A clara for your thoughts ~ More TK #9

I spent much of the last two weeks in Spain, in the blisteringly uncomfortable heat of Madrid, in an un-air-conditioned vacation rental in the village Mave where we parked in a field, in a humid and cow-farm-adjacent AirBNB in Torrelavega, and for one final night in a drizzly, calm Bilbao. I saw a total solar eclipse and tried not to sweat through every piece of clothing that I owned. I ate more anchovies in those twelve days than I probably have in the preceding year and change. I finally had a clara, the (much better) Spanish take on a shandy, and was blown away that they're not serving this shit at every bar in New York all the time. It rules! It tastes like lemon soda and beer, because that's what's in it!!

Also, did I mention the eclipse?

I don't want to overstate the value of travel—this was a family trip for a few days with a set itinerary and a defined purpose (see above) so it's not like we were ~*out exploring*~ or whatever—but there's something very nice about sublimating yourself in another culture, even a little, even for only a few days. There are worlds outside of your own, and those worlds are full of mostly-normal people who argue with their boyfriends while walking around and drag their kids from one activity to another and drive too fast on a crowded highway, and in those worlds they do cool shit like eat a bunch of octopus and ox, and shut down half of a city during late August because it's too fucking hot to do anything, and sell canned Absolut & Sprite at the grocery store:

The language and the money are different, the pace is different, and the weather is different, and the traffic doesn't move the way you're used to, and these are all obvious things to notice, I guess, but it's good to experience them anyway. Was it a touch weird that we couldn't check in to our flight home at the Bilbao airport because there simply weren't any gate agents working until a discrete period before the posted departure time? Sure! Did it cause problems? No! We bought some mid as hell pastries and lattes and had a snack. It was Spain, and it was fine.

Two days after we got home to beautiful, rainy, humid, messy, wonderful New York, I found myself standing in direct sunlight on a line on 67th between Broadway and Columbus, waiting waiting waiting to get IMAX tickets to Dune Part Three.

It was maybe the dumbest thing I'd done in a while, and it felt like a uniquely American thing to do, to be such a victim-participant in our scammy promotional-resale culture that I was compelled to blow a good chunk of my last day off on the chance to get movie tickets because some other pricks were going to rock up and buy eighty of them (and god knows AMC can't build a website to save its life (this is the second part of the parenthetical where I point out that AMC has been teetering on the verge of bankruptcy for basically six years and I'm slowly reaching the point where I feel like any other company taking over management might lead to an improvement because the existing cracks are only getting wider)).

The movie will probably be great, but I'm sure it also won't have been worth this level of hassle that I engaged in, even if I did it on my own free time. I'm not even so much worried about Dune Part Three as I am the next movie that tries this level of exclusive screening and marketing, especially in the wake of The Odyssey. What do we do when the entire film industry pivots again, towards these massive-spectacle roadshow-esque release models? The last time they tried this, in the sixties, it basically killed the studio system, but now there's not even much of a studio system left to kill—so what does in the aftermath? What do we do when one of the last communal art forms finally succumbs to the same totalizing capitalistic brutality that concerts gave themselves over to decades ago? What do we do when Regal decides that they should do presale windows and cardholder exclusive screenings and deluxe VIP packages?

I don't really have an answer, or a good ending to this post—the financialization of everything was well underway before I started typing my stupid little words into my stupid little CMS (shoutout @offprint.app ) but we have to stanch the bleeding, at least a little bit. Maybe this is one of those "Mamdani will fix it" things where there's some esoteric City ordinance about not fucking over literally everyone all the time that's gone unenforced for three decades. Maybe we just have to be better people.

The Watchlist

Dead Man's Wire (2025)

I really think I wanted this to be a play, in the end. It's structured as, essentially, a two-hander with some drop-ins (including an insane performance by Al Pacino as "Guy who shot his scenes in a day, probably from his own beach house"), but that two-hander never really gets all the way off the ground. The film is, instead, too invested in Bill Skarsgård's Tony Kiritsis performance, which is fun and mannered but never internal. Nor is the movie terribly concerned with Richard Hall's (Dacre Montgomery) whole deal—sure, he's scared, and he misses his family, and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he has this instinct to placate and flatter Kiritsis repeatedly that's utterly fascinating. Maybe it's because there was a gun to his head, or maybe there's more there to explore—it certainly seems that way, when Montgomery's final bits of dialogue start gesturing towards Republican corporatist ideals about "family values" or whatever. The imagined staged version of this would be better at getting to the heart of these two characters and their whole interplay over the course of two and a half days—even if that would rob us of Colman Domingo's sexy, suave radio host, or a remarkably transformative Cary Elwes performance—because I should really have a better idea of the subsurface of these two characters by the end of this film, and I simply don't. Dramaturgy!

Warfare (2025)

Speaking of fucking dramaturgy, eh?

Here I'll largely restate what I said on Letterboxd at the link above; I’m not super encouraged by the fact that the most we get to see of these guys having a personality outside of combat is a distaff retake of the Jarhead “Ride of the Valkyries” scene set to Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me”—it's a fun, energetic way to paint a portrait of time and place, and one can imagine that more than a few of the many military members interviewed for this project remember that as the quote-unquote last good moment before shit went south—but it's far too cute by half and nothing like it ever resurfaces within the narrative. Then again, due to Alex Garland's unique combination of detached hyperrealism coupled with his outsider obsession with American imperialism, these inevitable contradictions crop up quite pointedly. We never learn what the fuck these guys are here for, specifically, but the fact that we don’t learn that is suffused into the subtext of the film, in the boring spaces in between combat, in the blood and the gauze and the family whose house you stole and then blew up screaming in the background. The question is literally always there—what was the point of any of this?—but merely asking the question does not deter from this movie's dumb Call-of-Duty-ass construction and pace.

As Tears Go By (1988)

As with most debut films, this has a lot of the bones of what makes Wong Kar-wai films a sicko's paradise—gorgeous shots of neon-lit streets, step-printing, Maggie Cheung yearning—but it's also kinda a dang mess! It's got all the first-feature problems of having a zillion quasi-professional young people doing their best and succeeding in patchy ways. It's better than a lot of debuts, to be sure—if you want a kinda rancid version of this same gangster-love-trio premise, check out Park Chan-wook's The Moon Is... the Sun's Dream, which I would argue is a true pile of shit. But, as with many other debuts (even Park's!) and like I said above, you can see the bones, and the bones are good. Hell, the bones eventually become In the Mood for Love!

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

I'd direct you towards this very good very recent post from @emilystjams.bsky.social in her very good newsletter Episodes for more fulsome thoughts about the multiple layers that Camp Miasma is operating on, specifically in re: developing a new sexual understanding of oneself after transition. Suffice it to say that I saw those themes, and I broadly did not hate their implementation, but I'm not coming away from this viewing absolutely fawning over the material like I did after I saw I Saw the TV Glow, a movie that fucked me up good and proper for a few days. I loved Kris and her dumb in-universe movie sicko jokes—the bit where Hannah Einbeinder calls out a split diopter shot only to get shushed by Gillian Anderson pretty much sent me through the screen—and I'm all-in on Jack Haven's Little Death performance, and the ways they manage to imbue that character with so much genuine pathos and humor despite wearing an air vent on their head for ninety-five per cent of their on-screen time, but I feel like the third act tip into pure fantasy was too rushed, or too unbidden from the other elements that came before. Like, sure, Kris gets to fulfill their fantasies of being the Final Girl, to become one with the art that messed her up a little as a kid, tropes and all, but that intention doesn't exactly land with pure clarity, which I found annoying. Maybe it's a me thing. It's probably a me thing. Brody loved it, so what do I know.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Rewatched for movie club, and was surprised to find myself a good deal cooler on this movie than I had been—my previous watches had all topped out at "essential masterpiece" levels, and I would still claim that the film is an essential masterpiece, but it's much quieter than I remembered, and the middle desert-love-story section is its own kind of brave but really feels like it fills more time than its eighteen minutes would indicate. It's a special movie, to be sure, but I'm not sure it's at the top of the mountain for me anymore.

Writing soundtrack

More tk,

Luis

Art work by Antonio Saura. "Multitud (Crowd)," Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía