I was writing this up elsewhere and I thought it’d be worth saving here too. This particular version is prompted by the release of the 2022 Sight and Sound poll results. The Master -- my favorite PTA. Is it the best? Easy to argue that one, but it’s messy and sprawling which I love, and it has my favorite actor of all time, who I still mourn. Tokyo Story -- what an incredibly heart-rending movie. The sadness lies in the stillness. It is as calm as The Master is messy. In the Mood for Love -- the greatest visual director of our time (I kindly assume he’ll make another movie some day) and two of the best actors I’ll ever see. Nostalgia. Coincidence. Sadness. Crash -- my favorite expression of Cronenberg’s thesis statement: mankind will evolve into something else some day and we’d best be ready for it. I love the chilly violence of the Toronto highways in this. Beau Travail -- not just for that final scene, although I will happily explain why Denis Lavant is remarkable for hours, just ask me, see if I won’t. If there’s a common theme to these first five movies (and there is), it’s desire. Claire Denis knows how to put desire on screen. The Third Man -- I swear I didn’t notice until I was making this post, but this list can be divided into arthouse and genre, and we’re now in the genre section. For a long time Casablanca was in this slot but The Third Man replaced it for me. Vienna as a haunted house. Brazil -- this is the movie that taught me there was more to life than the multiplex, and I still love it for the messy excess of it all, plus it’s about rebellion and I find that still resonates with me. The Big Sleep -- yeah, the plot makes no sense, but I’m not in it for the plot. I’m in it for Bogart and Bacall and a poisonous toxic Los Angeles and the snappy dialogue. And for Dorothy Malone. City of God -- did you hear about the time a couple of Brazilians took the pyrotechnic effects from The Matrix and the disjointed narrative that Tarantino didn’t invent anyhow and bent them to their whims to tell a story about their homes? It’s really good. Lawrence of Arabia -- I have been lucky enough to see this in 70mm on a high quality screen three times, and if I could only ever see one movie like that again it’d probably be this one again. For my money, there has never been a better epic. Those dunes. Holy Motors, Hiroshima Mon Amour, 8 1/2, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and Three Colors: Blue could very easily be on my top ten as well.

Sarah Polley haș some absolutely wonderful thoughts about making a movie ( Women Talking) with a mostly female crew. If you’re really fretful about assigning any behaviors to genders in particular, consider it as a piece about how much value there is in challenging norms. “They crafted a budget based on 10-hour days, shot in and near Toronto, so everybody could be home for bedtime.” Can’t wait to see this one. ...

Movies reviewed this week: Run Lola Run, The Rules of the Game, Detour, Werewolf by Night, The Banshees of Inisherin, and Like Rabid Dogs.

New text AI! Let’s try it on some tabletop RPG work. Bold is my prompts; I’ve snipped the polite banter out of most of the AI’s answers. Spoiler: this is way better than the last one I tried. If I repeat the same prompt it gets a little repetitive, but still not bad.

Movies reviewed this week: Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Dragon Inn, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, if…., Shaolin Temple, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Kes, The Meetings of Anna, Bones and All, Decision to Leave, and Down Twisted.

Feeling mostly better other than being a bit more tired than usual. The final timeline: 10/29: almost certainly my initial exposure — I was at a loud crowded event without a ton of mask usage. 10/31: light symptoms. 11/1: first positive test (all my tests were at home). 11/2: Paxlovid course started. 11/6: Paxlovid course ends; maybe a couple of negative tests in the next few days? Can’t recall. 11/11: testing positive again; feeling sick but able to focus. 11/13: negative test (probably because at-home tests are not 100% reliable). 11/15: positive test again; able to focus well enough to deliver budget presentations. 11/19: able to write code again! A surprisingly important milestone. 11/23: negative test again, and this time the negative tests stuck. Haven’t tested positive since. 11/27: still getting a bit tired here and there, as noted, but I feel pretty much OK otherwise. All told that was three and a half weeks of positive tests, and I felt pretty sick during most of that. Able to focus but definitely not great. Please get vaccinated and boosted.

In September 2022, the Criterion Channel added a British New Wave collection, which made me quite happy because I’d been interested in those movies ever since I listened to a Filmspotting series on the topic. Wow, back in 2008. I didn’t actually wind up watching any of those at the time, but 14 years later isn’t too bad, right? I’ve been watching them in order as the spirit moves me since September, and since a few of them are leaving at the end of November – Criterion Channel collections aren’t necessarily permanent – I got into higher gear and finally finished off the collection today. My capsule reviews are here. ...

I grabbed Battle of the Linguist Mages from the library the other day (thanks, Libby!) and it wasn’t bad. It’s enjoyable reading Ready Player One from the anarchist point of view, even if it’s a bit broad. Don’t look for well-architected laws of magic here or anything – it’s more that a bunch of stuff happens in ways that amp up the fun factor. But it’s really fun! The role of punctuation is top-notch and had me pausing midway through to do some Web searching.

I read Lawfare because it represents a place where fairly traditional liberal approaches to national security are meeting (occasionally) more progressive and practical understandings of the challenges before us. Accordingly I read their piece on composite violent extremism with great interest. I Don’t Speak German and others in the anti-fascist researcher sphere have been talking about this for ages, of course. I think it’s a reasonably good piece. There’s one huge gap, however. The authors define “individuals who draw on a variety of disparate prejudices and grievances but do not adhere to a discernible ideological framework” as “ambiguous” and sort of throw up their hands; this is a failure, because in many cases the underlying similarity is accelerationism. In some cases – Christchurch, for example – accelerationism is an expression of a clear ideology. Often that’s white supremacy, but not always. ...

Recovery from covid continues. Allow me to express the sentiment that wearing a mask is a very small price to pay for avoiding literally three weeks of reduced capacity, one week of which was complete downtime. I installed an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, so if you’re a Mastodon person you can effectively follow this blog at @Bryant@popone.innocence.com. This works very well for me, because it means I can easily put my longer-form permanent thoughts here and everything I post on my main Mastodon account ( @BryantD@dice.camp) can be transient. ...