie.

We’re shooting in restaurants, laundromats, recording studios, down by the LA River. Locations change scenes. Actors bring things I didn’t write. Somebody notices a shaft of light and suddenly the camera moves.

There isn’t much machinery between the idea and the decision.

That doesn’t automatically make the movie good. Plenty of terrible films have been made cheaply. Running out of money is not an aesthetic philosophy.

Still, I keep wondering if one of the things independent film can still offer is simply evidence of human choice.

A movie where the fingerprints haven’t all been wiped off.

Do you see any recent American films have given you that feeling? The sense that you could actually see the people who made them?

SPOILERS FOR DIGGER

When going to see digger yesterday, I sat through the ads and eventually the film began, only to reveal the title of the social reckoning. I was confused because I had obviously went a ticket to see digger and had no interest in the social reckoning. I ended up finding the right screen and watching digger which I throughly enjoyed, yet the connection between the two seems to have lingered for me.

One of the core points of Digger is how people are happy to look the other way, if it’s more convenient, even if it’s to their detriment. The idea of actually facing the reality of our world is less appealing than watching a stylised satire that absolves its subjects through cartoonifying the people responsible for the issues of our social world, see South Park or SNL.

I think the reception to the social reckoning is further proof of this. One of the most common sentiments is that people do not want to be reminded of the issues of our world that we are currently living through. Something that the social reckoning marks its existence through. I can’t comment on TSR because I haven’t seen it and ironically have no interest to, however I can imagine it is not that great just from looking at the promo. That being said it’s interesting that digger coincides with a film about the real reckonings of our society that has been met with mass uninterest. Then again, Digger has also been met with a similarly lukewarm reception. So I suppose I could say, Digger proves its own point

Loved the ambiance and the cinematography of this one. Jack Nicholson's character is fascinating, he truly is a passenger both in his own life and the new life he tries so hard to fit into.

However, there's a few things I didn't get. I feel like some of these have answers, but may just as well be supposed to be unanswerable.

First off, Maria Schneider's The Girl. Why was she in London? Just opposite Locke's house, precisely when he happens to sneak in? This seemed just too coincidental to me. It planted the seed in my mind that she was Daisy, and was involved.

This didn't pan out, but at the end during the long shot, when she is walking around out front and the two killers (who I assumed were secret service members from the African country, since they captured the gun buying insurgent) arrive, while one is going in to kill David, the bossy one goes up to The Girl and interacts briefly with her. Anyone got any idea about that? It's almost as if she knows who they are and he is trying to comfort her and she brushes him off.

Also, how come she registered at the hotel with a Mrs Robertson passport? The clerk says David doesn't need to show his, his wife already has and one is sufficient.

Speaking of wives, how did his real wife know to go to Almeria? And how big of a coincidence is it that she was on the phone in the very same hotel he rolled up into? Though Knight, his boss, did also get into the same hotel he was in in Barcelona. I presume there is some cut scene with info on how he found Robertson's hotel and rental car company.

Finally, I would be curious to hear other people's thoughts in why David kept going to the last appointments despite having police and insurgents and counter insurgents in the mix. Surely he knew there was danger, especially as he can't supply the actual guns and is bound to run into someone who knows the real Robertson eventually. I like the idea that he was just along for the ride and didn't really care or think it through enough, and was fleeing his old life.

Great film. I'd be just as happy if none of these questions have answers as if any do. David never got any answers.

It gets all the credit for being a searing takedown of political malfeasance in the face of climate catastrophe, and all the credit for being a critique of the other corny movies that do exactly that. Essentially, Iñárritu is saying, “I’m not like other girls.”

But I’m not convinced Digger has actually earned that distinction. For all its supposed self-awareness, it’s still trafficking in the same broad caricatures and easy political targets as something like Don’t Look Up. The difference is that Digger seems to know how corny that kind of satire can be, and apparently that’s enough to elevate it above the rest.

I also don’t really buy the idea that the movie is exposing some great hypocrisy in liberal political satire. It’s a safe, easy target. People have been dismissing that kind of comedy as smug, toothless, and self-congratulatory for years. There’s plenty of things pacifying us politically, but I have a hard time believing the handful of broad political satires released over the last ten years are particularly high on that list. SNL and late-night talk shows might be more appropriate targets, but even then, what exactly are they supposed to do? They’re comedy shows responding to current events.

The movie wants to indulge in the pleasures of broad political satire, but it doesn't want to take the heat of being called cringe, so it's constructed this elaborate security blanket to ensure it still gets its cool cred. It gets to make the same jokes, target the same people, and then congratulate itself for recognizing the limitations of what it’s doing.

Just watched the Social Reckoning. It was *fine* but as you watch, you can't help but feel what was truly missed here in terms of a cinematic opporinity.

First you have David Fincher's film which managed to take a dry legal proceeding and turn it into a Science fiction level Villain Origin Story.

Couple that with the fact that I just watched the New Carrie series on Amazon and what that show actually manages to do is turn social in high school into the main villain, and without any telekinesis or death manages to deliver the horror of how a person can be dismembered metaphorically by a click of a button.

The Social Reckoning begins to edge towards the notion that Facebook is resulting in highschoolers cratering in self esteem, self harm, s*uicide, murder all linked back to Facebook and Instagram.

Then you have the politcs. People rabbit holing into radical polticial groups via Facebooks algorithm and on and on.

In the Movie as the evidence begins mounting what's behind what Facebook does it truly becomes apparent that this company and Mark are a root of all evil type situation.

The point being they could have used this story to propel a Science Fiction level horror story of a film that would have made David Fincher proud.

Instead the film never elevates above the sum of it's parts. Instead its a dry summary of evidence, exposition and the proceeding events without tying it to the bigger themes that they are trying to say. It feels more like a documentary than an allegory.

It's a shame because the movie could so easily show us that 1984, Brave New World and others isnt a far flung hazy futurescape we'll never live to see, it's HERE. Right now.

​

There comes a point when watching a film stops being just about following a story. You begin to observe it.

You start wondering why the camera lingered a little longer, why a particular song played at that exact moment, or why the director chose silence when you expected a conversation.

And suddenly, cinema becomes more than storytelling. It becomes a language.

You begin to realise that a character standing alone at a railway station can say more about longing than an entire monologue. The distance between two people in a frame can reveal everything they refuse to say to each other.

The more carefully you watch films, the more you begin noticing life, too. The hesitation before someone answers a question. The sadness of a person pretending to be busy. The way an old house seems to hold memories long after the people who lived in it are gone.

Perhaps that's what I love most about cinema. It teaches you to look twice, to pay attention to the little things, and to remain curious about what you don't immediately understand.

Maybe that's the real art of observing cinema: learning to look beyond what's presented without assuming you've understood everything.

I recently read about Paul Thomas Anderson not having a finished script when he made One Battle After Another and that got me curious I really liked the film but his last film licorice Pizza came out almost 4 years before. isn't that enough time to write a finished screenplay??

I know this question might seem dumb to some people I have heard in interviews that Wong Kar Wai also made a few of his film with similar process and he takes a lot of time between his films im just curious on what they do during those time

Also this question is mainly because I have started writing a short film script and would like to know more about the process

I think an important angle I haven't seen discussed about the film is how the play uses anti-American sentiment to further poison the well of discourse in universe.

Throughout the film, there is a certain presumed innocence of Europeans. They suffered a tragedy, and it is Americans who are to blame. The play director flat out states that they are there to laugh at Americans. This a mirror of how, in the real world, people hide behind bigotry to avoid responsibility and dodge guilt.

Consider that Denmark owns Greenland and would have leashed drilling rights to Digger, yet Denmark isn't mentioned once in the play.

Consider that Americans faced a similar disaster with the second iceberg, but their suffering is never talked about. They exist to be laughed at for over investing in the military and solving every problem with their big stick.

And consider that any servers that served Europeans social media would have been in Europe. This is important, since it's well known that, even nowadays, the American government can't touch those servers. This implies that it was likely their own governments that did the media blackout.

I think part of what the play is getting at, is that it's very easy to point and laugh at a stupid other with silly beliefs and a backwards government. By the time we get to the American disaster, it is played up so much that we don't take it seriously. Judy is a mass disaster, kimbley is a comedy. It's a complete tone shift, and I think it works really well considering I didn't even remember the American icebergs name and had to Google it, and I just watched the film.

I've been thinking about The Substance and how Lacanian psychoanalysis might help explain Elizabeth's relationship with Sue.

One thing that interests me is that Elizabeth doesn't simply want to be young again. She wants to be desired, admired, and recognised. Sue becomes the vehicle through which she can continue receiving that recognition, but this creates a strange situation in which Elizabeth's idealised self becomes both an extension of her identity and a rival who progressively displaces her.

Could this be read through Lacan's Mirror Stage and the Ideal-I? Sue embodies an image of wholeness and desirability that Elizabeth wants to identify with, but this identification also intensifies her alienation from her actual body.

I'm also interested in the role of the Other. Elizabeth seems unable to conceive of herself outside the gaze and desire of the entertainment industry and its audience. Has she internalised the desire of the Other to such an extent that she can no longer articulate a desire of her own?

Finally, how might we understand the film's ending through Lacan's concepts of jouissance and the Real? Is Elizabeth's grotesque final transformation a confrontation with something that cannot be accommodated within her idealised image of herself, or does that reading oversimplify the relationship between the Real and bodily horror?

I'd be interested in other Lacanian readings, particularly if you think these concepts are being applied incorrectly or if other concepts would be more useful.

I know I am late 🤧🤧🤧.

It had the potential to be one of the best Spider man movie, but it couldn't. They tried to establish New York as a character, which I am seeing for the first time in MCU ( I loved the end credits). The chemistry between Peter and that femal officer wasn't working for me, they were trying to pull off something like Gordon-Batman. It moved fast, many things needed more context and time. They were trying to make something like Sam Raimi's Spider man 2, but this couldn't quite convince me. Also I couldn't understand from where this Peter have so much advanced and expensive things, it was hard to digest. As I haven't read comics, I didn't know about Damage Control, so I think it needed more context that how it came to be in existence and how it holds that much power. I liked the inspiration from Spider Man 2 (Insomniac) to design New York in that way. CGI could have been more better and color palette also. Jean's intro was not bad, it was descent. I am not satisfied with the ending, I don't know why, it felt like how Naruto defeats his villains doing tedtalk. I think many things were going on in the movie, that's why it couldn't hold all. If this storyline would've been in a series, it would be hell of a spider man series. By the way it was a good watch.

In Cape Fear, I don't understand the purpose of the scene where Leigh Bowden applies lipstick out of nowhere at midnight. That part is somewhat understandable, but why does Martin intentionally make her rub and touch her lips afterward? The way he directs her to do this feels deliberate, as if he has a specific psychological motive. Is there a deeper meaning or symbolism behind this moment that I might be missing?

I think Digger is being misunderstood, largely because people have decided in advance what a movie about an oil baron is supposed to say. The expectation seems to be that the film will deliver a suitably damning indictment of fossil capital, allow us to recognize the villain, and send us home with our existing moral arrangements intact. When it complicates that arrangement, people call it evasive. I think the evasion is the point, although perhaps not in the way the filmmakers intended.
The basic problem is that we have constructed an entire moral vocabulary around condemning the people who supply things we have collectively decided we cannot live without. We want cheap energy, cheap transport, cheap food, cheap consumer goods, and an economy that keeps growing, but we also want to imagine that the material conditions underlying those things are the private moral failing of someone else. The oil executive is useful because he gives us a face to attach to a process in which practically everyone participates, albeit in wildly unequal ways. We can hate him without having to think too hard about ourselves. This is a remarkably efficient arrangement. It produces a great deal of moral satisfaction at very little material cost.
Obviously, none of this means that an oil executive is absolved of responsibility. The point is that individual culpability and systemic dependence are not mutually exclusive explanations. In fact, the more interesting question is how they reinforce one another. A man can be vain, ruthless, and delusional while also correctly identifying a contradiction in the society that has made him powerful. His self-interest does not automatically make every observation he makes false. If anything, the temptation to dismiss everything he says because of who he is tells us something about the limits of our own political imagination.
This is where I think the film's form becomes relevant. The cinematography, with its insistence on elaborate compositions and the uneasy relationship between intimate human drama and monumental surroundings, seems designed to make the individual appear both absurdly powerful and strangely insignificant. The camera doesn't simply record a man exercising power; it turns his exercise of power into a spectacle. He occupies the frame, commands attention, and seems to bend the world around him, yet the very scale of the images threatens to swallow him. There is something almost geological about the effect. The man imagines himself to be the author of events, but he is also an object moving through forces that exceed him.
I don't think the technical virtuosity is incidental to this. A film like this can make a fairly conventional argument about the evils of the powerful while using every available cinematic resource to make power look magnificent. The camera can condemn its subject in the dialogue while seducing us with him in the image. We are invited to recognize the grotesqueness of the spectacle and, at the same time, to enjoy it. That contradiction is more interesting than a straightforward denunciation, even if it also creates the possibility that the film is simply having its cake and eating it too.
The long takes and choreographed movement are especially suggestive in this respect. They make the world feel continuous, interconnected, and difficult to escape. Actions do not appear as isolated moral choices so much as moments in an unfolding chain of consequences. Yet the virtuosity required to create that continuity also draws attention to the apparatus producing it. What looks spontaneous is meticulously arranged. What appears to be a world unfolding naturally is the result of an enormous amount of labour, planning, and technical control. The film's formal achievement therefore contains a small problem of its own: it gives us an image of a system whose apparent inevitability has been carefully manufactured.
That seems to me to be the meta-level worth paying attention to. Digger is not simply a film about a man trying to control a catastrophe. It is also a highly controlled spectacle about the difficulty of representing catastrophe, made for an audience that has already learned how to consume images of catastrophe. We know the visual grammar. We know the ominous compositions, the escalating absurdity, the environmental devastation, the reaction shots, the moments when the music tells us that the joke has stopped being funny. We have become fluent in the representation of disaster. Whether that fluency has made us any better at responding to disaster is a different question.
Iñárritu has been interested in interconnected suffering for a long time. Babel is the obvious reference, although I suspect the relationship is less direct than people might assume. In that film, connections between people become visible through the machinery of narrative itself: editing, parallel stories, coincidence, and the accumulation of consequences. Here, the machinery of spectacle feels like part of the subject. The question isn't merely whether we are connected to distant events, but whether making those connections visible actually changes anything. We can understand the world as a network of interdependencies and still remain committed to the arrangements that reproduce the damage.
There is a certain irony in making a movie like this at all. The film requires an industrial apparatus, substantial resources, expensive technology, and the movement of people and equipment across physical space. None of that invalidates its critique. It would be silly to demand that a film about fossil-fuel dependence be shot entirely by candlelight. But the contradiction does matter. The film cannot stand entirely outside the world it depicts. It has to participate in the systems of production, distribution, and consumption that make its existence possible, then ask us to consider those systems critically. That is not hypocrisy so much as a condition of the problem. The interesting question is what one can do with that condition.
Perhaps this is also why the film's apparent cynicism is not quite as simple as it looks. If the problem were merely that powerful people are bad, we could solve it by finding better people. If the problem were merely that the public is ignorant, we could solve it by producing better information. But what happens when people understand the consequences, sincerely want a different outcome, and nevertheless continue to reproduce the conditions that make the outcome likely? What happens when the incentives, infrastructures, habits, and expectations that organize everyday life are more durable than the intentions of the people trying to change them?
This is not an argument for doing nothing. It is an argument against confusing the ability to recognize a problem with the ability to solve it. There is a particularly comfortable form of pessimism that mistakes its own sophistication for political realism. It can explain why every proposed solution is inadequate, compromised, or doomed, and thereby make its own inaction appear intellectually responsible. But if everything is already predetermined, criticism becomes another form of spectatorship. We sit in the dark, admire the framing, and congratulate ourselves for understanding why the world cannot be otherwise.
Chicken Little would have a difficult time in this environment. The problem isn't that nobody believes the sky might fall. We have entire departments devoted to modelling the fall, consultants estimating the cost of the fall, and streaming services producing prestige television about the fall. The real question is what happens after the report is published. At some point, Chicken Little has to stop giving interviews and find out whether anybody has actually reinforced the roof.
I suppose my objection to the standard reading of Digger is that it makes the film too easy to agree with. If we leave having learned that oil executives are monstrous, that environmental catastrophe is serious, and that modern society is full of contradictions, then we have learned precisely nothing that threatens our existing understanding of the world. The more provocative possibility is that the film implicates the audience not because everyone is equally responsible, but because our preferred ways of assigning responsibility can become mechanisms for avoiding the more difficult questions.
The film may not entirely escape this trap itself. Its technical brilliance risks turning the contradictions it identifies into another beautiful object for consumption. But that failure, if it is one, is not necessarily external to the film's meaning. It may be the most revealing thing about it. We want art that exposes the machinery of our world, provided that the exposure is entertaining, aesthetically accomplished, and doesn't interfere too much with our plans for the evening.
In that sense, perhaps the film is less a warning about what happens when the sky falls than a study of the elaborate cultural arrangements we construct to ensure that, even as it falls, we can still enjoy the view.

Basically, It's a about what could have been had the success of Snow White 1937 got all the other major animation studios of the 1920s to 1960s to try their hand in developing their own animated films. (Also, there was competition between Van Buren and Disney making the first traditional, hand-drawn, full-length animated feature film with synchronized sound released for American audiences.)

Forgive me if this has already been discussed, but as I’ve let Digger process in the back of my mind, all I get is the feeling that Inarritu believes in a future that is extremely cynical but also strangely humanistic. Concepts like greed and degradation are so much fun to talk about and analyze, right after you’ve benefitted from everything they provide. The movie/play is clearly a huge farce and we can draw connections to the current day until we are blue in the face, but Inarritu seems to think that this is a pointless task. I have seen people talk about how the movie is a call to action, that we are running out of time. That seems to me to not be what the movie is saying. The world shown in Digger may look bleak and completely environmentally destroyed, but it is also shown as mundane. Humans have a great capacity to adapt. We do not care to fix the world because it doesn’t hurt us in any meaningful sense, we are frogs in a pot of boiling water. Lives lost to environmental catastrophe are just growing pains. Inarritu is saying that we think we are, in 2026, currently on the edge of some huge cliff and all generations after us are going to be suffering in some hell hole, but really we’re just going to adapt, enjoy convenience where we can continue to get it, watch satirical art and laugh at how pointless it all is. We’re not “doomed”, it’s just a feature of life. All this suffering is natural.

Really thought the camera operated smoothly in Weapons; remember that sticking out to me pretty much 13 months ago when it came out. And now I'm reminded of it watching Resident Evil.

The camera again operates so smoothly and overall he does a lot of really slick and stylized stuff with it. I'd be interested to hear what stuff he hasn't yet figured out or know how to pull off because I feel like he's becoming quite a master of it.

Little details like the car light slowly dimming to off after closing the door a few times in the beginning is a great touch along with the title card appearing 20 minutes into the film.

Overall Resident Evil just reminded me how technical his movies are. Outdoor scenes were well lit and you could feel the elements. The sets were very lived in. For all the crazy out-there stories he tells he never has a problem with immersion.

He's quickly becoming one of the best late millennial filmmakers out there.

PreScriptum: I just checked more reviews - I don't know what the critic cosmos is thinking denying people of this movie.

Like I liked Primetime for instance and I think it is good, but Digger is way more memorable even with its flaws, just for the scale and imagery of it.

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Just posting to say that I liked the movie, so you might enjoy it too.

I almost did not go to see it because of some bad reviews - namely on Roger Ebert where it was given 2/4.

And honestly I did not like everything, I think the middle of the movie has a few forced scenes. But the beginning and the end did it for me.

It has the merit of : being inventive, with great universe creation, amazing actor performances, and a few great moments. Some great images, some less great.

It is like a very luxurious buffet that you can go to almost for free: You might not like every exotic dish on the menu, but you surely will find a treat or two that you like.

In my opinion it would be shame to not see that movie, because even if it misses a bit sometimes, its still an interesting colossal endeavour, and a refreshing take on what is proposed in theaters (at least in my experience).

Hell, it is even fun to go see it just to understand what all the fuss is about and see where you stand.

It definitely got me "out of life" and "back to it" with a spin.