not a real crow

rewatched mulholland dr. last night, and it's so fucking good. remains my favourite david lynch film, the recursive imagery is so fascinating. there's so many things i could say about this film that i struggle to produce any insights. the film is perfectly ambiguous. every scene kaleidoscopes into the next in such delirious haze. even with the hindsight of having seen this one before, i found myself watching through this film just as bewildered as the first time.

like, the way the relationship between betty and rita forms out of the pictures around them, the way their identities manifest out of their surroundings, all the while the two of them struggle to accept each other and understand their sense of who they really are... it's so mesmerizing to watch. their experience as actors leads them into simulacra of their own lives playing before their eyes, as opaque yet distant as street signs illuminated by headlights in the dead of night.

can't recommend this one enough. truly one of my favourite films

my plans to rewatch the fly with my good friend who hasn't seen it yet were foiled by the movie rental's trick, which gave me what i thought was a dvd including both the original and its sequel but only ended up having a dvd for the fly 2. i think as far as horror sequels go, this is a decent one. the monsters resemble the grotesque machinations of cronenbergs other films, and the practical effects for them are good despite their age. really liked the larva from which the monster of the second part of the film grows, can't believe those scientists didn't have that thing in better quarantine.

beyond that, i think this sequel is only okay. it hits all the notes it needs to; but the visuals and narrative carry too little of their own substance. martin's only distinction from seth is that he retained his sense of ethics after transforming. this would be interesting if we got to see martin struggling to grasp what was really happening to him as his humanity sheds from his skin. there's a more interesting film there, in beth's struggle to keep him on his goal as he succumbs more and more to the mutations in his dna. there's only a scene where this happens with martin, compared to many escalating episodes with seth in the original.

the climax of the original is so memorable because seth's drive for the prestige of changing the world culminates in his attempt on the life of the only one who respected his ambitions. seth's efforts not only fail, they result in a condition so abhorrent that even he knows his only way of fixing himself is death. it's a grim, tragic look at how the ambition to better our world makes monsters out of good people. the fly 2 ends with the vindication of martin's struggle by allowing him to survive at the expense of his terrible "dad", but i can't help but feel the conclusion is too clean given the disgusting circumstances that precipitated his birth.

just watched werner herzog's nosferatu, really love it. dracula has such an eerie presence throughout the film, he's as oppressive an entity as the foggy woods and the terrifying stillness that paralyzes the town while plague slowly consumes the people; and yet at the same time, dracula also comes across as this incredibly pathetic being desperate to die while doing everything to prolong his own misery by extending it to anyone and everyone.

there's definitely something to how no one listens to lucy, too. she basically does what she has to do to kill the vampire at the expense of her own life, and no one really grasps the favour she did this town until it was too late. women just do not get understood or listened to throughout the movie and you really feel it by the end. there's interesting contrast in lucy's sense of faith and conviction and that of the men around her. the tragedy of the film seems less in the futility of the men around her than in their unfaltering faith in traditions that failed to protect them, which had long decayed into dracula's terrible visage.