Fear of a Black Hat - Spinal Tap but about 90s hip hop and it's ****ing side-splitting.
Tokyo Story - Insanely gorgeous visuals. Strong plot that nails the slice of life approach but I felt like it could've been stronger.
Teorema - Thought the ending was wild and loved the soliloquy on artistry. There were a lot of mid points though. Idk, maybe seducing a whole family was more provocative at the time, I feel like these days people have a D.E.N.N.I.S. system about it.
Synecdoche, New York - Much funnier than I expected, honestly. The main theme of confrontation of life and death messaging is well-done, but I was mostly thinking about what Kaufman's writing process must be like. I think it goes like this
Step 1: Sincerely write the sentimental, seminal, semen-filled Important Work you want to with no worry about self-indulgence or cliche.
Step 2: Merciless mock what you wrote in step 1.
Step 3: Rewrite step 1 to subvert what step 2 mocked it for.
Step 4: Merciless mock the outcome of step 3.
Step 5: Feed the scripts from steps 3 and 4 to your ouroboros.
Step 6: Write a script mocking the ouroboros feces.
Step 7: Take the most important moments from all of the above steps and combine them without sacrificing what you were going for in step 1 then send it to the director.
La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques? (Can Dialectics Break Bricks?) - A kung-fu movie dubbed in French, turning it into a story about anticapitalist revolution. The overarching joke has surprisingly long staying power and it made my reading list even more annoyingly long and dense. Good **** and has a bunch of good non-theory-based zingers to boot.
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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.
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