Letterboxd 3k1s3a Kyle Turner

Next to Normal 5o6541 2025 - ★★★★

Thu, 5 Jun 2025 16:03:26 +1200

321w3b

just a few inches away from perversely brilliant, a haunted house in the suburbs where the past—and perhaps the failure of the nuclear family itself—wraps its cold, cruel fingers around all the necks who walk through. Cassie Levy gives Diane an airiness that's like the stormy weather in her head, looking for consistent stream of wind past the eye, which makes her desperate confusion and ambivalence about being "better" that much more compelling. Jack Wolfe is at once felinic and reptilian, with lilting emo boy band magnetism, clutching to Diane with a mix of feverishness and a sheepish smirk. Making psychopharmacologists and maternal bereavement the big bads is definitely a CHOICE, but its commitment to bourgeois malaise vis a vis modern mood disorders leverages rockeratic heights. Very Oedipal!

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Mommy 6m382h 2014 - ★★★★

Mon, 2 Jun 2025 13:46:34 +1200

(author's note: my intro from my Nitehawk screening)

In August 2024, Instagram started testing out a new version of their main grid design, where s’ posts appeared on their profiles. For all the platform’s history, the grid posts were square, a neat 1:1 even if the posts themselves weren’t, and now Instagram head Adam Mosseri was playing with the alchemy. “We're actually testing a vertical grid, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, for your profile, instead of squares,” he said on the platform formerly known as Twitter that month. Mashable reported that this shift from square to vertical was, according to Mosseri, due to his claim that “the vast majority of what is ed to Instagram today is vertical.” He continued, “It's either 4 by 3 in a photo or 9 by 16 in a video, and cropping it down to square is pretty brutal.” The roll out from square to vertical grid posts was put upon all s by January 2025.

Though launched in 2010, it would take until the latter half of 2015 for Instagram to ditch its solely square photo format, after years of either uncannily perfectly centered photos of avocado toast, sunsets in empty midtown streets, and tightly squeezed group shots. There were third party apps to create borders to maintain the original aspect ratio of something taken in landscape or portrait, but now those could mostly cede the way to Instagram’s future of more picture sizes, more ways to curate and present life through stories (introduced in December 2017), Reels (introduced in 2020), and Shopping (introduced in 2018). In its initial form, Instagram wanted to be a platform to document life; now it wants to take yours over.

These various product introductions make Quebecois filmmaker Xavier Dolan’s fifth film Mommy a unique anomaly: premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014, where it tied for the Jury Prize with nouvelle vague stalwart Jean-Luc Godard’s experiment in 3D Goodbye to Language, Mommy is a film that, at the time of its release, with its perfectly square 1:1 frame looked towards the idiosyncratic constraints of a social media platform that photographers such as Sean O’Hagan have asserted as helping transform photography into “the medium of our time, not just defining our globally connected digital image culture, but propelling it”, while artists like Chris Wiley have argued that such platforms exacerbate “a world thoroughly mediatised by and glutted with the photographic image and its digital doppelganger”. But now, Mommy’s 1:1 aspect ratio and its formal referentiality are, in a way, artifacts of the past.

Dolan had been in the industry for years as a child actor before making his Cannes debut with I Killed My Mother when he was 18, and throughout his 20s he would accumulate – partially through his press appearances, but arguably primarily through his directorial work – a reputation for being a wunderkind derogatory. His mashed up millennial-pilled references to Godard, Almodovar, and Fellini seemed to irk international critics who saw his work as bratty, empty, unnecessarily florid. But throughout, from his debut to his international trans breakthrough Laurence Anyways to Mommy, the inability to contain the overwhelming, sometimes cyclonic storm of feelings about gay sons and their mothers Dolan contained and expressed through a tumblr fan page’s worth of allusions seemed to be the point. His movies, with avant pop like The Knife and classic alt rock like The Cure, random tableaux and sophomoric sexuality, are quintessential ‘90s kid fever dream, reveries of contradiction between putting the family portrait back together and letting the sheer melodrama of it all melt the borders.

In Mommy, the near future (2015) tells of a recently ed federal law that permits parents to leave their difficult children in the care of hospitals. When widowed Diane (Anne Dorval) reunites with her behaviorally erratic son Steve (Antoine Olivier Pilon), they try to pave a path of familial functionality, proving to one another, and themselves, that their family can still be some flavor of normal despite the economic and emotional obstacles. Their stuttering neighbor Kyla (Suzanne Clément) comes to help with tutoring Steve, leading to Kyla’s presence as a kind of second mother to the teen. It’s classic melodrama: family struggling to maintain order mitigates chaos with the help of a friendly neighbor.

Dolan’s stylistic habits up until Mommy would have not necessarily immediately conjured the idea that he would invoke such a narrow frame size: he had used 1.33 (Academy ratio) for Laurence Anyways, and 1.85 or 1.78 for his other films, but the director packs, if not information, into his frames, at least a lot of emotional signifiers. Subjects crowded by color, smaller objects, sometimes featuring a sky showering beautiful textiles to the ground or a mother character in a nun’s habit and tears running down her face. They’re the kind of bold frames that imply bigness and breadth, flush with saturated color and glistening light, if not maturity. Even scaling down, even with proto-naturalistic dialogue, Dolan’s filmmaking is defined by his rascaliness in the guise of rigor. If the frames are simplified, the emotions sure aren’t. They’re Pollockian splashes of ion and fury, even the mundane taking on histrionic proportions.

As Diane and Kyla struggle to manage Steve’s outbursts and unchecked sorrow, fury, and ecstasy, Xavier Dolan presents a mirror image of his earlier work, which was primarily rooted in the perspective of the misunderstood queer child. In Mommy, we are granted access to the people, the women, the mothers trying to understand. The very narrowness of the frame makes it an arena: perhaps more overtly than in other aspect ratios, paired with Dolan’s trademark theatricality, certain questions linger in each shot, making elements like who takes up more space, and what does that mean for their power dynamics, and for their idealized version of what their relationships look like, what their family looks like, all the more potent because of its rigidity. But as modern as Dolan makes his film, replete with time dilating slow motion, nostalgic irony, and propulsive scenes of domestic malcontent, Mommy is as indebted to the banal disappointments of Yasujirō Ozu and painterly suburban malaise of Douglas Sirk as it is to the stormy soap opera of Almodovar and hallucinogenic portraits of adolescence of Francois Truffaut.

But implied in the kaleidoscopic references in Mommy is the tacit understanding that no frame will be good enough to articulate the frenzied love, hate, resentment, need, and magnetic attachment between gay son and mother. All the artistic tools in the world, which Dolan seems to try to channel, can barely articulate all that emotional tumult, such that it almost breaks the film’s gimmick. References, like any language, fail as often as they succeed in their mission to communicate. It’s a sentiment I identify with: Xavier Dolan’s filmography, which I was introduced to in college (he’s very millennial college kid coded) was one of the first that felt like it was speaking directly to me and about my relationship with my mother, I Killed My Mother and Mommy two halves of my own dysfunctional family portrait that could barely contain all hope, brokenheartedness, rejection, fear, and joy I felt as an adopted queer kid who could barely communicate with his mother, and vice versa. Death, violence, anxiety, smothering love, abandonment, snobbery, pretension. All features of my life and his films. Mommy, in some ways, marked a new phase of my writing life and career: although I had been freelancing in some capacity since 2010, the release of Dolan’s film and the subsequent essay I wrote about it for IndieWire that detailed my tempestuous dynamic with her, my arrest during a particularly bad argument we had, and how the film provided a fractured looking glass into which to try to see the way my mother and I had frayed each other’s nerves was the most exposing piece I had written at the time. More than helping me into a new period of my life as a writer, Mommy was instrumental in helping me develop a vocabulary and framework to interrogate the possibilities and limitations of film and film criticism as conduits for honesty.

But Mommy’s initial use of an aesthetic framework predicated on a cheeky “think i can’t make a movie in 1:1? just watch me” egoism and all the nods to Home Alone and The Royal Tenenbaums and Late Spring one can muster, is an ironic coup du cinema, functional in its context, useful and even inspired in certain moments, yet is actually a testament to the failure of all languages – spoken, written, filmed – to articulate that crazy amour fou between gay child and mother. All the things we wish we know about our mothers, and the things they wish we know about them and they wished they knew . All the things that are never said but we try to package in a card, or beneath a ribbon, or in a brunch mimosa. We try to escape a tyranny of visual and spoken language to try to make sense of our need for the most natural and yet most unpredictable relationship, where both parties are not only misunderstood by each other, but often by the rest of the world. On Mother’s Day, I see everyone post pictures of them with their mothers. On stories, on grid. And we know it’s not enough: as a thank you, a fuck you, or something in between. But it’s worth trying to see what you can fit in a frame.

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Bring Her Back 4qn5j 2025 - ★★★½

Sun, 1 Jun 2025 16:17:57 +1200

Very well made chamber drama/horror, Sally Hawkins is great, some gorgeous cinematography and gnarly sound design. Yet occasionally feels a bit unfocused and unclear as to how much it wants to be a bit more of a straight forward horror/possession movie versus a somewhat self-consciously stylized serious horror take on Medea.

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Final Destination Bloodlines 3o1zo 2025 - ★★★★

Sun, 1 Jun 2025 16:15:41 +1200

a hoot and a holler, a near perfect calibration of the goofy and the grotesque. Some of the sleekest editing in ages.

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Solitary Acts (4 1d2662 5, 6), 2016 - ★★★★½

Thu, 29 May 2025 15:16:28 +1200