u/hangonsufi

A post in r/criterion led me to this beautiful, moving film by F.W. Murnau. Acclaimed by cinephiles as a masterpiece, alas, I had never seen it.

The arts are the modes of creation allotted to man; be thankful each day you wake up, that you are given anew the opportunity to experience some measure of the greatness that our human race can aspire to.

Sunrise is the famed German filmmaker's first U.S. film. It stars Janet Gaynor and George O'Brien, two popular and busy American actors, as a simple but happy, young (did I mention very attractive?) country couple living with their infant son lakeside in an Old World village.

Ah, but a serpent has slithered into this bucolic Eden. Margaret Livingston plays the alluring high-fashion hottie from the city taking the country air in an elderly peasant couple's humble vacation home rental. The temptress has been seducing the handsome young husband and convincing him to sell the farm, lure his wife into a drowning (dark!), and come wallow in the city's fleshpots with her.

It almost works. The husband convinces his wife, who knows he's been unfaithful, to take their dinghy for a day away from the farm. She gaily accepts the outing, but it is soon anything but pleasant. Her glowering husband is rowing like Charon on the River Styx, then he comes toward her to throw her in the water. He stops himself, but once they reach the shore his wife jumps out of the boat and runs up into the mountain village, and he chases her to the trolley and boards with her, desperate to make amends and mend his broken vows.

Aside: When they are running through the mountain hillsides, I'm thinking, this looks like the mountains I grew up with in So Cal; yep, much of the exteriors were shot in Lake Arrowhead.

For the sake of setting the story's narrative, I have neglected the stunning cinematography that opens the film from the scaffolding of a bustling train station, then powers that narrative throughout. Camera “tricks” abound, and the skill and patience to work the analog (pre-analog?) process is a feat of magical proportions.

Sets were built and lighting engineered to place the actors in the congestion of a 1927 cosmopolitan street with horse-drawn lorries, trolleys, automobiles, pedestrians and pushcarts. Their last day in the city has our dear couple dodging the traffic against a pretty convincing backdrop of the hectic street. They embrace and appear to stop traffic, including a big black horse that pulls a “Frau Blucher” nearly on top of them, then immediately the scene is live, the horse is balking, horns are honking, angry motorists are shaking their fists, and they are pushed out of the middle of a modern maelstrom as they dash off, laughing.

It's a silent film, so the story is told visually; the actors emote to the balconies, the gags are sight gags, from pie-eyed piglets to the peek-a-boo of a lady's slippery gown strap.

My favorite, and a wish-I-thought-of-that, is our reunited couple in a photography studio waiting for their prints. They are country clumsy and knock over things. They are horrified when they appear to have broken the head off a classical statue. The search everywhere, under furniture, for the missing head. The husband see a doll's head with some toys and sticks it on the statue – of Winged Victory.

While rowing home, a fearful storm whips up and the boat founders at sea. The husband ties bundles of rushes, stashed for his own escape, to his wife as floatation devices as he endeavors to get to shore, but she goes overboard. The village is roused, rescuers take to the lake.

The city woman thinks this is her plan at work when the wife is missing. She goes to the devastated husband but he chases her out and starts to strangle her. Then the wife is recovered from the lake! She lives!

The city woman leaves the village in the back of a horse-drawn wagon down the path in another breathtaking interior. Finis

The cinematographers, Karl Struss and Charles Rosher, won the first Oscar for their craft when the Academy Awards were inaugurated in 1929.

A post in r/criterion led me to this beautiful, moving film by F.W. Murnau. Acclaimed by cinephiles as a masterpiece, alas, I had never seen it.

The arts are the modes of creation allotted to man; be thankful each day you wake up, that you are given anew the opportunity to experience some measure of the greatness that our human race can aspire to.

Sunrise is the famed German filmmaker's first U.S. film. It stars Janet Gaynor and George O'Brien, two popular and busy American actors, as a simple but happy, young (did I mention very attractive?) country couple living with their infant son lakeside in an Old World village.

Ah, but a serpent has slithered into this bucolic Eden. Margaret Livingston plays the alluring high-fashion hottie from the city taking the country air in an elderly peasant couple's humble vacation home rental. The temptress has been seducing the handsome young husband and convincing him to sell the farm, lure his wife into a drowning (dark!), and come wallow in the city's fleshpots with her.

It almost works. The husband convinces his wife, who knows he's been unfaithful, to take their dinghy for a day away from the farm. She gaily accepts the outing, but it is soon anything but pleasant. Her glowering husband is rowing like Charon on the River Styx, then he comes toward her to throw her in the water. He stops himself, but once they reach the shore his wife jumps out of the boat and runs up into the mountain village, and he chases her to the trolley and boards with her, desperate to make amends and mend his broken vows.

Aside: When they are running through the mountain hillsides, I'm thinking, this looks like the mountains I grew up with in So Cal; yep, much of the exteriors were shot in Lake Arrowhead.

For the sake of setting the story's narrative, I have neglected the stunning cinematography that opens the film from the scaffolding of a bustling train station, then powers that narrative throughout. Camera “tricks” abound, and the skill and patience to work the analog (pre-analog?) process is a feat of magical proportions.

Sets were built and lighting engineered to place the actors in the congestion of a 1927 cosmopolitan street with horse-drawn lorries, trolleys, automobiles, pedestrians and pushcarts. Their last day in the city has our dear couple dodging the traffic against a pretty convincing backdrop of the hectic street. They embrace and appear to stop traffic, including a big black horse that pulls a “Frau Blucher” nearly on top of them, then immediately the scene is live, the horse is balking, horns are honking, angry motorists are shaking their fists, and they are pushed out of the middle of a modern maelstrom as they dash off, laughing.

It's a silent film, so the story is told visually; the actors emote to the balconies, the gags are sight gags, from pie-eyed piglets to the peek-a-boo of a lady's slippery gown strap.

My favorite, and a wish-I-thought-of-that, is our reunited couple in a photography studio waiting for their prints. They are country clumsy and are horrified when they appear to have broken the head off a classical statue. The search everywhere, under furniture, for the missing head. The husband see a doll's head with some toys and sticks it on the statue – of Winged Victory.

While rowing home, a fearful storm whips up and the boat founders at sea. The husband ties bundles of rushes, stashed for his own escape, to his wife as flotation devices as he endeavors to get to shore, but she goes overboard. The village is roused, rescuers take to the lake.

The city woman thinks this is her plan at work when the wife is missing. She goes to the devastated husband but he chases her out and starts to strangle her. Then the wife is recovered from the lake! She lives!

The city woman leaves the village in the back of a horse-drawn wagon down the path in another breathtaking interior. Finis

Cinematographers Karl Struss and Charles Rosher won the first Oscar for their craft when the Academy Awards were inaugurated in 1929.

“Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan” appears on the dark screen and there was more than scattered applause; I joined them, to do otherwise would have been churlish. That mine was three-quarter-hearted was hopefully lost in the scramble of SOME people leaving as the credits started to roll. Now, that's churlish.

An Epic that isn't grand, isn't epic, just long? Yeah. A modern screenplay of a Bronze-age classic about Greek heroes, gods and monsters in a-little-too-modern English? In the parlance of the script, “OK.” Yes, Telemachus calls his mother, the queen, “mom,” and speaks of his long lost hero father, Odysseus, as “dad” and answers more than once, “OK.”

Why not just go full Bill and Ted, full Wayne and Garth?

Perhaps I am a churl, after all. No, no, I am a member of the theater-going audience for film. The peanut gallery, if you will, and that's what we do, we bust nuts.

But you do feel sorry for Odysseus, OK? The gods sought to punish him just for the hades of it. He was tooling around the Mediterranean, looking to make land – and it's snowing? Appears the gods sent him to the Outer Hebrides, or some such bleak archipelago off Scotland. Oh yeah – they also filmed in Iceland.

There is some good acting in the film. I loved Samantha Morton as Circe, including her workingman approach turning Odysseus' men into pigs – by hand. John Leguizamo should get plenty of award nods for being almost unrecognizable (in a really good way) as Odysseus' blind loyal swineherd Eumaeus. More of this Leguizamo, please! I liked Tom Holland as the son Telemachus, he took the role seriously, and I thought he was quite more than OK.

Why were so many of the male actors wearing pants? I haven't seen any Bronze Age representations anywhere of men in pants. Oh duh, HangOn – the Outer Hebrides and Iceland, OK? You don't want to freeze your peanut gallery off.

I did see some trailers for coming attractions that will get my business: Digger, looks totally gonzo with Tom Cruise in septuagenarian makeup; a delightfully goofy Street Fighter; and of course, Dooooooone (Dec. 18).

Two actors make this drive-in movie worth watching, and thankfully director Tobe Hooper knew this and gave them the film. Not that they didn't work hard for it, but that's what memorable performances are all about – actors who work their particular strengths to the last row of the balcony.

Or the last row in the drive-in-theater, where the speakers are shot, you're crunching on empty beer cans, burning your fingers on a roach and happen to look up from a supine or prone position...and start watching the movie.

Caroline Williams plays the appealing and spunky Stretch, a radio DJ with a call-in request show. A couple of douchey male students are rampaging down a country highway and call in to Stretch on a real-life 1986 car telephone in their Mercedes ragtop. They won't hang up, she just can't scrape them off her shoe, so to speak. But now they're in the reach of the Sawyer bros, who chase them down with their chainsaw justice for some insouciantly-dealt disrespect on the road.

Yeah, it's a mess, but funny. And our girl and her hapless studio engineer LG (algae, get it?) capture the mayhem on a cassette tape.

Dennis Hopper is Lt. Lefty, definitely not telegraphing the brilliance that David Lynch would draw out of him in Blue Velvet, also 1986. He stooopidly doesn't take, or even listen to, the tape when Stretch (“Missie”) brings it to him. But then he has the lack of cojones to set her up for real danger by playing the tape once every hour as a request from Lefty – and not staking out the studio with a security detail or even with his weasley (sorry, Ron) self, admitting he used her as bait for the power tool posse.

Leatherface and his scene-stealing brother Chop Top (Bill Moseley, Yale grad, no kidding,) come to the defenseless studio. Chop Top is Blue Velvet-level demented and depraved, but way too dirty and grimy and scrofulous. Good make-up, you recoil at this breath when he opens his wide mouth with its diseased dental arcade. And Moseley uses every inch and second of film to captivate even the rocking cars in the back row.

And now, because you're peering over the back seat, Leatherface corners Stretch in her short shorts, running the still blade of his chainsaw along her tender inner thigh, in closeup, all the way up to her VaJayJay. Oh yeah, you're watching now.

The bros totally destroy the studio and drag LG off to their meat processing plant they call Home. Stretch, in time-honored horror heroine fashion, follows them alone. Lefty follows Stretch and shows up with chainsaws of his own.

There weren't a lot of stunt people listed, so I think Williams really took a lot of abuse slipping, sliding, falling, hanging in a series of gaggy killing room floors of blood and innards.

There are flensings and disembowelments, in case you were wondering.

The finale is our two favorite characters, Stretch and Chop Top, in a chase through the Texas Battleland, uh, theme park the Sawyers use as their meat processing plant they call Home, replete with a Batesian patriarch and matriarch.

I don't know a lot about Texas, but I think Stretch's triumphant Last Stand might be on a replica of the Alamo. I mean, why stop being cheesy now?

NOTE: The beautiful drive-in theater featured in the slide show was that of my hometown, El Monte, Calif. I conducted a lot of “cinema research” there. It was mowed down to make room for a home improvement store about 20 years ago. RIP.

Two actors make this drive-in movie worth watching, and thankfully director Tobe Hooper knew this and gave them the film. Not that they didn't work hard for it, but that's what memorable performances are all about – actors who work their particular strengths to the last row of the balcony.

Or the last row in the drive-in-theater, where the speakers are shot, you're crunching empty beer cans on the floorboards, burning your fingers on a roach and happen to look up from a supine or prone position...and start watching the movie.

Caroline Williams plays the appealing and spunky Stretch, a radio DJ with a call-in request show. A couple of douchey male students are rampaging down a country highway and call in to Stretch on a real-life 1986 car telephone in their Mercedes ragtop. They won't hang up, she just can't scrape them off her shoe, so to speak. But now they're in the reach of the Sawyer bros, who chase them down with their chainsaw justice for some insouciantly-dealt disrespect on the road.

Yeah, it's a mess, but funny. And our girl and her hapless studio engineer LG (algae, get it?) capture the mayhem on a cassette tape.

Dennis Hopper is Lt. Lefty, definitely not telegraphing the brilliance that David Lynch would draw out of him in Blue Velvet, also 1986. He stooopidly doesn't take, or even listen to, the tape when Stretch (“Missie”) brings it to him. But then he has the lack of cojones to set her up for real danger by playing the tape once every hour as a request from Lefty – and not staking out the studio with a security detail or even with his weasley (sorry, Ron) self, admitting he used her as bait for the power tool posse.

Leatherface and his scene-stealing brother Chop Top (Bill Moseley, Yale grad, no kidding,) come to the defenseless studio. Chop Top is Blue Velvet-level demented and depraved, but way too dirty and grimy and scrofulous for Lynch. Good make-up, you recoil at this breath when he opens his wide mouth with its diseased dental arcade. And Moseley uses every inch and second of film to captivate even the rocking cars in the back row.

And now, because you're peering over the back seat, Leatherface corners Stretch in her short shorts, running the still blade of his chainsaw along her tender inner thigh, in closeup, all the way up to her VaJayJay. Oh yeah, you're watching now.

The bros totally destroy the studio and drag LG off to their meat processing plant they call Home. Stretch, in time-honored horror heroine fashion, follows them alone. Lefty follows Stretch and shows up with chainsaws of his own.

There weren't a lot of stunt people listed, so I think Williams really took a lot of abuse slipping, sliding, falling, hanging in a series of gaggy killing room floors of blood and innards.

There are flensings and disembowelments, in case you were wondering.

The finale is our two favorite characters in a chase through the Texas Battleland, uh, theme park the Sawyers use as their meat processing plant they call Home, replete with a Batesian patriarch and matriarch.

I don't know a lot about Texas, but I think Stretch's triumphant Last Stand might be on a replica of the Alamo. I mean, why stop being cheesy now?

NOTE: The beautiful drive-in theater featured in the slide show was that of my hometown, El Monte, Calif. I conducted a lot of “cinema research” there. It was mowed down to make room for a home improvement store about 20 years ago. RIP.

"UFOs, and Related Subjects" An Annotated Bibliography. Library of Congress, Lynn E. Catoe AD668332, AFOSR 88-1656

It's a PDF, I appear to have messed up the link, sorry. It's over 400 pages, even includes cartoons.

The movie begins with the classic tune by The Mighty 'Mats, “Bastards of Young”:

God, what a mess

On the ladder of success

Where you take one step

And miss the whole first rung

It's 1987 and James Brennen (Jesse Eisenberg) has graduated college with majors in Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies. He was promised a European vacation by his parents before going on to Columbia, where he plans to take journalism courses so he can be a travel essayist.

James' dad gets demoted at work and now James has to find a paying gig if he wants to go to Europe, Columbia, enjoy regular meals. His resume is pretty much summed up by mowing a neighbor's lawn.

But he has a pulse! Perfect for manning the games on the midway at Adventureland in Pittsburgh. Yeah, the one in PA. And heck, the obnoxious Frigo already works there. Of Frigo, James says, “He used to be my best friend, then I turned four.”

James soon finds family failures run in the Adventureland family of friends. Employees hang together in what could just be lifeboat diplomacy, but with real care for each other that exceeds the mere exigencies of their shared situation.

James' love interest is arcade attendant Emily (Kristen Stewart), who recently lost her mother to cancer and now has her father's new wife to contend with.

Connell (the “I forgot how damn handsome!” Ryan Reynolds) is the park maintenance guy, a would-be musician who is married but takes extramarital trysts in his mother's basement, like he's doing with Emily.

Joel (Martin Starr) is in games, like James, and is as glum as the Russian literature he majored in. He won't let James come in his parents house because he's ashamed of the shrink-wrapped furniture and art faire paintings. He styles himself an “existential pagan.”

Bill Hader and Kristin Wiig are the managers of Adventureland, decent folk.

Funny stuff and sweet stuff churn through the film; you like the Adventureland characters, and writer/director Greg Mottola keeps it from ever getting tedious. I should mention James is a virgin (again, Jesse Eisenberg? I recently watched Roger Dodger and you played a college-bound virgin).

The film does have sex! drugs! vomit! dialog not outweighed by four-letter words! booze! (there is a lot of knockin' 'em back in drinking establishments by characters whom I would definitely card.)

The deed itself isn't shown, but we're led to be reasonably certain that James and Em consummate at the film's er, climax – with “Unsatisfied” by the 'Mats (has it been that long? The Replacements!) one of the final musical selections.

The bright ice cream-and-candy colors of run-down dreams, the fairy tale false narratives of as-yet unrealized hopes, all this can be yours for $38 a night.

The sad destitution of human sacrifice zones that are the circles of purgatories and hells around the Happiest Places on Earth are traps with no releases, with no recognition for time served. You make the best of it, sometimes in the worst ways possible, then game over, make room for the next prisoner of circumstance.

Sometimes bad choices are all you get.

What if this Sister of Misery, Our Lady of Bum Luck, this wrecked Rapunzel just isn't a sympathetic character? If she's got one last coin for the fountain, one last candle to blow out, or if she spots a falling star that isn't on a collision course for the planet, she'd better pray for a moment of clarity to appreciate Bobby, the tolerant and patient manager of the purple place, the Magic Castle Inn and Suites.

Halley (with a long 'a', played by Bria Vinaite) is this unsympathetic character. Her daughter, Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince) is a virago, not really sympathetic but a fascinating creation of scary proportions by a child actor. “I can always tell when adults are about to cry,” Moonee tells a fellow ragamuffin, and Prince makes you believe her.

Bobby (Willem Dafoe) is sympathetic – to his last-chance denizens just trying to cling to the best circle of this Dantean world they can, for as long as they can. And film maker Sean Baker found the actor that actually looks like he could be Bobby's son, Jack – Caleb Landry Jones.

Nothing really happens, but somehow everything seems to happen, or to befall, the women and children in this film, mostly in the categories of no job, no money, no prospects, no home.

For $38 a night.

Rotten Tomatoes gave this film 79%, about 40% higher than I would have. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes. What do I know.

It's running time is as long as The Watchmen, by the way. However, actually more full frontal male nudity (McCaul Lombardi as white trash hottie Corey) than The Watchmen, so there's that.

American Honey is about a traveling band of teenage flotsam and jetsam ostensibly selling magazine subscriptions, with made-up hard luck stories, across “the heartland.”

“Newsstand sales of consumer magazines continued to decline in the beginning of 2016, according to the latest figures from MagNet, which tracks single-copy sales across the U.S. and Canada...The number of magazines distributed by wholesalers also dropped compared to last year.” - Erik Sass, MediaPost, June 6, 2016.

Bleak statistics; so is this the last press of the skins for these wandering wastrels?

Jake (Shia LaBeouf) (I've always thought it takes a lot of nerve to wear that name) (if you're a guy) (a stripper with a boa constrictor, maybe), in a pin-on braid, is the boy toy for Krystal (Riley Keough), the boss lady of this, er, enterprise.

Star (Sasha Lane). Oh yeah, plays the lead opposite LaBeouf.

I watched it because maybe I have a slender connection to the premise.

Long ago I drove a school bus during the day and worked a phone boiler room selling tickets to police and fire benefit shows at night. The shows were legit, but we didn't have to use our real names. There I learned how fast a dry Christmas tree will ignite when you throw lit matches at it. Wicked fast, in case you're wondering.

The year is 1965, the place is New Penzance Island, and the story is love, redemption and reclamation.

It is a Wes Anderson film that will make you laugh and cry, will make wish for the world where the Sam and Suzy in all of us is ascendant, and where that ascendancy triumphs because peoples' hearts are irrevocably good.

The prepubescents, Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) meet-cute at an elaborate church production of the Great Flood story. Sam is a member of Scoutmaster Ward's (Edward Norton) Khaki Scouts in attendance at the play, but he grows restless and goes snooping about the vast old church. His prepubescent spidey sense leads him to the girls' dressing room, where the chicks are transforming into their bird characters. Suzy, with a bloody bandage on her arm from being hit by a mirror, is The Raven, the first bird sent out of the ark to find dry land.

Spoiler alert – the raven never returns.

Sam is an orphan, ping-ponging from Juvenile Refuges to foster homes after he loses his parents. Suzy lives with her three little brothers in a dollhouse home parented by two “counselors,” lawyers, played by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand. Both children are misunderstood and outcast, driven from the Eden of hearth and home created for "good" boys and girls.

Sam and Suzy exchange addresses and correspond; eventually they plan their escapes and their meeting in the meadow. Scout Sam is wilderness survival trained, Suzy has a different approach, like bringing her tiger tabby kitten in a fishing creel.

Included in the adults is Bruce Willis as the island's police captain Sharp. Willis, who's talents we have lost to a cruel debilitating disease, plays Sharp as a tender and gentle man surely hiding out from a harsh world that doesn't understand him, either.

The missing children must be found, and Social Services' Tilda Swinton muses to Captain Sharp and Scoutmaster Ward that Sam will probably be administered electric shock treatments once found. Incorrigible, don't you know.

It's an all-island effort just hours before a historic storm is headed for the region. Ward tries to mobilize the scouts as a non-violent rescue force, the boys quickly become Lord of the Flies armed vigilantes. Harvey Keitel is the Kurtz-eque Scout Commander Pierce who reprimands Ward and relieves him of his office when he appears to have lost his entire troop.

The tides turn for Muskrats Suzy and Sam (sorry) and they are escorted by their rescuers to (supply sergeant/chaplain?) Cousin Ben (Jason Schwartzman) who has the power to marry them in a non-binding but emotionally and morally meaningful ceremony.

The storm makes landfall, lightening strikes, the wooden dam bursts, Social Services arrives by pontoon plane, the chase for the children still enjoined.

Eventually the storm moves out, much of the island has been clobbered, but the sparingly-used narrator (Bob Balaban) tells us that the crop yield the following year was the most abundant in island history.

No! No! Please tell me Sam and Suzy were not the human sacrifices to the heartless bloodthirsty Harvest Gods!

Dry your tears, for tho' weeping may endure for a night, joy cometh in the morning.

Suzy and Sam are reunited with visiting rights in an age-appropriate way, Suzy back with her character-arc-experienced parents and Sam with Captain Sharp as his legal guardian.

OK, now you can cry.

Forgive me gods, it's been four days since my last confessional post:

I shamelessly reveled in Rorschach's gloating over filth and horror; sick, yet I begged him to tell me more.

I wallowed in lust for the two wantons, coupling like dark angels in the sky, a mockery of the divine glory.

Now, finally, I will plead for mercy for my most brazen, debased, impudent and impious infliction visited on your most precious gift, my immortal soul.

I'm talking about my fevered obsessions, not secret but carried on my sleeve, burned into my forehead: Elio and Oliver, Call Me By Your Name.

I know you are merciful, and listen to the cries of the oppressed. Allow me to advocate on my very human failings, allow me to move your omniscient heart to pity one so low as myself, your most wretched creation. But still, you made me, therefore I am deserving of an audience, of reclamation.

That's pretty overwrought, even for me, but I am ever importunate for indulgence.

I was perusing the Cult's past podcasts, and I found that a year ago this was the movie assignment.

Call Me By Your Name was also on my list forever, and it came into my life when I needed it most.

December 2025 marked the end of a very dark and ugly year for the world, with evil emanating and spreading from our version of Mount Doom. No doughty hobbit I, my only recourse was to seek refuge in a world of beauty and enchantment, of love's possibilities.

I watched, and I watched, and I watched every day, throughout the day, for the ensuing months. I found interviews, press junkets, compilations of clips set to Lana Del Rey; read the book and it's sequel, allowed myself to stop the world and melt with Armie Hammer as he read the source document to me in an audio book.

My friends did the emotional equivalent of patting me on the head.

I found Reddit, and joined my fellow ecstatic lovers in dervish-like devotion to our chosen gospels, our sutras, our recitations.

Is this blasphemy? If it is, I will absolve my fellow lovers and take the whole blame, take the surplice, take the penance, I'm sure I am the worst, the most abject; but I will never denounce or recant of my obsession for Elio and Oliver, for Call Me By Your Name.

So frigging overwrought. But you haven't heard my most depraved confession.

I cannot watch the end of this film. It is gratuitous heartbreak, it didn't have to end this way!

So, I rewrote the ending. 75,000 words and I'm still writing - yes, every day I write the book.

Now, Oliver has a last name, a personal history, a family history. And Elio and Oliver live in a world where their love is triumphant, a sweet light in the darkness, I won't settle, can't settle for less.

Maybe I am defiant of absolution, maybe I would rather commit these erotic excesses than endure the “moral” scrubbing to be “cleansed” of life-giving lust, maybe the secrets of the universe are in each violated peach, the forbidden fruits of joy. Maybe it's hubris to write my own hope in the face of a world's despair, but maybe I'm not the only one.

There is no such thing as a hopeless romantic; we are the most hopeful holy fools you will ever meet.

A Spielberg film is usually a story about humans; humans in unusual, frightening, strange, magical, difficult, unimaginable, extreme situations and how they are affected by these situations, how they react, and how they triumph. And there is ACTION! CHASES! DARING SAVES!

So if you haven't seen Disclosure Day, let me tell you it is not a space invaders, alien attack, ET takeover film. Not a Day The Earth Stood Still film. Nor is a congressional hearing given The X Files treatment. It is an engrossing and compelling tale about humans wresting with The Truth. It is about humans who want to suppress, control, or reveal The Truth.

There is a shadowy organization, headed by Scanlon (Colin Firth), that wants to suppress and control the alien tech. Some hand-size rods were crash retrieval booty, and Scanlon is “diving” into their power like Newt drifted with the Kaiju. He keeps at it until he gets better at, and this time eyes go spice blue.

Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt, im - not very - ho carries the film) is a Kansas City, MO, TV weather-caster, a childhood abductee who starts speaking and understanding some very foreign languages.

Dr. Dan Kellner (Josh O'Connor) has all the flash drives with all 70+ years of government files on all the famous and lesser known UFO cases. He served time for cyber crimes and was recruited upon release by a disclosure group headed by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo). Kellner is also a child abductee.

The story opens with a world on the brink of war with North Korea. People are shown panic shopping and evacuating their towns. What could possibly be bigger news that would turn the world from war to wonder? Outrunning Scanlon and getting The Truth to air is the point of the movie.

There is a car vs train action scene that is almost Indy Jones worthy.

There are some Big Questions asked, like did God create beings on other worlds and does he love them, too? And, will we make gods out of the aliens?

Surprisingly disappointing effects are the NHEs and the animals that they chose to present themselves as. Sad, very sad. I'm watching a series, Surviving Earth, about various extinction events, and I'm buying the gorgonopsids. We know what this guy can do, too bad he didn't.

Hoo boy. I think some of you guys punked me on this one, just because I said I was getting soft for Wes Anderson and posted a dewy-eyed review of The French Dispatch on this sub.

LingonberryGlum2356 (lingonberry pancakes was already taken?)( Sorry, bratty, but for all you nihilists our there) has watched it thrice and it keeps getting better every time (Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice...); tree_or_up's fave Lynch film (uh, Blue Velvet?).

Of course I wanna see a Lynch flick I haven't seen. So I voted for it. Like leaves72, was looking forward to it. I'm thinking could be Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway.

Maybe Lynch is referring to some wasteland of our interiority, not the graceless bustling commercial, industrial, track housing, freeway girded region of So Cal grandiosely named the Inland Empire. Yeah! How Lynchian!

It has the touches we thrill to in the Lynch experience: A tense unsettling ambient soundtrack aurally signaling that something is...off...wrong...even dangerous; the old furniture, the worn rooms; the people who are reacting to things around them in subtle or blatantly dis-associative ways, the deep pore closeups; the ambiguity, oh the ambiguity, we live for it.

It still had the absurdities that made me laugh out loud, for instance: One of Laura Dern's characters, who seems took a recent right hook to the kisser, admits,”I screwed a couple of guys for drinks, no big deal.” And it wasn't nervous laughter, so I have no excuse.

It takes a lot of money to make a film - you hire lots of people, there's lot of expensive equipment, you need lots lawyers, everyone has to eat – a lot. All in the name of entertainment. So when you get your hands on that kind of lots of money...

Even when a sassy young lady flashed her nice ta-tas, I checked the time.

Sorry, lingonberry & tree, I had to bail at somewhere around 2 hours into the 3 hour film. But I did stick around for The Locomotion dance, still really dig that oldie.

The Straight Story. Don't wait, leaves72, tomorrow is promised to no one.

I think the rabbits are from a Lynch short, and he obviously felt they made sense here.

Saturday evening, June 13, this stunning film will be screened at the Palm Springs Cultural Center's Camelot Theater.

We're so lucky to have this wonderful independent movie house in our community. I hope everyone appreciates their independent and art house neighborhood treasures!

Maybe I'm just becoming a nicer person; after all, I let Romy and Michelle steal my cynical, cranky film snob heart. But now I'm really softening up for Wes Anderson again. Are they related? I think they have to be; you can't be that insufferable overweening film bore for long once you open yourself to this gentle genius who paints on film, who writes dialog for poetry lovers, who charms mortal actors into outrageous subtleties and sublimities as they ensemble and disassemble.

What is the cupid's arrow of my current besottedness? The French Dispatch.

A couple - three? - weeks back, Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme was submitted for our approval. Ya know, you get busy, a bright shiny object or two, a 5-day UFO confab, a story about hickeys you just can't stop writing – but I did! I finished it! I ticked through a couple in my stack (Roger Dodger, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) then The French Dispatch popped up.

I was already getting nicer because I had recently watched Asteroid City and really liked it.

AND RUSHMORE IS ABSOLUTELY ONE OF MY FAVORITE FILMS EVER!!!

But, and I'm pretty sure this is a minority opinion resulting from my cataloged character ...idiosyncrasies, I kinda considered Anderson's next film, The Royal Tenenbaums, as his Barton Fink. That's where he lost me, and I became that over-snobbing weeny.

I saw that The French Dispatch (hereafter referred to as TFD) had some male actors I will watch in just about anything for at least awhile: Timothee Chalamet, Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Adrian Brody. Plus Tilda Swinton, for whom I think the jury may be out.

If Anderson and/or Chalamet reads this, please work together again.

The film, set in the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blase, starts and ends with the death of the editor of TFD, played so well by alum Bill Murray, who did not chew any scenery. In between are four delightfully unique feature stories of charming beauty filmed with stunning color palettes and luminous black and white, moving through tableaus that defy gravity, or switch scenes like a View-Master, or fidget with surprise after surprise.

Those who are already Anderson-nice will know all the alums, so feel free to point them out amongst yourselves.

Owen Wilson, The Cycling Reporter, gives a two-wheel tour of the town's historic districts.

Benicio Del Toro (Rosenthaler) is in prison for a double homicide with a butcher's tool for which he says one had it coming and the other was in self defense. He's painting his muse, Simone, the lovely young prison guard, as therapy. Adrian Brody is a shady art dealer who promotes (pimps?) Rosenthaler's work. Actually, a Master's thesis could be written about this segment, but I'm fagged out after that hickey story.

Timothee Chalamet is Zefferelli, a charismatic student revolutionary leader and muse/lover to TFD staff writer Krementz (Frances McDormand). Another thesis, but instead I will just watch this segment a few more times because I've fallen in love with it. Swoon.

Jeffrey Wright is a writer with a typographic memory who also spent a few days in Enuui-sur-Blase's prison. This is a riotous rollick about the kidnapping of a kid, and the police station's enigmatic chef. It's an obvious connection, right? I mean, you see it, too? Damn, it's so good! So good!

All throughout, the dialog is clever, and funny (“The Children Are Grumpy” is the student revolutionaries' battle cry) (whom Krementz calls “the pimple cream and wet dream” contingent) (see why I'm a-swoon?) and insightful and worthy of so much repeat.

Even (the voice of) Jarvis Crocker gets back in the Anderson mix.

Sorry for my dizzying confessional, er review. I just felt so nice.

I've been going to Contact in the Desert almost every year since the first one came to Joshua Tree in 2014, where I lived for many years. The early Contacts were more Ancient Aliens roadshows – I was in super-fan heaven! In fact, I was a reporter for the local papers and got to cover it with press access.

Moving “down the hill” a few years later, I found Contact was in my new Coachella Valley 'hood. While there were still some well-known TV “stars” (Ben Hansen, Marc D'Antonio, Daniel Sheehan, Richard Dolan) this year, the emphasis was much different and different from what I expected.

I expected a lot about disclosure, AI, and the missing scientists, researchers, government people, etc. This year the emphasis was on consciousness, the nature of reality (stuff I really like anyway) and DMT (haven't tried). Also, there were live podcast panels, again, the aforementioned emphasis.

Over the five days of approx. 40 events a day/night, usually 7 happening in each time slot, you're really just grasping at the elephant in the dark. The many panels I attended were of smart, thoughtful people sharing their insights and experiences intelligently, and light on the drug-speak, about reality, our consciousness, and UFO/ET/paranormal experiences.

Here are some panels I attended: The Infinite Within: Where Thought Becomes Form; Psychedelic Gateways: Entities, Realms, and the Expanded Mind; Glitches in the Matrix: Questioning the Nature of Reality.

Whitley Strieber's lecture titled “The Disappearances: Why They Are Happening and What It Means,” was rambling- about what? dunno - and with 30 mins to go an audience member shouted, “Get to the topic!”

Richard Dolan gave a live Zoom 90-minute non-stop wound-up presentation on disclosure, and he was adamant that disclosure would not be from any world government, but would come from the ETs when and how THEY are ready, that they are controlling disclosure.

Probably the last of the OGs was there – Jacques Valle. He and Paul Hynek (son of) (and DMT enthusiast) did a presentation together of the two families' long history together. Really nice, lots of pix.

I got a chance to tell Vallee that, earlier this year, my local art house theater screened a recent French film, Valensole 1965. The film tells the story of a famous UFO incident in a lavender field near the village of Valensole, France. An actor portrayed Vallee in the film, tall, thin, long black hair. Vallee grabbed my hand and held it tightly as told me he indeed spent three days in the village interviewing people and investigating the incident before being rescued from a lengthy selfie session. I tend to eschew them myself, not judging.

Included are two photos, one of the late Erich von Daniken (I did get my first American edition hardback Chariots – from a library book sale! - autographed, not above that) (please don't judge) at the Joshua Tree Contact, and one of Jacques Valle preparing for his talk with Hynek, Close Encounters of the Family Kind: The Hynek and Vallee Legacy.

Good to meet a few of you at Contact! Antenna put away until next year.