Just finished "Banned Book Club" by Kim Hyun Sook & Ryan Estrada. Holy crap 😵 That was intense & insane-I honestly don't think I'd've gone to college if it was like that. But props to the kids who stayed & learned & continued to do the good work 👍👍

The only good thing about AI in film is that it has outed so many pretentious directors whose work we were trying to connect to as hacks we can safely ignore.

I usually leave celebs alone (except when I jokingly tried to kick John Cho out of the afterparty due to what he did in The Afterparty and the joke flopped) but Hyun Sook will just so casually walk up to the most famous people on Earth that they assume they know her and do the "how have you been?"

I just Googled what did Luc Besson do and I no longer feel bad about elbowing him. (I previously only knew him as a dude whose movies I pretended to have seen and who I elbowed in the head one time)

The trick is if you have the opportunity to do a thing, and you have no ethical, financial, or safety reason not to do the thing, you just do it, what the heck.

I've been crashing BIFF parties so long that now I just get invited because people assume I'm supposed to be there. Once I got so excited to see my wife in the packed crowd I accidentally elbowed a dude in the face and later someone told me it was Luc Besson.

"Some yakuza cornered me near the fruit table but it was to offer me free passes to their documentary about quitting the business to do street art. I had to choose between two parties on the same floor of the same hotel and missed Tony Leung."

Film Festival party hopping is wild. "we had to wait an hour to eat because the crown princess of [REDACTED] wouldn't stop doing karaoke and no one was allowed to move until she was done. Then I ate smelly cheese with the gangster from Pachinko, and did the YMCA rave remix with some Tibetan monks"

Occulted has of course been subjected to challenges and bans from school libraries. And it’s worth noting that the organizations spearheading the massive surge in book bans are fully devoted to Trump. People ban books that they see unfavorable depictions of themselves in. It’s a cult.

Make sure your local library has Occulted in the children’s section, along with Banned Books Club, co-written by Estrada and his wife Kim Hyun Sook. It tells of her discovery of banned books under the South Korean dictatorship. And of course it’s been banned in America as well.

I heard rumors that it is.

The director is telling a very personal story that exists entirely in the main character's mind, and when THEY watch the film, it's probably all there on screen. I am happy that meaningful art exists, even if it is only meaningful to one person.

The old footage is clearly the same people 15 years younger making a film in college, and the boxes she looks through have badges from the same festival this played at. So this was a successful film because their film about their lost film that didn't get into BIFF got into BIFF.

She then slowly walks all over the city reuniting with people she has no reconnection with and just sadly asks if she can look through their closet, and then in long unbroken cuts sadly silently sorts through crates of DVD-R discs in real time.

In it, a woman sadly stares at her laptop watching behind the scenes footage of a movie she and her friends made in college about people sadly staring. Then she has a vague curiosity about what happened to the DV-R with the film on it...

A prominent subgenre is "sad man stares at water" but there is variety. Yesterday I found myself in a film that felt like a meta parody of such films, but so committed to the bit that it is never once funny. I won't say the name because I don't think it was intentional.

The game of film festivals is to see enough movies you know nothing about without accidentally finding yourself in a "sadly silently staring at stuff" film. It's a surprisingly prolific genre of films where nothing happens except the thing mentioned above, and no context or explanation is provided.

Here's a thread to practice on!