Aspiring to be Robert while really being Charles. This took a lot out of me and I probably didn’t need to see a movie about someone who was actually successful in productively channeling their issues into art at this point in my life, but respect must be paid. Extremely funny and much more formally savvy than I expected - all those individual Crumb panels might be worse than the gradual immersion into one of his narratives.
Sturdy, well-crafted film that has plenty of KK’s gift for incidental moments that wind up being the primary focus of a scene. The sex scene is the obvious highlight, at once erotic and funny and heartbreaking - one of the best I’ve seen. I’m less fond of all the political-legal drama, which has a few great moments (one look into the camera cutting to another in a separate scene, like if Ozu went mad) and probably has some extra power…
Something that I find interesting is that the HD copy that just showed up online is not the definitive version of The Illiac Passion in one very specific sense. A friend of mine (follow them here) noticed that the title card for the version that he saw on a print has “The Illiac Passion” in a more ornate font that takes up two lines rather than one. I was informed by someone I share a discord server with that this…
Goal lines, circular balls, and square pixels. If I disappeared from this world, would anyone who looked for me do it for me or for an excuse to satiate their wanderlust?
To paraphrase T.S. Eliot on Nightwood, a narrative film so inventive that only people trained on experimental film will appreciate it.
