helpless, from 1996—the first film by japanese director shinji aoyama. i had previously seen aoyama’s eri eri rema sabakutani, which was quite weird but i found really cool; this one was a bit more grounded in terms of story/subjects, but a lot of the style is already firmly in place. i like the way his camera moves; inquisitively, patiently. it reminds me a lot of jarmusch, in form—long static takes, lots of pauses/silence—but also in the general scheme of things: the characters seem to be adrift according to their own (opaque) compasses, the action being merely how they occasionally bump into each other. aoyama doesn’t give us much in terms of narrative, in fact it’s kind of hard to follow sometimes, but then again that might be because the characters have no idea where they’re going either. yasuo, a disgruntled gangster, is the only character who has any decisive direction, and even so it seems muddled, and crashes&burns swiftly. this is where the jarmusch comparison drops away: i find, not exactly an optimism, but a warmth, a smile over jarmusch’s drifters (in the early ones, at least—certainly not in dead man, not really in ghost dog), but aoyama offers nothing of the like. or: if jarmusch makes little poems, aoyama spits unsettling newsfeed scroller blurts¹. helpless doesn’t end on an entirely bleak note, but it’s only very tenuously hopeful. also, like eri eri… (this is a trademark of his, i understand), this was very well soundtracked.

ti west’s the house of the devil, which was so fucking good, and i’m not going to say much about because, for anybody who hasn’t seen it, it’d be best to go in pretty blind. it’s set in the 80s, and west shot it to fit: 16mm, zooms instead of dollies, freeze-framing in the credits—it’s all really cool if you’re into that sort of thing (i am), but i don’t think it’s really essential to the film, so if you’re not into that sort of thing i guess it could come as kind of an annoying dead-weight quirk. but even so, it’s a fucking masterfully crafted horror movie—i’m not even usually a person who gets scared at horror movies, but i had hand clasped to mouth for pretty much the whole last half. i haven’t been this excited—like, go tell everyone to seeitseeitseeit excited—about a movie in a while, when it was over i ran and turned on the lights and ate a bunch of hot peppers and drank too much of the pickling juices from the jar and then i had to take like a breather to settle my mouth down—and that’s basically how i felt about the movie, i was going to watch something else but i was too excited about that so i wouldn’t’ve been able to give anything else fair attention. so yeah, if you haven’t seen it, if you’re into horror, go see that.

^1. and, just after writing this, i find it perfectly confirmed in an interview: “Back in the day, I would read the newspaper. Now, I go online to read the news. From these sources I look for incidents in society that might work, both big and small, and collect them. From there, I think about how I can turn these incidents into something else. If I can turn it into a story I figure out how I can mix in several things together, chop them up. And it might turn out that the current incident might not be as interesting as figuring out what happened before this incident or what happens after. If you follow people around these incidents, then you have a story, I think.”