ak

lestat/hannibal as someone very fucked up.. obviouslt.. that doesn't care for his adoptive daughter much past the point of pleasing their partner/whatever hannibal has going on with will. except lestat/hannibal is very coincidentally similar to claudia/abigail which brings them closer but not in a loving way necessarily

this entire film is based on archetypes. everybody is assigned a sort of "crowd", except the main character of course, who works only for himself and his dead love interest. then he does end up joining a certain "group", more like an organization, and it all plays out in very typical noir fashion


the pacing in particular is one of my favorite things about this film, second to the cinematography. combined with the character archetypes, the visuals, and the plot, it's exactly what you'd expect from neo-noir.


the only difference is that these characters are in high school, which i feel adds to the exaggeration. popularity is a big theme in the movie, as is who the characters sit with at lunch. the lunch seats are brought up often, mostly by brendan, the main character, who seems to have a sort of resentment for the popular kids at the beginning of the movie. i honestly don't know how to make sense of the lunch seating being brought up, but i do know that it was important.


the last scene was beautiful. i could actually list countless scenes that impacted me profoundly, but the last scene simultaneously tied everything up and left the audience with more questions. again, pretty typical, but in my opinion it was very well executed.

something i noticed about this movie is there are times that luke does things, and jon isn't aware because he's looking the other way.

at the pool, jon throws luke tanning cream and luke doesn't catch it, but since jon looked away, he assumes luke caught it, even saying "nice catch." this shows how much jon lives in his head, because the thing that distracted him was his "journal".

a more intense example is the scene right after, luke pulls a gun on a guy who approaches him, and jon doesn't notice because he's busy staring at the couple fighting. it's repeated throughout the movie even before this point that jon doesn't like when luke has the gun out, so he would've got mad if he did notice.

the way i see it, jon thinks they're on the same page throughout this entire "adventure" they have, but the fact is that they aren't.

jon is so preoccupied in his own head, and things happening around them, that he genuinely doesn't SEE luke. he only sees this idea of luke.

jon gets mad when luke pulls a gun at the cops. he doesn't understand that this is who luke IS. he heard jon talking about how much he hates cops, and how he'd want to kill one, and he took it literally. as the audience, in this moment, we're under the impression that he really wanted to help, to make jon happy. but when the machine's out of order and he shoots the place up, we realize he's also just insane. he wouldn't have stopped hurting people, and jon thought he would because he "promised".

there's a cycle that luke is in, and it's a cycle of violence.

cross posted on letterboxd

love is momentary. it lasts for only an instant in the grand scheme of a person's life. its hard to get over a love, for some people. for some, its easier.

either way, the feeling ends eventually, because we all have to grow up at some point.

and still, we never forget, whether it's recorded on tape, or recorded in our brain, playing on loop constantly, consuming our entire being.

cross posted on tiktok

when wong chi-ming gets shot, he repeats a bit that he says at the beginning of the movie. "the best thing about my profession is that i don't have to make any decision. who's to die, when, where, it's all been decided." that's why he needed a partner. to make these decisions for him.

he repeats this but he adds onto it the second time, saying that this time, he wanted to be the one to make that choice. he wasn't letting people choose for him. he didn't need a partner anymore, hence him "terminating the business relationship" with the killer's agent.

i think that the killer's agent sent him on his last mission to die, especially because of the line stating "who's to die, when, where, it's all been decided." that kind of tells me that everything that happened, was meant to happen. there's no mistakes.

around halfway through the movie, as the girl gets progressively more and more frustrated with him, he starts getting more and more injured. he says something like "i've been getting injured more often", probably indicating that she's sending him on more dangerous missions, probably out of anger and spite.

given that at the end he basically leaves her, it would make sense for all that buildup of anger to reach it's peak in that moment, and so the danger level of the assignment increased. he was heavily outnumbered. there was no way he was making it out alive.

at the end, he states that this is his choice. he knew he was getting sent there to die. and yet, he chooses to go through with it.

he knows the only way for her to be free of her obsession with him is for him to be gone.