candyman (2021)
mirror imagery!! shadow puppetry!
see how they run
mixed feelings on this one bc i still think it could have been so good but somehow just failed to satisfy. so. i loved the metatextuality of- movie that is about a movie being made about a play of a book based on real (fictional) events, and how it creates a kind of narrative matryoshka doll. wish they'd done a bit more with the layers of media & facade and artificial/real narratives. I think most of it just came off as too self-aware and very insincere because of it. like, trying too hard to be clever with How Knowing it all was, but without being charming or funny about it. saoirse ronan was great and carried the whole movie, the set design was lovely and i liked the stylistic choices. underwhelming but like, it's fine.
scream (2022)
absolutely solid. yes you can recreate entire scenes wholecloth from the original, i will not dwell on feeling like at times it was too too self referential because. it's scream and they're good at it and it's fun. elevated horror dialogue great representation of people who have said 'the babadook is an excellent exploration of motherhood and grief' verbatim (me). enjoyed it a lot :)
perfect blue (1997)
:0 !!! would have LOVED to have seen this in a cinema in the 90s. the way everything shifts so seamlessly from staged performance to tv scene to dream to reality to imagined reality, to fiction that so closely resembles the 'real' events of the film until it's all hopelessly blurred, the narrative of the real Mima indistinguishable from the narratives of her impersonators, fictional counterparts, and celebrity persona. watching this felt like having the rug pulled out from under me, over and over and over. also really neat to see how the same themes would manifest a few years later in paprika.
suspiria (1977)
sooooo striking and red and vibrant !!! such gorgeous set design!! not enough meat hooks but i will forgive
glass onion
first 20 minutes of pandemic jokes aside, i looooved this. so satisfying and enthralling to just sit back and watch everything unfold- nice to just be taken in by the spectacle and go JANELLE MONAE everytime she appeared on screen
the hearing trumpet- leonora carrington
exactly the kind of book i would expect a surrealist painter to write. strange, fun, refreshing in its difference.
the seven deaths of evelyn hardcastle
the premise of this book (time loop body swapping murder mystery in a big country house) is so immediately thrilling and yet the execution is. not good? it could have just been another middle of the road murder mystery but i think it failed precisely because it tried so hard to be bigger than that. easy and engaging enough to read but so overly complicated and messy. and not even in a fun way ! the protagonist stumbles around being unlikeable in 7 different bodies, not so much solving a mystery as having things happen to him, with very little sense of a plot unravelling or progressing. it's a book very preoccupied with explaining its own mechanics, which it can't actually do very well without revealing one of the big plot twists at the end. very much an underwhelming, disapointing mess. sad! well there's other murder mysteries.