Well, the Olympics are still going, and Canada is looking a little better. It doesn’t really feel that way though, having watched the women’s Hockey final the other day. That game was brutal, man. Complete heartbreaker. Props to Anne Renee Desbiens, who looked like a wizard for 58 minutes of the match. It’s unfortunate that the way these tournaments work makes winning the silver medal feel so bad.
The morning this goes up, I’ll be watching the men’s Hockey final. Expect some thoughts about that next week.
Oh, and MLB spring training games have now started. I’m watching a Jays/Phillies game as I write this. I’ll be skipping Baseball Corner this week though, as I have truly run out of things to write about, and next week I’ll have a week of spring training games to work with. For now I’ve got some thoughts about three movies I watched and a review of the new Remember Sports album.
I meant for this to be the week I finally learn how to properly get images going in HTML, but then I got sort of busy towards the end of the week. My band is playing a show tonight (Saturday night), so I’ve mostly been getting ready for that. Next week, though, I’m hoping to get like, movie posters and album covers going on here.
Continuing with my letterboxd watchlist pruning, this week I watched “Demonlover” (2002) and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” (2010). I also caught “Iron Lung” (2026) in theatre with my girlfriend.
”Demonlover” (2002) is a weird, slow burn corporate espionage story about rival factions in a French company working to secure distribution rights for new, 3D animated hentai. The story twists and turns as our main character, undercover saboteur Diane, discovers more about the American porn company that the French company is going to sell the hentai to.
So, conceptually this thing is pretty bizarre, but the jarring disconnect between the sterile business discussions, the violent espionage, and the actual product in question -- animated pornography -- is really thematically effective. One of the main themes is how cold and inhuman capitalism is. The product is irrelevant, as long as it can be sold. This is taken to disturbing extremes as the American company’s less legal websites are uncovered.
Our main character is cold and detached the entire time, furthering this theme of distance between seller and product. At the start of the movie she views violent hentai with disinterest, later she is similarly unfazed as she views illegal porn featuring actual real life violence. She, as financial operator, is completely unconcerned with what she’s actually doing. The larger system is just as indifferent to who is working for it, as at the start of the movie our main character contrives to replace one of her superiors, and the system carries on as though nothing has happened.
Parallel to this sort of capitalist alienation angle, the movie is dealing with a more general theme of desensitization. None of these characters are fazed by violence they see on screen, even when the violence depicted is real. This reaches a sort of meta level, as the movie features many, many shots of screens, making us watch what the characters are watching alongside them. Gently, the movie probes us about our own desensitization.
I won’t spoil the movie, but basically these themes culminate in as depressing a way as possible. This is a big time feel bad film. Desensitization to filmed violence, on both a personal and systemic level, enables violence, is more or less the idea.
On the level of form, mostly I found this movie pretty electrifying. It’s glacier slow, in a way that skewed hypnotic for me. The dialogue is in French, English, and Japanese, making very real the boundaries, the alienation, that exists between the film’s characters. And as I mentioned above, there are so, so many shots of screens, and moments where the movie entirely shifts to depicting the films the characters are watching. It blurs the line between us watching the characters watch things, and us watching those things ourselves, in a way that really drives home what the movie is doing conceptually.
My only real complaint is that the final act is a little illegible. I was able to piece together what had happened by the end, but things get confusing. This is mostly due to some breaks in chronology, which were clearly intentional, but I don’t totally understand the reasoning behind the decision. I would probably appreciate it more on a second watch.
”Iron Lung” (2026) is another slow burner. Technically it is both a video game adaptation and a YouTuber movie, but it deftly avoids the pitfalls of both of those cursed genres. It’s a tense, weird, slow sci-fi horror movie, that manages to be paced extraordinarily well despite very little actually happening. There’s some great monster design, and just immaculate set design. And Markiplier can both act and direct, it turns out.
It has way too much lore, though. I didn’t need to know anything about the convict’s backstory. It didn’t really take away from the movie, but it didn’t add anything either. All of the actual conflict and tension springs from the convict’s present situation; I straight up do not care about his history of terrorism in the space war or whatever. But that’s the kind of baggage that comes with adaptation, I guess. Iron Lung the game has a lore terminal, or something, I’ve heard? I don’t know. Horror movies need to get more comfortable with leaving the audience in the dark, in general.
But I need to stress that I barely cared about this flaw. Strong pacing and ambiance carry this thing, and it gets absolutely fascinating as our main character starts losing his mind. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m pretty excited for whatever Markiplier does next.
”Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” (2010) was another Letterboxd watchlist pull. I don’t really remember how this one got on there. I think I saw somebody review it and thought “wow, that seems like it’ll fuck me up!” and then added it. It did not end up fucking me up. It does deal with death and grief, but it does so with so much tenderness that it was sort of uplifting.
As the title says, the movie is about a guy called Uncle Boonmee who can remember stuff from his past lives. Boonmee is dying of liver failure, so his sister in law and nephew come out to visit him on his rural farm. Then the ghost of his wife and his long lost son, who is now a monkey spirit, also come to visit him. These characters basically just hang out for a while, as everybody tries to make sense of Boonmee’s oncoming death.
This movie is incredibly slow, even more than the other two movies I’ve talked about here. Here, the slowness is soothing. We get tons of long, static shots of the Thai countryside, all verdant green woods, made to look like paintings by the fuzziness of the film compositions. The dialogue is naturalistic and the acting subdued, such that it feels like you’re hanging out with some real people, even when ghosts and spirits start showing up. Everything it does is subtle, but it builds to a pretty intense emotional crescendo, as Boonmee, on death’s door, goes to the cave where his first life began.
I don’t think this is a movie you can spoil in any meaningful sense, but I’ll still issue a spoiler warning ahead of this paragraph; I’m going to talk about the movie’s ending a little. The last 20 minutes or so of the movie take a left turn out of the setting the audience has become accustomed to, as Boonmee’s sister in law and nephew return to the city after Boonmee’s death. They attend his funeral, which is set in a big fluorescent lit room, with some flashing light decorations around. Then they return to what is either a hotel room or the sister in law’s apartment, which is also sterile and harshly lit. Finally they go to eat at a karaoke bar, where the movie ends, unceremoniously. This sequence captured with a fidelity I found cathartic the exact way I felt beholding the oppressive tackiness of the funeral home where we held my father’s wake. Watching someone die, being with them in their final moments, is a profound, intensely human experience. Then you get dropped back into the real world, where all the lights are too bright, and life just kind of carries on in a series of settings that mostly fail to reflect the new way you feel about everything. Now, I realize I’m making the movie sound depressing, but I actually found this ending comforting. I’ve never really articulated this exact feeling before. To see it represented so clearly in a movie from across the world made me feel considerably less alone. And the dinner in the karaoke bar is beautiful in its own way: life goes on.
This week I decided to check out the new Remember Sports album, “The Refrigerator.” Remember Sports are a somewhat niche power pop band from Philadelphia who I am familiar with mainly through their 2018 album “Slow Buzz,” which I listened to obsessively during the early pandemic. I still get a couple of the songs from that album stuck in my head from time to time. Remember Sports’ music is basically like comfort food for me. Their songs are upbeat rock with nice guitar licks and great vocal hooks. Regardless of whatever else they have going on, they always deliver on those two things.
”The Refrigerator” is a straightforward Remember Sports album. I can’t say that, other than some nice backing vocals from members of the band other than lead singer Carmen Perry, it offers any huge evolution on the Remember Sports sound, but evolution isn’t really what I want from this kind of music. This album is extremely comfortable.
As was the case with “Slow Buzz,” “The Refrigerator” has a couple of real standouts, and then a bunch of songs that are just kinda nice to hang out in. “Across the Line” is an excellent opener where Perry leans into the sort of country twang her voice sometimes affects over a pretty relaxed groove. “Selfish” features prominently two of my favourite recurring traits on this album: a nice little duet in the chorus, and excellent, really just lovely, lead guitar tone. I’m not really a guitar tone guy, but this album made me feel like one of those gen Xers who do YouTube videos in front of shelves lined with hundreds of pedals. “Ghost” is my favourite song on the project overall. It’s the longest, and it earns all 5+ minutes of its length, with a groove I could hang out in forever. It’s a very 90s sound, in how its groovy drums and bass sit under acoustic guitars and mellow vocal hooks. It’s also got some wacky violins happening; I love wacky violins.
The album is a little front loaded; none of the songs in the back half impressed me quite as much as the opening five tracks did. The pacing suffers a little, too. Through the first half the album’s structure is carried by two sort of dyads in “Bug” and “Thumb,” which run together, ramping up the energy over their collective 3 minutes and 48 seconds, and “Fridge” and “Roadkill,” back to back mellow numbers that serve as a middle of the album break, before picking the energy back up in the last third of “Roadkill.” This works wonderfully: the first half of the album has the real standout bangers framed by these pairs of tracks that set the tone and energy. The second half doesn’t really have anything like this to offer; it’s just a procession of still solid but sort of unremarkable standard issue Remember Sports songs. I think a few of these could’ve been cut for pacing, but they’re all still perfectly pleasant.
Overall this album is exactly what I want from a band like Remember Sports: a very comfortable, fun 30-40 minute listen with a couple of excellent, standout tracks.
Rating: ☆