The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983)
Beyond The Black Rainbow
I was ready to like Beyond The Black Rainbow a lot. The cut-glass retro futuristic stylings of the trailer promised something of a synth soaked, immaculately detailed psycho-puzzle perfectly tailored for homage fetishists. The first half delivers on this, with aplomb, the second half however losses the thread disastrously. Slow-burn menace gives way to schlock horror and what had seemed a finely tuned chamber piece suddenly erupts into a messy adolescent fright night that dissipates nearly all of the carefully wound unease of its premise.
everytime I prepare a pineapple I think of this scene. it’s never that easy
The Shining is well-represented in this video compilation of one-point perspective shots from the films of Stanley Kubrick .
Yella
I watched Yella the other day, in anticipation of Christian Petzold’s latest. It’s fairly melancholic, you could perhaps call it Lynchian, there are moments of Mulholland Drive-esque, noir-inflected eeriness, but its content is something other altogether. It’s a story mostly told in the soulless hinterlands of business hotels and high rise offices. Yella, played by the eminently obsession worthy Nina Hoss, is an accidental traveler in this colourless landscape. Fleeing her past, her interior chaos seeping out into the glacial exterior. A purgatorial malaise pervades, humanity takes on a purely transactional value as money, balance sheets and meeting tactics serve as the measure of a life lived always in pursuit of success and stability. The underlying pulse is that of reconciliation, the settling of accounts and the irreconcilable need for affection in this world of desperate self-preservation. When the spectre of love rears its head it inevitably suffers at the hands of financial need. If this all sounds overly ambiguous then it’s because the film itself trades in ambiguity and shards of understanding, to haunting and darkly mesmerising effect.
HELLO, I’M SHELLEY DUVALL ! (by Goddessshelleyduvall)
